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I nodded, distracted by the years of memories of our families eating breakfast together at the Inn. Growing up, Trevor and I used to always play together, but after he went to high school, the only time we ever really hung out was with our dads and his sister at breakfast. We hadn’t eaten breakfast together since before my dad’s accident, and I suddenly realized how much I missed it—another one of the many things that came to an abrupt end when my dad died.
As if Trevor could read my mind, he reached over with one arm and hugged me into his chest. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. He knew how close I had been to my dad, and he knew how my world imploded after the accident. Although his familiarity was comforting, I stepped back to end the hug. My grief was surfacing, and I didn’t want it to. Everyone at school knew why I had moved away for a year. The stares and whispers were going to be hard enough to face without also being an emotional wreck at the same time.
Trevor checked my expression to make sure I was okay, then shoved my shoulder in a playful way to get me to smile. “You can make me breakfast tomorrow. Kiki, let’s get a move on,” he called back towards the house at his sister. She was born with Down syndrome and, although she was older than him, Trevor had been helping to take care of her since their mom took off. He opened the front passenger door for me as Kailyn stepped out onto the porch of their house and locked the door with the key she wore around her neck. “Are you getting in?” Trevor asked me.
“Kailyn likes the front seat. I’ll sit in the back.”
He stepped forward and opened the back door for me before he walked around and hopped into the driver’s seat. Kailyn climbed into the front passenger seat and slammed the door. She clicked her seatbelt on, tucked her straight blonde bob behind her ears, and opened one of the pre-teen magazines she was crazy about, even though she was nineteen. Her freshly applied lip balm made the air smell like the Strawberry Shortcake doll I played with when I was little.
“Hi, Kailyn,” I said as Trevor pulled out of the Inn’s parking lot and turned north on the Sea-to-Sky highway to head to Squamish.
Kailyn didn’t say hi back, but she asked without looking up from the magazine, “Did you know that Austin Sullivan’s favourite thing to eat is Hawaiian pizza? And his birthday is on April seventeenth?”
“No. I don’t even know who Austin Sullivan is,” I answered, never really that up on trends.
“Gah!” She slammed the magazine down in her lap exaggeratedly. “Deri. You’re so silly. Everyone knows who Austin Sullivan is. He sings the song that goes, ‘When I see your eyes, eyes, eyes, I want to cry, cry, cry.’ You know.” She sang in her husky monotone voice. I didn’t recognize the song at all.
Trevor looked over his shoulder at me and smiled because my face obviously showed my utter ignorance of pop culture. He joined in and sang the lyrics with Kailyn. “Recognize it now?” he asked me with a wink.
“No. Let me see his picture. Maybe I’ll recognize him.” I leaned forward to peek over Kailyn’s shoulder. She showed me a magazine page with a collage of twenty different teen idols. I had no idea which one was him, so I said, “Oh yeah, he’s really cute.”
“He looks like my brother, don’t you think?”
“Really?” I sat forward. “Show me again. Which one is he?”
She held the magazine up and pointed to a ruggedly handsome outdoorsy-type guy who had dark hair and light eyes. He was on a farm, shirtless, with a cut chest and abs, leaning up against a wood fence. He did look like Trevor. I sat back in my seat and Kailyn grinned wide enough that her chubby, freckled cheeks made her eyes squint shut. “Deri thinks Austin Sullivan is really cute, and he looks just like you. That means she thinks you’re really cute. Did you know that?”
Trevor didn’t turn his head, but I could see his eyes in the rearview mirror. They darted for a second to look at me.
Kailyn turned in her seat to face me. “You and Trevor should get married one day,” she whispered loudly.
Right. As if that would ever happen. Trevor could have any girl he wanted, and the introverted tomboy next door wasn’t even on the list. He smiled—maybe because the idea of getting married to someone he thought of as a kid sister was ridiculous, or maybe because he couldn’t wait to tease me for saying a guy who looks like him is cute. Either way, the entire topic of conversation made me uncomfortable. Fortunately, one of Austin Sullivan’s songs came on the radio. Kailyn turned the radio up, and we drove along the winding highway without talking.
The road followed the coastline with the ocean on our left and the mountain rock faces to our right. It was one of the most pristine places on earth to live. I definitely didn’t want to have to leave it behind again. When we arrived at the community centre for adults with disabilities, Trevor turned the radio volume down and whistled through his teeth to break Kailyn’s attention from her magazine. “We’re here.”
She climbed out of the truck without saying thanks or goodbye and slammed the door. Her wide strides made her stocky body sway from side to side. After she disappeared inside the building, Trevor looked over his shoulder at me. I thought he was going to embarrass me for the Austin Sullivan comparison. Instead, he asked, “Aren’t you going to get in the front?”
