by Karen Rivers
Praise for Karen Rivers’ Haley Andromeda Trilogy:
The Healing Time of Hickeys
“This book will have you laughing out loud. Haley is a completely loveable and crazy character. Her quirky thoughts are fun to read and her adventures in dating (or lack of) will have you giggling until your sides ache. It’s guaranteed to make you giggle and feel good — what more could you want in a book?” — Kidzworld
“Sixteen-year-old Haley Harmony is ... a likeable, grounded soul, despite the fact that she spends an awful lot of time hyperventilating ... A pleasure from start to finish.” — Quill
& Quire
The Cure for Crushes
“I can’t help it. I’m a sucker for Bridget Jones and I’m a sucker for Karen Rivers’s ongoing series based on the star-crossed life of Haley Harmony. We first met the unfortunately named Harmony (hippie parents, home-schooled, deck stacked against her socially) in The Healing Time of Hickeys. It’s refreshing that Haley, told through v. funny diary entries, is not entirely likeable; nor are her friends endlessly patient. And without her brother’s shoulder to lean on, Haley finds herself alone more this time than last, wondering, like all of us, if she really is capable of happiness and how to make the good hair days outnumber the bad.” — The Georgia Straight
“We’ve all had our fair share of red-faced moments, and that’s why it’s so easy to relate to the accident-prone Haley. Her quirky accidents and comical thoughts are the best part of the book cuz they’ll make you laugh until your stomach hurts!” — Kidzworld
The Quirky Girls’ Guide to Rest Stops and Road Trips
“Fans of the Haley [Andromeda] books (The Healing Time of Hickeys and The Cure for Crushes) will definitely enjoy the conclusion of the trilogy. Yes, it’s chick lit, lite chick lit (is that chick lite???), but it’s fun, perfect for a quick read over the holidays, maybe even on a road trip! Buy it for your young Haley wanna-bes, and make sure that you have the two preceding volumes for those who like to read a complete series.” — Joanne Peters, CM Magazine
“Teen readers will find Haley’s diary filled with countless moments of recognition as Rivers, with spot-on accuracy, captures contemporary teen life.” — Quill & Quire
*****
Y in the Shadows
Book Two of the XYZ Trilogy
by Karen Rivers
Published by Raincoast Books
Copyright 2008 Karen Rivers
Edited by Colin Thomas
Cover by David Drummond
****
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
*****
Yale
Chapter 1
It started with something unimaginable. Something more like a punchline to a really bad joke than a real possibility, you know? Something that you’d see in some kind of dumb spoof movie, over-the-top and gut-churningly dumb. And it happened to me. It did. Now when I think about it, it seems surreal. Like a nightmare. It’s so overwhelmingly, devastatingly, embarrassingly bad that I can hardly bring myself to tell. It’s beyond humiliating. Beyond anything.
“Beyond beyond,” as someone cooler than me would say, probably mussing her perfectly messy-tidy hair at the same time or coyly covering her mouth with her perfectly subtly manicured hand. She’d be someone totally unlike me. Someone who wears clothes brand new from The Gap or Urban Outfitters or one of a thousand identikit stores, but in mysteriously perfect combinations and makes them look better than they were ever intended to look. Someone whose shoes always look new even when they aren’t. Someone who smells like fresh-cut lilies and cake. Who has teeth so sugar-white you want to pluck them out and crunch them like rock candy. Hands like a bird’s wings, you know what I mean? Overly pretty. Fingers like feathers. Sharp sparkling eyes. When she walks, you want to be her hair, the way it’s moving. When you see her, you want to know her. You want her to like you but you can’t explain why. It’s not like a crush. It’s different than that. It’s more intense and less meaningful at the same time. It’s like hungering after a perfect pair of boots or jeans. It’s yearning for something more perfect than what seems real. A different life. A different existence. A different you.
