Y in the Shadows

by Karen Rivers

  My jaw is clenched so tight, I feel like my eyes might pop out.

  I can’t stand anything. I’m crawling out of my skin.

  The only person at the moment who I actually want to see is Yale. But she isn’t at school. Neither is Michael.

  I think I have to find Yale. I have to leave this horrible place and find her. See her. I have to explain to her how I feel. I know it’s bad timing, probably, and might come out all wrong especially in the context of what happened, but suddenly it’s like it’s urgent that she knows that I like her. I have to tell her. Even though I’m gross and I stink and I look terrible, all hollow-eyed and green. I have to know how she feels. I think — and I could be totally wrong — that the way she was looking at me on that endless bus trip home, that there was something there for her, too. I want to make sure she’s okay, but it’s not just that. I just want to see how she’s going to look at me and see from there if I’m safe to tell her how I feel. I’ve never ever felt this way before. It’s like one good thing in a sea of bad things that are going on and I don’t know what else to do with it other than just tell her. I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks anymore. Everything is so crazy. I feel like she’s the only noncrazy person in the whole mess.

  ****

  Michael

  Chapter 18

  Michael lies in her bed. Her perfect clothes are sweaty under the heavy quilt. The air smells unwashed. The house sounds thump around her. A while ago, her mum came in. Lay her cool hand on Michael’s forehead. Brought her an Aspirin, which Michael dutifully swallowed. Like an Aspirin could fix everything. She did have pain. Pain she’d never admit to. Like real physical pain, not just the pain in her mind. Pain from the sex mostly. A strange cramping in her abdomen. A feeling like she’s been sitting on blades. She’s bleeding.

  She lies there and feels the trickle. The taste of the partly dissolved Aspirin in her mouth. She could never swallow pills. She watches the sunlight make patches of brightness and darkness on the white ceiling. The peach tree outside her window occasionally caressing the glass with a lazy branch. The blue of the sky peeking through the slats of the closed blinds. She picks up a book, but doesn’t open it. She hardly ever reads and she can’t concentrate now but it seems important to have something in her hand. Then it feels too heavy, so she drops it on the floor. Every noise she makes feels too loud. The slap of the book onto the hardwood. The heavy thud of the quilt following as she pushes it off, suddenly feeling like it’s squashing her. Suffocating her.

  The phone rings. She isn’t going to pick it up, but then she does mostly to make the sound stop.

  “Hello.”

  “Michael?”

  “Who is this? What do you want?”

  “It’s ... Yale.”

  “Oh,” she says. “That’s okay. I mean, thanks.”

  “I just wanted to, you know, see if you were okay,” Yale says.

  “I’m okay,” Michael says. Then she bursts into tears. Real tears. Like an unstoppable downpour of rain. Her sweater front is soaked.

  “I’m coming over,” Yale says finally, when she thinks Michael can hear.

  “Okay,” Michael says.

  She gets out of bed. Changes into a clean T-shirt and sweats. Goes into the bathroom and washes off her makeup. Pulls her hair back into a ponytail. Cleans herself again. She can’t get clean enough. While she waits for Yale, she cleans the bathroom floor. She cleans the toilet. She cleans her teeth.

  Then Yale is there. At first, it’s awkward. They’re obviously both thinking about the same thing. How can they not be? Michael suddenly, more than anything, wants her to leave. She wants to be alone. Yale is too much of a real person, she sees that now. Yale is too human. Yale is ... Yale saw what happened to her, so she can’t pretend differently. In light of this, people like Madison, like Aurelia, like Sam — people like them who are so fake, so surface — are maybe easier to take.

  But Yale doesn’t leave. She sits down on Michael’s bed like it’s her own, even though she doesn’t look quite comfortable. Her eyes look nervous. Her hands are shaking.

  “Your hands are shaking,” Michael says.

  “I know,” says Yale. “They always do. It’s not that I’m nervous or something. It’s not that.”

