by Karen Rivers
Then, out of the blue, Michael said, “Hey, Yale, you left this,” and passed me my necklace.
“Uh,” I said.
“Yeah, you forgot it. In Tony’s car,” she fixed me with a look that I couldn’t read. Quizzical. Curious.
“Oh!” I said. “Um.” Did she know? She knew. She did. Her blue eyes didn’t leave my face. What was she thinking? “Thanks,” I mumbled.
My heart was racing. I started to see stars. Breathe, I reminded myself. Breathe. Now would not be a good time to faint. I focused in on whatever I could: sounds. I could hear the clock ticking loudly. Someone’s shoe squeaked and a cell phone rang loudly somewhere outside the gym.
“So,” I said. “That was nice of you to give it back.” I clenched the necklace in my hand. She stared at me. She had a funny half-smile on her face. The glass was cool and smooth, like a fist full of still water. Then I turned around and ran to the showers. My shoelaces were untied and rained down on the floor like a dog’s claws scrabbling.
“Hey, wait!” she called after me. But I pretended not to hear. It was just easier that way.
Now, from my new under-the-blankets perspective, I realize that there are a hundred things I could have said. I could have pretended to not understand how it got there. I could have said I’d loaned it to someone who might have more obviously been in Tony’s car. I could have said it wasn’t mine, but I wanted it back. I loved that necklace although I couldn’t recall where it came from or why I always wore it. It must have been a gift from my parents; I don’t get anything from anyone else, and I’d never buy anything like it for myself. Swirls of falling colour trapped in glass.
I could have said anything. Not saying anything must have just made me seem even stranger to her, so much less than normal. Less than her. Why couldn’t I have been casual? Chatty? Nice?
Why did I make everything so hard? I wonder, after all, what she does think of me. She must think something, even if it’s just, “God, that girl is so weird.”
I take a deep breath and hold it. I play with the necklace, which now hangs around my neck where it always usually is. How did I not notice it was gone?
I frown.
It’s hot under the blankets. Like breathing air in a sauna, it’s damp and sticky. I’m sweating.
I want to go outside. I need to go outside. I want fresh air. Cold, fresh air. Fresh air and trees and green grass to inhale.
When I go downstairs, I can hear the murmur of Mum and Dad’s voices.
I hesitate by the phone in the front hall. I could call someone. Who? Anika? No. I can’t think of a single person who wouldn’t be really surprised to hear from me. I can picture the awkward silence while they wait for me to say what I want. I can imagine them wishing they hadn’t picked up.
I fish around in the hall closet and find my coat. Stick my bare feet into some old gum boots. Propel myself out the door, shouting, “Going for a walk!” down the basement stairs.
I’m out on the street. Hurrying. My bare feet loosely rubbing on the too-big rubber boots. I’m hyper-aware of everything. The colour of the sky, quickly turning into a deep purplish blue. The huge bright moon rising through the rooftops. Puffs of exhaust as cars and buses trickle by. A waft of dog poop as I pass the Crazy Lady’s house. The Crazy Lady has about twenty little fluffy dogs, matted and filthy, encrusted with their own waste.
I’ll never be like that.
Some dogs spill out onto the lawn. I walk faster, cross the street. I’m sweating under my coat, so I take it off. I wanted cold fresh air, not this summer-like thick warmth. It’s too suffocating.
The street is deserted. Except for me. Not a lot of people seem to go for evening walks. Why not? In tiny strange patches, as random as the warm patches you find when you swim in the ocean, I get what I want: the air is so sweet and clear, like fresh cold lemonade. As I make my way by house after house, I can see the flicker of TV screens. People hunched over computers. It gets darker and some streetlights hum to life. A flurry of birds’ wings as a startled flock abandons a wormy-looking lawn.
No cars in sight, no one on the road but me. It’s my chance and I catch my breath and do it. Step one: fade away. A ripple of goosebumps and then heat and I’m gone.
I think at first that I’ll start with just peeking in windows or something. Something innocuous. Innocent. Something ... that seems okay. Or at least something where I wouldn’t actually be breaking any laws. Although do laws apply to the invisible?