See, if Michael Hyde-Smith liked me, then it would mean I was a different person than who I am. As I am now, who would want to know me? My inner strings are so taut that you could probably pluck them and make music. Sometimes my hands tremble like my skin can’t quite keep my pulse inside, you know? Like nothing is quite the right fit.
I’m quirky. But I don’t want to be.
It’s how I live my life. Believe me. Wanting. Wanting to be someone special, someone smooth as cellophane, pretty in a way that is more than just symmetrical features, in an all-encompassing way. Wanting to shine, easily, without effort. Wanting to be someone else. Someone more.
Someone like Michael.
She’s such a bitch, I guess. Popular. Surrounded by girls I can’t stand — The Girls — girls so purely evil that I can’t believe they can stand themselves. Michael is different, though. Somehow. I don’t know why she matters to me, to everyone. But she does. She walks through the halls of the school and heads turn in spite of themselves. Mine does. It always has. Since forever. Since kindergarten, at least, when she showed up in a dress (everyone else in jeans, pants, shorts) and instead of being the odd one, she somehow made us all feel underdressed. It’s just how she is. The natural leader, born into it, like royalty.
It’s not like I emulate her style or her hair or anything about her. Me and Michael Hyde-Smith, we couldn’t be less alike.
I’m not pretty.
Michael is preternaturally, movie-star, straight-up beautiful.
But mostly, she just seems happier than the rest of the population. Maybe that’s it. All the good hair that slips around like shards of shining metal thread. All the money and good clothes cut to make her body look perfect. That’s just the packaging. It’s the inside part, that satisfied happiness she gets to wear like it’s her right. Her entitlement.
I wanted that so badly. I wanted the kind of life where I wanted to go to the prom. Where I knew how to dance, and I liked it. Where I’d make my own dress and I’d look like Gwyneth Paltrow accepting an Oscar, my immaculate blonde hair (as if) flowing to my waist.
Beyond that, I wanted (okay, still want, will probably always want) normal things: like a name that doesn’t make people stop and look twice, looking confused. Saying, “Uh, Yale? Isn’t that, like — is that a name? Isn’t that a college or something?” (Yes, it is, dumb-ass. My parents went there. They liked it. A little too much. Obviously.)
To have eyes that were the same colour as each other. (What a dreamer, huh?) Not one grey-brown and one ice-cold glass blue, silvery, like something too cold to touch. When I was really small, my eye scared me. How unhealthy is that? No wonder I’m wound so tight. Imagine being afraid of yourself. I used to think my stuffed animals would freeze if I looked at them too long through that blue lens. I thought the eye was glass, a marble that had somehow fallen in there before I was born, something my mother swallowed that got planted there like a seed and stuck.
If I were a different person, maybe I could make my eyes seem fascinating and mysterious
and enticing. Michael would, I’m sure. She could. But on me, they are just too. Too disturbing, too crazy, too unusual. Too easy to make fun of. Like, “Wow! That’s ... uh, wow. That’s really, uh, cool. You’re like one of those dogs.”
Great.
That’s perfect.
Just what everyone hopes to hear one day, “You’re like ... one of those dogs.”
It gets worse: I have a tendency to get dizzy and faint. Especially on buses, which is too bad for me because my parents don’t drive themselves, so they can’t imagine why I would want to do it. They use skateboards or the aforementioned horror of public transport — the bus. After I fainted on one for the third time, they “compromised” and got me a scooter that sounds like an ancient environmentally hazardous lawnmower trying to cut through gravel and toxic waste. Ironically, it’s ostensibly “green-friendly.” Planet-saving. A friend to furry animals and green grasses everywhere.
The scooter breaks down almost every time I use it. Usually at an intersection (a busy one). It spurts random clots of black oil onto the road, like an old man spitting snot onto the sidewalk. It horks. The steering wobbles. The seat creaks and is cracked in such a way that, if I wear shorts, it grabs the skin on my thighs and pinches so hard it brings tears to my eyes.
Michael drives a brand new Jeep Liberty, bright red and shiny. Leather seats. Stereo system. Sunroof.
