Free Falling by Anne Simpson Page A

help Tarah out, because the drawing had to be done by the following morning. But it wasn’t working. Why couldn’t Jordan get a flash of a Panda bear? Why did it have to be a dragon on a Kawasaki?
    In grade three, Jasmine’s teacher had said that her trees looked like sponges. The teacher had been a jolly woman with red hair and large hands; she’d said the trees looked like sponges, and then she’d smiled. She didn’t have to say anything about the sky or the clouds. After the teacher went up the row, Sandra-not-yet-Jasmine looked at her trees. She liked them. She didn’t care what Mrs. Jewett said.
    She’d gone home after school and yanked out all the hair from the head of her hand-me-down doll. It had been her sister Shirl’s doll.
    What kind of a girl
are
you? asked her mother when she found Sandra and the doll and the yanked-out hair.
    What kind of a girl was she?
    One who’d left Lanigan before it was really spring, on a bus that went down the highway past fields that were not yet green, not even close, because it was always cold in Lanigan, and the cold went deep into the sky and the fields and the trees and the driveways and the cars and the houses and the people in the houses. Of course, that wasn’t entirely fair, because the heat of summer went deep into everything too, later on, but it was early spring when she left, and the world was grey-green. It was as flat as if someone had taken an iron to it and pressed it down.
    One who’d saved a fortune cookie (from the Full Moon Chinese Restaurant in Saskatoon, while waiting for the bus that went via Winnipeg to Toronto) that read, in small green lettering: Good fortune and great happiness will come your way very soon .
    One who had phoned home to tell her parents she’d left for a year and to wish her luck: a wish that went unwished. Her mother told her there’d be hell to pay and to come right home, what was she thinking, going off like that at the age of eighteen to live on the streets like some hussy, like some tramp?
    One who was scared to leave Canada, in the end, and had got off the bus at the last possible place before crossing the border between Ontario and New York State.
    One who found a place to rent after a bad night in the bus terminal, walking from one basement apartment to another before she found Tarah, who saved her life, because she needed someone to share The Dump on Stanley Street.
    One who got a job in the Lundy’s Lane Historical Museum by giving the impression she was bright and perky. Of course, it helped that she was majoring in Canadian history at – at the University of Toronto.
    One who’d been in Niagara Falls, Ontario, for five weeks and two days.
    One who couldn’t draw motorcycles.
    That was what kind of girl she was, if anyone wanted to know, but no one did.
    She switched off the lights and went out the side door into the alley, making sure the door was locked behind her. She glanced down the alley to Clifton Street as she unlocked her bicycle, and it was then that she noticed the man in pyjamas. He was on the other side of the street. He was staring at her. No, he wasn’t staring at her; he was staring into the window of the Ornamental Hand. One side of his face was green because of the light from Alien Terrors. His feet were bare, and this was the strangest partof it, because why would a person go outside without shoes? He was a nutcase, that’s what he was. A car went by, and his pyjama top swelled out as it passed. She had a sudden, eerie thought that he must have been watching her.
    A blond-haired man took his hand and spoke to him; she saw how they turned slowly, like people in hospitals when they’d come to the end of a long hall. It could have been an old-fashioned, complicated dance they were doing, with one leading the other. The blond man was tall and lanky, with a braid down his back, and the other was solidly built, with tufts of hair standing up on his head. The streetlight turned their hair to silver,