Y in the Shadows

by Karen Rivers

  In Tony’s case, it’s just his smell. His skin just exactly smells like fresh dirt. Not dirty dirt. More like earth. Like when you’re a kid and you’re helping your mum weed dandelions out of the garden and your hands sink into the wet, damp ground and later, you can smell it on your skin. It smells calm. It smells like being okay. Like breathing.

  His neck and T-shirt are usually a bit damp from sweat. You’d think he’d stink, but he doesn’t. He moves so fast all the time it’s like he’s always half-way through a workout, on his way from a run to a game.

  I’m too sensitive to smell. It’s too important to me. I know that’s weird. I can’t help it. It’s just there. Everything smells. You might not notice it, but I do. I read somewhere about people who have an extreme sensitivity to colours, they see colours in the air where there aren’t any. I have that, I think, but it’s odours instead.

  My house smells terrible. It’s the most repulsive smell in town, in the world, in the universe, anywhere. You’d think it wouldn’t smell bad, at least to me. You’d think it would smell like “home” and give me a warm, safe feeling regardless of its actual scent. But it’s bad.

  Really bad.

  No matter how much I try to clean it (which is hopeless, anyway, because my parents are pigs), the smell pervades. Someone once told me that if you smell something all the time you don’t notice it anymore, so that’s why people with gross BO don’t care or even notice. Yet to me, my house smells like curry, feet, plastic bandages that have been left on too long. And rotting flowers. Wine and smoke. Old milk.

  I notice.

  I care.

  Probably — given my lack of social success and all that’s happened — I should become one of those people who never goes out, stays in my house forever, staring out the window at a patch of ever-never-sometimes-changing sky. But I can’t do that. Because of the smell.

  I can’t see the sky from my window, anyway. It’s blocked by a satellite dish the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

  My parents like technology.

  I should say some things about them but I wouldn’t know how or where to start. When I describe things, the first thing that comes to me is what they smell like. My parents smell like cigarettes (marijuana) (for obvious reasons), incense (see above) and the kind of sweet-flower lavender soap that is favoured by elderly women named Elsie and Blanche. And fish. My parents smell like tuna fish. It’s hard to know why. They rarely ever eat it.

  My parents are very young. They were twenty when I was born, so even though they’re in their thirties now, they are like slightly rumpled teenagers with only a smattering of laugh lines and grey hairs. For fun, they play video games. The latest and greatest. Whatever is new. Even those grotesque ones with limbs being torn off and blood spattering the screen. My dad is a world expert at some particular kind of game programming that makes things look real. 3-D. To play, you have to wear this thing over your head that’s as big as a breadbox and suffocates me. I hate it. Video games give me motion sickness.

  My mum is famous for blogging, which as far as I can tell is just sharing way-too-personal anecdotes with strangers. She blogs about everything. Everything that she thinks about, her thoughts, her “philosophies,” her politics, her diet, her hair. She blogs about her college experiences. She blogs about me, stuff that’s too personal to share. She seems unable to have a thought that she doesn’t blog about. For some reason, she has a huge following. Thousands of people go to her site every day. She gets paid every time someone clicks on an ad. My mum’s internet friends who occasionally make appearances at the house — blog buddies — are usually ten years younger than her and have names like Stargazer and Chiclet.

  Sometimes I feel a bit like I own Mum and Dad, like some people have pairs of matching dogs. I feed them and clean up after them and remind them to go outside sometimes so that they get fresh air. They barely notice me, but sometimes they touch me affectionately, pour attention on me for fifteen minutes, and then instantly forget my existence again. It’s hard to explain. It’s as if all those computers have made them forget how to act for real.

  Here is the biggest thing I know about my parents. I don’t want to know it because I don’t know what to do with it. Knowing it is like knowing I have a tumour somewhere in my body that’s growing and growing and growing and it will one day take me over entirely.

  Ready?

