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.
