Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World

by Janet E Cameron

Genres: General Fiction; Coming of Age

Synopsis

Stephen Shulevitz remembers the end of the world. Two o'clock in the morning on a Saturday night, in Riverside, Nova Scotia when he realises he has fallen in love - with exactly the wrong person. There are no volcanic eruptions. No floods or fires. Just Stephen, watching TV with his best friend, realising that life, as he knows it, will never be the same. The smart move would be to run away - from Riverside, his overbearing hippie mother, his distant pot-smoking father - and especially his feelings. But then Stephen begins to wonder: what would happen if he had the courage to face the end of the world head on?

Release date: March 1, 2013

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 384

Sample

‘It’s not the end of the world.’

That’s what people will tell you. That’s what people will tell you when they want to say, ‘Your problems are stupid, your
reaction to them is laughable, and I would like you to go away now.’


‘Oh, Stephen, for God’s sake, it’s not the end of the world,’ my mother will say, over and over, in tones of sympathy or distraction.
Or sometimes plain impatience.


So of course if she’s ever running around looking for her keys and cursing, I’ll always tell her, ‘It’s not the end of the
world, Mom.’ And if she’s really been pissing me off, I’ll scoop the keys up from wherever she’s left them and stick them
in my coat pocket. Then I’ll settle back to watch with a sympathetic expression while she tears the house apart looking. Lost
keys? Not the end of the world.


I’m not an asshole to my mother all the time, by the way. It’s just sort of a hobby. There’s really not a lot to do in my
town.


Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, ‘not the end of the world’ is utter bullshit. Sometimes it really is the end of the world.
Sure, everything’s continuing the same as it ever did, but there’s been a shift. Suddenly you don’t know what the rules are.
People will do things that leave you baffled. Or maybe you’ll surprise yourself, start acting like a person you don’t recognise. And you have to live in it now,
this new world. You can’t ever go back.


The end of the world doesn’t have to be floods and fires and screaming and Nostradamus and the Mayans hanging around looking
smug. It can be, say, two o’clock in the morning in the TV room in the basement with the light from the screen freezing all
the cigarette smoke into shapes like ectoplasm. My best friend Mark leans forward to light another cigarette and – boom –
the world ends.


Do you ever get these mental images – impulses, whatever – of things you wouldn’t ever do in real life? Like, suppose you’re
sitting at your desk watching the shyest girl in the whole school (Rachel Clements!) giving some kind of speech, and then
she forgets what to say next – not because she didn’t prepare or anything, just because she’s scared. So, you’re dying of
sympathy for her and clenching and unclenching your fist in nervous tension, watching this poor girl up there sweating and
stammering away. But at the same time another part of your brain is looking at the pink rubber eraser on your desk and thinking,
Throw it at her. And you can see yourself doing it, bouncing that thing right off her forehead. Boing!


Okay, maybe it’s just me who thinks this way. But the point is, I’d never do these things. These mental blips. Who knows where
they come from or how to stop them? And if you don’t, is it the end of the world?


Anyway, it was two in the morning on Saturday night in April, and me and Mark were drinking cans that had gone all warm from
sitting in our backpacks, because it’s not like we could walk right up and stick them in the fridge in front of my mom, right?
And smoking. Smoking my mother’s brand, so if she ever finds them, I can blame it on her. Once I spent a whole afternoon with
a big pile of used butts and one of Mom’s lipsticks, marking each one with her colour. The idea was she’d find them and think she’d gone on some kind of crazed
smoking bender and blacked out.


Didn’t work. I started feeling guilty and just threw them in the trash.

So me and Mark were in the basement, tired and stupid, laughing at the infomercials on TV, buzzing from the beer and working
our way through that red pack of Du Maurier Lights like it was some kind of assignment. These are my favourite times, but
it’s kind of hard to explain why. If you’re up that late, you’re probably alone or with somebody you’ve always known, I guess.
Or maybe it’s because there’s no light changing, so it’s as if you’re in this little corner of the world that’s safe from
time. That hour of night has always felt perfect to me. Perfect to be doing the same old shit or doing nothing at all.


