Read Online No Signature by William Bell - Free Book Online

talkin’ to my—”
    I stood up. “I’m going to bed.”
    He gave me an apologetic look and nodded. “Okay. ’Night.”
    I climbed into the top bed, took off my clothes and got into my sleeping bag. I wasn’t tired but no way was I going to sit there and listen to him talk about my mother like that. Maybe I had to travel with him but I didn’t have to take any crap from him.
    He stayed at the fire for a long time.
REPLAY
    Hawk and I called his house the United Nations because his dad was half-black, born in New York, his mom came over from Viet Nam when she was four, and Hawk was a short white kid from who-knows-where.
    I liked it at Hawk’s house. His parents were low-key, easygoing types. They published a local weeklynewspaper called
Good News
, which they started up when Hawk was little because they were sick and tired of all the gloom-and-doom, wars and disasters and dirty politics of the major papers. Hawk’s parents figured more good things happened in the world than bad things but we never get to hear about them.
Good News
contained only positive stories, like fund-raising campaigns for the Queensway General Hospital, scholarships won by local students, environmental stuff and a Citizen of the Week citation. I sort of agreed, but, to tell the truth, the paper was a little boring. Maybe that was why it didn’t bring in much advertising revenue and Mr. Richardson had to work at the health club. Mrs. Richardson, a small thin feisty lady, wrote most of the stories.
    Hawk’s house was the opposite of ours. My mother and I got along okay most of the time, but our house always seemed to have an atmosphere of tension. I remember reading a story called “The Rockinghorse Winner” where this little kid named Paul thought he heard voices coming out of the walls saying, “There
must
be more money; there
must
be more money.” I’m not saying our place was that bad, but, like I’ve said before, my mother’s two big goals were making lots of money and keeping up appearances. Our new condo was carpeted everywhere and full of costly new furniture that didn’t look very inviting. In the downstairs bathroom were vases of dried flowers and baskets of little rose-shaped soap cakes on the back of the toilet beside the can of aerosal air-freshener. Is that pretentious, or what?
    Hawk’s house was calm and comfortable. The dishes didn’t match, the furniture was worn, and the rugs were threadbare. There was nothing fancy or put-onabout his house or the people who lived in it. I guess that was why I spent so much time there—that and the fact that Hawk was my best friend.

FIFTEEN
    T HE DEAFENING CHIRPS of a thousand excited birds woke me up the next morning to the smells of frying bacon and fresh coffee. I wasn’t supposed to like either one of them—Coach Leonard’s orders—because coffee does all manner of subtle damage to the body and bacon contains nitrites, which are bad too, but I forget why.
    Coach Leonard was totally rabid about all that stuff. He looked it, too. He was small, muscular, wore his hair super-short and had a hard single-minded stare. That’s why we called him the Fanatic. I’d hate to have faced him on the mat. He once told me that when you grow up Jewish in a Gentile neighbourhood in Toronto you get tough or you get beaten up a lot.
    He demanded a lot from us and he was always preaching about proper diet as well as proper training. Hawk had been converted long before—his parents had always been granola and alfalfa-sprout types—except for his carrot muffin habit. I followed the Fanatic’s regime. I had to if I wanted to stay on the wrestling team and, besides, I thought he was right.
    I rolled over in the bunk and stared at the camper’s slanted ceiling, letting my nose enjoy the forbidden aromas. The more I thought about it, the more I realized everybody I knew was paranoid aboutwhat they ate. My mother was always on one kind of diet or other, the water diet, the banana diet, the