The Truth Commission (4 page)

I was awoken by her soft voice.

“Normandy? Are you asleep?”

I raised my head. The room was dark. Keira had turned out the lights in the closet. She was just a shape in the darkness.

“No,” I croaked.

“Can I come up?” she said.

“Sure.” My sister hadn't gotten into bed with me since—well, since before she published the first Chronicle.

She shuffled up onto my bed. She'd wrapped herself in a puffy sleeping bag she keeps in the closet for when the “portal gets drafty” and my sweaters aren't protection enough. I have a queen-sized bed, which is one of the most luxurious things in my life. I got it from Neil when his dad decided to change all the mattresses in their house, which he does every two years. I sincerely hoped this mattress was Neil's or from a guest bedroom, and not his dad's. Anyway, there should have been plenty of room for me and my sister, but somehow it didn't seem like enough. She lay halfway down the bed, so she was talking to my knee.

“I think it's time for me to tell someone what happened.” Keira's voice is soft and raspy. It goes with her haunted eyes and distracted demeanor. I used to live for the times my sister would focus her blazing attention on me. Her focus was so total, it seemed to transform the entire world. Just talking to her used to turn me into someone special. That was before I got scared of talking to her. Scared of what she would do with our conversations. With my small secrets.

The key was to let her take the lead. Not react.

I could hear my heart thud in my chest. I wanted to know what was wrong, but I also felt unqualified. What if I listened badly and made things worse?

“I need to tell someone what happened at school,” she said.

“Ponchohontas” and Other Problematic Tales

20
I'm really not ready to go into what my sister said.
21
I mean, the details were fuzzy and she has this way of stretching stories out in a way that's almost painful,
22
so I'll move the narrative back to school. As we are so often reminded in creative writing class, this is referred to as a transition. These are the points in the writing that move the reader from one place and time to another. Without clear, brisk transitions, all books would be like
Under the Volcano
. I dare you to read twenty pages of that and tell me what happened. Nothing clear and brisk, I assure you. So, consider this your transition.

A week after the first truth, Dusk found us Candidate #2.
23
24

Mrs. Dekker. Office secretary.

Mrs. Dekker is right out of central casting. The unhappy secretary, with back-combed bangs, a sun-ravaged complexion, and a dyspeptic expression. And let's not forget the PONCHO! Worn for most of the school year, the poncho tends to suggest a certain lightness of spirit. After all, ponchos indicate a person is a funny sort who likes to surround herself with her own snuggly body heat.

Mrs. Dekker's poncho had pom-poms at the edges. It looked like it was from Peru or Bolivia or some other poncho-producing nation. In shades of red and orange, that poncho indicated oneness with the earth and possibly a side career in hillside potato farming.

But one only needed to raise one's eyes to Mrs. Dekker's face to see that the poncho was not the accurate character marker
25
it ought to have been. The poncho set up expectations and then destroyed them. It might even have been a red herring.

When you raised your eyes from the handwoven and hand-embroidered Bolivian/Peruvian joy of the poncho to see the thin-lipped mouth and slitted eyes, Mrs. Dekker went from gentle back-to-the-lander to Clint Eastwood at his least forgiven.

I happen to know that Mrs. Dekker scares not just students but also teachers, and even Principal Manhas walks softly
among
26
around her.

When a person or a person's parent calls Green Pastures Academy of Art and Applied Design to report that a person has a
legitimate
illness, Mrs. Dekker has decided it's her job to heap on the shame and scorn.

“Oh really,” she rasps, sounding like she was exhaling smoke from an extra strong Cuban cigar. “And I'm supposed to believe that?”

All this makes her sound kind of salty and charming. It is not. She is not. Rumor has it that when George Chan was carried past the office on a stretcher by
uniformed paramedics
after he fell off some risers in the drama room, Mrs. Dekker hacked a cough into the poncho-covered crook of her arm and said, “Some people will do anything to get out of class.” As we all know, George broke his arm
and
his neck and spent six months walking around school like an extra from season one of
The Walking Dead
, back when the series had a proper budget.

Mrs. Dekker hates students and teachers. She doesn't like her job or the education system. I personally know two students who have sustained bruises when they were knocked over by Mrs. Dekker in her 3:10 p.m. après-school race to reach her Dodge dually.
27

Dusk, who has a soft spot for negative people, chose Mrs. Dekker to be the next target of the Truth Commission.

“You can't ask her about anything personal. It's not safe,” I said.

“It really isn't,” agreed Neil.

“You can't even report an absence to that woman, never mind ask her intimate, probing questions. She'll tear your guts out,” I added.

