Until I Find You

bleedin’ yet,” the sheer coarseness of the moment evoked an awkward, embarrassed silence from the rest of the cast. “I know, I know—it’s an unforgivable question, but that’s the point,” Mr. Ramsey said.

Jack answered in character; he already knew his lines. Bonnie Hamilton didn’t need to prompt him. “What do you mean?” Jenny screams at Halliday. “Why should I be bleedin’?” But Jenny knows exactly what Halliday means.

Halliday grows impatient. He can’t believe how long it’s taking for his child bride to become a woman. One evening, when Jack-as-Jenny is singing a nostalgic song on a porch swing, Ginny-as-Halliday assaults her. Clever girl that she is, Jenny has stolen Madame Auber’s pistol—a prop Mr. Ramsey borrowed from the Upper Canada College boys’ track team. It was a starting gun that fired blanks. At the end of Act Two, Jack-as-Jenny shoots Ginny-as- Halliday with the starting gun. He-as-she fires two very loud blanks into her-as-his chest, and Ginny Jarvis—a star on the St. Hilda’s field-hockey team—falls on the stage with an athletic thud.

Act Three is Jenny’s trial for Halliday’s murder. Her defense is that she was only a child when she was forced to marry the fur trapper, and that she is still a virgin. The “miracle”—namely, that Jenny hasn’t yet begun her menses—is disputed by the prosecution. Jenny refuses to be examined by the community’s only doctor, because he’s a man. The few women in the community—only two women are on the jury—are tolerant of her refusal. (They despise the male doctor.)

Jenny’s fate appears to be in the hands of a female physician who has been summoned from Yellowknife. But before the lady doctor arrives, Jenny is saved by another miracle of her own making—once again, the power of prayer. While testifying about shooting Mr. Halliday, Jenny suddenly stands, screams, and begins to bleed. A prop more creative than the UCC track team’s starting gun is employed for the bleeding. Jack wears a plastic bag filled with water and red food coloring under his dress. His wrists are bound together at his waist. When he stands, he clutches his lower abdomen as if in pain—bursting the bag of colored water, which soaks his dress and hands blood-red.

Darlin’ Jenny’s piercing scream indicates to the jury that this must be her first period. She has been telling the truth. She is innocent. Trial over! But Jack was able to practice bursting the plastic bag—at the time, filled with just water—only once before the first performance. He thought that more practice might have helped.

Meanwhile, backstage, after the dress rehearsal, Emma Oastler, Penny and Bonnie Hamilton, and Ginny Jarvis stealthily dressed Jack in a school uniform they had scrounged from one of the bigger grade-six girls—a short gray skirt and knee-highs. Since Jack already had makeup on—a little rouge, some stage lipstick, which showed redder than it was in the footlights—it was only necessary to adjust the wig he wore as Darlin’ Jenny. Flanked by Penny Hamilton and Emma, with Ginny Jarvis leading the way and Bonnie Hamilton (accompanied, as always, by her limp) taking a rearguard position, Jack-as-a-girl marched straightaway to the older girls’ residence. In the after- school hours, their entrance from the second floor of the junior school was unobserved.

The Hamilton sisters shared a room. Ginny Jarvis occupied the room across the hall from them. There were no locks on the residence doors, but the matron was not inclined to check on the girls until after supper—when they had to be accounted for and were supposed to be studying. Jack was invited to lie down on a bed. He must have looked anxious, because Emma bent over him and whispered in his ear: “Don’t worry, honey pie, I won’t let anyone touch you.” But Jack was in the presence of girls who were older than Emma; he was frightened.

“Which one of us do you like looking at the best, Jack?” Ginny Jarvis asked. By the indifferent way she raised the question, Ginny seemed resigned to the fact that she wouldn’t be the boy’s first choice. Penny Hamilton was staring at him with an intimidating self-confidence. Bonnie Hamilton wouldn’t look at him; she stood at some distance from the bed, her left foot forward.

“I think Bonnie is beautiful,” Jack said.

