The Saver by Edeet Ravel

talking. Ricardo said he liked dogs, but his older sister Michelle liked cats, so they never got a pet. I began telling him about Beauty and why cats are good pets. I convinced him, and he said he’d get Michelle a kitten for her birthday.The next thing you knew, he invited me over to his place.
    There are a lot of things I still don’t get. Like why he went out with me.
    I knew it wasn’t a dare or anything, because his sister Michelle told me it wasn’t, and she was into feminism. She had all these posters and buttons saying WOMYN POWER . She’d know if he was lying.
    So maybe some people are just weird. Like you hear about guys who like all kinds of messed-up things that you wouldn’t believe could turn anyone on.
    In school we only said hi, and on Sundays Ricardo worked at Wendy’s, but we got together on Saturday and Saturday night.
    He was a bit bad, but not too much. We got drunk, and once we threw bottles at a wall in an alley and we wrote graffiti, but that was about it. We went to Old Montreal mostly. Old Montreal is cool. We used to go there with Simone when I was a kid. It has ancient buildings from when the explorers first came and ancient cobblestone streets. When the weather’s nice everyone sits out in cafés and you can watch artists on the street drawing people. They have horse rides too, for tourists. I always felt sorry for those horses. They didn’t look too happy, trapped inside all those harnesses.
    Ricardo told me a lot about his life. He had leukemia for two years when he was around eleven. His dad was a bus driver and his mom was a nutritionist who went toschools and told kids how to eat better. His grandparents also lived with them.
    We made out in my room. He didn’t want to go all the way because of a dream he had when he was in the hospital with leukemia. He was getting a lot of transfusions and they gave him nightmares, or maybe it was the drugs, and he had a bad dream about sex. He dreamed he saw someone doing it, and their dick came off and stayed inside the woman, and he woke up feeling sick. I knew what he meant, because I’ve had dreams where my teeth fall out.
    I almost began to think I wasn’t totally repulsive, with Ricardo. He used to say, “This is the best part of my week by far, girl.”
    He was good at comedy. That’s what I really liked about him, how funny he could be. He didn’t just copy jokes from TV. He made them up as he went along. Like we might pass some old man and he might start pretending to be that old man and saying in an old man’s voice, “Laddy, in my day we didn’t even have wheels. We just rolled people up. Never did work too good.” It was more the crazy way he said it.
    He got along OK with Michelle and his dad but not with his mom. She was always after him to do better in school. His mother’s name was Angela, but he called her Lady Jane. Sometimes she’d say, “Don’t you Lady Jane me, young man,” but she didn’t really mind.
    Then two weeks after school ended, he broke up withme. Not that I was surprised or anything. It was a fluke all along. He said he met some other girl who worked at Wendy’s, and that was it.
    That’s when I started being mean to Mom. And believe me, Xanoth, Mom never did a thing to deserve it. She never raised her voice in her life. That’s because of what she went through when she was a kid, on the farm.
    Apart from ignoring her, I began to snort at everything she said as if it was the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life. She’d start telling me about something from the past and I’d give this huge yawn. So she stopped, and then she had no one to talk to. And I lost out too, because she used to brush my hair at night, and now I wouldn’t let her near me.
    It was the worst summer. I was so desperate to take my mind off things that I got something in the park. I don’t know what it was, but it was a