So this is a story about the first time I saw myself, and it’s not actually my story or even about me. It’s a story my father told me when I was twelve. I think he told me to try and teach me something, because that's what parents tend to do when their daughter spends more time at school sitting across from the principal than a blackboard. It was March break, and we were on one of our rambling family camping trips. Roads and hills undulating under the wheels of our van; falling asleep as we drove through the warm sunlight; waking up hours later to my brother thumping on the side of the door with the wobbly bones of a tent rising up in the darkness outside the window. This night, my father had decided to let us stay up late by the campfire. He was in a good mood because the couple in the camping lot next to us had let him tour their fancy RV and ask a bunch of questions about fuel efficiency or something earlier.
"Did I ever tell you about Davies?" he said to me, three beers in with my brother snoring on the log beside him. "Let me tell you something that happened to my friend Davies."
So he started describing this friend he had when he went to an all boys school in England. Davies was his last name, because everyone over there went by their last names in school. So my father would’ve been called Garrett then. Davies made me picture a weedy sort of boy, like my kindergarten best friend, who had eaten sand and given the impression of a friendly rodent glad to have not been chased away with a broom. I liked the idea that someone as big as my father would've been friends with a boy like this.
This story about Davies was from when he and my father were in Year 9 and had just met a very tall boy named Harris. My father had known Davies since primary school, but Harris was new. He had an open, pleasant face, and was the kind of boy who would have been very popular with girls if it weren't for the fact that he had been held back a year and was almost fatally clumsy. There was never a time when he didn't have at least one sprained limb and two band-aids on his body. Everything he'd done in his life seemed to have been by accident, including becoming friends with Davies and Garrett. The three of them had gotten in trouble for something (my father wouldn’t explain what) that they all denied involvement in, and after they’d been bound together by a shared lie, there was nothing left but for Harris to become their friend.
Fourteen-year-old Davies was usually not one to turn down a friend, but he was practical, and didn’t want Harris’ bad luck getting stuck to him, so he knew he had to find a way to combat it. It had been a stroke of luck in itself that had given Davies the solution: when his dog Cherry ran down a rabbit on their morning walk one day, Davies had looked at the limp body hanging mangled in her jaws and seen it for the gift it was. He carried the rabbit home, laid it out on his back porch, and sawed a front leg off with a kitchen knife. He pressed down so hard that the knife became briefly lodged in the porch itself when it finally broke through the bone. Davies washed and trimmed the foot, soaked it in a jar of alcohol for two days under his bed, then washed and dried it again so the fur was as tough and sleek as his papa's old leather shoes, and the stump of bone was yellow and smooth.
I'm sorry for going into the gross details. You probably didn't want to hear that much, but my father said it was important, because if Davies had simply bought himself a lucky rabbit’s foot, Harris might not have been so obsessed.
"My nan says it's more powerful if you cut it off the rabbit yourself," he said when shown the foot under Davies' desk at school. "Can I take one of the other feet?"
"I only cut off the one," said Davies.
"Yeah, but, a rabbit comes with four, don't it?"
"I don't have the rest of the rabbit."
"You said it was dead."
"It is."
"So it can't have left your backyard itself, can it."
"It was Cherry's rabbit."
"She ate it?"
"I don't know! She's a dog, she did whatever dogs do with dead things."
To Harris, this meant the coveted rabbit might have been buried somewhere in the wooded area behind Davies' house. Harris lived uptown, where the only wild animals he saw were clusters of fat pigeons, so in his childhood mind, his only chance to get lucky would be to find the remains of Cherry's rabbit.
In the following weeks, instead of walking home to his parents' townhouse, Harris began squashing his awkward frame into the seat beside Davies on the school bus most afternoons, and the two of them would rattle down the hill to Davies' house. They rooted around in the dirt together with Cherry at their side, digging up coins and grubs and broken pieces of plastic, but never any parts of a rabbit. Davies was slightly annoyed at first by his newfound shadow, but he got used to having Harris crouched next to him under the trees all the time, grinning lopsidedly and getting brown earth mashed into the stiff white squares of his cast—for he was recovering from a broken arm then. Soon it seemed as if Harris simply belonged there in Davies' backyard, sat in the dirt with his trousers gone damp and Cherry's head in his lap.
