Chapter 5 The Shape of Fear #2
Charlee is at the very end, walking in that careful way that tells you she thinks her ankles might not be forgiven if she steps wrong.
There is a smudge of dirt on her jeans and she’s tried to hide it by pulling her top down, which only makes it worse.
The flyaway bits of her hair crown her head as if static loves her too much.
Her bag is too new. Her nails are unpainted. Her eyes, when she glances up and sees me, widen.
I smell her before I register any of that. Not her perfume—she doesn’t wear any—but something warmer, thinner, like paper warming in sunlight, like toast. Skin. Salt. Fear uncoiling inside her like a ribbon.
My mouth waters. It is not sexual though, it is something older and stupider. My tongue presses forward against the backs of my teeth and there’s that ache again, a pleasure-bruise in the gums.
“Hold on,” I murmur to Kass. I don’t think it through. Usually, there would be a survey before I act; Who’s watching? What angle will this make if someone films? How do I make the moment teach everyone the right lesson about me?
Control. Always control.
But the hum in the vents threads a line through me and it tugs. I stalk towards Charlee as if I’m being pulled on a leash.
She tries to go past me without touching me, so I step right into her path.
She beams this little performance-grin at me that is all apology.
“H-hi, Briar,” she says, like the word is a gift, like she thinks there’s a version of me that will be pleased.
She holds her textbooks close, pressed to her body like a shield.
The top one is for Algebra and has a crease where she’s thumbed pages back and forth while trying to get her stupid brain to understand it.
“Charlee.” I let her name be a knife on my tongue.
She flinches back, tiny, the way small animals do even when they’re frozen; that internal quiver you can learn to see if you look for it.
I see it. My vision narrows until the hall is a smear and the only crisp thing is her throat, the smooth long part where her pulse throbs delightfully under skin.
“What are you doing wearing that?” I ask, pointing at nothing really, a non-existent crime, and she looks down instantly, as if she could fix it if she knew which thing it was. The muscles in my jaw shift on their own, my teeth grinding for a second and I can’t stop.
“You know, it’s almost brave, showing up in that. Did you think no one would notice? Or did you want me to?”
“I—” She looks at me again, and there is no plan in her eyes, only hope. “I’m not— I didn’t—”
I lean in. My fingers find her wrist where it peeks from her sleeve and I wrap around it without fully intending to.
Her skin is warm in a way that makes my palms ache.
Her veins thread up in a blue ladder. She gasps but I didn’t do anything, not really. My grip is not technically tight but my nails are sharp enough that when I shift, they leave crescent impressions. God, how I want to see them bloom.
“Listen,” I say, and my voice is low and soft, the way you speak to dogs and to terrified girls, “you’re in my way.”
Her mouth trembles. She steps sideways into the bank of lockers, and the little shadder-shadder of the metal door shakes my teeth even more.
The vents above us carry a scrabbling I want to answer.
People are looking. Eyes are on us. Phones rise, covering faces like tiny silver masks.
“Leave her,” someone says, too brave or too stupid; it might be Cala, because she cultivated a conscience last semester and won’t shut up about it. Her voice is far away. The hall smells like synthetic lemon, old sweat, and Charlee, Charlee, Charlee.
She looks at the crowd and then looks at me, and I see that moment where she hopes I might have mercy. Mercy - I used to believe in that word for myself. Like I could give it or not give it because I was the motherfucking Queen here, and that meant I could be magnanimous sometimes.
My fingers tighten of their own will. It feels so good to make the world respond. She tries to pull back, but I want her to learn that the correct answer is to be still when I move. The lesson writes itself. I push her shoulder so she hits the locker behind her with a nice fat sound.
Her textbooks slide, and the Algebra book spits its papers like birds. She catches at them with her free hand, frantic, and the sight makes something laughter-shaped rise up through my chest.
“Oops,” I say. So sweet. So sugary. “Clumsy.”
She says, “Please,” and I feel that word like a sparkler going off between my ribs. It’s not begging that satisfies me; it’s the way the begging finally acknowledges the shape of the space between us.
That I am big in it, and she is small.
The hierarchy reveals itself and it is elegant. The edges of my hearing fuzz, as if the lights are dimming for a show.
I tug the elastic from her hair—not hard enough to hurt, not exactly, but hard enough that the pull gathers everything from her skull into my hand for a second. Her hair fans. A few strands stick to my fingers, and there’s a reflexive impulse to put them in my mouth.
