No. No. It’s only because the pupils are a little larger, the light is dimmer, the steam is thick.
I snap on the vanity lights and flinch because my ears ring at the brightness.
My ears look… not huge, not then, but my earlobes seem thinner. The cartilage above has an ache, a new outline like something is trying to pull them into points that aren’t points but just stop. I lean closer. Black spears are pushing through the skin on either side of my nose. They’re not blackheads. They’re hairs. Two, four, six, arranged exactly where whiskers would be on a cartoon mouse I’d have mocked as a child.
I pinch one between my nail and finger and yank. A lightning pain zips down my cheek into my teeth so sharp I yelp. The hair comes out with a bulb on the end. It bleeds. The wound looks like a tiny mouth, helpless to be filled.
I swallow bile. The razor slides from the counter into the sink with a slam that is louder than it should be. My hearing is wrong. I can hear my parents’ downstairs, their footing, their voices. The refrigerator compressor has a rhythm I never noticed. I can hear the neighbor’s dog breathe when it huffs under the fence. I hear my own breathing, and it sounds too quick, too shallow.
“Briar?” Mom calls up the stairs. “You okay?”
“Yes,” I say, bright, sharp and just a little brittle. “I’m fine.”
“You’ve been in there a while,” she says. “Don’t make yourself light-headed, honey. Come down and have some toast.”
They are always trying to problem solve. Dad with his earnest tech-fix logic, and Mom with her Pinterest essential oils and herbal nonsense. They mean well. They love me in their way, and yet it smothers like a heavy throw blanket on a damp, hot night.
“I’m busy.” I sing, and the edges of the sing-song cut, instinctively cruel because I am best when I’m poised on knives.
I exit the bathroom, wrapped in the robe and move fast. The scratch follows like a thought that refuses to leave, tracking me down the wall, then over the ceiling to the corner above my closet.
I open my bedroom door and slip inside.
I have not been sleeping. My sheets are crumpled like someone struggled with them, and my pillows are on the floor. There are little piles of things in the corners. Not piles, I tell myself. Clean laundry I haven’t put away, but I know the way I’ve tucked socks into a sweatshirt sleeve is not like laundry. It is like something else. It is like nesting.
The closet door is slightly ajar. The mouse doll peeks with its button eyes and a grin so smug it’s like my own. It’s ridiculous that in this room that I have curated into something colder and prettier than anything from my childhood, there is this thing from a time before I learned which parts of me were sharper, which could be used.
It is a relic that should have gone in the box we took to the thrift store years ago. It is a reminder of a girl who cried easily.
I should hate it.
I hate that I do not hate it.
It would be a relief to be able to let the hate carry me through this. Hate is clean. Hate is a blade. But my edges are going soft. No, not soft. Fuzzy.
I do not open the closet further. If I do, I feel like I will touch the mouse doll, and if I touch it, I will lose the last of somethingcomplicated in me that allows me to look in the mirror and say my full name and not some made-up childish scream.
I slam my laptop onto my bed and flip it open. Incognito window. I type “hypertrichosis treatment” and get stuck in a trap of articles about laser therapy, and eflornithine cream. Cream that slows hair growth, prescription only. I click anyway, skim success rates. “Visible reduction in six to eight weeks.”
I keep thinking there will be a link that will make it all click. A forum post from some other girl who woke up with fur along her spine and could suddenly smell the metal of her own laptop. Maybe it’s a rare syndrome buried in a medical database where a doctor with gray hair and compassion says yes, this happens. It’s rare, it’s okay, we can manage it.
But that’s not what happens. I keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling with the blue light eating my eyes until the words give up their meaning and turn to static.
Hypertrichosis. It looks like a prank, like a word my brain spat out and the page dutifully arranges itself into columns and stock photos of bearded ladies. The pictures are wrong. The hair sits wrong on their faces, wrong on their cheeks. Mine isn’t that. Mine stands on end when the house breathes. Mine has a direction.
I open a new tab and type “can teeth move on their own,” then delete it, replace it with “teeth pressure, urge to chew.” It spits out stress. Night guards. Grinding in sleep.
Have I been sleeping? I don’t remember.
My jaw aches. The two front teeth press against each other like they are arguing, and each individual one wants to win the fight. If I press my tongue there, I can feel where the enamel is thicker, the edge sharper.
The scrolling is now a rhythm too. Scroll. Scratch. Scroll. Scratch. Scratch-scratch-scratch. It used to be soft and far away, a story happening in the walls I could ignore. Now it is rightbehind the plaster as if something folds itself thin and runs the length of the studs, looking for a weak point. Every time it hits the corner by my closet, the hair along my arms lifts and my skin understands without asking my brain that it is close.
“Honey?” My mother’s voice is outside the door. Maple syrup poured over anxiety.
I snap the laptop shut so fast as I look up. I push my sleeves down to my knuckles, fingers clawing at the sweater cuffs, but the sweater is dangerous. It catches on the new things on my arms and makes me feel like I will scream.
“Yeah,” my voice says, too bright. My throat feels weird, uh, up in the back. Higher? Are the bones wrong there, or have they always been like that I’ve just never felt them? “Just… homework.”
