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“Noel, what are you doing! The Mall is up there by the Highway, why are you putting it so low down?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. It’s not like I literally went there every day of my life to work myself to death— I know where the mall is, you loathsome wench.”
Mischa wasn’t really listening to the choir’s conversations as he knelt on the floor, scrawling out a bunch of curvy shapes and lines and stickmen standing on semicircles. Constance peered over his shoulder.
“What’re you drawing, Mischa?”
“Skatepark,” he said simply, as he added the finishing touches to his masterpiece; sunglasses and a backwards cap on the guy at the top – that was him. Ricky glanced at it and tapped a finger to his chin.
“I thought the skatepark was closer to Saint Cassian. Wasn’t it just over the road from the Corner Store?”
“No! It was on pedestal compared to everything else in town! It deserves its own landmark.”
“That’s not exactly how this works, Mischa,” Ocean sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose and covering her freckles in chalk from her fingers. “You need to actually draw things where they were – you can’t just choose what the map looks like.”
“Maybe you can’t,” he grumbled as he moved on to the alleyway beside the skatepark that always smelled like shit and weed.
“Ricky, draw the road that went down through the residential area by Walmart. Constance, start drawing people’s houses,” Ocean ordered as she stood in the centre of it all, covered in chalk as she pointed to different areas around the floor.
It had been her idea initially, to get that little taste of Uranium again and draw out their town using the entire floorspace of the warehouse. But Mischa didn’t realise that her idea meant her excuse to be a bitch and boss everyone around for an hour.
“Noel! Get rid of the Mall and move it down by the highway!”
“Oh, shut up,” Noel groaned loudly, throwing his head back dramatically.
The smelly alleyway done, Mischa moved a little further away from the main part of town they had been working on, to fill in more of the trees of the forest behind Uranium.
“Ocean, why don’t you come and draw something, too,” Constance called lightly. “I have chalk you can use! There was enough in that box Mischa found for us all to have a piece each.”
“Seriously, how does Mischa keep finding all the useful stuff?” Ricky laughed. Mischa shrugged.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’re kidding,” Noel deadpanned. “You found alcohol. Like, where did you even get that? And then you found that beanbag, and now a box of chalk. None of us have found anything in this stupid warehouse so far!”
“I think he conjures them with his mind,” Constance whispered conspiratorially. Mischa grinned.
“Nah, it is just brain power,” he said. “No wonder Ocean not found anything.”
He stuck up a finger behind him, and smirked as he heard an outraged squeak. Noel snorted.
“Ricky, what’s that part?” Constance asked.
“Oh, that’s the Spaceship Launchpad to Zolar.”
“Ricky!” Ocean yelled. “That’s not real! You can’t draw that on the map.”
“Let him have his fun,” Noel sighed.
Mischa had drawn about twenty trees and moved on to the houses next to them. He had said that this idea was stupid, and had only reluctantly agreed to help because Connie and Noel had promised to let him teach them both how to play Black Jack and gamble with fake money afterwards. But he was honestly finding it quite relaxing. Filling in the little details that he remembered about that shitty Canadian town he had hated so much was oddly calming.
He drew a big box with a long driveway and frowned at it. It was his adoptive parents’ house – they were filthy rich and had too many cars to count. But he didn’t draw those; he instead filled in the box with the layout of his basement room. Minifridge he had bought with his father’s credit card where he kept his beers and the occasional bottle of vodka, the bed in the corner with the sheets he had never changed in his eight months of living there, his dresser full of clothes he never even wore.
He finished his masterpiece by scribbling in big, bold letters: THE MISCHA PAD, before getting up and walking back over to the rest of the group. Noel had crawled over to the far side to carry on working on the park behind the Mega Mall, while Constance drew the little details on Saint Cassian, like the big ugly bell on the front and the little benches that dotted the path up to the front gates.
He glanced around. “Where is Jane?”
Ocean shrugged, looking around, too.
“I’m not actually sure. Maybe she left when we started drawing Uranium. She can’t remember it after all.”
