“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 ideaof 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 aheadache 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.
Pain sparkles and my eyes water. I tilt my head, and I swear, I swear there are two very fine white filaments at the exact corner of my mouth that didn’t used to be there, catching light like spider silk.
I lean in so close my breath fogs the glass and use my nails—small, careful, precise—to pluck. When they finally come loose there’s a sensation somewhere deep inside my cheeks that feels like something let go, like a thread pulled out of fabric. It makes me nauseous. I stare at the filaments laid across my fingertip, almost invisible, and something in me wants to keep them, to tuck them in the little pocket of my jeans like a token. I crush them against the sink instead, smear them with soap as if I can wash away the thought that they were mine.
Charlee walks in then. Because of course she does. Her face is clean of tears, which means she went somewhere to fix herself, which means she is still trying.
She sees me and freezes. It is not fear exactly. It’s recognition, the way two animals meet each other’s eyes acrossthe clearing and understand the ledger between them. I don’t want to hurt her now.
No, wait, maybe I do.
My mouth does that thing again where it smiles before I decide to. “You look better,” I say. “When you cry.”
She flinches. “What’s wrong with you?”
For a second, the word wrong vibrates the air around me so hard that it feels like I am in a bell and someone just struck me so hard.
