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On the mirror’s other side there is a demon who dwells.
In the rare occasions where she feels brave enough to face it Nathania counts twenty multiples of three one at a time—as her math tutor Mrs. Inés has been teaching her—and stands on an elegant wooden stool that Nathania herself carries from her bedroom of princess locked in the tallest tower to her private bathroom, carelessly placing it in front of the mirror to observe her own reflection. Still, Nathania must stand on her tiptoes and crane her neck upwards, holding onto the bathroom sink for additional support.
Overmuch small even for such a little girl! Aren’t you worried that Thumbelina has more chances than you to reach the moon, Junior?
Nathania is just the right size so that when she sneaks through the green grass in the garden a bear trap will jump on her and sink its metal fangs into her and make Nathania scream, however. So that the adults of the world can chew her politely with silver utensils and cloth napkins at the main dining room table—accompanied by the maids and butlers once Nathania has been served as a main course, without smearing her blood around like mashed potatoes. But Nathania never screams. Screaming is dangerous. This Nathania knows. A scream attracts the attention of the police and the police are a problem for her kind, capital P. More murderers than anything else. Whenever their weapons are fired bullets roll in the mud going all oink, oink!
What’s the point of screaming if it only makes you a voyeuristic spectacle for another?
Lola loves when people scream. Nathan is the same. The most obvious conclusion to these two facts is that Nathania must keep quiet at all times, duh. Don’t give them the satisfaction. May their pain hurt Nathania in a way that can only be communicated through sign language with all the people present around her so that no one can ever hear it because no one will take the trouble to learn to translate it all.
Push your voice off some stairway, my sweetest! Hush, hush!
Following this principle Nathania never dares to insult her father to his face either. Or behind his back. Or even while counting numbers instead of sheep already about to fall asleep, more numbers than fingers on both tiny hands—the exact number of daily superficial wounds that both Nathan and Lola paint over her with blades like crayons on a notebook paper, and fists, belts, shoe soles, canes—nothing noticeably permanent that could ruin the attractiveness of an older Nathania for when she can be offered to some other rich mafia important man so that Nathania fulfills her duties and has her belly swell and grow with a heir, also imprisoned from the womb. A grandson for Nathan—another child to terrorize and psychologically slaughter.
The worst kind of game. Mental games. Brain games. Sticky ones. As sticky as brain woo! And blood! And raspberry jam in a jar!
Nathania fears that in some inexplicable way Nathan will read her mind and learn of her less than favorable opinions of him and then enter her room in the middle of the night all dressed in his satin pajamas with a durag on and strangle her while Nathania is still asleep in her king-sized bed, full of very expensive but sterile stuffed animals with which Nathan makes her pose in the photos that he gives to his agent to maintain a good public image as a Black Elite family man.
An image painstakingly hand-woven like Mary’s quilts, but three times as cold.
“A father should always be respected by his children, Junior,” he’d tell her the morning after, deceptively calm, strangling her harder still. Depending on his mood Nathan would be wearing a dashiki or a traditional western suit, but whichever it could be they are all completely tailored to his size and quite fine—not a strand out of place, the short coily curls neatly combed and the measured voice. Nathan rarely raises his voice, with her or Mary or any of his other victims. It’s in bad taste, Nathan explains quite reasonably. He’s above all that. He’s above Nathania. “Now, now. Let’s keep this meat business civilized. White people can shout at each other’s lungs however they please, but we know better than to lose our composure.” The guillotine smile practically pasted on his face with super glue. Nathan has perfected the art of fear. He graduated with a diploma and everything—top of his class, perfect grade, straight A’s. His mere presence intimidates more than any shouting. So big, so wide, so tall, so cruel. “Are you gonna be disrespectful to me, my beautiful girl?”
It would be stupid. Nathania is small but not stupid. Or at least that’s what she likes to believe. Maybe her heart was just born stupid.
“No, sir. ‘m sorry, sir,” she would apologize, purple and out of breath.
Mary secretly calls her her Brʼer Rabbit even though Nathania is a girl and not a brother and she feels idiotic more often than not, trying hard to keep her grades up with each private tutor so that Nathan doesn’t hit her more often.
“You are smart,” Mary says, and it rings true, strangely. Sharing her own survival tips as a woman—and not only that but as a Black woman. She diligently spreads antiseptic on them and bandages all of Nathania’s ouches whenever Lola and Nathan are finished with her, failed torture lessons—a derailed plastic train lost on its plastic tracks—don’t you want to grow up to be a murderer like Daddy, mhm mhmm? No! I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna, I DON’T WANNA!—Mary stinking of ashes all the while as they listen to a Queen cassette in Nathania’s room. “What does your gender have to do with you being smart, hm? Nothing. Brʼer Rabbit could be anyone. It cud be yuh. It is you. Blood of my blood, you are courage. You going to outlive us all.”
Their game of privacy of two is very fragile—a box full of treasures in a closet about to slide off. The lock on Nathania’s door shall not be closed under any circumstances, on Nathan’s orders.
I. WANT. TO. BREAK. FREE, sings Freddie Mercury through the music player.
Then Mary puts the first aid kit aside and holds onto Nathania’s face and causes her no harm—the least cruel Mary Wesninski has ever been to anyone on purpose besides her twin brother and the family on the other side of the world, far away in England, with whom Mary broke all contact since they arranged her marriage with a butcher after dressing Mary in sheepskin for her wedding dress—and looks straight into the face of her husband, and only sees her own daughter.
“He does not shape you,” Mary says, but there is indescribable tenderness around her edges. “You do not allow it. You do not allow Nathan to mold you into his image. Ok?”
And Nathania, each time, understands what Mary really means and puffs out her chest and shakes her head. “No!” Nathania squeals. “Mi promise. Mi promise yuh, Madda.”
I promised not to become him and to stop being myself.
“Gud,” Mary says, voice suddenly like a sun—fierce and lethal and burning and essential to any life. Mary gives Nathania a bone-crushing hug. She is shaking with her whole body. Stroking Nathania’s afro puffs, still tender in her strength. “Gud gyal. That father of yours who ridiculously calls himself a family man is undeserving of your face, Abra. It is a waste on him.”
This is why Nathania does not start screaming until her vocal cords burst out in a grotesque parody of firecrackers no matter how much she wants to, nor does she ever insult her father.
She is a good rabbit. A smart rabbit. No bear trap is going to kill her. Nathania will surpass them all, eventually. Mary says so. Nathania believes her. She will escape from their pointed jaws scratched to death but alive.
The demon trapped in the mirror, however, is fair game.
So Nathania wrinkles her pink lace dress. Raises her face, counting more multiples as far as she has learned them in both Patois and English, and before Nathania can cower she looks straight into her own blue eyes and her own red hair and—
x
“I never took you for a coward. You cannot be afraid of a dead man for the rest of your life," Andrea nags her. There is nothing in Andrea’s voice that betrays that Andrea cares or that she’s irritated or that she’s worried about the matter, except the fact that she decided to speak at all instead of continuing to stay silent.
Petulantly childish Nina covers the mirror with a dry towel. Just like she always does when she has to use the bathroom.
Her scarred hands don’t stop shaking until her reflection is out of sight.
She clings to the ceramic of the sink. Takes a deep breath. “Watch me,” Nina says.
x
The Baltimore house isn’t the only thing Mary and Abra leave behind. For a time, fine hairstyles disappear in both.
Often, Mary leaves their hair natural in afros and straightens it on herself with a flat iron so that they spend less hours styling it in the midst of life-or-death chases, or she twists Abra’s natural hair into twists out and flat outs and long-lasting locs that will grow healthily strong for the next few months for the same purpose.
Even if their bodies are dispensable their feet and their respective hair are not.
But sometimes they have time. And water. And hair products of the best quality. Unsulfured shampoo and conditioner and coconut cream and vegetable glycerin in a spray bottle. Sometimes Mary fears that they will accidentally separate and delay their reunion, and so Mary devises a plan. A good plan. Sometimes Abra stands very, very still while Mary braids Abra’s hair into intricate, delicate secret patterns with all the patience in the universe in extra-cheap motel bathrooms and apartment bathrooms where they don’t pay rent—maps that only Mary and Abra are able to decipher, right in front of everyone’s sight.
And Mary tells her, still combing her hair, no secret, “If we lose each other fi whateve reason, no matter how briefly, memba dis map dat mi ave woven inna yuh, and you will find me even at the very end of the Earth.”
x
Nina’s injuries have injuries of their own.
Andrea doesn’t care about that. Or. A lie and a quarter. Andrea only cares why there are injuries where there shouldn’t be any—not the injuries themselves, that Nina is bruised from head to toe because it’s Nina in particular but because Nina falls under Andrea’s protection for a year. She fixes her sharp monolithic eyes on Nina, blades that Andrea never bothers to hide from anyone even off the court and that flay other people’s weaknesses with mere scrutiny. Taking her sweet time lighting a cigarette—and taking a long drag and exhaling it, very flammable. The smoke, this old friend, clinging to Andrea’s clothes as if he had missed her too.
In case of a fire—
Her face is disconcertingly apathetic. Nina can’t take her eyes off her. Afraid that Andrea will fade away like a dream or crack up a crazy smile at any given moment like an omeletteʼs egg in a breakfast’s plate. Does Andrea even have omelette for breakfast, anyhow? Won’t she and Aaron eat ichiju sansai for breakfast instead? Maybe Andrea prefers smoked rice?
There are pronounced dark circles under Andrea’s eyes.
Dark circles under the eyes of someone who clearly had not slept well for three months straight during rehabilitation. The reasons for that could well in turn keep Nina awake at night for the rest of her fleeting existence.
Andrea was much faster as she took back her armbands and put them on again, covering herself from the wrists onwards. Hiding the unhidden. Nina has tried in vain not to think about those self-inflicted cuts since she saw them by accident, and all their possible implications. Nina has tried. Each of her own scars old and anew singing in resilience. This one goes to you, Mary. Sing it. Andrea didn’t even bother to check that the same number of knives were still concealed there.
As if she trusted Nina Josten. Except Andrea doesn’t. It wouldn’t be keen of her, and Andrea is no idiot. She’s smarter than that—and yet Andrea chose to trust Abra, if only temporarily. Due to a short-term barter. One condition.
Truth for a truth.
Eye for an eye.
If it were physically possible Nina would have already given Andrea both eyes. Let Andrea keep them and do with them as she pleases.
A minute drags between them. With its feet and with its hands, its spine all bent. Excruciating. Eventually Andrea points the same hand at Nina that she holds her cigarette with. All of Andrea’s fingernails devoid of cracked black varnish. Another rarity.
Do not blink.
“Fool me once,” Andrea gestures toward Nina’s naked eyes, “fool me twice,” toward her hair stripped of black dye. “I will take my explanation now,” there’s bite in her voice despite Andrea’s brand new general stoicism. “Or should I continue to expect in advance that everything about you is a falsehood? Mayhaps the day after tomorrow you will reveal that your arm is a prosthetic. Or your nose will be made of wood and change size and shape for every lie of yours, lengthening on and on and on. Or you will grow a mermaid tail up at sunset. What will it be, U-s-a-g-i. Should I play the guessing game? Make a bet out of it?”
Nina straightens her back. Her involuntary shiver at hearing Japanese so soon—even from Andrea, or particularly due to it—can be excused by the roofʼs cold weather.
It would be a shame if Riko ruined an entire language for Nina with his fourth-grade boy torture methods. Andrea’s native language, on top of that. It is inconsequential that Andrea rarely speaks it with anyone besides Nina, much less fluently—her accent extremely clumsy, of someone who grew up not listening to it or talking it—though Nina herself doesn’t speak it either, but.
Any lunatic can wield a knife. It’s not that Riko was special.
“Nothing,” she says, swallowing. “This is all me.”
This is all Nathania Wesninski.
Andrea is not buying it. “Including the recent ouches.”
Especially the ouches.
“Oh, those,” Nina is purposely obtuse and looks away. Riko’s living ghost breathing hard behind her neck, kissing the lower part of it with a mischievous breeze. Nina has to resist the desperate urge to turn around to make sure he’s not literally there. Gone, gone with the wind. “I got a new makeover. Deluxe’s Edition: Beaten Wife. What do you think? Aren’t I very pretty?”
“What I think is that your nasty habit of not admitting things as they are has become predictable and, therefore, quite boring,” Andrea puts the cigarette in her mouth again. Faces the cruelty that Nina subjected herself to for almost a month without blinking. “Just answer me this, Little Red Riding Hood. Whose promise was abandoned into the streets as a poor foster child. Yours or mine.”
“None,” Nina replies, her cool attitude pushed to the side. “Kevin remains unharmed in one piece.”
If you don’t count the bruise on his face that Matt gifted him oh so kindly, on Nina’s behalf. Nina could have hugged Matt in gratitude despite the unnecessary action, under any other circumstance.
It wasn’t Kevin’s fault for keeping the secret.
All her secrets.
In another life you were the closest to my first and only friend, Kevin Day.
“That he is. And yet the cotton stuffing falls out of your rag doll seams. Curious, that. Do you care to explain?”
“None,” Nina reiterates. And in a questionable act of sanity, tears the bandage off her left cheek, grimacing in discomfort. Exposing the IV tattoo for the death penalty that it is, the black ink almost as dark as her bistro brown skin. Andrea freezes, but Nina has never had the luxury of being able to stop. Always in movement. Always going from here to there to here. To stop is to die. She continues, ignoring Andrea’s very visible reaction. “I spent Christmas at Evermore. For you.”
Andrea is quick to throw her cigarette off the roof—not even bothering to put it out with the sole of her boot so as not to risk triggering a fire, first—and quick to advance towards Nina, and quick to wrap a hand around her neck, yanking it hard backwards—but also careful not to touch Nina’s hair, her long Fulani braids freshly done the day after New Year’s, not since that fateful first night at Edenʼs—even now, even—exposing her throat to her, Andrea’s other hand painfully holding Nina’s jawline. Nina makes no attempt to fight her. Remains motionless. Not reacting. She lets herself be moved by Andrea. The tendons in her neck these twenty-one strands of musical instrument stretched to their maximum capacity, like a Kora.
