Behind me, I heard a splash. One of the girls in the booth bent over to pick up a fallen cup of root beer, the brown liquid on her shoes and fingertips. Lydia-Rose and I locked eyes. We looked at her ass, her pants pulled taut, the faint edge of her panty line. Lydia-Rose’s lips curled upward and she nodded at me, as if we both knew something now—something that the bent-over girl would never know.
When we stood in line to get more French fries, no one said Excuse me to us when they needed to get by. In an ugly man’s shoes, it was all pushes and dark stares.
Back at the town house, Miranda is waiting for us in the living room. Her face is screwed up in a tight little knot. She looks at us and I can tell that she wants to laugh but knows she can’t. Someone’s got to be in charge. And so we are lectured—at length and it goes too far—until Lydia-Rose’s nose begins to leak blood.
As punishment, when we get home from school the next afternoon it’s Spring Cleaning Day with Miranda, except that it’s not spring. We clean the bathroom, walk and bathe Winkie (who for some reason smells like duck poo), clip her toenails (hell), prune the dead parts off plants, pick up every single leaf that Winkie has tracked into the house, vacuum all the animal fur off the carpet (at first we tried to lint-brush it, in an attempt to avoid lugging the heavy vacuum out of the closet, but this proved futile), beat the rag rugs, disinfect the kitchen, launder every machine-washable thing in the house, water and fertilize the newly pruned plants, and then clean something we’ve never cleaned before, just for the sake of cleaning. For example, the paper towel dispenser. Which I wasn’t aware could get dirty. Miranda calls our activities a “blitz.” After dinner we iron the pillowcases and the cloth napkins, which we use once a year.
The only thing that makes this ordeal bearable is that Miranda puts on the Edward Scissorhands soundtrack—to promote speed and efficiency and to create a sense of whimsy, she says, somewhat lightheartedly, dishcloth in hand.
The next morning I take the dog for a poo, then pretend I’m walking to school but turn back once I’m sure that Miranda has gone to work. I’ve decided to take naked pictures of myself with Lydia-Rose’s fancy digital camera.
I’m hoping to angle the camera so that the mirror won’t capture the flash, but I’m scared Miranda or Lydia-Rose will come home, so it ends up being a series of haphazard snapshots—amateur angles, ill-thought-out poses, poor facial expressions. It is a cliché thing to do, but I have no choice. I want to know what my future lovers will see when I undress for them. And I can’t tell from looking in the mirror because a mirror reflection is actually your reflection backwards, i.e., your left hand becomes your right hand; therefore, it isn’t accurate. I need accuracy. So I take eight fast clicks, throw on my bathrobe, jam the USB cable into the back of the computer, wait for the icon to appear on the desktop, and double-click on the first image.
We have an old Apple ColorSync monitor, which is only a good thing if it’s working. It’s not. The RGB settings are all fucked up, and instead of “Millions of Colors,” I get green. So I read the Help files, which suggest I recalibrate my monitor. So I do it, and all that happens is I get an error message that says “Error. Factory settings have been restored,” and then everything turns a brighter shade of green. I feel like taking a big Jiffy marker and writing GreenSync on the bottom of the monitor, just to clear things up around here.
The point is that thanks to the ColorSync monitor, my mission to spend the day deconstructing an accurate rendition of my naked body is left unfulfilled. My skin is a kind of pasty chartreuse mixed with putty, and my nipples are outlined in deep emerald. Not what I am looking for. Plus, the flash has indeed been caught by the mirror and my head looks like a big ball of pale-green cotton on fire. Again, inaccurate. But that’s not the ColorSync monitor’s fault. It’s the digital camera’s, for having its Flash selection menu be a series of ambiguous icons instead of words like “Flash On” and “Flash Off.” How am I supposed to know the difference between a lightning bolt and an eyeball?
When I am fifteen and Lydia-Rose is sixteen, she goes to a party with a boy she has a crush on and tells no one about it, not even me. A little after midnight, she walks into our bedroom, face pale, and climbs into my bed. This is something she hasn’t done in years. My feet are instantly hot and uncomfortable. I am drinking NeoCitran (three packets) and wearing flannel penguin pajamas because it gets cold here at night, even in the summer. I’ve been reading bits of Judy Blume books to Winkie for hours, waiting for Lydia-Rose to come home, and feeling like I’ve spent my whole life with a head cold.