“You see?” Ginny asked the assembled girls. “There’s no predicting what turns on men or boys.” Jack could tell he’d made Penny angry by not choosing her, which under the circumstances made him more anxious than before. “Get closer to him, Bonnie,” Ginny directed. “Let him see more of you.”

Bonnie lurched forward, left foot first. Jack was afraid she was going to fall on him, but she dropped to her knees beside him—catching her balance with both hands on his chest. She still wouldn’t look at him. She knelt next to him, putting her hands on her thighs and staring at her lap; ever the prompter, it was as if she were waiting for someone to flub a line. Jack was suddenly shy about looking at her, because Bonnie wouldn’t look at him. He could feel Ginny Jarvis lift his skirt and pull down his underpants. At least he assumed it was Ginny—Penny Hamilton seemed too peeved with him to take an interest. No one touched him. “It’s little, all right,” Penny said, when Ginny had exposed him.

“We’ll see about that,” Ginny replied.

“What’s happening?” Jack asked Emma.

“Nothing, baby cakes. Don’t you worry.”

“Less than nothing,” Penny Hamilton said.

“He’s frightened. This isn’t right,” Bonnie Hamilton said. “He’s too young—he’s just a kid!” She leaned over Jack. When Bonnie looked at him, it was in the same way that she scrutinized the text in her capacity as prompter—as if his face were the only true map of the unfolding story and Bonnie Hamilton was the absolute authority on what he might be feeling.

Bonnie’s limp compelled Jack to look at her and imagine her accident. It was his first understanding that physical attraction, even sexual desire, was stimulated by more than the perfection of a body or the beauty of a face. He was drawn to Bonnie’s past, to everything traumatic that had happened to her before he met her. Her crippling accident drew Jack to her. This was worse than what Emma had correctly identified as his older-woman thing. He was attracted to how Bonnie had been damaged; that she’d been hurt made her more desirable. The thought was so troubling to Jack that he began to cry.

“I’ve had it with penises,” Ginny Jarvis was saying.

“Maybe it’s asleep or something,” Penny Hamilton suggested.

“Don’t let them frighten you, Jack,” Bonnie Hamilton said.

It surprised him that she was the one who looked stricken with fear, as if she were a prisoner in the passenger seat and saw the fast-approaching collision seconds before the driver could react to it. Bonnie pinched her lower lip with her teeth and stared at Jack as if she were transfixed—as if he were the upcoming accident and, even though she saw him coming, she couldn’t turn away. “What’s wrong?” he asked her. “What do you see?” Bonnie’s eyes welled up with tears.

“Don’t cry on the kid, Bonnie—you’re the one who’s frightening him,” Penny Hamilton said.

“Something’s working,” Ginny Jarvis observed. “Maybe it’s the crying.”

“Keep crying. See if I care,” Penny told her sister.

“If Jack is frightened, we should stop,” Emma said.

“I think Bonnie’s frightened,” Penny said with a laugh.

“If Bonnie is frightened, we should stop,” Jack said—not that he was aware of what they had started. Bonnie Hamilton looked terrified to him. He felt increasingly afraid of whatever was frightening her.

“This is a frightened little boy!” Bonnie Hamilton cried.

“I’m here, baby cakes,” Emma said. She leaned over Jack and kissed him on the mouth. He wouldn’t remember if she used her tongue; his fixation was with her upper lip. It must have been her mustache that made Jack hold his breath.

“Keep kissing him, Emma,” Ginny Jarvis said.

“Something’s definitely happening,” Penny Hamilton more closely observed.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t breathe; he’d simply stopped. He saw a multitude of streaming stars, the speckled glow of northern lights—the aurora borealis, that radiant emission beloved by all Canadians. “Better let him breathe, Emma,” he heard Bonnie Hamilton say.

“Whoa! Look out!” Ginny Jarvis cried. His ejaculation caught Penny Hamilton as she was taking a closer look—too close, as it turned out. (And to think that no one had touched him!)

“You got her smack between the eyes, honey pie,” Emma told him later. “I’m so proud of you! I felt