The blow does not come.
The blow is not coming because there’s a one-year deal still in place standing between them, and Andrea takes her deals very seriously.
What would it take to make you stay with us?
This is a very risky bet. As far as Andrea is concerned Nina has already risked far too much. Not limited to: her prolonged stay in the lion’s den, one too many pieces of half-truths, Andrea’s palm on Nina’s wrenched stomach, the only real name of a girl raised in a house built on lies and bricks, Riko’s unsavory attention.
Andrea looks livid. “For me,” she spits out slowly. If Andrea were still medicated now would be the idyllic time to laugh and laugh and laugh—laughter like a madhouse, a signal for help. But Nina’s eyes are clean pools full of chlorine and Andrea hasn’t been this sober in years, and that’s the point. Isn’t it? “All this damage, for little me? Do not tell. How flattering. How amazing. Look how moved I am, Nina the selfless. Is it eternal gratitude you seek out for? I recommend you to start begging for it somewhere else before you get lost with us pesky Foxes and our neverending problems. I never asked you.”
“You didn’t have to,” Nina retorts, and ignites herself with a lighter soaked in water. “Riko said that if I agreed to his terms, Doctor Proust would not touch y—"
Andrea puts her palm over Nina’s mouth, leaving the sentence unfinished. And if Andrea was livid before, now—Nina hurts everywhere. What hurts her more is what she apparently couldn’t stop from happening.
Again.
It’s so unfair. The unfairness of it all could make Nina scream. Inspire her to raise her red flags in the air and attract every bleeding bull in the world to share her blood in solidarity. Starting with Andrea, just as long as someone else survives but her.
Once more Andrea does not take long to compose herself. Zero emotions on the surface. Not gone. Not completely. More like lurking around the limits of Andrea’s strict self-control, hungry dogs waiting for Andrea to throw them any bone at lunchtime.
“Oh Nina. Why the long face. Naivety is ill fitting on you, contrary to these new hair and eye colors, or should I say old ones?” Andrea’s sarcasm is harsh, another jab at Nina’s secrecy that only accumulates like a meat debt. “Since when has Riko Moriyama been anything but dishonest. Use your pretty head and think about it. That’s something for you two to share, after all. Along with a cheap tramp stamp. Congratulations.”
“A’dr’a—”
“Nuh uh. Look at that. This conversation has expired.”
Andrea lets go of her with the same viciousness with which she clutched her. She wipes her hand on one of her long sleeves. Grabs a new cigarette out of her pack and lights it. A motion practiced a thousand times, from an expert smoker. Like someone born from the womb already with a cancer stick in hand. Andrea smokes it, this cigarette. Continues smoking it. Almost agitated. Regarding what? Andrea has never faltered when looking at Nina’s true eyes, but at this moment her own gaze is fixed on the horizon, far away from her.
Avoiding looking at Nina at all costs, Andrea says in disdain, “Next time a megalomaniac comes after you you will get off your heroic martyr pedestal and let me handle it, understood.”
Mary used to get between Nathan and Nina’s beatings at most opportunities. A human wall. For what it was useful. My turn, now. I’ll be damned if I see you burn just as I did with her, and my current life-sentence is already too damning. Have you not learned anything, dumb child? Yes. Yes, she has. Andrea should know better than to order Nina around and hope she accepts it meekly.
“No,” therefore Nina answers. Stubbornly—despite everything—more than anything—in reds and blues, predictable in her unpredictability. And touches the tenderness in her throat where Andrea’s fingers were barely there, harmlessly dangerous. “Not if it means losing you.”
x
Are you proud of the person I didn’t become, Mumz?
x
Seth Gordon is found dead in a dirty bar bathroom with multiple syringes buried in his arm and Allison grieves him for three days in a row, not a day more and not a day less, just as her traditions dictate. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un. Or something among those lines.
Allison’s pain is built on a strong foundation. It is a mausoleum and it is a mosque. It doesn’t lack dignity. For Seth’s cremation she brings her heart full of neeyat and her hair covered with a scarf for the first time since Nina has met her, also dressing in modest clothes of flat colors—a long sleeved high-necked blouse, a flowing skirt at ankle-length, her best white socks to pray. For the next few weeks, even in her normal and revealing pink outfits, Allison stops dying her hair blonde. Nina has no idea if it’s intentional or not. She buys another box of dye for herself at a pharmacy, anyway. Applies petroleum jelly to her front hairline, both ears, her neckline. Diligently touches up her roots with more oil-black whenever Matt is out of the dorm hanging out with Dan and opens the windows to air out any ethanolamine stench. So what if that particular color would be considered haram in Allison’s eyes? Nina is not even a Muslim, much less ahl as-Sunnah. An expert at this point in not looking into her own eyes in the mirror even with brown contact lenses in, in cleaning up all the evidence like someone getting rid of a corpse so that there is no funeral.
No red, no red.
Nina can’t think of how to say to Allison—Allison with her naturally dark brown hair and the loss in her features temporarily devoid of lipstick and eyeshadow and mascara and who knows what else and her plates of food stuffed to the brim—: I’m sorry your boyfriend was an asshole and got murdered because of me and my big mouth. I don’t feel bad for him but I do feel bad for you. Might be murdered soon too, if it is any consolation.
Hasn’t had to deal with guilt, before this— before. It’s unexpected. More painful than to bleed out from a gunshot wound on a public road, in some ways. Nina prefers to avoid Allison altogether just as common sense avoids Nina just as Allison avoids non-designer clothing. Even so.
The exact moment Allison goes back to eating normal portions of food and bleaches and dyes her wavy long hair to blonde again and uses cosmetics as an armor and her fighting spirit rekindles like a candle flame, Nina discreetly exhales in relief.
x
The first place Andrea lends a marker for Nina to draw a line on her map and allows Nina to touch it is her hair.
She takes Nina’s balled up hands out of her pockets. Holds them firmly by the wrists on either side of Andrea’s own head. “Just here,” Andrea says, expectantly—both warning and permission—still at a kissable distance.
And Nina, already drunk just from a couple of kisses and with her heart on the tip of her tongue dancing a complete choreography to the rhythm of a winning pass of Exy, relaxes her fingers.
x
As an African American born and raised by African Americans descendant of Afro Polish immigrants Nathan very rarely talks about his ancestors, but across the ocean for funerals they traditionally dress in red.
“It cannot hurt you. It’s just a color,” Nathania repeats to herself, and trembles.
“But what color is it, my miserable daughter,” comments the Nathan of her imagination, smiling from ear to ear.
The real Nathan bathes her in it, despite her protests. He does hurt her. Until Nathania is drowning in blood cells. Until the red turns to black. Until the rest is death and only death.
x
While Andrea plays with Nina’s fingertips and puts bat-shaped stickers on them she reveals one summer, as if it were no big deal, “They liked to pull at my hair.”
Both lying side by side on the bed in Andrea’s room in Columbia, in their underwear—the air conditioning on maximum and the door lock closed from the inside. Ignoring all noise of the outside. Nikki who is playing video games with Aaron in the living room one floor below, and Kevin who snores in his mid afternoon nap on their couch despite the noise directly in front of him coming from the TV screen while Nikki cackles and Aaron complains loudly about losing again against his cousin—stop cheating, augh!
That close. Like a nail to its flesh. Just kissing, Andrea and her. Their mouths wet with oath. Two disarmed homemade Molotov bombs at rest.
Nina is not startled. She refrains from it. To not show on the outside how she is constantly mourning Andrea’s childhood. Not after Nina has tried so hard to control her physical reactions so that Andrea doesn’t feel defensive about sharing more. Even if the horror will always be inevitable.
Thatʼs why.
“When I was raped,” Andrea unnecessarily clarifies, still impersonal. Nina borrows some of that indifference. Just blinks. “All of them did it. They had that in common, besides their preference for sleeping around in child-sized beds. But that was to be expected. You see, my head hurt as much as it did down there on those nights. They yanked my hair so harshly and so often that I was sure they would scalpel me and I would end up having a double bloodbath. Pushing me against pillows to keep me quiet or away from them if they preferred to hear me shriek. And I thought to myself, well, Andrea Josephine Doe, you cannot get rid of your butt hole without turning yourself into a Human Centipede, but you can get rid of this stupid ass hair. Cass helped me get eliminate all the bed bugs I had gotten from previous houses. She cut my split ends quite happily. Once in juvie I sneaked into the kitchen, stole a butterfly knife from the cook and cut all my hair unevenly, not thinking twice about it. Bye, bye long pigtails! Bye, bye sickly migraines at midnight! Once I met Aaron I cut it shorter still, so that we would wear the same haircut on the same face when I left juvie earlier for good behavior. I kept the habit. It was useful, pretending to be him. At school, at the house of that pathetic excuse of a woman, in the garbage dumps with the other addicts that Aaron hung out with, with his promiscuous little girl friends. And then it was hilarious. Already in PSU. I entertained the idea of being his owner. Aaron’s owner. “The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.” Well said, Tyler! Whatever you say, Tyler! Here is a Nobel prize for you. Soap and gold and more soap! You know the deal. So that that no one could tell us apart, and if Aaron were to look at me heʼd always see himself and understand that he would never been alone but regardless of that fact he would neither ever have me completely, nor anyone else,” here Andrea pauses, squeezes Nina’s fingers. Being vulnerable, is it worth it? It surprises, the answer. “But who cares about all that. It is ancient history. Now, though. Now, I like to keep it short,” Andrea forces herself to admit, with more difficulty. “Not as a defense mechanism. I like my hair short. For myself,” and Nina listens. Nods. Offers her unconditional understanding.
It is not for Nina to say: I think you look attractive with short hair, nor: it suits you. Andrea didn’t ask for that opinion of her and what Nina likes or doesn’t like is irrelevant to this conversation. What’s more important. Andrea allows Nina to decorate it with tiny bows and hair clips in hundreds of colors except orange ones on the bus trips to other stadiums and seatted in planes. Braid it into tiny braids, sometimes—Nina looking for tutorials on YouTube for straight hair or with Andrea’s own guide.
Nina doesn’t pull her hair. Ever. She tangles her hands in it and caresses it with tenderness or lust or tranquil. Awed to be allowed that privilege and not taking it for granted. Enjoying its texture so different from her own. But never yanking any strand.
“Fuck them long pigtails,” Nina declares after a while, a little hypocritical considering the length of her own hair, and lets Andrea lick her knuckles one by one, lets Andrea bite her on the joint of her wrist, lets Andrea kiss the palm of her hand.
No less punishing, and so radiant.
“Fuck them long pigtails,” Andrea eventually agrees, discreetly pleased.
x
Even on the rare occasions where Mary and Nathania are alone Nathan is still with them.
“Forgive me for being born his and not yours,” Nathania hurriedly apologizes once, when Mary brushes her hair for hours and hours and hours and hours to no end. It is Mary the only one who teaches Nathania its importance and how to take care of it. Moreover, the only one Nathania allows to touch it even though they can afford any good professional stylist in expensive beauty salons.
Forgive me for forcing you to see his face every time you see me when we both carry his abuse, Nathania wants to say and doesn’t dare.
Mary’s expression is a closed hardcover book. Not for the first time Nathania is unable to read the emotions on her mother’s face. It’s hard to express how scared Nathania is for Mary. For how Mary puts the most expensive makeup on her bruises and turns herself into a human Matryoshka—all these layers hiding her from everyone in plain sight, even Nathania—and insists on insisting that she’s always fine so as not to distress Nathania unnecessarily when FINE it’s not even printed in Mary’s dictionary nor hers.
Eventually, Mary places the wide-tooth comb on her lap. She turns Nathania around in the swivel chair and pinches her cheeks gently. Gathers Nathania in her arms as soon as Nathania squeaks like a mouse.
A little more and Nathania would be sucked back into Mary’s stomach, fusing bone and cartilage and ligaments of muscle—turning into one again. From grave to womb. From womb to world. It wouldn’t be so bad. If Mary gave birth to her a second time perhaps Nathania could now be born correctly.
“Keep that meaningless apology to yourself,” is what Mary says softly, still holding her tightly. “You are not him. Wi belong tuh one anotha.”
x
“You are not getting an apology from me,” Andrea announces out of nowhere as soon as the two leave Wymack’s apartment, Nina politely closing his door after herself because only ignorant people have the luxury of slamming a grown man’s door without the fear of consequence. Andrea’s withdrawal most noticeable now, in the sweat beaded on her forehead and her small spasms and twitches and the exaggerated paleness of her face. Scrappy words like pedestrian walkers pushing each other in a hurry to get out.
Nina mistakenly assumes that Andrea is referring to everything that transpired the night before: the non-consensual drugging, the unfounded accusations, the intimidation, the threats, the kissing and groping of Nikki surely on Andrea’s orders or at least her blind but knowing eye, and waking up in a bed that’s not yours with no idea how you got there, which—no shit. Andrea doesn’t seem like the kind of girl who carries out plans this crazy and invasive just to ask for your forgiveness afterwards, and if she were Nina would rather swim the Atlantic Ocean all by herself sooner than forgive her.
But then Andrea looks pointedly at Nina’s hair, not at all drugged yet and extremely grim, and.
Oh.
“But if you must believe something coming from my mouth believe this, rabbit girl. My hands do not fall on those who don’t ask for them," Andrea keeps saying with some mockery, as if she were sharing a private joke with Nina even though none of this is funny. “Sleep peacefully, you. For I won’t touch you again void of your permission,” so firmly that it convinces Nina at the first try that she is speaking sincerely.
It’s a confusing feeling.
Just half an hour earlier Nina would not have believed Andrea that the Earth was round.
Her memories of yesterday are fuzzy. “Nice hair,” Andrea complimented her insincerely after she and Nina returned from the bar with drinks, the club’s strobe lights illuminating Andrea’s square features in yellow and blue and green and pink. Nina had carefully combed it the day prior, but not for Andrea. “A girl has to wonder if being a Mole includes such a good hair treatment in its contract. Where do you find the time to do your hair being the King’s personal Jester and dressing like a pauper in enemy courts?”