  “Oh,” says Michael.

  Even that short burst of conversation feels like a lot. She crawls onto the bed herself. Curls up at the end like a cat. When she was little, she had a stuffed tiger that lay there (an actual toy, not a real stuffed cat), just like she’s lying now, head on her paws, like her head is too heavy to lift. She wants to close her eyes.

  “Maybe I’m nervous,” says Yale. “I think I’m always nervous.”

  Michael doesn’t answer. Yale’s shoes are dirty and clods of dirt fall onto the hardwood floor, onto Michael’s quilt. The dirt bothers Michael more than she can say, so she doesn’t say anything because anything she says about it would come out wrong. Instead, she closes her eyes. Pretends she can’t feel the stinging between her legs. Pretends that Yale being there isn’t taking her back to the moment itself, again and again and again.

  “I’m really sorry,” says Yale, suddenly. “I was there, I should have stopped him sooner, I should have ... I’m so sorry.”

  Michael’s eyes are startled open. “What do you mean?” she says.

  “I should have stopped him before,” she says again. “I should have.”

  “Oh,” says Michael. She hadn’t thought of that. It wasn’t Yale’s responsibility. “You didn’t have to do anything,” says Michael. “I’ve never done anything for you.”

  “It’s not like that,” says Yale. “It’s not like, I’ll do this if you do that. It’s like, I don’t know, someone’s in trouble, so you help them no matter what.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Michael whispers. “I’m just home because I have a migraine.”

  Yale cocks her head to one side. “I get those, too,” she says.

  “I get sick,” says Michael. “I get so I can’t see.”

  “Me, too,” says Yale.

  “It sucks,” says Michael.

  “I know,” says Yale. “It’s the worst.”

  The silence is awkward, but it’s not really silent. The house is alive with sounds. Music reverberates from the living room-studio where the sisters are finishing the last of their photos for their upcoming show. Sully thumps on the wall in rhythm with a song only he can hear. The music therapist is in there with him and suddenly she bursts into a rendition of The Sound of Music at full volume that makes them both laugh. It isn’t really funny, but the laughing feels like exhaling.

  “Okay,” says Michael. “I think I’m going to sleep now.”

  “Do you want me to go?” says Yale.

  “No,” says Michael. “Stay.”

  She closes her eyes. Stretches out enough that just a part of her leg touches Yale’s. That’s all. So that she’s not quite alone, after all.

  ****

  Yale

  Chapter 19

  I walk home from Michael’s house slowly. My legs are sore from lying down in such an awkward position but I also feel somehow lighter. I pass a tree that’s in full-blossom and it’s swarming with bees, the hum of them feels like it’s coming from inside me. If I hadn’t gone, it would have felt like a furious buzz of guilt. But I did go, and it was okay. I think she was glad to see me.

  Actually, I know she was glad to see me.

  Michael’s going to go back to school tomorrow; she’ll pick me up on the way. We’ll go in together, The Bleeder and The Slut, heads held high. And what does it matter, anyway? Six weeks from now this school year will be over and no one will remember either of our traumas, except maybe some vague whispers at the reunion, which we won’t go to, anyway. Who really wants to see these people again? I know I don’t.

  That’s the thing, right? Everyone is so caught up in themselves that this won’t seem so important to anyone else except Michael, and to me, in a week, a month, a year.


  I’m walking. For the first time in ages, I don’t feel like I want to disappear. I’m just breathing. The air brushes by my skin like a cat, soft. Spring is getting warmer and summer is hovering on the edge. You can smell it in the warm sidewalk smell and the dry patchy grass that’s cropping up on lawns. Dandelions are everywhere and the slightly acrid odour they make when they are crushed is interspersed with the other, still-fresh smells of spring.

  I’m almost home when I see Tony. He’s standing on the sidewalk outside my house, spinning a basketball on his fingers again and again and again.

  He’s waiting for me.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey,” I say.

