Boston, Massachusetts
Lara lit another cigarette from the glowing butt of her last, then sucked in a final drag and flicked the nub under the tires of the cars whooshing through the rain past the departures gate at Logan. The overhang kept the worst of it off but the air was still damp and cold, clinging clammily to her skin. She hunched deeper into her coat, shivering as she exhaled and drew the coils of heavy blue smoke up into her nostrils, savoring the earthy burn before blowing it out again. The coat was Michael Kors, a gift from a longtime client, and it was absolute shit for Boston in late fall. The wind cut right through the marled sheepskin and its dark silk lining. She took another deep drag.
Lung cancer, here we come, she thought as she watched rainwater hiss through a sewer grate a few feet from where she stood. The butt, caught in the gutter’s current, swirled through the corroded iron and was lost to sight, borne down into the dark and out to—where? Boston Harbor? The Charles? Some scenic reservoir or wetland? Or maybe, some hateful corner of her brain suggested, it was Boston’s version of the farmhouse basement. Maybe it lurked just out of sight, sifting the rainwater that fell through the grate, searching for anything edible, for anything it could hollow out and imitate.
New England always made her think like this. It was the cold, the rain, the ceaseless fucking humidity. Akira dying didn’t help. He’d been kind to her, put up with her shit without so much as a raised voice, cooked for her night after night even knowing she’d just puke it up afterward. She closed her eyes and tapped her silver cigarette case against her hip. A gift from a client, a silver-haired old man named Rudy with a tan like a Ritz cracker and a dazzling white smile. He was waiting for her in Palm Springs, would be there to pick her up from the airport in his big silver Corvette, the top down and the light flashing in his sunglasses and from the band of his Rolex. They’d kiss, his cologne enveloping her in a cloud of heady musk, and she’d blow him while they did ninety on the highway, the Stones or Jefferson Airplane blasting from the Corvette’s speaker system loud enough that she could feel it in her bones. She’d straighten up after, fixing her lipstick as the wind blew through her hair, and he’d say something like “You’re a hell of a girl, Bunny,” before dropping her off at her hotel with an envelope and a promise to call her sometime that week.
It would be warm there. She’d have a room overlooking the lagoon. She’d lay out by the hotel pool, feeling like a movie star, watching men and women check her out in passing, feeling the outer edges of their lust the way she had since the summer of her fifteenth year. A trace of the wild power that had danced in her that summer, that had woken her screaming so many nights with fragments of the others’ dreams replaying on an endless loop lodged in her mind and made the psych ward such a deafening hell of overlapping want and misery and hatred. She always knew when someone wanted her.
“Think I could get one of those?” asked a man in a Red Sox sweatshirt and blue jeans. He’d sidled up on her left while she was lost in thought. He looked like money in spite of his getup. His nails were manicured, his haircut the kind of effortlessly rumpled waves only a three-hundred-dollar trip to the barber could produce. Finance bro, she decided. Probably dressed down for a long flight. She dug out a cigarette for him and handed him her lighter, which he flipped open and shut with expert precision before exhaling a stream of smoke.
“Thanks,” he said, smiling. He had a hungry look in his eyes. She could feel it pouring off him, that familiar impatient yearning. It always reminded her of a little dog yapping to be let out. Men like him didn’t really understand their money yet. They didn’t have Rudy’s comfortable largesse, or the cold, sharklike affect of a real executive who knew exactly what he wanted and how to take it. They were nervous, resentful, impulsive. Stupid.
Lara pocketed her lighter. “No problem.”
They smoked side by side for a while in silence, his scrutiny uncomfortable but bearable, but when she flicked her butt away in a shower of sparks and ashes, he raised a hand and touched two fingers to her forearm, like she was a waiter who’d ignored his signal.
“You’re Bunny Vixen.”
God, not again.
“No, sorry, you have me confused with someone else.”
“Come on, you don’t have to do that.” He flashed her a wide, bright grin that didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m a fan.”
She stepped smoothly away, shrugging off his hand. “I’m not working right now.” She turned to leave.
“Five thousand.”
He was smirking when she looked back at him. It made her want to kick a heel off and put the spike through his eye socket. “Excuse me?”