I don’t know.
But no. I am in front of Michael’s house. Step two. It’s not an accident, not at all. I think of how she looked at me this morning. Her perfect hair like fine Christmas tinsel glimmering around her shoulders. Her eyes sparkling. Her funny smile, like she knows something. What does she know?
Bitch.
Yet, also, I sort of want to tell her. I don’t know why. What is it about her?
Crazy, crazy, crazy.
Who do I think I am?
Step three. I am inside her house before I have a chance to change my mind. Michael’s house. The sliding glass door is partly open, which makes it easy. I guess it would be easier if I could just pass through solid objects, but I can’t. It’s noisy when I open it, but I pause in the doorway and no one seems to hear or care. There are voices upstairs, but the room I am in is completely empty except for a few spotlights and some photography equipment. It’s effectively a big white box. No shadows to hide in, to cover me up. I’m so scared.
So scared. My heart is going to erupt. I feel like I might be sick or I might laugh or wet my pants. Or all three.
Why am I doing this? Quickly, so quickly, I make myself move. Head for the stairs, the only visible option out of this weird place. As I move up the stairs to the hall, I notice that along the walls animal heads are staring out at me. It’s seriously creepy. Like something from a bad movie or the set of a Halloween prank. It makes me think differently of Michael, I can tell you that.
My hand touches a stuffed squirrel on the railing, which disappears on contact, causing me to scream. But silently, I have to assume. No one comes running. It’s okay. I exhale. I’m still safe.
I duck into the first open door that I pass. It’s a bedroom. No one in it. A few stuffed dead animals lying around that look like an assortment of family pets, frozen in time. Well, except for the dog tipped over in mid-run. He just looks dead. Marble eyes that I can’t help but notice are much like mine, one brownish, one blue.
Gross.
Some photos are thrown on the bed. I can see a lot of flesh in the pictures. Girls. What kind of weird place is this? What am I doing here? Is this really Michael’s home or did I get it wrong? The carpet is shag, circa 1970. Olive green. It looks like seaweed. There is a smell in the air that I can’t pinpoint. Maybe it’s the animal fur. It’s a thick smell, an acrid musky smell.
In the next room — the door is ajar — a boy (or is it a man? He’s tall, it’s hard to tell) is sitting on the floor. No, he’s not really a boy, he looks older than me. But also, he looks like a baby. His skin is so smooth, it’s mesmerizing. I really want to touch it. For a minute I think he’s a wax figure, the way he’s just staring into the corner of the ceiling, a book open on his lap.
His hand moves.
He scares me. I’m scared. This place is nothing like what I imagined. Nothing like what it is on the outside, it looks like a regular suburban house. It’s so strange in here; the light moving through the air is different. The odour, definitely. The sounds echo and feel staged. Everything looks different than I expected.
It’s like that moment when you see the girl in the bikini going into the cabin in the woods. “Don’t do it!” you want to scream.
Only I’m already here.
I hear footsteps. Instinctively, I get into the closet like a little kid playing hide and go seek. There is a row of T-shirts on hangers. Who hangs up their T-shirts?
I press myself as deeply as I can between them. I can’t trust the invisibility. I feel like
it can’t be real, even though I know it is; it doesn’t matter. My heart is pounding so hard I feel like it should be shaking the ground. The wall feels solid against my back. I’m burning hot from the vanishing. Breathe, I think. Just as I hear someone say, “Breathe.”
I jump. Nearly give myself away by knocking over a pile of white sneakers. So many shoes in here, the smell is strong and fetid and sweaty and nearly overpoweringly boyish.
“Breathe.”
It’s Michael’s voice. Coming from the other side of the wall. This closet must somehow back onto her room.
“Don’t be so crazy,” Michael’s disembodied voice says. “Stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about him.” She’s speaking so loudly. Like she’s talking to a microphone.
“If he didn’t eat those onions,” she says. “If I had better breath. If. Then. I’d be okay. It was just a kiss. Why am I making it such a big deal?”
“Just a kiss. Not anything more. Nothing scary.”
“It wasn’t too much.”
“Come on. It was fine.”
