Y in the Shadows

by Karen Rivers

  I can’t imagine him actually going somewhere alone and fending for himself. A hotel or anywhere like that seems impossible. Coping with the check-in process, finding his room, getting his own food. He’d probably die. Besides, who would pick out his shirt and tie?

  When he’s here, it’s terrible.

  It’s like the worst dark storm only the weather is inside the house, all around him. It’s probably not his fault; it’s just the way it is. The way he deals, or doesn’t deal. The way he percolates. The thunderstorm pressure of him makes me want to go to sleep. I like to lie in my room and read and avoid the other rooms when he might be in them. It’s hard to explain why exactly because he’s not really doing anything wrong.

  He doesn’t really do anything.

  He makes dumb comments. He calls me “Bud” and acts like he’s my best friend. He sends me crappy e-mail jokes and thinks he knows what I’m all about. He watches reality TV and acts like all the people on the show are his friends. He’s probably the only man in the world who reads the National Enquirer and thinks it’s the same as keeping up with the news. He invites me on crazy weekend trips with his dumber-than-dumb friends to shoot deer or moose or some other poor stupid animal that I’d never kill in a billion years.

  I never go.

  He’s just such a buffoon.

  Not like I’m a mental giant or anything, but still. I’m smarter than him.

  When I’m in my room, avoiding him, I do weird things. Embarrassing things. And I don’t mean like jerking off or sneaking a cigarette. I mean, like I sometimes do science experiments from this kit that I got for Christmas when I was little. Put baking soda into beakers, add funny coloured chemicals, watch it boil over. It’s got a microscope. Sometimes I’ll find spiders or flies or other gross insects dried up on windowsills in the house and just look at them.

  I don’t know why I like that. It’s a kit for little kids.

  I read a lot of comic books. Embarrassing. They aren’t just comic books. I guess they’re really porn. But dumb porn. Surreal porn. I’d never tell anyone. What’s worse, never reading or reading comics with naked girls in them?

  Both of them seem like things stupid people would like. I don’t want to be a buffoon like my dad, but I am probably doomed to be by my genes. I got his eyes, why not his other, less appealing, qualities?

  When he’s not here, it’s worse. It’s like the eye of the storm. It’s like an illusion of calm. But then it bubbles up again in the form of Mum worrying herself into a frenzy about where he is. She worries if he’s ever coming back. She worries that he is.

  Mum is a worrier. If she could be a worrier for a living, we’d be fine. She’d be the best worrier the world has ever seen.

  I don’t care what he does. Dad, that is. You can’t pick your parents. You just have to get through it until you are too old to care anymore. Until you’ve flown the coop.

  Later, after school, I’m going to take my basketball down to that old park behind the bowling alley. When we were kids, we always had birthday parties at that bowling alley. Cake and pop and stomach aches and some kid getting his fingers trapped between the balls coming up the ball return. It was a long time ago. Bowling is kind of not what we do now. Trust me.

  Maybe as a joke, I guess. Maybe if everyone was baked.

  When I head down there to shoot hoops, usually no one else is there except for some homeless dude who stores his shopping cart full of empty bottles in the corner. I call him Hank because he doesn’t talk and doesn’t exactly wear a name tag saying HELLO, MY NAME IS ______. Calling him Hank makes him seem more human. I’ll take him a few empty bottles. No skin off my nose. It’s like I pay to play, you know?

  The park is so old and underused that the basket is just a hoop with a bunch of old string and rusty chain hanging from it. The paint lines on the court have all been worn away. You have to watch for broken glass. A lot of the surrounding shrubbery is growing into the court so you have to be careful of the blackberry brambles. They haven’t flowered yet, the blackberries, that’s still months away, but the brambles are already full and green and choking and, believe me, they’re sharp. My arms are all scratched up from trying to get the ball back. You have to handle those brambles carefully.

  I’m going to shoot exactly one hundred baskets, and then I won’t care about my dad.

  I’m going to shoot a thousand baskets.

  I wonder how long it would take to shoot a million baskets. I don’t think I have that kind of time.