But for all that the friendship grew, Davies never considered simply handing over his own rabbit's foot. At first it was out of a sense of pride and ownership. Then, secretly, he started thinking that without it Harris would stop coming around. Davies may have gotten the foot to ward off Harris' aura of bad luck at the beginning, but now he was convinced it was only good luck keeping Harris interested.
The evidence for this was that Harris—luckily—had an obvious crush on Davies' older sister, but—luckily—hadn't been alone with her for long enough to tell her and inevitably get rejected. Davies didn't need to be told that was the real reason Harris wanted to spend so much time at his house; no one wanted a rabbit or his company this badly. Garrett had often said Harris was too posh for them, and was only slumming it because no one else wanted to talk to the kid with the slow voice and shit arm. Davies wouldn’t tell Garrett this, but he preferred Harris' long way of speaking. Harris talked like a bathtub slowly filling up—a smooth, consistent flow that a listener could sink into. Garrett talked like he looked—fast and pointy and unwelcoming.
As days passed and it became increasingly clear to Davies that they were never going to find a rabbit corpse with a foot intact enough for a charm, he held onto his own rabbit's foot in his pocket and hoped for these days of closeness to continue just a little bit longer.
It ended the next month, a day after Davies' sister turned sixteen. Davies had been allowed to have both Garrett and Harris over for supper and s’mores and camping in the backyard by their fire-pit because his sister had ten girls overrunning the house the day before. Helen had received a huge pink sun-hat from their parents as a birthday gift, and she wore it all through dinner, pretending she didn't notice Harris' eyes tracking it like a cat mesmerized by a moving light.
Later when it was just the three boys around the fire, Garrett pulled out a case of beer he'd smuggled from his father's fridge.
"Might help you get the courage up to do something about pretty little Helen Davies," he said, nudging Harris in the side.
"She's not little," Davies said, unsure if it was an insult or a defence of his sister.
"She is compared to this strapping lad."
Harris was looking at the ground. Garrett, who always had some mischief up his sleeve, decided now was the time to share some top-quality information.
"Williams says she likes younger men."
"Maisie Williams?" Davies asked.
"Yeah."
"How would she know?"
"Girls know these things about each other. They probably all talk in the change room. Her sister is friends with your sister, isn’t she?”
Harris, who still hadn't said anything, took a swig of his beer and made a face. He was sweating rather a lot, with thick, damp patches reaching down from his armpits and the unbuttoned collar of his polo shirt. Harris always sweated, spat, and cried a lot—they’d recently learned about the water cycle at school, and the fact that Harris participated in that exchange more than most people Davies knew made him seem particularly alive.
After a few pulls, Davies decided that beer tasted like licking a potato before it had been washed. He drank more anyway.
His parents had already turned in for the night, trusting the boys to put out the fire when they were ready to sleep in the tent set up at the edge of the forest, but Helen snuck out of the house in her nightgown not long after they'd started drinking, sun-hat held firmly to her head by one prim hand. She demanded to have a drink in payment for her not tattling about the beer, and—with a significant look at Harris—Garrett invited her into the circle.
Time, from then on, seemed to turn into a rubber band, snapping fast and stretching out slow. One minute Davies was listing against Harris' warm shoulder, and then the next they were all yelling at him to see the rabbit's foot.
"It's mine," he said. "My luck, not yours."
“Unfair," Helen said. "Just let us take turns holding it and see what happens."
"It's not going to turn you into a pumpkin and take you to the ball,” Davies snapped. “That's not how it works."
Garrett laughed, but Davies felt slightly ashamed when he saw the surprise on Helen's face—as siblings go, the two of them usually got along very well. She didn't know she was possibly stealing one of Davies' best friends just by existing.
"It wouldn't hurt to let her look at it," Harris said slowly.
And this is when Davies, starting to feel properly betrayed, reached into his pocket to squeeze his rabbit foot for reassurance, and realized there was nothing there.
Things derailed. He accused his sister of taking it, then Garrett, then Harris, and when no one would fess up, he lunged across the fire and seized the most precious thing to anyone in the circle: the sun-hat. Helen shrieked in pure rage; Davies made for the trees with her in pursuit.
