Page 15 of You Weren’t Meant to Be Human
Past her, over her shoulder, Levi is murmuring to Jess, his head ducked to her temple. Her big brown eyes focus anywhere but him. She frets with the frayed edges of her jean shorts. When Levi asks her a question, she makes a face that probably means no.
The claw clip is falling out of her hair. Her sneakers are scuffed. There’s a blot by her eye where she messed up putting on drugstore mascara—if she didn’t steal it from Sean’s house while loading up his corpse, she bought it at the Dollar General across from Wash County’s singular stoplight.
“Crane?” Tammy says. “You hearing me?”
Sophie was thirteen the first time she wanted to hurt herself.
Or that was halfway decent shorthand for it.
If she’d ever bothered to describe the specifics of what she wanted to do, presumably to a mental health professional, that’s what it would’ve been called.
Self-harm. Pain-seeking behavior. But even as a young teen, she knew that wording wasn’t quite right.
The pain would be an unfortunate side effect of what actually had to be done.
The moment it clicked, she was standing outside with her middle school class while the fire alarm blared.
It’s not as if it was an actual fire. Just a faulty wire in the gym that gave off a spark, never got above a flicker.
Barely more than a drill. Boring. But Sophie thought about being caught in that school as it burned.
Being rescued with second- or third-degree burns obliterating her beyond recognition.
In her imagination, the moment when she walked to the mirror to see her melted face for the first time? It was everything she’d ever wanted.
It consumed her. In high school, stuck in the art classroom while Aspen had a meltdown in the hall, she chewed on her eraser and wished for a car accident or a dog mauling.
She considered the time she saw a woman on a TV talk show who’d been attacked by a chimpanzee.
At night, she pulled blankets over her head and googled burn survivors until her vision blurred.
One night, she found a write-up of a fireman recovering from full-body burns.
An incident report of sorts, or a case study, complete with photos.
From all angles, every piece of him. The glistening, still-fresh wounds and painful skin grafts—they were beautiful.
He was beautiful. So beautiful to her, in fact, that she thought about him fucking her and masturbated in that awkward fifteen-year-old way.
She saved the photos and made an album on her phone, titled homework , and looked at them under her desk at school.
Sophie wasn’t actually going to do anything to herself.
She wouldn’t make a plan until she was walking across the graduation stage, and even that wouldn’t pan out.
Even in her worst fantasies, none of the accidents were her fault.
It was always someone else’s unleashed dog, or decision to drive drunk.
See, she told herself. She doesn’t want to do it.
If she wanted to do it, then it would be bad. Obviously.
But as she got older, began creeping toward womanhood, or whatever future was stalking closer by the day, it got worse. Didn’t it. The things she thought about.
Disgusting motherfucker. Wanting the boys in the locker room to rape her.
Maybe beat her into the bench until she stumbled out broken-nosed and sobbing.
She held the kitchen knife in her hand too long.
She put her face near the chain-link fence in the backyard, where the neighbor’s reactive German shepherd snapped its teeth.
She stood there barefoot in the grass, in the sundress she forced herself to wear, breathing hard as the animal paced back and forth, huffing angrily at her presence.
She thought about letting that dog fuck her. Horrible, filthy piece of SHIT.
A week before high school graduation—a month after she looked up “female castration” in a fit of disgust at her own libido—Sophie tried on the cute black dress she intended to wear to the ceremony, tied up her hair with a ribbon, and stared at herself in the bedroom mirror.
“I know I bought eyeliner,” Mom was saying from the bathroom across the hall. “It’s somewhere, I promise!”
Sophie said, “Mom, seriously, it’s okay.
” Her voice was a soprano, sweet and clear.
She’d spent most of her school years in choir, mulling over and refusing every concert solo, because she wanted the attention, but the wrong attention made her want to die, and she was pretty sure this would be the wrong kind.
She didn’t know what the right kind was.
In the mirror, she was busy trying to make the dress accentuate what little chest she had.
Long dark hair. Big eyes, small tits, pale skin.
There should have been proof written on her. An imperfection or impurity she could point to as evidence of everything that was wrong with her. There wasn’t. She was just a girl.
And what had gone wrong? Nothing had even happened to her.
Mom, chatting happily from the bathroom, joking about the heat index predicted for the ceremony, could not have been the cause of the crossed wires in her head, the disgusting wants lurking in her lizard brain.
Dad, napping off lunch on the couch downstairs, was a kind man with kinder hands, so it could not have been him, either.
And yet. And yet she didn’t want this anymore.
She was sick of speaking and straight As and expectations and a future she would inevitably crumple under.
What she wanted was to set herself on fire.
She wanted to cut her knee ligaments so she would be forced to crawl on all fours.
She wanted to reach into her throat and find her vocal cords and crush them, then let someone take her and break her and use her.
Put an ice pick into her orbital socket if she had to.
Fuck her up for good. Make the outside match the inside.
Then she’d be happy.
When Mom came out of the bathroom, Sophie was crying.
“Oh,” Mom said, dropping the eyeliner she’d finally found. “Oh no. Come here.”
While she’s sobbing into her mother’s shoulder, while Mom runs a hand across her hair and whispers to her, rocking her back and forth like she’s a baby again, go ahead. Make eye contact with the mirror. Really look.
Doesn’t Jess look a hell of a lot like that.
“Crane?” Tammy says again. “ Crane .”
Jess stares, and Crane can taste the impending burning-hot bile in the back of his throat.
Fuck her. She doesn’t get to do this to him, not now, not like this. It should be her in his place right now. It should’ve been her. Fuck her.
And Stagger is holding him. A hand on the chest, on the shoulder, pressing down. Body curled protectively, close and warm. Murmuring, “Okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
He’ll run, Crane thinks, like he hasn’t already failed. He’ll defect, he wants to say, as if he is capable of surviving out there in the world alone. They can’t do this to him. They can’t.
Oh, but they can.
Carry our little one into the sun, the hive says, where we cannot go.