  At first, it’s so awkward I want to die. Like we’re circling each other, sniffing like dogs, trying to identify one another. We’re not really sniffing, but you know what I mean. Then it feels like the square of concrete we’re standing on is rotating us around, saying, “Look, see, this is who it is.”

  He looks embarrassed and I feel embarrassed. To hide my shaking hands, I stuff them into my jean pockets. It’s like outside of the context of that night, we don’t know each other at all. But still, when I look at his face, I know him. Like he’s someone I knew a long time ago from somewhere and have only finally recognized.

  “You know,” he says. “You know ... So ...”

  “What?” I say.

  “Um,” he says. He kind of shifts back and forth and the ball rolls out of his hand and onto the lawn. He looks like he wants to get it, but he doesn’t. He stays put. I feel a bit sorry for him. It’s like without a prop — a basketball, a pen — he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He settles on stuffing them deeply into his pockets, mirroring me.

  “I just wanted to tell you,” he says. “I have to tell you, that what happened to you before. You know, the thing. What happened to you. It was really stupid. I mean, not stupid that it happened. But what went on afterward. You didn’t deserve that.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Yeah. It was beyond. Beyond beyond.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Well, it was stupid. People suck. Like they have to laugh at someone else to turn the attention away from themselves, you know? I just wanted you to know that it didn’t make me like you any less. It didn’t, you know, change you.”

  The last part comes out in a burst. Like he’s been rehearsing. I’m surprised. I couldn’t be more surprised. My toes curl under.

  “And the thing is,” he says. “The thing is that I’ve always ... I mean, I do now. I like you. And I was wondering, if it weren’t too weird, if you wanted to ...”

  The whole world is standing still. If there were birds flying by, I’m sure they’ve frozen in time, dropped onto the lawn. I look up half-expecting it to start raining feathers. I can’t breathe. I’m holding my breath.

  I’m getting dizzy from it.

  This is beyond surreal, so far beyond that I feel like I must be asleep or dead and this isn’t happening, it’s a hallucination. His arms dangle so awkwardly at his sides, he looks like he’s in pain, like he’s going to explode from it. So all I do is just reach out my hand to him, and we stand like that for a long time. Just there, on the sidewalk outside my house, cars going by. A bus. A group of men on bicycles all wearing bright yellow and black outfits like a swarm of African killer bees.

  My heart is going crazy, but I stay really still because that’s what feels important. When I’m holding his hand, my hands don’t shake. It’s the weirdest thing. Finally, the wind picks up and my hair starts whipping around my face, and that kind of breaks the moment.

  “So,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Let’s sit down.”

  We go sit on the lawn, which needs cutting. It’s peppered all over with white daisies and thousands and thousands of bright yellow nodding dandelion heads. I sneeze four times in a row and then stop.

  While we sit, and talk, he keeps crunching blades of grass between his fingers and rubbing them and from now on that smell will always be the best smell in the world for me.

  ****

  Tony

  Chapter 20

  Yale is my girlfriend. She’s my girl. Mine.

  I’ve been smiling a lot. In spite of everything. I’m still upset. Who wouldn’t be? I’m torn up about Israel. Michael. Everything.

  But something is shifting, somehow I can’t explain. I know Yale is going away to school in the fall and so am I. It’s not like happily ever after. Does that even exist? There is always an after.

  But I don’t care right now. Right now I care about the way she looks at me. The way I feel. The way I get to kiss her. The way she reaches out and touches the skin on my face. The way she somehow makes things okay.

  That’s the best part.

  I can’t explain it, but it’s like I’m okay. Now. I was not okay for a long time, but something intangible has changed enough that now everything fits. I don’t feel like I’m screwing everything up.

  I don’t feel like everything is my fault.

  I don’t even know what one thing altered that feeling, not really. Some kind of internal tide change, I guess. And I know it has to do with Yale. It has to do with how she knows everything there is to know about me and she still seems okay with me. With who I am. It has a lot to do with that.

