The Truth Commission (8 page)

Pale Investigations

By the time I got home, I'd decided that since I was initiating a Pale Family Truth Commission comprised of me, myself, and I, the first order of business was to speak to Keira's friends. Maybe they knew something about her teacher. Of course, first I had to figure out whether she had any friends.

My sister has always been too consumed by her art to really nurture friendships. Still, everyone at the Art Farm paid attention to her, just like all the kids at camp had. At G. P. she mostly hung out with a girl named Constance, who went off to the Ontario College of Art and Design to study Industrial Design. Constance was one of those people who don't mind doing most of the work in a relationship. If I ever get married, I hope my first husband is like Constance.

I assumed things had been different at CIAD. I'd seen the website: tiny class sizes, low student-teacher ratios, acclaimed yet engaged professors. In addition to the Chronicles, Keira had submitted a superstar portfolio, and there's no way she'd have gone unnoticed by her peers. Even if she hadn't made any close friends, she must have had acquaintances. Someone must know something.

Unfortunately, the school had a privacy policy.

Enter Facebook: Slayer of all privacy policies!

It took me about three seconds to find a Facebook group for students taking the undergraduate animation program at CIAD. The program has a reputation for being harder to get into than Harvard or Yale, and being more expensive.

I switched my profile photo to one in which I was wearing an ironic chapeau. From what I could see in their profile pictures, the heads of CIAD students were festooned with berets, trucker hats, deerstalkers. To be honest, I briefly considered using a photo of Dusk and me together, in the hope that I'd be mistaken for her. Studies have confirmed that beautiful people get special treatment, and I needed some.

I sent a Facebook message to one Roberta Brown Heller II because, despite the regnal number after her name, she had a friendly, freckled face.

The message would go into that “Other” message box that Facebook helpfully makes invisible, so I hoped that Roberta Brown Heller II would get it. Trying to friend her seemed too pushy. After all, we were supposedly just planning a surprise party. No need to get psycho about it.

Less than a minute later, I got a response.

How to respond?

This was like a Jason Bourne moment, only not athletic and on the world's least secure privacy platform other than skywriting.

Get lost.

Heller II's friendly, approachable profile picture was misleading. She was rude and off-putting. I was starting to like her.

Just go away.

Go on.

I tried to think of a detail I knew about Keira that a classmate might also know but that the people who obsessively followed her career wouldn't.

I had to be careful here. Keira had made me promise not to tell what happened at school. Of course, she hadn't exactly told me what happened, either. It was all vague allusions. Looking into her story was a betrayal. But I felt compelled. She was finally talking to me again, and I had a terrible feeling that she was leaving things out. Important things.

What if I pretended she'd never said anything and she went out one day and never came home? She was disappearing more and more often. I knew it was connected to what had happened. What was my responsibility here?

I was about to close Facebook when another message popped up.

I hesitated. Then I typed:

Why?

There were no more messages after that.

Making the World Safe for Bad Judgment

“Got one,” said Dusk.

Neil and I turned to her. We were in Acrylics 1, taught by the effervescent Cynthia Choo. Ms. Choo looked like a recent graduate from grade eight. She wore her medium-length black hair in two braids and shuffled around in cheap embroidered Chinese slippers and silk coats.

Ms. Choo had been my sister's favorite teacher, and she always asked after Keira in a way that was nicely friendly as opposed to overly interested, which I appreciated.

“Shouldn't you get the last candidate to cough up the facts before you move on to a new one?” I said.

“Don't worry about backlog,” said Neil. “The truth is a river. We've got to let it flow.”

He looked down at his cell phone. “Oops. It's Aimee. I have to get this.”

“Aimee. Agony Queen,” intoned Dusk.

It was true. Aimee, though popular and in demand even before the renovations, spent her time reeling from imaginary crisis to imaginary crisis. Her boyfriend of two days had looked at another woman. The guy she dated after that looked at a guy. She'd read in the
Los Angeles Times
(online edition) that broadcast television networks were only hiring men of color. Her best friend had had a vision board party and sent her an invitation a full two days after everyone else.
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Other Aimee problems: The new sweater from that adorable store in Qualicum had been stolen out of her gym bag. Jo Malone discontinued her favorite cologne. She gained half a pound. And her perennial favorite: people were talking about her.

Aimee was paranoid, self-centered, and fear-based. She did not share much in the way of affection or support with Neil, at least not that I could see, but she sure had a free hand with the neediness. I was going to resent it very much if she became his new muse, even though I'd pretend I wasn't bothered.