We lock eyes. She has become the classic beauty that everyone predicted. But there’s a pimple on her cheek that looks like a tapioca bead. It is swollen and red from her picking at it.
“Put some toothpaste on that thing,” I tell her. “It’ll shrink by morning.” I push her out of the bed and worm off my socks. Sometimes I think I have the sweatiest feet in the world. There’s no way other people’s feet sweat as much as mine.
Lydia-Rose sits at the end of my bed and kicks off her sneakers. She’s wearing a sleeveless wraparound sweater with a little belt around the waist and flared jeans. Her socks are bubblegum pink. She lifts up the sweater and shows me her purple satin bra.
“I bought this for tonight. I feel like such a fucking idiot.”
I stare at the bra. It is lined in black lace and exposes the tops of her breasts. It is an amazing-looking thing. But what really catches my eye is the long red welt that runs down the length of her stomach, puffy and raw.
“What the fuck happened?” I reach up and trace the welt with my finger.
She flinches and drops her sweater. “Don’t ever have sex, Shannon. Just fucking don’t.” She unbuckles her jeans and lets them drop. Her thighs are covered in red welts, too. She stands in front of me in her underwear.
“He said it would be fun,” she says and looks at her feet, still in the pink socks.
“What?”
“If we did it rough.”
“Jeremy?”
“He said we should have filthy sex. I don’t know. Fuck. What the fuck is wrong with me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“Do you know what he said to me after he finished? He said, ‘You’re due soon, I can smell it.’”
I pull back the covers and pat the mattress. She climbs in. I feel a rush of sympathy for her, but there’s something stronger—more selfish—and it’s my own shame and jealousy. I’ve never gotten a period. I don’t radiate sexual. I could stand on the corner in a nightie and spike heels and men would walk on by. Miranda says I’ll get my period soon, but I just don’t think I have it in me.
Lydia-Rose picks up a book about Marina Abramović and starts reading out sentences from it. Lately I am so sick of her I could scream. She spends all day browsing art books, then delivers minilectures to me when I try to use paper towels for dinner napkins or wash our whites with colors or don’t say Excuse me before I answer the phone. I find it nauseating. I want to eat with my hands.
And then I have this funny thought as we’re lying in bed. It kind of bursts into my head, like a bright flash. I want to carve a little star into my calf. Where did this thought come from? Regardless, here it is, ping-ponging around in my head, restless until I do something about it.
“This woman lets people do whatever they want to her,” Lydia-Rose says and points to a picture of Abramović in crotchless leather chaps. I fling the covers off, rescue Winkie from the comforter burrito I’ve turned her into, grab my Swiss Army Knife, and lock myself in the bathroom. She let someone hold a gun to her head! I turn on the water so I don’t have to hear any more of this crap and roll up my pajamas to study the hideous white flesh of my calf. I have such ugly legs. I’ve made a habit of studying women’s legs, and no one’s legs are as ugly as mine. My knees are so fleshy that I can grab handfuls of fat. No one else’s legs look like this, I’m sure of it. When I have money, I’m going to get liposuction. Suck the fat right out o
f these things.
My calf is so white, it looks blue. My shins are covered in bruises because I’m still so clumsy. I must hit my shin five times a day. I flip open the Swiss Army Knife and drag it down over my lower calf, about an inch. It seems right, somehow, to do this—to carve this star. But the knife doesn’t break the skin. It leaves a white line and that’s it. Is the blade too dull? I close my eyes, push as hard as possible. The skin is red, but there’s still no blood. I think about the knives we have in the kitchen. A serrated knife is what I need. My heart pounds. I like having secrets, doing weird stuff. I like being stealthy. I open the door to the bathroom. “Gonna trim my hair,” I say to Lydia-Rose. “I need the good scissors.” Lydia-Rose doesn’t look up. This woman took pills for catatonia and had a seizure!
