Y in the Shadows

by Karen Rivers

  She makes her legs move. They feel like they don’t belong to her. Nothing belongs to her anymore. She does not belong.

  “Bye, Mike,” yells her mum suddenly from the bathtub. Michael nearly screams. Then she hears splashing. She forces herself to answer.

  “Bye,” she says hoarsely. Her voice doesn’t even sound like hers anymore.

  I am still the same person, she reminds herself. I am still breathing.

  Breathe.

  Yet she can’t.

  What if she’s pregnant? Then what? Or, worse, what if he’s given her something, some disease, something awful? Something deadly?

  Her knees wobble. She stands outside the bathroom door. She can smell the Body Shop bath gel her mother uses. She wants to open the door, kneel by the tub and rest her head on her mother’s chest.

  But that would be crazy, so she doesn’t.

  She makes her way down the hall. Holding on almost, hand dragging along the rough plaster wall, feeling vertigo pushing her toward the ground. Which way is up? She stops in Sully’s room.

  Sully is asleep. He sleeps like a toddler. Bum in the air. His arm wrapped around Red Ted, his stuffed bear he’s had since he was a baby. She kisses his cheek. He smells like teenage boy, not like he should. Not like baby powder and diapers. More like body odour and bad breath.

  She pulls away. He smells too much like a grown-up boy.

  Somehow she gets through the kitchen where Angene and Chelsea are building some kind of sculpture out of grapes and hard-boiled eggs. The smell is unbearable. It smells like sickness, like something rotting.

  The Jeep stalls. Won’t start. She floods it and waits. Turns on the radio and tries to make herself calm down.

  “Didn’t happen,” she tells herself in the mirror. “Doesn’t matter.”

  The engine finally roars to life. She doesn’t stop to pick up Aurelia like she always does. Aurelia can figure it out. She’s mad at her, in a way that feels bigger than anything she can imagine. Maybe it’s misplaced: this hatred should be focused only on Israel, but it’s not. It’s spreading. Infecting everything she’s ever thought she cared about. It’s Aurelia’s laugh she keeps hearing. Aurelia’s voice. Aurelia calling last night and denying she saw anything, claiming that she had no idea what happened until Matti told her. She was tobogganing with Jackson, she says. She was busy. She was stuck in a snowbank. She thought she was going to freeze to death down there, that she was actually going to die, and here Michael is, yelling at her, and that’s not what friends do.

  What friends do, thinks Michael. She hung up the phone. Erased Aurelia from her speed dial.

  Methodically erased all The Girls. None of them helped her. None of them were friends. Which she guesses she knew all along.

  She woke up with Yale of all people asleep in the bed next to her. The door bolted. Keeping them out.

  They all watched.

  Michael breathes deeply. Yale will be at school. That steadies her a bit.

  Her chest seizes again. She’s gasping. Panicking. Someone is behind her, someone is looking over her shoulder, someone is watching her.

  No, no. No one is there.

  She pulls the car over to the side of the road and closes her eyes for a few minutes, working on the meditation chant that Hope says is miraculous. And it does clear her head. A bit. Only she’s repeating in her head, “It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen.”

  Only it did.

  I’ll just stop going to school, she thinks. I’ll do the rest by correspondence. I’ll explain to a counsellor, but, no, she’ll make me do something. “Press charges.” I can hear it now. And that’s never going to happen. Never. No way. She won’t go through that. Not a chance.

  She turns the car around and drives home. She isn’t ready.

  She stands in the entrance to the house, listening. It’s so busy in there. Her parents crashing around. Her sisters in the studio. Even upstairs, there is a racket. In Sully’s room, she can hear the caregiver getting him dressed. Getting him ready for the day. She sits down in the hallway outside his room. Pries off her boots. They’re pretty but they’re so hard to get on and off. What is she waiting for? What is he getting ready for? Things like this would never happen to him, not just because he’s a boy, but because he doesn’t have to go through it. No one expects anything of him.

  It isn’t fair.

  She closes her eyes, crawls down the hall to her room. It’s like crawling is all she can do.

