Y: A Novel (12 page)

Lydia-Rose jogs in place and calls the kids who have surrounded us on the playground
a bunch of shit-ass losers. She is the skinniest girl I’ve ever seen, too tall for
her age, and knobby kneed. Her hair is pulled into a tight bun at the top of her head
and her eyes are full of rage. She is goofy-looking now, but I often hear Miranda
and her friends tell her that one day she will be a “classic beauty.”

“Come on, you fucking fucks.” Lydia-Rose has got on white high-tops and pink spandex,
a too-big T-shirt with
Sonic Youth
spray-painted on the front that we found in a cardboard box at the side of the road.
She pumps her fist; the other one with the keys is hidden behind her back. The kids
look at us like we’re aliens, like we’re straight-up weirdo freaks.

I wait for the insults. The jokes about being adopted. Shorty shorty dogface. Crazy
eyes. Cyclops. Lydia-Rose waits, too. Baked potato skin; brownie. The girls turn away
from us, disgusted. The boys stay a little longer, and one throws a handful of woodchips
into Lydia-Rose’s face. She flinches, throws a punch at the boy, who ducks and darts
away. Her nose starts to bleed all over her Sonic Youth shirt and through her hands.
She drops the keys and tilts her head back, and I stand on my tiptoes and pinch the
bridge of her nose. We stay this way for ten minutes, past the recess bell, while
Lydia-Rose chokes on the blood running down her throat and then spits up a big clot.
It looks like a chicken liver and we stare at it among the woodchips at our feet.
It is disgusting and makes her cry, and we sit there for what feels like hours, the
woodchips digging into our legs while she occasionally dabs at her nose with the edge
of her T-shirt to make sure it has stopped bleeding.

“Do you miss your mom?” She says it quickly, and at first I think I haven’t heard
her right.

“Miranda?” I pick up a stick and start digging in between the woodchips, trying to
make a hole in the dirt underneath.

“
Your
mom, stupid.” She laces the keys back through her fingers and rakes them through
the woodchips. I look toward the school. I am willing a teacher to notice that we’re
missing and come walking out of the
big double doors, calling our names. I am willing for anything to happen besides this
conversation.

“I don’t know.” It’s an honest answer. I’ve never thought about it before. I don’t
even know who she is.

“Mom says you were in a bad situation.” She looks at me, and I see that her questioning
is earnest. She isn’t trying to be mean. She dabs at her nose, then spits on her fingertip
and rubs the saliva around her nostril. She wipes the goo on her pink spandex tights.

“I lived with some other people before I lived with you.” It’s all I can think of
to say. My face is hot, and I want to go inside and wash Lydia-Rose’s sticky blood
off my hands. But my heart is pounding, and I’m too scared to move.

“Mom says she loves me in a different way than she loves you.” Lydia-Rose stands up
carefully, her head still tilted, her hands poised in front of her nose in case the
blood starts again.

At three o’clock, the horrible day is finally over. I tap my toe against the concrete
steps and bang my backpack against the school’s brick side. I am waiting for Lydia-Rose
to emerge so that we can walk home.

“Freak,” a voice says behind me.

I freeze.

A fat girl wearing a ball cap and three others walk down the steps and form a circle
in front of me.

“We heard about you.”

I drop my bag and clench my fists.

The girls move closer and the fat girl pokes me in the stomach. “Your mother was a
whore.” They kick my backpack and I swing at them, knock the cap off the fat girl’s
head.

“Get away from me,” I spit. I see Lydia-Rose at the top of the stairs, and I push
past the girls, then grab my bag and use it like a battering ram against the fat girl’s
chest. “Get out of my way.”

Lydia-Rose grabs my hand and we run down the street together, and even though I know
she was the one who told the fat girl that my mother was a whore, I’m grateful to
be holding her hand. We run away from the girls, the fat one on the ground, crying
now.

When we get back to the town house, I stand in the living room, hands on hips. “I’m
not going back.”

“Everyone says that the first day of school,” Miranda says. She looks Lydia-Rose and
me up and down. Lydia-Rose’s shirt is blood splattered and my shorts are covered in
grass stains. “Let’s get you girls some better outfits.”

She hauls out one of her big bags of consignment clothing and puts her hands on either
side of my face. “You’ll feel better with something new.”

She rifles through the bag, then throws four shirts over her shoulder. She pulls out
a little denim jacket with shiny brass buttons. She shifts from foot to foot, holds
the jacket up in the window’s light. “This one’s fit to see the Queen,” she says.
“All those buttons. And you’ll try this skirt on, too.” She hands me the heap of clothing,
and my arms sink from the weight.

The bathroom is bright and cold, the window left open all day, and I try to slip the
skirt over my shorts, but it won’t stretch. It’s a little plaid thing, and I can tell
it’s nicer than what I usually wear and fashionable, but I hate it. I tug at the zipper
and try to force it up farther, but the fabric hugs my hips and won’t budge. I kneel
and rest my forehead against the cool of the full-length mirror, wrap my hands around
my shoulders, and rock back on my heels.

“Miranda,” I say and the word sprays like spit. “Miranda.”

“Doesn’t fit?”

“No.”

“Let me see.” She comes into the bathroom and looks down at me and the ball of wadded-up
clothing on the floor.

“Stuck,” I say, fingering the silk liner under the skirt. I roll my head toward Miranda
and blink, droopy-eyed, heavy.

“The littlest things defeat you,” she says. “Come on, honey, stand up.” Miranda pinches
the fabric of the skirt and shakes the zipper and the skirt falls around my ankles.
I wrap my arms around her and let myself cry.

