Chapter 10
I don’t accept his follow request.
But I do stand in the doorway of my apartment and stare at it for eight whole minutes while my emotions spin like that bottle on the dock.
There is a strong possibility that if I had received that very first “hey” two years ago, I would have responded with my own hey, which he’d follow with a you good?, me a yup, and that would have been the end of it.
But there’s also the possibility—as minuscule and improbable as it may be—that something more might have happened.
And although my usual tendency is to put that thought in a mental box, tape it up tight, and shove it into a dark corner of my mind, tonight I’m fighting a strange sense of nostalgia for a past that never even existed.
He had asked where I planned to live when I moved to Toronto—that night on the dock.
“I don’t know,” I had said. “In one of the dorms, I guess?”
I hadn’t figured that part out yet.
“You should look into the Annex,” he said.
“I have a friend who rents a room in an old Victorian just off Bloor. He’s got a dumbwaiter in his closet and a massive fireplace in his room.
It’s a really great area, and it’s within walking distance of campus.
I could get you the landlord’s number if you want?
There are a million great little sushi places right around there, too.
I could take you sometime. Do you eat sushi? ”
I had never tried sushi before, but I wanted to. I wanted every little detail Reeve described.
That weekend may have ended on a bad note, with me assuming Reeve had ghosted me.
However, our talk that night had ignited something deep inside me.
I wasn’t going to pretend I didn’t care if my future panned out.
I was going to go to medical school, and I was going to live this life I’d just imagined.
I spent the next week getting my application ready to send. My transcripts, essays, and recommendation letters were all perfectly prepared and ready to give me the shot that would change my life.
Then, I made an appointment at my bank. I still had a small outstanding student loan from my undergraduate degree. But I had been making steady payments on it. I hoped they’d let me take on additional debt, leveraging my theoretical future salary as a medical professional.
I should have known something was up when the adviser looked at his computer screen and let out a long, low whistle.
“You didn’t mention your line of credit,” he said, his voice shifting from its previous cheery tone to something far more disapproving. “Or that you have two credit cards that have gone to collections. I’m sorry, I can’t help you here.”
I told him there must be some mistake. His computer must be wrong.
His computer was right, and that was just the beginning.
When I called my mother out on what she’d done, she had an excuse for everything.
She couldn’t find work in West Lake, but there were jobs in Collingwood.
She needed to put a deposit down on a place and a car to get her to her job once she found it, but her own credit was shot, so she “borrowed” from me.
She’d planned on paying me back before I even noticed, but the job market took a turn and I “noticed” sooner than she anticipated.
Needless to say, I didn’t end up applying to medical school that fall. There was no way to come up with the tuition money, let alone the day-to-day costs required to live downtown in one of the world’s most expensive cities. It felt cruel to try, knowing I couldn’t go. It was better not to know.
Tonight, I seem to be in a masochistic headspace. I sit down at my laptop and navigate to the University of Toronto’s medical school website, clicking on this year’s admissions information just to see.
Applications close in three days.
The requirements are the same as when I considered applying two years ago. However, as I skim the summary, I realize that my MCAT score, the one that would have set me apart from the rest of the pack, is valid for only one more year.
I wrote it in the summer of my third year of university. I took a six-month prep course, wrote three practice tests, and finally achieved a score that seemed almost impossible at the time.
But according to the web page in front of me, that score will expire in the summer. My math courses and study prep are so far in the rearview mirror that it would probably take me years of preparation before I could score even close to as high as I did back then.
A heavy, uncomfortable feeling settles on my chest at the thought of a future that was never really mine. I think a small part of me assumed I’d get my shit together one day and actually send it.
However, it looks like “one day” is today, and my shit is so far from together that I can almost hear the low whistle of the bank clerk, looking at the mountain of debt still attached to my name.
It would take a small miracle.
I climb into bed, exhausted, pulling the covers high over my chin.
As I reach to turn the light off, I catch sight of Kitty’s diary.
Part of me wants to shove it in the drawer and never look at it again.