  Before I was born, there was Yale. Not the school (although there was that, too), another human Yale. A baby. My sister, I guess, although it’s hard to imagine a sister who you’ve never known. How could I ever have known her? Or about her? Here’s the bad part, the unbelievable terrible truth: they gave her away. And they never said a word about her, not to me. Not ever.

  To make it worse, I read about Yale — found out about her — on Mum’s blog. Otherwise I wonder if I’d ever have known. I didn’t save the entry or anything. I guess it’s probably still there, lurking around in cyberspace, if I wanted to go look for it. Which I don’t. I don’t remember Mum’s exact words, but she’d been posting about babies. Childbirth. Someone she knew was having a baby and she was talking about epidurals, of all things. Talking about being numb. Well, she must have been, that’s all I can say. How could she give away a baby? She mentioned Yale in passing, in that context, like she didn’t matter. Like she was a pair of shoes that was returned to the store or an umbrella forgotten on the subway.

  I keep wanting to ask them about her. About Yale. And about me. What made them keep me if she wasn’t good enough? Am I measuring up? See, I doubt that I could be. I’m nothing special. Is she? Did they pick the wrong Yale?

  But I can’t even broach the subject. If I go to try, it’s like my voice box shuts down. My throat closes entirely. My lungs stop moving. But I can’t stop thinking about her, wondering what happened. Where is she? Is she dead? If so, why is she a secret? Why isn’t there even a photo of her on the fridge? Was she adopted? Does she live somewhere not knowing about me, not knowing about us? Does she know?

  Every time I talk to them about anything, no matter how weird or trivial, I want to tell them that I know. I know. But I don’t. I just keep letting it go. It’s just always there, in my head, like a quiet black cat quivering on a high shelf, waiting to jump.

  I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I avoid my mum now, and her blog. I avoid talking to her because when I do, I’m just reminded of the fact that I’m not talking to her about the only thing I want to talk to her about, and then I feel like I’m letting myself down. And Yale. Crazy, I know. I just ... can’t.

  Pretty easy to avoid conversations with my parents, anyway. They spend all their time in the basement, where there are about eighty computer terminals, mysterious humming boxes. It smells like burning dust. I don’t know how they can stand it. That burning dust smell hurts my nose and scratches up my throat. It makes me gag. But they love it. I hear them laughing down there all the time.

  What’s so funny? I want to yell. Why are you laughing?

  I don’t know what they do, not really. I mean, I know they are programmers, but I can’t actually picture what that means. The phone rings in the middle of the night and they have hushed conversations. They rush around looking tired and important. They both wear thick tinted glasses. They work mostly in the half-dark. They sometimes seem to forget who I am. They look at me from behind their identical (on purpose, they buy them in bulk) lenses as though I’m a frog that they’ve boiled who has mysteriously come back to life.

  They weren’t there when it happened. They rarely came to my meets, even when I wished that they would. Not that I’d ever tell them that. You know.

  But, anyway.

  It.

  Okay. I’m putting off getting started in case it doesn’t come out right. In case it just sounds too stupid to be true.

  It’s a hard story to tell.

  Think of the worst thing in the world that’s ever happened to you. And I don’t mean cancer or having your favourite cousin die in a plane crash
or watching your dog being run over by the mailman or having a wild bird pluck out your eye or something gross or epi-tragic. I’m talking about normal-awful. Except not normal.

  And so awful.

  Beyond awful.

  Pretend you’re me. (Sorry, just try it.)

  You’re below-average looking. Maybe you look okay in some light. (The dark, ha, ha.) I guess at first glance there is nothing really noticeably grotesque, but there is nothing great either. It’s somehow the combination that’s wrong. Brown hair with grown-out black lowlights that you can’t afford (or be bothered) to fix. Slightly crooked teeth that aren’t quite crooked enough to get corrected but crooked enough that you notice. Those dog-like eyes. Skin that’s okay in general but usually marred by at least one zit. Face usually flushed bright red from one embarrassment or another. Very short. Arms almost always encircled by crooked henna vines that sound much cooler than they inevitably look. Thin (from all the gymnastics, the extra hours spent in the gym to avoid going home). No breasts to speak of (see: gymnastics).

