Monkey Beach

Tab is shocked to learn that Lisa has been hanging out with Frank, Cheese, and Pooch. Tab and Lisa attend the village Santa Night party for children, ostensibly to get free candy. Girls at the party pick on Tab and Lisa. Tab suggests they go outside to smoke a joint. Having never smoked marijuana before, Lisa struggles with the joint, but eventually begins to feel relaxed. When Lisa becomes too giddy, Tab suggests they go home. When they arrive, Lisa’s mother and father are upset because they have learned that Tab left home without saying where she was going and hitchhiked her way to Kitamaat. Josh drives Tab home.

Later, Lisa learns about Ma-ma-oo’s sister Mimayus. Ma-ma-oo says Mimayus is pretty, like Lisa, but has mental issues. Ma-ma-oo then tells Lisa old legends about shapeshifters. However, she also tells Lisa that she needs to learn the Haisla language to fully understand the stories. Lisa’s thoughts then come back to the present day, where she is still in the motorboat travelling south. She continues to think about Ma-ma-oo, remembering picking the plant kolu’n with her. 

While traveling in the motorboat, Lisa meets a man paddling a kayak. The man, Greg, chats with Lisa about his mundane issues with his family. Greg seems to want to hang out, but Lisa is uninterested. She asks him for a cigarette, then awkwardly leaves, thinking to herself, “[a]h, tobacco, whose sacred smoke carries wishes to the spirit world. Please let me find Jimmy” (217). She continues to think about Jimmy and their place within the universe.

Her thoughts flash back to memories of smoking with Pooch. Standing by a road in Kitamaat, they laugh about a tourist family looking at them “as if we were dangerous animals in a zoo” (218). Cheese says the Haisla survived because they spooked outsiders. She hangs out at Pooch’s house. Flipping through a book she finds there on voodoo, Lisa becomes intrigued by a chapter titled “To Communicate with the Restless Dead” (221). She later tries out a spell it recommends. She wakes up feeling relaxed until she sees the little man again. She hears crows outside and finds “a dead crow with a missing wing” (222). Lisa has a premonition that Jimmy is going to die.

Frank realizes Lisa is upset and attempts to console her. She talks about her dreams of the little man. Lisa and her friends bully Jimmy into not leaving the house without them, to protect him from danger. Jimmy wonders what is going on but says nothing to Lisa’s mother and father, even when he runs into his ex-girlfriend Adelaine again. Lisa shadows Jimmy for three days, and later learns that a friend he was going to hang out with had the mumps. Furthermore, the rest of his swim team had to sit out on a competition, but he went alone and as a result was invited to attend an elite training camp. Lisa believes that by preventing Jimmy from hanging out with his friend, she prevented him from contracting the mumps and helped him succeed. While Lisa is happy that Jimmy has not been harmed, she is alarmed because her cat, Alexis, is missing. Furthermore, she is unsettled when she and her friends use a Ouija board that suggests Alexis is dead.