  Lately I have a weird thing about numbers. I’d never tell anyone. I don’t know when it started, but it seemed like one day I started to count everything and what it added up to seemed to matter. I can’t explain.

  I like even numbers. Sometimes when I’m freaking out about my mum or mad at my dad or whatever, I go for long runs and it just is natural to count my steps. I know it’s crazy but it makes me calm the fuck down. I have to make the last step an even number that’s all lined up. Like eight hundred and eighty-eight. Two thousand two hundred and twenty-two.

  Ever since Joe died ... that’s my brother, he died last year.

  Died.

  I still can’t believe it. It doesn’t seem real.

  Anyway, ever since then, it’s all messed up. Dad and Mum can’t be in the same room; there isn’t enough space for both of them in this house or in this city or on this planet. It’s his fault, it’s her fault, it’s both of their faults; it has to be someone’s fault. I could close my eyes and imagine the force of their hate for each other propelling them off the sides of the earth, out into space, their faces all shocked and surprised to find out the ground isn’t under them any more.

  Yeah, it sucks that Joe died. It’s the worst thing. It’s inconceivable. It can’t be true.

  And let’s not overlook the fact that he chose it. It’s something he did to us. It didn’t just happen. The asshole. Jerk. Idiot.

  I’m so mad.

  I didn’t know it was possible to feel this angry.

  I feel like...

  I feel like he changed me. I used to be easygoing. Everyone said it. Even my parents. Even Joe.

  Then he started with all the drugs. Drugs, drugs, drugs. I don’t know what he started with, but by the end it was tonnes of ecstasy and crystal meth. That was what got him the worst, I think. I don’t know what else he did. Other shit I wouldn’t know if I stumbled on it, that’s for sure. His eyes started to look weird, crazy, blank. They drifted and jerked, like too much caffeine and too much energy. He darted around, and then he slept. For days. Like he was in a coma. Unmoving. When I think about all the times I saw him asleep and thought he was dead, it makes me dizzy. Because now he is.

  Dead.

  For real. Forever.

  All he ever talked about, when he did talk, was insane craziness. He thought he was an artist. A musician. But then he made “statements” by making no art, no music. He spent all his time at raves, gulping down life like it was running out, moving like he had to stay in motion to keep living. He took me once and I hated it. It was too much sound, you know? Like the beat of the music was trying to take over my heartbeat, it made me feel like something else was taking me over. Scared me.

  He slept with a pacifier in his mouth like a baby. He was the most frantic and tired kid you ever saw. He was a stranger. He made me tired. He was always talking so fast and seemed so desperate. He died because he wanted it so badly he couldn’t do anything else. I’ve never known someone whose whole self was such a black hole. A bottomless endless pit of black. Being around him in the last months before he died felt heavy, like trying to breathe underwater.

  I guess he got that from Dad. I feel like that about Dad now. But for different reasons. Dad’s not on drugs; he’s just stuck in some time of his life that doesn’t exist any more than Joe exists.

  Sometimes I have nightmares about Joe. Sometimes I dream that I’m punching him in the head. Kicking him. Washing off the stupid makeup he used to wear sometimes. Forcing him to dress
in something other than leather. Hurting him. I know that’s wrong, it probably means I’m as much of an asshole as he was. Maybe I’m the psycho. Maybe he was just mixed up and made a mistake.

  If I shoot a thousand baskets, in a row, without missing, everything will be okay. Mum will stop calling in sick to work. She almost got fired from The Bank for crying. She’s on some kind of probation now. She told me about it but I couldn’t really concentrate. Sometimes I just can’t hear her; it’s like my ears are full of water.

  How can you fire someone for crying? Now she just calls in sick every other day or gets sent home. She lies on the couch in her pink fluffy coffee-stained dog-eared robe sobbing like if she does it hard enough, she’ll be done and it will be finished with.