Neil nodded. Sighed. Rallied his courage. “You know what? I think it's worth the risk. Just make sure you ask her in a safe place.
Not the office!
”

“Why not?” I asked. “Principal Manhas is there to keep order. The nurse's office is nearby. You know, in case it goes wrong.”

Dusk shook her head. Her ponytail looked like it had been slept on for three days straight and then a troll had spent an enjoyable hour poking at it with old branches and broken cutlery. Yet somehow, the ponytail still looked like it belonged on a Fashion Week catwalk.

“Can't ask her in the office. It's the scene of so many unhappy hours. I have to talk to her in neutral territory.”

“You're going to follow her to the most hellish part of Peru?” I asked.

Dusk rested her chin on the back of her hand and stared at me.

I shrugged. “She always looks to me like she should be in Peru. The unhappy part of the country.”

“Wasn't Paddington Bear something to do with Peru?” asked Neil, opening his lunch: a jar of olives, a box of ten-dollar crackers, and a block of cheese covered in Welsh thistle dust or similar.

“I'm going to speak to her near her truck,” said Dusk. “That truck seems to be her happy place.”

“Death wish,” muttered Neil, breathing out a small cloud of cracker particles. He brushed the residue off the chest of his dark blue turtleneck (à la Steve McQueen in
Bullitt
) with the backs of his fingers.

We were sitting outside at the pitted picnic table in a small cul-de-sac between the office and the curved brick wall of the theatre. It was shaded by a gnarled, misshapen tree. Thanks to a fork in the trunk, the tree is a popular site for photo shoots and portrait paintings. More than once a naked or semi-naked student has been asked to get out of the tree by Mrs. Dekker or one of the teachers, due to safety concerns and regulations having to do with student nudity on school property. The Green Pastures Academy of Art and Applied Design is
that
kind of school.

A small brown wren had come along and was hopping toward a fallen morsel of cheese, an avid look in its round black eye.

“Don't eat that!” Dusk admonished it. “Your cholesterol levels will skyrocket. If you must scavenge, scavenge from me.” She scattered a bit of her homemade granola on the dead grass.

“Let the bird live, woman,” said Neil as he tucked the thistle-covered cheese into its wrapper and the rest of his lunch into a linen napkin and put it all away in the tackle box he uses to keep his paints and brushes. Then he shrugged on his brown suit jacket, another key component of McQueen's
Bullitt
look. He'd earlier asked if it would be “too much” to wear one of those shoulder pistol harnesses that look sort of like suspenders, and we assured him it would be quite a bit too much.

I tried to refocus us. “I'm just saying, Mrs. Dekker's truck has
six
fully inflated tires. On most days, Nancy has only three.” Keira named the truck Nancy for reasons I can no longer remember. She gave her to me when I turned sixteen last year and got my learner's license. My sister is like that. She is prone to bursts of careless generosity. At least, she used to be.

“Well, I'm not going to follow Mrs. Dekker home,” said Dusk. “We need to ask the truth on or near school property. We are not free-range truth seekers.”

This is a fine illustration of how weird little rituals develop. One person says something is a rule, and then it is. Once in a while there's an argument and the rule is changed slightly, but mostly these things happen arbitrarily. Come to think of it, more argument might have been a good idea when we were establishing the Truth Commission.

Before we could ask Dusk any more questions, the bell rang and we had to go in for history. That would be followed by traditional arts (me), sculpture and installation (Dusk), and AP oil painting (Neil). Our school is the brainchild of a farmer named Ronald Green who, late in life, became a famous and wealthy international artist thanks to his uncannily powerful paintings of pastures, barns, and feedlots. (As our instructors like to say, with a discernible note of bitterness, “It's just plain amazing how much money some artists make.”) Ronald Green was like the Grandpa Moses of Nanaimo. Our Founding Farmer.

No one thought a private high school for artistically inclined high school students would work in a town of less than 90,000. They were wrong. Green Pastures
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has a long waitlist. Our students are a mix of the rich, the bullied, and the talented—usually some combination of all those things—plus those like me, who got a scholarship because my sister is a famous alumna and they probably hoped that I'd have some thin shreds of her ability.

I made sure I was ready to sprint out of class when the bell rang at 3:10. Neil must have done the same, because we met in the hallway at 3:11, but we weren't quite fast enough. When we reached the lobby outside the office, moving like a pair of power walkers—no running in the halls of Green Pastures because there was too much chance of knocking over one of the many ethereal, artistic types wandering around in hip glasses with the wrong prescription—we were just in time to see Mrs. Dekker's poncho sweeping out the door. Dusk, in her vintage Adidas warm-up suit, was hot on her heels. Mrs. Dekker looked like a Dorito running away from a stoner.