  You smell like laundry detergent, something salty, and pumpkin.

  There you are.

  You are me.

  Surprisingly to most people, you’re a half-decent gymnast. Not even just half-decent. Really good. More than good. It’s a funny talent for you to have, people react to it like they’ve suddenly found out that Michael Jordan is a brilliant poet or that Brad Pitt can ice dance.

  You’re on the school gymnastics team. You gave up the non-school stuff, even though they still call from your old gym and ask you to come back. (It was too far to go to on the bus and your parents didn’t ever seem to remember when it was time to take you.) The school team sounds cooler than it is because there are only five of you on the team and the other four are The Girls — joined at the hip, the most popular girls in school. The prettiest. The elite. Sometimes, when you’re feeling mean, you think they share a brain. Mostly, you just want them to like you. Michael is the leader of the group. It’s not something that’s spoken, not like she wears a jacket with a Head Girl logo or anything like that. It just happened naturally. I think it’s just because she is who she is. The other girls (Aurelia, Sam, Madison) are all trying to be like her, but not quite succeeding. They are too bitchy, too insecure, too mean. Michael doesn’t resort to that. I can’t explain the dynamic because I’m not sure I understand it, I just know that I don’t think she cares too much what they think of her. But they sure care about her thoughts. It’s like they vie for her attention somehow, always trying to out-cool one another to be in the spotlight. Only the thing is, they aren’t really cool. They’re just popular because everyone else is scared of them.

  Case in point: they still laugh at you behind your back because in the third grade you peed your pants at Samantha Farraday’s birthday party. Or because at the one party they dragged you along to last year, you played drinking games and didn’t notice the drunkenness creeping up on you until you opened your mouth to say something and threw up on Matti Koivu’s lap.

  In spite of that, they are, sort of, your friends. They act like they like you (sometimes) because you’re good enough to sometimes win ribbons at meets. They just don’t invite you to parties anymore. You guess you could just show up, but you’d never do that. You’d need to be coerced. Wanted.

  Your best event is the uneven bars, your favourite, flying through the air, your hands dusty from chalk and sweat. When you’re up there, you aren’t really you, awkward blushing quivering you. You’re someone else.

  It doesn’t matter now.

  Those girls were apparently not good enough friends not to stand around laughing at the biggest meet of the year as you’re twirling around the bars wondering why the audience is so quiet, and then, half-way through a move where you’re forced to look at your own crotch, you see it. It. The thing that will make your school life unimaginably horrible. It will make you the butt of all jokes for the rest of the twelfth grade.

  You got your period.

  It.

  Your bright red, humiliating, spreading, staining period. In a big way, not just a tiny unnoticeable drop.

  In a flood.

  Your uniform, of course, is white.

  Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, is all you can say, over and over again, in your head, while it’s happening. Your head is going to explode. The gym floor will crack open and swallow you, any second, please let it, only it doesn’t, no matter how much you want it — need it — to happen.

  And then ... well, then it all gets so strange that it’s like no one can notice it, it’s too far beyond their ability to understand it.

  You drop down from the bars, your hands releasing as though they never knew how to hold on in the first place. You fall onto the crash pad. Blushing so furiously red that your face is sweating, burning. You think you might combust. People do. You’ve read it in a book. You think you smell the smoke of burning, something worse. You think, okay, burn. You think, I have to get out of myself. I have to get away. I have to disappear. I have to disappear. I have to disappear.

  And you do.

  It feels like fire. Your skin feels too hot to exist and then suddenly cold. You can’t hear or smell anything for a second. Then it comes back in a rush, like static, but heightened. Overwhelming.

  But you aren’t there. No one can see you. For all intents and purposes, you are gone.

  Picture it.

  Imagine it.

  It.

  That’s how it happened.

  I just faded away. I couldn’t see my hands.

