Y in the Shadows

by Karen Rivers

  “I mean it!” she adds, as if it isn’t too late.

  Then Michael is there; she looks at me and shudders so hard I can feel it through the floor. “Blood,” she says, and keels over in a dead faint (or a fake faint) and then the attention is gone from me, all of them crowded around her while I lie there, invisible. But not actually. I’m here, I feel like shouting, only the shouting would hurt my head, my ears, my being.

  Finally, there’s an icepack (too cold), bandages (too tight), Coach shining a light (too bright) into my eyes and declaring that I’m okay. Her breath is heavy with onions and garlic and it’s half past seven in the morning. How is that possible?

  Disgusting.

  I hear Aurelia whisper to Sam, “She sure bleeds a lot.” Both of them snickering. Oh, that’s funny. Why do I care so much what they think? Tears sting my eyes. Bleeding, bleeding. So hilarious.

  I feel so strange. Light-headed. Faint.

  Which all sets me up for a long, horrible day. I won’t bore you with the details of the long, horrible classes. My throbbing headache. The feeling that I’m not really quite here. But it’s worse than that. There’s more: like I wasn’t already the punchline to every giggle in the hallway, now I’m stuck with a bandage on my head that looks like a maxi-pad.

  “I think you’re wearing that in the wrong place, girl,” someone shouts. Is it Matti? I can’t tell. Probably I deserved it, from him. After all, I did puke on his lap. That was humiliating, too. And pretty unforgivable, I guess, from his perspective. I wonder why the embarrassment of that didn’t make me disappear. I just passed out. Barf in my hair. On the ground.

  I’m gross.

  No wonder everyone hates me.

  I will myself to vanish, but it doesn’t work. I crave it. I want it. I want to be able to do it at will. I mean, why not? But nothing works.

  The jokes go on and on. The whispers, all of which I can hear. I don’t want to hear them. I stick my iPod earphones in and blast the music when I’m in the hall, but I can still tell people are looking and laughing. Only Anika shoots me a sympathetic look, and I’m so grateful I nearly cry.

  The day takes forever. Forever and ever.

  As soon as the last bell goes, I run. Trip on the stairs and stumble, knocking over some smaller kid with an armful of books. “Sorry,” I shout over my shoulder but I can’t stop to help him. I have to get out of there.

  I walk home. I feel like I could run the whole way. I feel like I could walk forever. I find a scrap of paper in my backpack, a pen. I write down, “Too strong.” It seems important to write it down somehow. Like otherwise, I might forget this feeling, this passing second.

  I feel like if I passed a car accident or something, someone trapped under a vehicle, I could lift it off with my pinkie. I want to lift a car off someone.

  I write the word “superhero,” followed by a question mark. Feeling stupid, I stuff the scrap of paper into my jeans pocket.

  I run a few blocks, my bag slamming into my back, but it doesn’t make me feel any different. Doesn’t take away the feeling.

  My parents are in the kitchen when I get home. Eating Alphagetti straight from the can. Sharing a spoon. I eye them suspiciously. Maybe they know. They’re somehow in on it, like... But no, that can’t be true. They can hardly be experimenting mad scientists. They’re like children.

  “How’s your world?” Dad says.

  I hesitate for a minute. Like I’m going to tell them. “Okay,” I say. “Good enough.”

  “What’s wrong?” he says.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Nothing is wrong. I’m hungry. Is there anything other than that crap to eat?”

  “It’s not crap,” says Mum. “It’s good.”

  “I’ve got to go to my room,” I say.

  “Something’s wrong,” says Dad. “I sense it with my dad-sense.”

  “Dad,” I say. “Please don’t be weird. I’ve had enough weird for the day.” I drop my bag on the floor. Chuck my jacket on the back of a chair. My arms are tingling.

  “You should talk to us,” says Dad. “Tell us about your day. We’re interested.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Sure. Only nothing happened.”

  “Nothing?” says Mum. “What’s that on your head?”

  “My head?” I say. I’d forgotten. I reach up and touch the bandage. Under it, a shot of pain zings down my forehead through my cheek to my tooth. “Oh. That. Well, I fell.”