“Come back to my hotel room for half an hour. Have a little party with me. Five thousand dollars.”
“How about we go back to your car instead?” She stepped back toward him, resting a hand on his chest. She could feel the heat of his erection even in the chill. The musky funk of how badly he wanted her to do something little and mean and boring to him, something he thought was the apex of perversion. “I can jerk you off, wipe your cum on the upholstery, and then next week I’ll find you out at brunch, and I’ll come up to you and your wife and your kids while you’re eating eggs Benedict and say, ‘Fancy running into you here, Bill. What are the odds? Remember me, the tranny who gave you that handy in an airport parking garage?’”
He stared at her, his mouth hanging open, then seemed to find himself. His face went hard and tight. “Fuck you, cunt.”
“Yeah,” she sneered. “Fuck me.”
It felt good to leave him standing there, though her stomach roiled at turning her back on him. Men had hit her for less. Her only defense now was an affect she’d spent years cultivating from one of breathy vulnerability to a sort of steel-clad cuntiness with a spine of fuck-you money. She’d probably made more than the little shit last fiscal year anyway. Let him hit her; she’d take his beach house and slice off his balls in court.
Her phone started vibrating as she stepped through the sliding glass doors and into the echoing clamor of check-in. She took her sleek little iPhone out of her coat pocket, pushing her fogged-over glasses up onto her forehead to read the caller ID. She answered, but somehow her voice had dried up in her throat.
“Lara? Are you there?”
Her palms felt damp and clammy. She licked her lips. “Yes,” she said, her voice a strangled croak.
“I found it,” Felix said, and she knew what he meant, had never been able to bury the knowing of it even when it had eaten through her twenties like a cancer, had put her in a psych ward in Rhode Island and then, a few years later, another in upstate New York. The line crackled. “I’m just outside Reno. The Star Motel.”
She thought of Palm Springs, of lying poolside like a lizard in the sun, a mimosa close at hand and clients cuing up to smell her dirty panties, to suck her toes and drink her piss and beg her to step on their faces and put her cigarettes out on their nipples. Clamps and spankings and ball gags. It was the best job she’d ever had. The only thing she’d ever been good at.
“I’ll be there tomorrow.”
That first night, all of them crammed into a motel room in a Podunk town just across the Idaho border, Jo had told Oji what happened at Camp Resolution, switching back and forth between English and her broken Japanese until she was pretty sure she’d gotten it all out, had vomited the entire nightmare onto the dirty carpet. He took her hands and said, “I believe you.” She saw how it hurt him to mean it, how badly he wanted to tell her she must have hallucinated, must have misunderstood something while out of her mind on whatever the administrators had given them—probably mushrooms—but he hadn’t. He’d believed her, believed the whole insane mess of it.
For seven years he’d worked his fingers to the bone however and wherever he could to keep a roof over their heads. Technical drafting, night shifts at convenience stores, stocking shelves at Walmart, telemarketing for a company that sold steel wool and industrial solvents in bulk to factories. He’d done it all without complaint, just like he’d worked through the tantrums, the depressive episodes, the fights and breakups and suicide attempts, the anorexia and petty theft until one by one the others went off on their own. Until it was just the two of them.
For eight years after that he’d lived with her in her little third-floor apartment on Gate Street. It was during that time he’d told her about his marriage to her grandmother, about the matchmaker in Hokkaido who’d known the signs and led them to an understanding. He told her about the men he’d loved, showing her letters full of poetry by someone named Yoshi who he said had been the most beautiful man he ever saw, long black hair and a little mustache. Like Clark Gable. A few weeks after that, Oji had gotten his diagnosis. Cancer, hospice, and pneumonia, bam, bam, bam. Three months start to finish, and now, in the back of a cab, all that was left of him was the little copper urn in her lap, no bigger than a potted plant.
“… another tragic entry in what psychiatrists have termed an unprecedented case of mass hysteria. A Ventura County mother murders her teenage daughter in cold blood before turning her gun on herself. Friends and family say the deceased, forty-one, struggled with a rare disorder known as Capgras delusion, the persistent belief that a loved one has been replaced by an identical or near-identical copy. Police have thus far been unable to locate—”
The driver changed the station. “That’s all there is on the news these days,” he groused. “Mamas killing babies. They oughta do something about it.”
