WHY WE KEEP EXPLODING
JUST A JOKE
THE FIRST GIRL explodes on the final evening of orientation weekend.
Allison Greer, Sutton University freshman, joins us in the dining hall, where all levels of college kids pack the inside, clacking dishes and loud voices bounding off every surface. Beneath that cacophony, no freshman would fear silence.
The boys who join us at our table are upperclassmen. They forego hoodies and torn jeans for stiff button-downs and slacks, like they have job interviews scheduled after dinner. Juniors? I can’t say for sure.
The tallest, a blond boy with razor-straight teeth and a narrow face, sits across from Allison. I can’t make out their conversation through the noise, but he points repeatedly to a cup of yellow liquid, likely beer, and then taps a penny on the tabletop, and I understand this is some kind of challenge.
She tells him she doesn’t like games. When he doesn’t let up, she curses him and throws her glass of fountain soda into his face.
I stare, awestruck, while Tall-Boy sputters. Shaking my head always felt like drawing too much attention, let alone cursing and splashing. I dread the glint in others’ eyes, how I’ll turn from human to thing in the flick of an internal switch the moment they realize I’m different. Vocal training hasn’t come as easily to me as other girls still recovering from early testosterone infection. Some self-teach or find others to teach them. A few like their voices and insist everyone else had better deal with it.
I should be grateful that silence is my friend, that others don’t clock me at a glance and figure out how I’m different from other girls. Lucky little Laurie started estro at fourteen.
Most days, I keep strict posture and bite my tongue. I would never throw soda into anyone’s face. Had Tall-Boy challenged me instead of Allison, I would have agreed to whatever game he wanted. Boys like him twist sorcery on their tongues. They insist you play with them, and I’m easily witched.
Allison is my heroine for a few brief moments. She turns to stride from the table, a victorious warrior abandoning a corpse-choked battlefield. Carbonized droplets skitter down Tall-Boy’s face while his friends laugh at him.
But then he weaves sorcery. “Chill, sweetie,” he says, wiping a paper napkin down his face.
She turns to snap at him, dark hair coiling: “Chill yourself, asshole. Goodbye.”
He leans over the table, and I see the witchcraft swirl in his piercing eyes. “Somebody has an attitude problem,” he says. “It was just a joke.”
Allison’s lip curls back, but she hesitates. Her gaze darts back and forth, uncertain, sizing up witnesses and how they might judge her reaction. Was she the kind of girl who couldn’t take a joke? She had to get her words just right or else see the dining hall condemn her a stuck-up killjoy for all time.
“Try—” she starts, fighting tooth and nail to get the words out. “Try. Being. Funny.”
Tall-Boy turns on his debate me voice. “Humor’s subjective,” he said, smooth and smarmy. “Asking me to adjust for you when we barely know each other, that’s completely irrational.” His eyes stab through her, reading when she’ll try to speak again. He doesn’t let her. “Just a joke,” he repeats, this time coated in slime.
Allison’s lips fight her face to make words. I don’t know what she would say if she could speak. I would like to.
Instead, the silence clamps over Allison’s paling complexion, her dark hair shimmering with milky starlight. She clutches her gut, as if the unspoken words now burn her belly. Her legs stagger back from the table.
Tall-Boy and his friends lean in, like they know what’s about to happen. Sorcerers must have that power.
Allison’s skin ripples. Every muscle twitches. If there’s a sound building toward what’s about to happen, I can’t hear it beneath the dining hall din, Allison rendered silent. I read words in her face, the ones that have done this. Just a joke. Attitude problem. Irrational.
And then she has no face. Her body flashes out, a sudden supernova of white light and viscera. I cover my eyes, but the boys keep looking, their heat oozing over the table, dwarfing Allison’s cold, starlit explosion.
She doesn’t even scream.
When I finally uncover my eyes, there’s nothing left of Allison. The white-light explosion has burned away her every cell. She’s erased, the boys having silenced her forever.
I’m not the only one looking—the place where she stood has the entire dining hall’s attention except for Tall-Boy and his friends. They’re looking around, making sure this explosion has been seen and understood.