  She’ll go to school tomorrow. Face it all tomorrow. Not today. Today she has a headache. That’s it. A migraine. Today she’ll just close her eyes.

  ****

  Yale

  Chapter 16

  It’s too much.

  When I come home and Mum and Dad act like nothing has happened. They don’t ask me where I’ve been. They don’t wonder why my hands are shaking more than ever, like paper ribbons caught in a fan.

  They don’t notice that I’m different: how can they not notice?

  I am different.

  I don’t know what I feel.

  It’s like all the smells are stuck to me. All that stench of fear. I’ll never forget it. The tinny smell of blood and hot smell of sweat. The salty smell of pain. The white hot scent of anger.

  Everything has a smell. Everything permeates.

  I feel like my face should look different, transformed, even disfigured by the ugliness that I witnessed. But in the mirror, I’m still just me. Irregular freckles, wispy hair, dog eyes. The house is the same: it smells of curry and socks, dust litters the floor, unopened mail spills off the hall table. In the kitchen sink, three saucepans with macaroni crud in them make me feel that time has stood still. I want — I need — for there to be a shift — and I want it to be universal. For suddenly everything to be in Technicolor or black and white or to smell different or to feel different. The fact that it is all just the same — my parents are just the same — makes me angry in a way that I can’t even pinpoint.

  Nothing is different.

  Everything should be different.

  I guess I am what’s different. What I did. I don’t know. I never would ever have thought that I would be a person who did what I did. It makes me think of stories you hear where people will pull a cougar off a kid, or lift a car off a baby. Because in that moment, I felt like I could do that. Israel was the car. I lifted him off.

  But did I? Not fast enough. The reality was that maybe I gave him a black eye, but I didn’t stop him in time. Not before he started to do what he was going to do. Not before Michael was already really hurt.

  I took too long.

  What kind of superhero does that?

  So I’m not a superhero. I’m just me. Tony might qualify. If he had been there instead of me, it wouldn’t have got that far. The way he pounded Israel, I thought he was going to kill him. I wanted him to kill him. I will never forget the smirk on Israel’s face. I think he really is a bad guy. And maybe, after all, Tony and I are both good guys. Maybe that’s all there is to it.

  I hope Michael is okay. I want to call her, to go to her house, to find out for sure. I need to know. It’s like she’s my responsibility and I have a right to know. But I don’t call because I’m waiting for her to come to me. I think she will. I think maybe we’ll really be friends now. But I also think it doesn’t matter. It’s like I’ve spent my whole life thinking she’s so important and she’s not really. She’s just a girl.

  I’m just a girl.

  But maybe I’m also important.

  I feel like I’m a part of so much all of a sudden that when I’m at home and Mum and Dad are ignoring me, robbing banks and eating children’s food or whatever, I feel like I’m just on pause, waiting for more to happen.

  Last night, I did something else that’s changed me. I went down to the basketball court behind the old bowling alley. I went to see if Tony was there. There’s something about him now that I can’t stay away from. It’s like everyone else from the scene has fad
ed away and it comes down to me and Tony, Michael and Israel. The important players.

  He wasn’t there. Not right away. So I waited. I sat there for quite a while with the homeless guy, but not with him. We didn’t talk, but even though I was invisible, he knew I was there. He kept looking at me. I was testing him, to be honest. I’m pretty sure he’s the only one who can see me when I’m gone and I’m dying to know why. What extra vision does he have? Is it because he’s mentally ill, something extra making up for whatever he has lost?

  He watched me and muttered. I wonder what’s wrong with him, but whatever it is, it’s too far gone to fix. Maybe he doesn’t want it to be fixed. Maybe he likes his life the way it is: how can I know? Anyway, I can’t rescue him and he doesn’t want rescuing, even if I did. I can tell that by the way his face is set, the lines making rivulets in his dry skin. His eyes fixed and steady even though they are bloodshot and leaking. He’s not looking for help.