  She’s something important at The Bank. Her job apparently matters. Vice President of Rich Assholes or something. But she can’t stop the tears. I guess it sucks when they are buying and selling countries or customers or whatever they do and suddenly she starts weeping. I want her to stop and just breathe. I want her to be normal. Fuck. I want to be normal. I want a normal life. I want to get away from all of this freakiness and all this tripping.

  Fuck you, Joe.

  My ticket out is college, so I hope I pass the Biology test in third period. I hope I do well, but it’s dumb to hope that. I never do well. I just have to pass. My dad says that athletes don’t need to be smart.

  He was a football star, so I guess that proves it. He’s an idiot.

  And he’s right, in a way. I have letters from three Ivy League schools shoved into the back of my desk drawer. Solicitation letters. Lots of them. They come more and more often now that the season is heating up and the recruiters are starting to show up at regattas. They’re looking for rowers, and I’ve been rowing since I was twelve, which seems like forever ago. I guess I’m good at it. I should be. I love it; it feels right to me. There is something about the feeling of a boat moving fast through the water, cutting through it like a sharp blade, that’s just ... well, it’s another world. It’s peaceful, is what it is. It’s like breathing, but so much more intense. So much faster. Like flying.

  But am I good enough?

  I don’t know.

  I haven’t told Dad. Or Mum. About the letters, that is. Mum would be so thrilled, she’d die on the spot. She’d think I had it made. Then she’d cry because Joe didn’t have it made. Because Joe never got a letter from Yale and never would have, even if he’d lived.

  And Dad? Dad would be proven right — sports are everything, after all — and he’d like that too much.

  The thing is that I don’t know if I’ll do anything with those schools, if I’ll fill out the applications, which are more about erg scores and race points and height and weight than they are about grades.

  Even though I love rowing, I just don’t know if I deserve it, if that makes sense. If I get to do something that I love as a job, you know? Do I have the right to have a life that’s easy for me? Isn’t it supposed to be harder than this?

  The thing with sports is that, no matter how hard you work, it’s just entertainment. I think that’s why I like it: nothing depends on it. Not really. At the end of a race or a game, no one dies. No one ends up dead.

  Death. I can’t imagine what that’s like, and I can’t stop myself from trying to picture it. Is it just nothing or is there something there? How can anyone know? How can we not be scared?

  I’m not Joey. I don’t do his kind of drugs.

  I am okay without them, without that kind of crazy crutch, without that kind of escape. I am okay.

  I will be okay.

  I’m not careless. I’m tight, taut like a tiger. Tony the Tiger, that’s what my mum used to call me. Now she mostly calls me, “Oh, honey.” As in, “Oh, honey, I’ll be okay.” “Oh, honey, your dad really does love you.” “Oh, honey, can you fix dinner tonight? I’m just dead on my feet.” “Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”

  I wonder sometimes about other kids’ lives. My best friend, Israel Santiago, his life is great. He’s just enjoying the ride, doing what he wants to do, being who he wants to be. He’s so popular it’s ridiculous, so I guess I am, too. Riding his coattails, mostly. Using him to stay cool enough that people don’t notice me too much.

  It’s not like I try to get people to like me, they just do. But I’d be lying if I didn’t think it was because of him. Before he showed up at school, I was no one special. I was just Tony, some athletic guy. Popular enough but not like now. Now it’s like being famous.

  I like it.

  I wish I were the kind of person who didn’t need that, but I do. So that makes me an asshole, I don’t care. Maybe high school is the best time of our lives. In which case, I should be doing what I’m doing. Collecting friendships like a popularity contest will somehow save me from everything bad. Everything that real life is all about.

  Israel’s magical, he just is. And I don’t mean that in a gay way. There’s just something about him that draws people in and keeps them. He’s almost like an actor who is too good looking for the part who is just playing a kid in high school. Is plays hockey; he’s a forward. He’s up early in the morning, totally devoted. He’ll be famous one day for it, I know it. He’s scary good. I wonder if we’ll still be friends when he is, or if he’ll just move on. I just think we’ll always be friends somehow. We always have been. I don’t see why it would change, no matter how different our lives get. But I know we’ll do different things. He’ll be a hockey star, there’s no other option for him. It’s who he is.

