Free Holding Still for as Long as Possible by Zoe Whittall

from scratch. Sometimes it took about an hour. I stopped doing it when Kimberly Actonvale was actually kidnapped in Grade Seven, and my grandfather died of cancer. Fuck that , I thought.
    I opened my eyes, clutched my bag of bruised produce and double-jumped the splintery, wooden blue stairs, landing with two solid feet on the kitchen floor. Roxy sat at the table reading The Globe and Mail .
    Her short black hair was a bird’s nest. She was dressed in her work clothes for catering: white button-down men’s shirt over her mostly flat chest, black dress pants and men’s dress shoes, a sparkly pink Care Bear hoody overtop. Most people couldn’t peg her as a girl or a boy, even from one foot away. Our cat, the adopted stray with one remaining piercing blue eye, was curled on a placemat opposite her, like a place setting. Her name was Joan Nestle, or Smoosh for short.
    I ran one of the plums under the tap in the sink. I’m fucking lu cky! I felt like yelling to whoever controlled my various mental disorders. We’re all so lucky. Who cares if I was afraid of aneurisms, nosebleeds, spontaneous blindness? If I had a heart attack right now, and it was my time, then shouldn’t I be happy I had lived such a struggle-free life? I took a bite. Sour. I threw the plum in the sink, where it landed in a bowl of half-eaten instant oatmeal.
    Roxy smoothed out the newspaper on the kitchen table and started rolling tobacco on top of the Business section. We were just starting to have a roommate routine, something also entirely foreign to me. The exaggerated politeness, the am-I-in-your-way? feelings were fading. Roxy was fun to observe. She seemed to operate entirely in the present, with no obvious worries or preoccupations. She had a lot of friends, many hobbies, too many idiosyncrasies to mention.
    I wished I were one of those “grateful for what I have, aren’t we lucky to be alive today” people. I was without a doubt deeply terrified of the inevitability of death. And so I did what I could. I counted. I repeated. I breathed deeply. I distracted myself.
    Despite Roxy’s stripper name — the actual name on her birth certificate was Roxy Barbara Streisand Gillard, and I’m not even kidding — she was as far as possible from the way you’d expect a Roxy to look. Roxy was a connector — or was it a nucleus? At school I had always skipped biology, so I wasn’t good with scientific metaphors. Anyway, she connected people. She was pretty much how I made all my friends in Toronto. She made an effort to make plans with friends, and to introduce them to others, like a community hub. There — Roxy was a community hub. She was rarely alone. She was always up to something interesting.
    We called our apartment — a second-storey two-bedroom number just north of Queen Street — the Parkdale Gem, after the area in Toronto where we lived. “A gem”— that’s how it had been advertised in the local paper when Roxy found it a few years ago, a gem amongst the high-rise shit-holes, crumbling old Victorians, and rooming houses. The apartment’s best feature was the large kitchen that opened out onto an expansive fenced-in balcony that could, if one wanted, fit a small yoga class. Our bedrooms were small, and the living room more of an idea squished between them in the long hallway of the house, but the kitchen made up for it and we spent most of our time there. Even though Roxy owned most of the furniture and had lived here for five years, I knew it would eventually feel like my home too. If I ever really unpacked.
    Still, there was a new form of uncertainty in the air, and you could taste it in Parkdale. The west end of the city was experiencing a growth spurt along Queen Street west of Ossington Avenue. On the sidewalks I often kicked giant screws that had fallen from fast-rising construction sites. The area was definitely deep into adolescent tantrums, boisterous