“Hey, where was the Food Court again?” Ricky asked.
“Over by the Theatre Hall I think,” Noel replied, running a hand through his hair as he worked far too hard at creating an artistic masterpiece of a swing set. “You know, the dingy little one next to McDonald’s.”
Mischa looked around at the shitty chalk map on the floor. It was big alright, and at some places too smudged to even tell what it had been thanks to people walking all over it.
You could clearly see who had drawn what. Constance’s contributions were too small and neat to really notice, as if trying to hide themselves from view. Ricky’s were big and uncoordinated, but you could just about decipher them if you looked close enough. Noel was trying way too much, but he did draw a good three dimensional building.
Mischa elbowed Ocean.
“You draw,” he ordered, shoving his chalk into her palm. She shook her head and pushed it back.
“No, I’m much better at observing and giving advice, thank you.”
“Not advice,” he corrected. “Orders. You are being bossy and annoying. Draw.”
She tutted and rolled her eyes as she snatched the chalk and reluctantly got on her knees to help Constance. Mischa walked over to Noel.
“Yo, is that dog?” he gasped, falling to the ground to look at the little drawing in the park Noel had mapped out. Noel smiled self-satisfactorily and nodded.
“My dog, actually. Little scruffy white thing called Freddie. Mom let me name him after I came out to her, you know,” he went on, colouring in the slide. “He bit Ocean on the hand once, and she was convinced she had rabies. That was the first time she didn’t come into school since she’d gotten the flu in second grade.”
“Awesome.” Mischa grinned. “Anything I can help?” he asked, looking around and wracking his brains for anything he remembered over on this side of town – it was the opposite of where he lived and he didn’t really go out exploring much.
He remembered that there was a drug store somewhere around here… and there might have been a dentist building too. He recalled that his adoptive father had given him the date and time of his first Dentist appointment in Canada but refused to drive him, saying he was old enough to just make his own way there. Safe to say, Mischa never went.
Noel looked around at his section before shrugging.
“I don’t know. Just draw what you want, this will all eventually get rubbed out anyway,” he said. Mischa sat back on his heels as he watched Noel work, thinking.
What did he want to draw? As nice as drawing trees over where the Mischa Pad was, it was getting dull and he didn’t know much else about the town. Noticing his slightly lost expression, Noel bumped his shoulder.
“Hey, why don’t you draw where you used to live in Ukraine?” he offered with a smile. Mischa startled, face splitting into a grin. Why hadn’t he thought of that?
“Thank you, Poet! I will do that,” he said, shaking Noels shoulder slightly before darting over to a fresh patch of floor a little way away from Uranium City.
He got to work on the main street of his little neighbourhood. The road where he would play as a kid with all his cool, older teenage friends who gave him cigarettes and shots like it was candy, but who always looked out for him like a little brother. He wondered how those kids were doing now. Hopefully better than him.
He drew the tiny little schoolhouse near his home he used to go to, before he had to be pulled out because it got too expensive. He wasn’t particularly unhappy about that – he had always hated school.
Then he drew his house – a tiny box on the corner of the road. It was three stories, but only because it was an incredibly narrow building, squished like sardines in between two other blocks of apartments. It only had one or two small rooms on each story; his and his mother’s shared room was on the very top floor. Out of the window, you could see the entire town. Tiny, poor and dingy, grey sky so polluted from the factories all over that part of the city that it looked like smoke. But there was something nice about gazing from that window every morning before he trudged down the three sets of stairs to the smell of his mother’s mouthwatering Holubsti, kissed her on the cheek and sat at the table.
His mother would smile as she served him his tiny helping of food, but he would grin and scoff it within seconds, rambling in his own beloved language about how amazing it was. And she would laugh so much she had a coughing fit, and he would help her sit on a chair and rub her back until she had finished spluttering…
He didn’t like to think of those parts.