Mark’s been my best friend forever, since my parents moved here when I was eight. We fell into routines that lasted years.
Saturday nights we’d go to my place and watch TV till we passed out wrapped in old sleeping bags on the two disintegrating
couches in the basement. I’d take the green one with the mildew stains and he’d take the orange one the neighbours didn’t
want. Sundays we’d wander the streets of our little town – usually high on cheap home-grown weed – and we’d end up at his
place and eat stuff spooned out of cans until I had to go back and do my homework. And Mark’s homework too, he’s not great
at school.


Neither of us ever planned this, of course. It’s not like we’d say, ‘Hey, it’s three o’clock, we better hurry or we’ll miss
getting chased out of the parking lot behind Sunset Manor by that old guy with the Sherlock Holmes hat and his fat yellow
half-blind dog who can barely bark anymore.’ But for years, if you wanted to find us at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon,
that’s where we’d be. It happened without us making any kind of arrangement, like birds going south for the winter know how to fly in a V.


I never even thought about whether we liked each other. I mean, how do you feel about oxygen?

That Saturday night, Mark lit another cigarette. His hand was cupped around the flame to shelter it – long habit from mostly
smoking outside – and there was a flicker of warm light on his face. Everything else was frozen in the flat white beam of
the television screen, like we were on the surface of the moon.


It reminded me of going camping with my father that one time, when I was a little kid, just before he left. We’d built a fire
together. Yellow and orange flames nodding and weaving, embers floating up. You could hear the ocean a long way off. The dark
sky opened out into trails and clusters of galaxies over our heads, and every once in a while a spark would give a satisfied
cracking pop, as if this were a live thing in front of us stretching itself with contentment. The two of us there, with our
tiny hearthglow at the edge of the world. Safe from time. I couldn’t talk. I was too happy. I didn’t want to ruin it. There
was always something that could ruin it.


A quiver of that feeling came back, watching Mark’s face, quick firelight against the bleached glare of the TV. A campfire
on the moon. Don’t say anything. Don’t ruin it.


I was hanging off the couch looking at him through the smoke, the ghost-in-a-bottle smoke.

And that’s when I kissed him.

Except of course I didn’t. It was just something that happened in my head, like seeing myself throwing erasers at Rachel Clements.
One of those strange little impulses. But so vivid and real. I could almost feel it, our teeth knocking together because I
wouldn’t know what I was doing at first, the way our faces would look all weird being so close. He’d taste like stale beer and Du Maurier Lights and so would
I.


Nothing happened. Nobody moved. The TV continued to broadcast images of a miraculous food processor into my house. Mark kept
making sarcastic comments about it. The few streetlamps outside were still probably beaming cones of misty light against the
dark, and my mother was more than likely sleeping peacefully upstairs. Pretty quiet for the end of the world.


Mark leaned against the sofa, taking an easy swig off the beer, letting white smoke drift from his lips. In the TV kitchen,
people with big teeth and lacquered hair hovered around the food processor like they were at a party waiting for a chance
to talk to it. More blades and attachments kept getting added to the offering, fanned on a white counter before us. All for
this amazing low price.


‘Stephen? You asleep?’

Kind of a stupid thing for Mark to say because I was sitting up with my eyes open. I glanced at him quick, smoke curled around
his fingers like mist at the foot of a mountain. It hurt to breathe.


The sleeping bag was draped across my shoulders. I pulled it tighter and hauled myself to my feet.

‘I gotta go. Gotta go to the can.’

I shambled up to my room alone. The laces of the sleeping bag trailed on the floor after me.



My room was a cold place. I’d moved all my stuff in here when I was twelve, thinking I wasn’t a kid anymore and it was time
to start over. This used to be the guest room. It still felt like one. There was nothing on the white walls but a calendar from the Royal Bank. For years I had a bikini girl on a beach pinned up by the window, the
first thing you’d see as you opened my door. She fell down a few months ago and I never bothered putting her up again.


I lay on the bed with my clothes on, knees pulled into my chest like I thought I could make myself into a dot that would get
smaller and then disappear.