Neil took it all in stride and even seemed to like it.

“No one is listening to me right now,” said Dusk. “This Truth Commission is starting to feel like home.”

“I'm listening,” I told her.

“Not to me you're not,” said Ms. Choo, sliding up to us on her tiny embroidered slippers. These ones were high-noon blue with plenty of metallic embroidery. Her robe, made of some papery material, was suburban lawn green. White cranes flapped their way across the fabric. “Is any of this getting through?”

“Ms. Choo,” said Neil. “Those clothes look wonderful on you.”

“It's true,” said Dusk. “They do.”

“Allow me be the first one to say something that doesn't rhyme. I like your ensemble,” I said.

“But do you like the brushstroke technique I just spent twenty minutes explaining and demonstrating? That's the big question.”

“Love it,” I assured her. I stabbed at a blob of paint on my canvas to show how much.

“Me too,” said Neil. “It's so open and expansive.”

“I don't think I'll be incorporating it in my next installation,” said Dusk. “But I'm glad to know how it's done.”

“Every person can benefit from brush skills,” said the unflappable Ms. Choo.

“Touch!” said Dusk, who likes to mangle words because it drives her parents crazy. She held up a hand to be slapped. Ms. Choo stared at the offending appendage.

Dusk took her hand down.

Then Ms. Choo went to check on what the other painters were accomplishing.

We all got to work leaving brushstrokes in heavy globs of acrylic paint. It was quite satisfying, and I'd have been happy to work in silence and cozy togetherness, but Dusk would not be prevented from telling us about the new target.

“Zinnia McFarland,” she said.

“That girl who puts on the Slut Walk?” I asked.

“That's the one.”

“What are you going to ask her?”

“Whether it's true what they say.”

“What do they say?” I found myself dreading the answer.

“Her sister did a little web-stripping. Then she got severely online bullied.”

“Inter-tormented,” said Neil. “That's the worst.”

“She tried to kill herself,” said Dusk. “Zinnia's been trying to make the world safe for bad judgment ever since.”

My brush had frozen a foot away from the canvas. “Dusk, that's not funny.”

“I don't mean it to be funny. Everyone knows that Zinnia puts on the Slut Walk for a reason. And it's not because she personally is sexing it up all over the place.”

“Or sexting, presumably,” added Neil.

“It's not your business why she puts on the walk. It's cool, and she's right. Women should be able to dress how they want.”

“Here, here!” said Eleanor St. Pierre, who was at the easel behind me, clearly eavesdropping for all she was worth.

“Looking gorgeous, Els!” said Neil with a big smile.

Dusk shot me a look, and I lowered my voice. “It's one thing to ask people their private business. But this is about her sister. So it's not Zinnia's truth to tell.”

Dusk added a few more brushstrokes to the small shrewish shapes on her canvas. Since she got the idea to taxidermy a shrew for her Spring Special Project, everything she makes is vaguely shrew shaped, and she's frequently in a bad mood because taxiderming, especially tiny creatures, is very hard. Or so she reports after each failed attempt.

“I'm just asking her about her motivation. She's putting it out there—how we should all be able to dress how we want. Get our revealing on. But at the same time, she keeps this very personal motivation private. I think it would be both healing for her and inspiring for others if she talked about what happened.” Dusk turned to me and lowered her voice. “Norm, we all know you're kind of sensitive about family stuff. Because of your sister and everything.”

I was about to protest, but Neil beat me to it.

“Everyone is sensitive about family,” he said. “Not just Norm.”

“That doesn't mean it's okay. Our families are often the thing that keep us stuck,” said Dusk. “If I bought into my family's agenda, I would—”

“Be getting better than a C in biology right now,” I said.

“C-minus,” Dusk corrected. “Anyway, I think that if you want people to join you in a cause, you should be honest about where you're coming from.”

“Why?” My voice was rising again. I couldn't help it, even if Eleanor was straining an eardrum trying to listen in. “It's not our business. The Slut Walk is to protest all the bullshit that girls have to deal with for how we dress.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ms. Choo's head come up and turn to us.

“If she doesn't want to talk about it, she won't,” said Dusk. There was a stubborn set to her chin. “I'm allowed to ask.”

“Let's all just relax and enjoy our brushstrokes,” said Neil. “I think it's good to discuss these things openly. Like Tyler Jones might turn me down. I'm still waiting for him to get back to me. No harm, no foul.”

“Do I need to separate your easels?” asked Ms. Choo, coming over to us.

“No, ma'am,” said Neil. “We're just excited about the whole modern brushstrokes thing.”
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