The other part of me still wonders if it holds some clue as to why Kitty left me that dance hall.
Against my better judgment, I pick it up and begin to read.
May 28, 1949
Dear Diary,
I am facing a big dilemma and I don’t know who else to turn to.
I had a whole plan to be Beau St. Clair’s girlfriend this summer until I found out he took Ruth Eaton to her school’s spring dance because their daddies are best friends.
Then I overheard two of Ruth’s girlfriends talking at the snack shack about how she is sweet on him but that he hasn’t asked her to go steady even though he took her as his date to the dance hall last Saturday.
Oh, Diary. I was so mad when I saw them together that I thought I would cry right there in the middle of the dance floor.
Then this older boy from town, Knots, asked me to dance, and lo and behold, he’s the best dancer I have ever danced with.
We had four more dances together, and everyone kept talking about how wonderful we were at dancing.
Knots is also a true gentleman. He put a chair next to his station so when he had to collect the tickets at the beginning of every dance, I could sit and rest my feet while I waited for him.
He has a wonderful sense of humor, too. If it’s a slower song, he tells me funny stories about all his younger brothers—he has six!
And about all the bands that come to the dance hall to play.
He knows all these things about the world that I don’t know yet, and I want to know them all.
Now, here’s my big problem, Dearest Diary.
The other night, when I was dancing with Knots, I looked over and saw Beau watching me.
His eyes were so dark, and his mouth was turned into a frown.
I think seeing me dancing with Knots made him mad with jealousy.
He approached me as soon as I left the dance floor and asked if he could have the next dance.
I pretended it was already taken and told him he could have the one after that.
After we danced, he stayed by my side the whole rest of the night.
He isn’t as funny as Knots or nearly as good of a dancer, but his friends are all so sophisticated.
They go to dinner at nice restaurants and the theater or the cinema whenever they want.
I am returning to the dance hall this Saturday but don’t know who I should dance with.
Knots? Beau? Or both of them? What do you think I should do, Diary?
xoxo
Kitty
I awake with the diary still clutched to my chest, sunlight streaming onto my face so brightly I can’t fully open my eyes.
“Put that book down and talk to me, Dotty. It’s bad enough I have to work on this positively gorgeous day, but there aren’t even any customers to entertain me.”
My eyes fly open, then squint from the bright sunlight, and I sit up so quickly I get a head rush.
It’s happening again.
I’m not in my room.
Or any room at all, for that matter.
I’m at the beach. The waves of Lake Huron are crashing a mere twenty feet away.
I’m on a chair.
In a bathing suit.
Next to what looks like a wooden hut with the words Snack Shack painted on the side and a very bored-looking teenage Kitty St. Clair sighing dramatically as she rests her head on the countertop.
“This part was barely even in the diary.” I throw up my arms, unsure of what my brain is up to with these dreams.
Kitty lifts her head from the counter, pushing a blond curl out of her eyes. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“You.” I point at her red-and-white-striped uniform with its matching hat.
“There was one brief line about the Snack Shack. The rest was about the dance hall again. You were trying to decide between Beau and Knots. It didn’t even mention the beach, so why am I dreaming about being in a bathing suit? ”
She leans over the counter and stares down at me.
“I think you’ve been out in the heat too long.
” Kitty throws her arm over her eyes and drops dramatically back down onto the counter.
“But you are right. I still don’t know what I should do about them.
Knots is so funny and sweet, but Beau is… Beau. Do you know what I mean?”
She hoists her whole body onto the countertop, stretching her legs out long and leaning her head back against the wall.
I slap the side of my face with my hand in an attempt to wake myself up, but nothing happens.
“What is going on?” I groan, rubbing my now stinging cheek.
Kitty doesn’t even open her eyes. “What is going on is that you’re helping me, Dots. I’m in a pickle and I require my nearest and dearest friend to advise me.”
“So you think I’m your nearest and dearest friend?”
Kitty’s eyes open. “Aren’t you? You are both dear to me”—she reaches out her arm, as if to show the minimal space between us—“and near to me.”
