Page 5 of Nine-Tenths

I take the envelope. "I was here at Thanksgiving. AndChristmas.AndEaster."

"I'd forgotten. Mum found it when she was looking for the birthday candles."

I slip the letter out of the envelope. The paper is textured and expensive. The letterhead is crowned with maple leaves, and a little flame. Underneath it says,From the Office of Lt. Gov. Francis A. G. Simcoe.

Dear Colin Fergus Levesque;the letter reads, in a computer-generated handwriting font.On behalf of the office of the Lieutenant Governor of the province of Upper Canada, and in the name of her Royal Majesty, Elizabeth Regina, we are pleased to congratulate you on the occasion of your graduation from your post-secondary studies…

…blah blah blah.

"What is it?" Stu asks, looking over my shoulder. "Oh, one of those."

"Yeah." I chuck it into the recycling bin under the sink. "Just the same thing the dragons always send. Nothing special."

Chapter Two

As soon as I shoulder open my apartment door, someone shouts "surprise!" from behind my sofa.

"Shit!" I drop my bag on my foot in shock, grabbing at my shirt over my heart.

The shout is followed by coughing, whichdoesn'tsurprise me. It hasn't been vacuumed back there since my roommate Katiya left on her grand Backpacking-and-Smelly-Hostels Tour of The Continent with her fiancé. Happily, this means I get the place to myself for the rest of the summer. Even more happily, it also means she's not bugging me to spin the chore wheel every weekend.

Less happy for Dikembe, my fourth year lab partner, who is crawling out from behind the sofa, streaked with gray dust.

The "surprise!" is echoed from a few other hiding places around the apartment—not that there are many, it's just a two-bedroom, first floor of a crummy, crumbling row house in the student-ghetto part of downtown—and two more people tumble laughingly into the front hall.

"This is a gross misuse of the emergency key I gave you," I say as Hadi steps out of my front closet.

"Happy birthday!" she jeers, detangling the back of her purple hijab from the Velcro on one of my coats.

"Keep your shoes on," Dikembe says. "About face."

He pushes at me until my nose is nearly against the front door.

"No, no, no," I complain. "I've been on a train all day. I want to go to bed."

"You want to go with us to the bar and get waaaaaasted!" Mauli says, coming in from the kitchen. They're in their Party Skirt, the sparkly blue one, which means they are planning to really properly drink tonight. Shit, is that the last of Katiya's vodka swinging from their fist?

Dammit, I'm gonna have to buy a new bottle before she gets home. Make it an apology present to sweeten her up to the idea that I might not be moving out after all. The hope was that I would find a job and be outta her hair before January. But I'm starting to think that won't happen.

"It's a school night," I protest.

"You graduated a year ago!" Mauli reminds us.

"So it's a worknight." I aim an elbow at Dike so he’ll back up.

Hadhirah makes a noise like an old-fashioned telephone and lifts her palm to the side of her face. "Hello? Yes? Hmmm, you don't say. I'll let him know." She drops her hand. "Your boss says it's fine."

"Har har." I let them manhandle me outside and down the grungy cement porch to the broken sidewalk. "Just don't be on my ass tomorrow if I'm hungover."

"Hey, they're notmytips at risk."

We end up at The Brass Monkey, just down from Beanevolence. My apartment is a few blocks north of the main street, where both the bar and the café are located. It’s one of the few advantages to living in a place where the smells and stains of a hundred students who rented it before me are ground into the carpets.

Hadi spends a few minutes chatting with the bartender, while Mauli opines on the wonders of microbreweries. Dikembe makes eyes at the girls at the table next to us, and tries to look as cool as he can with a Chez Levesque dust bunny stuck in his twists.

One of the other nice things about living and working within the same few blocks is that you get to know everyone else who does the same. And sometimes, because of it, they give you free shit.

"Turn that frown upside down, grumpy gus," Hadi says in a syrupy voice when she comes back with a basket of Roasted Cauliflower Bites. There's a candle in the curry mayo. "Look, on the house."

---