Expo!

Sunny hadn't looked forward to an event so much since the release of Star Wars had first captured his imagination, and this event was running for six whole months! The theme was "Transportation and Communication: World in Motion – World in Touch," and his brain fizzed when he saw the commercials. Movement! Space exploration! Star Wars in real time! Even Expo Ernie, the robot, reminded him of R2D2.

Ever since the Skytrain was completed, partly to accommodate the increasing need for transit from the suburbs to Downtown Vancouver, and partly to show off Vancouver to visitors coming for the Expo, Sunny knew he had to get a season's pass. He already loved taking the Skytrain from their new home, which was just across the bridge from Queensborough in Connaught Heights, disembarking at Broadway Station, and taking the bus the rest of the way to UBC; it saved him at least half an hour each way. Knowing that it was going to take them to Main Street Station, and that they would walk across the street from there into a world of magic, its entrance marked by the golf-ball-shaped Expo Centre (later redeveloped into Science World) made him quiver in anticipation, almost as much as his first time with Tej had.

By the time they went, there had already been controversy around the Expo, one an embarrassing hiccup, one a tragedy.

While opening the World's Fair, Diana, Princess of Wales had briefly fainted onto her husband in a crowded hall in the California Pavilion. She'd recovered quickly in the washroom, and left half an hour later. Prince Charles later said that her fainting spell was a result of heat and exhaustion. However, the Princess confessed several years later that it was actually caused by not having kept down any food for several days, the result of her eating disorder. She was chastised by her husband for not "fainting gracefully behind a door." He might have been embarrassed then, but poor Charles probably never foresaw the shit storm that would fall on his family eleven years later, when Diana, divorced from him by then, perished in a car crash with her lover while being pursued by paparazzi, and maybe if he'd realized sooner how unhappy both of them were, he might never have shown up with Diana that day for her to have that fainting spell, and later stopped in its tracks the series of circumstances that took Diana's life, while being happier himself with his first love, Camilla.

That tragedy was in the future, though. The Expo tragedy had happened only a few days later, when a 9-year-old girl had died at the Canada Pavilion. She'd been crushed while on a revolving turntable connecting two semi-circular theatres in the pavilion. The revolving table had been shut down for some time after the accident but put back in service with a number of new safety measures.

He wouldn't let those events dampen his enthusiasm, though. He knew he had to take Tej, to show her this event, this representation of everything he was passionate about. They just maybe wouldn't take the risk with the Canada Pavilion.  

By this time they'd progressed beyond chaste courtship; she'd relieved him of his virginity with a kindness and tenderness that had made him want to bow down and worship her. She'd had only one other lover, she'd informed him: Sean, the white boy on whose arm he'd first seen her, and that had been a secret that would have scandalized her parents, but she hadn't been so stupid as to not protect herself just because her parents wouldn't take her to get birth control. Sean, bigoted though he might have been, hadn't been stupid either, so he'd always had condoms on hand, and Sunny had made a practice of copying him, to her relief (said condoms bought only when needed and always out of his parents' sight.) She wasn't that much more experienced than he was, so in a way they were discovering the pleasures of it together. And they discovered. A lot.

Of course, neither of their families knew how far they'd gotten. One of them was supposed to bring a chaperone on all their dates, but they found ways to sneak away or get around the rule. Campus was an exception they used regularly, finding creative venues to explore each other while at school.

Bishan was another. She sometimes accompanied them on their dates, but the fifteen-year-old was just as eager to ditch them as they were to ditch her, so she and Sunny arranged to drop her off to see her friends, while she kept up the facade that she was with them when in reality they'd booked a motel room.

Looking back, Sunny wondered at how young Bishan was to be going off on her own with no supervision, and that it had never occurred to him to be worried about her; it had only been five years, after all, since Clifford Olson's reign of terror had ended. How ironic, then, that Bishan's demise came at the hands the man her family trusted most with her safety.

Bishan didn't ditch them today, though. She was just as eager to attend Expo as he was, enthralled by the pavilions from all around the world. She begged to go on the Scream Machine and the Minolta Space Tower rides, and he was reminded of the years they went to the PNE, and he and Tej screamed like kids at being spun around like laundry in a washing machine. They visited the Great Hall of Ramses II and marvelled at the treasures of ancient civilization.

There was no India pavilion for them to visit, but Bishan seemed inordinately interested in the Japan pavilion, not just because of the advanced technology on display (they were winning the automobile wars, to Sunny's amazement,) but for some other reason she didn't divulge. At the pavilion exit, they got their passports stamped. Every pavilion had a unique passport stamp that was highly prized; Japan's had an image of Mount Fuji, but Sunny's favourite was the Yukon pavilion, which sported a single engine bush airplane, "Queen of the Yukon." 

When they found a place to sit and eat, Bishan said, "I wonder where Lauren is right now."

"Lauren?" Sunny said, surprised. "What makes you ask?"

Bishan shrugged. "She was nice to me. She taught me aikido even though Mom forbade it. She was kind of cool. We had fun."

"Well, I think Lauren said she was moving to Burnaby," he said, "but I don't know where."

"Who was Lauren?" Tej asked with furrowed brow. "You never told me about her."

Sunny smiled mischievously, sensing jealousy, which pleased him no end. If she'd peered into his brain a few years ago, she might have had a right to be worried. Now, though, Lauren and Rachel were both very far away, geographically and figuratively. "She was a girl I grew up with back in Queensborough."

"Oh, yeah," Tej said flatly. 

