Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

this pleasant-enough woman in a purple fleece coat, holding a baby in her arms, comes up to the window
and says, "Homework?"
Now, if I met you last week, I'll never remember your name, but if we went through kindergarten
together, you're still in my brain for good: "Demi Harshawe!" Demi is the massacre victim I'd last seen on
October 4, 1988, having a silver spike jabbed into her unclothed heart.
"How are you doing, Jason?"
"No surprises. You?" Joyce trampled over my lap to lick Demi's face.
"Pretty average, I guess. I got married two summers ago. My last name is Minotti now. This here's
Logan." Joyce dragged her tongue right across Logan's face.
"Sorry."
"It's okay. We're a dog family. See - Logan didn't mind it one bit."
"It's so great to see you."
We were both six again, and I felt so innocent and genuinely free, like we'd just quit jobs we hated.
After maybe five minutes I asked Demi about her health - she'd been one of the kids shot over by the
vending machines, and she'd lost a foot.
"I don't even notice it anymore. I do Pilates three times a week and coach softball with my sister. To be
honest, wearing braces back in elementary school was way harder to deal with. How about you?"
Demi knew, in the way everyone knows, about how things went wrong for me in the weeks after the
massacre. We're both ten years older, too, so I could describe things to her in non-candy-coated terms.
"You know what? I never got over Cheryl. Not ever. I doubt I will. I try really hard to join the real
world, but it never seems to work, and lately I think I've stopped trying, which scares me more than
anything. I do house renovations on a by-the-hour basis and all my friends are barflies."
She thought this over for a second. "I stopped trusting people, too, after the shootings, and until I met
my husband, Andreas, I didn't think I'd ever trust people again. And for what it's worth, I think you're
one of the few people I could trust, now that I believe in trust again."
"Thanks."
"No, thank you. After all the junk you had to go through." Demi paused for a second. "I was in the
hospital for two weeks after the massacre. I missed all those hand-holding ceremonies and flowers and
services and teddy bears et cetera. I really regret that, because maybe it would have made me a better
person - or at least maybe I wouldn't go around looking at everybody as evil instead of good."
"I doubt it."
Demi sighed. "When I talk like this, Andreas thinks I'm coldhearted. But then he wasn't there. We were.
And if you weren't, you weren't."
We'd hit on something irreducible here, and talking much beyond this point would have felt like a
betrayal of our shared memories. We made our quick good-byes, and Demi and Logan headed down to
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