“Cherish being scared isn’t the worst thing,” Jerry tells his wife in a way that makes me think she took the next step and he reached for her, asked her without words to reconsider. “Sweetheart.” Her hair must be what muffles his words. “What’s the point if she never sees what she’s done?”
Control.
Cherish did this.
Control.
What she’s done.
“Control,” I whisper.
Cherish has done something, and even her parents know.
“One two three four five.”
This can’t happen again.
“One two three four five.”
But I shake my head and take a step back. Because I was sick the same night Kelly fought Tariq for Cherish. I got sick the same night Cherish didn’t get what she wants.
Her parents made her take care of me. They made a girl of whom they require nothing but existence undress me and wash my hair. A girl who had no idea where her own spare toothbrushes were kept. Because, Brianne had told her, this couldn’t happen again.
But it obviously has. Whatever liquid skin is meant to do, it isn’t this. Whyever it burned when Jerry said it wouldn’t, Cherish has something to do with it. She wouldn’t go swimming with me—but that doesn’t mean she didn’t watch. It doesn’t mean she wasn’t close by when I scraped my arm. She would’ve known what would happen next. She had plenty of time. While her father squatted down next to me and studied my arm, while we talked about the bracelet . . .
She noticed.
If Jerry noticed it on my arm throughout the day, there’s no reason Cherish couldn’t have. But she left it for me. She took the tally journal from the drawer but left the bracelet—and then punished me for taking it?
“No.” I shake my head, squeeze my eyes shut to quiet the distracting pain, groan against the way it stabs and then courses from my arm throughout my body in a tidal wave. “She wouldn’t do that.”
However reverent Jerry Whitman is over his mother’s belongings, Cherish wouldn’t hurt me over something she doesn’t even want.
Tariq.
I remember the way she dropped her phone when I startled her in the garden, and I know. I know what she’s punishing me for. I know what she wanted today, what she thinks I’ll take from her again. I know why she’s upset every time she hurts me.
She hasn’t left the bathroom, not even to see if I’ve found her parents and gotten help. When I come back inside, she’s sitting with her back against the wall, her feet planted on the bathroom floor, her knees in front of her. She looks like she’s hiding underneath the sink, her temple resting against the exposed bowl of the basin. She looks up at me sullenly but doesn’t say a word. So I do.
“One two three four five.”
Cherish’s brow crimps briefly, and then it flattens and she’s just looking at me again.
“One. Two. Three. Four. Five.”
“One two three four five,” she parrots back to me as though to appease me, her eyes darting away from me and then back. “RahRah—”
“One two three four five,” I say, and I bring my hideous forearm in front of my body where I know she has no choice but to look at it.
“I heard you.” Cherish sighs—and then she screams.
The hardened magma-colored monstrosity protrudes where Jerry Whitman accidentally cut the skinned flesh, allowing whatever Cherish added to the small container of liquid skin to slip inside of me and erupt back out in a small volcano of shiny red crystals. A moment before Cherish screamed, I pinched the protrusion between two fingernails and tore.
I feel it separate in a flash. It almost doesn’t hurt. The small volcano and its crystals snatch some of the cellophane away with it, and after the pain, there’s the slightest relief.
Cherish is gaping at me, incredulous. Like she can’t believe what I’ve done. Like what she’s done to me makes sense, but not my getting free of it. She doesn’t care that the cellophane layer was cinched too tight, that it was pulling my skin so taut that it was buckling, blackening. That if it isn’t the liquid skin, then it’s however she tampered with it—or with me after the fact.
“One two three four five,” I tell her, and then I hook my fingernail into the opening I’ve made and rip again.
I don’t flinch. I don’t close my eyes or break my gaze. I watch Cherish watch me as I undo it.
“One two three four five.”
I dry heave, the third time. It’s a reflex that doesn’t seem connected to the tearing I’ve done, but my guts clench anyway. Something warm and thick rushes down and around the curve of my arm. I know when it drips and hits the bathroom floor because I feel droplets land on my bare feet.
“Mom!” Cherish is screaming, her hands flat against the floor, her fingers splayed as though we’re in the grade school yard and I’ll outline them in chalk.
I want it off me—for both of us. She’s scared, like Brianne said. That’s why I’m not angry. She’s scared at what she’s done, and it means Cherish doesn’t have the stomach for this, even if she’s the reason it’s happening. It isn’t a decision she made because she’d measured out the impact and the likely reactions and decided it was worthwhile. That isn’t how Cherish works. It isn’t the way she’s equipped.
I don’t know why she’s the one I always forgive. I don’t know why she’s the one I love even when I hate her. It’s involuntary like the multiple attempts my body makes to vomit while I tear away the skin without looking.
I don’t know how to explain that it’s the void in her, the way that even when she plots against me and succeeds, I know she isn’t built for this. She can’t be. She didn’t know that this was going to happen—not this, specifically. That’s why I’m willing to undo it.
“Onetwothreefourfive.”
I am tearing away the pain she caused me, but the damage is done and she needs to see. It adhered too well to me. Tearing it away is taking strips of me with it. I can feel it even though I won’t look away from Cherish. My feet catch splatter, but I only know for certain that it’s blood when she finally scuttles from beneath the sink and tries to stop me.
It matters that she comes. When she’s sloppily hurrying from her hiding place, her eyes jumping between my forearm and my face, I almost stop. I almost buckle at the sight of her wide eyes and contorted mouth, even though I’m not listening to whatever she’s pleading. It may be the first time Cherish has knowingly come toward something that frightens her, and I know that I am good for her.
She tries to get a grip on me, but her hand slips instead and I am still free to tear the skin. Both her arms windmill around trying to secure one of mine, and the palms of her hands are smeared with my blood. When she can’t get a hold on it, Cherish does what is unthinkable for her; she grabs my wounded arm instead.