  “I fell,” mimics Dad. “That’s a lot of information, thanks.”

  “I fell off the beam,” I say. “The balance beam. I fell on my head. What more do you need to know?” It’s stupid, but I’m mad at him for asking. I’m mad at him when he doesn’t ask about my day, mad when he does. He has Alphagetti sauce dripping down his chin. His T-shirt features The Clash. He takes a huge gulp of milk right from the container.

  “Looks painful,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It sucks.”

  Out of nowhere, my mum says, “I understand more of what you are going through than you think. I was a teenager myself once, you know.” She bites into an apple to punctuate this. I can see a spray of juice at impact, glistening in the light.

  “We were teenagers,” Dad echoes. “Yes.”

  “You still are,” I say meanly. But they take it as a compliment.

  “Thanks, honey,” says Mum. “I feel old today.”

  “Huh,” I say. I take off my shoes. And socks. The lino is crumb-covered underfoot. Gross. Like stepping on a million tiny pebbles. I make my way to the fridge and peer in, a blast of cold stinging my eyes when I open the door. A brownish looking array of celery and a few limp carrots. Some uncooked ground beef. A half-dozen eggs. I put the eggs on the counter and start making an omelette.

  My dad sighs. “It’s hard to be a teenager,” he says.

  “I guess,” I say. “It’s probably not as hard as being an adult, say. Having to earn a living. Be grown up.” I say it pointedly. But he doesn’t get the implication. The frying pan is filthy. I put it in the sink and start scrubbing.

  “Once I jumped off a bridge,” says Dad. “Just to test, you know? What would happen?”

  “Dad,” I say. “Please. I’m not in the mood for one of your stories.”

  “I was drunk,” he says. “Don’t ever drink, honey. It messes you up.”

  “Totally unlike the drugs you smoke,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says. “It’s different. That’s natural.”

  “Huh,” is all I say. And even that is an effort. Suddenly I’m so tired. Cracking the eggs seems like a lot of trouble. If this is some kind of science experiment that I’m unwittingly participating in, it’s a pretty weird one. Take two half-baked parents and one invisible child, and what do you get?

  I leave the eggs bubbling in the pan, dig the scrap of paper out of my pocket and write, “Definitely not an experiment.”

  I see them look at each other with a look that says, “She’s in trouble! We must help! And yet we should go back downstairs and pretend everything is normal!”

  So they go.

  It’s easier, after all. I don’t blame them. I wish I had somewhere to go to get away from me, too.

  “I just have a headache,” I tell them, even though they aren’t there to hear. I dump the omelette out onto a plate. It tastes really good. Incredibly good. It’s so good I have to close my eyes to eat it.

  Then just like that, a bird flies into the glass. Wham. The thud almost knocks me sideways, my heart racing in my throat like crazy, the glass trembling in a vibrato. So loud.

  I try to calm down. Breathe. I feel like I need to try to think. What is happening to me?

  The first day after, I figured that everyone knew. About the disappearing, not about my period. I was surprised that they didn’t but also not surprised. A lot of people were at the meet. Gymnastics is popular. Boys like to think about the girls all twisted up, probably naked. Girls like to envy.

  So many people saw. Or didn’t see.

  But
nobody saw. Or nobody said, maybe they thought they’d all imagined it. The vanishing, that is. They all saw the blood. They all talked about that. Ha, ha. So, so funny. Ha dee ha.

  Assholes.

  Like getting my period (which probably every girl in the school, except the anorexics, gets every month) is a big deal?

  I’d do anything to undo what happened. I’m going to start wearing tampons every day of my life from now on. Or I would if it was safe, which I guess it isn’t. I checked.

  If I had a friend right now, I’d call her up. I’d talk her into doing something stupid, like smoking up or drinking. I’d talk her into doing something crazy, like climbing up onto the blue bridge downtown and dangling our feet over traffic.

  Some days are worse than others, like today. Today it was seriously like I had my own personal force field. The boys are embarrassed by me. It’s like they don’t know where to look. Honestly, most of them stared at my crotch. Like I’ll make that mistake again? Seriously. Jerks.