  I won’t be.

  I think we all probably have something, some scary good thing we can do. Am I scary good at rowing? I don’t know. I’m pretty good. But somehow it’s not like Is and his hockey. It’s not just about being good, either, I guess. It’s about loving it, and being a star at it. And man does he ever have that going on. And he’s obsessed. Knows everything about every hockey player who ever played. Watches every game. Kills himself to get more fit, to get better, to get more accurate, to get to perfect.

  He’s smart, too. He reads and no one would say that he wasn’t cool. No one would tease him for standing up in English class and ripping on Moby Dick or whatever. It’s like he’s exempt from the “smart is lame” rule because he’s good-looking and an athlete, an athlete that’s going to succeed no matter what.

  He’s smart, but he’s also stupid. He does some really dumb-ass things. Some of our other friends, like Jason and Matti and those guys, they’re idiots. They’re going nowhere fast, as my mum used to say, when she cared about my friends.

  They’re not really my friends. I hang with them, but Israel, he’s my only real friend. After Joe died, I lived with Israel and his family for three months. My own house just wasn’t okay in the aftermath. Mum and Dad were not okay. I guess I wasn’t okay either.

  Is was everything to me then: family, friend, whatever you want to call it. I think he saved my life. He made me okay somehow, which is weird because, when I was there, we didn’t talk much about Joe. It was just that he made everything seem normal. Not Joe’s death, but just everything else. He made it seem like life was going on. And then it did. So I guess he was right. But he has that way; I don’t know what it is. He has a way of making you feel better than you are.

  The girls go nuts, like he’s a star. He’s something brighter and more important than everyone else. Nothing makes him stress. He’s like liquid. I don’t know what I mean by that, but it fits.

  His family lives up the street in an identical house to ours but in a completely different life. They laugh all the time. It’s light there. Nothing is so serious, not like at home.

  Living there was like finally stopping holding my breath. I can’t explain really. It’s just that they are so easy. They eat normal food, like you see people eating on sitcoms. Not like what we eat, which is pizza or toast or whatever we dial out of the phone book. His mum and dad take turns and cook. Healthy food. Chicken and vegetables and rice and whatever. Take turns talking about eve
ry trivial thing that they thought about during the day. Jokes. They tease each other.

  Is has three sisters. They’re all pretty okay. Yeah. But they’re younger than me, so it doesn’t count. It would be creepy to hook up with your friend’s sister though, anyway, right? The oldest one is Stasia and she’s ... well, she’s ... I like her. But she’s only fifteen. Maybe she’s sixteen now. I don’t know. I don’t talk to her much because I’d probably sound like all the other jerks who are always talking to her.

  Israel has a tattoo of a blue and green snake that curls around his whole leg. His dad did that. He’s an artist. He said all the kids could have one piece, just one, and they better choose carefully. Israel’s is cool but I wouldn’t have picked it. It’s corny, too.

  It’s obvious.

  I want to know where Stasia’s is, or if she has one. One of the other girls — is it Annie or Dee? — has a frog on her shoulder. Like a cartoon.

  She’ll probably want to get that removed one day.

  I’ve never seen Stasia’s, so if it’s there, it must be somewhere hidden. Somewhere that I can’t see. I wish I could.

  No, I shouldn’t think of her that way. I’m a creep. She’s like a sister to me.

  I have a lot of friends. Friends who are girls. Friends who are boys. Whatever. There’s a girl, Michael (yeah, I know, it’s a guy’s name) who has crushed on me for years. It’s creepy but it’s also flattering. It’s like everyone knows about it and so it’s just there. It is what it is. I guess I’ve kind of just accepted that I know that she’ll probably be my girlfriend sooner or later.

  I just don’t feel like I really want a girlfriend right now.

  I guess I do. Who doesn’t want a girlfriend?

  Weirdos, that’s who. Losers. I’m not a loser. Ask anyone. People like me. I don’t know why. I guess they don’t have a reason not to. I try to be nice to people. I try to think about their feelings.