Chapter 5 The Shape of Fear
Iwake before my alarm because my skin is buzzing. It’s a furred, electric hum that doesn’t stop when I hold my breath. It itches without offering the relief of a good scratch.
It prickles.
It whispers.
It’s wrong.
The first thing I see is the halo on my pillow; a ring of fine dark threads around where my cheek must have rested, like the wilted stems of flowers after a long party. My sheets are a mess. My nerves are a mess. The back of my hands look… soft, but not human-soft.
The hair I shaved last night has returned not as stubble but as a tide, edging past my wrists now, wicking light in the gray dawn.
My forearms are carpeted, as if the night had been long enough for me to crawl through some ancient tunnel and come back with it still clinging to me.
I sit up too fast, and the room swings. The closet door is cracked open the width of a smile, and the long dark mouth beyond it breathes out a smell like dust, cedar, and something sweetly rotten.
I feel that smell deep in my nose, in the high caves behind my eyes.
The scratching I pretended not to hear in the walls last night follows me up out of sleep now; a faint papery scramble that knows my name. It always knows my name. It says it with a rasp. Briar. Briar. Briarr.
The bathroom mirror is a traitor. I avoid it because I already feel it watching, but my eyes find their way to it anyway, magnetic with dread.
There I am, and I am not.
The fur has crept onto my cheeks in a scatter of patches, a constellation that maps a territory I didn’t authorize.
There’s a shadow along my jaw that isn’t a shadow.
The down along my cheekbones catches light the way peach fuzz does on girls with soft stories; only this is a story written in all the wrong strokes.
My lips look smaller. My nose tip looks…
darker? My eyes are huge, ringed, catching too much. My pupils are fat and lazy in the dim.
No. No. Noooo.
I pull the shower curtain closed like it will hide the world from me and turn on the light with my elbow because suddenly, the idea of touching the switch with my furred hand makes me feel like crying.
The brightness is surgical. Cold.
The razor waits on the edge of the sink like a challenge. I pick up the pink disposable razor, pretending to be calm. No, I am calm because I am not a drama queen. I am contained, I am civilized, I fix things.
The first pass through the hair on my forearm makes a sound like a whisper being cut in half, and the razor clogs immediately. The fur is too long. As I rinse it, hair eddies in the bowl like little drowned weeds.
The second pass works better. I drag the blade against the grain, and watch my beautiful self return; patch by patch, hair falling away to reveal skin, human skin, pinked where I take too much.
I do my other forearm, my shins, the tops of my thighs.
It’s everywhere. I didn’t think the human body had this much surface area until I had to strip it all the way back.
It feels like I hold my breath through all of it, like if I don’t breathe it won’t shame me. When I finally exhale, the fog of it hits the mirror and ghosts me out.
Then I look closer, and the hair is already emerging. Not just at the edges, not just where I missed. It’s like the little black dots under the skin are waking up and pushing, eager, hungry. I can see them cresting like mouths.
I drag the razor again, harder. It screams against me and I know razors don’t scream, so that means it’s me making the noise. I rinse and cut and rinse and cut until my skin is slick, angry and dotted with red, and still the hair is there, softening my arms again, insisting.
“Stop,” I say to it before laughing out loud, because that’s insane. It’s hair. It doesn’t listen, but the laugh is too thin. My reflection’s mouth looks like it’s been drawn on with the wrong pencil.
My face.
I can’t.
I can.
I must.
I pull my hair back and it smells different, like it’s an entirely different animal, and immediately I stop thinking of it as “my hair.” But it’s my hair. It is. I can’t seem to stop my mind from detaching piece by piece.
I smooth shaving cream along my cheeks with my middle fingers. The foam looks like meringue in the mirror, and I am suddenly a dessert about to be torched. The razor sinks into it and lifts needles of dark with a faint tick.
It is obscene to shave your face and yet, here I am. I make neat strokes. I rinse. I do not touch my upper lip. I can’t look at my upper lip. I angle my face away from the light to disguise the way it wants to… change.
When I rinse the foam, my skin looks younger and rawer and wronger. The hair is already gusting up there too, like a field in wind. I want to scream until my throat turns to red glass.
I sluice water over everything, and when I come up from the sink there is a thread in the drain that looks like a whisker.
