Meet Me at the Lake
: Chapter 10

“I have a confession to make,” I said when we reached the end of the alley.

Will had stopped a few times to point out graffiti he found honest or vivid or raw, but mostly we talked and meandered. He told me about Roommates, his comic based on “living in squalor with three other guys in a two-bedroom apartment,” and how murals began as a hobby, but he quickly figured out there was enough demand to help pay rent. While he spoke, I tried not to let my eyes get stuck on his tattoo or his hands or the bulk of his shoulder for an indecent length of time.

“I wasn’t really paying attention to the art,” I said in an exaggerated whisper.

“I also have a confession to make.” He sounded serious.

He leaned toward my ear, and the shock of his breath on my neck sent goose bumps down my arms. “I’m starving.”

“Oh. Do you want to take off?” I smiled to show that this would not be a disappointing turn of events whatsoever.

“Actually, I was thinking we could grab a bite before the next stop. I mean, unless you had somewhere else to be.”

“The rest of my plans for today were walking around,” I said. “And hanging out in my apartment. So I’m all yours.” I squinted at my choice of words.

His smile widened. “Perfect.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Do you mind if I call my sister? She and my dad had a big fight yesterday. I think I should probably check in.”

“Of course not. I’ll just . . .” I hooked my thumb over my shoulder.

He waved his hand, motioning for me to stay put as he held his phone to his ear.

“Hey, Bells,” he said, watching me. I glanced around, listening to Will ask his sister how she was doing, where she was, if she was coming home tonight. I could hear the answer to the last one: an emphatic no.

“I did tell him, believe me,” Will said after a few seconds, rubbing the heel of his hand against his brow. “We got into it after you left. I spent the night at Matty’s. But you and I are still doing breakfast tomorrow, right?” he asked after a minute.

Once he’d settled on a time and a place with his sister, Will laughed, then caught my eye. “Her name’s Fern.”

I narrowed my gaze when he slid his phone back into his jeans. “You told your sister about me?”

“Mm-hmm. She said to tell you the Annabel Baxter tour of Toronto is ninety-eight percent less pretentious.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Allegedly.”

“Is she okay?”

“She will be. She’s still cooling off. My dad was way out of line, but she really lost it, and the whole thing escalated. It was more vicious than usual. I feel like something’s going on.”

I touched his arm. “Listen, Art School. I know this is your tour, but this is my city, too. I’m picking lunch.”

We were close to a popular Vietnamese sandwich spot that had opened a couple years ago, and I was thrilled Will hadn’t heard of it. Loud music and air-conditioning blasted us when I opened the door. It was well past the midday rush, so the line that often snaked onto the street was only three people deep. I checked to make sure Will wasn’t a vegetarian (a good chance, I figured) and that he ate pork, then sent him to snag the only empty table.

I ordered two types of pork banh mi sandwiches (belly and pulled) and a massive cardboard container of kimchi fries, topped with mayo and green onions and more pulled pork, as well as fancy lemon sodas.

“It’s so good,” Will said, taking his first bite of his sandwich.

We ate in gluttonous silence until Will set his soda down. “I heard you on the phone earlier. Who’s Whitney?”

I hesitated.

“Do you want me to pretend I didn’t?” Will sucked a dab of mayo off his thumb, and I was momentarily silenced.

“Maybe?” I said as he wiped his hands with a napkin.

I couldn’t pinpoint why I felt so comfortable around Will, but I knew it wasn’t the pot. I needed to talk to someone—I’d been drowning under the weight of my secrecy. But I didn’t want to unload about Whitney in the middle of a crowded restaurant, either. “Shall we continue with the tour?”

We spilled out onto the sidewalk, and Will fished his tin of lemon drops from his backpack, holding them out for me. This time I took one.

We sucked on our candies as Will led us through Chinatown to his next destination. He kept positioning himself so that he was on the street side of the sidewalk.

“You don’t have to do that,” I told him. “It’s weird.”

“It’s good manners,” he said.

“In 1954.” I yanked his arm and pulled him so that I was beside the curb.

“Whitney is my best friend,” I said after a while. “She has been since the fifth grade.” I told Will our origin story, how I slugged Cam in the stomach for spreading a rumor that Whitney stuffed her bra. The tale had Will grinning widely—the way Cam, who was twice my size, doubled over in tears, how Peter came to pick me up from school and told the vice principal Cam got what he deserved and that I would not be apologizing.

“They’re dating now,” I told Will.

“No.” His laugh slid down my throat like chocolate sauce.