I’d kissed exactly one person before, a girl at a party a couple of years ago. We were both drunk – there wasn’t a lot of
motor control involved. I remember she’d been eating ketchup chips. It was nothing like the scene I’d just imagined.


An image out of nowhere. Completely random. No idea where it came from. Oh, right. Total bullshit. When I did things like
imagine throwing erasers at Rachel Clements, I’d be surprised at myself. I would not feel half sick because I wanted it so
much.


And if I’m honest …

It wasn’t the first time I’d had these thoughts. Not the first time, not even the thousandth. Ever since I was a kid, I’d
had this stuff in my head. Ever since I was eleven or twelve I’d been telling it to go away, waiting to wake up and have it
gone.


So what was different about tonight?

It was the light on Mark’s face. It was the extra hours of day now that it was spring. It was having less than three months
of high school left. It was the TV and the smoke and the stale, flat taste of beer and my mother asleep upstairs and what
I’d just said, and what he’d just said, and the food processor on the screen, turning the resources of the earth into pureed
mush. It was everything.


I kissed him. He kissed me back. We came up for air and sat with our foreheads resting together, breathing into the silence,
hands moving over each other’s faces. A few seconds of perfect certainty. The end. Roll the credits.


I swore and punched myself in the head.

He’d kill me.

Mark hated fags, queers, anything to do with that. How did I think he’d react if I sidled up and planted one on him? I’d end
my days with my head split open on that concrete floor in front of the TV. Nice mess of blood and brains and failure for someone
to mop up in the morning.


The stain would never go away. It would be like those children’s stories where you follow the adventures of a statue or a
tin soldier, and at the end they get thrown in the fire with the trash. After the burning, there’s always something that remains.
A heart, a little silver key. I imagined my mother would try to sell the house, have some real estate agent walking people
too quickly through the basement, trying to explain it away: the shape of my love splattered onto the floor.


Love. Is that what I’m calling it?

Remember when I said I’d never thought about whether me and Mark actually liked each other? When I said it was the same as
oxygen, that you inhale it without even knowing it’s there?


Bullshit again.

I knew I liked oxygen. In fact there was a good chance I loved it. And it occurred to me that it would be nice to be able
to breathe. Nice to be able to breathe without somebody thinking I was doing something disgusting just to spite them.


The window was a square of darkness, then it was full of cautious grey light that quietly shifted into blue. I heard a rush
of water in the sink downstairs, chirps of cupboard doors opening and closing. My mother. A smart little clack as she loaded
the tape player on the counter with her favourite Sunday-morning tune: the Velvet Underground with ‘Sunday Morning’.


I sat on the edge of my bed and blinked into the light. I’d been sitting there for hours. When I finally got up, it felt like
I’d forgotten how to walk.




Mark was at the kitchen table with my mother, wearing my father’s old suit jacket and eating cinnamon toast.

Cinnamon toast is my mother’s thing. Her background is Russian, so really we should be having, I don’t know, brown bread and
pickles or porridge made of old copies of Pravda or whatever they eat over there. It was all these British children’s books she’d grown up with. I read the same ones when
I was a kid. Taught herself how to make cinnamon toast after she read about the Famous Five or some other band of English
schoolkids preparing it on a campfire for one of their endless little picnics.


Cinnamon toast. She told me she’d loved the sound of the words. ‘Didn’t know what it was,’ she said, ‘but I knew I had to
have it.’


So there was Mark, chowing down on Enid Blyton food, in my father’s jacket with the leather patches on the elbows, big seventies
lapels. The physical fact of him was making me uncomfortable. He was shoving toast in his face – a mess of crumbs sprinkled
over the table and a light glaze of butter coating his chin. I leaned against the counter with my elbows grazing the sink.
Mom left the kitchen to check something in the wash.


Sun on his hair, big hands curled around a blue-striped mug with chipped edges. His shadow was cut out on a square of sunlight
on the table behind him, with the shadow of the floating steam rising, and watery lines of heat from the cup’s surface. Mark looked
up at me and I turned away.


‘Hey, what happened last night?’

‘What do you mean?’ I pretended to rub my eyes.

