Another day without ribbed tank tops won’t topple an empire. I add a plaid skirt, because I like the contrast. Over-the-knee socks, because the new patches at the backs of my knees spiked overnight, like fields of dry grass. I am not interested in explaining razor burn to anyone, thank you very much.
Breakfast is an abstract I perform. The smoothie is cold, sweet and flavorless against the part of me that is tasting something else. There’s a grainy thought at the back of my tongue, a suggestion of dust, of the pantry.
When I open the cabinet for a glass, the smell of oats derails me.
I stand with my hand on the bag like some Victorian heroine pressing her palm against a window and Mom struts in, her flats clicking merrily and says, “Wow, long sleeves in August? Is the school doing a polar expedition theme I didn’t hear about?”
She is perfect in her variation of the uniform we call adulthood; sheath dress, hair ironed into civility. She looks like a picture of herself cut from a magazine and laminated for reuse.
“It’s freezing in Ms. Cutler’s class,” I say. “She keeps the thermostat at sixty-two because she’s a lizard in the sun, and we’re all just gilding on her rocks.”
Mom smiles like a person reading a foreign language she can just about pronounce, but doesn’t understand. “Just don’t give yourself heatstroke.” Then, because she is a mother in a house where unusual sounds are not to be noticed unless they break something expensive, she asks, “You look tired. You didn’t have your phone in your room last night, did you?”
“I’m not twelve.” I reply, rolling my eyes before drinking the smoothie.
It tastes like chalk.
In the wall behind the cutlery drawer, something suggests that it could eat, if I wanted to.
Dad appears long enough to kiss the air somewhere to the right of my forehead and tell me to “go easy at school, princess,” and then his train of thought derails into stocks and some tech company that’s crashing on Nasdaq, and could make us a fortune.
It’s not that my parents are cruel. It’s that they are so convincingly busy being who they are that the rest of us are expected to remain props, to be moved, dusted and occasionally upgraded.
The scratching accompanies me out the door in my head.
It’s not in the driveway, it’s not in the car. Of course it isn’t. Why would it be anywhere but the house? Houses settle. Houses complain. Old houses collect sounds like lint.
At school the air is the crisp, artificial kind, both temperature-controlled and rumor-controlled by the way people lean into each other when I pass. I don’t smile. Smiling is for equals. I walk through them like Moses through the sea, and they yaw open, giving way to their superior.
The comments are the right shape; the little gasps, the tiny, unsteady laughs.
A freshman tries to make eye contact and I let her drown in it. She looks down at her shoes, and lives to see another day.
In home room, Lily says, “Love the socks,” and her mouth is doing the smile thing while her eyes do the calculus of status.
So I tilt my head and look at the part in her hair and say, “I love them too,” as if she borrowed them from my closet without asking and now we’re both forced to live with the lie.
She flushes in that moisture-prone way she has, and drops her gaze to her planner. Human behavior is such a scratched record sometimes.
The whispers are all about “have you seen the video” and “I heard she’s transferring” and “no one’s seen her dad since…” which is an interesting addition I will have to verify. But there is no sentence that includes the words “drugging” and “humiliation” that doesn’t end with someone clutching metaphysical pearls and asking why we can’t all be nice to each other, while simultaneously doing nothing. Hypocrites, all of them.
It is mid-math, somewhere between slopes and intercepts, when the sound returns.
Not to the house this time. To my vicinity, which is worse because it means it belongs to me.
The scratching is a spider crack in the window of my attention. It is the smallest idea of movement under the desk, between my ankle and the chair leg.
In the metal cage of the flip-up desk there is nothing but my pencil case, my notebook and the faintest scattering of—what? I look down without lowering my head, the way other people practice deadlifting without the bar.
Dust. Paper scraps from a torn page. Why would I think there would be something else?
But I feel the prickling dread along the backs of my calves, in the place where the razor burn is becoming something else. I expect to see a hair there; long and drab and waving, and I will have to pluck it like a bass string while I hold in the urge to gag.
But there is just me in my socks, and the sense that the floor is sinking beneath me.
I slowly rub the toe of my shoe against the inside of my other calf and feel both the soft-satin of new growth and—horribly—the grit of something caught. Wood powder. But that is ridiculous. There is no wood in this plastic place.
I wipe the edge of my shoe against the underside of the chair and feel my breath hitch, just a whisper.