“Since tenth grade. It turned out Cam had a huge crush on her. Anyway, we’ve been best friends since. I’m an only child, but Whitney is basically my sister.” We dodged around a sidewalk rack of ten-dollar T-shirts. “She was here visiting me for a few days. The whole trip was kind of awkward.”

“You didn’t insult her artwork, did you?”

I let out an amused huff, then gasped as a bike messenger zoomed past, giving my tote a smack. Suddenly, Will’s arm banded around my middle, pulling me to his side.

“Are you okay?”

I looked down at his hand tight on my waist, and he immediately dropped it, a flush spreading from his neck to his cheeks like grenadine into a Shirley Temple.

“Assuming you didn’t call Whitney basic, why was her visit so awkward?” he asked after we’d started walking again, slow enough that people pushed by us.

“I think I wanted it to be something it wasn’t,” I said. “I thought I could make her fall in love with Toronto, but she never will.”

“Does that matter? You’re not going to be a city person soon.”

My head jerked back. “I’ll always be a city person. It’s not one or the other—rural or urban.”

Will raised his hands. “Yeah, you’re right. But why is it so important to you that Whitney likes it here?”

I scratched the inside of my wrist. “I guess I thought if she saw Toronto the way that I do, then maybe she’d understand . . .”

Will looked at me and then at my scratching.

“It’s a stress reaction,” I said, schooling my fingers. Ripping at my own flesh was a revolting habit, but Will didn’t look grossed out.

He shuffled me to the side of a large building. I had the vague sense of groups of people milling around, but my focus had narrowed to Will, who stood in front of me, watching and waiting. “She’d understand what, Fern?”

I didn’t want to tell Will the full, horrible story. But I could tell him this part. I let it out in a rush. “I don’t want to move back home. I haven’t told anyone, but I don’t want to work at my family’s resort. Everyone expects that I’ll run it one day, but I definitely don’t want to do that, either. I didn’t even want to go to business school—it was my mom’s idea.”

Will listened silently. I waited for judgment to mar his expression, but it didn’t, so I kept going. “I think I felt like if Whitney got why I loved living here, then maybe I could have told her about the other stuff. But she hates Toronto. She wouldn’t understand why I’d want to stay. I’ve sort of been lying to her, to everyone.”

“Hasn’t it been hard, keeping all this to yourself?” Will’s eyes darted around my face like he was looking for something.

I nodded. “You think I’m pathetic, right?”

“No.” His gaze locked on mine, and for a second, I thought he might say something else. For a second, I thought he might kiss me. But then he glanced around and announced, “We’re here.”

—

“The AGO? Really?” I asked, looking at the building we stood beside—the Art Gallery of Ontario. I felt lighter having confessed to Will. “It’s a little—”

“Don’t say it,” he interrupted. “I can hear what’s happening inside your head right now. You’re as transparent as a window.”

I raised my voice. “It’s a little basic, don’t you think?”

His laugh was bright and merry and bursting like a balloon on a pin. A pitch-perfect chord hummed through me.

“It’s one of my favorite places in the entire city. It was renovated a few years ago. Frank Gehry did the design—it’s an architectural masterpiece inside and out.” Will moved his hands through the air as he spoke, motioning to the curved glass facade that soared above the street and stretched the length of the block. “And then there’s the art, of course.”

“Of course.” I clamped my lips together to keep a laugh behind them.

“Now what?”

“I was just thinking I should see if your sister’s free. Maybe I can still get in on her tour.”

“Come on. There’s an exhibit on that I’m pretty sure you’ll like.”

“Really?” Most of my courses were required for my major: business law, calculus, game theory—and I took as many music electives as possible—music and film, global guitar, a history of music in cities. I couldn’t imagine what art Will would think I’d like—I didn’t know what art I thought I’d like. But then I caught a glimpse of a large poster hanging in the window.

“Patti Smith?” I looked at Will, confused.

“There’s a showcase of her photography on. I thought you might be into that.”

“I’m extremely into that.”

Will paid for our tickets and we went straight to Patti’s show. I had expected larger-than-life images of grit and grime. I’d expected punk. But the exhibit was so subdued, austere. The walls were whitewashed, and the photos were small black-and-white Polaroids of inanimate objects. A stone cherub, Walt Whitman’s tomb, a pope’s prison bedroom, a fork and spoon. A handful of Patti’s personal items were displayed under glass.

“It’s not very rock and roll, is it?” I whispered to Will once we’d worked our way through.

“I dunno. Death is a recurring theme in her work,” Will said, gesturing to a photograph of a withering flower. “What? You’re making a weird face.”

“Nothing,” I hissed. “Death is a recurring theme. Go on.” I liked Will’s arty talk.

