Y: A Novel (30 page)

Lydia-Rose has a new boyfriend, a guy a year older than us named Jude. I do not like
Jude, but I don’t fault him for that. He lives down the street from us in a little
white single-story house, a big untamed front yard separating it from the street.
The grass is over a foot long and has been stamped down in a makeshift path that leads
to the front door. He lives with his father and older sister, though she’s never around.
His father is
a sweet man, that much I can tell. Miranda says he drives a Handi-Dart, the bus for
disabled people. As I said, it is not Jude’s fault that I don’t like him. He’s a good
person. But now that he’s in our lives, he’s always around: we eat our meals with
him; we watch movies with him; every weekend is spent with him. If I want to see Lydia-Rose,
which I do, I have to see him, too.

Jude is handsome; I’ll give him that. He is thin but muscular and wears the same outfit
every day—a short-sleeved checked shirt buttoned up all the way, baggy dark blue jeans,
Converse sneakers. He dyes his brown hair a bright yellow-blond and Lydia-Rose cornrows
it for him, which makes him look a lot cooler than he actually is.

Miranda seems fine with this arrangement—happy to have this young handsome man in
our lives. She even lets Lydia-Rose sleep over at his house sometimes. I’d thought
she would have been stricter. She has been so protective of us until now. I suppose
she knows that Jude is nothing to be feared. I know she marched Lydia-Rose down to
the clinic to get her on birth control, but beyond that she seems content to let the
relationship be. Unlike so many other mothers we know, she treats Lydia-Rose and me
with respect. She’s respectful of our personal space, our privacy. So many girls in
our class have stories about their mothers ransacking their rooms, finding their journals
and poring through them, making them empty out their backpacks when they get home
from school, interrogating them if a boy calls. Miranda never does anything like that.
She expects us to be decent, that’s all. And we don’t want to disappoint her. I already
have. I am eager not to do it again.

It rains all the time, and there is nothing to do. My feet are always wet and I don’t
feel like wandering downtown by myself to go find Mickey, because if I don’t find
him I’ll just be soaking wet and standing at a bus stop by myself, waiting for no
one to come along and take me back home.

“Shannon,” Mickey said to me one of the last times I ran into him, “something keeps
us connected.”

Yes, Mickey. But what?

Vaughn and I haven’t seen each other since we went to the ministry. I feel weirdly
protective of myself since Madeleine told me the name of
my father. I feel like I don’t want anyone to get to know me too well. I feel like
I carry around a big heavy secret. I don’t know why, exactly, but I feel ashamed.

There is nothing to do but watch television or go downtown and sit in a coffee shop
until the manager kicks us out for asking for too many refills. Or go to McDonald’s,
order a large fries, eat half of it, pluck one of Lydia-Rose’s hairs off her head
and slide it into the fries, go up to the counter, demand new fries because of the
hair, get those fries, eat them. Walk to another McDonald’s, repeat. I’m just trying
to find some way to spend the time. People talk about when you’re young as being full
of possibilities, but the uncertainty of it all makes me feel lost and insane. I try
to be cheerful. I try to live in the present. But it’s hard.

Sometimes we go to this coffee shop downtown that has pool tables. It’s in the basement
so we have to walk down a little black metal staircase to get there. We can play chess
there, too. I don’t know why we like it so much, but we always gravitate to it when
there’s nowhere else to go, no more fries to be eaten. By now we know the regulars
and the staff. The regulars are guys with long gray hair and skinny goth girls in
their twenties. On Fridays they have an open-mic night that we go to sometimes, but
the real appeal of the place is that the tables are covered in broken shards of glass
set into tar so that you can look down and see hundreds of versions of your face—we
never get sick of doing this—and it’s one of the last places in town that lets you
smoke indoors. In this pitiful weather, it’s a necessity.