  Then, finally, long after it got cold, Tony came. He appeared out of nowhere almost like I willed him to do it. I could smell him before I could see him. I could smell the dirt-sweat smell of him. He was bouncing on his feet, like he couldn’t stay still, but it wasn’t a happy kind of restless. His anger and frustration were everywhere. He was moving around like he was on a chain he couldn’t break free from.

  Then, of all people, Israel showed up. I thought there would be a fight. Tony’s fists clenched under all the white tape. But there wasn’t.

  And then it got stranger.

  Well.

  I waited. I watched. I wanted to stop him from taking the bottle but I didn’t. It felt like it wasn’t my business somehow. Who was I to change his choice, right? It was his call. I felt bad about it, yet I couldn’t bring myself to interfere. Even though I knew it wouldn’t go well for him. I knew.

  Some kind of hero I turned out to be. I let him do it. Let him keep drinking and drinking. I could have stopped him simply by appearing, but I didn’t. I watched.

  Like some kind of creepy voyeur.

  Just sat there.

  All night, literally, Tony drank and drank. The bum seemed to have a stash of bottles, I never would have guessed that he had a supply. The smell of whatever was hidden by the brown paper bag burned my nose. I don’t know what it was. Couldn’t see a label. There’s another smell I’ll never forget. Like medicine and fertilizer and some harsh stinging metal. Tony winced every time he swallowed. He was talking a lot. About his brother. The bum didn’t even pretend to listen. Just kept swigging himself until he passed out. Maybe he was mute. I’ve never heard him speak.

  But that didn’t stop Tony. He kept talking. He talked about how when Joe died, Israel became his brother, sort of, in exchange. He talked about how he’ll never speak to Israel again. He cried a bit. There was something about Michael that I didn’t catch. While I wasn’t there, I think he might have said something about me, but I was at a distance, under the maple tree and I might have heard it wrong. I had to walk away a few times. To pee, obviously. But also to breathe.

  It was intense.

  Maybe I should have stopped him, after all. It’s just ... he didn’t seem to need help until he slumped over. When he tipped and passed out, I was scared. I thought he was dead. But he was moving, he was still drinking. Nursing the bottle like a baby. I was scared he’d drink so much he’d die so I finally took it away, reached out and touched it and it vanished. I threw it into the night and it splintered hard and loud on the concrete.

  The homeless guy shifted in his sleep, his snoring that I hadn’t noticed until it stopped, abating, and then beginning again in earnest.

  Tony was definitely unconscious. I rocked back and forth, hugging my knees. What could I do? Call 9-1-1? I looked close, so close I could feel his breath on my face. He was breathing deeply, evenly. The smell of it made me reel.

  Then he came to, suddenly, startled me into visibility. I couldn’t stop it, it was like I was reappearing in spite of myself. He fished around for the bottle and not finding it, he started to talk. To me, or so it looked. He stared right at me. Talking, talking. I felt like I shouldn’t be there, it was too personal, but I also couldn’t leave. I couldn’t leave him alone. He talked more. Mostly about his mum and his dad. Still more about Joe. I think he said, “I knew you’d understand, I could tell that you’d get it.”

  He held my hand. Not romantically, not really, more like someone who needed some help crossing the street.

  I waited it out. I waited until I made sure he was awake, just in case. I don’t know in case of what. Just in case. Finally he slept, and then woke up in the dawn light. Dazed and looked like he was in agony. Terrible. I wanted to hug him, but instead I vanished before he could be reminded that I was there and that maybe he said more than he wanted to say. I think that was why, anyway. I just knew I had to do it, for his sake, to protect him, I guess, from feeling embarrassed in the cold light of day.

  On my way home, I stopped at Michael’s. It’s not so much that I have to look after her, it’s just that I wanted to make sure. They never lock their door. I don’t know why not. I guess they know that any burglar would be so startled by the mausoleum of dead animals that he’d turn tail and run. They didn’t bother me any more. I was almost used to them. I waited in the front hall until I was sure the house was quiet. Everyone was still asleep. I could tell by the way the air smelled, like sleep punctuated with the sour air of a house that wasn’t being moved through.