Nina was confused. And nervous. And irritated. And still thirsty despite having drunk an entire medium glass of soda in one gulp. That was when the cracker dust took effect, smacking into her with no further delay. A clean hit. How to be transported in time, volumen one. Nathan’s leather belts. Mary’s eventual slaps. A hot iron. Two weeks sleeping with a bulletproof vest. I’M DYING I’M DYING IDON’TWANTTODIEMUMZ—
Andrea’s abrupt and inconsiderate tug of Nina’s jumbo twists as Nina frantically tried to stand up while staggering was anything but pleasant. You have no right, Nina managed to think lucidly and furiously. You may drug me to the satisfaction of your psychosis but you have no right to touch my hair. Not you. Nor any of your ridiculous B-movies horror minion monsters. Nina smacked Andrea’s hand away, and miraculously Andrea didn’t reciprocate with more physical violence at Nina for touching her back no matter how briefly, and Nina fell right back into her seat, face against the table and dizzy—so, so dizzy, watching all around her in Edenʼs spin and expand and shrink and double in size and melt into hundreds of colorful, vomitive little dots. Ooooooh Alice, we’re really going through it! DRINK ME, the bottle said ominously. No, thanks. It had been too long since Nina had read that story for her own bedtime. She was late, she was—More distressed about finding an escape route as quickly as possible than about the offense of having had her hair touched by Andrea. Her priorities had always been out of order.
Now Nina looks suspiciously at Andrea, standing in the middle of the hallway. Lies, “I don’t care,” and because it’s important and the lie far too ugly with its artificial sugar flavor and she does care, how could she not, Nina emends, correcting herself, averting her false brown eyes. “I’ll believe it when I see it. ‘m holding you on to that, Andrea Minyard.”
x
But her father’s face still swallows her whole—
x
Any smile from Matt is a punch straight to the solar plexus.
Matt laughs with his whole body, the laugh of a lightweight champion who fought and fought and won and got the gold—one two three four, knockout. Boys who are told they are men when they are boys, say no to hard drugs, and the applause aaaaaaaah! Happiness’ my prize and I take it home with my momma, excuse me. Sitting in the same sofa as Nina while they watch television together, a movie of this or that with a Chinese mother saying buoyantly to the world and to her Eldritch daughter: Nothing matters—and the lime green beads that adorn his wicks, short and pointed upright like a riot—reflect the sunlight.
Nina has known nothing but to live in the shadows for almost two decades. Nina is as soft as a raw kidney.
“I like your hair,” she says. Impulsive. And her ears boil. Ninaʼs hybrid Jamaican maternal accent almost slipping out.
Almost.
I like how you wear it as an act of resistance, Nina doesn’t explain. How you do not see it as your own walking funeral. How you aren’t terrified of your hairstyles being flashy in public spaces out of dread that they will make you stand out even more in a sea of other people of color and Black people and instead give you uncomplicated pride in your heritage. How not only is your hair Black but also black, by nature’s design, and how it belongs solely and exclusively to you and not to the man who helped give you life and now wants to steal it from you. Brooklyn, baby.
If Nina were to say any of this—
Matt’s eyes crinkle in compassionate happiness. It’s like he knows, though that is impossible. The last time Nina wore her hair in its distinctive natural shade was eight years ago. She would already be being eaten by worms otherwise. Still, still—Matt gives Nina a firm but friendly pat on the back. Causing Nina’s lemonade braids to wobble around—the air to escape from her lungs, very briefly.
Since arriving at Palmetto, Nina has experimented with all variety of hairstyles given the time available and the clean water and the illusion of stability that the temporary lack of anonymity provides her.
His heart is big, too.
“I know thatʼs right,” he says, smiling wide. Matt’s hand still resting on her upper back. Harmless. Warm. It’s cloudy outside and for Nina the sun shines through closed doors. “Yeah, sis. We have great hair, you and I. Don’t we?”
x
The van continues moving forward and Lola sings in her ear, “Red has always been your color Juniorrrrrrr,” in delight, almost nostalgic. Lola’s long canary-yellow plastic fingernails taking a stroll along Nathania’s neck, and higher still. “I’m glad that that Moriyama brat gave it back to you. It saved us the trouble of doing it ourselves. I mean it. Even if he’s a spoiled pompous idiot he has occasional usefulness, who could’ve guessed. Not me. But, oh. I think I shall send him a fruits basket in thankfulness. Don’t wanna be ingrateful. Where are our manners? Hey Romero, write it down in a note somewhere to not forget it. And you! Pay attention to your elders. Daddy raised you better than that. Any suggestions for the basket, honey? Ah! Maybe some pears. A pineapple... or two... And a photo of you, yes! So that Riko Moriyama has one last chance to admire your new looks! After all, they’re to die forrrrrr. You wouldn’t want to waste these looks with a closed casket, no? No, of course not. What a beauty. What a bombshell. Who is the most beautiful of them all? That’s right! Junior! Junior, my dear! The prodigal daughter! Mhaw, mhaw!”
Disrespectfully twirling one of Nathania’s box braids around her pale finger Lola keeps caressing the rest of her hair with bony fingers, causing Nathania to shiver.
All of her pressed against all of her in the back of the van in which Romero drives towards Maryland at full speed, although careful not to ignore the traffic lights or attract the attention of pigs in their way to the slaughterhouse.
The flame from Lola’s lighter greedily licks every corner of exposed skin that Lola feeds her on. It is so hungry of Nathania. Wherever Lola doesn’t stain her with her own burgundy lipstick and sewer breath, if anything. Opening Lola a pat in turn with a knife to the opposite cheek of Nathaniaʼs tattoo, and back to her hands and arms—the steel blade practically drooling to taste Nathania again after almost a decade of not doing so, and dyeing her torture-red.
“Pretty girl, how we have missed you! Give your Aunt Knife a kiss.”
Pain falls short as a word to describe what Nathania feels. Lola is making mincemeat of her—worse, Lola is burning her. And Nathania has plenty experience with knives but not fire. It burns her like Mary burned when Abra herself lit her in imitation of a torch—Mary’s lifeless cold gray skin clinging to the front passenger seat of the car they had stolen together two cities ago and the choked noise forcibly torn from Abra’s throat when she didn’t had the guts to make a second try to move Mary’s corpse from there and give it a proper funeral rite and instead watched Mary turn to ashes and bone with the entire beach reeking of charred meat as Mary melted and ceased to be until Abra’s eyes forgot how to be dry and she bawled and there were two seas on that coast in Seattle. Abraʼs hair was awful afterwards. The only time. For months. Then she got up, stopped feeling sorry for herself, and fixed it.
This is indeed fitting for Nathania, in a twisted way. It’s no coincidence that her hair has also bled since Nathania was born. It had to be natural red, right?
It spills out, there between Nathania’s box braids that Matt helped her braid a week earlier at Nathania’s own request with Renee’s assistance. But thinking about the Foxes is prohibited. Stop it. They are safe. They do not belong here. You do not belong here. Not with this stench of scorching flesh and knives like sniffer dogs, oh no, oh no. If she belongs to nowhere at least the Foxes belong to Nina Josten. Along with her tears. And her screams. And her hope of living.
Oh, the hope. It is relentless.
Scream, little rabbit-fox, scream.
x
“Have you ever felt like your body is a prison of your own making?” Nina asks quietly as she’s spooned from behind.
Andrea pokes Nina near her exposed navel, Nina’s shirt just a little bit lifted. She places a chaste kiss on Nina’s nape. Tightens her hug around Nina. Her response is immediate. “Yes.”
x
“Get those eyes away from me,” Mary-then-Always-Someone-Else screeches on one of her worst days, and sobs loudly, falling to the floor and collapsing—only behind the safety of a locked door. Mary this pile of crunchy tree leaves in autumn. Crunch, crunch! The gun that she carries everywhere kept in her handbag, and her relaxed hair dyed ash blonde falling all over her anguished face. “Do not let him see us through you. Do not let others see you through him. Abra. Abra. My gyal. I would have already ripped off your entire face with my bare hands if that didn’t make me into your murderer. Who else but me could love you genuinely and unconditionally with those awful eyes?”
Abra-Then-Any-Name-In-Turn feels a stone get stuck in her windpipe and doesn’t choke on it by sheer miracle but barely controls the urge to cough it out. She is still haunted by the blow of Mary’s palm on her right cheek, the slap Mary gave her that made Abra spit out a tooth for having accepted a box of chocolates from a classmate Abra never even learned the name, let alone liked back, on this February 14th, even though Abra has never been a fan of candy. The offense was not the box itself—it was that Mary saw him offer it to her when picking Abra up from middle school and that Abra did not reject the boy—that boys only seek you out for what you carry between your thighs and betray you as soon as they get it and if they don’t get it all the more reason to turn you in, I’ve taught you this already, you are smarter than that. Abra just touched up her hair by herself. It has been temporarily ironed since they arrived at Germany. Who else could love my real self across all my deception but Mumz? Even away from other people’s eyes Abra wears her colored contact lenses except when sleeping, from then on.
x
It gets very exhaustive, pretty quickly.
The instinctive reaction of feeling terrified every time there is a mirror nearby, the nausea caused by the mere idea of looking at herself in any reflective surface even if it is the rearview mirror of the Maserati, her express rituals to desensitize herself in situations, the temptation to buy a box of dye or colored contacts again even though Nina has legal permission to stay in one place, how can she not appreciate herself for who she is but who Nathan was.
Her entire image one vehicle of another—the extension of her worst human monster. Even with Nina’s entire new repertoire of distinctive and unique scars. Even with Nathan’s skin tone much lighter than Mary and Nina’s darker ones, his lightskin medium brown complexion.
Nina has stomached far crueler stuff than body image issues. This should be just a grain of sand on her I’m-fine-but-not-really-yes-that’s-my-own-blood-on-my-shirt-ignore-it-like-I-was-saying scale. Thing is, she doesn’t need to stomach anything else. And doesn’t need to suffer anything alone either. Not with her Foxes holding her up—dividing Nina’s sorrows among nine equal parts.
Trusting others is no weakness. Or so Betsy has claimed during their weekly sessions since Nina surprised everyone by voluntarily deciding to attend therapy at the beginning of her sophomore year—announcing it grumpily in front of the Foxes that mattered at movie night, and then to Wymack and Abby.
“Unreal,” Andrea called her then, not particularly emotional, but the intensity spelled in Andrea’s kisses and how she kicked Kevin and Nikki out of their bedroom for one night and pushed Nina against the mattress and took off Nina’s sports bra to bite and suckle Nina’s nipples in mouth as if she were capable of getting milk from them told another story. Andrea making Nina’s difficult decision to let Betsy pick her brain with a silver tubho tea spoon more bearable, in her own particular way.
Now Andrea declares, bluntly, “I am not dating Nathan Wesninski.”
Next to Nina, supposedly studying for an upcoming exam. Not in the school library but in the living room’s dorm because Andrea is allergic to libraries and if she views Katelyn making out with Aaron surrounded by so many books—her blessings for them to be miserable together aside—nothing would stop Andrea from throwing some milkshakes at both in disgust, soaking them, and that being benign. Andrea has not turned the pages in her textbook for five minutes.
Disoriented, Nina stops chewing on her pencil and rubs her eyes with the back of her palm. “What.”
“I am not dating Nathan Wesninski,” Andrea reiterates. She pronounces his name as if it were not worthy of being produced by her vocal cords. Three seconds away from spitting on it and beating it to death as if it were Nathan himself. “It is not him who I kiss," she adds, grinding her teeth. “It is not him who I make love to. He is not the one who verbally defends me from opinions I couldn’t care less about. Not the one who buys me pints of ice cream as a bribe so I don’t slack off at stickball practice with the rookies as to accomplish his Vice Captain duties. Not the one I gave a key called home to. Not even the one I asked not to leave. I do not sleep in the same bed as him. We do not take showers together. I sure as fuck do not allow him to hold my hand. Nor kiss my neck. See me cum.”
Nina knows all this. In theory. In practice. Just as she knows that a polynomial is an expression made up of numbers and letters. It would be downright insane to believe that it’s Nathan living Nina’s life through her body.
And yet.
Yet.
She shudders. Andrea is being very cruel.
“What,” Nina repeats, perplexed.
Andrea takes Nina’s chewed pencil and throws it against the wall. Her strength is such that the pencil ends up breaking in half. It lies there on the ground.
That cost three dollars. Tremendous waste.
“My girlfriend is you, Nina Abra Josten. Not the homicidal abusive specter of your sperm donor. Is that clear enough? Stop this boredness or I’ll make you.”
Nina frowns. Clenches her fists on the desk. Anger bubbling fast in her windpipe, a current of electricity. And beneath that anger some kind of terror.
Basic formulas.
Nina says, “You saw his photos. You saw... when I disappeared in Binghamton and you strangled his name out of Kevin alongside everything else, you looked him up on the internet on Nikki’s phone and saw a picture of him,” she protests weakly. “Mi luk like him.”
Andrea does not agree. Still she answers, “I look like Aaron.”
“Maybe,” Nina shrugs her shoulders, also disagreeing. “But Aaron didn’t torture you psychologically and physically for a decade nor he spend another nine years hunting you and your mom around the Globe to make an example of you.”
Someone must give in.
“Abra.”
“Andrea, I’m telling you no. Are you going to ignore it?”
Someone must give in. It’s a low blow, that’s why Nina uses it.
“What did I tell you about putting your leash on me,” Andrea asks, violence outlined in her broad shoulders and the thin line of her lips, but still giving in. Nina doesn’t feel any satisfaction. Her expression must give her away. Andrea opens and closes her hands, typical of when she wants to hit windows but holds back, a relaxation exercise approved by the queen bee. Nina may still not completely like Betsy as a person but as a therapist she certainly has her uses. It is not without reason that Andrea holds so much esteem for Betsy.
If they were worse versions of themselves either of them would have already slammed the door on their way out and ignored each other for bitter days or weeks, or they would be yelling hurtful things, or perhaps—in an extreme case—hitting each other. They are not. The worst version of themselves, that is. The apples fall far from the tree. They crawl over the hills to greener pastures, bleeding peel and juice and tons of blood.
