Believing Cedric by Mark Lavorato Page B

the hospital, gagged with a tea towel to stop the bleeding. He’d broken his fibula, chipped a tooth, bit his tongue open, and would spend two months in a heavy cast, hobbling around on crutches, recounting the story to any and everyone that asked, without the faintest tenor of regret.
    While he was away at the hospital, Denise had knelt on the grass, avoiding the dark stains, and had torn a piece of cardboard from the corner of the failed flying machine. She doesn’t remember ever seeing the piece again, which means she’d probably thrown it away, or hid it somewhere so particular that she’d forgotten where it was. What she does remember clearly is that, the following morning, she got in trouble for leaving her Barbie outside on the table all night. “The poor thing was left out in the dark,” her mother had scolded, “not put away, unattended to, uncared for. How would you’ve liked that?” Denise went outside to collect her doll, who’d been lying on her back in her fur-frilled gown, white gloves up to her elbows, her earrings lobed, lipstick crimson, staring up at the night sky with her flawlessly eye-shadowed and mascaraed eyes, wide open. While the stars blinked back.
    As strange as it was, Denise had actually gone to the party that had changed everything in the way she saw her life by accident. Cedric had asked whether or not she was going to “the shindig on the weekend,” using the crucial misleading word: weekend . Then, during her bookkeeping class forty minutes later, an acquaintance invited her to a get-together on Saturday night, owing to someone’s parents being away. And how many different parties could there possibly be in one junior college? So she’d accepted the invitation, done her hair and makeup for an hour, and arrived to hear people talking about the wild bash that had happened the night before, on Friday, and caught Cedric’s name wafting in and out of the tales of inebriation. Great, she’d thought to herself, just great.
    She looked around the room for somebody to talk to, somebody she liked, but hardly recognized anyone. It was a different crowd than she was used to, the kind of people who were going to school to become park wardens and Fish and Wildlife officers, where the hot topic, besides the bigger party that she’d missed the night before, was fishing. But out of common courtesy, she resolved to mingle for an hour or so, then slip out the back. She said a few hellos and accepted a snub-necked bottle of Lethbridge Pilsner from a guy she’d once been introduced to, though had since forgotten his name. He asked her if she had come with Patricia, one of her classmates, who was apparently with her sister downstairs (at the word “downstairs,” he had widened his eyes with drama, but Denise didn’t feel like taking the bait and asking what he’d meant by it). “Not really,” she’d answered, already looking for the stairwell, thankful that there was at least someone in the house she knew. She lit a cigarette, left the conversation, and, beer in hand, started down the unlit steps.
    The stairwell descended to several small landings, the second of which was the porch for the back door. Just outside, Denise saw three men through the doorglass, standing in a circle, passing around a hand-rolled cigarette, each of them squinting as they took their turn to suck in an enormous lungful of abnormally blue smoke. They were dressed like they hadn’t showered in days, weeks maybe, their hair unkempt and greasy, clothes more colourful than they should have been. And as she turned on the landing to continue down the steps, she caught a sniff of their skunky smoke, and it all came together. They were hippies! And that was marijuana they were smoking, here, behind the very house she was in!
    Like everyone else, she knew all about the existence of the counterculture, had seen the Vietnam protest marches on