“They should,” Jo agreed. She always agreed with cab drivers, just like she always looked down when she passed by a cop. There was no way to know how far the Cuckoo’s work had spread. There was no way to know who was safe and who was just a glove of skin around a knot of alien muscle. Mostly she managed not to think about it. Mostly. The cabbie pulled up to the curb outside her building. “Thanks,” said Jo. She dug in her coat pocket for cash and handed it over without counting. Oji had always said it was bad character to count money in front of someone you were paying. She slipped out of the cab and shut the door, the urn cradled like a baby against her breast.
When she turned, the car pulling away, she found Shelby sitting on the steps of her walkup. For a moment the old fear seized her, the hair on the back of her neck standing on end, but if Shelby had been a copy she would surely have called ahead. She would have taken pains to make sure Jo felt comfortable. The fear passed. Shelby’s round face was flushed in the unseasonable chill. She flashed a sad smile. “Lara told me,” she said. “I tried to get here for the funeral, but you know what LAX is like. I’m so sorry, Jo.”
A cold gust blew down Gate Street, past the little pizza parlor—which was terrible, but the best you could reasonably hope to find this far from Jersey—and the head shop where Jo’s ex, Fiona, worked most days. It had been years since she’d seen Shelby. Christmas of 2009, she thought, when Lara had come out from Boston with that awful boyfriend, Max or Mack or something, who wouldn’t shut up about how Facebook was going to change the world. She took Shelby’s hand and pulled the other woman up and into a tight hug, and before she knew what was happening she was crying at her kitchen table while Shelby made coffee and rifled through the cupboards, making an unholy mess that would, Jo knew from experience, result in the best chocolate chip cookies she’d ever tasted.
“He was such an awful cook,” said Shelby, cracking an egg on the lip of one of Jo’s metal mixing bowls. “You remember his pancakes?”
Jo made a sound, half laughter and half sob, and rested her head in her hands. “Raw in the middle, burnt around the edges.”
It was strange, being together again. All through the end of high school they’d been caught in each other’s hair, trapped in a succession of tiny apartments and unable to stop seeing what had happened to them that one summer every time they caught sight of each other. She still felt it, even fifteen years later. Just a glimpse of the old scars on Shelby’s forearms and she was back in their blood-spattered bathroom keeping pressure on the wound and wishing she was anywhere else, even back home in the airless tomb of her parents’ house. It wasn’t that they hadn’t been close, it was that they’d never been able not to be. They were her family, and seeing them made her feel like she was drowning.
Time passed. Shelby ordered Chinese food and they ate it in the living room, trying and failing to watch one of the old Japanese movies Oji had always put on at holidays. They were all three hours long and called shit like The Tale of the Dreaming Chrysanthemum. Jo hated them with every fiber of her being. Her aunts had always called her a banana, yellow on the surface and white inside. Maybe they were right. Maybe if she didn’t love watching handmaidens throw themselves into wells and samurai nobly sacrificing their lives for the shogun, she was betraying the memory of the man who’d raised her, who’d loved her even while she had the spins and puke in her hair, or when she’d crashed his car drunk the week before her nineteenth birthday, or flunked out of her GED program. Maybe she’d lose his memory, like she lost everything else. She was already on thin ice at her barista job at Bean Counter, and Rosalie at the print shop had taken her aside to let her know if she missed another shift they’d have to find someone else. More shitty jobs down the drain.
Three beers later she started crying again, sobbing into her lo mein as Shelby rubbed her back. “I’m a banana,” she wailed. “I’m a fucking banana.”
“What?”
Another beer and they were tearing at each other’s clothes, kissing so that snot and tears ran together. She pulled one of Shelby’s big, heavy breasts from her bra and took the other woman’s puffy nipple into her mouth, rolling it on her tongue, letting it slide through her teeth until Shelby moaned and squirmed beneath her. Not their first time together, but the way Shelby filled her mouth always surprised her. Her jaw ached, a blissfully all-encompassing sensation. Shelby’s fingers in her hair, pulling her closer while on the television Doug Bradley rasped, “Your suffering will be legendary, even in Hell.” Shelby and her scary movies. Lara and John couldn’t stand them, but Jo liked the thrill, the black cavern of a screaming mouth, the oozing drip of dyed red corn syrup. It made her feel naked. Vulnerable.
