I slide into the backseat, offer a smile to the driver that doesn’t touch my eyes, and set my gaze on the road ahead. On school, on anything not inside my sleeves.
But the worry has small teeth. It gnaws, and it gnaws. I tell it to stop. I sit straighter. I’m already composing the caption for the outfit post in my head and the car pulls away while, under the fabric, I try not to feel anything at all.
The scratching starts the same way headaches do, with a suggestion. A suspicion. A fleck of sound lodged behind the wallpaper of morning.
I peel back the duvet and swing my legs to the rug and, there, a faint skitter, like a fingernail against a paint stirrer.
Like something very small dragging itself along wood. I freeze with one foot half in a slipper.
The house holds its breath with me.
The air-conditioner coughs, the vents sigh, and it’s gone. Poof. Vanished, as if it never existed.
My skin prickles anyway. I tell myself it’s because I shaved last night. Aggressively. The new patches—uglier this time, coarser, a small flowering around my knees and the undersidesof my forearms—yielded to the razor and came away in clotted gray drifts that clung to the drain and made me physically gag.
There is a narrow wrongness to that texture, a cheap costume-fabric nap that has no business being attached tomybody.
I used Dad’s electric shaver after I clogged mine, even though he hates when I touch his things. I went over each place twice. Three times. The skin there is angry with me this morning, stripped and stung, goose-fleshed and raw.
I tug the sleeve of my pyjama top down, even though I am alone, even though the walls haven’t learnt to gossip yet.
Another suggestion of sound. Right behind my headboard this time, just above the baseboard; something testing its weight, making itself known. Did we always have mice? Old houses do. Dad’s always saying it in that proud voice he uses for problems with pedigree—”Old house, sweetheart. They settle. They complain.”
We are the type of people who own silver we never use, and apparently, pests we don’t acknowledge.
I stand, slip my feet into my slippers, and shut my brain like a cabinet. The itchiness, the prickle, the prurient curiosity of the ear; none of it is useful.
I pull open the walk-in closet. There’s a faint smell of cedar, wool, and silk alongside the dry chemical sweetness of padded hangers. It’s a curated forest of fabric, every branch my color, my precise measurements. I stand there for a moment, looking at the shelves where my shoes wait with their little mouths open to be fed my feet.
And then my gaze, traitor that it is ticks to the far left, to where that doll is.
It’s a grotesque thing. Ugly beyond reason.
A vintage mouse head with felted fur, attached to a porcelain doll’s body. Its frilly dress has faded gingham pink silk, with a peter pan collar I can imagine was all vogue in the 80s.
It is the wrong kind of handmade, something that remembers the hands that made it.
Its hands twist into claws, carved bluntly from wood and painted pale yellow, like a child’s idea of a rodent’s hands. Its whiskers are horsehair; too coarse, sticking out in stiff surrenders. The eyes are glass, black marbles with bubbles trapped inside. A seam runs down its center from throat to bellybutton, overstitched in a thread that has yellowed with age.
When I was a baby, Mom put it on a shelf above my crib, and I would screaming-fit myself raw whenever she turned it to face me. It took years for her to admit the two facts were connected.
I close the closet and go to the vanity. The mirror finds me pale and slightly puffy, that infinitesimal swelling your face does when your sleep keeps stopping for reasons you don’t remember.
I lean close to the glass, relieved that my pupils are normal. The whites are white. No weirdness there, then. But there is a faint discoloration along my jawline. Not a bruise. No, it’s something under the skin. I touch it, and then immediately wish I hadn’t. My fingertips tell me what my eyes refuse; a nap of fine hair gathering just behind the ear, a tiny spill into the darkest corner of my immaculate blonde hairline.
I pull back instantly, as if the mirror slapped me.
You shaved. It’s regrowth. Human hair grows. Just science, bitch.
But this is a new patch. A new area. It’s not regrowth if it hasn’t been there. My heart slams into my chest with panic.
And then I hear it; a hiss, a whisper from behind the vanity’s wall. I pretend I didn’t, I pretend there’s nothing. I’m just tired, stressed that’s all.
I will not give in. I will not.
I do my morning ritual quickly, barely looking at myself. Serums. Moisturizer. Sunscreen. Foundation…
Then I choose something with a little stretch. Black, long-sleeved, because my arms hurt and I will not let anyone look at me and draw conclusions.