I swallow it, horrified, but my horror is only one degree off from pleasure.
I dig my hand into her hair and tug. Tears leap to her eyes. They make her irises look like watery mirrors; I can see myself in them, a slit of something sharp and painted.
“That makes you pretty,” I say, lying deliberately. “You should say thank you.”
She stares at me like she’s trying to remember how to say anything. Her lip trembles. She lifts it to hide her teeth, and I lean in as if to kiss the air next to her ear, but instead whisper, “Tell me you’re grateful.”
The words mean nothing. The words are a test, nothing more.
She whispers, “Thank you,” and it’s the wrong answer, or the right one, I don’t know anymore.
Satisfaction clicks into place under my sternum, a little puzzle solved, and it’s obscene how good it feels to have somebody be obedient because I made them.
The thing in the walls hushes as if it’s listening.
“Aw,” I coo. “See? That wasn’t so hard.”
She is crying now. Silent, the kind of crying that doesn’t want to be seen, but can’t help being seen.
Tears slide through the powder of her cheeks, leaving clean tracks.
I lift a knuckle as if to wipe one and instead smear it, dragging the wet through, and feel a mean surge of joy at the spot of raw skin she’ll wear the rest of the day. A mark that says mine.
The crowd is silent in the specific way of a placed bet. Waiting for the exact moment to declare a winner. Cara is here now, close, and she looks angry in that performative way that thinks she’s noble, which makes me want to laugh again and bring her down a peg or two too.
She takes my wrist and I let her, because I want to feel her touch and see whether it does anything to the hum in me.
It’s nothing. It’s like a moth bumping glass.
I shake her off almost gently, the way you shake nasty little crumbs off your fingers.
“Walk away, Briar,” she says, and in her voice is the belief that her words have weight in the world.
“I am walking,” I say. “Around.” I lean around her to touch Charlee’s chin, lifting it to look at me. “Hold your head up,” I tell her. “Don’t you know anything?”
The look in her eyes is almost worship, and that equally sickens and delights me; I have no room for both at once, so my body chooses.
I turn her head, making her look at the crowd because I am creating a scene here, I am writing a story that will be told and told and told. I would have shaped it better a week ago. I would have thought about the symmetry of it, the way my hair fell, the ratio of hurt to humor.
Now it is just pure appetite.
The scratching in the vent above us rips like laughter.
“Enough,” Cara says, and there’s a hand at my shoulders now, pulling. There’s a teacher’s voice somewhere, and the crowd disassembling into newer gossip. I release Charlee as if I’m letting a song end.
She sags against her locker, hands to her face, like she’s praying. The world tints strangely, as if my eyes have slid a little out of alignment with reality.
People I don’t care about say my name. I blink at them, seeing their expressions but not seeing the awe that should be there.
The adrenaline drains out of me in a single slick line. I feel cold. My sleeves itch. My blouse chafes where the fur is pushing through the fabric under my arms.
Suddenly my nails are scratching, but the relief is brief and cheap.
“That was psycho,” Kass says under her breath, half thrilled and half afraid. She looks at me and then looks at the spaces around me where everyone else is still watching. “You’re… intense today.”
I smirk because I know how this works; I write the narrative, they follow. “I’m bored.”
“Come on,” she says. “You need a bathroom.”
The idea of a mirror scares me, but the idea of not seeing what my face looks like now is worse.
I order Kass to wait outside and though she doesn’t understand why, she does as she’s told, just like the little dog she is.
I lock myself in a stall to shake. The walls are covered with the usual proclamations—Whitney sucks, hearts and initials, a phone number with the last digit missing like a promise.
I press my forehead against the cold metal and feel the beginning of a headache in a place I never get headaches; high, behind my eyes, where my ears meet my skull.
They itch too, as if there is a growth spurt contained in the cartilage. I rub them and stop when I feel the edges have a tiny cut to them that wasn’t there before, a delicate point.
No.
Stop.
Control yourself. Be calm.
When I come out to the mirrors, the reflection is beautiful and wrong. The foundation has gone satiny dull. The contour that screamed sharp now just frames the soft, as if I’ve painted around the wrong thing.
My upper lip shadow peeks through again in defiance, and, when I swipe more concealer on it, the brush catches and snags.