They meant to make an example of her, and they have.
They leave us then, point made. We freshman girls sit quietly, out of respect for our deceased hallmate. The moment of silence stretches to dinner’s end. Back in the dorms, someone is sobbing.
Not me. I’ve seen quiet horror. In high school, boys used to silence with fists and boots; here they use words. This is the way of college.
Have my hallmates absorbed the lesson?
Quiet girls don’t get clocked. We aren’t made examples.
Quiet girls don’t explode.
EMOTIONAL
I watch the chattier freshman girls when crossing the quad or getting coffee at the open-air campus center—the ones who haven’t learned.
One of Tall-Boy’s friends reminds me that silence is a blessing. He circles the chatty girls, a shark sizing up swimmers, and intrudes with his debate me voice, egging the girls to engage him on human rights or politics or some superhero movie. Given time, one will speak, and then he mocks, and interrupts, and chastises. He puts her in her place. When she’s upset, he calls her “emotional,” and it’s a silencing nail hammered through her tongue. She’s learning terror, one syllable at a time.
Unspoken words can’t escape. I watch her swallow them, and they stew in her guts like trapped gas in a mine. The more she tries to talk, the worse the pressure. It’s slow for some girls, quick for others. Sometimes, when crossing campus, I hear a distant eruption, and I know we’ve lost another.
Survival requires silence. This is the way of college.
When do the boys turn from freshmen to sorcerers?
Who teaches them the silence spell-words?
Why don’t they warn us before it’s too late?
Allison wouldn’t have come here had she known what Tall-Boy’s tongue would do to her. She wasn’t the type to be silent.
Except getting a rise from her was Tall-Boy’s game. She didn’t know better—how could any of us? Freshmen mouths might spit fire, but we know nothing of spell-words.
Our fingers are smarter. On the way out of the dining hall one evening, I steal a knife.
IRRATIONAL
Alone in the dormitory shower, I slide the knife down my upper arm and cut a small letter into my skin—A. The shape is ragged; the blade could be sharper. I tell myself that this is how I’ll remember Allison when we took no selfies together; there is no body, no candlelight vigil.
We’re afraid our gathering at campus center will lure the boys. They would hear our sneakers squeaking across cobblestone and be drawn like sharks to blood in the water.
I want the second letter to be L, and then L-I-S-O-N, but I’m no longer certain Allison had two L’s. Instead of overthinking it, I let the blade take over.
Knives have always made sense to me. Hormone therapy has treated my features down to a cellular level, but deeper than that, our flesh holds bad habits holy. I thought I quit cutting myself in middle school, but a smoker smokes when the chips are down, and a cutter cuts. Transition during high school only pressed the pause button.
Still, I haven’t been trapped in that what am I? body for years. Things have changed, even the cutting.
When I glance at the knife’s work, I find the A is not the beginning, but the center. Before it, I’ve carved J-U-S-T. After, I’ve carved a J. I finish what the knife began and carve O-K-E myself.
I carve further spell-words. It’s nothing like my old cutting: every bleeding stroke less about dulling psychological pain, and more about creating protective sigils. Silence spells will find themselves carved in my skin and scurry back to their masters. The boys can’t witch me with words I’ve bled.
That’s the theory, anyway.
SMILE
There’s a trick to keeping boys from telling you to smile. Most girls ignore or retort, but “smile” here is another silence spell. No comebacks, only combustion.
The trick is to always smile. The worst these boys can say is “Smile bigger” or “Show some teeth,” but they never do. No matter how rancid I feel inside, my cheeks tug the corners of my lips. The expression is reflex now; no need to think, no effort needed.
I probably smile in my sleep.
Maybe it’s that façade of cheery disposition that draws this boy to me as I cross campus center. He has a wolfish face, jaw hugged by scruffy dark hair, but his eyes look wide and unassuming, almost innocent. Their pretty gaze doesn’t fit his lupine form, two damp orbs stolen from some gentle giant.
His voice is likewise sweet. “This sounds weird, and it’s okay if you don’t want to talk to me, but I just—sorry, I’m not good at this. Hello.”
