Y in the Shadows

by Karen Rivers

  After Joe died, I saw a therapist for a couple of months. We talked about feelings a lot. He said I was very empathetic. I guess he must be right. He’s the expert.

  To tell you the truth, sometimes I just want to be alone. Not that I ever really am, but aren’t we all alone? I guess that’s philosophy or some shit like Joe would have liked. I’m interested in it, but not like he was. I won’t throw everything away for some alternate reality. I won’t let it make me crazy.

  A lot of my friends are psyched for college for the partying. I guess I could care about that, but I don’t. Spring break? Whatever. I mean, I’m a guy, so sure, I’m happy to look at drunk girls in bikinis. Why not? But I wouldn’t want to get with them. I wouldn’t want to be out of control myself.

  I think I’d like to study everything that I think is interesting. Archaeology would be okay. I don’t know. Architecture. I’d rather study than get wasted and sleep in my own puke. I’d rather feel like I was accomplishing something. Like I was getting something back instead of just a headache and a blacked out memory.

  I’m just not gonna get excited about drinking so much that I shake the next day. I just don’t want it. I wonder if there’s such a thing as a college where that doesn’t go down. Where people read books and talk about stuff and where they’re really interested in things other than themselves. Where rowing is important.

  Can schools like that make you smart? Or are they just using kids up for their athleticism and then letting them vanish into the world, just as dumb as when they arrived?

  And, after all, is any of it what I want? What the fuck do I want? What do I want for forever?

  Rowing?

  I like other stuff, too. I’m not just okay to do one thing, that’s the problem. I’d never admit it, but I like Biology. But I never study enough and it always seems like I’m not sure what we’re doing, like I’m always about a month behind. Man, I hope I pass this test. I can’t fail again, Mr. Bell told me. He’s gonna flunk me out. He hates athletes, I know it. He’s a little guy, and round. The little round guys always pick on us. They do.

  I’ve got to pass. I just do.

  Then, after school, the baskets. That’s what I’ll do. I quickly text Is to see if he wants to come and do some one-on-one with me but just as quickly he answers, NO CAN DO, DUDE. It doesn’t matter. I wanted to be alone, anyway. Just me and the bum and the basketball. That’s all.

  ****

  Michael

  Chapter 3

  “Come on,” says Chelsea. “A little to the left.”

  “Left of what?” says Angene. “You do it. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Get Michael to do it,” says Chelsea. “She knows. Left. How hard is that?” Chelsea can’t move because if she does the raccoon will fall off her newly shaved (and slippery) head. She’s wearing nothing but some kind of made-from-tree-leaves bikini and body paint. She’s standing on a cable suspended between two chairs that are bolted to the floor, and the raccoon is teetering dangerously.

  “I’m busy,” says Michael. She rolls a glass marble from a dish full of them toward her brother, Sully. He appreciates marbles. The glass, the colours, the refractions they make. It looks like he does, anyway. He picks it up, holds it up to the light. She’s not sure, but she could swear that he almost smiles. Poor perfect Sully. So beautiful, but he’s not really there, not in the way that most people are. His own mind is a universe that he rarely steps out of. Chelsea jumps down off the cable with a thud, comes over and grabs another marble from the dish on the table and starts tossing it up and down. It sparkles yellow-green in the light. Sully flinches.

  “This shot just isn’t working,” says Chelsea. “I don’t know. It’s not right.”

  “You can say that again,” mutters Michael, under her breath. She grabs the marble, gives it to Sully who visibly relaxes, rolling it around in his palm. The bright spotlights make his hair look exactly like metallic gold thread, a look that Michael herself has her hairdresser emulate for about four hundred dollars a month. But on Sully, it’s natural. It’s incredible. She fights an urge to touch it. Sully doesn’t much like being touched.

  Chelsea slumps down next to Michael at the table. Michael can smell her sister’s freshly shaved head; it smells like men’s shaving lotion. Disgusting.

  “Your head stinks,” she says.

  Chelsea glares, pushes back the chair, goes back to the shot. Repositions herself with a lot of shouting and swearing. Michael wills herself not to look up, but she can’t help it. She looks up. Chelsea’s body is almost perfect, but she has cellulite on her legs that is making Michael anxious. “Do some leg lifts!” she wants to shout. “Go for a run!”

