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 thebacks 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 outsidehas 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.
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.