When I wave at him, he smiles, and my lips tug a little tighter from my teeth.
“You got a name?” he asks.
An invitation to speak, not like Tall-Boy’s prodding. I tell Wolf-Boy my name, keeping my tone neutral, and I never stop smiling no matter the syllables. Keeping my voice tender to temper his. Sweet as he might seem, he’s still a boy at Sutton University. I cannot trust him.
He’s flummoxed though, makes sure to say my name as many times as can fit in his sentences, like it might flit away if he doesn’t catch it. He chats at me until we reach the edge of the dorms, when a growl cuts through my body.
I slide a concerned hand over my middle. Does this count as breaking my silence? Will Wolf-Boy cast a spell?
“That’s adorable.” One arm folds around my elbow, and he leads me from the dorms. “Let’s grab dinner. My stomach’s rumbling too.”
I let him escort me toward the dining hall, my face smiling to mirror his, but I scowl inside. That growl wasn’t my churning stomach.
It felt like my skin.
CALM DOWN
Outside the dining hall entrance, I excuse myself to the ladies’ room. Wolf-Boy doesn’t roll his eyes or chastise. Maybe the bar is too low at Sutton University, in this world, but his lack of impatience feels like hope.
I slip into a stall and pull up my shirt. I’ve carved letters beneath the short side of my ribcage, as if I-R-R-A-T-I-O-N-A-L can pretend that hormone treatment grows the absent strip of bone. Around the letters, skin ripples, a pond disturbed by thrashing fish.
Like Allison’s skin before the end.
Maybe college just does this to girls, tells our skin to run away, fast as it can.
Or has carving the spell-word into my flesh stuck the sorcery inside? The words manifest, but unlike for other girls, my skin’s set to unravel, muscle sloughing from bone. Different girls might self-destruct in different kinds of ways.
Not an explosion, but a meltdown. How long until the sorcery kills me?
If I’m dying, I don’t want to die alone, and since there’s no one else in the ladies’ room, I find Wolf-Boy in the dining hall. I’m not sure if he’s genuinely interested in me or if he’s playing games like Tall-Boy. If I step away, tell Wolf-Boy, Goodbye, in Allison’s fiery tone, will he toss a spell-word or let me go?
Worse, if I like him, will he want me to speak more? Boys can be harsh. Sometimes I envy the girls who like other girls. I used to radiate the sun, but hormones cooled my blood. The only girl I ever dated had hands and feet as cold as mine, lizards attached to our limbs. Boys are furnaces, and I crave the warmth.
Sometimes attraction is that simple.
We eat slowly, and I let him do the talking. Never spell-words, always gentle. He urges a few words from me here and there, but they’re scaffolding through which he builds his side of the conversation.
“Where are you from?” he asks.
“West,” I say, tender yet neutral, still smiling while I chew.
He has no opinions about that, and asks, “What’s your major?”
“English.”
He has opinions there, my answer prompting his every thought on Literature classes, majors, and degrees. On the surface, I hear his critique. Deeper, I wonder if an onslaught of opinion is another means to silence me, a complex string of pieces that form a spell. Should I be terrified? My skin growls, but the dining hall din smothers the sound.
Even my body is silenced, but that’s better than exploding.
When will the meltdown take me? Do Wolf-Boy and I have time for kissing and touching first? He’s barely an acquaintance, but if I lead him to my dorm room, he’ll follow. Will a nod be my consent for more? He’ll have to notice the spell-words carved into my skin. I might even drag him into the meltdown. And shouldn’t I mention how I’m different from other girls? My last boyfriend knew before he asked me out. Will Wolf-Boy still see that I’m human, or will I become a thing?
When it comes to girls, sometimes boys see little difference. Even the ones with sweet eyes.
As we leave the dining hall, his arm once again hooked around mine, I realize we’re not going to find out how he sees me. Campus is no place for closeness or honesty. Another freshman girl whose name I’ll never learn cowers at the edge of the dorms, caught in Tall-Boy’s shadow. His friends linger close. Girls keep their distance, weaving around the scene or watching from doorways.
