Page 25 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
Stagger puts a hand on the back of his neck and squeezes.
Then Tammy is in front of him again. Oh, thank god. Ma is here. He reaches for her childishly and she allows it, presses his hands tight between hers. She’s cold. Her skin is paper-thin, fragile like suede,every knot and vein and spot painfully visible. He wonders how many years she has left. Who knows how much time the hive takes from their people.
“How far along are you?” she asks. Jess looks away. “Do you know?”
He shakes his head.
She extricates a hand and presses the palm to Crane’s stomach. Tells him to lean back a bit, dear. Moves down, nudges aside the waistband of his pants to press her fingers right above the pelvis. Lower than Crane would’ve thought to go.
“Almostfeel something.” She thinks, puts pressure on a different spot. Hums. “There it is. I’d say—” A sigh. “Eleven weeks. Maybe closer to twelve.”
Not just the start of the third month. Three months, in their totality.
The medical abortion Aspen and Birdie had scheduled wouldn’t have worked.
“It gets a little easier in the second trimester,” Tammy offers. “You stop feeling so sick all the time, if you’re lucky.” She takes her cold fingers away, leans in. Lowers her voice. “If you want to move back in with me, you let me know. I’ll get you out of there. I don’t care what I have to say to that boy.”
Past her, over her shoulder, Levi is murmuring to Jess, his head ducked to her temple. Her big brown eyes focus anywhere but him. She frets with the frayed edges of her jean shorts. When Levi asks her a question, she makes a face that probably meansno.
The claw clip is falling out of her hair. Her sneakers are scuffed. There’s a blot by her eye where she messed up putting on drugstore mascara—if she didn’t steal it from Sean’s house while loading up his corpse, she bought it at the Dollar General across from Wash County’s singular stoplight.
“Crane?” Tammy says. “You hearing me?”
Sophie was thirteen the first time she wanted to hurt herself.
Or that was halfway decent shorthand for it. If she’d ever bothered to describe the specifics of what she wanted to do, presumably to a mental health professional, that’s what it would’ve been called. Self-harm. Pain-seeking behavior. But even as a young teen, she knew that wording wasn’t quite right. The pain would be an unfortunate side effect of what actually had to be done.
The moment it clicked, she was standing outside with her middle school class while the fire alarm blared. It’s not as if it was an actualfire.Just a faulty wire in the gym that gave off a spark, never got above a flicker. Barely more than a drill. Boring. But Sophie thought about being caught in that school as it burned. Being rescued with second- or third-degree burns obliterating her beyond recognition. In her imagination, the moment when she walked to the mirror to see her melted face for the first time? It was everything she’d ever wanted.
It consumed her. In high school, stuck in the art classroom while Aspen had a meltdown in the hall, she chewed on her eraser and wished for a car accident or a dog mauling. She considered the time she saw a woman on a TV talk show who’d been attacked by a chimpanzee. At night, she pulled blankets over her head and googled burn survivors until her vision blurred. One night, she found a write-up of a fireman recovering from full-body burns. An incident report of sorts, or a case study, complete with photos. From all angles, every piece of him. The glistening, still-fresh wounds and painful skin grafts—they were beautiful.Hewas beautiful. So beautiful to her, in fact, that she thought about him fucking her and masturbated in that awkward fifteen-year-old way. She saved the photos and made an album on her phone, titledhomework, and looked at them under her desk at school.
Sophie wasn’t actually going to do anything to herself. She wouldn’t make a plan until she was walking across the graduation stage, and even that wouldn’t pan out. Even in her worst fantasies, none of the accidents were her fault. It was always someone else’s unleashed dog, or decision to drive drunk. See, she told herself. She doesn’t want todoit. Ifshewanted to do it, then it would be bad. Obviously.
But as she got older, began creeping toward womanhood, or whatever future was stalking closer by the day, it got worse. Didn’t it. The things she thought about.
Disgusting motherfucker. Wanting the boys in the locker room to rape her. Maybe beat her into the bench until she stumbled out broken-nosed and sobbing. She held the kitchen knife in her hand too long. She put her face near the chain-link fence in the backyard, where the neighbor’s reactive German shepherd snapped its teeth. She stood there barefoot in the grass, in the sundress she forced herself to wear, breathing hard as the animal paced back and forth, huffing angrily at her presence. She thought about letting that dog fuck her. Horrible, filthy piece of SHIT.
A week before high school graduation—a month after she looked up “female castration” in a fit of disgust at her own libido—Sophie tried on the cute black dress she intended to wear to the ceremony, tied up her hair with a ribbon, and stared at herself in the bedroom mirror.
“I know I bought eyeliner,” Mom was saying from the bathroom across the hall. “It’s somewhere, I promise!”
Sophie said, “Mom, seriously, it’s okay.” Her voice was a soprano, sweet and clear. She’d spent most of her school years in choir, mulling over and refusing every concert solo, because she wanted the attention, but the wrong attention made her want to die, and she was pretty sure this would be the wrong kind. She didn’t know what the right kind was.
In the mirror, she was busy trying to make the dress accentuate what little chest she had.
Long dark hair. Big eyes, small tits, pale skin.
There should have beenproofwritten on her. An imperfection or impurity she could point to as evidence of everything that was wrong with her. There wasn’t. She was just a girl.
And whathadgone wrong? Nothing had even happened to her. Mom, chatting happily from the bathroom, joking about the heat index predicted for the ceremony, could not have been the cause of the crossed wires in her head, the disgusting wants lurking in her lizard brain. Dad, napping off lunch on the couch downstairs, was a kind man with kinder hands, so it could not have been him, either.
And yet.And yet she didn’t want this anymore. She was sick of speaking and straight As and expectations and a future she would inevitably crumple under. What shewantedwas to set herself on fire. She wanted to cut her knee ligaments so she would be forced to crawl on all fours. She wanted to reach into her throat and find her vocal cords and crush them, then let someone take her and break her and use her. Put an ice pick into her orbital socket if she had to. Fuck her up for good. Make the outside match the inside.
Thenshe’d be happy.
When Mom came out of the bathroom, Sophie was crying.
“Oh,” Mom said, dropping the eyeliner she’d finally found. “Oh no. Come here.”
