Our Little Secret(4)

“Don’t let Christie Burbank work you over. She’s got nothin’. Just call her Spermbank, that’ll slow her down.” He stopped to tie the lace of his high-top. “And the other one’s Danielle Moyzen. I call her Moistbum.” His face craned up towards me. “What’s your name, anyway?”

“I’m scared to tell you,” I said, and he laughed.

When he stood up, he pulled the top of my English book down from where I held it clenched against me.

“Angela Petitjean,” he said, properly, reading the label on the front. “English Ten. Okay, you’re in here.” He opened the classroom door for me. As I walked through it, he added, “See you around, Little John.”

It was the only class of the day I went into smiling.

He walked me home, too. It turned out he lived a block up from me in a house with a huge birch tree out front. I was ahead of him, trudging along in my gray Converses, when I heard footsteps catching up with me. I turned and there was HP, running with his thumbs hooked under the straps of his skull-embossed backpack.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

We walked in silence as I racked my brain for a conversation to have with him. He knew I was doing it, too, because after a minute he looked down at me.

“Nothing?”

“What does HP stand for?” I blurted. It came out really loud. We’d already reached my driveway so I stopped walking and mumbled, “This is me.”

“Old Man Sneider’s place? You guys bought this house of horrors? Wow, when we were little, we used to hide behind this wall right here and watch for ghosts in the windows.”

“Who did?”

“Me. Kids around here. This house was the only one that never got decorated on Halloween. It never needed to.” HP sighed nostalgically. “And there used to be a shit-scary dog that lived here. I walked to school with a rock in my hand all of Grade Nine.” He took his baseball cap off and ruffled the hair at the back of his neck. He had a line around his head from where he’d thrown his hat on after swimming. “You got a dog?”

“We had one back in Boston but it got re-gifted.”

“By who?” He said it like he was about to get a posse together.

“Mom gave him to a family across town. I think it was a hair thing.”

HP nodded like he understood the logic. We stared at each other. He stretched. “I’ll walk by here tomorrow morning at eight. If you’re here, you’re here.”

I pressed my back against the brick gatepost and looked up at him. “What’s HP stand for?”

“My last name’s Parker, but that’s all you’re getting.” He put his baseball cap back on. “Some secrets you have to earn. I’ll see you around, Little John.”

He stalked off, his fifteen-year-old legs gangly in his skinny jeans. I watched him kick a pebble down the sidewalk, catching up, then punting it on. He did it all the way home.

From then on, the only days I didn’t walk to school with HP were those when one of us was home sick. And as it turned out, the greatest alliance anybody in the school could have was with HP. I never had any trouble from anyone ever again, including Burbank and Moyzen.

As we got older—Grade 11—girls waited for him at the gates and he’d peel off, flapping me a wave as he joined hands with the latest one. He had a constant stream of female fans; I’d often be in the washroom while a huddle of Grade 11s consoled the latest HP casualty as she dabbed her eyes. Shhh, they’d whisper, their eyebrows panicked. That’s her, that’s Little John. Wait till she leaves.

Girls threw themselves at HP’s feet, and he hadn’t figured out who the good ones were yet. I doubt he even cared. By seventeen he was captain of the swim team. He had bright blue eyes and arms like Poseidon. Even Mr. Cameron, the school principal, thought he was cool and high-fived him in the lunchroom. HP called Mr. Cameron “Jerry” or, on some days, “Jer.” When it came to the girls, though, I wished HP would be pickier, and maybe slow down a little on the hand-holding. Like my mom always told me, it’s graceless not to discriminate.

I never understood why HP had chosen me as his friend, or how I’d gotten an all-access pass to him. It was like having a key to the White House. He told me everything he thought and felt and wanted, and I don’t think he told anyone else in the world—not even Ezra, his best buddy. Ezra was a goofball and a jock, and if you told him you even had a feeling about anything he’d probably give you a charley horse and call you a pansy. Sometimes HP painted pictures on thick, fibrous paper and wrote me letters over the top of them, letters about the good things in life—how your skin feels after a day in the ocean; the smell of asphalt before it rains; the way old people’s hands wrap around coffee cups in restaurants. Ezra would have punched HP in the face if he’d found out about those. I kept all of the letters—I still have them.

In the summer after Grade 11, HP and I sat with our backs against the trunk of the old birch tree in his front yard. We met there a lot, often after dinner when I’d walk the block barefoot and call for him at his open front door. His parents rarely shut the door and never locked it. “If anything’s coming for us,” HP’s dad used to say, “it’ll come just as good through a window.”

It was a warm night—August, I think—and the cicadas were screeching. Mrs. Parker came out with pie, but I didn’t want any.