Descent

3 - "I'm trying to show you something here"

Tommy Carleson was eleven years old and just swore in front of his mother for the first time. He descended the stairs slowly, one bare foot at a time, and with each step felt another small part of his childhood stay up there in his bedroom. He paused at the bottom of the stairs and listened for his mother. He heard nothing. Dust hung in the sunbeams cast by the windows flanking the front door and the house stood completely still. He peered through the patterned glass of the door and saw her car was gone--she'd left early.

Turning around, he moseyed into the kitchen and dropped his empty yellow plate into the sink. On the large kitchen table, where there was usually an apple for his lunch, instead sat a piece of lined paper with a note written in his mother's efficient, simple handwriting.

"Lunch is in the fridge. There are green and red apples. YOUR CHOICE. Have a great Day!! Love," She had drawn a heart, crossed it out, written "XOXO" and crossed that out too, then had signed it "Susan Cartwright" like she was at a bank. Tommy rolled his eyes so hard he could hear them moving.

Tommy crumpled up the note. He looked inside the fridge and grabbed his purple nylon lunch bag. He took no apple at all.

The clock over the stove said 8:25 so he rushed to the front door and pulled on his dirty grey Reebok sneakers and the light purple jacket he wore everyday, rain or shine. He slung the blue and yellow nylon backpack over his left shoulder, where it made a "swish-swish" sound with every step. He called "Bye" to the house, because he'd been taught to treat his house as the fourth member of the family.

Third member, he thought to himself, then paused, the front and screen doors open. The dead banana-coloured leaves of fall had invaded the linoleum tile floor and scattered in the wind. For a second he seriously considered skipping school--something he had never before considered. He thought about staying home and playing Warcraft and just holding out until the weekend when he'd see his dad again and he could pretend he still lived in the city, not this weird old farming town with no movie theatre. He thought about it, and then the guilt of even considering such a ballsy move overtook his homesickness and he dashed out the front door, the screen banging behind him as he flew down the front walk.

Tommy's house was on the edge of town--if a town that was mostly one intersection surrounded by farms could really be said to have an edge at all--so the bus was almost completely empty when it picked him up. The only family that lived further out from town than Tommy and his mom was Arjun's family. Arjun was East Indian and despite spending his entire life in Canada would occasionally show signs of the rolling Indian accent his parents possessed and which Tommy, shamefully, found hilarious. The one time he had been invited to Arjun's house a few weeks ago, Arjun's mother had caught the boys looking at a Playboy Arjun's father had stashed in a shoebox in the master bedroom closet. Arjun's mother had torn into the two boys and Tommy had done his best to be respectfully shamed, until she said "How could you be so stupid?" And she hit the 'U' so it sounded like eighteen 'O's and Tommy had laughed so hard he got a nosebleed.

He hadn't been invited back.

Arjun and he had stayed friends: apparently Tommy's lightly racist inability to take his mother seriously had won him major points with the boy. Arjun and Tommy were eleven, so of course they showed absolutely no enthusiasm towards seeing one another, even though they secretly really did get excited at the prospect of sitting next to each other for an hour everyday.

Arjun always had toys in his bag and he was the only kid in school with a Game Gear- which he always brought with him. Tommy was a Nintendo kid and Arjun was 100% Sega, and this combination of shared interest in video games, with the built-in rivalry of competing companies, was pretty much all you needed out of a best friend as far as Tommy was concerned.