Chapter 3
The scratching starts the same way headaches do, with a suggestion. A suspicion. A fleck of sound lodged behind the wallpaper of morning.
I peel back the duvet and swing my legs to the rug and, there, a faint skitter, like a fingernail against a paint stirrer.
Like something very small dragging itself along wood. I freeze with one foot half in a slipper.
The house holds its breath with me.
The air-conditioner coughs, the vents sigh, and it’s gone. Poof. Vanished, as if it never existed.
My skin prickles anyway. I tell myself it’s because I shaved last night.
Aggressively. The new patches—uglier this time, coarser, a small flowering around my knees and the undersides of my forearms—yielded to the razor and came away in clotted gray drifts that clung to the drain and made me physically gag.
There is a narrow wrongness to that texture, a cheap costume-fabric nap that has no business being attached to my body.
I used Dad’s electric shaver after I clogged mine, even though he hates when I touch his things. I went over each place twice. Three times. The skin there is angry with me this morning, stripped and stung, goose-fleshed and raw.
I tug the sleeve of my pyjama top down, even though I am alone, even though the walls haven’t learnt to gossip yet.
Another suggestion of sound. Right behind my headboard this time, just above the baseboard; something testing its weight, making itself known.
Did we always have mice? Old houses do. Dad’s always saying it in that proud voice he uses for problems with pedigree—”Old house, sweetheart. They settle. They complain.”
We are the type of people who own silver we never use, and apparently, pests we don’t acknowledge.
I stand, slip my feet into my slippers, and shut my brain like a cabinet. The itchiness, the prickle, the prurient curiosity of the ear; none of it is useful.
I pull open the walk-in closet. There’s a faint smell of cedar, wool, and silk alongside the dry chemical sweetness of padded hangers.
It’s a curated forest of fabric, every branch my color, my precise measurements.
I stand there for a moment, looking at the shelves where my shoes wait with their little mouths open to be fed my feet.
And then my gaze, traitor that it is ticks to the far left, to where that doll is.
It’s a grotesque thing. Ugly beyond reason.
A vintage mouse head with felted fur, attached to a porcelain doll’s body. Its frilly dress has faded gingham pink silk, with a peter pan collar I can imagine was all vogue in the 80s.
It is the wrong kind of handmade, something that remembers the hands that made it.
Its hands twist into claws, carved bluntly from wood and painted pale yellow, like a child’s idea of a rodent’s hands.
Its whiskers are horsehair; too coarse, sticking out in stiff surrenders.
The eyes are glass, black marbles with bubbles trapped inside.
A seam runs down its center from throat to bellybutton, overstitched in a thread that has yellowed with age.
When I was a baby, Mom put it on a shelf above my crib, and I would screaming-fit myself raw whenever she turned it to face me. It took years for her to admit the two facts were connected.
I close the closet and go to the vanity. The mirror finds me pale and slightly puffy, that infinitesimal swelling your face does when your sleep keeps stopping for reasons you don’t remember.
I lean close to the glass, relieved that my pupils are normal.
The whites are white. No weirdness there, then.
But there is a faint discoloration along my jawline.
Not a bruise. No, it’s something under the skin.
I touch it, and then immediately wish I hadn’t.
My fingertips tell me what my eyes refuse; a nap of fine hair gathering just behind the ear, a tiny spill into the darkest corner of my immaculate blonde hairline.
I pull back instantly, as if the mirror slapped me.
You shaved. It’s regrowth. Human hair grows. Just science, bitch.
But this is a new patch. A new area. It’s not regrowth if it hasn’t been there. My heart slams into my chest with panic.
And then I hear it; a hiss, a whisper from behind the vanity’s wall. I pretend I didn’t, I pretend there’s nothing. I’m just tired, stressed that’s all.
I will not give in. I will not.
I do my morning ritual quickly, barely looking at myself. Serums. Moisturizer. Sunscreen. Foundation…
Then I choose something with a little stretch. Black, long-sleeved, because my arms hurt and I will not let anyone look at me and draw conclusions.
Another day without ribbed tank tops won’t topple an empire.
I add a plaid skirt, because I like the contrast. Over-the-knee socks, because the new patches at the backs of my knees spiked overnight, like fields of dry grass.
I am not interested in explaining razor burn to anyone, thank you very much.