They both continue eyeing each, tense and not.
Nina hates arguing seriously with Andrea, no matter how infrequent it may be. The anger escapes her hands. “I have never wanted to leash you. You owe me a new pencil,” Nina deflates, cautious and dull.
A white flag. The whitest one.
Humming some tune or another Andrea pinches Nina’s ear after exactly five minutes, the kind of affectionate pinch that lacks any hurting.
She accepts it.
“When have you ever?” But Andrea’s gaze remains half-lidded, contemplative. Not given up yet—not on the matter, definitely not on Nina. “I'll buy you one in the shape of a carrot,” Andrea eventually says.
x
“Please get my father out of me,” Nathania whimpers in a tiny voice.
Mary covers Nathania’s eyes. “There is no one else within you besides you, Abra.”
“Get that man out of you,” Mary demands loudly.
Abra does not cover her own eyes. “...There’s no one else within me besides me, Madda.”
x
Andrea Minyard wears her hair very short—almost like a boy’s—when they happen to meet. It’s a very light blonde, practically white, like bleached bottled blonde, but clearly not dyed. All straight, not even a little wavy either in the roots or in the ends. Strands split and neglected.
It’s the hair of someone who shows no care about it. And it’s not that Nina is familiar with vanity but the idea still disturbs her a little.
How strange, Nina thinks for the tiniest of seconds, lying on the floor of the lobby at Millport High and trying to catch her breath without any band-aids put on her to be good as new. But then Andrea picks Nina up at the airport terminal disguised as Aaron—large bust hidden in a baggy T-shirt just like his and what Nina will discover in two years when she inquiries about it some bandages acquired solely for that purpose, armbands hidden behind long lose sleeves also—hyena smile that has temporarily disappeared likewise as a ripped bounty poster in big letters of WANTED!, a practiced manly deeper voice, men’s clothes, boy’s haircut deliberately stylized to appear even more masculine—and Nina is none the wiser until she realizes that Aaron doesn’t have a cigarettes’ box in his back pocket nor smells like ashtray anymore.
Andrea’s haircut makes more sense, with that. Nina stops questioning it so much.
They are identical except for where they are not—the Minyard twins. Mirror twins. Oh sure. Why the hell not. Unlucky number ten. Their faces may be the same but their ire couldn’t be any more different. It overflows individualism and personality. It is also lost in erroneous translations that are impossible to be understood by the other without a know-it-all nosy dictionary in between.
It’s still strange.
Andrea Minyard is a girl who fills Nina with curiosity—unlike her insipid brother—despite Andrea’s clear mental instability and all the caution signs that surround her and warn of danger. If Nina tried to solve Andrea just for the funsies of it she has no doubt that more bruises would appear near her navel, that Nina would end up dead in a ditch before her already limited time runs up, surviving from hour to hour.
Good sense is not her strongest suit.
When Nina closes her eyes she can feel Mary’s nails digging into her arms and creating new life lines all RED RED RED urging Nina to focus on what matters if she plans to continue being this absurd.
Boys are dangerous Abra, and girls who look like boys are no exception.
Nina should ignore Andrea and her boyish haircut. Instead Nina watches her from afar—in extreme caution, not as an new hobby—and sees her talent, and sees her boredom, and sees her selflessness, and sees her violence, and sees her control, and sees all her contradictions, monstrous humanity and human monstrosity, and curses every blonde strand in Andrea Minyard’s head. Hitting balls against walls in drills so that they bounce and knock the cones out on the court and fantasizing all the while that they are Andrea herself.
Breaking
under
all
that
pressure.
x
Black walls. Black floor. Black uniform. Black hair—no, not black, not really—it was—was—
What color was it—?
R for Riko Moriyama and—
And the light bulb that emits a constant hum of dead flies feasting on carrion pecked by crows—
Say you will be a Raven, MY Raven. SAY IT SAY IT SAY IT—
But Nina was no raven. Nina wasn’t even the rabbit anymore, no more, this is the moment you become—although Nina would always be Brʼer Rabbit yes, Mumz had sworn it to her, yes yes yes, my brave gyal you will outlive us all, yes—and Nina is—she’s Nothing, true, but Nina is a fox as well, or at least she wishes to be one so fiercely that she’d be willing to saw off both her legs with a paperclip just to stay—true to herself, with all of them—oh how she wants it, and if she were to belong to anyone it wouldn’t be Riko, fuck that, it would be—it would be A—
Let them all look at their orange on her from a satellite in outer space and know her not alone because—
But the color Nina is looking for is not orange either, uh uh. Nina is sure of that even in her confusion. Orange is safe, is pack, is Exy—this color, on the other hand, is a little darker than orange but less so than black, what—
What—?
Nina’s scalp is on fire, she feels it. Very painful and piping hot. Someone call the forestry services to put it out, someone—! Bleach hair longer than recommended since Riko has never bleached anyone’s hair and wouldn’t think to ask but—
Since when does Riko need to use things like bleach hair—?
He who growls: MY RAVEN! MINEEEE!
And she who answers: NO! NOT YOURS, NEVER YOURS! YOU IMBECILE.
But someone is touching Nina’s hair indelicately regardless and she didn’t ask for it, SHE DIDN’T, SHE—
She said: I won’t touch you again, and against all odds Nina believed her because believing in Her was as simple as distrusting her own shadow and, and—
And Jean who murmurs, “Sorry,” morosely through those beaten pawn lips of his. Sorry for touching your hair, little devil. Nonetheless separating it into sections with hairclips. The clumsy hands of a self-taught person. Nina didn’t take long to notice his shaved head at the banquet. How where she and Matt and even Renee had it long Jean’s hair was nonexistent. It lacked autonomy. It required less time and effort in maintenance. Clear symbol of a puppet, of property. Wasn’t it time for Jean’s body to become a revolution?
The malicious constant pulling of Nina’s roots is unmistakable. How it burns, how it burns, how it transforms her from Nina Josten to—
But the aroma of ammonia does not cause her any comfort. Not like cigarettes do, from Mary and from—who was it?
A bathroom as oppressive as a coffin. Two Ravens and a Rabbit-Nothing-Fox hybrid. More flies. Water from the open tap in the porcelain tub. The ticking of the clock. Riko who asks, “Are you going to kneel for me now?”
And Nina who answers, guffawing, “Ask me in a week.”
Eyes open and eyes closed approximately every thirteen seconds, and Nina awfully dazed. They are icy blue. Her eyes. Nathan blue. Hideous blue. Nina knows this because Riko made Nina eat all her brown colored contact lenses one at a time on her first day in the Nest, not letting her throw them any up afterwards. And Nina won’t remember much about her stay in the bowels of this poem by now but she remembers that. At least there are no mirrors around. At least—her left cheek aches intensely since yesterday morning-afternoon-night? Or maybe since—and Nina has forgotten why, though. She should not. It feels—of vital relevance. A needle that stings and oozes and stings and oozes and. How painful. How painful. What a pity. Oww. It’s fine! You’re fine! We’re fine—! If Nina is certain of one thing, however, it is that her two-week limit that turned out to be three is on everyone’s heels and no contract has been signed on her name yet. Nor will it be.
That is Nina’s victory.
Riko can’t take it off her—not like her colored contact lenses, nor like the orange of her veins.
Not Riko with his false tone of composure and his comically furious expression in contrast—humiliated and living on his knees on the tatami mats of his shinden mansion in front of his father and his uncle and his older brother and yet demanding respect from everyone else. A boy who plays at being a man who has been denied his opportunity to ride the family’s carousel of death.
“It is quite tiresome to await for your compliance,” Riko adds, ignoring Nina’s insubordination, aware of all this. That his torture games are not infinite nor is Nina’s stay in Evermore, and the poem is in its very last verses and Riko still hasn’t gotten the girl—neither as a pet nor as a woman nor as a numbered player nor as a hunting trophy.
He leans down a little, thin black strands escaping from his previously neat short ponytail—and lets go of her hair to squeeze her cheeks like a fish, all capricious fury.
There’s copper swimming freestyle in Nina’s mouth, and her nose is bleeding too. So much fun! Bruises and cuts and newborn wounds festooning across most of her body. Edgar Allan’s uniform with the last name WESNINSKI and the number DEATH written on her back—damp from fresh water and half-dried blood—and Riko wanting to force Nina into a rotten meat dress in Nathania’s name that is already too small for Nina, worm larvae eating its fancy frames. You need better tips to ruin me, Nina considers in delirium. Maybe I’ll send you Lola Malcom's number to rectify that. Ha. And there, behind her back, Jean Moreau. Jean who holds her by both arms against his broad chest without exerting the necessary pressure for Nina to finally fall to her knees even though Jean has the force and capacity to—pretending instead to be mute and blind and deaf and anywhere else but here, Versailles or Paris or a trash can being more preferable. Jean this great temporary wall on which to lean as an unsatisfactory replacement of—of—pills and goalkeeping. How did it go? Nina’s heart fissures. Too many heart juice. Jean’s perfect native French this mix of defeated anger and incredulous frustration whenever he bandages Nina at the end of each day as they both watch her blood slowly drain down the drain—your punishment is my punishment you ridiculous, stubborn crazy woman. Stop provoking the jester-king.
She cannot.
She cannot give up.
Unfortunately for Jean, Nina is not in the habit of obeying psychopathic deranged men unless their name is Nathan Wesninski and was never taught to share her own portions of suffering with anyone other than Mary at dinner time neither.
That kind of selfless selfishness is innate. An apology works as a two interconnected pedestrian path. It is me who is sorry, Jean.
Ninaʼs head and cheekbone hurt like hell.
“Maybe you should buy a stool to sit on under your door lintel while waiting,” Nina replies as soon as she can, ignoring her own slurring.
Everything is so heavy, so—
Nina could be shipwrecked inside a glass of juice and sink to the bottom. Possibly. Where are your internal alarms creating a ruckus, you fool?
The gloating Raven that yells: TIME TO PAINT YOUR CANVAS. YOU ARE GOING TO LOOOOVE THIS. JEAN, PREPARE OUR WATERCOLORS.
And the Fox who writhes and wallows and has no escape from the trap and its terrible metallic embrace and is terrified but still goads back at it, full of conviction: DO YOUR WORST. C’MON! C’MOOOOOON!
Something about funerals—and how this is Nina taking responsibility and not running away—her feet firmly planted in their place. Remember why you do this, for whom—remember—
Artificial stains on the floor and Jean becoming a sad human-shackle for Nina—I AM DEEPLY SORRY, LITTLE DEVIL, SO, SO SORRY FORGIVE ME—
REMEMBER. DAMN IT.
you lie and lie and expect me to trust you—
very short blonde hair caked in crushed strawberries—
and Kevin was temporarily safe yeah he was with warranty included even not like—
give me the fucking plane ticket I won’t ask for it twice—
but the doctors were so easy to buy—
and freshly raped [] said I’m going to kill him but Nina had responded hollowly he’s already dead—
gentlemen prefer them blondes didn’t you know, Wesninski? and the laughs that [] laughed against a pillow while Nina hurried to cover her naked body with a not-so-bloody sheet were nightmarish—
trust me trust me trUST ME I WILL NOT SAY THE P-WORD BECAUSE YOU DON’T LIKE IT AND IF YOU WON’T PROTECT YOURSELF I WILL GLADLY DO IT IN YOUR PLACE I’VE ALREADY GIVEN MY BACK TO YOU SO— SO—!
Riko disapproves of many things about Nina, including her inability to cooperate. His cruel hands leave her cheeks to tug at her hair again—brutally, lovingly. A parody of tenderness that turns your stomach in, and Riko longs for her like poison longs to infect someone healthy. Drake Spear’s hand on And—for how many nights? Riko’s hand on Nina’s hair for two weeks. Unbearable. A tolerable small price to pay in comparison.
Do not run, bunny girl.
You are courage, Brʼer Rabbit.
“I do not like that disrespectful big mouth of yours at all, Nathania,” Riko hisses, his patience minus one.
And Nina with nothing to lose. Nothing that is everything. Everything that matters.
Nina who says, “And yet you take every opportunity to spit on it," and she coughs, and laughs, her gums pink, every row of teeth impeccably white and shiny and a public rejection of Riko’s crown. “Curious.”
And there must be something—something on Nina’s face—Riko takes a step back, startled. Quickly he composes himself, however. Not satisfied with that answer Riko jerks harder on her roots. Forces Nina to bite her tongue.
Hard.
But she refuses to cry. Refuses to run away. Mary put up with far worse than this from Nathan for many more years. What right does Nina have to cry now? How could Nina not keep silent and persist as her mother’s daughter?
Voice full of poison on the tip of his dagger and with a contorted face Riko insists, “Kneel.”
Jean’s tension is palpable. Pardonne-moi, is his whisper. And with Riko’s command he pushes Nina down. And he doesn’t stop pushing. His big hands look like butchery, the latex gloves all dirty. Who has Jean killed recently but himself, little by little? He should grow sponge curls someday.
Nina hurts so badly and.
Her responsibility.
“I think you’ve confused me with someone else,” she manages to snarl with a lot of effort, and probably a fever and an infection or six. “Is this “Neil” in this room with us? My name is Nina.”
Riko digs his fingernails harder into her scalp.
All that re—
“Now, you— you! Insolent. Last chance Nathania,” Riko warns her, changing fluently into Japanese to hiss, “Yotsunbai ni nare.”
Nina gazes straight at Riko’s face. I am not HIM and HE is not you. I can survive YOU.
“Make me,” she challenges, spitting her own blood onto Riko’s shoe—a perfect aim worthy of the rookie striker who conquered the nation in one single game. Kevin would be proud of Nina. Or maybe just horrified. She hopes he’s having a good time in New York, accompanied by Matt and Nikki and Aaron. The trifecta of perfect defense, of backliners. Poor Kevin! One day we will build you the most unbreakable and tallest spine of them all, you’ll see! Not that Nina is capable of thinking more about the subject. Riko loses what little patience he has left. There is a knife. Growing pains. The story of her life. Nina’s head isn’t the only thing burning in her, at least.