“She's gone off the reservation,” said Neil.

The two of us followed at a careful distance, pushing through the glass doors and past the Photoshoot Tree. The path led to the teacher and staff parking lot. Teachers didn't finish until 3:30, so Dusk and Mrs. Dekker were more or less alone out there.

“Excuse me,” said Dusk. “Mrs. Dekker?”

Neil and I backed away and took our seats on the picnic table. We couldn't hear, but we sat sideways so we could watch the scene unfold out of the corners of our eyes. We were ready to run for help if Mrs. Dekker pulled a knife on Dusk or began to smother her with the poncho.

My heart thudded and I could hear Neil breathing quickly.

Dusk and Mrs. Dekker faced each other. Dusk spoke and Mrs. Dekker stood very still. Then she leaned in to listen more carefully.

“This is making me crave antianxiety meds,” said Neil.

Then, astonishingly, Mrs. Dekker shook her head and leaned back against the gleaming rear wheel well, as though settling in for a chat. She began to speak. She pointed a thumb at an animal-shaped sticker in the back window of the truck's extended cab and shook her head again.

She put her hands on her hips, at least I think she did. That poncho hid a lot. She spoke some more.

Neil and I watched, fascinated. Dusk hadn't moved, but some of the tension had gone out of her body.

The two of them talked for fifteen minutes. Teachers passed on the way to their cars, staring in obvious amazement at the tête-à-tête.
No one ever
chatted with Mrs. Dekker. When they were done, Mrs. Dekker reached up and put a hand on Dusk's shoulder. Then she swept away in her poncho, climbed up into her truck, and drove away, leaving behind a cloud of diesel exhaust.

Dusk returned dreamily to us, coughing out small puffs of pollution.

“We're dying here,” said Neil. “What did you talk about for
fifteen minutes
?”

Dusk smiled.

“Ostriches,” she said.

We waited.

“Mrs. Dekker raises ostriches. She is, in fact, one of the foremost breeders in the region.”

I was too busy reeling from the obvious symbolism to say anything,
29
but Neil responded without hesitation.

“So what does that have to do with the truth about Mrs. Dekker? Why she hates her job? Hates students?”

“She doesn't hate her job or the students. She even called me ‘honey.' She said that she is often worried because ostriches are, and I quote, ‘surprisingly tricky wee scunners.' Mrs. Dekker is of Dutch-Scottish heritage, not Peruvian, as you'd speculated, Norm. She visited Scotland over the summer and picked up some of the lingo. Hence the term ‘wee scunners.'

“She's saddened that her natural brusqueness, quite common among the Dutch and some Scots, is mistaken for ill temper. She started wearing the poncho so people would find her more approachable. It hasn't worked. However, the poncho
has
been useful for keeping infant ostriches warm. Orphaned ones.”

“You should suggest she go the Aimee route,” I said. “Get her face surgically adjusted to express her warm, sunny personality.”

“Don't be mean, Norm,” said Dusk. “Being a part-time ostrich farmer is not as lucrative as it used to be. In fact, over the past several years the bottom has fallen out of what is known as the Aves market. When Blaire—that's her first name—started, a breeding pair might go for fifty thousand dollars. Hatching eggs went for a thousand. But that was a long time ago. Things have changed in the ostrich-ranching world. At this point, she probably doesn't have the funds to get her face done.”

“Blaire?” said Neil.

“Ostriches?” I added. But before I could bring up the whole “head in the sand” thing, Dusk went on.

“Blaire—Mrs. Dekker—
thanked me
for asking her how she felt about her job. She thanked me for asking her the truth about how she feels. We are sisters in truth. Or at least friendly acquaintances.”

“Just like me and Aimee,” said Neil. “We are really onto something here. I'm so in love with the three of us right now. Which reminds me, I'm getting together with Aimee tonight. We're doing coffee before her date with Joel Nordstrom. She just wants to touch base first.”

“Doesn't she call you almost every day now?” I asked.

Neil sighed. “Yeah, I'm pretty much part of Aimee's inner circle.”

I didn't point out that Aimee had yet to invite him out with her friends. She just took him aside and dumped all her problems on him. Neil, lover of female beauty, didn't seem to care that the relationship was unequal. He was probably getting ready to ask Aimee to pose for him. As I have already mentioned a time or ten, the last thing I wanted was to be featured in anyone else's art, but I couldn't help feeling slightly left out. I pushed my feelings aside.