Better Living Through Plastic Explosives Read Online Free PDF Page B

strongholds, whose older sisters were engaged to men they’d never met from countries they’d never been to. She saw them gathered around the entrance to the Terry Fox SkyTrain station like rejects from a casting call for a movie set in South Central L.A. The girls were almost beautiful when viewed from a distance and not under simmering compact fluorescents, their hair a startling platinum or copper-green against caramel skin; the one pallid girl’s hair a fretful black. Waiting there for whatever it was they felt the world owed them.
    Corinna D. had yet to finish an assignment. She stood planted regally in front of Alex, empty-handed, her eggshell eyelids at half-mast. Statuesque, petulant, she spoke with a liquid West Indies accent although born in Ladner, and wrote English as if it were a second, or even third, language. Most of them wrote it this way, but Corinna with particular finesse. (“In my own onion this Teecher have no Peoples skills,” she would write on her class evaluation. And the Teecher would attempt a snort of laughter while reading this alone on her front stoop as she watched the dispossessed drifting through the aborted heritage renovation across the street.)
    Corinna tugged out her earbuds. “So, I was clubbing with my cousins.” Every anecdote of Corinna’s began with her cousins—whether blood relations or a code word for something else, Alex had never figured out. Corinna’s story involved a drive along No. 5 Road, hitting something, Cousin Kevin arguing with Cousin Tristan about whether to stop or not. What looked like blood-smeared blond hairs on one of the tires. Cousin Kendra screaming that she just wants to get the fuck home (“That girl has the mouth in the family”). A lumpy green garbage bag in the middle of the road. More arguing along with the requisite Fuck you s between Kevin and Tristan about who was going to look in the bag.
    â€œAnd I’m all, I’m checking out the bag already.” Corinna sighed heavily and actually looked right at Alex—a first—as if to say, Men . She pulled a strand of gum from her mouth, rolled it into a little green ball. “You do not wanna know.”
    The garbage bags with their grisly contents had started appearing in the fall and had by now become the stuff of urban legend around Vancouver. Everyone claimed to know someone who knew someone who knew someone who had stumbled across one, always at night, always somewhere near water, but the authorities were keeping it quiet. No one had even been reported missing.
    Alex waved her hand towards the classroom door with what she thought was a coolly comic flourish and said, “Creative Writing, Room 209, Block D.” No one laughed except for the enormous congenial boy at the back of the room whose real name, as far as Alex could discern from class records, was Xmas Singh. She called him X and he pulled in solid Bs and feigned amusement at her jokes. You took what you could get.
    Here in Room 017, Block C, in the bowels of one of those community colleges proliferating bunny-like on the outskirts of the metropolis, cheek-to-rump with industrial pig farms, ginseng plantations, and warehouse outlets, sarcasm might as well have been an advanced form of skin disease. She used to be so good with words. Now, more often than not, Alex found herself at a loss. There was a time when she had been fluent in more than one language. Alex and Rufus used to speak IKEA with each other, a language redolent with umlauts and nursery-rhyme rhythms. Drömma. Blinka. Sultan Blunda! It was lingonberry of another tongue—tart, sexy even, in a birch-veneer kind of way. Their private lingua franca.
    While the rest of the class fiddled with their iPods and iPhones, Corinna D. drifted towards a workstation as if walking the red carpet, plopped down, and swivelled her chair around, thumbs already busy texting one of her cousins.
    It was the year provincial health