Three Years with the Rat Read Online Free PDF Page A

intellectually dominated her classes, and showed nothing but amused disinterest in boys her age. She was considered the most attractive, unattainable girl in her high school. There were still occasional blow-ups, but Grace and my parents now mostly ignored each other. My only accomplishment for that year was discovering our dad’s
Playboy
collection, stashed in a box under the couch where my father now slept most nights. For my birthday that year, Grace bought me a 1950s edition of
Catcher in the Rye
and lovingly threw out my sweatpants.
    When she was nineteen and I was sixteen, Grace told me our parents’ divorce had been coming for a long time. My father moved to the suburbs west of Toronto and I stayed with my mother in the suburbs to the east. I got my first A in high school that year, in English. Not one to be outdone, Grace accepted a full scholarship for the University of Toronto. And adding insult to injury, I had to live with guys in grade eleven and twelve telling me “your sister is hot.” Before she left that year, she surprised me by asking me to stop fighting with our parents.
    Grace may have overshadowed my every accomplishment but she was my role model, proof that our family was capable of greatness, even if it was troubled. Her departure from my day-to-day life was painful but it never lessened my loyalty to her, never diminishedthe memory of being her teammate throughout the progressively more difficult years of our childhood.
    After she left for university, I got only snatches of information from her.
Dean’s list. Double major. Invited speaker. Contributing author.
I hadn’t even known she was an academic writer. And then my mother rejoicing
Grace is dating a boy
, which carried undertones of
Grace isn’t a lesbian
with it. Then
Grace is dating an Oriental boy
, which had its own undertones, overtones. By then I had bounced to my dad’s new house in hopes of completing high school and getting away from my mom.
    Although I was only an hour away from Grace by car, the psychological distance from Toronto to its suburbs is so enormous that it might as well have been the other side of the continent. In 2002 I moved to Vancouver, and then it really was the other side of the continent. It wasn’t until 2006, eight years after she went to university, that we found ourselves in the same city again.
    —
    The sky was white-hot and I started sweating the moment I got out of my car. Even on the quieter side street and in the shade of old trees, the air was thick, oppressive, and sticky, and the simple act of stretching sent beads of perspiration gliding down my ribs. I was damp when I approached the white moving van, its contents mostly emptied by that time, and it seemed as though John and Grace’s friends were no better off in the heat.
    To my eyes, the three friends looked like misfits, each one a different variety of circus geek. One was a gaunt giant boy in stripes and slacks, not jeans, his face a little fishy but still handsome enough. The girl was of no discernible ethnocultural background, dark-brown hair and eyes and skin, and tightly bound in denim fromtop to bottom. And half-bent in the trailer of the moving van was the last guy, his eyes hidden by aviator sunglasses, the sleeves of his shirt cut off, his jeans hanging low and exposing the crack of his ass.
    He was the one who noticed me. He stood, stared, and when he finally spoke, his voice rattled like a stone in a can. “Fuck me, you look just like Grace.”
    All three turned their attention my way, parsing me into heritable little bits.
    “It’s just his eyes,” the girl said. “You ever seen Grace smiling all goofy like that? This kid’s the sweet one in his family.”
    She singlehandedly hauled a sofa chair out of the van and walked away. I wondered how she could bend in jeans that tight.
    The guy in the sleeveless shirt jumped out of the van, brushed some dirt off his bare shoulder, and extended a hand.
    “You’re the deadbeat