“I have to get the skin off,” I say, using a shaking, hesitant fingernail to test the cellophane surface for the smallest breaks that I can use to peel the stuff away.
“Farrah,” Brianne protests, because she doesn’t know I only mean the liquid skin her husband applied.
“Is it supposed to do this?” I ask her, and when she has the same wild, worried expression as her daughter, I turn to Cherish. “How does liquid skin usually work?” I demand. “How do you get it off?!”
She’s shaking her head and now her mouth gapes.
“Cherish!”
She jumps, and the tears come.
“Jerry!” Brianne cries, turning to run from the bathroom. She’s no more help than her ridiculous daughter.
No.
Control.
Somehow, control.
They’re all going to descend on the bathroom again to nurse me back to health.
But this time is different. I can’t wait that long. This pain is searing, stinging, burning. I could tear my own skin away, if that would stop what looks like a bacteria spreading, like necrosis devouring my arm. It can only be the middle of the night; it’s already widened the wound at an alarming speed.
“Cherish!” I grip her arms and sink my fingers in. Deep. I try to pierce her flesh, to ground my pain like it’s electricity and I can channel it through my friend to purge it from myself.
Control, I tell myself. But I can’t.
“How do you usually get it off? How do you take off liquid skin?”
She can’t focus when she’s in pain. Just like at the renovation site, her brain shuts down. She’s a wounded animal whose only recourse is to bleat until a savior comes along and rescues her.
I sink my fingers deeper. I dig into her nightshirt, pretend her flesh is something inanimate, like there will be no consequence to gripping until my fingers and thumb meet in the middle, where her bones must be. Like there are no nerves in the unfeeling thing I am boring into.
Onetwothreefourfive.
“Please, Cherish,” I beg, and push my forehead into hers while she struggles to loose herself from me.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
“Cherish.” I am kneading my head into hers, until it’s like there’s nothing soft between us. We are bone against bone.
She screams, but she can’t get free.
I know what she’s trying to say but she can only mouth it. Her words can’t get around the sobs.
“It’s hurting me,” I tell her. “Please! How do you take it off?”
Cherish shakes her head, and I shake the rest of her.
“How do you take it off?”
“RahRah, I don’t know,” she cries. I try another approach, let my fingertips ease up ever so slightly. She knows the instant I give her relief and she tries to wrestle out of my grasp again, this time gritting her teeth when I resist and punching my forearms—despite my wound. “I don’t know!”
I release her and pull my arm back where I can protect it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what liquid skin is!” Cherish crosses her arms over her chest, hands splayed to cover the damage my fingers have done to her arms. She looks like someone being laid to rest, except for the confusion and anger on her face. “I thought you were still dreaming!”
One two three four fiiiive.
“You’re lying.” I stumble back a step. “I know you’re lying.”
“Rah! I don’t know!”
I shove past her, sending her hard against the counter on my way out of the bathroom.
She calls after me, but it isn’t to confess. She’s pretending she’s the one being hurt. She’s pretending she doesn’t know I know. That I didn’t see her tally marks. That she isn’t the one keeping track.
I have to find Brianne and Jerry. I have to get this off, make it stop.
The bedroom door is open, like Cherish’s mom threw it wide in her harried haste, like it might seal and lock behind her otherwise—but I hear her.
I stop. The top half of me sways forward when the motion comes to an abrupt halt, as though I might topple head over feet.
They’re close—but they aren’t coming.
Their voices have made it up the stairs, but I’m alone in the bedroom, listening to them from just behind the open door.
I know the timbre of a hurried conversation. A hastily delivered summary so that Jerry knows what’s going on, when there isn’t a moment to waste.
This isn’t that.
I can hear their voices but not their words. There’s too much blood surging through my ears, my own pulse drowning out everything else I should be able to hear.
Control.
“Control.”
I’ve never had to whisper it aloud before. I’ve never had to close my eyes—but this is like nothing I’ve felt. This pain feels unnatural. In my arm, in my head, in whatever part of me makes sense of everything but can’t. My hands are at my head, like I need pressure applied there, like I’m bleeding even though no one can see. Or like if I can make blinders for myself, if I can focus, I can regain control. Because it feels unrelenting. All of it. Like it’s been building to this for weeks. Every strange thing compounding the previous, escalating steadily. The vomiting episode after dinner with my parents. Cherish’s combative behavior. The tally marks. It’s warped me until I actually believe the Cherish who needs me to know she’s alive is trying to hurt me. Worse. That she wants me scarred, that being sick wasn’t enough.
Control.
That is the one thing that cannot be true. That isn’t.
“Did she wake Cherish?”
That’s Jerry.
“She was screaming in her sleep.” Brianne has regained her composure, the way she always does. She’s relaying the details to her husband, and not for the first time. She’s told him this before, and now she’s adding emphasis to her telling, so that he understands the severity of the situation.
But they still aren’t coming.
“Cherish is scared,” Brianne says, and between her even tone and the contemplative quiet that follows it, it is being factored into whatever is delaying them.
I close my eyes to keep quiet. A throbbing that began in my forearm has traveled through my veins and is against my right temple, threatening to drown out all other senses. But I have to wait. I have to hear what they say next.
In the bathroom, Cherish is crying. It isn’t feral or dramatic now that she’s alone. It’s perfect the way she says my name once, as though I’m still there with her, so that when her parents return, they’ll expect to find us huddled together on the bathroom floor.