All that レッドsplashing around.
Oh. That was it. Red blood. Red stains. Red dye. Red hair—
Nina’s entire body is a bunch of inverted pins piercing her inwards. She gasps.
And finally remembers.
(Andre—)
x
Andrea’s best kept secret is this: she is an anchor. Her job is not to sink you but to prevent you from getting lost and drifting. Nina—with all her waves on display—sits comfortably on Andrea’s lap, her thin scarred arms loosely wrapped around her neck, and kisses Andrea unhurriedly. Small licks to her palate and more love in her bones than could fit on a whole planet.
Now or never, the thought arises, furtively interrupting the pleasant joy swimming circles on Nina’s mind. Nina dares to jump to the shore. Whispers rather boldly, “I want you to touch me,” right at Andrea’s ear pierced by too many earrings, before biting it a little in a mischievous gesture.
As if to prove a point and not to waste the opportunity presented to her Andrea gives one appreciative squeeze at Nina’s ass through her tight orange leggings in return. It brings Nina closer to her—personal space a crime only when it comes to Nina. She doesn’t remove her hands.
“Never took you for someone blind, bunny girl,” Andrea mocks. “Shiranai nodesu ka? I am touching you.”
Their sweats interwoven like the net of a heavy racquet. Nina holds back the urge to smile. She breaks off their kisses for the sole purpose of hiding her face in the crook between Andrea’s neck and shoulder blades, oddly shy, and shakes her head. Organize your thoughts, Abra.
From A to Z.
Once, Nina asked in curiosity if Andrea wished she had not been surgically separated from her paternal culture before she was born. Andrea didn’t say anything for several minutes, only to end up replying: wishes are for children. She still continues to study Japanese in her free time. Even bought a top-quality boxwood tsugegushi on a whim to brush her hair.
Be more specific, Andrea means now. Nina has no problem using her infinite arsenal of words to express herself.
“Not there. Well, yes there. Yes everywhere. That’s what I’m getting at. I just...,” here is the moment to swallow, to prove herself that she’s no coward. “I like your hands on my body,” Nina admits, shyness showing a little more. Andrea tightens her grip on her. “All my body. All the time. And I’ve been thinking— My hair. You never touch it. Not since... Yeah. And I was fine with it, before. But today and tomorrow I would like you to do it. I am telling you this frankly. I won’t be angry. Nor will I consider it insulting or a micro-aggression. Not if it’s you. If I acquiesce to it even though you have never asked me. Suh you cya. If you feel like it. This is my permission. Dis to me asking yuh. I would really, really like it if you touched it, Andrea. For you to touch me. So that no part of my body is deprived of the touch of your fingers because I belong to you in my entirety. My hair is no longer an exception.”
For some reason Nina is short of breath, more so than after running suicides across the field. For half a second she fears she has revealed too much. A feeling similar in magnitude to when Andrea suggested that Nina could watch her masturbate on certain days instead of closing her eyes or covering them with a blindfold when Andrea had had finished fingering Nina stupid, no doubt. Andrea’s big muscles aren’t stiff, not exactly, but they’re not very relaxed either, and Nina’s mouth feels dry with growing unease.
Then Andrea exhales, on purpose. Any tension is removed from her like an irritating mosquito. She says monotonously, not moving an inch away from Nina nor questioning her decision or its suddenness, still clinging to Nina, “If that’s what you want.”
A yes is a yes is a yes.
With them. And Nina—
The complete certainty of her yeses as far as Andrea is concerned could incinerate Nina’s every cartilage. A pyre of devotion to warm a hundred winters. Their shared beats thunder in her ears to the rhythm of public Wadaikos. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. So loud. Nina nods. Allowing herself to be supported by Andrea, for this continuing yes.
“It is,” she says, more easily, with confidence. “I trust your heart intentions.”
And that’s that.
Andrea doesn’t touch it that day, but that is to be expected. Nor the next one. Or the next of the next. Nina is not distressed. Time grows wings and flies around in whims. Here Nina trusts. Here Nina’s life is lived. Here Nina puts a gray bandana on her tightly coiled curls before going to class one morning, yawns, bites into a piece of toast. Here Andrea tugs on the collar of her blouse casually in the kitchen so that Nina stays still, and Andrea tugs again so that Nina bends over a little and Andrea can adjust the bandana, her deft fingers running superficially like a summer breeze over Ninaʼs hair without any drama or scandal, but not through it, from top to bottom until stopping at Nina’s parted lips, the pressure of her thumb. Here Nina thinks neither of Riko nor of Lola, and her stomach is full of ecstatic hornets. Here Andrea looks at her silent but intense. It’s wonderful on here. It’s lovely on here.
Submerged at the bottom of the ocean neither of them drown due to lack of oxygen.
x
“You should have been Court,” Kevin murmurs with immense distress. Meaning: in another life I call you my dheirfiúr and you do not break my hand into pieces or ruin my self-esteem.
It is not in Nina’s nature to initiate hugs but she thinks she’d like to make an exception for Kevin.
“Cruelty has never suited you,” Nina snorts in French, kicking Kevin’s leg in a friendly manner. The soles of Kevin’s well-worn tennis shoes, his short pristine black hair glistening with sports sweat, calluses on both of their hands from handling a racquet too much, and the Foxhole’s court at their feet this sanctuary that extends for yards beyond the muted board and closed plexiglass walls. The dream of continuing to dream. Time to wake up, Nina. “Don’t tell Andrea,” she begs in a hasty demand, and insists when Kevin expresses disagreement.
Regret has no place in Nina.
And on another occasion.
“I know what he’s like,” Kevin whispers in obvious discomfort. “If you’re willing— I can listen to you.” Meaning: I have had enough of this guilt. Won’t you help me bury it in some open cemetery?
Regret still has no place in Nina. Nina doubts that Kevin really knows.
Since leaving Edgar Allan she washes her hair five times a day. The half-exorcised ghost of Riko’s unwanted fingers doesn’t disappear, nor does the unnatural red. It’s fine. Nina is fine. She can always impulsively shave her head, like Jean. Start wearing hats and caps or even a nun’s robe. More significant, waiting here in Easthaven’s waiting room with its white floors and white walls that reek of sick people, Nina barely manages to hold onto Riko’s promise that Andrea would remain untouched by bitten nails until she feels like puking. Both the staff and the patients do not stop looking at her in their peripheries, some not even hiding it—a Black girl with her colored hair and eyes does not go unnoticed. A Black girl who looks like she has recently been trampled by thirteen consecutive heads of cattle less so. Nina didn’t miss this. Feeling so exposed. The fresh bruise above Kevin’s II matches one of Nina’s bandages, she realizes in her compulsive inspection of the hospital—same location, same size. Kevin hasn’t noticed. Kevin doesn’t notice many things.
She hopes for him to not notice this. Not until Nina is ready.
“Have you ever thought about letting your hair grow?” Nina asks, no reasonable explanation whatsoever.
Seated to her right Kevin frowns. Same Wymack frown. Were none of them really able to suspect it? They share the same nose and eyebrows—Wymack and Kevin. The definition in their shoulders. The hair tone. The width of their ankles. The height in their stature.
If you know what to look for. If you have read the correct secret letter.
Most of Kevin is Kayleigh, nevertheless—from his fair skin tone to his olive green eyes. Mom’s matching son to her Dad’s matching daughter. Nina tells herself that this doesn’t make her jealous. Knows it a lie.
Lucky, lucky Kevin. Who else but him is familiar with winning even when he loses?
“It would be unbecoming of a man,” Kevin answers haughtily, just like in one of his typical interviews but lacking the fake charisma. Despite his unwavering support for Nina, Kevin has trouble staring at Nathan’s face.
Red and blue.
“Says who? The white man from the West? As if his opinion were so special,” Nina looks at Kevin out of the corner of her eye— imagines him, imagines him vividly, drums her fingers on her knees, bruised and sore and decorated with scabs like stickers from falling and falling so much on Riko’s kingdom. “Think you could grow it out,” she proclaims casually. “Your hair. It would make Coach happy.”
It’s clear that Kevin doesn’t appreciate this hook, how Nina sticks it into his flesh without Kevin taking any bait—which implies that they’re unintentionally sharing another secret for their pile of secrets. Too bad. Nina can see Andrea’s silhouette in the distance accompanied by a nurse, getting closer and closer. She stands up, anxious. Yes, it wouldn’t hurt Kevin to look physically more like Wymack in the future. Like good father, good son. And who would not want to look like the father of all fathers and be proud of it enough for everyone to see it too? Just a fool, Mary would hiss.
Nina is dumb but not that dumb. More envy with which to hang herself.
“Don’t be a fool, Kevin Day,” Nina implores again, still looking in Andrea’s direction. “Do me a favor and grow your hair after I’ve died, okay?”
And with an obvious limp in her step Nina walks away from Kevin, not waiting for an answer.
x
Nathania is educated and studies and smiles and lies and endures and overthinks and plays Exy and runs and hides and obeys everything except her special lessons in the basement and is clever and is dumb and she is hit and she is hit and she is hit and she is hit and she endures some more.
Even if the father dies what prevents his only daughter from automatically becoming the man of the house?
Hiding in a cupboard full of cans from the pantry and hugging her knees to her chest while evading one of her nannies Nathania says to no one, “My blood is contaminated,” more bruises on arms and legs than planets in the galaxy, her shoes shining anew.
He will always live within you.
x
Imagine that there is a girl who goes by many names many faces and none at the same time and imagine that there is a man in her life the only loud and grumpy man who likes to shout and throw things that she is not afraid of and feels comfortable being around and imagine that he is her Coach her rangatira while she is his half Fox in the making and imagine that he picks her up from the airport after two weeks of being missing but not as soon as she calls him after regaining consciousness and imagine that he also takes her to his apartment because it is a safe space for her and imagine that beating no hammers he asks her rather gruffly: if you talk like Josten but don’t look like Josten do you mind giving me a fucking hint of who you may be right now? and imagine that she doesn’t understand not at first but then she does and imagine that upon hearing this she suddenly explodes and becomes all instinct before regaining any common sense and imagine she runs away driven by adrenaline pure unaltered terror and imagine that she must look at it that she must confirm it for herself that it is not true it is not true it cannot be
and imagine that he does not stop her and imagine that she insistently repeats to herself that the jester-king did not do it the jester-king could not the jester-king responds to other people’s rules and imagine that she is vaguely aware in turn that at some point she has taken possession of a kitchen knife but cannot force herself to let go of it from the handle and imagine that she fears knives any knife and imagine that this is bad this is frightening this is unthinkable this is worse and imagine that he yells something incomprehensible upon seeing it in her possession he is alarmed tries to stop her and imagine that she ignores him and imagine that she enters a bathroom almost slipping in her haste closing the door behind her and imagine that she looks herself in the mirror with wild bloodshot eyes and imagine that she does not falter at the metallic sight of the blade in her own hand but does flinch at the sight of her reflection and the Devil on the other side who returned with vengeance and imagine that the mirror comes to life and shouts with glee: HE’S COMING HE’S COMING HE’S COMING FOR YOUUUUUU! and imagine that the jester-king did it the jester-king dared second son by what right did you dare to do it
and imagine that she removes the gauze on her face just as desperately with fingernails bathed in red and imagine two primary colors a mark in non-erasable black ink permanence of the bad guy bad time bad life and imagine that there are frantic knocks on the other side of the bathroom’s door and imagine she thinks in her devastation: I can’t yet pay the price for gouging out my eye sockets or scalping myself but I can pay the price for getting rid of this shitty tattoo and imagine how she brings the knife to her cheek with boozy hasty precision zero finesse and imagine how she peels off a piece of her own skin as if it were a fruit to eat and imagine that she pays no attention to the overwhelmingly painful hurt or the turning of a key in a doorknob and imagine that she is also unaware of the slimy fountain gushing from her interior that soaks her entire left cheek a little of the jaw irregular road of fine fluid and imagine that she grunts screams curses in so many languages that she gets confused which is which all that noise coming out under pressure from her well-tied doll wrist straps and imagine that she wants him gone she wants that number gone that funeral red hair gone those blue eyes of death penalty gone she wants Riko Moriyama and Nathan Wesninski gone out her body gone gone out out there is no place here for neither of you two I barely fit in me as it is and imagine that she continues howling bawling skinning herself alive DAMN YOU DAMN YOU I DIDN’T SIGN YOUR STUPID CONTRACT I DIDN’T I COULDN’T I WOULDN’T I MAY NOT KNOW WHERE I BELONG TO BUT THERE’S NO WAY IT’S WITH YOU YOUR LENORE IS NOT ME I DIDN’T SIGN IT SO WHY WHY WHY DID YOU REVIVE HER WHY DID YOU TAKE HER OUT FROM HER GRAVE and imagine that her voice is raw meat imagine a butcher is coming soon to cut it all and imagine that the door finally opens and a Man enters
and imagine that he struggles with her not wasting even a minute and imagine that she resists it and imagine that he manages to get the knife out of her slippery small bloodied hands and imagine that she fights still she keeps screaming she scratches him wherever she can reach and imagine that he tolerates it imagine them falling to the ground imagine him carrying her into his arms not harming her how he hugs her and imagine that she is not fine that she has never ever ever been fine and imagine that the head is sacred that it’s tapu and imagine that she is quivering hyperventilating and imagine that he is talking to her and imagine that she finally notices the patterns tattooed on his hairy brown arms tribal life lines in circles rectangles triangles the wife beater the jeans the beard the long hair infested with premature gray hair that falls across his stern but kind face outside of his typical tikitiki due to the altercation the dark brown eyes not malicious immeasurably sad the large hands that do not hit just hold on and imagine that for the first time in her entire life the touch of a grown man doesn’t pain her and imagine how the only thing he’s saying is NINA NINA NINA as if it were a reality as if it were worth being that girl that lie that nothing-rabbit-fox and imagine how she sheds big fat tears along her blood hiccups something closes her mouth calms down comes back to her and imagine how she thinks: Wymack thinks: whānau thinks: will you wear your hair messy for me just like you did for Seth when my time comes? I am tired of mourning myself alone I am tired of being brave I am tired of holding on I am so so so so so damn tired—
“Help me,” Nina pleads at Wymack. And cries and cries and cries.
x
The day Nina heads to her death after receiving a ZERO on her flip phone Andrea’s hair shines like marble.
x
The easiest thing—the only easy thing—about being a fugitive is that Abra has to look like anyone but herself at all times.