I take her in. She looks so real. I feel so…real. It’s as if I’m actually on a beach talking to a teenage Kitty St. Clair.
“Well?” Kitty asks, and I realize she’s waiting for a response.
“I don’t know,” I answer her honestly. “Maybe make a pros and cons list?”
Kitty thinks for a moment, and as I wait for her answer, it occurs to me that as logical as my suggestion is, I know how this story plays out.
She chooses Beau. Moves to Toronto. Raises three children.
At some point moves back to West Lake and decides it will be fun to leave me an abandoned dance hall with no context provided whatsoever.
Kitty pulls her legs in to cross them, cradling her hands in her lap. “Do you ever think about a life outside of West Lake? Something bigger? Better than smelling like french fries all the time.”
Her question catches me off guard. I was expecting the rest of this conversation to be about weighing Beau’s blue eyes against Knots’s swing dancing skills.
“I…I think about it.” I immediately picture my abandoned med school application. “But then I also think about how great my life here is. My friends are here. It’s my home.”
Kitty stares at the water for a moment, and I wonder if she will say anything more. She looks so sad all of a sudden. I have this urge to reach my arm out and touch her, but before I do, she speaks.
“When I look at Knots, I can see exactly how my life will turn out. It’ll be just like my parents.
We’ll get married and maybe live in one of those apartments on top of one of the shops on St.Mary Street.
Above the drugstore, maybe? I’ll work here at the Snack Shack until I have a baby.
Knots will get a job at the grocery store or, if we’re lucky, the foundry, and we’ll save our pennies until we can afford a house, and then we’ll grow old together. ”
“That sounds kind of nice.”
Kitty closes her eyes and lets out a long sigh.
“Yes, but I want…more. I want to see things and go places. I want to know what the Taj Mahal looks like because I’ve seen it with my own eyes, not just in pictures in a library book, and I want to meet people who make movies or drive race cars or run our country.
I want to be fabulously interesting, but you can’t be fabulously interesting if all you do is live in West Lake every day until you die. ”
“Hey!” Although I’m not actually Dot, whoever Dot is, I take offense on behalf of both of us.
“Sorry.” Kitty winces.
“It’s fine.” I wave her off, but she shakes her head.
“But that’s my whole point. You should be better than fine.” She sits up so quickly her hat falls from her head. “We should move somewhere exciting. Like Toronto or Montreal or Paris even?”
I roll my eyes.
She shakes her head. “I’m not joking. We could pack our bags and get on a bus. We could do it tonight.”
“But…it’s not that easy, believe me.” I’ve spent many nights lying in my bed coming to terms with this exact fact. Leaving West Lake takes money. Big cities want security deposits and last month’s rent, not to mention funds to live off of until you find a new job.
Kitty throws up her arms. “Of course it’s not easy.
But if we just sit here and talk about it, it will never happen.
I’ll be a little old lady serving hot dogs with my hunched-over back, and you’ll be lying on that chair all shriveled up like a raisin.
Don’t you want to start thinking about our futures, Dotty?
Is this really the life you want forever? ”
I close my eyes to gather my thoughts, but when I open them again, I’m back in my darkened bedroom just like I wanted to be.
The clock on my phone reads just past three.
I lie in my bed for a few moments, wondering if the memories of my dream will slip away like they usually do, but they stay vivid as Kitty’s words echo in my head.
I get to my feet without fully realizing why I’m doing it. Then I’m sitting at my kitchen table and flipping open my laptop, the University of Toronto medical school site still on my screen.
I don’t know if it’s the conversation with Kitty or the feeling I haven’t been able to shake since I realized this year would probably be my last shot.
My login still works for the university application center site. It takes a few clicks to update my information, but everything from two years ago is still relevant. All I need to do is click send.
I want to throw up.
I draw a deep breath, my eyes drifting to my ceiling as my hand hovers over my mouse.
“I hope you know what you’re talking about.”
I close my eyes, let the air whoosh from my lungs, and click.