Chapter 6 All Panic, no Disco
The fact that I make it home unseen is nothing short of a miracle. I didn’t have time to call for the car and had to flee on foot like an actual peasant.
I shave again in the bright white of our upstairs bathroom, the mirror fogging from the shower I took three minutes ago.
I turn the water hotter and let steam hide me, pretending it’s mist over a lake where a tragic heroine might drift, and not a suburban bathroom with a rust stain under the faucet and a hairline crack in the porcelain sink shaped like a lightning bolt.
The disposable razor chirrs over my forearm, and black-brown fur comes off in wet clumps that clog the drain more and more.
I press harder until my skin pinks through, until the white foam is gray with hair, until I nick myself and little beads of blood stand up like punctuation marks.
When my forearms are back to pale, I preen with victory.
I rip the shower curtain aside and check the mirror, swiping a hand down my smooth cheek. A few hours ago, there were obscene patches under my jaw and along my hairline; now it’s just me.
I was overreacting.
Hormones. Stress.
Some freak growth spurt.
I’ve always been able to cut a problem into shape when it won’t behave. I press my tongue to my teeth like always and pause - a soreness, like something soft pushed from underneath, is bruising the root. I open wider. The left incisor looks a hair wider, brighter, but that’s ridiculous.
I angle my face and scoff at myself. It’s white bathroom light. It lies.
The scratching is back. It skitters under the window frame, a dry, urgent sound. The same noise from last night, from the night before.
It’s part mouse, part something too regular to be an animal. A phrase, a rhythm. A call that isn’t an invitation so much as an assumption, like I already agreed to it.
“Go away,” I tell the wall. “I’m busy.”
But the sound is nothing if not patient.
I step into my robe and wrap the belt around twice. My thighs itch under cotton; prickling madness, waiting to get out.
I drag my nails across the itch, and the relief is so powerful I moan under my breath. The second I stop scratching, it’s worse. My robe belt bites into a shape above my tailbone that wasn’t there last week; a slight knot, a swollen bruise of wrongness.
My phone is already in the robe pocket. I take it out and go to the only church anyone believes in now. Dear, delightful google. I type with perfect quickness that feels like safety. “Sudden body hair teenage girl not normal shaving makes worse”
Enter. The top result is a teen magazine with an article about embarrassing body hair and girl-power reassurance that everyone has it, we’re all beautiful, laser hair removal pros and cons, talk to your mom. I roll my eyes and scroll faster.
Hypertrichosis pops up—werewolf syndrome—with little thumbnails of faces buried in hair.
Electric blue text on serious medical sites; Congenital vs acquired hypertrichosis. I click hypertrichosis because words are a fence. If I can put something into a paragraph, I can master it.
I read the bullet points; excessive hair growth on any part of the body, not limited to areas with androgens, can be congenital or acquired, causes: medications (phenytoin, minoxidil), malnutrition, hypothyroidism, cancer - I roll my eyes at that.
Doesn’t every little ache mean you have cancer according to the internet?
On my forearm where I shaved, it’s already… I look down, and my stomach pitches. Dark dots are visible under the skin, follicle heads, like a pixelated rash. I rake the razor against them again, dry, shave off nothing, and leave tiny shiny scrapes.
I type “hypertrichosis whiskers mouse whiskers?” and hate myself for the last word.
The results laugh at me. Pictures of mice, costumes for Halloween, fake whiskers.
There’s a journal article about whisker-like sensory hairs in mammals.
Humans don’t have them, I know that - but when I sit still in the bathroom and hold my breath, I can feel a fan of sensitivity at my upper lip pulsing out, every breeze a sound.
The vent over the shower hums air, and I feel it as fingers splaying out.
I turn off the fan.
The scratch at the wall continues with more insistence, like a pen crossing out my search results. The sound makes my jaw tighten. I want to answer it with my nails. I picture my hand against the drywall, making noise back, and my body leans into the mirror.
I catch my own eyes and I freeze.
They look too dark. Not the iris, but the eyes themselves.
No. No. It’s only because the pupils are a little larger, the light is dimmer, the steam is thick.
I snap on the vanity lights and flinch because my ears ring at the brightness.