“You’ll be all right,” she says. She takes me by my shoulders and presses her face
close to mine. “You’ll be all right, little one.”

“Who is my mother?” I try to ask her, but no sound is coming out of my mouth.

That night I cannot sleep. The mattress is cold on my back, and I stare into the black
ceiling, my legs dangling off the edge of the bed, and wait for my eyes to adjust.
Here, there is always something to listen to at night. Slow cars outside my window,
the rise and fall of a passing siren, the click of heels on pavement, a lonely dog.
Miranda has taken to playing the radio at night; she leaves it on in the kitchen.
A low, constant hum. She says it will confuse someone if they try to break in—they’ll
think someone is awake and talking.

Outside, a car’s engine growls, and I snap my head up, wondering what’s going on.

“Hi, Shannon,” I imagine my real mother saying, one arm outstretched. “Don’t tell.”

I reach for my jacket off the doorknob and push my arms into the sleeves, blow hot
breath on the collar, and rub my chin back and forth against the soft fabric. I open
the front door of the town house, but my mother’s not there; there is no one outside.

For my tenth birthday, Miranda gives me a piggy bank in the shape of a cross-legged
cow and a French knitting kit. She is a lover of garage sales, of sifting through
junk. Lydia-Rose and I now have a whole section of our closet devoted to strange toys
from the fifties, Hummel figurines, and Christmas ornaments. I put the cow in the
closet and stare at the knitting kit, turn it over in my hands. Miranda has told me
my whole life that I need a hobby. She tried to get me to take up kickboxing because
lately I’m angry for no reason, storming around the house in a purposeless rage. She
caught me punching the wall in the laundry room, something I’ve been doing for years
now, and sat me down at the kitchen table. “Sports, Shannon,” she said. “You should
get involved in sports.”

No. I hate sports. Slap of the ball in my hand in baseball, body checks in
basketball, panic attacks during swimming lessons. The gasps for breath, flushed cheeks,
the pinch of the swim coach’s fingernails as she swam with me in her arms after I,
at the halfway point down one length of the pool, started to sink. The ridicule, Lydia-Rose’s
nosebleeds, the flinching, the bitchy girls, the getting picked last for every team.
The hard orange balls, sticks, and cleats of field hockey slamming into my shins.
The eye-rolling when I tried out for the volleyball team; how every time without fail
the dodge ball hit me in the face. Then: the special class I was put into where we
rode bikes and did light weight training—I guess to spare me any more emotional and
physical trauma. There were four of us: a girl who waxed everyone at academics and
never spoke; a red-haired girl, tall and spindly and more awkward than I; and Charlene,
a girl with long blond hair who was good at sports and had to join our class because
of a scheduling conflict. She led us all.

French knitting sounds like something I should do. It’s solitary, something for crazy
people, weird people, people with too much time on their hands, people who are good
with their hands, people who are good with finicky things, people who like finicky
things, people who can start something and see it through to completion, take a mess
of yarn and make something whole.

Am I supposed to unravel the yarn first?

French knitting is simple to learn: just follow the instructions and wrap brightly
colored yarn around the metal guides crowning Madame Knitting Guide’s head.

WARNING—CHOKING HAZARD

Small Parts.

Not for children under 3 yrs.

What instructions? Madame Knitting Guide? Are they kidding?

If I were an archaeologist, I’d photograph the knitting kit, describe it in considerable
detail, then liken it to something in modern times.

1. Clump of yarn.

2. Red plastic object the size and shape of a small pen, presumably the knitting needle.

3. Wooden tube with a pink cartoon face and four metal prongs sticking out of her
head (Madame Knitting Guide). She is hollow; a hole the size of a Smartie runs through
her body. The tube has five grooves and fits in my palm like the handle of an umbrella.

4. Instructions? Nope.

Up until now, I have not been involved in arts and crafts of any kind. Lydia-Rose,
on the other hand, makes bunnies out of socks. A ladies’ tube sock is best (she says
men’s socks create Sock Monsters), two black buttons of equal size, white string for
stitching, and red or pink string for the embroidered mouth and nose. It takes ten
minutes.

She’s made one for Miranda, two for friends, and says that when she gets around to
it she’ll make one for me.

They come with instructions:
Wherever you go, so must your Sock Bunny. Treat him with care. He would like it if
you made him a car out of one of your old Kleenex boxes.

A few months ago, she made a Sock Voodoo, which is a voodoo doll made out of a sock.
A man’s sock works best, she said, because you can stuff it full of cotton balls for
pinpricking and other violence. Sock Voodoo lives in the back of our closet on top
of the Ouija board. When Lydia-Rose and I are mad about something, we take him out
and stab him with a sewing needle. Sometimes we run him over with Sock Bunny’s Kleenex
car.

I lug the knitting kit around with me for a few weeks, show it to some kids in my
class and to a woman at the bus stop. No one even knows what it is. Lydia-Rose fiddles
with it for an hour one afternoon and then throws it at me, exasperated.

“What’s with the French, anyway?” she asks. We think for a minute. French toast. French
bread. French fry. French vanilla. French braid. French maid. French twist. French
kiss.

We ask Miranda how to do it, and she shrugs.

The next day, I show the kit to my teacher, Mrs. Bell. She’s a small woman with short
dark hair and a face like a fist. I am standing in the low-ceilinged classroom, waiting
for lunch to be over. I have no friends this year; everyone is just a hello in the
hall. Today I am on probation for writing
Dick
all over the girl’s bathroom (I can’t explain why I did this), and so I have to spend
my lunch hour with Mrs. Bell. Seems like a raw deal for her, too, though we kind of
like each other. I can tell she feels sorry for me. I feel sorry for her face.