  Her other sister, Angene (fully clothed, armed with a giant, expensive looking camera) is trying to wrestle three huge stuffed wolves into position to make them look they are attacking Chelsea. Angene is the quieter of the two. She works away in the background while Chelsea growls and poses. Angene is fat. Chelsea is mostly thin. Angene is almost all hair. Chelsea is bald. Opposites, yet something about them is so alike. More than just the flapping flesh on their upper arms. More than their identical voices. You can tell they are sisters, just at a glance.

  “You guys are seriously disturbed,” Michael says. “It’s like a freak show in here. This can’t be good for Sully.”

  “It’s art,” says Chelsea. “He likes it, don’t you, Sully? When will you understand, Mike? You have to learn to stretch yourself.”

  “Okay. Like, maybe, never,” says Michael. “I’m not helping.”

  “Please?” says Angene. “C’mon, little sis. I don’t know if I can do this by myself, I need someone to hold this beast. It’s too windy to balance him.” Angene’s hair is blowing into her mouth and sticking to her lip gloss. For some reason, a fan is on full blast. Why does there need to be a fan? It’s already too cold in the room. Like a morgue, Michael thinks. Like a walk-in fridge. She hates to be cold, more than anything. Being cold, freezing to death, that’s the worst thing she can imagine. Sully seems unaffected by it, but still, he must be chilled.

  He’s sitting up straight in his special chair. It’s not a wheelchair or anything like that; he’s not physically disabled. Not really. He just sometimes needs help to move or dress, but it’s less out of a need for actual help and more because he doesn’t seem to be able to think of how to do it or why. Secretly Michael believes it’s because he’s thinking things that are so much more important. Thinking things that aren’t so mundane as how to do up a zipper or have a conversation. Deep things. His chair is a wooden chair that he loves, or seems to love. He won’t sit on anything else.

  Sully is autistic. Not just mildly autistic, or Asperger’s. Einstein had that, people say. It’s almost trendy right now, in the news all the time. Sully’s not like that, he’s full-on autistic (“low-functioning,” they call it, but she hates that phrase), plus some other stuff that Michael can’t remember the labels for. He doesn’t talk. Mostly he just sits. He looks at things. He thinks. He has the most perfectly smooth skin. He’s model-beautiful, picture perfect. The crescent-shaped cheekbones slung high under his gold-flecked eyes.

  “No,” says Michael, pulling a hunk of flawlessly trimmed blonde hair in front of her eyes to inspect it for split ends. “I don’t want your total creepy weirdness rubbing off on me.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt you to be more creative. It would help open you up,” says Chelsea. She coughs. Again. She’s off-balance. She wobbles. Topples off the cable with a crash. “Damn it!” There is a series of thuds as the raccoon bounces along the floor and over to where Michael is sitting at the only table in the whole enormous, mostly empty living room-cum-photo studio. The stuffed dead raccoon stares up at her with its repulsive glass eyes. The eyes remind her of Yale and her one scary, unblinking blue eye. She had a bad dream just last night where Yale stared at her hard with that eye and smoke started curling up from the flesh on her arm.

  The dream made her sweat. She hates sweating. Unc
omfortable. Sticky.

  Smelly.

  Human.

  She nudges the raccoon hard with her foot and it rocks over onto its back, sliding back toward her sisters on the highly waxed floor. It’s ridiculous. It’s like a funhouse. No one lives like this, she thinks.

  No one should have to. It’s too weird to be real. Too weird to be her reality, anyway.

  “Disgusting,” she says. “Did you give Sully any food before I got home?” Sully likes chocolate cookies. Bananas. Chocolate milk. But he can’t ask for it and her stupid sisters get so caught up in their “art,” they sometimes forget to ask.

  “No,” says Angene. “I’ll get him something in a sec.”

  “I’ll do it,” says Michael. “Don’t knock yourself out.” She stomps to the kitchen and makes the snack, takes it out and puts it on his lap. He doesn’t acknowledge her, doesn’t look her in the eye, but he does start eating like he’s starving. She touches his head. She can’t help it. He doesn’t pull away, but she can feel him tighten.

