Page 77 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

Every time I glance at her, her eyes remain fixed on her own reflection, and the longer she withholds her attention, the more I need it, the more my need evolves into a real thing. It pulsates with memory, a heartbeat all its own.

I exhume a long-sleeved shirt from the bottom of the drawer. It squeezes me like a corset, tight enough to make my breasts ache, but at least it conceals my scars. She’s never seen those. The biting only started once we ended.

Zoe smiles meekly at me through the mirror. She asks me to watch TV with her for a little while. She doesn’t want to be alone yet.

We slink beneath silk sheets and rest our pretty heads on silk pillowcases. We find a rerun ofFriends, the episode where Monica thinks Chandler is jacking off to sharks. With every burst of canned laughter, Zoe sidles closer. Skin meets skin, her forearm brushing mine, her thigh against my own. Girls are so soft. It’s the best thing about us.

When her lips find mine, I taste her heartbeat. She kisses me like I am water, like I am air, like I am breath. Like I am inevitable. My body fizzes with desire like a can of shaken cola.

It is an emotional bloodletting, a return to a place long forgotten in the fog of memory. The topography of our bodies has changed—mine most drastically, sculpted and sanded beyond recognition—but the choreography of our desire has not. Legs entwined, spiraling around each other like vines. Hands in hair. Mouths on necks.Do you still like this?Yes, yes, always yes, Zoe. Her breath, my breath, mingling hot and golden together, smoldering. When she peels my shirt off, my bite mark scars glow silver in the television light. She doesn’t ask.

Touches, featherlight. The curl of a finger, the flick of a tongue. Her body is delicate and birdlike, enchantingly different from my own. She wants me to tell her she’s a good girl, and I do.There you go. That’s it.She tastes like saltwater and pennies when she comes on my tongue. Contrary to all the poetry you’ve heard, women never taste like nectar or candy. I wouldn’t have them any other way.

She is on top of me with one finger inside me, then another, and her smile is incandescent.The face that launched a thousand ships.She tells me I’m beautiful when I finally come. It is a reward for both her patience and mine. She slips her fingers out of me and brings them, still glistening and slick, to my lips, andI take her fingers into my mouth and taste myself, and then I bite, just forcefully enough to make her gasp.

The ecstasy is agonizing. So is the comedown, quick yet deep like the slash of a pocketknife. Nostalgia is no match for reality.

Our heads return to their respective pillows, a valley of mattress now separating us. The heat between us cools to shy indifference. A different episode ofFriendsis on, one I don’t recall, and we feign interest in the plotline to avoid talking about what we’ve just done. I want to ask her if this means anything to her, but I don’t. I already know the answer.

In five years, Zoe will have a wedding band on her finger and a husband in her bed. He will be generically handsome, good at polite conversation but mediocre at oral sex. She will smile at him over a dinner spread of dishes that she cooked singlehandedly and tell herself this is good, this is right, and when she thinks back on this night, how pretty I looked beneath her, she will shudder and remind herself it was just a phase. I am merely a waypoint on a journey that will take her far away.

I lock the bathroom door behind me. The walls are thin enough that I can still hear the studio audience’s guffaws. I stare at my naked body in the mirror, every scar and tattoo coloring my skin, and wait for my eyes to fill with tears that never come. I imagine unzipping my ribcage and cupping my hands at my sternum, ready to catch the sadness when it pitches out of my chest, only to look down into my palms and find them traitorously empty. As if this encounter did not mean anything to me either.

Zoe is a waypoint for me too. Zoe is not my destination.

A younger version of myself stares back at me from within the mirror. Underneath the plastic surgery, the tattoos, and the bite mark scars, there is a teenaged girl with amber eyes and crooked teeth. She keeps her hair chopped to her shoulders so no one can yank it. Her nails are bloody from being gnawed to thequick. Greenish veins spread like cobwebs across the hollows of her eyes. Her smiles fall short of her eyes, and she fidgets with her clothing to make sure her bruises and scrapes remain covered at all times.

The girl in the mirror is me, but she is Grace too.

I know what I have to do.

CHAPTER

22

August 22nd

7:50AM

I’M PARKED DOWNthe street from the high school in Carey Gap, hoping my presence does not look as sinister as it feels. Colorful backpacks stream past. Piping laughter takes flight on the wind. A gang of teenage girls, the scariest creatures of all, are clustered a few feet away from me, passing a vape around their circle. Smoke plumes above their heads as if from tiny chimneys.

The silver sedan I’ve been waiting for barrels around the corner. Karishma emerges from the passenger seat before the wheels have stopped moving. She snakes a crossbody bag over her shoulder and waves a shy goodbye to her dad. I watch his car pass mine. I count to three.

I pounce.

Karishma’s dawdling pace means I barely break a sweat to intercept her at the flagpole. When she hears me calling her name, she turns away from the nearby gaggle with carmine redcheeks. She lowers her head as she shuffles toward me, as if her acknowledgement of my presence poses an existential threat to her social status.

She tucks her arms beneath her ribs and rocks on her heels. “Is it even legal for you to be here?”

“I need to talk to you about Grace.”

“Okay, well …” Karishma gestures to the locker hallway, where students bottleneck at the doors in their rush for first period. “I have physics in, like, six minutes.”

“What would it take to convince you to get in my car?”

“You’re insane.”

Insane? No. Hell-bent. But they look so much alike. The warning bell shrieks. The bottleneck at the locker hall vibrates with frenzy, everyone jostling their way toward the double doors. Six minutes has become five will become four will become a missed opportunity, gone up in smoke.

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