  ****

  Michael

  Chapter 21

  School is ending. Michael isn’t going to the prom. She doesn’t want to go. She not only isn’t going but she’s given the dress away to a charity. She bought the dress last year. It was expensive. It was so long ago she barely remembers how much she loved it. It was from when she was a different person. And she’s not skipping the whole event because she’s depressed, even though maybe it’s partly that. She’s skipping it because she’s already past it. She’s thinking about what’s after that and what’s next and prom is just a reminder of what’s past.

  Not interested.

  It’s been over a month. She doesn’t hurt, physically. She isn’t raw. There are no physical reminders, except maybe a sharp shock when she sits, like a phantom pain that she’s read that people get after they have a limb removed. A pain in something that isn’t there anymore.

  She’s okay. She is not okay. Or she thinks she is okay. She hopes she will someday be okay even though today isn’t the day. Today is a bad day. She wishes — more than anything — that she could stop replaying the scene in her head and willing it to be different. She wishes that she ...

  She isn’t okay, but if she decides that she will be, then she will. She can’t think any other way because to think any other way would be to let Israel take more than he already took. And that was enough.

  She doesn’t miss The Girls at all. It’s easier now. She isn’t trying so hard. It’s just her and Yale and Tony, of course. They are so easy together that it makes something ache inside her to see them together.

  She’s out with Yale, alone, hiking. Something she never thought she’d do. They’ve climbed up the side of a hill that’s affectionately called a mountain even though it probably doesn’t really fit the description. It’s sunny, hot, both girls are sweating. The sky is an unrelenting shade of blue and her eyes squint even from their shaded perch behind her DKNY sunglasses (olive frames, dark lenses, so huge they cover almost her entire face). The path is rutted and uneven under their feet.

  The wildflowers are blooming. So much colour. Dazzling, even through her tinted lenses. The flowers are making Yale sneeze, which she does every few metres, her whole body lurching like she’s getting whiplash each time. Michael laughs in spite of herself. As it turns out, Yale is funny. She never would have thought that. Yale sneezes again and jumps straight into the air, ending the sneeze with a round-off. Bows.

  “You can take something for that, you know,” observes Michael. “Like allergy medicine?”

  Yale shrugs. “I don’t like drugs.” She sneezes again.

  “Loser,” says Michael, but she says it affectionately. She feels in some ways like
she’s been friends with Yale forever. She feels almost entirely relaxed. Almost. A part of her never relaxes. A part of her is always looking back over her shoulder, waiting. A part of her is braced for awfulness.

  A breeze pushes through the grass on the west side of the trail, flattening them long enough for the girls to see two deer, eyes wide open, staring back at them. Yale sneezes again and the deer lift into the air, bounding out of sight into the trees.

  “I’ve never seen a live one before,” says Michael. “Isn’t that weird?”

  “It’s not only weird,” says Yale, “but it’s creepy. Don’t all those dead animals freak you out?”

  “Yes,” says Michael. “You have no idea.”

  “I’d be having nightmares,” says Yale.

  “Yeah,” says Michael. “Who wouldn’t?”

  “I wonder how Sully feels,” Yale says. “I wonder if they scare him, too.”

  Michael stops walking. “I don’t know,” she says. “You know, I never much thought about it. I don’t think so. I don’t think he notices them so much. He’s more detail oriented. He likes the glass eyes.”

  “Oh,” says Yale.

  They keep walking. Feet crunching on gravel that gives way to dirt and then becomes grass and moss. The moss hushes their footsteps so that Michael becomes more aware of her breathing, the sound it makes in the air. The trees shade them a bit from the sun and suddenly she’s cold. She puts on a sweater from her pack, even though Yale is still sweating. It’s like any temperature change is impossible for her now. She’s more sensitive. Too sensitive.

  Out of the blue, Yale starts to talk. Michael can’t see her face because she’s slightly ahead on the path, talking away from Michael but, with no wind, her voice is being carried back.