In Laymon's Terms

Nicole Cushing

E MADE YOUR NIPPLES...scabby?” Deadweight gasped in disbelief, missing the toenail and instead landing a splotch of candy apple red on the nearly vestigial little toe.

“He nibbled on me a lot.”

Her belly rolled as she cackled. “Ewwww...you know, I bet that’s how he’ll remember you. In his little black book of girls, he won’t even remember your name, you’ll always just be ‘Scabby Nipples’ to him.”

Angie’s doe-like brown eyes rolled. “I could say something...”

A flicker of recognition signaled in Deadweight’s eyes when she realized that Deadweight sounded at least as derogatory as Scabby Nipples. But if it had worked, at least Angie would have had a label, too. Angie realized the awkwardness and changed the subject. “You’re so fucking predictable. Get the dirt, then knock my tits.”

Deadweight stopped smiling, and gazed at her behind the glare of what had to be one of the few remaining pairs of coke bottle glasses in existence. “Seriously, you need a friend like me, to keep an eye on you.” Angie noted a creepy defensiveness, combined with almost-maternal condescension. “That guy looked a little rough to be hanging out on under-twenty-one night.”

“Mmm hmm, he was.” Angie closed her eyes, pursed her glossy pink lips into a tight, tiny smile, and remembered. “And more than a little.”

Deadweight finished, scrubbed off the smudge of polish on Angie’s toe, then admired her work. Her eyes lifted from Angie’s toes, up two marble sculpture legs, to curvy thighs wrapped like a package in snug, ragged-fringed jean shorts. Then up to the Kid Rock tee shirt covering the bountiful home of the scabby nipples, and finally to her face. Deadweight envied those big eyes, high cheekbones, and the two tiny arcs of jawbone that met at her dainty chin. “You look hagged out. Were you out all night?”

“Hell yeah.”

“Tired?”

“Gettin’ there.”

“Hickey check before you crash.”

“Oh, shit, I would have forgotten it.”

“I’ve been doing hickey check on you since we were in eighth grade. What are you going to do without me at college?”

Angie’s first thought: Lose Deadweight.

“Reel in Alpha Male.”

“Oh please, a campus full of sensitive poets, and here you go already with your fucking Alpha Males.”

“J.D., the guy last night, he was Alpha Male, and let me tell you...”

“Yeah, yeah. Big dick, monosyllabic. This is Mickey Rivera all over again. Now, stay still.”

Deadweight studied her face. “Hmmm...this guy...kind of weird. Makes your tits all scabby but leaves no trail anywhere else. Leave it to you to find a freaky guy like that. I bet he still lives with his mother, and still sucks on her each night to satiate his titty fetish. I wonder if he makes his mommy’s titties all scabby.” She grinned with teeth that weren’t quite crooked, or quite straight.

Angie sighed. “You just wish some guy, any guy would bother making your tits scabby.”

Deadweight glared. “That was uncalled for.” Her eyes flinched in their sockets the way they had when Angie would pull a pigtail when they were little.

“Ummm...wait, before we get into this...You’re the one who’s been ragging on me. I just say one thing and...”

“I was kidding; that wasn’t kidding.”

“Relax, kidding is in the eye of the beholder. Okay?”

Her glare relaxed, but her mouth still tensed. “Just because I don’t have a different guy each week doesn’t mean I’m ugly.”

Angie looked up at Deadweight. Her cousin, underling, and sometimes-confidante oozed a broken-spiritedness that hadn’t been in since the days of grunge and heroin chic. Only, she couldn’t possibly pull off the waif look until she dropped a hundred pounds. Beyond her size and her despondence, there were other things. Those thick glasses caked with smudges. The acne which, even at eighteen, clustered in colonies on her forehead and chin. Deadweight’s attempts to match Angie’s fashion sense slammed against the reality of the girls’ disproportionate family incomes.

To see the two of them together served as a compelling testament to the power of nurture over nature. The defining features of their matrilineal clan lingered over both. Each had wide hips, ample breasts, and most defining of all, the Roman nose and pouty mouth. Yet, as if subjected to an experiment, each had been raised in homes as different as two sisters can be.

“I didn’t say you were ugly. Look, I’m really, really tired. We shouldn’t fight like this our last summer together. No more fights, okay?”

“Oh, I see, the commoner did your nails, served her purpose, so now you need to crash. Who’s going to do mine?”