  Wait, that’s not totally true. I could see a bit of my hands, a vague outline, an impression of moving light, like sunlight seen from underwater. I was there, but not there. I was hazy, like a watermark or smoke trying to form a shape. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was only something to do with my eyes, my vision going bad, blind from maximized, intolerable embarrassment. But I could see everything else.

  There was a silence in the gym then. It was so almost-funny. Like a toddler’s game: I can see you, but you can’t see me. The hush and stillness and people looking around vaguely, at one another, forgetting in that instant because it didn’t make sense. There was a smattering of talking and laughter. People shifting and coughing. Someone cat-called, but what they were cat-calling wasn’t clear. Me?

  But it couldn’t have been me. I was gone.

  I walked away. I could see the imprint of my feet on the soft mats, but no one else seemed to be looking. Everything seemed louder than usual, clanging in my ears. The sound of my bare feet echoed on the floor, slap, slap, slap, yet it seemed like only I could hear it. My breathing came in gasps. I was crying. The smell of the chalk and feet and industrial floor cleaner was choking me.

  The door to the change room was open and I went in. The smells changed, but still pummelled me. Newish paint, fruity soap and shampoo from the showers, the thick murky tang of dried sweat. The reek of slightly burning hair from someone’s straightening iron. There were four or five girls in there, no one I knew. No one looked up. I waited until they left, and then I went into a stall and fixed myself up, which was completely unnerving because I could see through myself. I changed into my regular clothes, jeans, white T-shirt, brown boots, a glass pendant on a chain that looked like an eye. As soon as the clothes touched my skin, they faded to transparencies. I threw my bodysuit into a toilet and flushed, knowing as I did it that it would jam and overflow and flood. It did. I sat there for a few minutes listening to the toilet struggling. It seemed only fair.

  I bought a Coke from the vending machine and drank it. It was ice cold and sweet and the bubbles flirted on my tongue. It was delicious. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted. My stomach made sounds as the carbonation hit. By the time my hands had stopped shaking and my heart had slowed to normal, I was back. There I was, in the mirror. Me. Blurring into focus, ice cold and then warm. My face blotchy from crying, but also pale as paper, as though all the blushing sapped the colour from my flesh.


  When I look back on the day, it’s funny what I remember the most clearly. I remember in such detail what happened after. But the build-up to it, the before. I don’t know. It seems both like I’m remembering it wrong and like I can’t remember it. Like a movie I saw, then dreamed about, then couldn’t distinguish between the dream and the movie itself.

  I remember the start of a dull aching cramp. Was I bloated? Why didn’t I notice? Maybe I’m remembering now symptoms that weren’t there. But they must have been. I must have known. I should have known.

  I definitely remember that I was hungry. That the weather was just starting to crack open and become warm, although it was raining. I remember the sweaty smell that wet concrete gets when it’s warmed by the sun.

  The rest has all faded away. When I try to remember more details, it’s like I somehow remember fewer of them.

  Did it really happen?

  Yes.

  I do know that there was the crowd of faces staring, the hunger and then the vanishing.

  I guess that’s how my story starts, then. I guess that’s when everything changed.

  ****

  Tony

  Chapter 2

  This morning I found out that Dad is leaving again. Bye, Dad. You miserable old jerk. Get out. Go. Take your ugly sweaters with you and your stupid soggy cigars. Your old leather jacket from high school with the cracking sleeves.

  It’s fine.

  I don’t care.

  Asshole.

  Sometimes I half wonder where he goes, but then I don’t. I tell myself I don’t care and I believe it.

  I bet he goes to his mother’s house, lies in his old room, looks at old pictures of himself as the big high school hero. Whacks off on his perfectly made bed (he’d never make it himself) while remembering the “good old days.” Eats Grandma’s strange tinned food and lies about how great it is. Lets her do his laundry but bitches at her if she shrinks his shirts. Forgets that he’s an adult now and it’s not Grandma’s job anymore to pick up after him. Forgets how to be anything but a self-centered adolescent, picking his nose in front of the TV, waiting for her to remind him to go to bed.