My ears look… not huge, not then, but my earlobes seem thinner.
The cartilage above has an ache, a new outline like something is trying to pull them into points that aren’t points but just stop.
I lean closer. Black spears are pushing through the skin on either side of my nose.
They’re not blackheads. They’re hairs. Two, four, six, arranged exactly where whiskers would be on a cartoon mouse I’d have mocked as a child.
I pinch one between my nail and finger and yank. A lightning pain zips down my cheek into my teeth so sharp I yelp. The hair comes out with a bulb on the end. It bleeds. The wound looks like a tiny mouth, helpless to be filled.
I swallow bile. The razor slides from the counter into the sink with a slam that is louder than it should be.
My hearing is wrong. I can hear my parents’ downstairs, their footing, their voices.
The refrigerator compressor has a rhythm I never noticed.
I can hear the neighbor’s dog breathe when it huffs under the fence.
I hear my own breathing, and it sounds too quick, too shallow.
“Briar?” Mom calls up the stairs. “You okay?”
“Yes,” I say, bright, sharp and just a little brittle. “I’m fine.”
“You’ve been in there a while,” she says. “Don’t make yourself light-headed, honey. Come down and have some toast.”
They are always trying to problem solve. Dad with his earnest tech-fix logic, and Mom with her Pinterest essential oils and herbal nonsense. They mean well. They love me in their way, and yet it smothers like a heavy throw blanket on a damp, hot night.
“I’m busy.” I sing, and the edges of the sing-song cut, instinctively cruel because I am best when I’m poised on knives.
I exit the bathroom, wrapped in the robe and move fast. The scratch follows like a thought that refuses to leave, tracking me down the wall, then over the ceiling to the corner above my closet.
I open my bedroom door and slip inside.
I have not been sleeping. My sheets are crumpled like someone struggled with them, and my pillows are on the floor.
There are little piles of things in the corners.
Not piles, I tell myself. Clean laundry I haven’t put away, but I know the way I’ve tucked socks into a sweatshirt sleeve is not like laundry.
It is like something else. It is like nesting.
The closet door is slightly ajar. The mouse doll peeks with its button eyes and a grin so smug it’s like my own.
It’s ridiculous that in this room that I have curated into something colder and prettier than anything from my childhood, there is this thing from a time before I learned which parts of me were sharper, which could be used.
It is a relic that should have gone in the box we took to the thrift store years ago. It is a reminder of a girl who cried easily.
I should hate it.
I hate that I do not hate it.
It would be a relief to be able to let the hate carry me through this. Hate is clean. Hate is a blade. But my edges are going soft. No, not soft. Fuzzy.
I do not open the closet further. If I do, I feel like I will touch the mouse doll, and if I touch it, I will lose the last of something complicated in me that allows me to look in the mirror and say my full name and not some made-up childish scream.
I slam my laptop onto my bed and flip it open.
Incognito window. I type “hypertrichosis treatment” and get stuck in a trap of articles about laser therapy, and eflornithine cream.
Cream that slows hair growth, prescription only.
I click anyway, skim success rates. “Visible reduction in six to eight weeks.”
I keep thinking there will be a link that will make it all click.
A forum post from some other girl who woke up with fur along her spine and could suddenly smell the metal of her own laptop.
Maybe it’s a rare syndrome buried in a medical database where a doctor with gray hair and compassion says yes, this happens. It’s rare, it’s okay, we can manage it.
But that’s not what happens. I keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling with the blue light eating my eyes until the words give up their meaning and turn to static.
Hypertrichosis. It looks like a prank, like a word my brain spat out and the page dutifully arranges itself into columns and stock photos of bearded ladies.
The pictures are wrong. The hair sits wrong on their faces, wrong on their cheeks.
Mine isn’t that. Mine stands on end when the house breathes. Mine has a direction.
I open a new tab and type “can teeth move on their own,” then delete it, replace it with “teeth pressure, urge to chew.” It spits out stress. Night guards. Grinding in sleep.
Have I been sleeping? I don’t remember.
My jaw aches. The two front teeth press against each other like they are arguing, and each individual one wants to win the fight. If I press my tongue there, I can feel where the enamel is thicker, the edge sharper.