Until I Find You

responsible that you were afraid. Never again are those girls getting anywhere near you, Jack. I’m taking better care of you from now on.”

At the time, Bonnie Hamilton’s eyes were locked onto Jack’s; she couldn’t stop staring at the boy. “What do you see?” she asked him. “Jack, what is it?”

“You’re the most beautiful of all the girls,” he told her, still gasping for breath.

“He’s delirious—he doesn’t know what he’s saying,” Emma said cruelly, but Bonnie didn’t seem to hear her; she just went on looking at Jack. Her sister, Penny, was furiously wiping her forehead with a wad of tissues. Naturally, Jack asked to see the blood.

“The what, baby cakes?”

“He must think he’s Darlin’ Jenny!” Ginny Jarvis said. “Boys are truly sick.”

Emma Oastler took him by the hand. They left the older girls’ residence—traipsing through the junior school the way they’d come. They went to the theater, where Jack dressed in his own clothes backstage. He wanted to practice bursting the blood bag, but Mr. Ramsey had gone home for the day.

Jack and Emma found Peewee sleeping in the Town Car. They went to the house on the corner of Lowther and Spadina, because Lottie was spending most of her time at the hospital, where she said Mrs. Wicksteed was “at death’s door,” and Alice was either at the Chinaman’s or with Mrs. Oastler. Jack was touched that Emma had stood up for him, and that she’d promised to keep the older girls away from him, but for how much longer? Wasn’t he being sent to Maine for his fifth-grade year? (Who would keep the older boys away?)

Also troubling was Emma’s discovery that she, upon entering grade eleven, would become a boarder. Why? Jack wondered. Emma lived at home. She could walk to school! “My mom doesn’t want me around,” was all Emma would say. She was even more sullen than usual at the prospect of being a boarder.

They were in Jack’s bedroom, where Emma was examining the little guy. “No signs of wear and tear,” she said. “I don’t suppose you remember what you were thinking.” Jack could barely remember not breathing, but he was wondering—after his near-death ejaculation—if Mrs. Wicksteed would see that radiant emission of northern lights when she passed away. He was also struggling to articulate to Emma exactly what had attracted him to Bonnie Hamilton—not just the limp but her overall aura of damage, of having been hurt. Jack couldn’t quite express it, nor could he convey to Emma how Bonnie had looked at him—how he’d recognized that she was smitten, although Bonnie herself might not have known it.

Jack even tried to talk about it with The Gray Ghost—without letting on to her that he’d had a near-death ejaculation in the older girls’ residence, of course. “This was one of the older girls?” Mrs. McQuat asked. “And she looked at you how?”

“Like she couldn’t look away, like she couldn’t help herself,” he said.

“Tell me who this was, Jack.”

“Bonnie Hamilton.”

“She’s in grade twelve!”

“I told you she was older.”

“Jack, when an older girl looks at you like that, you just look away.”

“What if I can’t look away or help myself, either?”

“Mercy!” Mrs. McQuat exclaimed. Thinking she was changing the subject, she asked: “How’s it going with the mail-order-bride business?”

“The blood is the tricky part,” he said.

“There’s blood this year, actual blood?”

“It’s red food coloring with water—it’s just a prop.”

“A prop! I think I like blood better when I have to imagine it. Maybe I should have a word with Mr. Ramsey.” But if The Gray Ghost ever had a word with Mr. Ramsey, nothing of their conversation was reflected in the premiere performance of A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories. On Saturday night, the St. Hilda’s theater was packed. To Jack’s surprise, not only was The Wurtz in attendance, but The Gray Ghost sat in the front row beside her. Maybe Mrs. McQuat believed that her encouraging presence would serve to mitigate Miss Wurtz’s scathing condemnation of the play.

More surprising still, and also occupying front-row seats, Alice had come with Mrs. Oastler and Emma. (Lottie, Jack knew, was maintaining her vigil at Mrs. Wicksteed’s deathbed—otherwise Lottie would have been at the theater, too.) And most surprising of all, Peewee was there! He must have overheard Emma and Jack talking about the play in the backseat of the Town Car. A strikingly beautiful black woman was with him. Peewee had a wife or girlfriend! Whoever she was, Peewee’s date seemed stunningly overdressed among the divorced moms and dads who were the usual audience for a senior-school play at St. Hilda’s. Mrs. Peewee wore a flowery dress with a plunging neckline; from Jack’s backstage perspective, her hat resembled a stuffed parrot.

