Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You

Donna Decker

• Publisher: Inanna Poetry and Fiction Series
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781771332019
• eBook ISBN: 9781771332026
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Through the braided narratives of three spirited characters, this novel bears witness to the infamous "American" crime that metastasized uber-civilized Montreal. Everyone wants a Marin at her party. Bohemian and beautiful, this engineering student is as passionate about constructing sets for theater and opera as she is about Trey, the one man she can finally trust. Deirdre is a first year engineering major, earnest and perceptive, but too naïve to know that frat boys can be dangerous. Montreal columnist Jenean is feisty and urbane, a feminist who longs for peace between the sexes even as she ponders splitting from her live-in partner. In the face of startling and heartbreaking tragedy, we witness fierce love and bonding.This is not your everyday love story. The Montreal Massacre is lodged in Canadian memory: on December 6, 1989, fourteen female engineering students were murdered in their classroom. Set in thattragichistorical moment, on two college campuses fraught with gendered antagonisms, this novel follows the imagined lives of women as they happen headlong into the December 6 tragedy.WereIn Cold Bloodto marryThe Poisonwood Bible, this novel would be their progeny: a story disarmingly accurate and bountifully probing that explores the profundity of deepest love and unimaginable loss.

1.
MARIN ~ SEPTEMBER 1989

IF ANYONE WERE THE ODD DUCK of the CanTech sisterhood, it was Marin. While most of the female students at the school of engineering wore nondescript clothing, Marin had long ago cultivated her own style, a hint of bohemian, a whisper of exotic, all stemming, perhaps, from her lifelong dream to create scenery for the theatre or opera. More artist than engineer, Marin’s naturally straight hair was always carefully arranged, often hot-curled into a mass of bobbing ringlets. Her makeup was always striking, particularly around her eyes. They were yeux pers, a mix of light brown and green, hazel, just like her father’s. It was universally accepted that they were her best feature, but her smile was a close second. It was a family trait, also inherited from her father. His Slovakian ancestry deeded to the Hazeur siblings a no-holds-barred, winsome smile.

Of the five Hazeur children, she was the one with brio, a vivacity that drew others to her like sunlight. It could not be quelled. Even when she was disenchanted, Marin was alive with possibility and always moving. Marin’s was a face people contemplated. If she was a petite woman, just over five feet, Marin defied it with high heels, shimmering necklaces, and a mélange of wild colours. She would wear a red cardigan over a purple T-shirt over a black lace skirt that fell to her shins. Argyle knee socks and red Converse sneakers would complete the ensemble. Often, she wore textured and vibrant scarves around her hair or neck or waist. Marin painted and primped, artistically representing herself. She was a young woman who turned heads, and she liked that, especially when the compliments came.

Still and all, Marin had tamed her fashion exuberance sometime after her first semester at CanTech. Displays of femininity were noticed, drawing unwelcome attention. Marin had not wanted to explain herself, so she fell back on the bland comfort of turtlenecks, sweaters, and khaki pants, stealthily adding a contraband silk scarf or bejewelled bauble on occasion. If there was any consensus about the stereotypical female engineer, Marin was not it. She was a Pisces, for one thing. Though she was endowed with an impressive memory, she disliked discipline and confinement, tending toward the beauty of art and nature. The diligence required of engineering students wrenched her spirit, but she had adapted by now. She was, after all, nearly thirty, and after this academic year, she would be in her final year of study.

“The purpose of school is to challenge your mind, MoMo,” her brother Hilaire told her. He had graduated from CanTech two years earlier, and there was no question, the engineering school was the most prestigious, and that was saying something, given that Montreal, an island fifty by sixteen kilometres, the second largest French speaking city in the world, was also the second city in North America, after Boston, with the highest concentration of university students.

To say the function of CanTech was to challenge her mind was the understatement of the century. God knows Marin had discovered this to be the undeniable truth. That first year, everything had been new, and the challenge, if tough, was not crushing. The second year, she and everyone else in her class had asked themselves, more than once, why they were there. The third year, despair had set in. The challenge Hilaire had talked about pushed Marin and the others to the breaking point. There would be progress by the fourth year – at least, that is what everyone who had gone before promised Marin, though there would continue to be scant sleep, minimal social life, engineering problems that seemed unsolvable, and the monotonous schedule. Marin had friends who vomited and sobbed before their heat transfer exam and who popped entire bottles of antacids trying to solve the Hamilton cycle problem. It had been brutal, but it was never boring. She had made it this far, into her third year. She had grown the armour, acquiesced to the turtleneck, weathered the intensity. No matter the skirmish, she would soldier on.