‘You just took off. Had to get rid of all the butts and cans myself and I didn’t know what to do with them, so …’ He held
up his backpack, which was swollen with garbage. Our Sunday morning ritual of getting rid of the evidence from Saturday. I
had a hundred places around the house to stash it all. But today I’d left him to deal with that alone.


‘Fell asleep upstairs. Sorry.’ I stared into the yellow and green linoleum at my feet. I’d never had to work at having a conversation
with Mark before.


‘You’ll be late,’ I said.

He glanced at our clock, a plastic daisy on the wall.

‘Shit. You’re right. Ten minutes.’ Mark stood up, slung his backpack over his shoulder and stuck a piece of cinnamon toast
in his mouth. He mumbled something about returning the jacket and was out the door in seconds.


Striding down the driveway munching on a piece of toast, with the sun falling on the shoulders of my father’s coat. Off to
church. Mark’s belief in God tended to waver in and out depending on how he felt about himself and life in general. But he
never missed a service at St Andrew’s Presbyterian. ‘It’s forty minutes out of the week where you’re concentrating on not being a selfish dickhead,’ he’d told me once. ‘Everything else is mostly pushing in the other direction.’


I realised my mother was standing beside me. Weird how she’d always seemed so tall when I was a little kid, and now she was
barely up to my shoulder. At this rate I’ll be able to carry her around in a shoebox by the time she’s seventy. Well, I’ll save on old people’s homes, anyway.


‘So, Mom. Is this some freaky hormonal thing, dressing teenage boys up like your ex-husband?’

She laughed and wrapped her hands around a mug of tea for warmth. My mother is fair-haired and light, fine-boned. It would
be nice if I looked more like her, but I’m dark and angular like my father, all bumping elbows and jutting knees. You’d want
to fold me up and stack me in a corner. Mom was in flannel pyjamas, with her hair down her back in light brown waves and a
bathrobe I remembered from early childhood. It’d been turquoise back then. I wasn’t sure what colour I’d call it now.


‘He didn’t have time to go home and change for church,’ she said.

‘He should just keep it. It’s not like I’m going to wear it.’

‘Doesn’t really fit you, does it? You don’t have the shoulders.’ She ambled over to the tape player and rewound the cassette.

‘So … what were you guys talking about when I came in?’ I said.

Mom tweaked opened a cupboard door, gazed into it for a moment and then seemed to forget why she was there. I had to ask her
again.


‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Mark? The usual. Cooking. He wants to make supper for his little sister tomorrow.’

The sounds of ‘Sunday Morning’ started to fill the kitchen once more, innocent musicbox notes of the intro, then Lou Reed’s
drifting drugged-up voice talking about wasted years and a restless feeling by his side, telling us to watch out. The world
was behind us.


We moved around each other. The room should have felt bigger with Mark gone, but I was still acting like he was there, sitting
invisibly at the table with a plate of crumbs in front of him. After a while, Mom decided she’d had enough cinnamon toast
and it was time to go off and do something else. Left me alone with this empty feeling whirling around inside.


I felt drained, lifeless. I was sure that everything was ruined. I’d never feel the same way around Mark. It would never be
easy and comfortable between us again.


I was right, as it turned out.

Now, you tell me that’s not the end of the world.

So tired I felt like something freeze-dried, brine shrimp in an envelope sold off to children as Sea Monkeys. Mark would be
in church by now, talking to God. He’d be expecting us to meet up afterwards – it was almost time for the next phase of our
hectic weekend schedule, the part where we’d get stoned and then wander around town annoying old people. The guy in the Sherlock
Holmes hat was waiting with his wheezy dog outside Sunset Manor. Just another Sunday.


I stared into the sink, hypnotised by the shapes of mugs and dishes rolling against each other. Then I pushed them aside,
stuck my head under the tap, and turned on the cold water. It flowed over my neck and face, soaked my hair. Cold and perfect.
I shuddered. At times when I am a bit overwhelmed, I find that this is a very, very good thing to do. My skull sank to rest
on an empty tea mug and the water kept coming.


Then it stopped. My mother was gazing down at me.

