Y: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

Shannon,” she says to me, tapping my knuckles with a wooden spoon when
     I break out of the Stillness and begin to move around. “Concentrate and I won’t have
     to hurt your little hand. I don’t want to hurt your little hand.”
    I want to tell her that Julian holds me so tightly that he hurts me, and that is the
     reason I move around, but I am afraid to say the words. I am not bad, I want to tell
     her, I am in pain.
    “I want you to practice the Stillness for seven minutes now. We’re going to work our
     way up to ten, okay?” She waves her spoon in the air like a magic wand.

    At a routine checkup, the family doctor finds purple thumbprints on my limbs. He takes
     Moira into his office and tells her to make sure she and Julian are gentle with me.
    “She’s a bit of a Jell-O jiggler,” Moira laughs, and the doctor does, too. Moira tells
     him it’s the staircase and my wobbly legs, the way I wrench myself out of Julian’s
     arms.
    “She’s a very special girl,” the doctor says to her. “Take best care of her.” He gives
     me a lion sticker on our way out, and when Moira and I get back in the car she turns
     to me and says if I can’t be still I’ll have to go and live with another family.

    The longest word in the Oxford English dictionary is floccinaucinihilipilification . It means “the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.”This is the last thing Julian teaches me before I’m rushed out the door in the arms
     of a social worker, my little arm in the bright blue cast. One of my fingernails catches
     on the zipper of the lady’s coat, tears, and leaves a bloody trail. Moira stands in
     the doorway, her face pale. There is nothing in her eyes.
    In the backseat of the lady’s car is an old video game: Pac-Man. I play it, one-handed,
     with a boy who is older than me, and he says if I get the keys sticky he’ll sock me
     in the gut. The lady straps me so tightly into the car seat that I can barely breathe.
     She drives a wood-paneled station wagon and the beige seats are coated in plastic.
     It smells so strongly of vinyl that I throw up and the boy hits me when he sees what
     I have done.
    I am afraid of the dark. We are led by the hand down a carpeted staircase, and I can’t
     tell whether we’re in a church or somebody’s basement. Little wooden crosses dot the
     walls and everywhere I look there’s a Styrofoam cup with a lipstick smear. The room
     smells like Hamburger Helper. The man who’s holding my hand looks like Raffi, but
     he speaks in a gruff voice and there’s dirt under his nails. There are fifteen cots
     in rows of five and we each get a blanket and a small pillow. When he lets go of my
     hand, I ask him to stay, but my voice is too quiet and the room sucks the sound. Lights out, someone says and someone else says, I don’t want to be next to this stinky fucker, and someone else says, Shut it, and that’s that. The boy is in the cot next to mine. When my eyes adjust, I can see
     the whites of his. We watch each other, and when I reach out my hand he whispers, Baby, but takes it nonetheless. We fall asleep this way, and all night people come and
     go.
    I am placed in a home the next day, the sixth child in a four-bed home. I share the
     bottom bunk with a smelly girl who wets the bed. None of us belongs to anyone. The
     woman who runs the house calls me Samantha, and for a while I think that’s my name.
     I teach the smelly girl to pee in the tub with me before bed, and from then on we
     are friends. Her mother died while giving birth. The girl plays with my hair at night,
     and this is what I remember most of all, the feel of her soft nails on my scalp while
     the other children cry in the bunk above us.

II.
    t he man in the back of the car is my father. His brother is at the wheel and my mother
     is in the passenger seat, her hand on her belly. Her water has broken and seeps into
     the seat, moving in ribbons down her thighs and through the thick, rough