Abra’s first kill is not one of the animals that Lola insists on torturing despite Abra’s stubborn denial to harm them nor one of the henchmen paid by Nathan to bring her back home screaming and kicking: it’s Nathania Wesninski. Abra says nothing to her, not even a goodbye. It barely occurs to her to bury her, throwing dirt and white wine into her child-sized coffin. Busier changing her own appearance and name just like snakes change their skin.
It doesn’t even hurt. Not like abandoning her Exy racquet and pretending that the possibility of Riko drawing a three on her with his black marker didn’t excite Abra when it was miraculously offered to her.
“Even if you’re a girl,” Riko said, smiling cockily but not malevolently, and touched Abra’s left cheek with his marker, looking at all of her and no one else, “there is potential in you to play on my court in the future. We will be champions, you’ll see. The three of us. All the stars will fall from the sky in jealousy of our forthcoming talent.”
The night Mary steals her—just a couple of hours after that conversation with Riko and of meeting Kevin Day in person and oh God Kevin Freaking Day bumped friendly his racquet into mine at our practice and the end of Nathania’s visit to Evermore with its dark walls and dark birds and its permanent grief for lost Lenore—the pig-like screams of that mysterious man Nathan dismembered in the highest room of the East Tower still stuck in Nathania’s eardrums—if you scream you’re already dead, silly!—Mary pays at a drugstore on the outskirts of Maryland for hair dye and coconut oil and purple shampoo with the small letters DO NOT USE THIS PRODUCT ON CHILDREN UNDER SIXTEEN YEARS OLD written on its boxes and dyes Abra’s hair black and hers in dark brown sitting on a toilet bowl in a motel bathroom. Their eyebrows, as well.
Really, Abra is lucky not to be tender-headed.
Ordering her not to move Mary places also a small box of contact lenses in her hand while the hair dye takes effect and teaches Abra how to put them in and how to take them out without accidentally poking out her eyes. They are almost black in color, very conspicuous.
“Like this, Abra. Pay attention,” button eyes and no thread or needle, wasted on a lost-and-found second-hand doll. “Now you try it.”
It is not until Mary is smoking her fourth cigarette of the day on the balcony and calling in a burner cellphone to a document forger to make them emergency fake passports to fled the country that Abra raises her head, a kiss still tingling on her forehead, damp towel around her shoulders—insecure, alarmed of who awaits her, of the demon that has accompanied Abra all her life—and for the first time in ten years does not find her father reflected back at her but her mother. A younger version of Mary by decades.
Abra can’t help but let out a dry laugh. She immediately covers her mouth, in alarm.
I should have been born with this coloring if I was to be born at all, is what Abra thinks. And then she turns around and maintains her habit of avoiding mirrors because opposite to the act of changing her identity this thought does sting her.
x
Andrea gifts Nina a full club-appropriate outfit and orders Nina to ditch her contact lenses for their night in Columbia via Nikki and Nina is ready to throw up and pretend it’s Saturday instead of Friday at the risk of receiving a knife stab from Andrea in the lung, but she ends up agreeing.
“Think I lost the memo telling me that you have your lackeys on a collar delivering your messages from door to door,” Nina says tensely, containing her worry and the impulse to kick Andrea in her stupid face with her new heavy platform boots, and maybe even break Andrea’s nose. A girl can dream. “Next time you want something from me you should try asking nicely yourself.”
Andrea is holding Nina by the back of her nape, bending Nina’s neck a little so that she is at Andrea’s height, avoiding rather purposely to touch her jumbo twists. She carefully inspects Nina’s eyes, strangely attentive. This close Andrea’s body heat is intense. She is wearing more black leather than usual. Tight and provocative, despite Andreaʼs buff figure. Jeans with a thousand chains. Boy’s haircut pristinely smeared back in gel. What is there to inspect? They are eyes and they are icy blue, one in a million in the genetic lottery for non-white people, and they have been consistently giving Nina panic attacks since before she learned to crawl and knew what a panic attack was. Nathan’s eyes.
Terribly cold. You would find more warmth in a morgue.
And now Andrea has seen them—she has seen him, a part of him—and she is going to see—
At least it’s not her hair, Nina reasons. At least Andrea still doesn’t know that Nina dyes it black, or she probably would have bullied Nina too to show her its original color. There were no boxes of dye in her duffle bag. Nina had finished the last one in Millport. Nina is meticulous about making the dye look believable.
None of that changes that this sucks.
It sucks to show something so intimate to Andrea. Force herself to do so so as not to make the already discouraging situation worse. But it is a necessary evil. Like going to their damn club for one night and that’s it. Whenever they are in the same room Andrea only has eyes for Nina. She raises her hands in Nina’s direction simulating a gun and murmurs bang! before pretending to shoot her and doubling over with laughter. She calls her 脅威 (きょうい) to her face too often, not bothering to speak discreetly. Nina may not speak Japanese but nothing good comes from Andrea so it must be something bad by process of elimination. Even if Aaron doesn’t seem to understand that accusation either despite being twins.
It's a big risk.
Nina might as well have ripped off her skin instead and let Andrea look at her bloodied bones. It would be less condemning. Not so humiliating. Distress her less.
Might even feel prettier for once, like that.
But lessons are not to be disremembered and discarded even if Mary is no longer around to reaffirm them with a firm hand—flamed to the core, the beach sand kissing her femurs inside a backpack that Mary herself ripped off its Club Winx’s logo to make less descriptive. Nina needs to go unnoticed. Cannot afford the luxury of becoming prey to another bear trap. That wouldn’t be unwise but suicidal.
Andrea just hums. She smiles one of her grotesque, lazy smiles—another knife drawn—before releasing Nina. Gives Nina’s right cheek a condescending pat before letting her hand fall. She is not backing down.
They are still very close to one other. For some undiscernible reason this doesn’t seem to faze Andrea. Nor that her Monsters are waiting for them outside in the hallway, surely getting impatient with every wasted second. Nina has not forgotten how Andrea does not allow anyone to touch, even by mistake. She is careful not to shorten that small distance.
“Worry not, I will personally make sure to deliver you my business card,” Andrea finally says. The manic smile noticeably weakened like a newborn fawn. Weird, that. She’s still watching Nina with hawk-eyes. “Next time we do this you may have already learned that I do not ask, anyway. You’ll have heard of Simon Says, even from the unlikely hole you crawled out of. Let me explain it to you in simple terms: I am Simon, and you do as I say. Yes?”
Andrea finally takes a step back. Waves one of her hands in a theatrical gesture, come here—if you dare.
Nina breathes heavily. Angry, of course. But also apprehensive. If she kicks Andrea—she can’t kick Andrea at all. “No,” Nina hisses, and leaves the bedroom, ignoring how stiff the leather skirt she is wearing and that it reaches below her knees is. It doesn’t take long for Andrea to follow, walking behind Nina to her increasing agitation. The leashes Andrea has placed on others are the opposite of desirable. Put any pressure on them and they clearly break your neck. Nina is not under the delusion that one night will be enough for Andrea to leave her alone for the rest of the year. “You don’t like to be leashed? Well, news flash: neither do I. And I couldn’t care less that you don’t like brown eyes either,” it’s important to mention that, even belatedly.
Andrea blinks. Laughs nails on chalkboard. Black lipstick smeared around her lips messily just like Andrea’s black nail polish. Her skin is very pale.
“Good thing your eyes are naturally blue then,” she replies, sugary. And snapping her fingers draws the attention of the other Monsters, gathered all in front of Nina’s door dorm and dressed like extras from a vampire horror movie, if Nina watched that kind of movie, or any movie in fact.
Hello, bloodsuckers. This is a walking blood bag speaking.
There is one last question. This terrible nosiness in Nina. Before the night goes from bad to terrible. “What would you have done if I weren’t wearing any contact lenses after all and you demanded something impossible of me wanting them off?”
Andrea hasn’t stopped looking into her eyes since Nina came out of the bathroom and Nina already found her in her living room, once again Andrea having invited herself without permission.
“Why,” Andrea says, happily artificial, “I would have scooped them out with an ice cream spoon, of course.”
x
“I should braid my hair with colored ribbons like I did when celebrating my Quinceañera, right? On second thought it might make me seem too desperate. Not desperate as a whore! At least that would be fun... The other kind. You know which one. Uhm. Desperate-bored. Mom would hate it. And Dad— Me voy a la chingada. Fuck! No. That won’t do. Only positive vibes here! What about a bun? It would be more— proper. Respectable. A good bore. Repressed Catholic-bored. Everyone loves a desperate boring repressed Catholic, don’t they?”
It’s a rhetorical question that Nikki expects no answer to. She has been a bundle of nerves and cempaxúchitl petals ever since she received permission from Andrea to accept Maria’s sudden invitation for the cousins to celebrate Thanksgiving with her and Luther, after years of apparently pretending that Nikki is an insidious stain on the wall that can be covered with a finger just for being a girl who loves other girls indiscriminately. As if Christ himself didn’t love his neighbor and motivated anyone to do the same. As if Nikki’s joy didn’t come with a detailed instruction manual—and now you smile, ignore your sadness at any time on any day, and lift your lips from point A to point C. That Nikki came to Nina of all people for moral support is kind of pathetic, but Nina feels perplexingly flattered in turn. It must be something Nina ate. Probably. For sure.
Nikki’s hands transform into monarch butterflies on the verge of a heart attack, brushing and brushing her mid-length black hair with a plastic hairbrush even past the point of needing to be brushed. They style it into braids and pigtails and high buns only to undo it and start over, leaving it loose. Nikki makes a dissatisfied face. She puts her head in said hands, the least confident Nina has seen her so far. Twisted happiness. Clown masks with cross-shaped fractures.
“The ribbons would make Mom happy. I believe. I hope.”
Nina furtively thinks about Mary teaching her how to take care of her hair with protective hairstyles from a very young age. The possibility of building a truce between mother and daughter if not a bridge. Mothers who destroy daughters and daughters who destroy mothers and fathers who destroy both and are the origin of all evil. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb—
There is a not-so-altruistic reason why Nina agreed to be Andrea’s go-between for Nikki’s request, after all. It flashes in her mind, the obvious: YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO MOMMY ISSUES.
Mary’s imaginary disappointment a heavy weight.
Nina frowns. Plays with her own fingers. Hair dye retouched three days ago. Possession-black. Trying to infuse the greatest sincerity into her voice, therefore, despite her clumsiness and doubts Nina answers, “It sure does, Nikki. Show me the ribbons?”
x
Nathania is maybe five or maybe six when she sneaks a pair of scissors out of one of the maids’ bags.
Before Nathan hits her with a hot iron in a fit of rage caused by snooping pigs and before Mary consequently takes her to an Exy court for the first time as a consolation and introduces her to the sport Nathania observes these scissors in her little girl hands, admiring the edge and the weight and the danger. She has a split lip. Still baby teeth to lose.
She shivers all over, alone in her bathroom, far past her bedtime.
Nathania wants, more than anything, to gouge out her eyes. She is furious and they are very ugly. So, so, so ugly. The ugliest of all. She is furious and she’s not allowed to scream so she wants to take them off and throw them on the floor like glass marbles and stomp over them. But that would be irresponsible. Irresponsible, now that’s a biiiiiiiiiig word. Nathania is being taught big words and how many liters of lost blood it takes for an adult to pass out and how many for them to stop breathing altogether and sleep with the fish. None of those minutes under a knife that she herself wields. Not now, not ever if Nathania gets her way. It’s just that I’m clumsy, Lola. What? You going to hit another tooth out of me? She is furious but she’s even more terrified—only five or six and already too chewed up by life—and she is not allowed to scream and she cannot cut out her eyes with the scissors because without eyes it is impossible to see and if she does not see it is impossible to survive and surviving is better than nothing—and without her eyes Nathania would be lost too—at the complete mercy of Father and his henchmen, the Knife People—and she is forbidden from doing so many things, including getting rid of her own eyes and being free of them, but what can Nathania get rid of is her horrendous red hair—not the hair itself but The Hair. So she does exactly that. Cuts unevenly a large portion of this coily thick hair in front of the sink. Salty tears clouding her vision in the meantime. Her heart hiccupping the same amount in pints of cherry ice cream.
It is Mary who finds her an hour later with several chunks of it in her hand, already prepared Mary to sleep in a satin nightgown and with her bonnet put on, the light from Nathania’s bathroom an open mouth in an otherwise already dark house. Mary who cleans up the mess not uttering a single word. Mary who then admonishes Nathania, biteless, her fangs well hidden, squeezing her cheeks: My brave gyal, she says. Ku pan dis mess, she says. Our hair is sacred, do you hear me? she says. Madda will fix this for you, don’t cry no more, she says. Mary who fixes the rest of Nathania’s curls in a shorter semi-decent afro haircut so that Nathania doesn’t look so bad. Mary who prepares an excuse for Nathan the next day at breakfast.
Something frivolous for a frivolous husband. “It is no one’s fault but mine, beloved,” nothing submissive or ashamed in Mary’s posture when lying to Nathan’s face, and even less zero love for him. The three of them were well aware. “The scissors accidentally slipped out of my reach when I was touching up her tips. It won’t happen again.”
Thanks to that lack of respect Nathania’s split lip rips up open again and Mary earns herself one to match.
It is a universal truth that Mary Hatford does not scream but does know how to speak, and Nathania wants her tongue to conjugate phrases that are at least half as brilliant in the future—words with their own backbone.
She never disrespects her own hair again, nor does she try to cut it so ruthlessly in another outburst of feeling.
x
“Baby blue,” Andrea calls her, in a whisper. “Like the ocean. Water in the desert.”
x
Andrea removes the irons of her deal from Aaron and the first thing Aaron does is go to a hair salon and pay for a different haircut than hers.
It’s not intentional.