Angie remembered Deadweight’s brittle, chipped nails. She got up and pulled the bed sheets down. “Tomorrow. Right now I have to crash, and this headache’s killing me.”

Deadweight looked on.

“Good Byyyyyyeee.”

It stabbed and released, over and over again with the rhythm of rutting. Each pain in her skull reminding her of J.D. clawing into her, slurping and sucking on her nipples, then biting and thrusting into her. He gave no pause before crashing into her like high tide in winter, and she had succumbed gratefully.

She woke up damp. Wet between her thighs, wet atop her skin, and frozen to the marrow. Someone kept on knocking on the door, and calling to her. She found her panties and nightshirt tossed to the floor. She scrambled to put them on, stumbled and fell onto the hardwood floor. The knocking at the door continued, and the knocking in her head resumed, now like a hammer driving a nail deeper and deeper into her brain. She crawled to the door. Bracing herself with the handle, she pulled herself up from the ground. She turned the knob.

Deadweight stood just outside, frowning. “Aren’t you going? You’ve been hiding out in there all day.”

She glanced out the window. Nighttime. “Going...where?”

“To the outlets. We were supposed to find me some new shorts, remember?”

“Oh, I...” Her teeth chattered and pricked her gums. “Ouch.”

“Something isn’t right. You’re sick.”

“My mouth...fuck!”

“Here, let me see.” Deadweight flicked on the light switch.

The only hint of color in the girl’s body was the thin scribbles of blue veins around her wrists, the undersides of her elbows, and her legs. Something had bleached her skin an impossible white. Her dirty blonde hair, brown eyes and candy apple nail polish now stood out as awkward anachronisms from days of life and color.

Deadweight screamed her throat raw. “Oh God, what the fuck’s happened to you?”

Muffled voices from downstairs. “What’s wrong up there?” She heard the clanking lever of her father’s Lay-Z-Boy. His steel-toed footsteps bounded up the stairs, creaking the hardwood. Squeak, pound. Squeak, pound. Deadweight continued to shriek.

New instincts asserted themselves. The pounding inside Angie’s head grew less severe, less foreign. It now served as a new pulse, a psychic one picking up where the physical one ended. She tried to tell Deadweight to shut up, but it came out as a hiss and a snarl. Frustrated by her inability to tell Deadweight exactly what she thought of her, she summed it up by flipping her the vampiric bird.

Yellow and red flew past her, followed by a ghostly rush of air. The window flinched twice in two seconds. Then the door flew open, and Deadweight turned to face Uncle Ray. “She’s left.”

She told the police, Uncle Ray, and Aunt Charlotte everything that she thought they’d believe. Angie had gone out with an older man known only as J.D. He had been rough with her. By the next evening she disappeared without a trace.

The result netted Deadweight notoriety, the closest she’d come to popularity since she’d boarded the bus for first grade. For a while, her classmates even stopped calling her Deadweight and actually used “Becky.” In the vacuum of information left by a true vanishing like this one, the gossip mill needed answers, and had no one better to turn to. Had Angie been there to navigate her through the gauntlet of stares and eavesdropping, she could have perhaps turned it to the advantage of her social status. Yet instead she floundered, a moon with no planet around which to revolve.

Rain rattled the roof and crisp static thunder ripped open the sky the Friday night in February that Angie came back. She pawed at the window like a stray until Deadweight woke up. Deadweight tensed in her bed as if bound and felt her gastrointestinal reflux worsen. Bile and vomit tickled the back of her throat. Sleepdust crusted her eyes half-open. A raspy muffled voice barely made it past the rain and the window.

“Hey Deadweight, it’s me, Scabby Nipples.”

She slinked to her nightstand and fetched a Bible. She thrust it forward. “That only works with crosses. I really don’t have time for this.”

Deadweight answered aloud. “Don’t have time? You have eternity.”

“Deadweight...”

“Yeah?”

“I’m pregnant.”

Deadweight let her dry off with the comforter. There, drenching her bed, sat an honest-to-god, five-month pregnant, naked vampire. She’d lost some of her wildness and much of her confidence since she disappeared. Her shapely hips and still-scabby tits had retreated onto her emaciated frame. Out of modesty or repulsion, Deadweight shoved a terrycloth robe toward her. “You look awful.”

“Let me guess, all hagged out?”

“Seriously...”

