Y in the Shadows by Karen Rivers

Author:Karen Rivers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: teen fiction, YA, paranormal
ISBN: 9780986961045
Publisher: Raincoast Books
Published: 2008-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

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Michael

Chapter 9

Angene and Chelsea are making dinner, an exercise that for them involves adding too many foul-smelling vegetables to a pan of sizzling oil and shouting as much as possible. Michael can smell it from her room. The smell seeping into everything. Into her pores, it feels like. If she actually eats it, she’ll stink for days. Gross. Garlic and mung beans. She’ll make something else, she decides. A salad. Clean fresh vegetables, unfried. Baked chicken. Something okay. She’ll make some for Sully, too. He’d never say (well, obviously) but he doesn’t like the sisters’ choices either. She can tell. Probably it also drives him crazy the way they eat like animals, the grinding of their jaws chewing and the saliva sounds of swallowing. Thinking about it makes her feel sick. She’ll take Sully into the den and they’ll eat in front of the TV. No one will mind. They think it’s “sweet” how she dotes on Sully. She thinks that’s patronizing. She doesn’t “dote” on him. He’s her brother. She takes care of him. Which is more than she can say for the rest of the family. Her dad hiding in his beer can, fixated on the animals. Her mother so consumed by whatever project she’s working on (or that the sisters are working on) that she scarcely seems to notice Michael or Sully for that matter.

It’s not fair. But what is?

Michael drops down onto her yoga mat without bothering with the cute clothes bought expressly for the purpose. Her clothes don’t need to breathe. She just needs to think. To really think.

The problem is that Tony hasn’t called. She can’t even try to meditate because all she is doing is obsessing. From the mat, she reaches for her cell phone and dials up Aurelia to talk about it. Or to try to get a word in edgewise. Two words in and Aurelia has already cut her off with a long gossipy story about Sam hooking up with some guy named Mitch from the track team, something about how he had bad skin and wasn’t it gross that Sam would make out with him? And she wasn’t even drunk.

“But,” Michael wants to say, “I want to talk about Tony.” But she doesn’t. She realizes right then and there, the phone curled in her hand like a weapon, that her “friend” isn’t listening. In fact, never really listens at all.

Sometimes, especially lately (like right now), Michael has felt such a stab of loneliness that she’s nearly doubled over from it. She can hardly stand the gossipy chatter. The who-said-what-to-who and why The Girls must now hate this person or that. It’s just not sitting right with her. She’s starting to feel like The Girls are almost — and it’s hard to define exactly — but sort of using Michael because she’s pretty, a bit like an accessory almost, to decorate the group. It’s starting to make her wonder if she really is the “leader,” or if that’s just something she imagined.

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