  The girls (not just The Girls, but all of them) are out and out mean. I’m not stupid. I know what it’s all about. Self-protective. It’s human nature, right? If the same thing had happened to them, they’d die. So by distancing themselves from me (like they were ever close), they avoid it themselves. Or something. What do I know? I just can’t see my way out of it. I’m always going to be the girl who let her bleeding show.

  I feel like I’m about to get a migraine, or maybe that’s just from the regular I-have-my-period hormones or the more obvious head injury, I guess. In my vision, I get those lights that drift by and spread, so I feel like my eyes are somehow slipping or melting or both. I never take pills, but I make my legs move and I go the mile and a half up to my parents’ bathroom with the idea that I’ll sneak a couple of sleeping pills from my parents’ stash. I won’t take them. But somehow the idea of having them in my pocket makes me feel like if I wanted to, I could. I don’t know why. I’ve never done it before. I just need to do it right now. Don’t tell, I tell the velvet Elvis they have hung up over the toilet. I swear, he winks at me.

  I’m losing my mind.

  I jump out of my skin when my dad comes up behind me. He clears his throat. I can’t hear him over my iPod, but I can feel him there somehow. The way he vibrates the air. The way he smells.

  I grab the Tylenol instead of the others and shake it around. “Headache,” I explain, without turning around.

  “Hey,” he says. He shifts back and forth a bit. “Hi.”

  “Hi, Dad,” I say, popping out my earphone so I can actually hear him.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I was just going to ... well. You know. Nature calls. And have a shower. Sweaty work.” He’s looking someplace over my shoulder. Even my parents don’t look me in the eye. Why?

  The way he’s standing there in these ancient rolled-up jeans, small belly sticking out under his dumb rock star T-shirt makes me either want to berate him for dressing like a child or poke him in the belly and laugh.

  But I don’t.

  Dad is not the kind of person you do these things to, even though he seems like he would be. He’s more of a distance person than a close-up-and-touching person. Unless it’s Mum. He touches her all the time.

  “Right,” I say. “I was just ...” I let my voice trail off, knowing he won’t ask. He “respects” me too much for that. Whatever. For a second, I think of this book I once read where the girl saw an island in the bottle of pills, swallowed them all to get there. I don’t know what makes it jump into my head, but there it is. The Tylenols are like hard pebbles in my palm.

  “You’re okay?” he says.

  “Yes,” I lie.

  “I never know what time it is,” he says. “Did you eat?”

  “I had an omelette,” I say. “But I’ll make something for you if you’re hungry again.”

  “Yes, good,” he says. “Maybe macaroni, okay? With some of those hot peppers if we have any?”

  “Okay,” I say.

  My parents have always eaten like kids. Macaroni. Hot dogs. Tinned pasta.

  “Okay,” he says. His hands hover somewhere near his nose, like he’s going to push up his glasses and then realizes he’s not wearing them. Sometimes he looks so fragile. He’s not a person who seems like he could survive a fall from a bridge. Even one that isn’t far from the water. I try to picture it, but I can’t.

  “If you want to talk, I always want to ... talk, too,” he says, shifting, like a little boy who needs to pee. “About school. I know high school is a nightmare. I hated high school. Wait until next year; you’ll meet some better people. You’ll have better ... thoughts.” I should walk away, only I don’t. I’m in his way. Dumb. I should just move, but it’s like I’m paralyzed, waiting for him to see me.

  “Uh-huh,” I say. “School is school. It’s fine.” I force my legs to bend and move. Leave the room so that I can breathe because suddenly, in that tiny bathroom, I can’t. The air is used up.

  I hear the shower go on. Sure, Dad, school’s good. I got an A on my Biology test. A hundred percent. Do you care?

  I go into the kitchen and put a pot of water on to boil. I feel so restless. I swallow the Tylenol with tepid tap water that tastes like metal. I throw out the remains of the omelette and clean the pan. The lino is filthy and the bottoms of my feet are turning black. The windows steam up from the boiling water. I dump the noodles in the pot; stir them with a knife so they don’t stick to the bottom. When it’s done, I leave the pot on the sideboard for Dad to find, if he even remembers when he’s done in the bathroom that he asked me to cook him something. I take a couple of bites myself, but I can’t force myself to swallow it. It tastes like hot plastic but also like something living. Tapeworms or amoebas or something worse.