I push past our beaded curtain and stumble into the kitchen. Part of our kitchen wall is mirrored, a white lattice dividing the large pane into a checkerboard. It gives me nine different faces. I balance a steak knife in the elastic of my pajama pants and walk stiffly past the bedroom, past Lydia-Rose and her stupid book, and into the bathroom. I take her blue shirt out of the laundry basket and rip it a bit.
The steak knife does its job efficiently. I don’t even have to press that hard. I’m surprised at how well I handle the pain. My hand is shaking but I make one clean cut, about an inch long, on my lower calf. Tiny beads of blood bubble out and I mop them up with my finger and swirl them around in my mouth. The blood tastes dark, like molasses. I make two more cuts until I have a triangle. The next part is more difficult—the next triangle. For some reason, I am making a Star of David. It’s difficult because I have to cut over the parts I’ve already cut. I hold my breath and press down with the knife. I get a weird sensation in my stomach, something like guilt or shame, like how I felt when Lydia-Rose and I threw rocks at a suckerfish until it died. An evil feeling. I put the knife under the bathroom sink; I’ll deal with it in the morning.
I blow my nose and walk into the bedroom, catch a stack of YMs with the side of my foot. “Damn.” They fan out on the floor.
“Filthy sex,” Lydia-Rose says. “What is wrong with me?”
“Nothing’s the matter with you,” I say to her. “Do you want to go to sleep?”
“No. Do you?”
“No.”
Lydia-Rose flips onto her stomach and fights with the covers for a second. She spits out some of Winkie’s fur that has found its way into her mouth. “He didn’t know it was my first time. I never want him to know.”
I stare at her and want to slap the back of her head. My calf is burning but it’s a pleasant, warm burn.
I climb into bed and wince when my pajamas rub the cuts. “Why’d you fuck him if you didn’t want to?”
“Don’t lecture me.” She pushes herself out of my bed and climbs into her own. “You’re a stupid freak sometimes. Grow up.”
A week later, I have to break the news to her.
“He has another girlfriend. I’m sorry.” I’ve seen them at the Vietnamese restaurant downtown. The new girlfriend wears a pink coat and has long black hair. She is short and bucktoothed and hangs off Jeremy’s arm as casually as a rag. I sit at the bus stop and watch them in the picture window of the restaurant, where they huddle like chipmunks over their food. The girlfriend slurps her noodles and wipes the end of her nose with her hand. Jeremy doesn’t notice because she has wiggled her toe into the corner of his shoe. He looks smug, and high, and happy.
I tell Lydia-Rose this, and she does not speak to me for days.
Now that I am older, I am a better spy. I’ve snuck into Miranda’s room countless times, read all her letters from her sister Sharon, determined that Sharon was in rehab for a while and that this was the cause of a lengthy falling-out (discovered via more letters, in a manila envelope underneath the mattress). I’ve also discovered that Miranda doesn’t seem to notice if I slip a five- or ten-dollar bill out of her purse every once in a while, so I do it every few weeks and buy myself a pair of shoes from the Sally Ann or some cigarettes so I can finally learn to smoke. I have a summer job in the mailroom at the Maritime Museum, but it’s volunteer work—for experience, Miranda says. That’s fine, but I need something on the side every now and again. Because Lydia-Rose is already sixteen she has a job bagging groceries after school. That’s where she met Jeremy.
Lydia-Rose keeps a Moleskine diary stuffed in the toe of her giant tiger slippers, and I have read every page. She writes about everyone except me. Pages and pages about Miranda, about her teachers, her friends, some woman she met on the bus, the old Chinese man who stands outside the corner store, about Jeremy. Sometimes I’ll do something strange—or, if I catch myself saying something profound, I’ll say it again—in an effort to affect her, but nothing makes its way onto the diary’s pages. Even when we fight. I must not be in her head as much as she is in mine. I would never keep a diary, lest someone like me discovered it. There are too many ugly thoughts in my head. Who wants to write this stuff down? Who wants to remember it? Today I thought about stepping in front of a bus. Today I wondered whether it would hurt more to slit my wrists or hang myself in the closet. Today I prayed to God because my stomach hurt so bad I thought I was dying.