Wolf-Boy strides toward the cluster, a solitary angel who might make a difference in this undergrad hell. A familiar itch crosses my skin, the kind when you want to drag a boy by his jacket into your bedroom and then tear away that jacket and everything else.
The nameless freshman girl turns to speak to him, probably to plead. Her face is scrunched, desperate.
Wolf-Boy holds up an open palm. “Calm down,” he says. “What’s the trouble?”
Desire’s itch washes off my skin, and the growling ripple returns. Tall-Boy and his friends lean in, expectant, but Wolf-Boy stares oblivious. My sweet wolf has no idea he’s spoken another silencing spell.
I can’t watch. Without waiting for him, I skirt around the crowd and run for my dorm’s front doors. He doesn’t mean to cast spells, but he can’t help it. They are the words he knows. How long until he slings them my way? I catch the girl out of the corner of my eye, wrapping her arms around her torso as if trying to hold herself together. She’s already reached her limit from Tall-Boy. Wolf-Boy’s pressure is too much. She’s done.
As I rush inside my dorm hall, I hear her explode.
NEUROTIC
My skin twitches harder each day. Wolf-Boy watched me run, and now he haunts my dorm hall. “Laurie, you there?” he calls, but I never answer. He might tell me to calm down, and I won’t risk it.
No one guides him to my door. We girls are frightened, and the boys down the hall don’t know my name. Those immune won’t answer him—the musician who speaks more Mandarin than English, the history major with hearing aids, the non-binary students scattered between binary hall designations. They can’t share their safety.
Not that I blame them; I can’t share my knife.
And I can’t quit cutting. My skin growls non-stop, every pore a mouth caught mid-snarl. Beneath the shower’s spattering rain, I try to relieve word-driven pressure, but whispers aren’t enough. Something inside me wants to roar.
Only carving settles my skin. I imagine spell-words Wolf-Boy might lace onto his opinions were we to peel each other’s clothes off and bare my cutting. R-I-D-I-C-U-L-O-U-S. N-E-U-R-O-T-I-C. T-O-O and then M-U-C-H. I empathize with tattoo lovers—I’m running out of spare skin.
Still, no meat sloughs off. If I’ve averted the meltdown, will I still explode? Too many theories swirl inside—maybe I’m too different from the other girls. Maybe surviving attempted self-destruction years ago has helped me build antibodies. Maybe the carvings do their job so that Tall-Boy and friends can’t destroy me. Maybe I haven’t given them a reason.
And Wolf-Boy? In a darkened room, he might not notice my carvings. He might not care how I’m different. If my fingertips coax him to growl like a wolf, he might not hear my skin do the same.
But Wolf-Boy, Tall-Boy—they’re of one nature. The boys pronounce themselves individuals for conflicting views on ethics, culture, and history, but they’re each sharks in the same ocean. Tall-Boy the Cruel, but he’s just joking. Wolf-Boy the Cruel, but calm down because he doesn’t mean it. Surely the others have spiced up their cruelty to help live with themselves.
Excuses, excuses.
Our upperclassmen know when to be silent and when to speak—when spoken to. Those of us who survive our freshman year will grow into sophomores if we learn the same, a mandatory class we obliviously enrolled in upon orientation. Sutton University’s spell-word crucible will destroy the rest.
In the end, we girls will likewise be of one nature. I won’t be a different kind of girl anymore. Isn’t that the dream?
As my skin ripples, filled with wolves and leopards and every growling angry beast that’s ever walked this world, I wonder—if that’s the dream, then what’s the nightmare?
And the boys? What’s their nightmare?
ATTITUDE PROBLEM
Weeks have passed since Allison’s death, but I finally muster a candlelight vigil for her. For all the girls who’ve exploded. I pass notes through the freshman dorm, meant for the girls, but others will find them, too. They’ll spread the word.
The lure.
We gather after sunset at campus center to raise candles. This moment of silence might have stretched until midnight, but I hear Tall-Boy’s snide voice at the crowd’s edge. He’s playing the shark, testing us for weaknesses. Sizing up who to bite.
