Chapter 3 #2
At lunch, I say something rather surgical about the sweater Madison is wearing—how brave, to try that cut when your shoulders are so... democratic—and watch her body fold in on itself like a cheap lawn chair, and I feel, for exactly one solitary second, relief. The relief of a properly set bone.
Afterward my stomach turns at the sight of her yogurt, but the granola on top is a small landscape. I want, sickeningly, to put it directly in my mouth and chew it in the back molars until it turns to thick, sloppy paste.
God, what is wrong with me?
I don’t hurry. I glide out the room, acting calm, acting normal as I head to the bathroom.
I lock myself into the farthest stall and pull up my sleeves under the fluorescent light.
The fur is back along the undersides of my forearms; not hair, not mine, not human.
It is thickest at the wrist bones, uncertain up the arms like a ragged tide and when I press it down, it springs up again in defiance.
There is a patch on my lower back I can feel but not see, like a crawling tickle that stretches outwards from my spine.
The skin around each patch has a slight yellow tint, like a bruise composed entirely of cowardice.
The urge to cry hits me hard, but I swallow it down. I beat it down.
I dig into my bag for the razor I started carrying, because failure to plan is planning to fail.
The sight that greets me after three careful swipes is worse, somehow; bare skin that looks far too pale, waxy even.
Something about the pores is wrong, and there’s hair already whispering beneath in a darkness that promises to return.
I rinse the razor in the sink and watch that gray fur clog the drain like tumbleweed. My hands, my fingers clutch the sides, and my knuckles are pure-white from the grip.
Someone opens the door. The sound comes in before the body does. I button my cuffs, adjust my expression, moving to walk out like I’ve been merely fixing an eyelash.
The girl looks at me, no, not looks, stares, like she’s seen a ghost. I turn my face up, sneering at her frizzy hair and cheap clothes.
“Br, Briar,” Belinda begins, turning from the paper towel dispenser as if she has a right to talk to me. As if we’re suddenly equals. “We heard—”
“Snooping is such a cheap move, even for you,” I say, and her mouth snaps quickly shut.
I walk past her, head high, ignoring how my sleeves whisper at my skin as if to warn me there’s more coming.
It follows me into the afternoon like a choice I keep not making.
In English, in the long-windowed classroom that overheats when the sun comes around, I sweat under my sleeves because I refuse to roll them up.
Someone asks a question about tragic flaws, and I say something about mistakes dressed up as destiny. The teacher actually claps her hands a little because she thinks I’ve had an insight into literature, and not into myself.
At the lockers, I open the narrow metal door and stop. Inside, on the top shelf where I keep the mint tin and the emergency comb and that small expensive perfume that smells like white tea and judgment, there is dust.
No, not dust. A drift of gray, too ordered to be a coincidence.
Like the fur from my razor.
Like something nested here and then left before I arrived, polite enough to clean up after itself.
I put my hand against it without thinking, and come away with two hairs stuck to my palm like threads. The urge to rub them between finger and thumb is so specific that I almost laugh out loud before I collect myself, before I mentally slap myself fucking hard.
I am not weak. I am not a freak either.
I shut the locker hard enough to make the neighboring doors jump and throw someone else’s off balance.
“Jesus,” someone mutters, only I don’t hear it. I don’t hear anything beyond that incessant noise. That scratching.
It won’t stop. It just won’t go away.
At home, I pause in the entryway and listen. The floorboards are quiet. The house is too still for either of my parents to be at home. And yet, somewhere upstairs, something brushes wood.
In my room, I shut the door because I want - no need, the illusion of control. I stand there, my hand on the knob, and hear it; a soft, insistent, unguarded scratch.
Behind my headboard again.
No.
In the closet wall toward the back, behind the cedar plank where Dad had the contractor install some silly safe because he thinks the criminals in this city are literate enough to look up floor plans.
It isn’t frantic. It is exploratory.
The claws must be tiny. It is a small thing, this sound.
In any other house, to any other girl, it would be vermin.
But to me, it feels like someone knows my name and is practicing writing it on every single surface.
That they’ve made a song of it, have turned it into some cursed thing that haunts my every step, that plagues my ears and torments me.
‘Three blind mice, three blind mice,
See how they run, see how they run.
They scatter and scratch in shadowed halls,
Whiskers twitching, as the darkness calls,
You’ll never escape when the silence falls…
Three blind mice.’