Miranda starts having me see a counselor. He is a short man named Leo, with a bald head and a thick, dark brown beard. We sit cross-legged on the floor, on little blue mats. He throws his hands around when he talks, has me chart my moods on a piece of graph paper. He tries to talk me out of things, gets me to punch a pillow. But my problem, I tell Leo, is the way I was born.
Leo considers this for a minute, then asks me what I know about my birth parents, and so at our next appointment I bring in my shoe box with the sweatshirt, the Swiss Army Knife, the newspaper articles. But I don’t say a word. I sit on my little blue mat and keep it all inside my head.
“Do you think about her often?” Leo asks. “Your birth mother?”
I take out the Swiss Army Knife, flip open the little blades and the ice pick, shove them back inside. “Dunno.”
Leo’s eyes follow my hands, and something darkens in his expression.
“Do you—” he starts, leaning in slightly—“ever think about hurting yourself?”
I know how this goes so I don’t answer this one either. The girls in my class have been dropping like flies. First they get this weird, faraway look in their eyes, then they start wearing long-sleeved shirts, even in summer, then they disappear for a while and come back with big white bandages wrapped around their wrists. Then they lose twenty pounds, transfer to the fucked-up school, and no one ever sees them again. That is not what’s going to happen to me.
“No, Leo,” I tell him finally. “I don’t.”
After my appointment, I’m supposed to go home, but instead I tug on my mother’s sweatshirt and head for the bus stop. When I whine and make a big fuss about forgetting my bus fare at home, the driver lets me on for free. I spend ten of the twenty dollars I stole from Miranda’s wallet this morning on two used CDs from Lyle’s Place, then head to Market Square. A bunch of guys are sitting around banging on bongo drums, so I sit by them and nod my head in time until one of them passes me his drum and I get to bang along. But it’s pointless and boring and there’s too much pot smoke, so I walk to the Johnson Street Bridge and look out over the water. The wind is cold and rips through the sweatshirt, through my jeans. I clutch the shoe box to my chest. I want to know who my mother is. I want to know who my real family is, who I really belong to, why I look this way, why I feel this way. I want to know these things more than anything in the world.
The sun comes out behind me, and I turn to face it. It’s late in the afternoon and the temperature is dropping. The wind gusts and rattles the masts of the boats below. I walk over the bridge and onto one of the docks, where a man is unloading crabs off an aluminum boat. He’s a small guy with a big moustache. He wears a ball cap, overalls, and gum boots. I watch him hoist a plastic crate off the boat and set it on the dock, reach into it with b
are hands, pick up a protesting crab, and then toss it into a keeper cage that has been tied to the dock with rope. When the cage is full he throws it over the side, and it sinks with a dull splash into the ocean.
“Ever get pinched?” I ask.
He laughs. “Sometimes. Not too often. It’s usually not the one you’re picking up, it’s the one underneath him.”
He tells me the crabs were caught off Esquimalt Lagoon. They’ll be shipped to Vancouver and then to Hong Kong.
A man with a ratty beard and a toque pulled low over his forehead walks by and nods to us. He has smooth, pale skin and looks about twenty-five; his cheeks are flushed from the wind. As he passes the crab boat, he stops and says, “How’s it goin’? How’d it go out there?”
The crab man nods and says it was all right.
“Got a light?” The crab man’s friend is tall and skinny, his toque pulled down so low that I can barely see his eyes. He twitches an unlit cigarette up and down in his mouth.
“No.”
“Party tonight.” He hands me a flyer and tells me how many deejays there are going to be, that it goes all night. “You want to go?”
I look at the flyer. “Doesn’t say where it is.”
The guy twitches his cigarette. “Call the number after ten,” he says and points to the fluorescent green numbers scattered all over the flyer in a weird robot font. “Then come find me.”
“Okay.”
He tugs his hat even lower over his eyes and spins around, heads back toward downtown. A seagull slaps its feet along the dock, and I follow it to the edge, where we both stare into the foamy green water.
“Don’t jump,” the guy calls out.
Y: A Novel Page 10