“We had matching haircuts since we met and I visited Andrea in Oakland’s correctional juvenile facility. Just one visit from me was enough for her to take it too seriously. The twin game. The mirror game. For her to become a rope the size of my neck. That stuff. But Andrea controls me no more than I control some character when playing Street Fighter, nowadays,” Aaron explains in his typical snippy humor, although quite casual. The rabid animosity he usually reserves for Nina and that Aaron unleashed at the cabin in the mountains months ago to prove a point is not seen anywhere. Maybe it’s taking a nap in a doghouse.
Nina fastens the laces of her running sneakers, sweaty and squatting at the entrance of the Fox Tower next to Aaron and with her hair tied up in top knots.
“I didn’t ask,” she says, accidentally rude.
“I know that,” he retorts, raising his shoulders like a shield, his cheeks coloring. “Shut up. It’s called making conversation. Have you ever heard of extending an olive branch?”
“What use do I have for a branch given by you?”
“I figured.”
Nina jumps up and doesn’t take a step inside. Chooses to lean against Aaron’s other side, her long bare legs crossed parallel to his arms. Indulging him for a while. The curiosity that lives on and dies off and lives on again, between meows.
“And how does the hair fit in?” Nina, also a conversationalist, dares to ask.
If Aaron hits, Nina hits back. If Aaron makes an effort, Nina makes an effort as well. It’s always been that easy between them, theoretically.
Right now Aaron is looking at a piece of gum stuck to the pavement—narrowed hazel eyes and pursed lips in a gesture quite foreign to Andrea. More expressiveness in him than in the entire Expressionist movement.
Like a portrait on reverse. It never ceases to surprise Nina—the similarities, the differences.
“It was impossible for me to escape my face then and I don’t think I would have even if I could because in the end it is as much mine as it is Andrea’s, or maybe more, but I could escape a shitty haircut. I am not her prisoner only her brother. Just like she’s not my jailer but my sister. Do you get what I mean?”
It’s not intentional at all, the idea that Aaron plants in Nina with such an ordinary comment. And yet the seed is there. It is a rainy season. Nina understands better than anyone.
Doesn’t want to dig it up.
“... I do.”
“So?” Aaron asks impatiently. His spiky hair gives him the illusion of being taller than he is.
“So what?”
“Stop worrying unnecessarily my bitch of a sister,” Aaron says curtly, turning to face her. And Nina is this close to opening her mouth and taking offense, turning her tongue into a harpoon, but the endearment in the word Sister is more noticeable than the insult in Bitch, and anyway Aaron immediately adds, “Just because we share DNA and hemoglobin with someone we extremely dislike does not mean that we are an identical copy of that person. Andrea never hated the fact that we inherited my mom’s blonde hair or her robust body type, you know. Didn’t care enough either to resent neither that Mr. Minyard was Asian American and so do we, albeit mixed. And I— I’ve learned to be grateful, sometimes. From what she and Dad gave us physically. That man you called father was not worthy of being chosen even by a funeral parlor, from what you told us about him. But Andrea still didn’t hesitate to choose you. And I chose Andrea by blackmailing her into letting me go. And you chose all of us, plural. Whatever your current problem with your appearance is it can’t be worse than running from the fucking mafia for practically a decade.”
So even Aaron has noticed. Nina’s throat itches. She tries to play it cool. Ice at room temperature. For it to be Aaron of all Foxes comforting her—
Inevitably Nina remembers Andrea. And Andrea’s words. Her shoelaces are extremely interesting to observe. “Oh, wow. Did it hurt to say something that kind to me? No lies.”
“There’s no way, spewing bullshit is your specialty. But fuck me. You caught me. It hurt so much that I need you to walk me to the emergency room right now or else I’ll drop dead in three milliseconds.”
“Asshole. Nice haircut,” Nina praises, changing the subject and at the same time not. Maintaining a straight face, not an ounce of ridicule or sarcasm in her tone.
Sincerity as an armor.
Aaron snorts. Bumping shoulders with her. He is as solid as Andrea, although nowhere close to her.
No one else could be, for Nina.
“Fuck off. Thank you,” Aaron says. “I personally chose it.”
x
If Nathania is victorious in not passing out or fleeing from the bathroom with her tiny shoes’ echoing behind her, she glares at the demon. Shows at it her baby teeth in contempt. Shows her tongue in childish irreverence for good measure.
Screw her manners. Screw the Devil on the other side of the mirror.
“I’m not him,” Nathania murmurs afterwards. She looks miserable in her reflection. She looks like her father. Her words don’t sound convincing despite Nathania’s best efforts. “You are exactly as he is.”
Lola often pokes Nathania in her cheeks and ruffles her hair and mentions unprompted how cute she is—no matter how much Mary insists that it’s offensive if she’s present too, hissing at Lola, “Get your filthy hands out of my daughter’s head right now Malcom, or I will chop them and feed them to a dog,” to which Lola answers, slyly, every time, “There are no dogs here, Miss Wesninski! I have slaughtered them all in front of Boss’ pumpkin. Puppies for the puppy. My best work.”
Her fingers smeared in the stray’s cat fresh blood she just gutted in the basement as a demonstration, and Nathania forcing herself not to recoil in panic as soon as Lola puts them on her shoulder.
Lola is a natural predator, and Lola is the lover of the Boogeyman and the Boogeyman himself, and Lola tells Nathania how lucky she is to have inherited Nathan’s best attributes. Nathania disagrees. She thinks about it often. In all her free time. When she is not studying with her tutors and when she is not purposely failing all her death lessons with Lola despite the punishments that this means and when she is playing Exy in Little Leagues by another name—the best invention in all humanity’s history since apple juice—and when she envies the ignorant children who pass by her house on the way to school and when she runs in circles in her big garden and falls on her belly and enjoys scraping her knees, getting dirty in the grass and drowning a laugh in a puddle of equally dirty water.
It would been a small mercy to share Mary’s almost black eyes and black hair—from their people—instead of Nathan robbing her of that part of her autonomy as well.
He has her name, already. He imposed it on her. And he imposed his eye color and his hair color and his smiles, too. And he imposes on her nightmares and reasons to scream and not scream. The cultivated skill of learning not to stand within an arm’s length of anyone else but Mary. Of feeling how your pulse freezes in the presence of adult men. And lying well. Fadda is a good man. Fadda wouldn’t hurt a fly. Is it not enough? Hasn’t Nathan taken enough from her? He takes and takes and takes and gives and gives and gives and Nathania is left with nothing, is nothing, is—
Lola calls her lucky. But Lola is insane, and Nathania believes only in luck of the bad sorts. She continues making ugly gestures to the mirror. The demon returns each of them to her. Like clockwork.
x
“You are already ours, Xīngān (心肝),” Dan says, jolly and affectionate, after breaking their embrace and presenting her an orange Ji with a finely carved fox that Dan has no use for with her pixie cut. Unlike the one she gave Matt this one is not accompanied by a lock of Dan’s brown hair.
Nina accepts it, still. She clings to it rather fiercely. Despite her injuries. Despite her bandages. Despite her pain.
If she squeezes it hard enough its shape may imprint itself on her palm, permanently. Right under the wounded skin. Nina can recognize it for what it is—one more key—of a different kind, of the kind that matters most—for her growing collection. Endless ways in which Nina can stay. In which she is welcome to. In which Nina’s love for the Foxes is returned to her tenfold in spades, never taking the form of a prison.
Dan is smiling still at her—so toothy, from ear to ear. Nina’s heart competes in a marathon aiming for first place, and Nina traces the edges of the hairpin until she has them memorized with every cell in her body.
Ours. Mine. Yours.
x
There is an Andrea-shaped hole left behind when Andrea departs temporarily to Easthaven and Nina decides to throw caution out the window, talk to Renee, attempt to understand the cross on her choker and the smiles that like sugar take root in Renee’s sweet face that are clearly not a deception.
How would someone like Renee need a second, third, fourth chance?
Seeing this, as Nina tries to overcome her discomfort for her, Renee digs up her own skeletons. The dancing worms and the damp earth that live in that then sealed tombstone. She tells Nina a story about drugs and gang rapes and knives and desperate girls who sharpen themselves more than these. Just because Nina asked. Renee’s voice remains calm through all of it.
Nina is not sure she deserves it, that brutal honesty. Still, she spends plenty of hours at Renee’s side having heard about the dirt on her hands, no longer perturbed by her. It is simple. Endurance isn’t pretty, but Renee is. Nina wouldn’t dare judge her for her survival, for wanting to be a different person. And Nina feels Andrea’s absence with every breath like a chasm in her lungs. She continues to secretly dye her hair obsessively, using her colored contacts. Tries to bridge the team’s cracks with duct tape and stubbornness, leaving an empty space for when Andrea returns—whether Andrea wants it or not, that space. Ignores the surprised looks from most of the rest of the upperclassmen and Monsters at this peculiar development, the not-so-discreet money exchanges whenever Nina jogs next to Renee.
On one of those two-person walks Nina questions, “What’s with your hair?” too rash for the benefit of anyone with good judgment.
And Renee. Renee is the flower born from a root already uprooted. Blood poured back into a half-dead body then resurrected. The first stone to be thrown, but not free from sin. Renee says, friendly, “I used to shave my head, you know?” and whatever she sees on Nina’s face—of course not, I barely met you this year and barely spoke to you properly until this month, what am I supposed to do with this information?—Renee lets out a giggle capable of making God himself start praying to her, if Nina believed in any God.
“It is true,” Renee continues in good humor, not at all offended. “It was atrocious, my hair, even before I joined the Hounds. My mother at that time— the first mother I was given who was not motherly at all— she was not a Caucasian woman by any means, but that made little difference in my childhood. The white man I was supposed to call father was never home, and I didn’t have the necessary money to go to salons or the inclination to talk to other Black girls in our neighborhood, or their mothers, or their aunts, or their grandmothers, to find out how to take proper care of this Black hair of mine. After my initiation ceremony one of the Hound’s veteran women grasped me by the head rather unkindly, dragged me to the nearest bathroom, and not even waiting for me to get dressed and ignoring all my cursing, shaved off all my hair. “To prevent bed bugs,” was her excuse. But I know she was thinking about how all those men had tangled their greasy hands in it without my explicit permission while they grabbed me and took me from behind. One after another after another. I didn’t care, at that time. It was—” Renee positions her palms together in a parody of a prayer, a little mean, tilting her head to the side, “—a blessing. A small one. Very small. Of the size of a stone in your shoe. I kept it that way, years below the line. Habits that take hold of oneself. Like the needles and the ecstasy of a shady injection. It wasn’t until I met Stephanie, now sober, that I changed my mind. She has the prettiest fro, and I was everything but a lost cause to her. Stephanie accepted me as troubled as I was. I stopped shaving it.”
Nina can’t help but catch a glimpse of Renee’s hair, in a short bob cut. It’s completely white—a bone clean of viscera—minus for the pastel rainbow tips. Renee has it straightened. Recognizable from a mile away, it is indistinctly Renee Walker. Nina admires and fears that. To let others gaze at you and watch you be yourself and not see a shadow of who you used to be, not even suspect—
“And so I let it grow. I let it grow healthy. For me,” Renee admits, softly. “Stephanie showed me the path to salvation, but also how to brush my hair and with what comb, about protective hairstyles, locticians, extensions and wigs, what was the appropriate shampoo and conditioner to use, creams, sprays, how to wash it, what to cover it with at the time of sleeping. And when I wanted to straighten it with a flat iron and dye it in my graduation from high school she supported me the same. Even if it was an absurd color. “Your body is yours to do as you please as long as you don’t cause any harm to yourself or another,” she told me. I have kept those words under my ribs all this time. Even today.”
Delicate and strong. Bible paper is good at absorbing blood but just because Renee has voluntarily stopped cutting like the knife she was molded in doesn’t mean she is any less sharp. Thing is, Nina is not afraid of general human cruelty any more than she fears her father particularly, and finds she also has no fear at Renee. No more. Maybe not ever. Not the way Nina learned to fear instinctively.
Andrea has surely come to this same conclusion countless times.
She is somewhat jealous of Renee, however. As with Kevin, Nina is helpless to the resentment that peeks around her half-person silhouette. I want that, Nina thinks in selfishness and longing. I want that for myself. I want to shed on my personal Natalie Shields and throw her skin suit into the wind to never been seen again on me.
Renee’s eyes are kind and knowing. “Has our conversation brought you any clarity, Nina?” she asks.
Nina exhales sharply. Counts the stains on the floor. Her loc ponytail is shaken by the wind. “Yeah. Yes. I believe so.”
x
Damn me. Nathania Wesninski you were always nothing and today I am on the way to become someone no matter if that someone is a champion or a corpse. Damn us. Let me go. You are me just as I am you and there is no love here but I am dying to die in the name of all this love. Who would be able to endure such ugliness? You were just your parents’ daughter. All is forgiven. Believe me. Believe her. Damn you. Let us go. Let us go. Ple—
x
With her mind in blank Nina goes and locks herself in the bedroom she shares with Andrea, Kevin and Nikki in the dorms one day when Nina’s classes have ended up early and the rest haven’t, sending one text to Andrea to let her know that Nina won’t be going to her classroom to wait for her as soon as the bell rings—for non lethal reasons involving kidnapping, attempted dismemberment, murder or torture and not using the phrase I’M FINE even once—as is her habit. She undresses carelessly, throwing her underwear on the bottom bunk, the A-cup sports bra and the gray panties that Nina rarely wears because she prefers the comfort of a pair of girl’s boxers. Standing in the middle of the room, naked. Or not quite. Almost. A sports watch on her wrist and a key hanging from a chain around her neck and an alphabet in scars engraved on each skin of hers and lemon-yellow padded socks. Just breathing. Restless. She takes a step towards the full-length mirror next to the closet. And another. And another one. Until Nina has the mirror right in front of her. Until her eardrums are imploding guerrilla mines. Nina doesn’t scream or gets scared nor winces. She just. Looks. Awkwardly. Intensely. Frowning deeply. She looks at her own reflection and tries to find what the rest of the Foxes have no problem believing is there for everyone to see. Trying to see herself as they see her.