Her tone demanded more explanation. "I grew up with four friends on Lawrence Street... well, first there were three friends, Joe, Al and Rachel, for about seven years, and then Lauren moved from Richmond to our street, and it was like the closing of a circle. The extra girl filled in all the gaps, it seemed; Rachel bloomed in her presence, and we had more adventures in those years than in all the years before. Rachel and Lauren came up with the idea for the Lawrence Street Detective Club--"

"The what?" Tej asked, chuckling.

"It was a business venture where we found things for people for money. It wasn't very successful; at most we had two or three paid jobs."

"That sounds cute," Tej said. "What did you find?"

"A lost dog. One time an older woman paid us to basically landscape her backyard under the premise of having lost something in there."

Tej burst out laughing. "Oh, well, as long as you got paid."

"And one time Rachel worked out a plan with the father of a girl whose dog died... actually, we met Lauren over that dog... to present a lookalike dog to her and make like we found the original dog."

Tej's mouth dropped open in amazement. "And she believed you?"

Sunny shrugged. "To be fair, she was younger than us, and we never heard from her or her father again, so she must have been happy."

"Lauren chopped off a guy's penis once," Bishan said, so matter-of-factly that it took a second for Tej, who was sipping her pop through a straw, to do a spit-take and cough in surprise.

When she recovered, she looked at both of them with wide eyes, looking for one of them to say they were kidding. When they didn't, she said, "You're serious."

Sunny gave her the abridged story of Danny Trybek, his father, and the circumstances leading to them rescuing Rachel from that house. "Lauren took her grandfather's sword with her to even the odds, because Mr. Trybek was a big guy. It was really just an instinctual flick of the wrists, and his pee-pee... I mean, penis--" he stammered in response to Tej's stifled laugh; why did recounting his youth to his girlfriend make him use his eleven-year-old's vocabulary? "It was already out because... well, let's just say we arrived in the nick of time."

"Jesus," Tej breathed. "And you were only thirteen? That's two years younger than you!" she said, looking at Bishan.

When she put it that way, it sounded ludicrous to Sunny, who still viewed Bishan as his baby sister, and she still looked like a child to him. "We were very lucky for Lauren's panicky move. If she didn't injure him seriously with that sword, he might have put us all in the hospital."

"Huh," Tej said, impressed. "It sounds like you had quite an exciting childhood."

"What about you?" he asked. "You never really told me about your childhood."

Tej shrugged. "When I wasn't in school, I spent most of my time in my parents' fabric shop, since they both worked there and couldn't afford daycare or babysitting. I did my homework in the back room, and helped out when I was older."

"What about friends?"

"Sure, at school. Sometimes I had sleepovers. Sean was a high school sweetheart, and we snuck around a little. My family was busy, though, so not much time for leisure. After high school, I drifted away from most of them; Sean was the only one to follow me to UBC, and you can see how that worked out."

"It was kind of the same for me. In the last years, it was just Joe, Lauren and me, and by that time Joe and Lauren were in a serious relationship, and I was a fifth wheel most of the time."

"Aw." Tej put a hand on his. "Were you feeling unloved?"

He shrugged. "A little. But by then I was a lot more involved in the gurdwara and in volunteer activities in and around it, so I didn't have a lot of time to feel sorry for myself."

"And in all that activity, you never met someone who caught your eye?"

"No, at least not the way you did." He took her hand in his and looked in her eyes. "I really think, in a cosmic way, I was saving myself for you. Our meeting was fated to happen."

Bishan pretended to throw up, putting a finger in her mouth. "That has to be the corniest thing I ever heard."

"You weren't there," Tej said to her. "I was with Sean at the time, but as soon as I saw your brother, and saw how he was clean shaven and his hair cut, I was like, wow, I need to talk to this guy. It was the most powerful pull I ever felt."

"Aren't you disappointed now, that he's grown it all back?" Bishan lightly tugged at his facial hair and patted his turban. Air India hadn't completely fallen off the world's radar; the police were closing in on the suspects, but trials were still a long way off. With Tej's loving encouragement, though, Sunny had decided to define his faith for himself, and he knew the only way back to himself was to be Amritdhari again. His hair and beard weren't the length they'd been before he'd shaved it all off, but at least he didn't feel so exposed anymore.

"On the contrary, I encouraged him to grow it back, he looked like a hairless cat without it; you know what it is but you also know it won't feel as nice when you pet it as a cat with hair would.  No, Sunny looks better now."

"I don't know..." Bishan's mouth twisted. "I kind of liked when he was clean cut."

Sunny felt uncomfortable about his sister having an opinion about his appearance. It reminded him of the image of her at six, in the bath, with soap suds running down her leg. That first awakening to girls shouldn't have happened with his sibling, and for the most part he was able to stifle that memory, especially when he was with Tej, someone completely new to him, unconnected to his childhood and his Lawrence Street days. He felt no discomfort at all, for example, when he saw soap suds running down Tej's leg in the shower while he knelt in front of her, licking them as he ran his tongue upward, making her shake as he gave her cunnilingus, worshipping the body of the goddess who'd deigned to favour him with her love.

"Well, you're not the one kissing him," Tej said, "so it's not up to you."

Sunny grinned at Tej, who was already treating Bishan like a little sister, even when it came to reminding her what her place was in Sunny's life. Sunny might have pledged to protect Bishan until the day he died, but when he was with Tej that promise seemed very, very far away.

Thanks for reading this far! I was only eleven when Expo was in town, but I thought it was the most magical thing that ever happened at the time, and learned so much about other nations through their pavilions. I even had an Archie comic where the gang went to Expo, with Archie creeping on Veronica on the cover. If you liked what you just read, hit "Vote" to send this title up the ranks. Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

To get back to a meeting of the LSDC outside Jordan's house in the present day, click on "Continue reading."