Mischa looked back over his little Ukrainian hometown and felt oddly heavy. He missed it like hell, sure. And he wanted nothing more than to be back in their tiny little house on their dingy, druggie-infested street with his mother. He missed when she would sing him Ukrainian lullabies when he couldn’t sleep, right up until he was seventeen. At that point, he would roll his eyes and tell her he was too old for them. But she could see through his bad boy persona, and would stroke his hair while she huskily sung his favourite old melodies.
But at the same time, as he looked behind him at the map of Uranium. Or… not so much Uranium, but the people he was with now. He found he didn’t much mind being so far from home. As convoluted and twisted as that sounded, considering he was probably the furthest you could be from home right now, considering he was dead and stuck in some sort of limbo-nightmare-warehouse for all eternity.
He hated Uranium City, there was no question about it. But he found that he also missed that place, too. He missed walking upstairs from his basement and feeling a rush of excitement when his “father” was out at work and his “mother” had gone to the shops – which meant he could steal as much of the booze and money from the rest of the house as he wanted. They probably wouldn’t even notice anyway, the rich assholes.
He missed sitting in a tiny English classroom and, for the first time, not feeling so completely and utterly lost when he understood a phrase, or got a question or an instruction right, first try.
He didn’t miss choir rehearsals so much, but he did miss the sound the five of them would make when they all sung together. He missed the kind smile Father Marcus would show them when they finished.
He didn’t miss Uranium nearly as much as he did Ukraine. But he missed it enough to realise that, despite the many hours he spent shitting on the town to Talia over their messages, it had meant something to him. The people there had meant something to him. Maybe that was what mattered.
“Mischa, what are you doing? What part is that?”
Mischa snapped back into reality at the sound of Ocean’s voice, and instinctively glared.
“My country! This is my home in the Ukraine,” he called back over, turning to continue scribbling furiously against the ground. He had nothing to add to his little country, he just wanted to look busy so she'd leave him alone. He startled when he felt a presence over his shoulder, and looked up to see Noel peering at his map. He pointed.
“What’s that?”
“Мій дім! My home where I lived with Мамі. And that is the street where I was fed drugs and cigarettes,” he explained. Noel gasped.
“You got to smoke that young?”
“Mhm.”
“I mean, can’t have been good for your lungs at that age, but that’s so fucked up. In a good way,” Noel added, beaming dreamily. “I’m so jealous.”
“Guys, come over here! It’s done!” Constance called. Without thinking much about it, Mischa quickly slipped his hand into Noel’s and pulled him to his feet, before running over to join Ocean, Constance and Ricky in looking at their creation.
It was a mess. Uneven, wobbly, white lines zigzagged all over the place, messy writing, badly scaled buildings and drawings sprinkled here and there. It looked awful. The furthest thing from a map Mischa had ever laid eyes upon. One look at Ocean and Noel either side of him and their grimaces told him they thought the same.
But Constance and Ricky were grinning as though it was the loveliest thing they had ever seen.
“Look! Can you see my parents’ café?” Constance whispered to Ocean, taking her arm as she pointed. “I made sure to make it look really pretty.”
“What’s that over there?” Ricky asked, pointing to Ukraine. Noel nodded and gave his hand a little squeeze. Mischa vaguely realised that he hadn’t let go, but found didn’t mind so much.
“That’s Mischa’s home,” he said. Mischa looked over at the tiny patch of white chalk on the very far side of the warehouse, miniature compared to Uranium City. But he found himself smiling.
His list of things he hated most in the world still remained the same: Canadians, Canada, casserole and the medical system. But he couldn’t help but feel like it was as if he were remembering two of his homes as he looked over the badly drawn maps.
“Other home,” he mumbled to Noel, who looked up at him for a moment before smiling. They all looked over the map in silence for a beat or two, gazing at the respective parts of it that meant the most to them. Mischa wrinkled his nose at the most diabolical drawing of the town’s library he had ever seen, and following Ocean’s eyeline to it revealed that it was probably hers. Maybe there was a reason she didn’t want to draw. She was worse than his little cousin.
Eventually, Ricky broke the silence.
“…If Mischa gets to draw Ukraine, do I get to draw Planet Zolar?”
“No,” Ocean said.