In bed, Shelby softening, easing Jo’s hand away from her dick. Lube, delightfully cold, and a husky sigh of satisfaction as she slid a finger up inside the other woman. Tattooed arms around her, thick and soft, Krazy Kat lighting his cigarette on the fuse of a bomb, a spray of hibiscus blossoms, mushrooms in a riot of strange colors. She wrapped her legs around one of Shelby’s thighs, grinding frantically as she built a rhythm, easing a second finger up the other woman’s asshole. The room was spinning, but just a little. Just in a soft, pleasant way.
Afterward they lay together, trading memories and sipping water, talking about the times Lara ran away and when Mal had gotten drunk and done stand-up at open mic night at the White Horse in Seattle. You guys remember when Bush got really mad at France for a while and it was all freedom toast and freedom fries? Imagine being the guy who had to explain that to the French parliament. Respected ladies and gentlemen of the assembly, the president of the United States has changed the name of that wet bread thing they have over there.
Shelby blinked, a tear falling from the corner of her eye to trace the curve of her cheek and then soak silently into the sheets.
“It’s okay,” said Jo. She kissed the other woman, tasting duck sauce and Pabst Blue Ribbon, and let Shelby’s plump lower lip slip from between her teeth. “It’s okay, baby.”
They slept. Jo dreamed of an ex-girlfriend, faceless and brooding, shaggy blue mullet and snakebites, and of hummingbirds swarming like iridescent wasps around a gigantic hanging nest of woven grass. She woke to her ringtone drilling at a pounding hangover. Ke$ha singing nasally about brushing her teeth with Jack Daniel’s, which didn’t sound like such a bad idea. She leaned across Shelby’s sleeping warmth to grope for the sound, layered with the irritating shudder of vibrating plastic against the fake wood of the bedside table. Gray morning light bathed her pigsty of a room, the floor drifted in takeout wrappers and dirty laundry, the bookshelf full of waxed paper coffee cups and used acrylics scabbed with glue.
She found her little Motorola brick under a stack of coffee-stained X-Men comics one of her hookups had loaned her and never taken back. The caller ID blinked: Felix. She rolled onto her back and held the phone up to her ear, wondering what he was going to ask her for, if he needed money or had gotten his car impounded or himself arrested again. Fuck you, she thought as the call connected with a hiss. I have my own problems.
“Hey, Felix.”
His voice was husky, the connection fragile and crackling with static, but she knew at once he was afraid. The same fear stirred inside her. It had spent the last fifteen years nestled in her guts.
“I found it.”
John had always thought he might get thinner as he got older, that as he stretched and grew his body would find what his younger self had conceived of vaguely as a kind of equilibrium. He’d felt then like he woke up only to make his notch in the wall of his cell, his prison of rolls and folds, waiting for the day when it would all, somehow, be over. There’s a very handsome boy in there, his stepmother, Sheila, had told him more than once as he stood on the precipice of some diet or another. Once he’s out, you’ll be beating the girls off with a stick. Just you wait.
Once he’s out. It always made him think of Alien, of John Hurt screaming in agony as that penis-looking snake thing burst out of his chest and splattered everyone around the table with its gory afterbirth. Shelby had probably borrowed that movie from the library a dozen times. His body was just an incubator for a form of life that owed it nothing, that would hollow it out from within and then slit it up the front with a sharp black claw and step out slim and muscular and perfect, glistening with the last of his vital fluids, to begin a real life, whatever that was.
It had never come, that joyous moment of liberation. Not with Mal, who had alternated tweeting body-positive word salad about their beautiful fat boyfriend and treating John like a sex toy they didn’t want anyone to know they owned; not with any of the chubby chasers or curious twinks who’d come after. Not even with Louise, who’d been with him since she swept into the bar where he’d been working odd nights at the time, a mountain of creamy, freckled curves poured into a white dress dusted with sequins, flushed and sweaty from her act at Whispers, wet with rain, and dropped herself onto a stool, chin resting on her tented fingers.