“I haven’t fed...almost at all...rats mostly...I have no fucking thirst. I can’t fucking feed on people. What sort of loser vampire am I?”

Deadweight glanced at her belly. “How the fuck...”

“I don’t know...I guess his vampire jizz had a date with my vampire egg.”

“But, you’re both...”

“I know...”

A smile crept onto Deadweight’s face. “Just another preggers teen with bad teeth. In this town, it’s the perfect cover.”

Angie glared and growled. “This situation isn’t permanent, you know.”

“Angie, abortion isn’t always...”

“Shoosh your youth group talk.”

“You’ll be emotionally scarred for life!”

Angie cackled. “Now...at this point...you’re worried about that? I think that’s going to be par for the course, babe. Besides, the fetus, my baby...it can’t be alive anyway, right?”

“I have no clue. Could it be alive?”

“Not if I’m dead.”

“How are you going to do it?”

“Find me a phone book.”

Angie had only gone to one or two places where the air felt as heavy as that inside the abortion clinic. The AIDS testing clinic at the health department had been one, and the funeral home where they’d said goodbye to grandma and pop-pop had been another. All places where life and death mingled in an uneasy alliance. Angie wore jeans, an oversized sweater, and an overcoat for the occasion. The receptionist sat in the lobby, confirming that she was a girl here for an appointment, and not a fundamentalist terror bomber. “Name, honey?”

“Jenny D’Angelo.”

Deadweight rolled her eyes. She told Angie that with skin so pale, she should have picked an Irish pseudonym, not an Italian one.

“Yes, ten o’clock. You’re...”

“Early, yes, I know...”

The receptionist tried to smile the sort of knowing smile that older women flash when seeing a younger woman pass through a biological rite of passage. First period, first intercourse, first pregnancy. First abortion.

They sat and read six-month-old issues of People. “Ow!” Angie flinched, her mouth scrunching into a grimace.

“What’s the matter?”

“The little fucker,” Angie hissed, “just gnawed at me.” Deadweight groaned and pursed her lips in disgust.

Angie scanned the rest of the room. Two other girls waited. One older, probably in her mid-twenties. The other younger, fifteen at the oldest. Funny, how her gaunt, pale, frightened expression fit in among them.

The baby bit her womb again. Harder. She winced. Rose-tinted sweat began to bead on her forehead. Her head began pounding again, this time with the frequency of respiration. The fifteen-year-old approached and tapped her wrist. “What’s wrong?”

What’s wrong. “Wrong...wrong...” She heard the words over and over, in time with the pounding inside her skull. A blurry image formed in front of her. The fifteen-year-old lay spread in front of an older boy. “This is wrong...nooo...it hurts! It’s too big!” she screamed. The boy grinned and huffed atop her. No boy, wait...a man. Not just a man.

“Daddy...stop it...” The image focused. The man withdrew from her bleeding anus and plunged immediately into her vagina.

Angie paused and heard the sobs waiting inside this girl, then another series of images flashed through her head. More daddies, more sobs, more rapes, more pregnancies, but...no more abortions. Her own fetus nibbled at her insides even more swiftly. Then it all clicked.

Angie now drooled a foamy blood. Her eyes twinkled yellow and green, and her lips and teeth grew to a snarling, savage maw. Panic dinned throughout the waiting room. The frumpy receptionist tentatively called for both girls to take their seats.

Angie lifted the oversized sweat suit top, and dug hungry teeth into the girl’s belly. Layers of skin and muscle yielded little resistance, and shredded bits of them dangled from her gut. The twenty-something and receptionist fled, squealing. Angie shivered as the girl shrieked with a terror reminiscent of the night her Daddy knocked her up. She ended it quickly, grabbing the incest-fetus by its neck, and shaking her maw until it cracked. The pounding in her skull slammed her like bricks now. “No memory, no memory...no memory...”

She repeated the words. “No memory, no Daddy, no rape.” The eviscerated gut healed, strands of skin reassembling themselves. The girl quieted, even cooed, then slept.

Deadweight looked over at Angie. “What the fuck was that about?”

Angie stood over the girl, mouth crusting with infant blood, her skin flushing with ruddiness unseen since the night she’d turned. In her womb her own infant rested, its thirst quenched by the blood and the healing. That day was the last that Deadweight actually saw Angie. Angie stayed close, though. Watching Deadweight...watching Becky outgrow her awkwardness. Watching her, and waiting, in case she ever needed her.