As if it’s the raw flesh of human skin, peeled.
That’s what she’s doing: She’s peeling the house’s skin off.
Revulsion owns her and mixes with a hysterical sort of terror that has her hands shaking uncontrollably. The need to deny it, to scream that this isn’t happening, beats at the inside of her skull. But she can’t stop.
She goes to the next room, then the next. The house, with all its interconnecting, unfinished nooks and corners, spreads before her like a rabbit warren, and she is drowning with the need to know if every wall is the same under the paper. A wretched, monstrous scream grows behind her teeth. She is throttled by this terror, this horrifying realization that they have been living in this.
There’s an explanation. There has to be. Because it can’t be skin. It literally can’t be, or else she’s losing herfucking mind.
Her phone vibrates in her back pocket and she jumps, letting out a startled sob as she sees Bren’s name on her screen. She hurls the paint scraper away and flees into the entryway, where she hasn’t yet attackedthe walls and can’t see red stains dribbling in languid rivulets down the naked bricks and plaster.
“Bren?” She’s shaking, her voice out of control. “There’s something in the walls. I don’t understand—”
“Hey, hey, Elodie, slow down. What happened? Are you okay?”
“No.”She digs fingers into her curls and turns in a circle. “The walls are bleeding. I need you to come homeright nowand see this.”
“Wait, what?” Papers crunch, a chair shoving backward. She can hear car keys rattle as he says, “I’m coming, okay? But I actually called you because the school contacted me… They need us to come in.”
“What? Why?” Her mind feels fogged, and she’s barely holding back tears.
“I don’t know,” Bren says. “They want to talk to us about Jude.”
6 YEARS AGO
Her baby is born inthe same bathroom where her little brother drowned.
Even though she is breathless with pain, she marvels at him, this slick little thing with a scrunched-up face and gore clotted in the black whorl of his hair. Blood stains the grout like spilled jam, and the mess of it, of him, brings her grim satisfaction.
Every time her parents step into this bathroom, they’ll be forced to think of her.
Elodie said nothing when the contractions started, only shut herself in here, too scared to call an ambulance in case they snatched her baby away straight after labor. She is only sixteen. She is not meant to be a mother. Her body feels like an alien thing, torn open just for him, everything inside her sliding like pulverized sludge toward the floor. She is butchered meat. She is bleeding out.
She is a god.
From the living room, the sound of a game show throbs from the TV that never shuts off anymore, her parents’ way of drowning out the world they’ve grown to hate since they lost their son. If they turn up the volume high enough, they never hear her either.
Not that she screamed for very long.
She stares at the limp baby smeared in her viscid fluids, lying like a stunned, wet fish on a pile of bath mats near the kitchen shears and severed umbilical cord. She can’t believe she did it. Her heart is an explosion in her chest, her cheeks wet with tears that feel closer to a laugh of joy than a sob. She swaddles her baby in a towel, then just sits there and stares at him in pure wonder as he begins to scream.
Once upon a time, he didn’t exist. Shemade this.
Everyone thought the pregnancy was an accident, and her entire class held back a laugh every time they saw her: their hands pressed over mouths, eyes darting away, their curiosity waspish.
Who’s the father? Do you even know?
She doesn’t see why it mattered.
Boys are always belly up for her, stumbling over themselves to catch her attention or bluster and flex where she might see. There is a ballerina grace to her; she is tall and slim with thick, dark curls that tumble all the way to her waist, and she is quiet, which makes the girls call her a bitch and the boys call her mysterious. But boys are reckless, needy things, and she’s never wanted one to attach itself to her like a parasite. She knows what she wants and she is careful in how she decides to get it.
There had been a party in one of the trashy abandoned houses in a crumbling suburb close to their school, somewhere to be loud and wild, to invite those rich private school boys who always bring liquor and trouble. No one asked her to come—she has no friends—but sheslipped in quietly and drank until a warm, cottony shroud drifted between her and the flashing lights and throbbing bass, the happy screams and the grinding bodies. She danced too prettily, spinning and spinning until she couldn’t stop laughing as the walls melted in prisms of color. Every face blurred. Nothing hurt anymore.
One boy kept trying to talk to her, his hair floppy, massive glasses swallowing his face, his words bumbling and awkward. From his disheveled blazer, her cottony brain realized he must be from the private school. Good. She never had to see him again after this.
They found the bathroom, a foul, moldy hole of chipped tile and rusted sink, fresh spray paint over the mirror. It was easy to shed their clothes. He was so excited to be touched, to be wanted, and he never asked about things like condoms. A beautiful, elusive girl had picked him, gangly and stammering, and it was obvious he’d do anything she asked. In the gloom of the bathroom with alcohol a mussy cushion between her and reality, she never even had to look properly at his face.
She didn’t want him.