“Oh yeah, right.” I jumped out of the truck and hopped into the front passenger seat.
As he pulled out of the community centre’s parking lot and headed back onto the highway, a bizarre image flicked through my mind: a girl’s head smashed against the ground, and her blonde hair turned red from the blood pooled on the floor.
Trevor glanced at me, concerned, as he waited for me to tell him what I saw. I didn’t want to. My meaningless intuition visions, inherited from grandmother’s grandmother, started when I was about three. Back then, I’d see things like a dish fall off the counter before it actually did, or I’d point to where the whales were going to breach long before they showed up. When I was little, I thought everyone could see things before they happened. I was shocked when Trevor told me he couldn’t. He used to play games with me to test if I could guess what card he was holding or what picture he drew, but I always failed. The intuition never worked on demand like that. It wasn’t something I could will. Instead, I would randomly show up at his house wearing my full snowsuit and toque and mitts, ready for the storm that wasn’t forecasted. He’d look up at the blue sky and bright sunshine, sceptical, but he trusted me enough to go back inside to put his snowsuit on too.
Being able to see things in advance started to bother me when I was about nine because the scattered visions and subtle senses began to only happen for upsetting things. I once had a dream the neighbour’s dog was going to get hit by a car, so I sat outside their yard all day to make sure he didn’t get out. I was really proud of myself for saving him until it happened a week later. It was frustrating to not know when it would happen, and I felt so guilty. When I was twelve, I had a vision that my grandmother got sick and died in the hospital. Three weeks after the vision, she was diagnosed with cancer. She died a year later.
After I saw my dad’s car accident happen, I attempted to block all my intuitions. I promised myself the new Derian would no longer have visions. Unfortunately, despite determined effort on my part, I couldn’t stop them.
“What did you see?” Trevor asked.
I should have known he wouldn’t let me off the hook. “Nothing. It was a headache.”
He frowned and focused on the road. “I’ve known you most of your life. I know what it means when you get that look on your face. You don’t have to pretend you don’t get premonitions. It’s me.”
“They aren’t premonitions. They’re useless images, like crazy dreams. It was nothing. Nothing that makes any sense.”
“They aren’t useless. Search and Rescue teams are helped by intuitive and clairvoyant people all the time. While I was in Peru, I met a woman who finds missing children. I told her about you. She recommended I read her book. She says people with natural intuition can practice and get better at it, just like any other skill. I brought it home for you to read.”
I opened my bag and dug through it, hoping there was something I could use as a distraction to avoid the conversation. There wasn’t anything. “Why would I want to get good at seeing traumatic things I can’t do anything about?”
“The better you get at it, the more likely it will be useful. Maybe you’ll save someone’s life someday.”
I slouched in the seat and crossed my arms over my chest, fixing my attention on the rock face next to the highway. “A lot of good it did my dad. I saw it happen in exact, excruciating detail and couldn’t prevent it. He still died.”
Trevor glanced at me with empathy in his eyes. “Your dad’s accident wasn’t your fault, Deri.”
I shrugged and fought to swallow down the emotion in my throat. “Either way, I want to practice not having intuition at all, not practice to get better at it.”
We drove in silence. He probably wanted to convince me my brain glitch was a huge asset, but fortunately he let it go. “How are you feeling about being back at school in Squamish?”
Thankful to talk about anything other than my flawed neurology, I said, “Excited and nervous, I guess. It will be awkward at first when they all try to be sensitive about my dad. Hopefully that won’t last long and everything goes back to normal.” As soon as I said it, I regretted using the word “normal”. My life was never going back to the way it was. It was never going to feel normal again. I exhaled, trying to steel myself for the day ahead.
“It’s going to be okay.”
In an attempt to lighten the mood, I joked, “Yeah. Anything is better than living with my mom.”
A deep crease etched between his eyebrows. “She’s not that bad,” he said quietly.
Before my dad died, my mom lived in our apartment in downtown Vancouver and only came up to Britannia on the weekends, which was great growing up. Living full-time with my dad at the Inn had worked perfectly since he and I were essentially the same person—nature-lovers, bookish, and artistic. The opposite of my mom. Since Trevor’s mom left them, he always thought I should appreciate the fact that I, at least, had a mom, even if she and I had nothing in common. My whole childhood, he had encouraged me to try harder to get along with her.
I knew I needed to get over my issues with my mom, especially after losing my dad. I just didn’t know how. After my dad died, my mom refused to drive on the highway between Vancouver and Britannia, where the accident happened. She acted like it was a panic attack thing, but I knew it was just her convenient excuse to never step foot in Britannia Beach again and to guilt me into moving to Vancouver.