No one answers. She’s talking to herself. Well, that’s okay. Who doesn’t? I do it all the time.
“Just breathe,” she says. “Get over it.”
I get out of the closet. The boy-man looks at me, but he couldn’t. He can’t see me. I wave, but he doesn’t respond. See? There’s something wrong with him. He’s not okay.
I wonder if he is the same sort of not okay as Yale. My sister is also “not okay.”
Well.
I don’t know, do I?
I don’t know anything. I look back at him. He’s staring right at me. I walk toward the window and his eyes follow. He doesn’t seem to care, though.
“Well, bye, then,” I say. “Nice to meet you.” I know he can’t hear me, but still, he closes his eyes, like he’s absorbing the information. There’s something about him. I almost want to stay.
I step into the hall. I’m at the next door, which must be Michael’s room, but it’s shut. The house echoes with a feeling of fundamental emptiness, yet coming from what must be the kitchen, I still hear voices and sounds. I smell something cooking, something that doesn’t smell good. Cooking spinach maybe or cabbage soup. I’m scared to go in that direction, and besides, the glass French door is closed. If I were to open it, someone would definitely notice.
The door I want to open is Michael’s. I want to see her, which sounds creepier than it feels, I swear. It feels okay. It feels ... innocent somehow. Almost as if I’m simply watching a film. Or doing research. Gathering information.
Stuff to know about Michael. Stuff that might help me to be more like her, or get her to like me. It sounds all wrong when I say it, but that’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking that there is some secret here for me to learn.
“Michael!” I hear a voice yell from somewhere behind me. I’m afraid to look. She doesn’t answer. My heart is erupting. A volcano of adrenalin pumps through my veins. I swear I can feel it. Taste it like copper in my mouth. “MIKE!”
“Don’t call me that!” she shouts back.
“Dinner’s almost READY,” says the other voice. Her mum? Her sister?
“FINE,” she says.
I just stand there. The carpet fibres feel like crunchy plastic under my feet, too synthetic for words. Maybe that’s part of the smell, the overriding chemical odour. The hall is lined with class pictures of Michael and her older sisters all in identical black frames. I remember now that she has sisters. When we were really small kids, I remember going to gymnastics class after school and Michael’s sisters were in the more advanced group. They were so alike, it was creepy. From the pictures, it looks like they still are, except one of them has shrunk and one of them has plumped up. And, well, one of them is bald.
I touch my hair, which feels like I’m touching feathers. Wispy, insubstantial.
To be bald must feel very... I don’t know. Vulnerable is the only thing that comes to mind. The sister’s head in the picture reminds me of a baby bird — obviously the most recent picture because they are lined up in chronological order, the girls growing up as you move down the hall. The picture shows the sisters on some kind of stage. They are wearing fur coats. It looks like bright lights are shining in their eyes because they are both squinting and their eyes glow red like embers.
It’s amazing how you can know someone for your whole life and not know them. Knowing that they live with a picture of themselves in the third grade, hair askew, wearing a plaid jumper somehow changes something. Knowing about their sisters. Their brothers.
Michael suddenly swings her door open hard, moves past me into the room I just left. Her brother’s room. I hold my breath, flatten myself along the wall like a limpet, not really knowing why. It wouldn’t help, not if someone looked right at me. My head knocks crooked a picture showing their dad drinking generic brand beer (a bright yellow can labelled “BEER!”). I pick it up and replace it. Her dad (I assume that’s who it is) drinks BEER! a lot, from the look of these pictures, a can in his hand as the years float by on the wall.
“Sully, Sully, Sully,” I hear Michael singing. “Time to eat, time for a feast of stewed tofu or bug soup. You’ll like it, big brother of mine. And you know, if you don’t, we’ll sneak some peanut butter toast, you and me.” There are a few thuds, like he’s rocking the legs of his chair back and forth. I wish I could see them but I don’t want to get too close.
“You’re okay,” says Michael. “You’re okay.”
They emerge from the room. He holds her hand like a little kid clutching his mummy in a crowded mall. Stares straight ahead, not at me, which is both a relief and a disappointment. “Here we go,” she says. “Here we go, doll.”