I open the closet, and the smell of cedar and wool leaps for my mouth. My eyes go straight to the left shelf, to where the mouse doll now sits.
I tell myself I am not moving toward it, that I am standing still. That the doll is not in my hand. Why should it be? I did not pick it up.
It sits, it sits, it sits….then I blink, and it is in my right hand, staring back at me.
I recoil as if burned, and nearly drop it on my foot.
The weight of it is all wrong for its size.
It’s heavy as a book. Its dress gives under my fingers, thin as paper that has been folded and unfolded a thousand times.
The felt of its belly is rough and greasy with age.
The seam in the middle bulges slightly, as if whatever is inside has shifted toward the nearest exit.
The thread of the overstitched seam has loosened and I can see the darker interior fabric, a brownish gray that looks so horribly similar to the patches on my skin.
Its whiskers float an inch from my face and I smell something; lavender sachets kept too long near dust, the damp cardboard smell of basements, a sweetness that is not sugar but grain.
I put it back, carefully though. I arrange its dress where it has bunched, smooth the skirt as if it needs to be presentable for someone else.
My heart is stuttering like a trapped moth.
I am not afraid of toys, but this is not a toy.
It belongs to the category of objects that are made to feel alive… no, that’s ridiculous. Ludicrous.
I step back, and the scratching stops.
Only, it’s such an immediate cessation that I cannot trust it.
I stand there, in the threshold of my closet with my sleeve slipping over my wrist, and I listen for the negative space a persistent sound leaves behind. I swear the quiet has pupils, that it’s looking right back at me.
No.
I am not doing this.
I am not engaging in whatever this is.
I let out a hiss as my hand finds that unmistakable prickle under my skin once more.
I will burn this off. I will scald the itch right out of me. I will drown the fleabite suggestions in my very nerves.
I strip quickly, and the air hits my skin like a hand. The fur is more extensive already. The patch on my back now connects to the one at the base of my neck. Au naturel is not a look anyone has ever accused me of, but this is obscene.
I turn the shower to a punishing temperature. Water beats the hair down until it lies falsely flat. I let out a scream, reaching for my razor and I slice. I slice, and I slice, and I fucking slice until all that awful hair is now splattered at my feet, no longer connected to my body.
But it’s not enough. It doesn’t feel like I’ve purged enough. I shut my eyes, I stand there until all my skin turns to prune, until the water loses its torturous heat and, only then do I get out.
I rub myself down with the white towel so hard I could have sanded furniture with it. I throw the towel in the basket, and it lands with a disgusting weight.
When I step back into my room, the scratching resumes immediately, because it knows I am alone again.
I want to scream. I want to claw at my skin, to rip every single piece of flesh off my once perfect body.
A sound from downstairs, a real sound, a clattering of something in the kitchen tells me my mother is home.
I wrap a thick robe around myself and race down, feeling for the first time in what must be forever that I need someone else around me, I need another human being.
The kitchen’s stark marble gleams as I walk in.
Mom’s face appears behind a grocery bag, and she starts unpacking all the items one by one while I remind myself that we’re not those kinds of people. We don’t do hugs. We don’t do pep talks. Emotions are for the weak, at least, pathetic ones like fear and longing are.
“Did you know that girl, the one from the video? What’s her name, May?” She asks.
“Maya.” I correct and then shrug. “She’s a nobody.”
“She is now.” My mother smirks before looking up from her purchases to my face.
I know she’s not concerned about what happened, only that if I was involved, there are no consequences for me.
Afterall, she brought me up to be a mean girl, a bitch.
She carved me into this ice-like image of herself, and she revels in my viciousness as much as I do.
Her eyes skim over me the way some do a prized piece of art. She’s looking for flaws, things that need fixing. Beneath my skin, something flexes so quickly it’s gone before I can acknowledge it, but I know she doesn’t see the fur. I know it’s all gone.
And gone for fucking good this time.
“Dad?” I ask.
“Dinner with clients. I might go to Pilates at seven if I can get into a class,” she says, which is code for I will be there but also not in any meaningful way. “You’re sure you’re okay? You seem—”
“Tired,” I say. “It’s been a day.”
“You know, sweetie, if you need to talk about anything…” Her hand makes a little circle, a charade of a word she doesn’t want to say because acknowledging awful things is not refined.
“We weren’t friends.” I say, voice flat as a runway. “And I’m fine.”
She nods back, nice and respectful.