  “Sorry,” she whispers. She never really knows how to take him. Honestly, he sometimes scares her. His absence.

  She grabs her books and heads for the stairs. Homework can wait. Who cares? It’s not like knowing how to calculate how fast her car has to go to get away from a train coming in the opposite direction if x equals blah, blah, blah, is ever going to matter to her. “Freaks,” she mutters over her shoulder in the direction of her sisters. “Not you, Sully,” she adds. “But definitely you,” she says to the stuffed squirrel frozen in mid-scramble halfway up the railing.

  She’s never been able to stand the dead animals. It didn’t matter how much her parents tried to make them into toys, tried to convince her they were “cute,” they still gave her (still give her, in fact) the bad dreams.

  In her room (a Dead-Animal-Free Zone), she plonks herself down on the thick white throw rug and does sit-ups until she feels sick. Picks the carpet fluff off her pants. Inspects herself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror for pimples, ripples, flaws. Admires her rib bones. She’s almost perfectly skinny. Close enough that she can almost see it. She’s skinny enough that her head looks just a bit too big. Perfectly balanced in its imbalance. Like a lollipop girl, those thin girls in magazines. Big head, big eyes, insect-like body that barely exists floating somewhere underneath.

  Not finding any big flaw to focus on, she settles on trimming the tiny hairs on her eyebrows so that they are exactly, precisely symmetrical. She plucks out each one of the nearly invisible hairs from her top lip, which hurts. Makes her eyes water. Makes her sneeze.

  “Suffer to be beautiful,” she reminds herself. Her grandmother (Granny Aggie, not Grandma Jane) was a fashion model in the 1950s. She’s the one who named Michael. She practically raised her, really. For a while, Michael couldn’t stand to be in her parents’ house. It was mostly the dead animals but also her sisters and the way they used up all her parents’ attention. And Sully hasn’t always been so easy. Not that he’s actually easy now, but at least he’s calm.

  Granny Aggie let her stay for a week or two or three each month. She was the only one who ever really listened to Michael. She’s the only one who made Michael feel like she could do anything she wanted to do. That she was special. She let Michael wear her clothes and didn’t make her feel like an annoying kid. She took her seriously, or made her feel that way. And she got it; she understood that looking good was important. She understood why.

  And then, one day, she died. Not in front of Michael, thank God. Michael couldn’t have handled it. She just bent over to tie her shoe, and bam, she was gone. She left a ton of money to Michael, and to Michael’s parents. Enough that Michael can have whatever she wants, whenever she wants it. She’d rather have Granny Aggie back; she’d rather have an adult to talk to about her life. To help her figure it all out. But the money is nice, too. Buys her lots of expensive jeans. Nice car. Expensive haircuts. Good teeth. Her teeth aren’t even real; they’re veneers, just like all the movie stars have. Granny gave them to her for her fifteenth birthday when it seemed like her teeth were going to need braces. Veneers were a better, prettier choice. Granny Aggie wouldn’t have wanted Michael to have a mouth full of plastic and elastics. No way.

  She gave Michael a lot of advice. Taught her a lot of important things, mostly about being pretty. Always being pretty. Never, ever letting anyone see you looking less than your best. She also gave Michael a lot of clothes, which are sadly too mothballed to wear, but cool in a vintage actress-at-the-Oscars kind of glamorama way.

  Grandma Jane never gave her anything but a cigarette smoke headache. Michael wrinkles her nose in disgust at the memory. Fat old Grandma Jane and her funny tasting cookies and rum in coffee mugs.

  Both of them are gone, Grandma Jane not actually dead but stinking it up in some old age home, not knowing who anyone is, soiling herself. Teeth in a glass by her bed. Visiting her is a nightmare. Michael would rather tie her shoe and drop dead than ever be the slobbery unkempt mess that is Grandma Jane.

  She sighs. She misses Granny Aggie, probably the only semi-normal, semi-gorgeous, semi-cool person in her whole family tree. Misses her so much she’s sure she can actually feel the pain of it in her chest. A zing of sorrow.