Breakfast is an abstract I perform. The smoothie is cold, sweet and flavorless against the part of me that is tasting something else. There’s a grainy thought at the back of my tongue, a suggestion of dust, of the pantry.
When I open the cabinet for a glass, the smell of oats derails me.
I stand with my hand on the bag like some Victorian heroine pressing her palm against a window and Mom struts in, her flats clicking merrily and says, “Wow, long sleeves in August? Is the school doing a polar expedition theme I didn’t hear about?”
She is perfect in her variation of the uniform we call adulthood; sheath dress, hair ironed into civility. She looks like a picture of herself cut from a magazine and laminated for reuse.
“It’s freezing in Ms. Cutler’s class,” I say. “She keeps the thermostat at sixty-two because she’s a lizard in the sun, and we’re all just gilding on her rocks.”
Mom smiles like a person reading a foreign language she can just about pronounce, but doesn’t understand.
“Just don’t give yourself heatstroke.” Then, because she is a mother in a house where unusual sounds are not to be noticed unless they break something expensive, she asks, “You look tired. You didn’t have your phone in your room last night, did you? ”
“I’m not twelve.” I reply, rolling my eyes before drinking the smoothie.
It tastes like chalk.
In the wall behind the cutlery drawer, something suggests that it could eat, if I wanted to.
Dad appears long enough to kiss the air somewhere to the right of my forehead and tell me to “go easy at school, princess,” and then his train of thought derails into stocks and some tech company that’s crashing on Nasdaq, and could make us a fortune.
It’s not that my parents are cruel. It’s that they are so convincingly busy being who they are that the rest of us are expected to remain props, to be moved, dusted and occasionally upgraded.
The scratching accompanies me out the door in my head.
It’s not in the driveway, it’s not in the car. Of course it isn’t. Why would it be anywhere but the house? Houses settle. Houses complain. Old houses collect sounds like lint.
At school the air is the crisp, artificial kind, both temperature-controlled and rumor-controlled by the way people lean into each other when I pass. I don’t smile. Smiling is for equals. I walk through them like Moses through the sea, and they yaw open, giving way to their superior.
The comments are the right shape; the little gasps, the tiny, unsteady laughs.
A freshman tries to make eye contact and I let her drown in it. She looks down at her shoes, and lives to see another day.
In home room, Lily says, “Love the socks,” and her mouth is doing the smile thing while her eyes do the calculus of status.
So I tilt my head and look at the part in her hair and say, “I love them too,” as if she borrowed them from my closet without asking and now we’re both forced to live with the lie.
She flushes in that moisture-prone way she has, and drops her gaze to her planner. Human behavior is such a scratched record sometimes.
The whispers are all about “have you seen the video” and “I heard she’s transferring” and “no one’s seen her dad since…
” which is an interesting addition I will have to verify.
But there is no sentence that includes the words “drugging” and “humiliation” that doesn’t end with someone clutching metaphysical pearls and asking why we can’t all be nice to each other, while simultaneously doing nothing. Hypocrites, all of them.
It is mid-math, somewhere between slopes and intercepts, when the sound returns.
Not to the house this time. To my vicinity, which is worse because it means it belongs to me.
The scratching is a spider crack in the window of my attention. It is the smallest idea of movement under the desk, between my ankle and the chair leg.
In the metal cage of the flip-up desk there is nothing but my pencil case, my notebook and the faintest scattering of—what? I look down without lowering my head, the way other people practice deadlifting without the bar.
Dust. Paper scraps from a torn page. Why would I think there would be something else?
But I feel the prickling dread along the backs of my calves, in the place where the razor burn is becoming something else. I expect to see a hair there; long and drab and waving, and I will have to pluck it like a bass string while I hold in the urge to gag.
But there is just me in my socks, and the sense that the floor is sinking beneath me.
I slowly rub the toe of my shoe against the inside of my other calf and feel both the soft-satin of new growth and—horribly—the grit of something caught. Wood powder. But that is ridiculous. There is no wood in this plastic place.
I wipe the edge of my shoe against the underside of the chair and feel my breath hitch, just a whisper.
The boy next to me, Jonah something who collects limited-edition sneakers like stamps, glances over and flinches when he catches my profile, as if you can catch a disease from a kind of person. His gaze lands and skitters away like a bug.