When Marin was eighteen, the prestigious École Nationale de théâtre du Canada in Montreal had promised to make her dream come true. If she had had her way about it, she would have learned to build sets for film and opera, for Broadway maybe. This had been a dream since her parents had taken her and her sister Sybille to a Christmas performance of The Sound of Music when Marin was ten and Sybille twelve. The convent gates, the Von Trapp mansion, the frightening nighttime cemetery, the Auf Wiedersehen song – she had fallen in love with all of it. Though École Nationale accepted only sixteen production students a year, eight French and eight English, Marin had been confident she would be one of those. It had seemed, in the moment, within reach, though Marin had also applied to the Université Sainte-Catherine’s Environmental Arts Design program as a backup. She had purchased a navy blue beret, sent off her portfolio to École Nationale, and imagined herself a Canadian version of Mary Cassatt who lived among the pigeon cotes, high above Paris, with a bevy of young female artists surrounded by warm, flaky croissants, watercolours and fine cream-coloured shawls. When she was not admitted, Marin had donated her beret to the Salvation Army. She had then registered for classes at Université Sainte-Catherine to get her Design d’Environnement degree. She would become a scenic designer and fabricator one way or another.

With her pack of friends at Université Sainte-Catherine, Marin had studied and spent countless hours in studio. Most of her friends had been working toward degrees in the arts. Any excuse for an adventure was a good excuse. They had quested after treasures in consignment shops, hosted costume parties and keggers, wore hats and pajamas to class. Theirs had been a silly, whimsical edginess that the undergraduate art world embraced. They had consulted each other on hairstyles, karaoke song selections, and recipes. Their friendships and social life had made up for any strain brought on by their studies.

At CanTech, where academics claimed every waking hour of a student’s life, however, she had only three people she could really call friends. Marin relied on these for her daily dose of sanity in the hyper-competitive world of engineering. Chantal and Renee were part of her Materials study group, but Noelle, a mechanical engineering student, was an honourary member with whom they ate lunch most days. The study group became family in engineering school, became your lifeline. Since the hallmark of engineering education was the team approach to problem solving, for eight hours a day, you took classes with your group, you ate with them, you did homework projects with them, and when you were not with them, you talked to them on the phone. You did all but sleep with them. As if there were time for sleep. There were always those rare few who joined the engineering bowling league or played guitar in a band. Some played video or strategy games all night long, but the invigorating social life as Marin had known it at Université Sainte-Catherine ended when she entered CanTech.

The study group had to suffice and sustain since there was no easing up in a demanding curriculum designed to weed out all but the most resilient. Its own sort of social phenomenon, perpetually switched on intellectually, the study group meant, for example, listening for longer bouts than Marin would have preferred about Noelle’s plans for her heating and ventilation systems. Noelle thought of herself as a straight shooter, inflicting Marin with the “truth” about her wardrobe and on her tendency to get hurt or stumble. Noelle pointed out Marin’s occasional flawed analyses of roofs, trusses, or bridges, and, in particular, her wrong-headed understanding of the Challenger explosion in 1986. Marin blamed the officials at NASA for allowing the launch to proceed despite warnings from engineers. Noelle took a more utilitarian view, placing blame squarely and solely on the failure of the “O-ring” seal in the solid-fuel rocket on the Challenger’s right side. They would never agree on how best to ascribe responsibility, but the debate inspired lengthy lunch-time talk whenever George was absent.

Marin learned tolerance from guys like George. Testing her mettle every day at lunch, he never stopped talking. Ever. No matter how many others were at the table, it was George who kept up a running monologue that could not be ignored and could only be countered by a louder voice or a fist pummelling a table to get attention. Pisces were known for despising know-it-alls. George was Marin’s thorn.

“Professor Henson did not have that ODE right,” George pontificated. “I went to his office before class this morning, and good thing I did. I solved it at two a.m., went to sleep for three hours, then got up and finished the problem sets for the rest of the week. Henson was happy for my coming around, I’ll tell you. I really got him out of a bind. Imagine if he had come into the classroom with that.…”

“George, did you actually get all of the ordinary differential equations and the vector differential problem sets done already? For the entire week?” asked Renee, who was staring George down, as if daring him to confess a tall tale.

“Indeed I did. And I read the Royal Society Proceedings articles. And you all? Not finished yet? Hmmm…” he said, offering them a wide-eyed challenge.

This went on obnoxiously, every day, through the salads and grilled cheese sandwiches, and interminably through brownies and coffee, if anyone could bear to stick it out. While some students unearthed solution manuals from alumni or older students, George was the first to boast that he was a living solution manual and would never risk getting caught cheating.

George wanted to create linear logic alarm systems for use in hospitals and prisons. He would go on about the customized sub-features he would incorporate that would allow a programmed voice to announce “Evacuate the building” or “Fire” to a few portions of a structure at a time in order to enable evacuation in an orderly manner from one zone to another. His prison systems got him really amped. He sketched out alarms that could not only notify people in a building of dangers like fire and smoke, but could also control door locks, ventilation, and even pressurize areas in order to stop a fire from moving. The systems were sophisticated and innovative, and no one doubted George would be a top-notch engineer, if his personality did not tsunami potential employers.

