The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews Page A

anyway.
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    The phone rang. Thebie answered it. Bonjourno! she said. Oh yeah, hang on. It’s for you, loser, she said. She slid the phone along the floor to Logan.
    Oh hey, he said, all tender. He tried to lower his voice. How’s it going? Oh yeah, sorry about that, I was gonna but uh…what? I know. Yeah, he said into the phone, I’m really sorry. I was going to, but…what? Thebie threw an empty Coke can at Logan. Yeah, he said. Did you get that colour you wanted? Logan threw the can back at Thebie and missed. Yeah? I bet it looks good. Yeah? That’s nice.
    It’s a girl, Thebie told me. She pretended she was kissing someone and then she started hugging herself and moving around like she was dancing. Logan turned his back on her.
    How many washes before it comes out? he asked. Yeah? Oh, nice. Yeah, I will. I promise. Okay. Take it easy. He hung up.
    Thebes, you’re a fucking retard, he said.
    Who was that? I asked. Deborah Solomon?
    Yeah, he said.
    It was this girl who wears a Batman sheet as a dress and rides an old-lady bike, said Thebes. Min says she’s besotted with Logan. Sounds like a bedwetter. She’s emo.
    Shut up, said Logan.
    You didn’t tell her you were going to be gone for a while? I said.
    Nah, it was too hard to explain, he said. Plus, we’re supposed to be in a cooling-off period.
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    We loaded all our stuff into the van and left. On the way out of town we dropped the invisible plecostomas off at one of Thebes’s friends. I had no idea what Thebes had packed but her suitcase was bulging and she had various backpacks filled with other stuff and a big cardboard box of art supplies.
    Should we stop at the hospital and say goodbye to Min? asked Thebes.
    No, I said. She’ll be okay. She’s getting better. We’ll call her from the road. I couldn’t guarantee that Min would answer the call, probably not, considering she’d just said she didn’t want to see or talk to us. Thebes seemed satisfied.
    Word, she said. Logan looked at her. What? she said.
    Logan would have the front seat for the first hour and then it would be Thebes’s turn. We’d take turns playing our CDs and Logan would keep track of whose turn itwas. He was not allowed to drive. We were heading south towards the border, and then we’d stop and figure things out from there.
    On the way out of town we saw this guy standing by the side of the highway holding up a sign that said There are Three Eternal Destinies. And beneath it was a web address. Logan wondered if the guy was real. Let’s see if he moves, he said. He pretended to grab the steering wheel and I yelled at him not to do that and he apologized and then I apologized for yelling and he said it was okay, Min never yelled any more and it kind of made him feel more normal to be yelled at every once in a while.
    Let’s remember that website, said Thebes. I want to find out which of those three eternal destinies is mine. She crawled into the back seat to get some of her art supplies. She was back there for a while. I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep. But then she popped her head up and passed me a piece of paper with some writing on it. It said:

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    In Scrabble you’ve got a certain amount of time to make sense of your randomly picked letters, to make words, not necessarily to know what they mean, but to score points, to bluff, to bingo, to win.

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    What is this? I asked her.
    Grandma’s last words, she said. I write them down at least once a week so I don’t forget them.
    I wasn’t sure that those were, in fact, my mother’s last words. I’d been with her when she died, and just before she slipped into unconsciousness she held myhand and told me that whatever happened, I was not responsible for saving Min. But did she mean it or was dying similar to Scrabble in that you had a finite amount of time to bluff. My mother was an eternal optimist when it came to Min.