From the Novel Call It In the Air
Accidemts are Preventable
By: Gregory Light - Aug 12, 2026
(Ottawa 1967/Toronto 1972)
Best Friends! Until they were twenty-one. This was the pact they had struck in their boyhood. A unique understanding. A covenant that Joey had kept and preserved. For ten years it had jogged quietly with him, the stride indelibly paced by the sustained and persistent flipping of his Canadian penny. Gary and him. He and Gary. As intrinsically bound together as the two sides of the coin.
Joey still remembered the day, the very moment, he decided to toss his penny the entire one million times for the tenth anniversary of Gary's death in 1972. It had been in early December, Gary's birthday, the powdery snow crunching beneath his boots, his breath sweeping out to the side of his face like his scarf as he walked home from school. He had been counting his steps as he went, and he was well over six hundred when he reached the large, open field which he always cut through. It was the same field where he and Gary had built an enormous snow fort the previous winter; from which, hidden with their prepared stocks of snowballs, they were able to ambush passing high school girls who came by half an hour later. These girls, like Gary's sister Susan and her friends, were easy prey. Laden with schoolbooks and reluctant to do battle with an enemy more strategically positioned and armed to the teeth, they inevitably bolted, slipping and sliding and shrieking and scattering in all directions like a startled flock of Canada Geese.
This winter, Joey noticed that a new band of kids had taken over their old position. He took the long way around their snow barriers. He knew they would take practice throws at him but would give up when they realized he was out of range. He trudged off the path and into the fresh powder, his feet sinking in ankle-deep. By the time he'd crossed the park, he had counted 1,057 steps altogether. He looked back and saw his wide, circular path behind him; a clean, beautiful arc of discrete dots mapping out an exclusion zone around the young boys' fortress. Already some of the older girls had taken his detour to avoid the onslaught. The boys were forced to leave their protection and run through the snow toward his path to hunt them down. This, in turn, left them open to attacks from others—chivalrous boyfriends, eager to impress seized the opportunity to pick off these sapling hunters. Suddenly the field blossomed; toques, scarves, bundled-up bodies, and snowballs flew back and forth across the white surface.
As he watched the battle progress; footprints piling on top of one another, every single step colliding and adding and swelling into the thousands, Joey smiled. 'I can do it,' he said to himself. 'I know I can do it.' His penny. One million in ten years.
The inspiration of those heady days, however, was considerably diluted in the intervening decade.
By 1972, Joey was more amazed he was still flipping his penny, than by the knowledge that he hadn't reached one million. That he'd thrown and catalogued almost four hundred thousand was remarkable enough. (The results were now entered into notebooks of forty pages subdivided into ten rows of ten columns, a page containing five hundred individual marks, a complete notebook containing twenty thousand flips.) It was such an awesome accomplishment, and it was now impossible to stop. An obsession? Yeah, maybe. But it felt more like a compulsion. Sometimes he worried he might not stop with the millionth flip.
Whatever. He had learned not to be in a hurry. Besides, he conceded that flipping the coins was often fun, the basis of an assortment of eccentric games: his favourite being The National Election. This game consisted of using the flips of his penny as a method for electing constituent MPs to a ‘Parliament’ each decided by 25 flips. The ‘caucuses’ of Heads and Tails formed two political parties: the former stridently Conservative, the latter Liberal. Flips, where the penny bucked the odds, landed on its edge (only happened once) or fell off the table or slid up against a book at a slight angle were assigned to a radical revolutionary party trying to buck the historical tide of events. The game gobbled up a vast number of his teenage hours?especially near an election. It also taught him some of the idiosyncrasies of the Parliamentary system; the most noteworthy being that even though the main two parties received eerily similar numbers of votes, in a two party system, the victor won absolute power and there was never going to be a revolution. In university he progressed to more obscure games; like drawing up colourful "mood maps" by attaching the results of his tosses to the light spectrum. A string of six heads was associated with Ultra-Violet and six tails, correspondingly, with Infra-Red; hybrid sequences described the colours in between.
These games were not practical for wading through large numbers of throws and in long sittings had to be abandoned. As happened the evening before the tenth anniversary of Gary's death. Joey had intended to toss his penny over five thousand times: his goal was four hundred thousand, double the two hundred thousand he had completed for the fifth anniversary. It would be an "all-nighter". And he would have achieved the target, he assured Gary the next day, if he hadn't slipped out for one beer and bumped into Joanna in the pub.
'I don’t believe you?'
'I swear. Anyway, it was a good cause. I think you’ll be happy.'
He reached only three hundred and ninety-five thousand, the last eighty-three petulantly thrown when he woke up to find Joanna gone. 'What does she take me for? A one-night stand?' But she had left the coffee brewing and a note pinned to his jeans.
Joey,
Sorry. I had to run.
