“You think it’s red down there too?”
          “Like a caboose, my boy. Like a caboose.”
          Dawnie let out a stifled “gah” – stifled because she couldn’t be bothered to say it with more ‘conviction,’ like we used to hear them say in Sunday School, way back when. Stifled because I guess she’s getting kinda sick of saying it all the time. We gross her out, we know, but it’s all part of the game.
          “A real Little Mermaid,” Slapjack continues. He’s earned that name for two good reasons. The first being that for a long time when we were kids, he was pretty set on becoming a breakfast chef. I suppose he had one too many bad burnt-toast experiences or something – can’t remember now how it all started – but I do remember the time when his grandma told him, “Well, get off your arse and make your own slapjacks.” We nearly peed ourselves laughing, trying to explain that they’re called flapjacks. That was the sort of stuff that really got us six year-olds going. Even then, about 10 years back now, Dawnie was pretty unimpressed with us most of the time, for some reason or another. Maybe we were trying to put boogers on each others’ “slapjacks.”
          In any case, I don’t think Slapjack’s all that much into breakfast anymore. I haven’t seen him alive before noon since school got out. Lazy arse, indeed. I started working a paper route when I was 12, and have been bagging ladies’ groceries after school for about six months now. Dawnie started working part-time at the bowling alley right after she graduated and has stayed on for almost two years. Slapjack? Well, he keeps his pretty self busy doing other things: like slapping his jack. That’s the other reason he’s kept his name.
          “I’m telling you, she’s not a natural ginger. Besides, cabooses are red-red. Your metaphor doesn’t even make sense.” Dawnie suddenly stretches up and across the loveseat like a lioness, back arched like a perfect Roman bridge, with her arms and legs hoisting her up on either armrest, and her hair hanging, inky and straight like a jiffy-markered exclamation point. In her disgust, she whips her Cosmo across the room. She’s got bad aim: instead of hitting Jack, the magazine crumples against my arm and slips open on the floor to a page reading, in rigid pink letters, “Ten tips on giving good head.” Reflexively, I push it away, but not before I drop my licked-clean popcorn bowl hard – too hard – into my aching lap. When Dawnie sinks back down, I see the hint of a new tattoo just above her butt crack. Maybe ask about it some time. Maybe remember not to say “butt crack” when I do.
          “Of course it’s possible. Red as Ariel herself. I’ve seen it.”
          This part’s not true. Slapjack’s been telling me for the last few weeks that he’s been trying to get a glimpse – “just a glimpse, for lover’s sake” – of anything “remotely close to that secret cove of treasures.” He hangs out at the pool at the park a lot, to watch Emily Coates lifeguarding. “She’s always wearing those board shorts, man. I can’t even see a hint of her tits through that big-ass t-shirt they make her wear.”
          These aren’t the tragic confessions he’d ever make to his older sister, of course. And, truth be told, I’m getting kinda embarrassed these days to be so frank in front of her about what it is we’re dreaming about in the hot stink of August’s nights. On top of that, I’m noticing that I have to be a lot more careful about popcorn-bowl placement.

Later that weekend, I’m working. It’s funny bagging people’s stuff in this neighbourhood. You pretty much have a choice between getting weirded out having to put the pastor’s KY in a sac (at least I’m not the one asking if he wants paper or plastic), or acting like it’s as normal as brushing your teeth in the morning. One time, after the Coateses first moved here from Maple Ridge, Mrs. Coates came in and she just bought some girls’ stuff, except that when she pulled the Tampax box out of the basket, the tab got caught and the whole thing exploded all over the conveyor belt and floor. I helped her pick them up. A jumbo super-size box of them. I guess in her fluster, crouched there on the ground, she didn’t think much about how Emily would feel when, under her breath, she told me, “They’re for my daughter, with all that swimming she does.” When her eyes met mine, she looked a bit alarmed for a moment, but all I was paying attention to was her strawberry hair and the gold cross swinging between the valley of the shadow that went all the way past her freckled breasts and white lacy bra, right to her navel. Maybe it was the calm, stoic face I was giving her, like “It’s okay. I know it’s hard to be here, alone, raising two girls without a man around,” but I was feeling pretty good when she put her hand on my knee in order to straighten herself up again. Our limbs were such a tangle – hers frosted with golden freckles and specked with hair like flossy hay, mine smooth and tan from hours biking in the sun – that we began to look something like one of Dawnie’s old friendship bracelets, all woven together tight. I’ve thought about it a few times since.
          It was when I told Slapjack about the mishap that our conversation about the Coates’ uniquely-toned tresses began. Dawnie made such a fuss about it, how she knew Emily dyed her hair “orange” so that she’d look more like her mom (I guess her dad was such an asshole that she didn’t want him looking back at her in the mirror). When we saw how much our talk peeved Dawnie, we just kept at it more. After a while, she gave up on trying to shut us up, but that only seemed to make Slapjack all the more insistent, and thus he decided that he would do the expedition himself and find out, once and for all. I told him he was too lazy to put the inventory in order before he could even get out the back door, never mind up the mountain and into the cave.
          “Like you should talk,” Dawnie interjected, while fully immersed in a copy of something called Persuasion.
          “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said back. (I think I said it. In any case, Dawnie didn’t respond.) I asked Faith, a cashier at work, about the book, since I knew she likes to read, but all she told me is that they ought to be making more Colin Firth films with movies as lousy as they are these days.
          Anyways, this day at work was going slow. No limb-tangling with Mrs. Coates, or with anyone for that matter. Too hot for people to get off their lawn-chairs on their apartment patios to go out, even for their smokes. It’s like this when it snows, and everyone buys out our milk, bread, and condoms. The second it turns muggy like this, the liquor stores get emptied of their beer and the libraries of their free DVDs, which are mostly lousy CBC junk anyways, like old episodes of Coronation Street and Danger Bay. The latter’s not so bad, I guess. I watched the whole scratched-up set with Dawnie when she was sick with meningitis a few summers ago: she liked Christopher Crabb, and I liked the whales (which was a pretty good cover for the fact that I spent most of my nights for those two months swimming around naked with Ocean Hellman).
          With only about 45 minutes left in my shift, I was getting pretty tired of day-dreaming about the past. (Can you call something a day-dream if you aren’t getting warm and tingly feelings in your jewels about it? I liked that summer in front of the tube, but mostly because of the night-dreams I got as a result of all that Ocean Hellman. “They’re called wet-dreams, you douche,” Slapjack informed me. But, no, they weren’t: because I was still awake, and me and Ocean weren’t ever doing anything dirty. We were just saving whales in our birthday suits, and I was awake for the whole thing, making it up along the way, letting it all transpire in the darkest hours of night. So, then, what kind of dream was that, categorically-speaking?)
          “Keep bagging, kid,” and Faith dumped a huge and heavy savings-pak of detergent in front of me.

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