My scooter is a dull army green.
So, yeah. That pretty much sums up my life, so far. I’m the tiny girl who doesn’t have good hair, doesn’t have good friends, doesn’t have that magic whatever, the sparkle and the fun. Dog’s eyes, hands aquiver, heart beating like something is always just about to happen, hair that just lies flat. A laugh like something barking. A voice like a lifelong smoker, even though I only started last year, and I only ever smoke the clove ones. Chronic dark bags framing my creepy eyes. The most humiliating means of transportation known to man.
You get what you get, my mum says. Don’t ask for more. Life hands you what you can handle.
My mum is one of those people. I guess she considers herself Zen. Deeply thoughtful. She has all those books, you know. Like The Tao of Pooh. One philosophy after another, all some easy-to-swallow variation on Buddhist acceptance and finding inner peace. Honestly, everything about this makes me furious: if you’re going to be Zen, at least read the real books. Read something that’s never been on the New York Times bestseller list. That’s not philosophy, it’s beach reading. But she doesn’t go in much for the big books, the real heavies. Keep in mind, she smokes a lot of pot. Surely it’s that and not the dumb philosophies that takes the edge off, helps her find some kind of peace, inner or otherwise. Pot stinks. I hate that she and Dad do that, huddled over their computers, giggling like kids. It makes me mad. It makes me want to slap them and shout, “You aren’t making sense! You’re rambling!”
Well, you get what you get.
Until my weirdness started, I thought what I got wasn’t a lot of anything. Not a lot of friends, that’s for sure. Not one person to call my BFF — a phrase, for the record, that makes me want to stick a fork in my eye. Best Friends Forever? Please. But still, I want to be able to say that about someone, anyone. Not even just Michael, just someone who would get me. Someone who I wouldn’t feel like I was boring them to death with my stuff. I try. Maybe I try too hard? Or I used to. Now I don’t bother as much. Once in a while, maybe. But not often. For obvious reasons.
Like last week, for example, I went to the mall with this girl, Anika, from my Math class. She’s a bit of an oddball, but she’s okay. She’s smart. She reads. And she’s also sort of cool, like she’s accepted into any group because she’s too unique to fit into any specific one. I would like to be her friend, I guess, if it were an option. Sometimes she wears stripy knee socks like a roller skater from the seventies. Like Michael, she can somehow do that thing where she makes something out-of-the-ordinary look trendy, makes you want to wear those ugly socks too even though you know it would simply make you look stupid and awkward, like you were wearing a Halloween costume on the wrong day.
She listens to old music, like ABBA and the Bee Gees and she doesn’t care what people think of that. Her nails are all painted different colours, yellow, red, orange, blue, green. She shops at thrift stores and makes her own perfume out of flowers she finds in her yard.
Usually Anika makes me sneeze. She reeks of dandelions. Ragweed.
Anyway, we’d had a detention. Actually the detention was mostly a mistake. She had been horsing around with Aurelia, who is Michael’s BFF. Aurelia is the bitchiest of The Girls by far, so bitchy she’s actually scary. The pitch of her laugh is like the ear-jarring sound you make when you rub your finger around the rim of your glass. It sounds cruel. She’s something else. When she talks, she always flings her arms around as if her voice isn’t enough to say whatever she’s saying, she needs more. So there she was in Health class, gesticulating like a nasty headless chicken, and she accidentally (or not) flicked her long pale pink fingernail in the direction of my face and hit me directly in my blue eye. Hard.
For a second, all I could see was red. Then I screamed, but only a little bit. More like a yelp really. Who wouldn’t yelp when they got hit in the eye?
Mr. Dickson turned around and Anika was laughing and I was shrieking, so we got it. Aurelia was still as stone, staring down at her paper like studying was her life. She does “fake” so well, it’s hard to imagine that anything about her is real.
