In elegiac prose the daily paper informed us that one Dave Fiset, five foot eight, drowned in a three-foot-deep creek. Which is accurate. Dupuis Creek is thirty-eight inches deep at its shallowest point, and it doesn’t really have a current. “An unfortunate incident that should give the entire community pause and make us reflect on the importance of never letting young children play alone near a body of water.”

I remain convinced to this day that no one will ever drown in Dupuis Creek again. Not without a little assistance.

I go down to the river for a little peace and quiet. It’s been raining all morning and it just stopped, so there’s still no one there when I get to the riverbank. Thanks to the wind, the mosquitoes aren’t even that bad, for such a humid day.

I have a book to read in case there’s no one to observe, and my plan is to spend the afternoon in my tree. From the moment I get there and start tying my backpack to a branch, I hear them coming down the trail. I look over to the cemetery, and who should I see but the Fiset brothers. I have plenty of reasons not to like these guys. To name three, they’re ugly, they smell, and they’re constantly yelling, a habit they must have picked up from their equally obnoxious mother. You can hear her all the way across the supermarket parking lot.

Everyone in my class prays they won’t have to sit next to Dave Fiset. At the end of the school year, when the days grow warm, it gets excruciating. A bizarre odour that clings to the roof of your mouth. At first you don’t notice it, but little by little the air grows heavy and saturated. The teacher pretends not to notice, but you can tell she’s holding her breath whenever she walks by him. It smells like my uncle’s Ski-Doo helmet, which he lent me once so I could go for a ride with my cousins. Like that, but worse.

Fat Fiset also enjoys digging deep in his nose and then laying out his hard-won treasure for all to see. If anyone else dared do that, it would be a one-time thing: they’d get harassed so badly they’d have to change schools, move to a new town, maybe leave the country altogether. But the usual rules don’t apply to Dave Fiset. Dave has the skills to defend himself, zero parental supervision, and a few screws loose. Everyone can feel it. There’s only one way to handle Dave: like a wasp. You ignore him until he eventually goes away.