Justin

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Justin
My eyes were wide open in the dream. Mum was there, stern and troubled, standing before us.
—- What have you done? The police are on their way.

My confusion was mingled with thoughts of the world never being the same again. It had to do with Angus. He’d bullied us through school, and hired Justin as a gopher when his daddy made him a manager at 18. Justin was fired yesterday for taking a moral stance about fake invoices. Pre-dream so it happened, but for some other reason. I love Justin and detest Angus, so I helped Justin push Angus’s car into the river in retaliation. Even in a dream such an act has consequences. No one could have seen us at three in the morning. Except maybe for the night watchman.

—- They say you killed that guy, said Mum.

—- What guy?

—- The one who drowned in the car.

Angus was in the car? There had been no-one in the car. There had been no car, not really. Time to wake up and have a pee.

A knock at the front door. You two better run for it, said Mum, who would never say such a thing. We grabbed our coats and were out the back door. From the top of the hill we saw a police car with two Mounties searching the yard. We ran. Stopping to talk to them, explain ourselves didn’t present itself as an option.

We ran through the Grove, avoiding the paths where old people walked their dogs, till we came to the river where we had pushed the car with someone in it, how could we not have known? Justin and I gave each other a frightened look. What to do? The Queen looked us in the eye, bemused, from a twenty dollar bill. That was all the money we had to escape with. Justin’s better idea was to sneak into Angus’s office. If he was dead, he wouldn’t be there. Justin still had the key .

I always say ‘no’ to Justin, then do what he wants five minutes later. We said hello to Mrs Baird at the bakery, then entered Angus’s office from the alleyway. The door creaked onto a pokey room, the outer office where important things were stored, and stopped short at the sound of voices beyond the wall. Soothing voices, crying voices, an angry man, Angus’s father the head honcho of all the town. There was no point being petrified, Justin knew where the cash box was and we had to get it open. I tripped the lock with a pair of scissors. A hundred bucks, maybe two.

—- What are you doing? Angus’s sister came through from the main office and began to scream.

—- Angus owes me money, said Justin, not too convincingly, our escape route blocked by a chair falling over and the in-rushing of the Angus family, sister and Dad to the fore hitting us to the floor. —- Call the police, sis shouted to mum and Mum did just that as Dad fell on top of us, gasping, choking, collapsing, his astonished face spitting into mine.

—- He’s having a heart attack, said someone Past tense, had, I’d say because his eyes are staring at my neck but can no longer see it. I am thrashing about to escape this horror. There is great commotion but nobody does anything. I begin to perform CPR – cardiopulmonary resuscitation. We learned this last year in high school. I locked my fingers together and pushing down hard and fast on the angry dead man’s chest, combining this with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the latter bit was truly gross, but I found a rhythm and continued pushing and breathing until el muerto jerked into life. We locked tongues and bumped heads.

There were no congratulations but neither was my detention an immediate priority. Sirens could be heard. Police? Ambulance? Justin was nowhere to be found. I walked quickly down the alleyway and there he was, sitting in the front of the bakery van, with old Mr Baird at the wheel. As it was about to pull away, I shouted, it stopped and I threw myself through the back doors as the local police pulled up. I curled up against the bread as we trundled along the road out of time, heading north.

We waited half an hour for a bus. Mr Baird’s bread van continued on to a fishing village on the edge of the world. We would have stuck out like two sore thumbs, which made me laugh until Justin said the end of the line was Pointe-aux-Coques, the very fishing village Mr Baird could have taken us to.

—- I thought the bus was going all the way up the coast, shrugged Justin. He put his hand on my knee, which pleased me. That meant we should relax. —- They’ll try to pin two murders on us now, he said cheerily.

—- Angus’s dad came back to life.

—- Whew, but they’ll be gunning for us. We’ve got to hide out.

He put his arm around me and ruffled my hair. No one was sitting behind us, but still ... It felt good, and the desire to pee was overtaken by something else.

—- You’re so gay sometimes, joked Justin, pinching my cheek.

—- We’ve done gay things. Does that make us gay?

—- Just having some fun, me and you. No one’s the wiser.

Where was this place? It reminded me of a made up Acadian village we studied in Literature class. As we came to a crossroads, Justin shouted out something in French and the bus stopped. There it was, the Dew Drop Inn, a semi-retired motel with no cars in the lot. We didn’t have to show identification, and gave false names. Justin said something amusing to the receptionist, and she laughed, so I laughed too.

The room was mauve and the bedding synthetic. We had gay sex and said not a word about what in the world we did to get in this situation and what we were going to do about it.

—- I love you, was what I said.

—- Don’t be silly.

—- I want to kiss you, you never let me kiss you.

I kissed him and he did not draw away.

—- Am I dreaming?

—- We can get jobs in the fish plant, he replied. — And live happily ever after.

We tussled and the synthetic, mauve duvet slid to the floor.