Not hair. Not hair. A thick, pale wire, curved into a naive question mark.
I fish for it, and it slips away, and the idea of chasing it makes my stomach flip with a compulsion I can’t name.
My phone buzzes on the counter. I have seventeen notifications that don’t matter.
People laughing at the video of Maya, people crying over it, people begging me for a chance at friendship.
A boy who thinks he wants to be let in. It all feels like a life from a museum and I am in another room now, looking at the displays through glass.
Focus. School. Control.
I drag the bottle of foundation out like a weapon. I am so good at this lesson; cover everything. I layer the liquid on, buff it in, layer again. The brush picks up hair and clogs, and I curse, and then I don’t care. I use my fingers, making long defiant strokes.
It sits on the fur. It mats it.
There’s this moment where the skin underneath, suffocating, heats, and then I actually feel hair pushing through the makeup as it dries, pricking it into a crude terrain.
“Fine,” I tell my face. “Be difficult.”
I contour with a heavy hand. Bronze to hide the wrong. Powder to set the lie. Highlighter to dazzle away any unwanted questions.
My cheeks go from animal to golden ruthless and back again when I turn my head. There is no angle that is alright. A small shadow has appeared in the middle of my upper lip while I worked, like the softest little darkness, like a bruise of fur.
I hold my breath and paint it. Conceal. Overdraw my mouth. My top lip looks thin today anyway, so I build it bigger. I smile at myself and it’s… sharp.
When I move, there’s a pull in my gums as if my two front teeth are pressing for more space. I run my tongue over them and feel the edges are too smooth and too long.
Shut up, I tell myself. Shut up.
Sweat slicks my back. The long-sleeved blouse I pick is white and crisp as a threat. I want to be ironed into myself. I button it to my very neck. I find trousers instead of a skirt, because my legs look like they’ve been rolled in velvet.
I catch sight of the mouse doll on the top shelf of my closet when I reach for a belt, and everything tightens.
How the fuck did she get up there?
She glows in her dust. She makes a space around herself that is far too suspiciously quiet.
“Don’t,” I whisper to her without meaning to.
Don’t look at me. Don’t tell me things. Just fucking don’t.
The scratching in the wall behind the closet answers, frantic for a second, as if something has hit a corner and is trying to turn sharp.
I feel it in the bones of my ears. I press my palms over them and immediately regret it, because I feel the fur on the backs of my hands catch in the whorl of my hair, snagging, and the friction makes me want to puke.
I slam the closet shut. The noise is wrong, not satisfying because I know she’s still in there, calm, holding her little space.
I imagine opening it and taking it out and pressing her into my sternum, the way I did with other toys when I was a child who had nightmares.
You hold something soft until you think the softness has moved into you. I can literally picture it, can imagine it, her stitched whiskers against my throat. It is obscene.
The air outside has that school-morning rot and sugar to it; wet leaves, diesel exhaust and the cafeteria’s cinnamon-something already baking away.
My nose drinks the world in, whether I want it or not.
The edges are too sharp. A crow on the telephone wire opens its beak to throw an insult at me, and I understand it as rude syllables. I flinch from the sound of my own steps on the pavement. The world is loud, but also further away.
The lettering above the school doors is gold leaf, catching morning light so it looks almost edible. My hunger flares then; fast and mean, for something I refuse to name.
The hall sucks me in. The air is an aquarium of deodorant and stress.
The hum of the fluorescent lights isn’t a hum anymore; it’s a shimmering field of pain that I can chart with my eyes closed.
There’s scratching in it. No—that’s separate.
There’s scratching in the vents, in the locker seams, under the tile. It follows the line of my very spine.
“Bri!” Kass falls into step with me, her lip gloss is too glossy today, a slick that wants to drown me. “You look—”
“Don’t say it,” I say, too fast.
She blinks back, and I hear the faint crystalline scrape of her lash extensions.
I want to file that sound out of the air but instead, I smile. “Amazing. I know.” My voice lands right on the note of cruel, airy lightness I invented for myself back in sophomore year. That part is muscle memory. “What’s the gossip?”
She launches into something about some boy acting weird in class, it’s all just words that stick to each other, and I feel them as a pressure, not content.
We stride down the hall, heads bowed. People look, because they always do.
I wonder if they see anything, if my foundation is working, if my sleeves are cage enough.