‘Are you okay, honey?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Your head’s in the sink.’

‘It is?’ I started to laugh. Mom lifted her reading glasses so she could rub her eyes. I stared up at her like a landed fish.

‘Stephen. You can tell me anything, you know.’

‘Fine. Go away.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

‘You just said I could tell you anything.’

She twisted the tap and the water rushed down at me again.

‘Don’t drown, you little so-and-so.’

After a minute, I turned off the tap, stretched out blindly and grabbed the end of a roll of paper towels so I wouldn’t get
soaked when I stood up. The daisy clock was still ticking forward. I padded into the sewing room and apologised to my mother
for being a jerk. She told me I was dripping on her and I should find something constructive to do.


So I sneaked out back for a cigarette.

I had to step carefully – in April our yard was mostly mud and flat yellowish grass, plus whatever had been stuck in the snow
banks all winter coming out to get to know us again. There were sheets hanging on the line. Good. It would keep me out of
view of the house. The sun was bouncing off them, flapping walls of white light. I had a seat on the big block of wood we
use for chopping up logs. It was cold, but I like to be a little bit cold.


Sun on my face. And the wind such a calm, patient thing moving through the tree branches. You could imagine touching it, like
a horse’s back.


This is where I lived. Riverside, Nova Scotia (population 1,816). The kind of place where all those movies about small-town
America seem to get filmed. You know the kind I’m talking about. The camera rambles down the street and you see people chirping
greetings and friendly chit-chat at each other, waving from their houses, old people raking leaves, with a soundtrack of quick, bouncy notes on the strings.
For a horror movie just run the same scene but add a slow, tense cello.


I was falling asleep behind this maze of sheets with a lit cigarette in my hand.

So, was my life comedy or horror? I’d prefer a horror movie. At least you know what you’re dealing with there. Something low-budget
and tacky. Bad costumes, bad special effects. It Came from the Commune.


The commune. That was where I grew up, before we came to Riverside. Wasn’t really a commune, though, just a place we lived.
Down a dirt road on the side of the north mountain off the bay, me and my parents and about twenty others in ramshackle houses
a few minutes’ walk from each other. There were a couple of cleared pastures and abandoned farms – otherwise it was all trees.
My family lived in a dome made up of triangles of wood stuck together. The windows were triangles too, like eyes in a pumpkin
on Halloween. The electricity only worked sometimes. No TV, of course. My father hated it.


It was quiet there. I remember it was always quiet. You could hear the sea. You could hear somebody walking down the road
a hundred feet away or the horses swishing their tails or the goats nannering to each other. At night, the stars were huge
and if it was a full moon everything was lit up like day.


The last time I went down to see the old place, the roof had fallen in, and the triangle eyes just stared.

In the field behind the old Higgins farm, the grass used to be taller than your head. If you were seven years old, that is.
I remember this one afternoon in late summer. I was crouching there with the high, green sheaths all around me, watching a
grasshopper and trying to keep very still. School was over for the day. It was August, but I had school in the summer and any time Mom wasn’t busy with her job in the Valley. We’d sit on the floor by the woodstove with books and scribblers
and rolls of newsprint to draw on, working our way through the Nova Scotia Elementary School curriculum, just the two of us.
My father was the one who was supposed to be doing this because he was brilliant and all, and he only had to be at the university
two days a week. But the whole thing bored him.


The wind had riffled the tall grass, tossed the Black-eyed Susans with their funny domed centres. The grasshopper was watching
me. I held my breath. Then I lunged and cupped my hand over the bug, slid my other hand under, tearing up bits of grass. I
could feel him jumping around in the space I’d made with my hands.


I ran to show my best friend Dylan and almost tripped over her, lying quiet and straight five feet away. The little girl from
down the road. I’d known her since I could talk. Her mom was always dressing her in sparkly head scarves and she was wearing
one that day, and a long flowered blue skirt over red sneakers. Dylan said we should go to her place and get a jar so it could
be the grasshopper’s house. We could name him Pigeon, she said. Very dumb. Rocket was his real name.