The thing was, I didn’t mind so much. It sort of made us bond, me and Anika. The detention, that is. Mr. Dickson made us play chess as our punishment, which is a game I secretly love. We didn’t really play, though; we sort of just pushed the pieces around and rolled our eyes. Oh God, and then Mr. Dickson sneezed and a huge gob of stuff hung, unnoticed, from his nose for ages before it finally dropped onto his sweater. Disgusting. But funny. Really funny.
It seemed like we should do something afterward, almost like we were already friends. She wanted to get high but I said I couldn’t because of gymnastics. “I’m in training,” I said. Which isn’t totally true. I mean, they never specifically said we couldn’t get high. It’s not that kind of training. Not like serious athletics. I just don’t like drugs, they freak me out. Not in a prudish way, more in a I-bet-if-I-did-that-I’d-die way. (Mum says I’m a fatalist, but I like to think of myself as a realist.) (People do die from drugs, you know, I’m not making it up.) Besides, getting high is my parents’ thing. Not mine. I’m rebellious that way.
I suggested the mall instead. I had this idea that we’d try on clothes or get makeovers or hang out in the food court and flirt with the cute guys at the Orange Julius counter or something.
I don’t know what I thought.
Life isn’t TV, you know?
We bought coffee at Starbucks that tasted terrible: expensive and burnt and, frankly, really gross. (I hate coffee. It makes me feel like my heart is pulled taut, like it might burst like the skin of an overripe fruit.) I tried to remember to breathe. We hung out at the arcade, watching the younger kids playing games. There was a lot of yelling, flashing lights, the zip-zap of the sound started to hurt my ears. Then, out of nowhere, she decided to steal a T-shirt. The disabled guy who ran the kiosk looked sad around his eyes. She asked him for change for a dollar, and he gave it to her, even though there was a sign that said, WE MAKE NO CHANGE. She stuffed the shirt into my gym bag, which I had slung over my shoulder, before I realized what was happening.
Something about hanging around with her made me feel like I was getting the flu, or maybe it was the coffee. She talked too close and so fast I started to feel like I didn’t understand the language. Nothing was funny. Her breath made me queasy, made me want to go home and read a book. I was in the middle of Anna Karenina. It’s deadly boring but somehow relaxing. It takes so long for something to happen that I feel like reading it is the same as being asleep, a slow dream.
I wanted that.
Not the stealing. Not
the sad-eyed guy.
Anika hasn’t actually talked to me since, except to ask for her stolen shirt. It didn’t even fit her. It made her skin look yellow and showed off her belly-overhang bulge. On the front it said, PEOPLE DON’T KILL PEOPLE. ROBOTS KILL PEOPLE. I don’t even get that. Is that funny?
You get what you get. Some people get happy and shiny. The only shiny in my life is my nose after a day of sitting under the soul-draining fluorescent lights at Immaculate Conception High. Which only draws attention to whatever zit happens to have formed there when I was looking down at my textbook or staring at the back of Tony Nelson’s head. His skin is amazing. Incredible. It’s like velvet. Such gorgeous skin for a boy. And it smells unbelievable. It’s all I can do not to lean forward and just sniff. Weird, huh? I know it.
I also know that, if Tony Nelson knew that I thought he was anything special, he’d laugh. He’d tell his friends and they’d write my name and phone number with Sharpies on the bathroom stall doors. They’d find some way to make me into the punchline of a joke.
Like they need to try.
So I like him. But it’s like the kind of crush you have on people who will never, ever, ever notice you. People who see right through you, but not to your innermost thoughts, just through and out the other side like you aren’t there at all. Besides, it’s not really a crush on him, Tony Nelson. It’s more like the kind of crush I have on a lot of people. A crush on a part of him. I also have a crush on Israel’s eyes (incredibly bottomless deep brown eyes that make it seem like he must understand things that other people don’t see) even though I don’t like him. Not at all. He’s too slick, too shiny, too ... scary. But still, his eyes. Matti’s laugh (so real, so contagious, so heartfelt that he seems like he must just be happiness in the flesh). Michael’s hair. Anika’s style. Aurelia’s teeth.
