I grip the edge of the sink to stop myself from swaying. “Nothing,” I say. “Everything’s perfect.”
She nods once in that modest, nothing-to-see-here way and flees. I think of her walking down the hall like a lit fuse trailing sparkles. I want to follow, to snatch at the light, but I don’t.
I lean over the sink and fight not to throw up, the urge is sudden and violent, but it’s not like sickness, it’s like my body is trying to evict something that isn’t in my stomach.
The vent overhead grates. The scratching has words in it if I want it to.
Come home, it says.
Or maybe it says hurry.
I wash my hands obsessively, the way tiny girls do after crafts because there is powder under my nails and I need it gone, I need everything gone.
In English, I can’t focus. The teacher’s voice rips at my ears. The chalk on the board is a vulgar noise. The word “anthropomorphic” on the handout makes me want to laugh and cry, and I do neither because once I start, I may not stop.
I grip my pencil and realize I have been chewing the end; not cute chewing, but gnawing. It is half gone. My teeth slide over the wood, and the splinters taste so so good. I stop, embarrassed, and slip the ruined pencil into my bag like it’s evidence of a crime.
My body tells me when anyone behind me moves. The girl two seats back uncrosses her legs, and I know the sound of nylon. The boy to my left has a hole in his sock; his toe whispers into the leather of his shoe.
The room is full of scratching.
It’s in the hum of the lights, the click of the air vent, the whisper of pages.
It says my name. It doesn’t say my name. It says a word I don’t know yet, but I know it’s for me.
At lunch, the cafeteria is a slick sea. Grease, laughter and teeth everywhere. I sit where I always sit, and the girls arrange themselves as if we are building a display window. Kass tells a story. I don’t listen. My eyes catch on Charlee at the far table with the quiet ones. She sits with her shoulders up around her ears, like she wants to disappear into a hooded sweatshirt that she isn’t wearing. Her hand keeps creeping to her hair, as if she can smooth away the fact that someone touched it.
It delights me in a way that makes me want to bite my own fist.
It disgusts me too, and that disgust feels like justice somehow, like I am finally seeing my true self.
I push my tray away. The smell of the food is too loud. The breaded chicken might as well still be walking. When the cafeteria clatters a certain way—a chair dragged across tile with a squeal—the hair at the back of my neck rises.
I skip last period. The halls are empty in that misleading way where you think you’re all alone, but every corner holds a watcher.
The janitor hums to himself in a closet, and it sounds like bees trapped in a jar.
The light in the stairwell flickers, and the flicker is not random; it has a rhythm that my body understands.
I go to the second-floor girls’ bathroom again because it feels like mine now. My reflection meets me before I’m all the way through the door.
She’s there, impatient, rosier than me, mouth ready.
The fur is impossible to pretend around now. I am patched. I look like a mangy thing that could be left in alleys.
No.
I don’t.
I don’t.
I am beautiful and must be, always.
It’s simply that the emphasis is shifting.
My eyes are huge. My pupils drink in more light than is strictly polite. My face is a shade narrower. My nose is not— I touch it, lightly. The tip is soft. Tender. The concealer on my upper lip piles in dots around the place where the shadow is thickest, and beneath it, the skin looks slightly… rough?
”Stop,” I say to my own face. “Stop.”