We were always together like that. If Dylan was going somewhere and she wanted me to follow, she’d wave her empty hand and
I’d come running up and take it.


When we got to the edge of the field, I realised Rocket was gone – no point in going to Dylan’s house now. We changed direction
and went down to the brook, where we lay with our faces on the water blowing bubbles and chewing on peppermint leaves. Dylan
remembered there were baby goats at her neighbours’ farm so we took off in that direction, but then we saw a group of the
big girls having an argument with Dylan’s sister Summer and we had to stop. It looked like Summer was going to get a pounding and that would be very, very good to see. (The ‘big girls’ were really only about twelve or thirteen,
but to us at seven they were practically gods. And like gods, you had your favourites and the ones you’d curse with shaking
fists. Dylan and I had already spent a good part of our lives cursing Summer.)


They were all in a patch of woods at the edge of the pasture. Summer was scowling, with her back to a rock covered in patches
of papery yellow lichen.


‘Well, you’ve seen horses doing it, right?’

‘Yeah, but it’s different for people.’ A dark wispy girl named Andromeda was facing her down. The other girls watched.

‘You’re so stupid,’ said Summer, and she twisted her head scarf tighter. Andromeda spat her gum into the grass.

‘Come on, Summer. I saw my dad’s. It doesn’t look like that at all.’

‘It gets hard when they want to do it with a girl. It changes.’

Everybody laughed. Summer looked like she’d been cheated of something. She noticed me and Dylan at the edge of the group.

‘Oh, you think it’s funny?’ she said. ‘I can prove it. Stephen, c’mere.’

‘Whoa-no!’ I took off at a run. Summer tackled me, pinned me to the ground. I thrashed and Dylan kicked at her, and the other
girls seemed confused about which of us they should be helping. Dylan bit her sister on the arm. She screamed and let me go.
The two of us went pelting down the dirt road together.


Behind my old house there was a maple with a tyre swing and we clambered into the tree’s branches and waited for the big girls.
We decided to chew up leaves and spit them into their hair, did a couple for practice and watched them plop onto the ground.
Dark fizzy frogs dripping slime. I asked Dylan if we should tell on her sister.


She took a leathery wad of maple out of her mouth. ‘Nah. I don’t think Summer was really gonna do anything to your wiener, Stephen. She just wanted to win.’


I had to agree. Usually stuff like this never happened. The worst about being practically the only boy was getting married
so many times when the girls played at weddings, but even that wasn’t too bad. You just had to stand there bored out of your
mind and say yes every time somebody asked you a question.


We stayed in the tree for a while. The sun dappled our hands and I watched an inchworm rearing up on a twig in front of me.
We spat a few more leaf bombs onto the ground. Then there was music coming from my house.


‘Oh, neato!’ said Dylan. We had to go in.

The dome of my house was a circle wrapping itself around us. We had rugs on the walls. We had a couch and a table and a record
player, a swing hanging from the ceiling. There was plastic over the triangle windows instead of glass – it made everything
seem fuzzy, like the people in the field outside were something you were dreaming. That day the whole place smelled like vegetable
soup.


My mom was in jeans and one of my father’s T-shirts, her hair coiled on top of her head and a pencil stuck in there to hold
it. Dylan leaped onto a chair behind her so she could take that pencil out. I was convinced my mother was the prettiest person
on the mountain, with her neat little face and narrow cat’s eyes. She’d leave for work at her office job in the Valley in
high boots and swirly skirts and thin tight sweaters and I was very proud of her.


Mom laughed as the pencil went sliding out of her hair. Dylan was bouncing on the chair. ‘Dance with me, Maryna!’

‘Well, all right.’ A little smile, my mother was almost blushing. She took both Dylan’s warm pink hands in hers and they swayed
and bobbed to the song on the record player – ‘S.O.S.’, Dylan’s favourite.


Then the screen door banged and my father was home, in his corduroy jacket with the patches on the elbows, a sheaf of folders
under his arm.


‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is quite the ruckus. Quite the ruckus you’re cooking up here.’ But he was smiling, in that absent way
he had. He walked in through the noise, hit a switch on the record player and the needle reared up and