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Chapter 3
    I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. I had Mark and I had Lana, my other best friend ever since I was fourteen.
    It was Saturday afternoon, a week after the world ended, and I was over at her place killing time before my babysitting job
     at the Healeys’, both of us cross-legged on her purple bedspread surrounded by pictures torn from catalogues and magazines.
     She was making some kind of collage, an album cover for an imaginary band. Mark was in Arnottville with his girlfriend. I’d
     been avoiding him.
    Last week when church was over, he’d dropped my father’s jacket over my shoulders as I lay slumped across the card table in
     my living room, and I’d opened my eyes and nearly told him everything. But I didn’t. Instead I forced myself through the afternoon,
     smiling and laughing, turning everything into a joke, all very painful and fake. Mark knew something was wrong, but he didn’t
     come out and say it. I got the feeling he was waiting for me to tell him in my own time.
    I moved back and felt Lana’s bedsprings twang and adjust themselves around me. There was something wedged under my knee –
     a round plastic container in a muted shade of orange. Weird. I’d seen an object just like this, in my mother’s purse once,
     when I’d been rooting around looking for smokes. The thing popped open like a seashell as I was examining it and I found myself
     staring into a ring of prim white tablets.
    ‘Don’t take one unless you want to grow boobs,’ Lana said merrily. ‘They’re birth control pills!’
    I froze for a pulse beat of cold horror.
    Okay, I knew Mom went on dates. Occasionally. I even remembered the first one, a couple of years after Stanley left. I was
     eleven. ‘Stephen, I’m going out to meet a
new friend
,’ she’d told me, in the kitchen where the babysitter couldn’t hear. ‘But I won’t introduce you until I’m sure it’s something
     serious. And that goes for any other
new friend
I might make. Do you understand?’
    I understood. There’d been no introductions so far.
    I’d got a whiff of Mom’s love life last year when I’d overheard her on the phone complaining about someone. ‘But I didn’t
know
he was married!’ she’d said. And more. A lot more. I’d slammed my door and put a tape on, so she’d remember I was home.
    Birth control pills. This meant my mother and the married guy had probably … oh, God.
    Lana chuckled to herself and angled two curving paper zucchinis over a photo of Reagan so they appeared to be bursting out
     of the old man’s nose. She was in her usual get-up: black clothes that looked as if they weighed an awful lot, thick make-up
     ringing her eyes in raccoon shades, with her cheeks rice-white and her hair short and dark and twisted into spikes. The closest
     thing we had to punk in this town. Lana was from Toronto, so maybe she felt like she had to be an ambassadorfor urban life. She was also kind of solid and round. Plump, you might say. I wouldn’t call her fat. Everyone else did, though.
    ‘Great, Lana. So you’re doing it now?’
    ‘Not yet.’ She shot a flirty glance towards the photograph staring numbly from her bedside table: a pale kid with thick glasses
     and black hair, clusters of pimples blooming on his cheekbones. Adam, the boyfriend in Halifax. Lana had told me many times
     that this picture had been taken before he was cool, and now the guy was an absolute rock star. They’d met in a record store
     when she was Christmas shopping in the city and every few weekends she’d spend hours on a bus going to see him.
    ‘I don’t know about this guy, Lana. If he’s making you go on the pill …’
    ‘Relax. It was my idea. Remember the schlong malfunction?’
    Of course I did. A few months ago the two of them had been on the point of having sex at the boyfriend’s place while his parents
     were out on a grocery run. But nothing was working for him down there and I guess he’d freaked out