Thanks for the lovely coincidence.
We'll see each other again – right?
Joanna.
Pinned to the note was a small blue card with a telephone number. 'Now we're talking.' He smiled and sipped the coffee. He kissed the note and slipped it into his pocket. And left for his tenth visit to the cemetery.
At Gary’s grave, he pulled the card out and waved it exuberantly as proof of his excuse for having failed to reach four hundred thousand. Joanna was his ace.
'I mean last night in the pub when opportunity knocked, I mean, well, I would have been crazy not to have seized it, right? Right?'
Gary didn't answer. Joey drew a deep breath, exhaled, and put the card back in his pocket. It was, of course, a flimsy excuse. He'd had plenty of time. It had seemed endless at one point. Then weeks had passed without so much as one flip. Empty. What had happened to the promise? "... until we're twenty-one ..." Not that either of them was prepared to insist on the time limit. The promise “obviously” went beyond twenty-one. 'Obviously', Gary repeated. Joey nodded. Despite its inherent lunacy, he had accepted it as a matter of complete faith in their friendship. In their shared reality, however absurd and fragile that reality might look.
So, what had happened? Five years earlier, he had doggedly flipped his penny two and a half thousand times a day for almost a week to reach two hundred thousand. Nothing had distracted him. There had been no wavering belief or faltering zeal. It had been the perfect year. He and Gary had relived the main events of their sixteenth year with friendly challenges and adolescent enthusiasm.
The main topic had inevitably been girls. Gary had insisted. Or so Joey was convinced. It was Gary who had focused Joey's attention on the astonishing phenomena of females in the first place, clamouring for information on girls he (Gary) had publicly disregarded only five years earlier; pestering Joey into detailed exchanges on their figures, faces and attire. 'Dianne, Marlene, even Julie, that's what I want to talk about.' Gary even had a fourteen-year-old Joey follow Marlene home one afternoon, trailing a safe distance behind her, his gaze fixed on every step and movement she made. He followed her for almost a mile, with no other reason other than to look at her. And it was Gary who had dared him to drop his pen on the floor during English class so that when he bent over to retrieve it, he could catch brief glimpses of the girls' legs, as far up the thigh as their increasingly shorter skirts would allow. Come to think of it, Joey trembled, for who else but Gary had he endured that dreadful afternoon dance in the school gymnasium? Gary had insisted he go. Because Marlene was going.
Joey had resisted. 'Nah, I don't think so. It'll just be a lot of cheerleaders and football players. I don't fit in with that crowd.'
'You could.'
'I don't want to.'
'Liar!'
Gary knew Joey had contemplated trying out for the football team. But Joey decided against it after watching a couple of practices. He was athletic enough—he had been co-captain of the soccer team in middle school—but after Gary's death, his interest in team sports had dissolved. Nevertheless, under pressure from Gary, he relented and went to the dance, spending most of the time standing by himself near the door, looking uncomfortable. A few classmates said hello, but most knew Joey was a loner, difficult to befriend. Joey didn't mind. In any case, this afternoon he knew he was there for one reason only; to ask one of the girls to dance. For Gary's sake.
'Don't ask any of the pretty girls,' Gary warned, 'They'll turn you down.'
'You don't have to tell me.' Joey knew his reputation. He was the only guy in his class not to receive a valentine card and one of only two not to get an invitation to the Sadie Hawkins dance. Some of the girls thought he was cute, even curious, but most thought he was weird. Valerie, of all people, had said those exact words to his face. “You’re weird, Joey.” And then she grimaced.
'Ask Valerie,' Gary directed Joey's eyes across the gym to the short, plain girl standing by the refreshment table. Pinning the word "plain" to Valerie was being kind. Sort of like pinning the word ‘curious’ on Joey. Anyway, delete the worst case of acne Gary had ever seen and the word might have applied. Her skin was so awful that in grade eleven she spent two weeks in hospital having her face ‘sanded’! That was the word she used when she returned. It certainly looked like it.
'You've got to be kidding,' Joey complained, 'I'll catch something.'
'Forget about her face. Think of her body. Ask her for a slow dance. That way you won't even see her face, but you'll feel her body.' Gary's enthusiasm was mounting. But Joey's heart was drumming a warning. His hands had begun to sweat. The paradox was that Valerie's body was as beautiful as her face was not. She was the school contradiction; her incredibly seductive breasts and legs attracted at the same moment as her face repelled.
Joey waited, nervous, through two more fast songs, anticipation gathering in his throat as he silently rehearsed: "Would you like to dance? Would you like to dance? Would you like to dance?" His armpits were soaked in sweat. He was wearing a sweater so it wouldn't show. But what about smell? He leant his head down across his shoulder and sniffed as inconspicuously as possible. It was then he heard the first strains of Herman's Hermits' hit single Two Silhouettes on the Shade. A slow dance.