So Lydia-Rose, Jude, and I are there drinking coffee with one of Jude’s friends, this
guy named Nicky. Jude and Lydia-Rose are always trying to set me up, and Nicky is
their favorite candidate. He’s okay. He’s a little less cool than Jude—a little lower
on the social ladder. He wears the same uniform as Jude, the checked shirt and baggy
jeans, but his sneakers are all wrong—cross-trainers. Does he not notice the difference
between sneakers and running shoes? He has dark brown hair and a dark complexion—I
think he’s half Hawaiian, though we never ask him and he never talks about it—and
little scars all over his face from a battle with acne that is, thankfully, now over.
He’s short, like me, just over five feet. I like him for
this but am hard pressed to say much more. He seems to lack a personality. Or he seems
to be perpetually trying to copy Jude. But, whatever, he’s harmless. He is a guy I
can handle.

So here we are. I look great—I’ve got on a white tuxedo shirt, jean jacket, black
dress pants, and my suspenders. I’ve pulled my hair back with bobby pins so I don’t
look so much like a lion, and Lydia-Rose has traced black eyeliner over both my top
and bottom lids. We both wear the same pale-pink lipstick. Lydia-Rose, as usual, looks
stunning. She has on a black lacy slip over a long white cotton dress and knee-high
army boots. Her hair is pulled back in a severe bun and she has finally—at my insistence—plucked
her eyebrows.

I can feel Nicky’s eyes on me. And I can feel Jude’s and Lydia-Rose’s eyes on him,
watching me. My face is hot. Everything I do seems suddenly unnatural—the way I pick
up my coffee, the way I cross my legs. I suddenly don’t know what to do with my hands.
What did I used to do with my hands? I try to act like however I remember myself acting.
I’m the kind of person who might shove her hands in her pockets, so I do that.

And then this woman comes over. I’ve seen her in here plenty of times. She’s always
trawling for guys and always disappointed when it’s just the same pack of long-haired
men in leather jackets, full of dumb jokes, playing pool. She’s maybe around twenty.
She isn’t bad looking—long curly auburn hair, big bright green eyes, wide hips, and
dark eyebrows. She wears tight red jeans and an oversize sweatshirt that slips off
one shoulder and exposes a black bra strap. It’s kind of a sexy look, in a desperate
way. I can tell she’s drunk. She looks like someone who’s just run away from home
and now doesn’t know what to do.

“Got a smoke?” She stands over our table and tells us her name is Bess. Up close she’s
even more attractive. Her face is covered in pale freckles, and she has big plump,
glossy lips.

Jude runs his eyes over her, and Lydia-Rose gets a wild look. She’s been in a strange
mood all day. When he sees her eyes, he reaches for her hand and she leans into him.
He’s good about things like that.

Bess picks up my coffee and takes an uninvited sip. “I love your face,” she says to
me, then spins around to survey the room. She’s slurring her
words a little. “How about that smoke then,” she says, and Jude hands her a cigarette.

I look at Nicky. He’s shifting around in his seat as though he’s either uncomfortable
or has to use the bathroom. I try to picture him as someone’s husband. I can’t. I
look at him and think that whatever people mean when they say “So-and-so’s got personality,”
it isn’t this.

“You ever been in love, Nicky?” I prod his foot with mine. I don’t know why I’m provoking
him. Something about his meekness makes me angry.

He reddens and shakes his head, and Jude and Lydia-Rose burst out laughing.

I light a cigarette, and Nicky and I share it without speaking. Lydia-Rose and Jude
start to kiss, and Bess stares into the million little pieces of her face in the table.
It’s dark outside now, and the coffee shop is dim and full of smoke. Two guys in the
back are setting up the mic stand.

“Let’s go sit on the top of the parkade and look at the city,” Bess says. “I’ll get
us some beer.”

