The boy next to me, Jonah something who collects limited-edition sneakers like stamps, glances over and flinches when he catches my profile, as if you can catch a disease from a kind of person. His gaze lands and skitters away like a bug.
At lunch, I say something rather surgical about the sweater Madison is wearing—how brave, to try that cut when your shoulders are so... democratic—and watch her body fold in on itself like a cheap lawn chair, and I feel, for exactly one solitary second, relief. The relief of a properly set bone.
Afterward my stomach turns at the sight of her yogurt, but the granola on top is a small landscape. I want, sickeningly, to put it directly in my mouth and chew it in the back molars until it turns to thick, sloppy paste.
God, what is wrong with me?
I don’t hurry. I glide out the room, acting calm, acting normal as I head to the bathroom.
I lock myself into the farthest stall and pull up my sleeves under the fluorescent light. The fur is back along the undersides of my forearms; not hair, not mine, not human. It is thickest at the wrist bones, uncertain up the arms like a ragged tide and when I press it down, it springs up again in defiance. There is a patch on my lower back I can feel but not see, like a crawling tickle that stretches outwards from my spine. The skin around each patch has a slight yellow tint, like a bruise composed entirely of cowardice.
The urge to cry hits me hard, but I swallow it down. I beat it down.
I dig into my bag for the razor I started carrying, because failure to plan is planning to fail. The sight that greets me afterthree careful swipes is worse, somehow; bare skin that looks far too pale, waxy even. Something about the pores is wrong, and there’s hair already whispering beneath in a darkness that promises to return.
I rinse the razor in the sink and watch that gray fur clog the drain like tumbleweed. My hands, my fingers clutch the sides, and my knuckles are pure-white from the grip.
Someone opens the door. The sound comes in before the body does. I button my cuffs, adjust my expression, moving to walk out like I’ve been merely fixing an eyelash.
The girl looks at me, no, not looks, stares, like she’s seen a ghost. I turn my face up, sneering at her frizzy hair and cheap clothes.
“Br, Briar,” Belinda begins, turning from the paper towel dispenser as if she has a right to talk to me. As if we’re suddenly equals. “We heard?—”
“Snooping is such a cheap move, even for you,” I say, and her mouth snaps quickly shut.
I walk past her, head high, ignoring how my sleeves whisper at my skin as if to warn me there’s more coming.
It followsme into the afternoon like a choice I keep not making.
In English, in the long-windowed classroom that overheats when the sun comes around, I sweat under my sleeves because I refuse to roll them up.
Someone asks a question about tragic flaws, and I say something about mistakes dressed up as destiny. The teacheractually claps her hands a little because she thinks I’ve had an insight into literature, and not into myself.
At the lockers, I open the narrow metal door and stop. Inside, on the top shelf where I keep the mint tin and the emergency comb and that small expensive perfume that smells like white tea and judgment, there is dust.
No, not dust. A drift of gray, too ordered to be a coincidence.
Like the fur from my razor.
Like something nested here and then left before I arrived, polite enough to clean up after itself.
I put my hand against it without thinking, and come away with two hairs stuck to my palm like threads. The urge to rub them between finger and thumb is so specific that I almost laugh out loud before I collect myself, before I mentally slap myself fucking hard.
I am not weak. I am not a freak either.
I shut the locker hard enough to make the neighboring doors jump and throw someone else’s off balance.
“Jesus,” someone mutters, only I don’t hear it. I don’t hear anything beyond that incessant noise. That scratching.
It won’t stop. It just won’t go away.
At home, I pause in the entryway and listen. The floorboards are quiet. The house is too still for either of my parents to be at home. And yet, somewhere upstairs, something brushes wood.
In my room, I shut the door because I want - no need, the illusion of control. I stand there, my hand on the knob, and hear it; a soft, insistent, unguarded scratch.
Behind my headboard again.
No.
