Free Mean Boy by Lynn Coady Page B

sweetness and light between us.
    The hardest thing about the age of twelve for me was that twilight state. The state of still being a kid but getting my first inklings of the realities of not being a kid anymore. When you’re a kid, people smile at you almost like a reflex. They like you automatically, it seems, and wish you well, not just because you’re cute but because you’re so
blank
. That is, there is nothing about you to dislike just yet, so everyone is pretty much on your side. I don’t mean other kids—no, I figured that out long before it was driven home to me with the ball in the face. But adults. You assume they’re on your side, at least. And it’s around the age of twelve when these assumptions begin to fall into question. You’re too big to be cute, your voice is getting weird, your teeth are sticking out, you start to think it’s funny to mess with other people’s ideas of how a sugar cookie should be.
    “Grandma,” I said, furiously puréeing one of Lydia’s cherries with my knife. “Do you like
Paradise Lost?”
    “Milton is one of the giants of literature,” my grandmother said.
    “It’s about Adam and Eve, right?”
    “It is,” said Lydia, rolling out a new batch of yolk-tinted dough. “It is about The Fall.”
    “Isn’t it hard to read?”
    “Anything worth doing should challenge one.”
    This threw me off track a little. “Uh,” I said. “Really?”
    “That’s how you know it’s worth doing. The Bible is a challenging book as well.”
    I felt depressed. You know how that is? Sometimes it justwafts over you like stale air. I couldn’t believe she and I were talking about the same thing, the thing that I had only recently begun to identify as—not to put too fine a point on it—my salvation. But Lydia talked about books like she would a hairshirt or a crown of thorns. It made me tired to hear it. But I pushed on and I shouldn’t have.
    “Well,” I said, casually decimating another cherry, “I tried to read some, but I couldn’t get anywhere with it.”
    I shrugged, thinking I sounded pretty adult. I hadn’t whined, “I can’t understand it,” like a kid would do, even though this was actually the case. Already I was cultivating a handy nonchalance toward work I didn’t get, which would eventually serve me well in Jim’s seminar. The shrug, however, was the
pièce de resistance
, meant to convey, Oh well, perhaps old Milty and I just aren’t meant to get along. Ho-hum. Back to Chaucer I go.
    I looked up from my maraschino paste to see if Lydia appreciated any of this. Then I saw red.
    Not like anger. Like a bright burst of pain in the centre of my face, blinding me.
    “Nonsense!” I heard from somewhere.
    When the red lifted, she’d gone back to rolling out the dough. She’d flicked me. She’d flicked me on the nose so quick I didn’t even see it.
    “Wha—” I said. It was a noise that was a question. It was the closest sound I could make to an actual question mark, because the pain, and what’s more, the surprise of the pain, left me incoherent. Tears were streaming down my face.
    “You’re not to be reading such stuff at your age,” Lydia said, flipping the blank canvas of dough over and rolling and flattening it into a yellowed wafer-thinness that matched the set of her Presbyterian lips.
    That is my memory of Grandma Lydia. That is the only memory I need.

    This is all a long-winded way of saying, Poor Janet, at Thanksgiving dinner. Words I doodle into my notebook while talking on the phone with my parents. I’m expected to call her now. And go see her. Bring her food. Rub her feet. Who knows what. I am the only member of the family close by.
    “They let her come back to school?” I say, surprised.
    “Well, Grammie and Uncle Stan didn’t want her to,” concedes my mother.
    “I’d say the damage is pretty much done,” says Dad. “You don’t put a girl through school for four years so she can throw it all away.”
    “Even though