They vanish around the corner. Only then do I start to relax. Only then do I feel that muscles that I didn’t know were tight unclenching. Like getting off a roller coaster and only realizing when you are standing on solid ground how terrifying the ride really was.
And what did it accomplish? Was it what I wanted?
I had thought that by seeing Michael’s life differently, I’d be able to get her to be my friend but instead I just feel overwhelmed. She’s so perfect and her life — her family — is so overly weird, the contrast is jarring. It’s information I feel like I don’t know how to process. Like trigonometry. I can see that it should make sense, but it doesn’t.
Michael and I have something in common. We have siblings that are “not well.” We have siblings that are not there. Not really. Our siblings have disappeared: mine literally, and hers metaphorically. Present but not here. Absent but there.
Suddenly, I miss the other Yale so intensely it feels like a pain travelling down my body in a collapsing wave. How can you miss someone whom you have never met?
I stand there for a while. I stare into Michael’s brother’s empty bedroom. Sully. Yale never had a bedroom, at least not in the house where I live. Unless my bedroom was her bedroom. Did they give her away right away, or did they wait?
It’s completely dark outside now and the moon is perfectly framed by the red curtains hanging down over the window, partially open. What time is it? They eat late.
I forget to feel like an intruder. Whatever fear I had is gone. Michael’s family shots all look awkward and posed. In the pictures, Michael is always as distant from the rest of the group as her brother. She looks detached, not like part of them. I feel almost sorry for her. She looks alone. She looks lonely. Her sisters are always touching. Her mother wears terrible glasses. Her father has an unusual nose. Her brother always off to the side, staring. He is so good-looking. Really good-looking. Heart stoppingly good-looking.
I stare for longer than I should before I start to feel awkward in my own skin. Ill-fitting. Like I can’t hold the fade any longer. Then, out of nowhere, comes the sick, guilty feeling, like I’ve done something awful. Like it’s a violation of Michael’s family for me to have seen that they went to the Grand Canyon a dozen years ago. Worse, I have a strong desire to take one o
f the pictures. Just to take it.
I feel guilty for wanting it.
I couldn’t do it.
I reach out. I touch one of the frames and it disappears. There is a white patch on the wall. I quickly let go.
The heat is getting to me, the strange burning feeling. Making it hard to think and to focus.
I can only stay vanished for ten minutes at a time before it starts to feel terrible. It starts to feel wrong. Painful. Too much. Like every nerve ending is jangling, every nerve experiencing the noise and vibration of a dentist’s drill.
I hurry back down the stairs, not caring anymore if someone sees me. Knowing I have to get out of there. It’s like when I’m on a bus, sometimes I get overcome by panic. I have to leave. I have to escape. Escape, escape, escape.
I burst out through the front door, leaving it open behind me. I run, flat out sprint, barefoot. My boots in my hand. My feet feeling every bump on the ground, every knob of chewed gum. Every pebble and shard of broken glass. Until finally, I’m blocks away, my breath coming in sharp gasps. My legs hurting and cramping. Then, and only then, do I allow myself to reappear, hunched over, struggling for breath.
No one sees.
No one is there. The darkness is my cloak, hiding me even when I’m not gone.
I feel physically terrible. And mentally overwhelmed by guilt. Like I’ve stolen something I can’t give back. I hate that.
I hate myself.
Yet somehow I know I’m going to do it again.
Crazy.
****
Tony
Chapter 8
Israel arrives loudly. Like most things he does, I guess. The sound of his skateboard rattling over the broken up pavement is jarring. Rude.
He skates to a halt right in front of me.
Dude, he says.
Waves the spliff in front of me exactly in a way that he never does, like a commercial for peer pressure. The smell makes my stomach flip, sick. But I take it. I don’t know why. I guess I can’t think of a good enough reason why not. “I don’t like it” doesn’t seem like it would fly. I fake a drag — my mouth instantly dry in a way that no amount of water can fix — and shove it back to him. I work up some faint idea of saliva, spit on the ground. His expression is lost in the thin sweet haze of smoke.
