The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

LESS OF A GIRL by Chelsea Cain

SOPHIE SAYS NOT TO WORRY — that fourteen-year-old girls get a lot of practice cleaning up blood. She says they are experts at it. They scrub it off the crotches of their underpants, she says, and off their blue jeans. They clean it out of their bedsheets and mattress pads. They wipe stray drops off the bathroom floor, off the toilet seat, off their hands, out from under their nails. They bleed like stuck pigs, Sophie says. They hemorrhage. She says, watch a fourteen-year-old girl stand up from a chair, and half the time she’ll glance behind her to make sure she hasn’t left blood on the seat.

She says I should stop staring and get the paper towels.

“Under the sink,” she says, “in the kitchen.”

Her bedroom door is painted the color of an infected sore, and is covered with posters of actors wearing fake vampire fangs. Last year the door was yellow, and papered with pictures of horses.

It has been a long time since I’ve been out of the room.

I like it here, in the room. The smell of cherry lip gloss, piña-colada-scented candles, cotton-candy-scented hair spray, the Tide laundry detergent her mother washes her sheets with, hamster pee and sawdust, an orange peel that’s been rotting in the trash can under her desk for two weeks, talcum powder, and glue.

But now I can smell none of that.

Now it is sweat and blood and butchered meat.

“Paper towels,” Sophie says again. She looks down at Charlotte’s corpse, at the blood on the carpet, and frowns.

I reach for the doorknob and open the door to the hall.

“Don’t let my mother see you,” Sophie calls.

It’s like walking the plank, going off the high dive.

The hallway is thirty-seven steps. Framed color photographs of Sophie and her family line the walls. Their eyes follow me. They are wearing sweater vests. They are wearing white turtlenecks. Now they are wearing denim and leaning against hay bales. Now they are lined up on the beach in front of the cold Pacific Ocean.

I am walking, but I can’t hear my steps on the carpet.

Now they are dressed in holiday velvet in front of the Christmas tree. Now they are lying side by side making snow angels.

There are seventeen stairs down to the first floor.

I can see the pale blue glow of Sophie’s mother’s laptop. It smells like hair dye and charred wood and rotten grapes. She is sitting on the couch, with her feet up on the coffee table next to a glass of wine.

I have made a life out of moving silently, avoiding detection. I can stand against a wall so still that in the right light I am practically invisible. I am the thing you think you see at night in your room, before your eyes adjust and you decide it’s just a sweater slung over the back of a chair. When your hand slips off the mattress at night, I am the creature you fear will grab it from under the bed. I am Sophie’s naked, hairless twin. Her exact shape. Her budding breasts. Her skinny legs. I have her scars, her bruises.

The paper towels are under the kitchen sink. Sophie’s mother buys Brawny. It’s expensive. But Sophie says that her mother likes the guy on the package.

I slip the paper towels under my arm and back out of the kitchen, the ripe stink of rotten food in my nose, through the living room, past Sophie’s mother’s back, the blue glow of her computer, the smell of her red wine, up the seventeen stairs and down the hall to Sophie’s bedroom door.

Her twin bed is against the wall in the corner. The blue floral bedspread is pulled up neatly over the pillow. Postcards and pictures torn out of magazines are taped on the wall over the headboard. The bookshelf is crammed with books and horse show trophies and a few collectible dolls that she’s never been allowed to play with.

There’s a sticker on her desk that she put on the outside of a drawer when she was eight and hasn’t been able to get off. It’s a castle, but the edges are torn where she’s tried to peel it from the wood. There’s another bookshelf on the other side of the room, this one lined with stuffed animals. They are grouped into families: all the bears together, all the dogs, all the cats. The pink and orange lava lamp on her bedside table oozes and glows. The ceiling is covered with glow-in-the-dark stars. There are seven empty Diet Coke cans on the dresser.

Charlotte lies dead on a polyester sleeping bag on the floor next to Sophie’s bed. It is a Hannah Montana sleeping bag.

Sophie is digging out one of Charlotte’s eyes with a spoon.

You know when someone is trying to pop the pit out of a not-ripe avocado? That’s what it looks like.

Eyes smell like seawater and newspaper ink.

Sophie’s got one hand on Charlotte’s forehead and her other elbow akimbo, the spoon pressed into Charlotte’s optical bone, fighting a tide of thick red ooze.

She looks up at me. “Close the door,” she says.

I close the door and lock it.

The red eye slime slides down Charlotte’s cheek. Sophie has zipped the sleeping bag halfway up, so that Charlotte is tucked in, like this is a sleepover. Hannah Montana smiles happily.

The spoon makes a wet squishing sound.

The swollen flesh of Charlotte’s tongue sits limply between her braces. Dark bruises, dotted with broken blood vessels, encircle her neck and lower jaw. Her head is tucked back, chin up, so that the jagged wound across her throat is pulled wide, a crevice of bloody tissue and fat. Her hair, still blond from summer, is a bird’s nest, crusted with blood.

I stay by the door.

There’s a slurp and a pop, and then Sophie has Charlotte’s eyeball in her hand and she’s pulling and twisting because the optical nerve is still tethering the thing to Charlotte’s brain, and then, snap, the eyeball comes loose. Sophie lifts it up and holds it out to me like she’s found a particularly interesting shell, the eye soft and red, shredded nerves dangling from it, and Sophie says, “Eat it.”

