Chapter 1

Most men go all the way to their graves without ever realizing the purpose of their lives. I discovered mine the day my voice broke.

It started on a winter weekend. I woke up late and came downstairs into the too-bright family kitchen, rubbing my eyes.

“Morning, sleepyhead.” My mother, sitting behind the kitchen table and wearing her pink dressing gown, raised her coffee. “You’ve missed breakfast, but there’s cereal.”

“Aw, I really wanted pancakes.” As I spoke the sentence, I felt different: overnight, puberty had physically shifted something in my throat, dropping my voice into a lower, deeply resonant register.

But that wasn’t nearly as interesting as what happened next. Rather than rolling her eyes, my mother blinked for a moment, then stood up. “Well, of course. You’re a growing boy. What would you like with them? Blueberries? Strawberries?”

“Uh, blueberries. Please.” I frowned. That wasn’t like her: if I missed morning breakfast, I was expected to make something myself. But there she was, happily humming as she slid on an apron and began to make batter over the white kitchen bench.

“Your voice changed,” she noted as she worked.

“Yeah.” Even between the two syllables I could hear a pitch-shift, my vocal cords still struggling. “It feels ... weird.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think it sounds manly. Commanding.”

“Maybe.” I shrugged.

The rest of the morning passed without incident, and I pretty much dismissed the incident as a temporary whim of my mother’s.

While I was browsing the web, my phone buzzed with a text.

Come to the window!

Smiling, I headed upstairs. At the north end of my bedroom, the ceiling lowered to a dormer window. By crawling forward on my stomach, I could look directly across our cul-de-sac into the window of my best and oldest friend.

In her bedroom, Angelina waved with a grin. Pointed to her sunlit shelf.

Do you see?

I looked down. Along the shelf, under a series of plastic domes, a line of tiny green seedlings had sprouted. Angelina’s miniature hydroponic system, her contribution to the high school biology class we shared. My thumbs tapped the keyboard on my phone.

(ノ^^)ノ

Her grin widened.

How’s yours?

I reluctantly pulled my project to the window. The sealed transparent bucket of dark mud still had tiny air bubbles crawling up its sides. On top of the biobattery, the red LED barely flickered.

Not great. Getting only 30 microwatts.

I could see Angelina frown.

Maybe check the anode again?

Maybe. ヽ(ಠ_ಠ)ノ

She smiled from the window.

You’ll get it working! Come by later?

Sure. GTG return books to library.

K!

Crawling back from the window, I slipped the library books into my messenger bag and headed to the kitchen for a snack before heading out. Turning at the bottom of the stairs made it impossible to avoid seeing the photograph of my father in his regimental dress uniform, his constant location in our home.

I had never known my father. I was a year old when he died, killed when a suicide bomber drove a car full of explosives into the NATO convoy he was leading in Kabul. Two years before his death he had met my Samoan mother during a training tour of Australia, and had brought her to Canada as his bride. She had never remarried; as far as I knew, she’d never even dated after his death.

Seeing him was always slightly unsettling, like seeing a ghost from the past. I had studied his face endlessly as a child, trying to find myself in him: the light blue eyes we shared, the same strong, stocky Viking features. But I was so very different: from my mother’s side, I had inherited the height of my cheekbones, the shade of my skin and hair, my lips.

No matter which way I looked at him, I could never see myself.

I found my mother in the little sunlit office at the back of the house mending clothes. She worked as an accountant for some high-tech firms in the Toronto-Waterloo tech corridor, but remained super-thrifty; life hadn’t been easy when she was young, and she had never let go of the habit of saving at every opportunity.

“Just going to the library.” I kissed her cheek. “Back in an hour.”

She hugged my arm for a moment. “Be safe.”

“Always.”

The winter air was chilled, but not too cold; a recent warm spell had melted most of the ice and snow. I pulled a bike helmet over my toque, light gloves on my hands, and my brought my bike from the back shed, rolling it through the wet slush on the ground until I hit dry pavement.

Cycling towards Johns St, I took in fresh, bracing lungfuls of air, my breath streaming behind me. I turned into Augustine St and lowered gears as I moved up the hill, pulling out slightly to avoid a wedge of plow-driven snow. Heard a short, angry honk in response behind me. Forced myself to keep both hands on the handlebars.

