The taller of the two, a very young blond guy with thick legs, grinned back at my nervous smile. As soon as I was within earshot he asked, “Are you sure you’re warm enough?” His question caught me off guard.
“Yes, thanks,” I said, bowing my head and trying to avoid him, in case this seeming friendliness was some kind of trick.
It didn’t work. Hearing my Caribbean accent, he immediately did what many white Canadians I’d met had done: he asked, “Where are you from?”
“Trinidad,” I told him, before scuttling into the sheltered booth of the commuter queue, yearning to get my chilled bones out of the wind and escape from this disturbingly interested policeman.
I quickly warmed up, keeping my eye on the cops on the corner. My heart was still racing, but my palms weren’t as sweaty, and my breathing was calming down. I looked at my little watch, which my mother had given me three years ago when I sat for my secondary school entrance exam. A useful present, as you couldn’t take the exam with a cell phone as your timer. My mother didn’t give me many gifts just because. They were always practical, sensible: a new church dress, new sneakers for school, a longtime fountain pen. This watch had a plain steel band and plain white face, the picture of utilitarianism. It made me think of her. It made me a little sad.
The hands on the watch said I had another ten minutes until the next bus would arrive. The bus service on this line ran every twenty minutes, waiting for no one a minute past the schedule. A shocking realization for me at first—to read the schedule and find that the buses actually would be there at nine-twenty if they said they would be; at home, no such thing had ever happened in the government bus service. As far as I had known, buses arrived and departed when their drivers felt like it, end of story. Schedules, if they existed, were mere suggestions, rather than rules. Like the majority of people, I took a kind of minibus we called a maxi-taxi, and those ran whenever they liked, any time of day or night.
But here, the bus drivers were always on-time, serious professionals, saying goodmorningma’am or goodeveningsir or whatever to every single person who came in. Miraculously, they asked nobody how their grandson was doing in school, or how their diabetes—in Trinidad we call it sugar—was treating them, or how their macomere was keeping. It didn’t matter that I saw the same driver more often than not; their tone didn’t change when they said goodmorningmiss every single morning and goodafternoonmiss every single evening.
Standing in the windbreak, I could see the boyish-looking cop staring at me still, and even though I turned away to look in the other direction, I had a feeling he would soon amble my way to make small talk. So said, so done, and he came over, swinging his arms and rhythmically catching his fists together in front as he did. I could feel my heart miss a beat with nervous fear. The gray and yellow of his uniform was different from what I expected of a policeman’s; the jaunty yellow stripe was, I felt, unnecessarily frivolous, like a party hat on a pig. In my country the police are not friendly. They do not stop to chat or old talk with anybody, especially teenage girls. My anxiety rocketed with his every step.
“So, what brings you to Edmonton? Are you visiting or do you live here?”
Was he going to arrest me for truancy? Was he going to search me for drugs? Would he try to deport me as an illegal alien, even though I had my tourist visa? I started to sweat again, the silk lining of my coat sticking to my sweaty palms. I was terrified he was going to ask to see my passport. Oh, the crap that ran through my head. Man, I thought again, having a panic disorder sucks.
“Visiting,” I squeaked. “Just seeing my aunts.”
“Oh? A holiday before you start college, huh?”
“College?” I snapped my head around to look him in the eye despite my agitation and blurted, “I’m only fourteen!”
I could see him take a mental step back as his eyes opened wide and his cheeks grew bright pink. “Uh, I need to check in with my partner. You get home safely, eh?” He quickly ambled back to the other cop. I didn’t know what had happened, or why. I already found humans a mysterious species and I was an expert at saying the wrong thing in any situation. Ordinarily the idea that I’d said the wrong thing to a policeman, of all people, would leave me rigid with panic. But suddenly, I was too exhausted from the panic attack I was already having to notice anything but relief that he was gone. I stood alone at the familiar bus stop, my pounding heart slowing its race.
One of the purring buses in the small bullpen of the station suddenly emitted a little burst of wind, a sharp mechanical fart, and rumbled awake. It drove up and I anxiously checked my schedule once more. I was at the right queue. When the bus reached me the door opened with a gasp. The number was written plain as day on the front, and I recognized the driver. Still, I got on and asked him, “Is this the Eighteen?”
“Yup, goodafternoonmiss,” he said, nodding his familiar head with an impersonal smile. I paid the fare, lurched to a seat in the middle of the bus, and sat down gratefully on the cold, slippery vinyl. Another mechanical breaking of wind and we were off.
I counted the streets again, and then I was home. Not home home, I thought with a little wave of longing. Was this what tabanca was like? I’d never been in love before, much less lovesick. But I pushed the thought down. I’d worry about it later. Home at Jillian and Julie’s house was good enough for now. I reached up, pulled the stop cord, and got out when the bus rolled to a halt. The stop was a half-block from the house, but it was close enough that I hardly had to think about where I was anymore. My anxieties drove off with the bus, for now. I felt immediate relief. My brain switched back on again. And finally, the penny dropped: the boyish cop had been flirting with me before he heard my age.
journal session 1
Dr. Khan made me start this journal after I met with him for the first time. He said, “Write about who you are. Be honest. What’s behind that pretty face?”
Honestly? I’ve never thought of myself as pretty. As a kid I was not the one you’d look at and say, “Oh, what a little angel!” or anything like that. My little face in baby pictures was too serious, and I grew up to be the kind of child adults admire because I am smart and well-read, rather than because of how I look. I am tall and skinny, with dark brown skin and big black eyes that Akilah says make me look older than I am. Though I am shy, I have a good vocabulary, and when I used big words, like I normally did, adults acted like it was a trick I could do, as if I were some kind of monkey dancing on a chain or a dog doing flips on command.
Adults always said to each other: She’s so articulate! They would say it right over my head, as if I wasn’t even in the room. And really, sometimes I wasn’t. It came to be that I didn’t really care what they said anymore. I was doing my thing, talking or writing or reading or whatever, and they would be admiring me like I was a fish in a bowl. And I didn’t care, I just swam around in my dirty water and sucked up the stale food and my own pee—metaphorically speaking, of course—and everything was cool. Only, everything wasn’t cool.