  I go for a walk outside just to get out of the stink of home. I feel so funny, like I’m about to faint or get sick. I don’t like it, but I’m curious about the change. Is this like a hangover from the disappearance? Or does it mean that something else is going to happen? I feel like I’m waiting, holding my breath a bit, waiting for it to happen again.

  I’m aware of my skin to the point where I can feel every pore. How my shaved leg stubble feels against my jeans. My T-shirt touching my belly and my back. I forgot my shoes, but it doesn’t matter. It isn’t cold, just fresh. And I like the feel of the sidewalk roughing up my bare feet. It makes me think of being a kid, always barefoot. It’s spring, we should all be barefoot. We should all be touching the ground.

  All through people’s gardens, daffodils are tilting over, already almost done. Like yellow smears in the dirt, their stems too leggy and awkward to hold them up. I can smell them starting to decay.

  I keep my eyes down so that I can see any glass or gum before I step on it. Music loud in my ears.

  I walk for ages.

  I pass my ugly school. A bunch of kids from my class are crowded around on the stairs, smoking. Don’t they have homes? I pretend I can’t see them. I pretend they are invisible. I’m glad I can’t hear them. I can see one of them pointing at me, so I walk faster.

  I pass the mall. I want to go in and grab a drink, but I feel too self-conscious with nothing on my feet. I mean, it seemed like a good idea to begin with, but now I just feel too visible. Besides, the mall probably has rules about being in there with no shoes, like No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service.

  And I don’t have any cash.

  Just realizing that makes me parched. As I pass the parking lot, I can see people on their way to or from their cars staring at my feet. People who probably wouldn’t notice my shoes, if I was wearing them. Like their eyes are drawn to what’s different. I glare at them.

  One woman says something to me that I can’t hear. She has speckles of hairspray on her glasses. I pass her so closely I can smell the powdery smell of her face makeup. I point at my earphones, and then I give her the finger. I don’t know why. She looks so startled and hurt, I feel bad that I’ve done it.

  The next building is the old bowling a
lley. It’s empty and looks scary. The sign is half-fallen off and one of the windows is broken. Funny how quickly empty buildings collapse. I can feel a different vibration under me then, like a pulse. Rhythmic.

  Is it me? What is it?

  I mute my music.

  A basketball.

  I follow the sound. My feet are filthy. I keep myself looking down. Looking for glass. There’s lots of it around here. Why is there so much broken glass? Did people get together and decide that they would bring empty bottles here and smash them? Where does all this glass come from?

  I light a clove cigarette and feel the burn in my throat. I cough.

  With my earphones still in and the sound off, everything is muffled, but I can still hear the sound of the ball, feel it through my bare, cold feet.

  I guess I knew all along it was Tony. If I really think about it, I was looking for him. I knew, sort of, that he’d be here. I know he’s here a lot. I watch from around the corner so he can’t see me, blowing my smoke down at the ground. He is mechanically shooting the ball into the hoop over and over again. Like a robot. From the same spot each time, it bounces back to him like it’s magnetized. Past him, lying partway under a shrub that was growing through the wire fence, a bum of some sort is clapping. I stare at Tony, can’t take my eyes off him. He appears completely enraptured with what he’s doing. I’m mesmerized and also grossed out. He’s sweating like crazy. Sprays of it come off him onto the ground.

  Over and over again, the ball falls. It’s so loud when it hits the backboard. I never thought of basketball as noisy. There’s a cobweb dangling right over my head. I flinch and duck. I hate cobwebs. I hate it when they stick to me, those immovable threads.

  Sticky things make me nervous.

  My feet are so cold now. I slump to the ground, pick them up and inspect them. They’re turning blue. A couple of pebbles look like they’ve embedded themselves under my skin. They feel like shards of glass. The sound of the basketball on the court is soothing, like music without all the clutter. It’s making me feel very relaxed. Almost sleepy, as ridiculous as that sounds. Like the pills I didn’t take are doing what they do anyway, like they have that power.