The car slowed, pulled up beside me. No, a truck. Of course it was a white guy in a truck.

“Hey, you fucker!”

I pretended I was listening to something loud and violent. Kept cycling.

“Hey! What are you, anyway?”

I sighed deep. Thorncliff was extremely diverse; the driver was probably someone passing through on his way to a bedroom community in Toronto. Stop for a bite to eat, harass the locals, have a little fun.

“Hey!”

For a moment I debated pulling over into Rosemont St. on the left; mounting the curb, I could be in the park that ran parallel to the road, still heading towards the library, and no longer bothered by ignorant truck drivers. But a small spark of anger leapt in me.

Still pedalling, I turned my head. “Fuck off.” I could feel my new voice catch and flex, deep and resonant.

The driver blinked. Without another word, he pressed on the gas pedal and shot away.

I blinked. That never happened. We might trade a few insults, or exchange gestures, but angry drivers never just left.

I shrugged, kept pedalling. Perhaps it was just my lucky day.

At the library I locked my bike up at the white wooden fence and walked inside, stamping my feet a few times in the foyer to rid my shoes of the remaining sticky snow before walking to the central desk. The library was one of my favourite places in the village, a two-story white-painted house almost two centuries old that had been turned over to the community, full of warm nooks and crannies to lose myself in.

“Hi, Mrs. Applebee,” I smiled. I could still feel my new voice see-sawing up and down with the exercise on my bike, but it seemed to have settled a little more into its new register.

“Hi there, Joshua,” the head librarian smiled. Mrs. Applebee was a Thorncliff library institution, almost part of the foundation. When I had first wandered into the library, she’d been in her early forties. A decade later, she remained almost a caricature of a librarian: always prim and proper, wearing her dark hair in a bun with a single long pin, a white collar blouse, and cat-eye glasses on a chain.

I pulled the books from my bag and passed them over the desk. Mrs. Applebee scanned them one at a time, as thoroughly as ever.

The machine beeped on the last book. “Oh. I’m sorry, Joshua. It looks like this one is a day late. That will be 50 cents, please.”

“Oh, dam ... darnit. I don’t have any change today.” I felt my voice pitch-shift as I spoke. “Can you let this one slide? Just this once?”

She blinked. “Certainly, Joshua.”

That never happened. Mrs. Applebee was kind, but as long as I had known her she’d been as strict as God when it came to overdue books. Without fear or favour, she would always insist on collecting exactly what was owed.

‘Thank you, Mrs. Applebee.” She smiled, walking the books to the returns cart without another word. What was going on?

I felt a wide, crazy thought creep through me, like the strong impulse I had felt to jump on the glass floor of the CN tower, 500 meters above the street, when our class had visited Toronto.

I turned away from the book return desk and looked around. At one of the reading corrals, an elderly man wearing a thick cableknit sweater was taking notes from an open book. No-one else immediately around.

I walked up to him. Felt the point in my throat. “Give me your pen.”

The man looked up, raising his hand to his ear. “I’m sorry, what?”

With horror, I saw the pink hearing aid in his ear canal. I took an immediate step back. “Nothing. Sorry. My mistake.”

He shook his head, turning back to his book.

A feeling of deep embarrassment warmed my skin as I walked away, followed by confusion: what was going on? Could everything just be a product of my imagination? There were over seven billion people on the planet, I reasoned: one-in-a-million events had to happen to thousands of people every day. Perhaps I’d just experienced a string of them.

But I couldn’t let it go.

I walked upstairs, into the fiction section. The light was dimmer here, the rooms smaller, stacks closer together. I started turning randomly in the corridors – left, right, right – and almost ran into a girl carrying a load of books from a returns cart.

“Oh! Sorry.” I turned, crabbing sideways in the narrow passageway.

“Quite alright.” She leaned back against the far stack, books held against her chest. A few years older than me. Pale skin, blonde hair held back in a red bow, round glasses, the cutest hint of an overbite. Probably a university student on part-time work experience.