The teenager was crazy for Andrea but Andrea was crazy for Luke and the teenager could not see why. For one, Luke was so short that he stood a head below most of his male peers. For two, his head resembled a balloon and even Luke himself had described his presently-peeling nose as “bulbous”. For three, as hilarious as Luke was, his Aberdeen accent and Scottish colloquialisms were barely decipherable when he was sober, let alone when he was “bevvied”. And bevvied they got . . . but we’ll return to that later.
Luke had emigrated to Edmonton with his parents and two brothers in 2022. Charles Malory, his father, was an electrician, and Suki Malory, his mother, was a stay-at-home mom. They lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Mill Woods until where Luke, the middle child, shared a room with three single mattresses with Matthew, the eldest brother, and John, the youngest.
In 2024, the Malorys got a mortgage on a two-story four-bedroom house down the street for a quarter of what they would have paid in Scotland and the boys relished in their newfound privacy. Their parents, who had imprinted upon one another in their teenage years, never minded when one or another of them disappeared into their bedrooms with a girl. Charles had gotten a vasectomy after they had had John but he stocked the cupboard under the bathroom sink with boxes of condoms and dental dams that, whenever they ran low, magically replenished themselves.
When Luke had shown the teenager the condoms under the sink he was as shocked by Charles’ progressive candidness as he was by Suki’s conservatism as a stay-at-home mom: before Sufi would for her recitals at the Winspear, she would cook Charles and the boys dinner and stack them across the middle shelf of the fridge.
One afternoon when the teenager had visited Luke Suki had left plates of chicken, mashed potatoes, and corn niblets in the fridge. Each was covered by cling wrap and topped with a sticky with a name written upon it in red marker, surrounded by a heart. Luke shared his dinner with the teenager that day and when they found they still hungry they supplemented her meal with pepperoni and cheese.
Luke had proved himself a competent, if marginal, student and an ambitious, if mediocre, bassist but if his solid build and thick neck proved advantageous in rugby it was downright menacing in a fight.
A few months after the family moved into the house, Devon, a heavy-set football player, had unknowingly prepositioned Wendy, Luke’s newest darling in the hallway at Harry Ainley High School. Luke stood before the bigger boy, looked up at his square-jawed face, and demanded:
“Ya hittin’ on me girlfriend?”
“I had no clue, man . . .” said Devon.
“Oh! Then that’s all right, then.” said Luke with a smile.
Luke offered his hand, which Devon took, and on the second shake Luke jerked Devon’s arm down, and headbutted Devon’s face. Blood erupted from Devon’s nose and spurted over their clothes, their backpacks, and the nearby lockers.
Devon tried to pull away, but Luke’s grip held him fast. Then he dropped his phone on the floor, covered his nose with his free hand, and screamed:
“Let me go!”
But as he tried to pull away Luke’s feet barely moved from wherever they were planted; perhaps they had grown roots under the floor tiles.
In Luke’s gleeful eyes and muscular blood-spattered neck the teenager, shocked into silent horror as everyone standing nearby, saw a reflection of a brown pitbull he had watched maul a German Shepherd in Buena Vista Dog Park a few years back. He had seen no way to stop the pitbull and saw no way to stop Luke now.
Luke held on to Devon for another twenty seconds and stared up into his terrified eyes. When Devon stopped struggling, Luke said:
“We ‘ave an understanding, yeah?”
“Y-yeah,” said Devon.
When Luke let Devon go, Devon fled down the hall.
Luke wiped the blood from his face and asked the onlookers, “Where’s Wendy?”
They cast about but Wendy was gone.
“Oh, well.”
Between splashes of water on his face in the washroom, and before the teachers took him to the principal, Luke explained to the teenager that “Harry Ainley is like a prison, yeah?”
“I guess,” said the teenager. His phone pinged and he pulled it out of his pocket.
“What fookin’ school ‘as no windoos?” Droplets of water dripped from his fingers as he made quotation marks around school.
“They woon’t fook wit’ me now. Worth a suspension, yeah?”
The teenager read a text on his phone and said, “Wendy says she’s done with you.”
“Wootever,” Luke said. But when he looked down his shoulders slumped.
“Fooker got blood on me new Nikes . . .”
Luke’s prognostication proved correct and he was suspended within the hour.
Later that evening, a policewoman knocked on the Malorys’ door. Luke listened from the top of the stairs as she told Charles and Suki that Devon had been taken to the U of A hospital and that his nose was broken. She also said while Devon did not want to press charges his mother still might. And even if they did not press charges they might come after the Malorys with a civil suit, so Luke ought to behave himself.
Suki was adamant that Luke would never do such a thing without provocation, but as the policewoman turned to leave she caught what she thought was a glint of pride in Charles’s eye.
During Luke’s suspension, Suki made him study whatever chapters and lessons his teachers sent her at the kitchen table every weekday. Once she was satisfied that his lessons were done Luke was free to go to his room or to bike around on his BMX outside. She dismissed out of hand Charles’s suggestion to ground Luke because not only was he suspended from school but also from rugby and band practice, too. And so it happened that on the Friday evening following his suspension, at about 8:45 P.M., Shelby texted Luke to tell him that her eighteen-year-old sister had bootlegged two forties of vodka and two forties of Raspberry Sourpuss and that they were all going for a bike-ride party.