He lost her fast and himself faster. Darkness, trees, and alcohol did not make for a clear picture of where he was going or who the anger had turned him into. He’d read somewhere that losing a rabbit foot brought worse luck upon the owner than they’d had before the foot was ever in their possession. Finding himself plummeting through a forest so black it seemed to thunder in his ears definitely felt like luck of the worst order.
When he finally stopped running, he could hear voices calling for him and Helen, quiet, like Garrett and Harris didn’t want to wake Davies’ parents. He didn’t yell back, merely leaned against a tree, looking at the sun-hat in his hand, the only colour he could still make out. His throat was too tight for speech.
He put the hat on his head and closed his eyes for a moment against the swirling in his stomach.
Sometime later, Harris would round a corner in the woods and spot a set of shoulders and the brim of a pink hat peeking out from behind a tree. He’d approach with his eyes on the ground, saying quick things like “Hey, we’ve been looking for you,” and “You know, I really like you,” and “You can tell me to back off, but I just want to—” before he lost all words completely, and could do nothing but swing the person around with his good arm and press their mouths together.
****
My father is laughing when he gets to the kiss in the story. Our fire is just coals now, dying the bottom of his face with a dim red glow. That small light gets dimmer and dimmer as he finishes telling me the rest, outlining how Harris was so embarrassed by his mistake that he ran off and got properly lost in the woods. How he wasn't found until the next morning, dirt-streaked and wild-eyed. How his parents were so upset with what happened that they banned Harris from going to Davies’ house ever again, and then took him out of school a week later. How Davies found his rabbit foot half under a rock around the fire-pit the same day Harris' family moved away, and realized that no one had taken it that night. He’d simply dropped it.
“You might be tempted to think that I’m offering you proof of the validity of good luck charms here,” my father says when he’s done. “But I think it shows you more that it’s no good to put too much stock in this sort of thing. If Davies hadn’t gotten so caught up in the symbolism in that foot, the whole ordeal could have been avoided and Harris would never have mistaken him for his sister.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” I say.
My father had been chuckling softly into his fifth beer, but he stops at that.
“Harris saw Davies go into the forest holding the hat, right?” I press. “Maybe he knew it was him.”
I feel, for a shining second, that I’ve beaten the puzzle, that I’ve unlocked the real meaning of the story, but the look on my father’s face kicks that thought down into the ash between us.
“He wouldn’t have kissed another boy on purpose,” my father says. “Don’t be ridiculous.I found them, I saw it. I think I would know how the story goes.”
I don’t say anything more. It’s clear I have ruined my father’s attempt at teaching or bonding—maybe by not laughing at the story, maybe by seeing something I wasn’t supposed to. My father stands abruptly, and pours his beer on the coals. The last of the light disappears.
But later I would think about that kiss. Lying in my sleeping bag on the delirious edge of sleep, I would picture Harris finding the rabbit foot by the fire before he went into the forest to search. I pictured him stroking his fingers over the fur where Davies’ hands had been, asking luck to lead the way. I pictured him finding Davies, knowing him even through the dark, and I pictured Davies going soft under the kiss, pulling Harris closer, kissing him back with that pink hat tipped up by the nudge of Harris’ face against his. I pictured them on the same page for just that one moment, both so thankful for the luck that brought them the plausible deniability of the dark and the hat and the woods before Garrett stumbled upon them, and every time I pictured it, my heart soared so high in my chest I thought if I opened my mouth it would burst free and I would never get it back.
I thought I’d gone mad the next day and I put it out of my head, but when I finally understood what that feeling was that I’d started to grasp at twelve years old, I started thinking about it again. I still think of it sometimes now. And like the night I first heard the story, sometimes I still dream that I’m in a forest, digging and digging. And that I come upon a rabbit buried deep in the earth that has only three legs. And that when it opens its eyes, they are as deep and clear as a pond, as a lake, as a mirror.
—
Alexandra Mae Jones is a queer writer based in Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in The Goose, Leopardskin & Limes, and Third Wednesday, and she has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph. She writes for CTVNews.ca and previously worked as a breaking news reporter for the Toronto Star.