  I made my way up to Sully’s room first. He was sound asleep, arms flung over his head like he was being held at gunpoint. Snuck into his closet, perched there on his mountain of shoes. I was just watching him for a minute, lost in a daydream of Yale, when suddenly there was someone in the room with him, an aide I guess. Some kind of paid help I hadn’t seen before, who was helping him to get dressed. The closet door opened and closed, but not all the way, and even though it felt wrong I found myself watching him being dressed. It’s not that I wanted to see him undressed, nothing like that. It just made me feel so close to him, I almost cried. I know he’s not Yale. They’re nothing alike. He’s a boy, for one thing. He’s not related to me.

  I made myself leave the room, the door was partially ajar, enough for me to squeeze through. The now-familiar hallway with the odd crunchy carpet. Then, before I could go farther, Michael was there. For a minute, I thought she saw me. She was right next to me, walking from the direction of the stairs, and then she dropped to the floor and crawled to her room. I think she was crying.

  I felt a million things. Sorry for her. Guilty that I hadn’t stopped it sooner. Bad that I hadn’t called her, after all, hadn’t found out how she was doing.

  I went straight home. I know I was supposed to be at school. But who cared? It was like being invisible made me immune to all that.

  I went up to my room and I called her.

  I said, “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  ****

  Tony

  Chapter 17

  It’s like the world has gone fucking insane, that’s what it’s like. I can’t even believe any of this is happening.

  The whole school is talking about the ski trip, and, believe me, they aren’t talking about the slopes. They’re talking about what happened. Well, of course they are. In that stupid way that happens, where everyone is all, “I was there! I saw it!” when I know that wasn’t true because when it was really happening it was just Israel and Michael and Yale and finally, too late, me. The crowd only gathered afterward, they were drunk and stupid, they didn’t even know what they were seeing. Which makes the whole thing even more sickening, how they are talking about Michael like she deserved it. Like what Israel did was what she had coming. Are they sick?

  They have to be. They must be. Even her friends. Especially her friends. Like they’ve been lying in wait for this moment so they can make the pretty girl pay the price for being pretty. It’s fucking disgraceful, that’s what it is. Inhuman.

  And I’m a bad guy, to
o. My broken knuckles throb and the pain shoots all the way through to my chest, which aches. I’m a bad guy — according to the rumour mill, anyway — for hurting Israel. Apparently, I broke his ribs.

  Well, too fucking bad.

  I’m the bad guy?

  Well, fuck everyone. They have no idea. They’re just siding with what must look, to them, like the winning team. They don’t understand at all. It’s all wrong.

  To top it off, I’m sick. I’m so sick. I have to keep going into the bathroom to puke, and when I’m in there I’m treated to a big black-lettered graffiti drawing of Michael on her knees sucking some guy’s dick, a big sign around her neck saying, I’M A SLUT.

  People are disgusting. And cruel. For some reason, this makes me think of Joe. Maybe that’s all he could see, you know? The cruelty. The nastiness. Maybe that’s why he had to go because once you’ve seen that, it’s hard to carry on. The truth of that makes me dizzy. I’m dizzy, anyway, but it’s not just that. It’s beyond distasteful. It’s almost as bad as the thing itself. Evil.

  I hope she presses charges. I hope that asshole goes to jail.

  I puke and I puke and I puke. Above the flusher, someone has written, FOR A GOOD TIME CALL __________. It’s Michael’s real number, too. I spend ages rubbing at it with my finger until it’s faded enough to not show that much. My knees on the cold tile floor, the stink of my own puke making me sick some more.

  The stink. Everything stinks. I stink. Yeah, it’s a hangover so I guess you could say it’s self-inflicted, which it is. So this, I guess, I deserve. But no one would probably guess that I got it not from partying but from drunkenly pouring out my soul to a homeless guy on a glass-flecked concrete basketball court.

  God.

  I’m disgusting.

  How did I get like this? Each time I catch a glimpse of myself, I newly hate me. I see Israel in passing and ignore him. His swagger. Is he actually proud of himself? Who the fuck is he, anyway? Not who I thought, that’s for sure. Not anyone I could have ever known.