  Michael flosses her teeth, applies a facial mask. She moves the rug off the floor and sits down on the hardwood. Closes her eyes and crosses her legs. Concentrates on her breathing. Her bony butt hurts from sitting there, but she sticks with it. Actually, she likes that it hurts. Likes that she’s aware of her bones on the hard floor. It feels good. It feels like she’s won.

  Meditation is her new “thing.” She even got some new cute meditation clothes to celebrate her adventure into being “spiritual.” Yoga pants, tanks that breathe and wick away sweat, darling shoes that are almost like ballet slippers (pink, too) designed by a famous musician’s daughter.

  She thinks about her clothes breathing, imagines them moving.

  Creepy.

  Focus, she thinks. In out in out inoutinoutinoutinout.

  Her head spins a bit, so she lies on her back. Stares at the ceiling. Holds her breath. Plugs her nose. Will that fix it? She rolls over and presses her forehead into the cool wood.

  There.

  Her therapist, whose name is Hope (Is that made up? Michael wonders) suggested that she try meditation every day. An hour to just breathe. She is theoretically treating Michael for night terrors (which Michael wants to explain would probably go away if the dead animals were to vanish from her house), but they have never actually talked about the dreams themselves.

  Lame. Not that she really wants to talk about them; they sound so stupid when she says anything about them out loud. Dead stuffed animal zombies. Sounds like a dumb movie more than anything else. One too silly to be really scary.

  Hope is okay. The most important factor in her relationship with Hope is that Hope is also her mother’s best friend, which completely prevents Michael from talking to her about anything real. The bad dreams are the least of her problems. If she told Hope something truly bad, like how she feels worthless sometimes. Like how she sometimes envies Sully who never has to perform, never has to do anything. How she feels like an alien in her family, a fake everywhere else, faker than her fake “friends” who — if she’s being honest — are the embodiment of everything she’s afraid that she is herself. How she hates herself if she spots a flaw in the mirror. Like really, really hates herself. Loathes. If she admitted that, Hope would no doubt tell on her. Her mother worrying about her is worse than her mother ignoring her, as she usually does, being busy stuffing dead animals from around the world and posing them for creepy photographs and calendars and greeting cards. Family pets, posed to look like they’re sleeping. Hunting trophies posed to look like they want to escape. Roadkill rebuilt to resemble its former self. The most sick and twisted family business she could even imagine, much less participate in.

  And with all Granny Aggie’s money, they don’t even have to do it. They do it b
ecause they like it. They love it. They think it’s art. Why they can’t just slap some paint on a canvas instead, Michael has no idea. There’s art, and then there’s just, well, a horror show. This is definitely the latter.

  She shudders.

  Michael doesn’t usually follow Hope’s suggestions (nettle tea, Chinese herbs, fasting, support groups), but this meditation sounded okay. Not too kooky. The problem is that sitting doing nothing makes her think about too much stuff. Like Tony, her not-yet-boyfriend-but-soon-to-be. First she thinks about what she said to him at lunch, which was so embarrassing she blushes again now.

  She said, “You’re so welcome, Tone.”

  That’s all.

  It doesn’t sound embarrassing taken out of context, but it turned out he hadn’t said thankyou. Well, not to her. He was talking to someone else, not anything to do with her. She’d just blurted. She was nervous. He was so close. And it was so loud, her own voice. Gross. And “Tone”? What was up with that?

  She’s an idiot.

  He had given her that look. That particular look of his that said, “You’re not worth my time.”

  Michael can’t stand to be not wanted. It makes her want to hurt herself in some fundamental — but non-marking — way.

  She tries hard to think about something other than Tony. About the way he handed Madison her pompoms when she dropped them on the way into the gym. (All the girls from the gymnastics team also cheer, except Yale, of course, who tried out but didn’t make the team. “Not the right look,” the coach said. “She’d put the balance off.” And Michael, feeling like what that meant was “not pretty enough,” agreed even though she felt funny about it.)

  Tony. She thinks about the way he got flustered in Math and she just wanted to help him, give him the answer, rescue him from his own, well, inherent dumbness. But he is dumb. Like a golden retriever or something. Dumb but lovable. Dumb but still valuable somehow, still worth talking to, still interesting.