Everything Was Good-Bye Read Online Free Page B

Vice kind of way. Carrie was wearing leggings and a miniskirt; several hoops looped their way up her ears, which, I’d told her, was the exact look I would have worn were I allowed to get my ears pierced more than once. We had been best friends in junior high school, but she’d since traded me for the fame that came with being runner-up in the Miss Teen Canada pageant. I envied her popularity and adopted a new group of friends to replace her: the Smart Ethnics. They weren’t fobs, or fresh offthe boat, as we referred to the immigrants who smelled like onions and had body odour that was thicker than their accents. Nor were they dips—the Dumb Indian Punjabs who clustered together like jalebies, driving around after school in their Firebird Trans Ams. They were the ethnics who took all the advanced classes in algebra, thinking this would somehow help them in life just like the French-immersion kids thought that their piss-poor French would land them dream jobs.
    My locker was next to my least favourite Smart Ethnic, Tina, with her incessant cheeriness and bullshit stories. In pe she had brought in an autographed picture of Arthur Ashe; her dad had played tennis with him. In history she brought in pictures of Idi Amin, who had been their neighbour in Uganda, and in law she did a presentation on Clifford Olson, a family friend before he was a serial killer.
    “Hi, Meena,” Tina said, putting her pink lipstick on. She smacked her lips together and smiled at herself in the tiny locker mirror. She always wore blue eyeshadow and frosted Revlon lipstick caked over her chapped lips. By the end of the day the lipstick would have settled into cracks and adhered to flakes of dry skin, her mouth a pout of pink scales that she would pick at when she thought no one was looking. She pulled at her leopard-print leggings and adjusted her leather anti-apartheid medallion, which hung between her ample breasts in a display of social outrage despite her name-brand Ralph Lauren shirt. I wondered who she thought she was kidding. This display of ethnicity was all purchased from the Afri-can store in the mall where everything was made in Hong Kong. There was nothing authentic about her. She was part melting pot, part multicultural and part privileged, the kind of person who would get exactly what shewanted from life with very little effort, not realizing that for the rest of us, life was not that easy.
    “Hey,” I mumbled back, wishing that she would stop being so nice to me so I wouldn’t feel so bad about hating her. I slammed the locker door without looking at her. “See you in class.”
    I sat in the middle of the classroom, not close enough to the front to be seen as eager but not far back enough to be a slacker. As the other students took their seats, conversations shifted into whispers and note-passing. I wondered what the notes said and wished that one would come my way. Carrie and I used to pass notes, and when we weren’t in class together we would write long letters to each other. Her writing was always entertain-ing, full of inside jokes that made me laugh out loud until I saw that everyone was looking at me wondering what was so funny. The teacher would then say, “Would you like to share the joke with the rest of the class?” To which I would reply, “No,” and slip the note in my textbook until she wasn’t looking.
    I kept all the notes and letters that Carrie had ever written to me. I reread them last summer, embarrassed that I’d preserved the details of junior high school crushes in folded sheets of loose-leaf paper. I worried that someone would find them, and burned them all except for the one that said: “James totally wants to jump your bones. He’s invited us over after school.” I didn’t want to forget that someone had wanted me; I wasn’t the type of girl that boys were interested in. I wasn’t unattractive, but I wasn’t beautiful like the white girls whose hair smelled like green apples. I had features