I don’t understand why he does it. Probing the freshman population for what he considers girlfriend material? A lackluster comedian hunting an audience for when he’s just joking? Does he like to watch us brim with starlight and suffer explosions?
Or does he do it because he can?
I muscle through the vigil’s crowd and find he’s not alone. His cluster of friends traipse behind him in matching button-downs, eyes on their leader. I storm between him and the other girls, my candlestick spattering on cobblestone. Skin and mouth growl together as I hurl insults, telling him exactly what I think of Tall-Boy’s unjust jokes, creepy grin, and shark-like face.
He smirks at first, but his confident mask crumbles when his friends snicker. Spell-words spit off his lips, sprinkle my face.
I shout an onslaught of opinions to rival Wolf-Boy’s. Every word’s emotional, my voice clumsy, my skin snarling, and I’m not sorry for it, and I can’t stop. I won’t stop. That’s why Tall-Boy, tongue flustered, finally storms forward and shoves my shoulders.
I crash onto the cobblestones. My skin quits growling, the pain welcome, and I can’t help the cracking shout that shoots up my throat. It is an old voice I keep meaning to leave behind.
The glint shifts in Tall-Boy’s eyes. “Oh,” he says, piercing gaze at last seeing me. Clocking me. His barracuda smile returns.
The moment stretches in pregnant silence. I’ve turned from human to thing in his eyes, but I don’t mind because that’s how he sees every girl here. It’s validating in a terrible way. He wants to sling spell-words fashioned solely for me, the kinds of slurs you’ll find for a dime a dozen on any street.
But I don’t let him finish. I barely let him start.
“That’s why it doesn’t work,” he says. “Because you’re not really a—”
I stand quick and thrust my face into his. “I’m not done,” I snap.
His tongue limpens, and his jaw goes slack. No slurs, no spells. No jokes. The words slide down his esophagus and into his stomach, where they froth and rumble.
He tries again. “You—”
I lean closer. “Don’t interrupt me.”
Again, he swallows his words. His friends aren’t snickering now; they realize in fits and starts what’s happening to their tall leader. Behind me, the girls cluster. They’re still silent, but they’re watching.
Someone who isn’t silent appears from the gloom beyond the crowd—Wolf-Boy. His scruffy face doesn’t smile now. He scowls at Tall-Boy, who’s gripping his guts, and then at me. Wolf-Boy thinks he understands, but he’s thought that before and been wrong.
Still, he tries. “No need to fight, right?” he asks.
Each word rings earnest. I know he only means the best, can’t see the damage he does, how he props up boys like Tall-Boy and shatters girls like the nameless freshman he told to calm down. It would be easy to fall into his oblivious arms and let his furnace warm me.
But I can’t.
His mouth opens again to ask, “Why don’t we just calm—”
“No,” I snap.
Like a scolded dog, he bows his head, and I imagine his ears drooping. I won’t let him tell me to calm, or settle, or chill. Not anyone else, either. Good intentions don’t matter; a spell-word is a spell-word. Wolf-Boy has his innocent mistakes, Tall-Boy has his humor and viciousness.
And we girls have our vengeance.
I sling spell-words at Tall-Boy. Ones he knows, like irrational and attitude problem. Ones he doesn’t, like no. I speak ones specially for him, like sad and worthless and empty. The harder he tries to smirk through it, the deeper my tongue carves them into his body.
Other freshman girls chime in. They only speak the words I use, but an echo is better than silence. We know what this will do to him now, and we mean it. We aren’t joking. We are far from calm.
Because girls can be cruel, too.
And I make sure everyone sees. Tall-Boy will turn example at the center of campus. This is the way of college. Sutton University might trigger spell-words to explosions, but we’ve all been silenced before. Tall-Boy hasn’t. He’s never been put in his place, has no tolerance to the pressure. It builds quickly inside him.
I strip off my jacket, roll up my sleeves and leggings, expose my midriff and ribs and every spell-word etched into my skin. A new carving tattoos my sternum, and I speak it now. It echoes the first exploding girl. One last spell-word to bring white light bursting from the first exploding boy.
Silently, I thank Allison for teaching it to me.
GOODBYE