Who’s a girl have to do to get a drink around here?
More people flooded in out of the unseasonable rain. Regulars. Friends. He’d hardly noticed them. They’d gone home together. She broke two acrylics clawing his back before he even got inside her. She kissed his belly. Left dark hickeys printed on his breasts. Under the golden curls of her wig, her hair was fiery red and damp with sweat. Loose tresses tickled his thighs as she went down on him. She didn’t like to be touched down there, but they did other things, so many other things, and then it was rides to the airport, nights in instead of nights out, and the slow sliding together of their circles. He’d met her parents a year ago at Christmas, out in Sacramento. Kind people. Sweet and gentle. Matching coffee mugs and eight-hundred-piece Where’s Waldo puzzles spread out on the coffee table.
No release, no sense of finally shedding the weight he’d carried with him all his life, but he’d found a species of uneasy peace in his love for the expanse of her, for the warmth between her perfumed rolls and the sparse copper curls on the pad of milky fat beneath her belly and above her cock. The things he had loathed in himself since he could remember had become beautiful, had lost their power to curdle and suffocate him. How could he despise himself when he lay next to her, his arm around the swell of her belly, his face buried in the silky soft skin between her shoulders?
And now she was gone. He’d fallen apart after Felix called, and after the panic attack, after vomiting in the sink and shaking in her arms for half an hour, he told her everything, all of it, and she looked at him as though he were a broken-down old tramp raving on the bus about wiretaps and second shooters on the grassy knoll. She left a few minutes later, not saying goodbye. He wondered where she was now, which of their friends she was crying to, whether or not there were paramedics coming to perform some kind of wellness check on him. He had a ticketing site up on his wheezy little secondhand laptop, a red-eye flight to Reno ready to book. He could afford it, just about, with what he’d saved from temping in Punta Gorda and working at the Waldenbooks in the Cross Trails mall until it shuttered in late July. He’d be fucked for December rent, but he was already fucked.
He’d been fucked since the summer he turned sixteen. That first fall and winter together they’d talked about it constantly, gathering whenever they could between the collage of part-time jobs, all under the table, that had carried them through high school. The Cuckoo and its babies were the one inexhaustible subject they could always turn to, no matter how little they’d had to eat or what run-down shitbox they were living in. Where did it come from? Outer space? A government lab? The Earth’s core? Why had it singled them out as its prey, the queers and fags and transes, and what was it doing now?
There had been no manhunt. That had always surprised him, until he realized the thing would have had no problem producing bodies, and that it was probably tracking them itself. It had made them all paranoid, especially in those first few years and after Shelby’s first attempt. Any cop, any truant officer, any nosy neighbor could be one of those things. Their summer in Reseda had ended with all of them bolting in the night after Lara got herself arrested for solicitation and some fancy lawyer called the station to say he was representing her. Maybe it had really been a high-stepping pro bono type, but John could still remember the fear that had filled the station’s reception area when the officer on duty had relayed the call. Eighteen hours later they were sleeping in a warehouse in North Coast with six hundred dollars between them and no prospects whatsoever.
They’d talked about it less as time wore on. First Mal wanted to put it behind them, especially after they came out, and even more so after the two of them got together. Then Lara left. Then Felix. By 2000 it had all felt like a bad dream. There were other things to worry about, rent and work and Y2K and the Ebola virus. The president smirking and sweating at his podium and the towers coming down as though someone had killed the pumps in the world’s biggest fountain, concrete collapsing in on itself like water. The sky all full of dust and smoke. Wildfires and the ozone layer. Baghdad burning in the alien green glow of night vision while Fox News played “America the Beautiful.”
Except it hadn’t been a dream. He couldn’t pretend anymore, not with the girl’s name stuck in the back of his throat like a chicken bone. Abigail. Abby. Whatever its reasons, wherever it came from, it was back, and it had already started to wrap its tentacles around his throat. Louise was gone. She might never come back. He sipped his beer, long since gone warm and flat, and thought of the first time he’d climbed on top of her, the way she’d stroked his face with her plump little hand, pale and soft as fresh dough.