Luke invited the teenager who in turn invited Hikaru, from Ainley, and the aforementioned Andrea, who went to Scona, and within the hour three girls and four boys on bikes whooped and hollered over the trails of Mill Creek Ravine.
The teenager hadn’t thought much of Andrea’s response when he had mentioned who was coming:
Luke? she texted back. Luke Malory?
Yup, he said. You know him?
Nope, she said.
What about him?
Nicky knows him. She said he’s big fun!
He’s hilarious, all right!
Okay, see you there!
But his chest tightened when Andrea sped up or slowed down to keep pace with Luke on his BMX.
When they stopped to partake of Shelby’s sister’s bottles Hikaru spied something amidst a copse of trees higher up the bank. He leaned his mountain bike against a tree and climbed the hill. Andrea, Luke, and the teenager followed him.
They discovered a small triangular structure composed of three pallets: one pallet was laid flat against the ground as its floor, and the other two pallets were leaned against one another as walls. The shelter was covered by a large blue tarp that was folded in half and secured with its edges tucked under the base. Inside the shelter was a forest-green kerosine lamp, a dirty and unrolled sleeping bag, and a yellow CD-player.
“Do you like to swim?” Andrea asked Luke.
“Fookin’ rights.”
“Let’s go skinny-dipping!” she said as she leaned down an pulled the edges of the tarp out from under the pallet that formed the shelter’s base.
“Don’t,” said Hikaru.
“Somebody lives here!” said the teenager.
“We’ll need it for the barbed wire,” she said.
“The what?” said Hikaru.
But Andrea yanked the tarp’s corners out from under the pallet-walls. Then she pulled it off and laid the tarp upon the ground where she folded it once, twice, thrice, and twice more.
“Here,” she said as she handed it to the teenager.
Then she reached into the shelter and withdrew the sleeping bag which she rolled up and handed to Hikaru, and said, “Hik, take it.”
Hikaru recoiled from the soiled thing but took it from her just the same. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” he said.
“You’ll see . . .”
The teenager had been told he was handsome often enough, and by so many people, that he had come to believe he was an attractive chap. Even Andrea had commented on his looks; and this had given him the impression that she was into him. But as they descended the hill he reflected on the dismissive manner in which she delegated him to Tarp-Holder and the way she had asked Luke, and not him, if he liked to swim. As Andrea and Luke conspired in whispers on the way down he began to suspect that inviting her along was a bad idea indeed.
After they mounted their bikes, Andrea and Luke took the lead, but they rode slower to accommodate the awkward loads Hikaru and the teenager were carrying, to mitigate everyone’s increasing intoxication, and because the sun had set and it had gotten quite dark. The ground remained somewhat illuminated by Edmonton’s omnipresent sky-glow. After a ten-minute ride, a new concentration of lights appeared in the distance and the teenager caught the scent of the chlorine from Mill Creek Pool.
They dismounted at the trail’s base ten metres to the east of the red-bricked pool-house and hid their bikes in some bushes. As they approached the black-wired fence Hikaru threw down the sleeping bag and said:
“There’s no ‘barbed wire’!”
Andrea shrugged as the teenager dropped the tarp next to the sleeping bag.
In a flash, Luke was on the fence. He scrambled up like climbing fences was his career and then dangled from the outward-bent top with one arm, like a chimpanzee. He swung to face them and tickled his own armpit with his free arm as he attempted to make chimp noises.
“You sound like a drunk owl,” Hikaru said.
“A drunk owl imitating a raccoon . . .” said Andrea.
Luke scowled. Then he pulled himself up and over the fence and laid on the bend. He motioned for them to come.
Hikaru tightened the belt and straps of his backpack, for it held two of the bottles, and then climbed the fence.
Andrea was next, followed by Shelby, the teenager, and the others. Each time, Luke was there at the top to help them over.
When Luke grabbed the teenager’s wrists and pulled him up the teenager finally understood the strength that had immobilized Devon in the hallway. He found the power that must have terrified Devon comforting. And while he has seen the violence of which Luke’s hands were capable they now promised with an oaken assurance that whatever Luke held could neither escape nor fall.
Once everyone was over, Luke scrambled down effortlessly and they cheered and hugged and slapped one another’s backs. Hikaru pulled out the bottles and each took a swig. Then Andrea undressed before them, ran naked to the pool’s edge, and dived in.
Hikaru and the teenager shrugged at one another and then disrobed and, after they jumped in, the others followed suit. All but Luke, who took long swigs of vodka.
“Come on, Luke!” said Shelby.
Hikaru added, “We did it. You have to, too!”
Luke laughed, placed the bottle on a nearby picnic table, and took off his shirt. When he dropped his shorts there were gasps followed by a “Holy shit!” and the teenager finally realized what kind of “big fun” Nicky had told Andrea about.
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