We stand outside the liquor store, shifting from foot to foot to keep warm. Bess emerges
with two six-packs in a plastic bag, and we walk to the Yates Street Parkade then
up the eight flights of stairs, huffing and wheezing and practically dead by the time
we reach the top. We walk to the edge of the lot, spread our jackets on the concrete,
and face the harbor. The boats sit in the water like big ducks. We drape our legs
over the railing and Nicky spits out his gum. We watch it fall to the sidewalk. Bess
passes us each a warm can of beer, and Jude and Nicky have a contest to see who can
drink theirs first. It’s cold out, so we smoke constantly, our fingers kept warm by
the embers. Lydia-Rose drums her boots on the concrete and leans against Jude. And
suddenly the air is as warm as July, though the sun went down long ago and the sky
is a deep purple blue with no moon. I am half drunk. I lie back and feel the cold
concrete on my shoulders and the back of my neck. Bess does the same, and we watch
each other in the bright white light of the lot. Her lips are full and red and wet
with gloss. She has little
wrinkles starting to form at the corners of her eyes. Her chest heaves up and down
as she breathes. I examine her hands. Her nails are bitten down and ragged, a single
silver ring on her index finger but no other jewelry. I move closer to her, the pull
of her body like a magnetic field. But she’s looking past me at Nicky, who is sharing
a smoke with Jude and Lydia-Rose. He’s put on a toque and is suddenly more handsome
in his black knit hat, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He’s grinning wildly—Jude
is making fun of him for some stupid remark he made in class—and Bess reaches up and
puts her hand underneath his shirt and starts to stroke his back. He flinches at first—her
hand must be cold—but then shuts his eyes and lets his head drop. Lydia-Rose and I
lock eyes. She nudges Nicky with her boot, and then he opens his eyes and looks at
me. It is a peculiar look. He seems to be asking me if it’s okay. I reach for another
sip of beer.

“Shannon,” Bess says, “feel how warm Nicky’s back is.” She smiles and reaches for
my hand, and I let her put my hand against his back, which is so warm against the
night air that it feels hot to the touch. I understand her immediately. She is an
instigator, a fire starter, an accelerant of a human being, throwing herself into
the middle of a crowd and lighting it up. She is fucking lighter fluid.

“Let’s go to my apartment,” she says, and then we’re all stumbling down the eight
flights of stairs and out onto the street. I follow her in her tight red jeans as
she leads us out of downtown, over the Johnson Street Bridge, past the railyard, and
into Esquimalt. We walk for over an hour.

When we get to her apartment we’re sober and freezing. We stand in front of the refrigerator
and drink from a big cold bottle of vodka. We drink it as fast as we can, eager to
get back to that feeling where sex seemed possible. Jude and Lydia-Rose disappear
in the dark of the living room, and Bess leads Nicky and me into her bedroom. She
lights a few candles jammed into liquor bottles, and I examine the room. She has a
double bed, the sheets sloppily pulled over the mattress, a ratty wool blanket wadded
at the bottom. The floor is covered in clothes, papers, textbooks, and packs of cigarettes.
Her closet door is open and full of cardboard boxes, a few pieces of clothing draped
over the edges.

Bess lifts her sweatshirt over her head. Her stomach is soft and sags over the front
of her red jeans, but her breasts are full and gorgeous in her black bra. I shrug
off my jean jacket, let it drop to the floor, then unbutton my tuxedo shirt. I’m wearing
a gray sports bra, which I struggle to get over my head. I have never shown my breasts
to anyone, not even Lydia-Rose, who changes unabashedly in our small bedroom as if
it were the most natural thing in the world. I feel fierce and strong standing in
Bess’s bedroom with my shirt off. My breasts are small—hardly breasts at all. Just
two soft protuberances from my chest, the nipples inverted and hidden somewhere inside.
I know my stomach is nothing to admire. I have no waist. It is stunning the way Bess’s
breasts round at the top, gently pushing against the lace of her bra. I hear Nicky
behind me and feel suddenly horrified that he might touch me, but when I turn, I see
that he has settled into a chair in the corner of the room. He puts his hands behind
his head and leans back. He is so drunk I’m not sure he knows what’s happening.

“You look like a child,” Bess says to me, her eyes running over my body. “You have
such a child body. Look at you!” She walks over to Nicky and pulls him to his feet.
“Look at her little body!” she says, and they stand there staring at me.