Don’t be afraid. You’re not going to hurt me.
We’re the same.
He bought the ticket.
Mal stared at the half-finished painting. It was their latest, the white arc of the nun’s wimple still blurry where they’d fudged around with the still-drying acrylics, rubbing their thumb over the canvas. The blunt iron hooks holding her mouth open were wrong somehow, the quality of the light on the burnished metal distracting from the dark glow of her skin, the empty pools of her eyes. I am never going to finish this, they thought. Which is fine, because nobody’s going to buy it anyway.
Their little canvas travel bag lay packed on their air mattress. They’d been sleeping on it since the guy in the apartment downstairs dragged that bedbug-infested couch into the building and they’d had to throw their mattress out. The thought of the hard-bodied little insects still filled them with revolted panic. The bites on their lower back weren’t fully healed yet. The bugs are gone, they told themself for the hundredth time. They tented and sprayed. They’re gone.
They’d have to hitch to make sure they could afford the train and the two bus tickets to get them to Reno, but at least they wouldn’t bring bedbugs with them. At least the others wouldn’t know how things were with Charlie, who they loved, they really loved, they loved so much it hurt sometimes, which was good because everyone says love hurts. The hurting’s how you know it means something. Not that they were hiding anything. People didn’t understand how sensitive Charlie was, how hard his childhood had been. Sometimes they thought Shelby knew. Not that there was anything to know, but still.
I’m here if you ever need to talk.
I know how hard things can get.
Been thinking about you lately.
They zipped up their bag. Fuck anything they’d forgotten to pack. Fuck the painting and the other six in the series under their little canvas shrouds against the wall, and fuck Felix for calling and telling them the one thing they couldn’t ignore—that for fifteen years it had been out there doing to other kids what it had done to them, that it was stealing lives and faces, insinuating itself into the fabric of the country, and they’d decided to look away and live their lives while it did. Years of therapy to convince themself they’d imagined it, then denial, then drinking, and somewhere in that sparkling haze they became Mal, clawing their way in a disgusted frenzy out of what was left of grinning, joking Malcolm, and Charlie came into their life.
They kept thinking of the smell that had washed over them in the basement under the Glover house. Cat shit and warm root beer, a rancid sweetness that had made their mouth water and their gorge rise at the same time. The summer Shelby showed them The Thing, all they’d been able to think about was what it smelled like, that tame little stop-motion monstrosity wreaking havoc against all those grown men. Had Childs and MacReady caught a whiff of boiling aspartame and diarrhea as they slunk through the claustrophobic halls of their research station? Had they smelled it on the thawing tangle of cooked meat dragged back from the Norwegian base?
In their dreams sometimes they saw the Gabe-thing sit up and open its baby-blue eyes. They had painted it once, though they’d later burned the canvas behind the Big Lots where they’d been working at the time. What if she saw it? John had asked them. They were in love with John, then, but already angry with him, suspicious of his kindness and embarrassed of his body. Fat and getting fatter. Overflowing. Not like Charlie, skin and bones and sunken cheeks, the knobs of his spine like the heads of pushpins. Mal couldn’t stay hard for him, not even before getting on spiro, but that was just part of being together as long as they had. Charlie’s body was like a model’s body, sharp and clean. It was perfect, and sex would only demean it.
“What the fuck are you doing? Are you leaving?”
He stood in the doorway in his sweats, dark circles under his eyes, his mop of curly hair disheveled. He’d been going shirtless ever since top surgery. Mal had once made xylophone sounds while tapping their fingers on his stark, protruding ribs. They could almost hear his giggle now. He’d loved that bit. They wished with a sickening intensity to be back in that moment, to be pleasing to him and not the thing making his face shake like that, his lips press together tight and bloodless. What could fix it? What could they say to make it right before it all spun out?
The best they could come up with was: “What?”
“You’re obviously going somewhere.” Charlie’s pale eyes bulged in a way that suddenly reminded Mal of Mrs. Glover. “You didn’t think about telling me? We just had that entire discussion about abandonment triggers and you weren’t even listening.”