Renee was far quieter. She had told Marin she began reading Popular Science magazine when she was six. She had loved to build things from household doodads. Her father was an engineer, and she could still recall how he had beamed when his daughter won the rocket competition in fourth grade, and how he had called her “daddy’s little engineer.” Her dream was to get a job in the medical device industry and to eradicate colon cancer. Renee’s mother had died when she was nine, the same year she won the trophy for her rocket. She carried a photo of her mother, a physical therapist with a quiet smile and glossy black hair, everywhere she went. Renee was determined to invent a way to insert a miniature video camera with lights into the entire small intestine using ultra-thin tubing that the patient could swallow. Where an endoscope could only go partway, Renee’s device would allow photos of the entire intestine. It was a mission of love that she had committed to as a child and recommitted to every time the going got tough.

Chantal was the lynchpin of their study group. In her fourth year in metallurgy, she was one of the top students in the class, male or female. She was twenty-two, with a full head of red hair. Seven years younger than Marin, she had the same flair for presenting a confident face to the world. When Marin discovered that Chantal had acted in plays in high school, she relaxed into their instant theatrical bond that found them reminiscing dialogue from South Pacific and My Fair Lady.

Within their small group, Chantal was nicknamed Geber, thanks to Marin. ...

Table of contents

• Praise for Donna Decker
• Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You
• Copyright Notice
• Dedication
• Epigraph I
• Epigraph II
• PROLOGUE ~ DECEMBER 6, 1989
• 1.MARIN ~ SEPTEMBER 1989
• 2.DEIRDRE ~ SEPTEMBER 1989
• 3.JENEAN ~ SEPTEMBER 1989
• 4.DEIRDRE ~ SEPTEMBER 1989
• 5.MARIN ~ OCTOBER 1989
• 6.JENEAN ~ OCTOBER 1989
• 7.DEIRDRE ~ OCTOBER 1989
• 8.MARIN ~ OCTOBER 1979
• 9.DEIRDRE ~ OCTOBER 1989
• 10.CRAIG ~ OCTOBER 1989
• 11.DEIRDRE ~ OCTOBER 1989
• 12.JENEAN ~ OCTOBER 1989
• 13.DEIRDRE ~ OCTOBER 1989
• 14.MARIN ~ SEPTEMBER 1984
• 15.DEIRDRE ~ NOVEMBER 1989
• 16.MARIN ~ NOVEMBER 1989
• 17.CRAIG ~ NOVEMBER 1989
• 18.JENEAN ~ NOVEMBER 1989
• 19.LEE ANN ~ NOVEMBER 1989
• 20.MARIN ~ NOVEMBER 1989
• 21.JENEAN ~ NOVEMBER 1989
• 22.LEE ANN ~ NOVEMBER 1989
• 23.MARIN ~ DECEMBER 6, 1989
• 24.DEIRDRE ~ DECEMBER 6, 1989
• 25.THE MASSACRE ~ DECEMBER 6, 1989
• 26.SYBILLE ~ DECEMBER 6, 1989
• 27.JENEAN ~ DECEMBER 7, 1989
• 28.DEIRDRE ~ DECEMBER 7, 1989
• 29.SYBILLE ~ DECEMBER 7, 1989
• 30.JENEAN ~ DECEMBER 7, 1989
• 31.DEIRDRE ~ DECEMBER 7, 1989
• 32.JENEAN ~ DECEMBER 7, 1989
• 33.LEE ANN ~ DECEMBER 9, 1989
• 34.JENEAN ~ DECEMBER 9, 1989
• 35.DEIRDRE ~ DECEMBER 9, 1989
• 36.JENEAN ~ DECEMBER 9, 1989
• 37.SYBILLE ~ DECEMBER 10, 1989
• 38.JENEAN ~ DECEMBER 11, 1989
• 39.SYBILLE ~ DECEMBER 11, 1989
• 40.DEIRDRE ~ DECEMBER 11, 1989
• 41.JENEAN ~ DECEMBER 11, 1989
• 42.DEIRDRE ~ DECEMBER 12, 1989
• 43.JENEAN ~ DECEMBER 13, 1989
• 44.DEIRDRE ~ DECEMBER 14, 1989
• 45.SYBILLE ~ JANUARY 1990
• 46.DEIRDRE ~ JANUARY 1990
• 47.CRAIG ~ JANUARY 1990
• 48.JENEAN ~ NOVEMBER 1990
• 49.SYBILLE ~ MAY 1991
• 50.CRAIG ~ MAY 1991
• AFTERWORD
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author