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 mynails 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, andfeel 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.