“I was going to tell you—”
“Why the fuck should I trust you? You lied about your date with Lillith, you lie about money, you lie about food—”
Mal grasped for words. “I got a call,” they said, and their voice sounded as though it were coming from behind a thick stone wall. They watched themself speaking and thought how strange, how artificial their body language looked. Hadn’t they been loose, once? A clown. Now their arms were folded tightly, their shoulders hunched. “From an old friend, Felix Vargas. We grew up together. Someone … someone we knew back then is in trouble.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“Right, fine, because I’m not allowed to say anything. I should just shut up and let you do whatever you want, let you forget I exist. You use me to get better, use me to sleep around, but I can’t have anything because I’m so terrible.”
He had moved closer, his spit on their cheeks. They stood, slinging their bag over their shoulder. “I didn’t say that.”
“Because it’s my fault,” he shrieked. He stepped back to block the door, blotches of color in his sunken cheeks. He had such beautiful cheekbones, sharp as cut glass. “Everything is my fault. You’ve never done anything wrong.”
“I’ll only be gone for three or four days,” they said quietly, hoping and dreading that soon the crying would start, the pleading for forgiveness and the perverse feeling of power that came with it. Like looking down from a crucifix on their weeping executioner. “They need me. I promised I’d go.”
“Why? Why do they need you?”
They thought of Abby, of a kid with Nadine’s crooked smile and wheat-blond hair curled crying in a narrow bunk bed. They thought of the pallid monstrosity unfolding itself in the dark under the farmhouse, of how they’d stood frozen, doing nothing. Of Nadine swallowed by a wall of rippling light.
“I can’t tell you about it,” they said. Their voice shook, and with every fiber of their being they wanted to shrink back small into the corner, to apologize and cry and say they wouldn’t go, it didn’t matter, they’d been selfish and thoughtless and awful. “It’s something we went through together, when we were younger. I—when I get back, I can try to explain.”
“You’re gonna get raped,” he spat at them. He stepped aside to let them through the door, then fell in close behind them. They blundered through the kitchen, banging their knee on the edge of the rusted gas stove with the faulty pilot light as he ranted at their back. “Do you even care how I feel? Do you care how much I worry about you when you’re out there? What are you going to do for money? What are you—Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
He hit them on the shoulder. It wasn’t hard, more of a faggy little slap than any kind of punch. They yelped in surprise, wheeling to face him and retreating at the same time until the backs of their legs hit the threadbare sofa under the front windows. “You hit me,” they said. Their voice trembled. The darkness outside their apartment seemed suddenly incalculable, huge and yawning and unsafe. At least in here they knew what came next. At least it was safe.
Charlie’s expression curdled in an instant from shock and guilt into one of pure contempt. “Oh please, I didn’t hurt you. Are you gonna start crying now? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo-hoo, poor baby.”
They broke for the door, Charlie stomping after them. Down the stairs past the reggaeton blasting on the second floor and the furious screams from the first and out into the cool, dark night with Charlie still ranting at them from the window above, screaming that they’d never loved him, that they wanted him dead, that they owed him four thousand dollars for rent from when they’d first moved in together. Silence, then the sound of canvas filling with air and the painting arcing out over the street to bounce off the curb. Mal started walking, their thoughts blazing with static. They headed up the street toward the lights of Sacred Conception, trying to ignore the eyes that followed them.
“Dykes are fightin’,” laughed one of the men on the steps of the building across the street. There were two of them they knew by sight and one they didn’t. “Trouble in pussy paradise.” He raised his voice. “You all right, girl?”
Charlie was still screaming. Mal, not slowing, looked at the man. “Nothing your sister can’t fix!” they shouted, and burst out laughing at his shocked expression. They picked up their pace. The night seemed to open itself up around them, the smells of rain and garbage and late-blooming snapdragons in the overgrown yards of foreclosed houses twining together, the light mist brushing their bare skin—they’d left the apartment in a tank top and loose drawstring pants.
“Use your eyes, stupid,” said the hard-faced white woman sitting on the steps with the men, ashing her cigarette onto the sidewalk. “Those bitches are transgendered.”