“As I was saying, there’s a lot of death going on. Death’s pretty rock and roll.”

I leaned closer to him. “Am I an asshole if I say I prefer her music?”

Will cackled, and the sound raced up my spine. A man with a fanny pack strapped around his waist and a DSLR camera slung over his neck glared at us.

“He’s not very rock and roll,” Will said into my ear.

“Disagree,” I said, pointing to the man’s feet. He was wearing cannabis-leaf-patterned socks. “But this is a Patti Smith exhibit. It’s silly that we can’t laugh or speak at a normal volume.”

“We can,” Will said in his regular speaking voice, and the man scowled again. “But should we move on?”

“Sure. You’ve been here a bunch of times, right? Do you have a favorite piece?”

“I don’t have a favorite piece,” he said. “But I do have a favorite part.”

Will led me to a massive glass-and-wood atrium that spanned the entire length of the building. One side was floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out onto the city. It was called the Galleria Italia, and there were giant curving beams that made it seem like we were in the upside-down hull of a ship, except there was so much light. Massive tree trunk sculptures grew throughout the hall, and as we made our way through, I decided it wasn’t like being in an upside-down ship.

“It’s like being in the woods,” I told Will. Even though it was clearly Toronto on the other side of the windows, it reminded me of home. It was both—city and bush. “This is your favorite part?”

“Yeah. I like how the space is so overwhelming, it makes you feel insignificant and alive at the same time. It basically forces you to take a deep breath. It’s the same way I feel when I look at the mountains out West.”

I thought it was the loveliest thing I’d ever heard. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, what? Why?” He rubbed the back of his ripening neck.

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

After we left the Galleria, we found our way to the permanent collection of Canadian art.

“There’s your girl,” I said, pointing to a display of Emily Carr paintings. Will looked at me, impressed.

“Hey, I may not have gone to art school, but I can spot an Emily Carr.” We moved toward one of a single massive evergreen. “Someone once told me Emily Carr painted a shit ton of lonely trees,” I said.

“A snotty art school grad, I bet.”

I vaguely recognized a handful of the pieces in the Group of Seven area. They were some of the most celebrated paintings of the nation’s wilderness, all done by a troupe of seven men. It was wall-to-wall lakes and snow and mountains and oh so many trees. But others felt familiar because they looked like home.

“I guess Emily wasn’t allowed in the Group,” I said.

“Oh, definitely not,” Will replied. “She was painting at the same time. Lawren Harris even told her she was one of them.” He gestured to one of Harris’s icy peaks. “But she wasn’t, really. No women were.”

I fell silent as we walked around. There was a canvas of a lake on one of the last days of winter—sky gray, trees bare, snow melting into smudges of brown. I could smell the wet pine needles, the promise of muddy earth, and spring buds forming on branches. I blinked up at the lights, my throat tightening.

I could feel Will’s eyes swing to me. He’d been watching me like this as soon as we stepped inside the AGO. It reminded me of how I’d been with Whitney during her visit. He was checking to see what I thought.

We came to a Tom Thomson—a storm-dark lake in the background, a rocky shore and saplings in the fore. Looking at it was like standing on the banks by the family dock. The trees were bare in this painting, too, but it wasn’t winter. Late fall or early spring—shoulder season, when the resort wasn’t busy. When Mom and I would head down to the water in the morning and she’d drink her coffee slowly. When she came home earlier in the evening. When life didn’t seem to revolve entirely around Brookbanks and its guests.

The stinging started in my nose. I looked up at the lights again, but a tear escaped, then another.

Will stood beside me. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. It took me a little while to speak. “It’s beautiful up there, you know?”

“I’d like to know.”

“I miss it sometimes.” I missed my mom, too. So much. The older I got, the more I seemed to miss her.

“You sound surprised.”

“I guess I am.” I looked at him then, and he turned from the painting. “I’m sorry. Sometimes pot makes me . . . tender.”

“Tender’s okay.”

I took a shaky breath. “I’m not sure about that.”

“Did you know,” Will said after a moment, “that Tom Thomson wasn’t actually part of the Group of Seven? He died in Algonquin Park just before it was founded. Some say he was murdered. Very mysterious.”

I sniffed. “I think I did know that, yeah.”

Will leaned closer. “Did you know trees were a recurring theme in Thomson’s work?”

I sputtered out a laugh.

“I learned that in art school,” he said.

I looked up at him, wiping my cheeks. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did you say you went to art school?”

He smiled. “Yeah, I think I might have mentioned that earlier?”

“Emily Carr, was it?”

“Emily Carr,” he said. “Come on, let’s get out of here. I think I know what you need.”