I tried to make living with her work. I really did. I enrolled in the stuffy private school she had always wanted me to go to. I joined the clubs she thought would look good on my university applications. I attended the counselling sessions she insisted on, so I could “process my grief”. None of it made any difference. I missed my friends in Squamish, I missed my granddad, and most of all I missed Britannia Beach. My mom and I got on each other’s nerves. Her standards for everything were impossibly high, she worried so much it was suffocating, and I hated every minute of living in the loud, crowded city. Moving back to the Inn saved me. And I wasn’t sure I could survive losing it too.
Trevor and I didn’t talk for the rest of the drive, which was something I actually always appreciated about him. He was comfortable with quiet, like my dad. And like me. But his silence felt different, more serious. As if something had changed between us in the year I was gone. He didn’t even look at me again until we pulled up in front of my school and shifted into park.
Things still felt odd between us. I wasn’t sure how to handle it and ended up sounding awkwardly formal. “Thank you for the ride, Trevor. Have a good day.”
“I’ll be done work at four-thirty if you want a ride home.”
“Sure. I’ll meet you back here.”
After I stepped out and shut the door, the window rolled down.
“Hey.” He grinned with his chin tilted in a cocky way. “Do you really think I’m good-looking like that guy in Kailyn’s magazine?”
And there it was. We were back to normal. The teasing was going to be relentless. I shook my head and made a snarky face. “Don’t let it go to your gigantic head.”
“Too late.” He waved and drove away.
At least our relationship felt familiar and easy again. Which was good, since I had a feeling going back to my old school was going to be way harder than I had anticipated.
CHAPTER TWO (#u8c3f3cfc-b1c5-5637-86f0-ec5b35ac3220)
My best friend Sophie Sakamoto wasn’t hard to spot in her black-and-white-striped knee-high stockings, black micro-mini skirt, and fluorescent lime-green tank top. She lounged on the front steps of the school with her boyfriend and some of the guys from their band. Her boyfriend Doug was in grade twelve and they’d been dating for almost two years. They came down to Vancouver almost every weekend to hang out with me when I lived there, thankfully. The loneliness would have been unbearable if they hadn’t. Doug had shaved his dark faux-hawk into a buzz cut since I last saw him. It suited the dark-rimmed punk glasses he wore. Most people got the wrong impression about Doug because he was a musician who wore leather and had tattoos up his neck—well, maybe it wasn’t entirely the wrong impression.
“Hey, guys,” I said, loud enough for them to hear me, but quietly enough to not make a huge scene. At least, that was the goal. I should have known Sophie wouldn’t let my re-initiation to the school slide without a bit of a scene.
She shot up and squealed as she lunged over to hug me. “Oh my God. Welcome back. You are not allowed to leave me ever again. The boredom was torture.” She turned to the boys. “No offence.”
They all laughed, knowing full well it was intended to be an insult. She leaned back to check out my outfit. Normally, she was the one up on fashion, and I couldn’t have cared less. The suede boots were one of the expensive items my mom had bought for me while I was living with her.
“Damn, Derian, you look stylish.” She tickled my waist. “All we need now is to get you a boyfriend.”
I glared at her and whispered, “I’m happily single. Thanks. You want to keep your voice down a little? Please.”
“Why are you turning all red?” she teased. She was going to take it as far as she could, just to amuse herself. And maybe also to get back at me for leaving her alone for a whole year. “Hey, Doug,” Sophie called over to him. “You think Derian looks hot with her new look?”
Doug laughed. “Is that a trap?”
“Nope.”
To my horror, Doug and a couple of other guys on the steps all checked me out. Doug pushed his glasses up, studied my suede boots, then moved his gaze up my legs, over my skirt, paused for a second at my pink button-up sweater, and finished at my face. “Yup,” he said.
“Smokin’,” another guy added.
“See,” Sophie encouraged.
I turned sideways and folded my arms across my chest. “You can stop humiliating me. I’m sorry I left you for a year. It’s not like I wanted to.”
Her expression changed into sympathy before she hugged me again. “I understand why you didn’t come back last year. I’m not mad at you, and I wasn’t kidding. You look beautiful. But you’ve always been beautiful—even in worn yoga pants and muddy hiking boots.”
“Thank you.” I sighed and tugged down the hem of my skirt. It wasn’t about the clothes. The look was only supposed to be symbolic of a fresh new start. I thought a new image would help me move on and leave the pain of losing my dad in the past. I hadn’t done it to please my mom, or get attention, or pretend to be someone I wasn’t, but if it was going to seem like that, I would prefer for everyone to treat me like the old Derian and pretend like nothing had changed. The only problem was, everything had changed. And it had nothing to do with how I dressed.