'Now! Go!' Gary's voice streaked quickly through his head. Joey straightened up and set off towards Valerie. Three steps into his mission and he saw that he was too late. Bill Harper had already asked her and was leading her out onto the floor, winking at a few of his buddies behind her back. Of all people, it would have to be Harper, Joey thought. Didn't Valerie know he was an asshole? Harper clamped her tightly against him, slithering his chest up and down on her breasts. To a cackle of slimy laughter from his friends. The sleaze-ball! But Joey couldn't waste time pursuing his anger. He faced another problem. He had started onto the dance floor; it was going to be difficult to retreat. Marlene and two of her friends were watching him. If he turned back now, he would look idiotic. But where to go?
'Ask Marlene,' Gary urged. She's looking at you." Joey voiced a weak abstention but fell in line meekly behind his body. Gary marched it swiftly toward Marlene and her circle of girlfriends.
'Hi, Marlene. Would you like to dance?' Joey was surprised at the steadiness Gary had injected into his voice. So was Marlene. She looked at him suspiciously for a moment, then said ‘Okay.’
'She's all yours,' Gary whispered, relinquishing the reins. At the helm and solo, Joey suddenly felt faint. His mind was further buffeted by the smell of Marlene's perfume when she put her arms around his neck and drew her body forward to rest against his. Weakened by her fragrance, his head dropped, and his lips grazed her bare shoulder.
'What are you doing?' Marlene jerked back before Joey could react. His right arm, which was closing about her upper waist, suddenly slid back under her armpit and unintentionally brushed against her left breast. The contact flooded his body and made him blink. It made Marlene scream.
'You pervert!' Marlene was never one for minimizing a situation. 'Get your hands off of me!' And she pushed him away, her fists pounding his chest in a vicious thud. Not entirely recuperated from his swoon, Joey's legs hiccupped and staggered back like a new-born colt toppling him onto the refreshment table. The table and its display of Coke, Pepsi, and Seven-Up-filled paper cups, held for almost a second, then collapsed. Joey was immediately inundated in a carbonated flood.
Added to the tender voices of Herman and his soulful Hermits, who remained calm throughout, were the following sounds: a short silence, a breathless gasp inhaled by all two hundred students at the same time, a few foretelling screams, then a massive roar of splintering wood, breaking bottles and splattering, swishing, and gurgling liquid. Finally, another short silence, then sporadic giggles, spreading into sustained laughter, rising finally into a long, loud round of applause. In the space of, say, twenty-seven seconds, Joey had become a school legend it would take years to live down.
Two boys had instinctively rushed to his aid, standing him on his feet, but then, they too stepped back and joined the applause. Joey suspected Gary was clapping as well. From the corner of his eye, he saw Valerie shake her head. ‘Weird’, she thought, sympathetically. Joey fled the gymnasium and stumbled, dripping, through the empty halls to his locker. 'Gary?' he called softly, 'Gary?'' But there was no answer.
By the fifth anniversary at Gary's grave, the following summer, Joey was back on talking terms with Gary. But he had not yet broached the incident.
'Event number one hundred and sixty-two thousand, four hundred and ten,' Joey said.
'Oh no! Why did you have to bring that up?'
'Because you deserted me.'
'Deserted you? Come off it. I got you your first feel.'
'What?'
'How long did you want to wait?'
'That's my business.'
'Yours?' Gary said. 'What about the promise?' Joey didn't reply.
'Damn it, Joey! It's not worth waiting!' Gary's voice was angry. 'You never know what's going to happen? Things you can't do anything about. What happened to me on my bike that day?'
'I know! I know!' Joey interrupted. His head was hurting. There was a long pause. He sat down on the simple grey granite slab marking Gary's grave, playing uneasily with a bouquet of yellow tulips that had been placed on the stone that morning. Beneath them, he read:
In Loving Memory
GARY CHRISTOPHER BARNET
(Dec. 1950 - July 1962)
"Accidents Are Preventable"
Are they? Are they? Are they?
Every year Joey had read the inscription and every year he doubted it more. On the tenth anniversary, he concluded that it was a contradiction in terms. Accidents are exactly those things that are unpreventable. That's what he had tried to explain to his parents after the funeral. The only way to prevent a "head" was by simply refusing to flip the penny. Don't play the game. Don't ride a bike. Don't do anything. Don't! But then, one day, the penny slips off the table anyway.
'I'm sorry,' Joey said to Gary, standing cautiously by his grave. 'I didn't make it to four hundred thousand.'
Gary shrugged his shoulders and smiled. It wasn't a big deal. It wasn't as if he was being forgotten. He thought of Sarah's loving hand. Ten years to the day. She knew. And he knew. And Joey? Well, if his faith was a little bit troubled, it wouldn't hurt him.