It was a most impressive audience, especially by the junior-school standards Jack was familiar with from Miss Wurtz’s dramatizations. But some of the cast suffered from stage fright. Penny-Hamilton-as-Madame-Auber, whose French accent was such a hit with Torontonians, had a fit getting into her evil-chaperone costume. (In retrospect, Jack would like to think that Penny was distracted from the task of dressing herself by her memory of his jism nailing her in the forehead.)

Sandra Stewart, a grade-nine girl who was small for her age, played Sarah, the bilingual stutterer—who ended up freezing to death after losing her virginity on a dog sled. Sandra threw up backstage, which prompted Mr. Ramsey to say: “It’s just butterflies.”

Ginny-Jarvis-as-Mr.-Halliday, sweating in her fur-trapper costume, said: “That looks like worse than butterflies.” (Naturally, Jack thought that Mr. Ramsey and Ginny were referring to the contents of Sandra’s vomit.)

For the first two acts of the play, Jack kept stealing looks at Bonnie Hamilton, whose eyes not once met his. Jack caught only a few backstage glimpses of the audience. Peewee seemed to be enjoying himself. Mrs. Peewee had removed the stuffed parrot from her head. The Wurtz spent much of the evening scowling and muttering to Mrs. McQuat. The Gray Ghost was in character, unreadable most of the time. Mrs. Oastler looked bored—she had no doubt seen better theater in her sophisticated life. Emma fidgeted in her seat; she’d been to most of the rehearsals and was interested only in what would happen with the blood.

When Jack-as-Darlin’-Jenny shot Ginny-as-Halliday twice with the starting gun, Peewee jumped to his feet and pumped both fists in the air. (Miss Wurtz, knowing the shots were coming, had covered her ears.) Alice, who hadn’t read the play and had only the dimmest idea of its heavy-handed subject, looked growingly appalled. When the gun went off, she flinched as if she’d been shot.

The curtain fell at the end of Act Two; the houselights came up and revealed more of the audience. But from backstage, Jack’s attention lingered on the first row. Peewee was still excited about the shooting. Emma was chewing gum. Miss Wurtz appeared to be delivering a lengthy critique of the play, and no doubt the entire subject of menstruation, to a taciturn Mrs. McQuat. Alice and Mrs. Oastler were holding hands.

Why were they holding hands? Jack wondered. He knew that this was fairly common among Dutch women and other Europeans, but he’d not seen any Canadian women holding hands—some of the girls at St. Hilda’s excluded. Young women or girls occasionally held hands, but not women the age of Alice and Leslie Oastler. Furthermore, Emma’s mom had kicked off her shoes. With one bare foot, smaller than Emma’s, she was stroking Alice’s bare calf. Jack looked uncomprehendingly upon this curious behavior. He had not yet made the leap, which Emma would make before him, regarding why his mother and Mrs. Oastler wanted to live alone in such a big house; that Emma and Jack were a “bad combination” was only part of the reason.

Mr. Ramsey interrupted Jack’s scrutiny of the audience from backstage—it was time for him to tie the blood bag around the boy’s waist, and for Jack to put his trial dress on. Maybe Jack was supposed to resemble Joan of Arc, although (despite getting his first period onstage) he would fare better than poor Joan. The dress was a sackcloth sheath, as beige as a potato. The blood, Mr. Ramsey assured him, would be most vivid against such a neutral background. The clamminess of the plastic bag, which flopped against Jack’s bare abdomen, was at first disconcerting under the dress. While it wasn’t a very big bag, Mr. Ramsey worried that it might make Jack-as-Jenny look pregnant. Mr. Ramsey loosened the knot at the top of the bag to release any excess air. This may have precipitated the slow leak, which Jack didn’t notice until he sat down in the witness box to give