Hellfire hair. Somewhat wide forehead. Thick eyebrows. Clear eyes. Prominent nose. Small ears. High cheekbones. Mouth also big and plush. Slim neck. Whatever follows.
The kind of girl worth calling every hospital and morgue in Binghamton to confirm her location and confront later arrogant Pigs with shiny badges and guns who shoot first and ask no questions after too many uncertain hours. The kind of girl for whom someone would say, on their knees: you are not going anywhere, and standing on: Nathania or Nina or whoever, she’s ours. The kind of girl the Kevins Days of the world get strangled for, five thick fingers each on either side of the Queen’s windpipe. That kind of girl. The only girl.
Nina just stares.
Ignoring the disappearance of the seconds, the minutes, the hour along the roads of time. Also ignoring the opening of a door in the distance. How it closes again. The loose but firm walk of someone who has not taken off their shoes. How another door is opened, closer. The one in that room. And suddenly there is Andrea, alone, not carrying a backpack, with a lollipop in her mouth. Blinking only once when she recognizes Nina’s nakedness—palm still gripping the doorknob, her knuckles scraped like blackberries in spoiled milk. And Nina can notice the shameless appreciative hunger in Andrea’s gaze, and even more so the curiosity that overshadows it, pushing it behind, a neutrality for Nina’s own sake, just another variance between Andrea’s sexuality and Nina’s—all without Nina taking her eyes off her own reflection, through the stupid and horrible mirror, her back turn towards Andrea.
“I told Kevin and Nikki to get lost,” Andrea breaks their silence, not bothered by the oddness of the situation. Leaning her hip on the door frame in natural indifference, cocking her neck felinely. “It seemed appropriate, from what I deciphered from your text. Are you so surprised, bunny girl? Any worry is rather pointless. We’ll bring a map to find them, whenever you feel like it.”
Nina may be shuddering a little too much.
Thank you, she wants to say. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Thank you for having me and letting me have you back. Tank yuh. Danke. Merci.
What falls out of her lips instead, mad but not, more frantic than anything, is, “You’ve never seen him. My father,” Nina feels the ridiculous need to clarify, and her voice is two octaves higher, but Nina can’t control it either. There is a revelation. Like an anvil from heavens above hitting you. She turns around, facing Andrea bravely. Her fists clenched at her sides. “You’ve never seen him in me. Haven’t you? Even when you considered me a threat to be eliminated I was Nina Josten from Nowhere, Arizona the girl who inspired you distrust with her accordion of a thousand secrets that didn’t add up and not Nathania Abra Wesninski, daughter of the Butcher of Baltimore, bloodier than any blood bank, in and out. You never— You always— And I remember now. You hated me for me, since the beginning. Not because of who I used to be. You wanted to peel me like an orange and slurp my guts in search of any satisfying answer. My guts. Mine. Not from another. And you gave me a deal, many keys, honesty. You asked me to stay. Told me I should bury her with her father who is also my father. And my eyes— they were mine before his, with you. You wanted to see them. Like my hair. Its sight did not fill you with nausea. But if you had feared anyone at all it would have been all me— not the shadow of a powerful and fearsome man, not his sweet Nathania. And able to hate anyone in the world it was me too, barely Nothing, who you chose to hate. How crazy is that?”
Andrea is looking not so casual anymore. She’s focused on Nina. Her nettle-like gaze. Her unbent vertebra.
“There is no one else to hate. I wouldn’t dare,” she says, a muscle jumping in her jawline.
Nina knows this. She does. The reason may elude her more often than not, a prehistoric confusion when Andrea could dedicate her hatred to millions instead of Nina alone, but. “The Foxes also loved me at my Nobody era,” Nina keeps saying hysterically. “Maybe not Aaron, not at the start, but... Even Kevin. Especially Kevin.”
Andrea sounds almost mad as she answers flatly, “What was not to love.”
Everything. Nothing. The ten percent?
Nina’s nipples are cold. Nina hits her knees against the floor, dropping herself without any finesse. Not caring that it hurts and that she likely will gain new bruises. Covering her wobbly smile with both palms. Burying her head in her thighs, shaking it in denial. The last time Nina cried her eyes out was—
That father of yours who ridiculously calls himself a family man is not deserving of your face, Abra. It is a waste on him.
And—
Abra. Abra. My gyal. I would have already ripped off your entire face with my bare hands if that didn’t make me into your murderer.
“Even Mumz’ love mutated into hate over time. The natural order of things. No, not hate, I suppose. Something far more bitter and brittle. She loved me until her last breath. I know she did. But I cannot stand it. I cannot stand being seen by myself. It is unbearable. It’s been a year. It’s been two decades. He’s dead in a ditch and he’s all around me and he’s gone and he’ll never go away. I feel him right here, between the cartilage, and the light, and the rot. It is damn ugly. It suffocates me. And yet.”
“And yet,” Andrea repeats, advancing towards Nina.
Closer than close.
“Having a body. Inhabiting a body. What can be braver than that? More repulsive, too? The body itself as an act of rebellion, as an act of horror.” Very gently Nina confesses: “I like being seen by you. The girl I am in all your eyes. She seems nice.”
“She is.”
“I like... that unconditional acceptance, even if I am not worthy of it.”
“Says who.”
“My Mumz.”
“A ghost.”
“My father, then.”
“Another ghost. Irrelevant. More than irrelevant. Gomikuzu.”
Today Andrea’s hair is carelessly slicked back with a couple of loose strands, each one a ray of moonlight in broad day. Can a girl be handsome? Above all things, Andrea is immovable.
The strongest person Nina has known.
Defenseless, Nina raises her own face. Teary eyes and it’s not even raining. What was it that Andrea told her, months ago?
My girlfriend is you, Nina Abra Josten.
“Yuh si mi,” it sounds like a question.
Think about seeds.
Andrea wraps a hand around the back of her neck, gives a harmless tug to one of Nina’s Senegalese twists. Kneeling in front of Nina without any regrets. Again.
Her anchor. Her boonoonoonoos.
“Yes Nina,” Andrea says hoarsely, honestly. A grave’s gravity. “Fresh from the womb I was born seeing you.”
x
First night on the run, Abra peacefully dreams of Nathan’s head exploding like a party balloon.
x
In the end, she seeks out Renee. It couldn’t be anyone else. Not even Andrea—with her beautiful, powerful hands devoid of any melanin.
Nina finds her sitting at the foot of the stadium talking on her cellphone, dressed in pure pastel colors, white stockings above her knees and with a broken lip—Andrea’s latest sparring gift. In the middle of one of her daily calls with Jean, Renee waves at Nina and gently interrupts him. She says, “Something has come up with Nina that I need to attend to. No. Not of life or death. Hmm. Yes, I am quite sure of that. You can relax, I assure you. Of course. Yes. I received the heart emoji you sent me perfectly fine. It is very cute. Yes. Okay. I will tell her. Enjoy the Californian air and your walks with hyperactive dogs. I’ve sent you a heart back, see? It is a pink one. They come in multiple colors. Mhmm. Do not pout around with your team, I swear I’ll call you as soon as I am able to. Okay. I love you. Goodbye,” and when she has hung up, addresses Nina with the same sunny predisposition, “Jean sends you his regards. And, I quote, “for you to not lack bags with which to dispose off any corpse for whatever requires the help of mon Saint Renee, devil bien-aimé.”
Nina scoffs somewhat sardonically but then looks up at the clear sky, amused, and despite everything, fond.
You go, ivory tower. These days Jean doesn’t put a razor near his head even by accident—he covers old pots with new soil. Nina is proud. Not that sheʼll say it out loud to him, or anyone.
“Sure he did. Actually, I came here to ask you a favor,” she announces.
“Can I guess it’s not related to murder?”
“You’d guess right. Nothing that elaborate,” Nina agrees. And taking a deep breath. “Could you dye my hair? Uh. More like help me dye it all. I don’t lack any skills with black dye, as you know, but... the bleaching part. I wouldn’t know what to do. How much hair bleach is appropriate, or whether it is better to use peroxide, or something else. I’ve never done it before. Never except in— and that was— Riko. And I guess Jean too. As an unwilling participant. So, erm.”
“No need for explanations,” Renee soothes her. Whether or not she is disturbed by her own boyfriend’s forced participation in certain events orchestrated by Riko under his authoritarian regime Renee does an excellent job of hiding it. “You have come to me for this favor. Are you sure?”
Am I allowed that level of trust? Renee implies not so subtle.
“You have good hands,” is the way in which Nina expresses the reason for her choice, her certainty in it.
Renee plays with her fingernails, pale where her brown skin is not. She smiles to herself. Something sensitive like glass.
“I see,” she says, and looks at Nina again, still smiling. “It would be a pleasure.”
What comes next is easier. The same old song, but with a modernized sheet music. Renee asks her if she has any color in mind. Nina says yes. Renee asks her which one, with exactitude. Nina tells her as it is, not embarrassed in the least. That one. Renee says oh, how charming. Does not make fun of Nina. Accompanies her to buy it at a pharmacy, the two of them driving in the Maserati with Nina behind the wheel, not exceeding the speed limit and not ignoring the red lights neither, more out of habit integrated than any respect for the traffic system, and even pays for the boxes of dye out of her own pocket, ignoring any protests from Nina. Being loved is like that, she is learning. Renee already has hair bleach at home. And then. Renee preparing all the substances in a bowl. An old towel covering Nina’s nape. Olive oil for all her loose fro. A purple shampoo. Nina completely conscious and consenting. Renee putting on plastic gloves, telling her: this won’t hurt. Extreme care with the roots, the scalp, the individual thick strands. Sections of hair as mathematical divisions. Renee’s deft fingers working diligently like someone who has already danced this dance a thousand times on the same stage. And if anyone were to ask her—if anyone dared—Nina couldn’t describe the experience as anything other than—harmless. Maybe cathartic. As it used to be with Mary the very first times, all those years ago, ending the dyeing process with a kiss on the forehead of a younger Nina. Good hands that are hands that don’t punch.
Tap water running—
And the mirror.
“Your head looks like cotton candy,” Andrea remarks that same afternoon as she randomly tears pages off from a Murakami’s book she borrowed from the campus library, just to win a bet against Nikki that Andrea was unable to pick up any book without it automatically catching fire.
Nina is not exactly nervous about Andrea’s verdict on her makeover, but she’s also not not nervous. She figures that feeling shy is counterproductive and a waste of everyone’s time and walks down the hallway—sitting on the same couch as Andrea, crossing her legs, at least an inch apart between them.
“That’s Renee’s job for you. I redid the twists out myself. Is it bad?”
Andrea tears out another page. “Could be. If you have the bad taste of not liking sweets. More surprising is the fact that you didn’t dye it orange. Whatever happened to your passion for that annoying color? Miracle or bad omen, oh what will it be. Decisions, decisions.”
“Where’s the fun in being predictable. Didn’t want to risk you dumping me or keeping your promise to bury me six feet under prematurely just by officially becoming a ginger. They are evil people. ’Besides, you love sweets,” Nina grins playfully.
It is this what inspires Andrea to move her full attention to Nina. How Nina covers herself less and less by exercising her mouth in happiness.
“That I do,” she says, and throws the book behind her back. Merely observing her, half apocalyptic. “You are pink.”
Nina aborts a shrug. She settles better on the couch, poking Andrea’s own leg with one of her toes. Internally pleased that Andrea doesn’t reject the contact.
“Red was my father’s color,” Nina answers, her grin fading a bit, “it always was. Not only the hair but the bloodbaths. This past year I’ve found that I no longer have any use for bleeding myself out, no matter how noble the reason. It’s a work in progress. Baby steps. Nobody wants a martyr. Didn’t you say it? I thought, if I can’t get rid of his eyes, then— My hair is my own. I’m claiming it back.”
“Fascinating,” Andrea’s hand travels to Nina’s ankle, wrapping itself around it affectionately. “And what is it with the sudden change of heart.”
“You wouldn’t believe it. Your brother and I had a friendly chat some months ago. Emotional vulnerability against emotional vulnerability, deep instrumental music in the background, the kind of understanding that only a frenemy can grant, from jerk to jerk—”
“Say less.”
Nina sighs. Loudly. “Lots of things. Lots of conversations. Guess I just wished to be more. More than my father was in life.”
“You are. You were,” Andrea says. Nina feels very, very hot.
Tackles on, “I couldn’t have dyed my hair such a striking color before. It wudda bin suicide. Like offering a package of bullets to Lola in a firearms store. Deliberately making bigger the target on my back. Hey, shoot me here! It’s not the case anymore. Now I can do anything, legally speaking. I can stand out and stick around in crowds of normal people. I can be me without the fear of being killed when crossing to the other side of the road.”
“And what you are is pink,” Andrea states in lethargic interest.
Nina can hardly wait to show off her new look to the others.
It’s exciting, like Exy.
“Gentla dan red,” Nina says, nodding with a certain restless energy. Gentler than Nathan. “Do you like it?”
She hasn’t said it yet.
But Nina has this hunch. Has it just like she has this immense love for the Foxes and for Wymack and Abby and even Betsy engraved in the tiny teeth of her keys collection, not just the corporeal ones—the keys that allow Nina to open up as a woman and as a person, to take Nina out of her own shell of paranoia and introversion and bad temper, let her be Someone and Someone Good even, or at least Not Terrible. Like Andrea unconditionally fancying the specters that Nina calls eyes as they are, blue in their vastness, before anyone else—through the drugs and the suspicion, the very first one. There you are. Like Mary who told her as a little girl that to apologize for her face was meaningless because she knew that the demon on the other side of her reflection was no demon at all, not when it was Nina herself.
“My stupid rabbit. Bane of my existence. Gentler than red,” Andrea repeats decidedly serious, and squeezes again Nina’s ankle. Pulling Nina towards her, kissing her ravishingly and bruisingly. A kiss of open artery, Nina thinks, dizzy with positive feelings. And when they part, another truth. Nose to nose. Thumb over scarred cheek. From her yellow to her pink to their sunrise, and back again. Quiet, quiet. “Of course I like it.”