The door opens anyway, and I want to snarl at the bright band of hallway light across my carpet but I smile instead. My mother does the thing with her face where she thinks she is hiding fear. Fresh blowout, a smear of lip gloss that smells like fake vanilla.
She brings a mug that smells like chamomile, honey, lemon. “Stress tea.” She smiles too hard. “You looked tired again.” She sets the mug on my bedside table next to the laptop. The steam curls and tickles my nose. I want to sneeze, but sneezing feels like my face might detach. “You know we’re here for you, right? If it’s… girl things. Or just… kid things.”
She calls me kid even though last week she told me I seem older than some of the teachers at school.
My father stands behind her, hands on the doorframe like it’s holding him up. “We can call Dr. Han in the morning if your skin is still, ah, doing that.” He tries not to look at my wrists. I tucked everything away, but there are always edges you can’t tuck.
“There’s a lot of hair,” I mumble, and the word hair feels stupid in my mouth. This isn’t hair. “It’s not, like, weird. Just… weird.”
“Hormones are a rollercoaster,” my mother says, relieved to have a script. “We can get wax. Threading. Dermaplaning. People remove everything now. It’s trendy. Remember how Gregg’s daughter got her eyebrows laminated? Eyebrows, Briar.”
Briar. My name. It comes like someone calling me from far down a hallway. Why does it sound sharp and leaf-shivery? I nod. Smile. “So trendy.”
“And that noise.” My father tilts his head. He’s listening, but he isn’t hearing it how I hear it. To him it probably is a little scratch, like paper on paper. Not the precise claws dragging at plaster to mark a path. “I’ll call an exterminator. They get in anywhere there’s warmth, this time of year.”
Old house. Warmth. The words click in my bones. I imagine the layout of our walls as tunnels. I could draw the studs with my eyes closed. There is a knot in the wood behind my headboard shaped like a narrow eye. I know it’s there without looking.
I want to bite the drywall. I want to sink my teeth into it and feel as the cardboard and plaster gives way.
“Mice,” my mother says, wrinkling her nose while I barely listen to what she’s saying. “We’ll set humane traps. Poor little things…. Did I ever tell you about that mouse doll you got given for your christening? It just appeared one day, like a talisman.”
My stomach flips. Something in me screams out to hide it, to protect it, though there’s nothing secret about that doll. I casually put my body between her and it. I can smell the faint dust-sweetness from inside. It smells like the inside of a piano, like lavender sachets crushed under time. Like something else now too.
Warm skin. Cloth warmed by skin.
“I’m fine,” I say, my words too thick. Maybe she hears it. She looks at my mouth. Her eyes soften. “Briar… you’ve been under a lot of pressure. Queen Bee is a hard job, sometimes you have to show your claws, not just be mean with your words.” She says with a laugh that asks to be laughed at.
I picture Maya by the lockers, fumbling with the combination that first day while I leaned against the metal, watching the way her throat worked when she swallowed. I said something then to set the tone. I meant it to be a little surgical strike, just deep enough to leave an ache. What came out of me instead was a hiss around sharpened teeth. It made her flinch, her hand slipped on the dial, the locker clanged, and a thin joy licked up my spine like a flame. The memory makes my fingers curl. Nails. No. Not nails.
“I’m not mean.” I say.
She tilts her head. The lie sits in the air, invisible but dense.
“I’m just… efficient.” I want to take the word back as soon as I use it. It’s a word teachers use to compliment me. It makes a shape that’s all wrong.
“We love you,” my father says, seeing something he doesn’t understand and stepping around it like a puddle. He squeezes my shoulder—one, two, three—and then lets go fast, as if my sweater pricked him. “Try the tea. We can watch something stupid tomorrow. Fun stupid.”
They leave, and I hold my breath until the light stripe is gone, and the dark folds over the carpet again.
Iexhale, and it sounds like a tiny tin whistle through my teeth. The scratching resumes immediately, as if the conversation was an intermission. It moves from behind my bookcase, to under the window, to the closet.
It wants in. I don’t know how I know that, but my skin knows.
I type into the search bar: mouse transformation curse. The results are a slurry of creepypasta and a wiki entry for an old children’s book with line drawings of smiling rodents in clothes. I click and scroll down to the picture of the doll. Its eyes are glass. The stitches on its snout are tight, neat and serious. The caption says “comfort object.” I laugh and the noise that comes out of me has a new edge to it, a trill under the huff.
I slap my hand over my mouth to silence it, and my palm is slick.
But what the sites don’t say is that your tongue will want the taste of wood. Your ears will separate the hum of the refrigerator from the thin cry of a neon sign at the bodega three blocks away. Your pupils will widen and hold, and you will see the dust motes in their slow orbit. Your brain will begin to sort everything into two categories; safe or not safe. Outside. Inside. Sharp. Soft. Prey.
Prey.
The word lands and makes a small quiet crater,and everything in me leans toward it. I shut the laptop gently so it doesn’t click. The tea is still warm in the mug on the side. I pick it up and sniff. Lemon. Honey. Flowers. Under it all is the wet hair smell of my mother’s hands. The mechanics of disgust and love overlap in me like lace and wire.
I put the mug down, untouched.
The scratching in the closet is steady and urgent now. My body begins to move to it without asking me. My feet find the soft spots in the carpet, then the boards that don’t creak.
My fingers—too thin, the knuckles now wrong—reach for the closet knob and linger there.