Sophie slapped my hand to make me stop fidgeting. Then she gasped, dug her fingers into my arms, and spun me around. A guy I’d never seen before closed the driver’s door of a black Mercedes coupe. He ran his left hand through his caramel-coloured hair as he turned to look at the school. Then he lifted the tan leather strap of his bag over his head, adjusted it across his chest, and glanced at all the students milling around on the grass and the front steps. “Holy shit. Who is that?” Sophie whispered.
I didn’t respond. I just watched him. He walked smoothly and confidently for a few steps, then looked down at the ground for a step—as if what he was doing was the last thing he wanted to be doing. His grey trousers, light blue-grey shirt, and expensive-looking black dress shoes were not the typical look for our high school. His skin was tanned like he’d just gotten back from the south of France or something, and his shiny silver watch must have cost a fortune. When he got close enough that I could tell he was over six-feet tall, and his eyes were the most intoxicating shade of blue, he smiled. It was a shy smile. His chin was down, but he glanced up briefly before flashing his insanely white and perfectly straight teeth at Sophie.
She and I both stared at him as he continued towards the front door of the school and disappeared inside. “He’s beautiful.” Sophie sighed.
“And he smiled at you,” I whispered, as I checked to see if Doug was listening. He wasn’t paying attention.
“He didn’t smile at me, you geek.” Sophie smacked my arm with the back of her hand. “He smiled at you.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Ya, he did. I’ll get the 411 on him for you.” She jiggled around excitedly.
“What? No. I don’t want you to do that.”
“Hi Derian,” a male voice interrupted us before I had a chance to axe her scheme.
I jumped a little because I hadn’t even noticed Steve Rawlings walk up. He was a friend who sat on student council with me the year before I left. He looked different. He’d grown about six inches and got his braces off. His hair was cut really short—probably because it was the first day of school. He was kind of a keener like that. He actually looked cute.
“Hi Steve.”
“Welcome back, Deri. Are you coming to peer mentoring?”
“Oh, I didn’t sign up to be a mentor.”
“I know, but I remembered you said you wanted to be a mentor in junior year. So, when I heard you were coming back, I signed you up. Hope that’s okay. Mr. Orton said he was going to send you an email. Sorry. He must have forgotten. I would have told you, but I don’t have your email or phone number. It’s cool if you have other things you need to do.”
“I did, I mean, I do want to be a mentor. Yeah, thanks.”
Sophie grabbed my elbow to hold me back. “She’ll be right with you,” she said to Steve, then whispered in my ear, “I’ll fill you in on the new guy by lunch.”
“What? No. Don’t embarrass me,” I hissed back.
She giggled in a maniacal way, held up two fingers in a peace sign, and moved to lean against Doug. Doug draped his arm over her shoulders and kissed her neck. There wasn’t any way to stop her once her mind was set on something, so I didn’t bother to protest more before I walked away.
“Do you want me to carry your bag?” Steve offered.
“Oh, it’s basically empty. But thanks for asking.”
He smiled in a nervous way that made me feel vicariously awkward.
It took a while, but I eventually came up with something to say to break the silence. “You grew a lot since I saw you last.”
His face winced slightly, maybe wishing I hadn’t reminded him he used to be smaller than me. “A bit.”
“And have you been working out or something?”
His cheeks definitely went red at that point, which wasn’t the effect I was going for. “I’ve been coaching tennis at the community centre.”
“Oh, I didn’t know you played.”
“I’ve been on the school tennis team since grade eight.” He looked a little hurt that I didn’t know.
“Right, I knew that,” I scrambled. Truthfully, football was the only sport I paid attention to since it was what Trevor had played in high school.
Steve chuckled, “I was on student council with you too. My name’s Steve. Do you at least remember that?”
I squished up my face and squinted exaggeratedly. “You look vaguely familiar,” I joked, and we walked into the students’ lounge, where the grade eights were all huddled around, chattering.
The chairs were set up in two rows facing each other. Our principal yelled for the mentors to sit along one side. Steve and I sat beside each other and talked as we waited for our buddies to be assigned. A tiny girl with strawberry curls sat down in the chair in front of Steve. She grinned shyly and her cheeks turned pink as if she thought Steve was one of the celebrities in Kailyn’s magazine.
“Hi. I’m Steve Rawlings.” He reached his arm out and shook her hand.
She scanned the room, as if she hoped her friends could see that she lucked out and got a hot guy as her mentor. My buddy was as small as the girl and even a little skinnier. He had dark hair and very pale skin. His eyes were hard to see because he wore wire-rimmed glasses, and he hadn’t looked up since he sat down.