I meekly show her the Brawny. “Maybe we should clean up first?” I suggest.

Sophie shakes her head, almost sadly, and presses her cupped hand toward me. “You’re so pale,” she says. Her fingernails are painted with purple glittery polish.

“I’m not hungry,” I say.

“Hand me that,” she says. “I’m going to get the other one.” She is pointing to the ceramic dish on her beside table. It’s shaped like a cupcake. The frosting part is the lid. It has a red cherry ball on top and fake rainbow sprinkles. The cupcake is where Sophie keeps her treasures: two baby teeth, the head of the small plastic boy who used to live in her dollhouse, a 1935 penny, a rock, a piece of a broken cup, a Matchbox car she found underwater in the Gulf of Mexico on vacation. I hand her the cupcake and she dumps the contents out on the floor. They bounce and skid out of sight, the teeth, the penny, the car. Sophie drops Charlotte’s eye inside the cupcake.

“What did you think this was going to be like?” Sophie asks me.

I don’t say anything.

She frowns again and lifts her eyebrows. “I want us to be friends forever,” she says.

She looks so sincere. And hurt. I have rejected her offering, that blue, blue eye. Now I feel like a monster.

“Fine,” I say.

I pluck the eyeball out of the cupcake and put it in my mouth and roll it around a little. It’s still warm and slippery with metallic-tasting blood. When I bite down it pops inside my mouth, releasing a sweet sugary gel that coats my tongue and slides down my throat.

A warm light tickles down the length of my arms.

I lick my lips.

“See?” Sophie says. Her eyes shine and she digs the spoon into her friend’s other eye socket.

Squish.

My stomach churns.

I move Sophie’s hand away and squat over Charlotte’s face and I tongue her dead eye, working it loose, sucking on it, chewing on the lid, the tiny eyelashes between my teeth, until it slips into my mouth and then, panting, I chew through the nerve fibers, slurp out the blood, and swallow. The warm fluid of her fills my mouth and runs down my throat.

I can feel Sophie watching me, so I slip my fingers deep into Charlotte’s eye socket, hook them under the bone, and pull until I hear her skull crack. Her head changes shape as the bone gives way, less of a girl now than meat. It’s easier that way.

I try to eat quickly. The splinter of bone, the chewy knot of her tongue, the dry hay of her hair, her flesh and fat and clothes. My mouth stings from the metal of her blood, the sharp bits of her.

She is young and comes apart easily. Fat from muscle. Muscle from bone. Cartilage and connective tissue. Blood and spinal fluid and mucus.

I devour her. There is nothing left. I lick her blood off the sleeping bag until Hannah Montana is dark with my saliva.

Then I look up at Sophie. She is sitting crisscross-applesauce on the bed, her cheeks bright pink.

I touch the bloodstain on the carpet and rub my fingers together. “This isn’t going to come out,” I say.

The stain is only a few feet wide.

“The bed,” I say.

Sophie nods and gets up and moves the bedside table with the lava lamp, and then she takes the headboard and I take the footboard and we inch her bed over until the bloodstain is underneath it.

We do not hear her mother, the smell of her wine breath obscured by death, coming up the stairs and down the hall. She knocks on the purple door and we jump.

The doorknob jiggles.

“Is it locked?” her mother says.

“Just a second,” Sophie calls. We look at each other for a long moment and then Sophie says, “Go.”

I slide under Sophie’s bed, my back on the carpet, my nose under the box spring.

Sophie opens her bedroom door.

“You moved your bed,” I hear Sophie’s mother say.

“Yeah,” Sophie says. She is struggling into her pajamas. I see her feet and ankles on the carpet. The striped PJ pants. Purple toenail polish. Next to her feet, on the floor, her ceramic cupcake, broken into three pieces.

“What’s with the paper towels?” her mother asks. The roll of Brawny is on Sophie’s desk.

“I spilled a Diet Coke,” Sophie says.

“Remember, one square,” her mother says. “Those are expensive.” She walks over to retrieve the paper towels and her feet stop next to Sophie’s. Then her hand comes down and scoops up the shards of colorful ceramic — the colored sprinkles, the cherry — and I hear the broken cupcake drop into Sophie’s wastebasket.

“Want me to tuck you in?” Sophie’s mother asks.

There is a pause. “That’s okay,” Sophie says.

“Okay,” her mother says. “But it’s late. Lights out.” The room goes dark. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” I hear Sophie’s mother say from the door. “Or any other kind of bug.”

She starts to close the door, the room settling into darkness.

“Mom?” Sophie asks suddenly. “Can you leave the door open a crack?”

“Sure,” her mother says.

The light from the hall illuminates the carpet, a slanted yellow rectangle. Sophie is quiet. I can hear her breathing. Thinking about Charlotte, a blush of pleasure runs through me in waves. My cheeks grow hot. My mouth waters. The coils of Sophie’s box spring creak inches above my nose.

Underneath me, on the floor, the bloodstain is wet on my back, and one of Sophie’s baby teeth digs into my shoulder.

The two of us are quiet for a long time.

“Sometimes I think my stuffed animals are staring at me,” Sophie says finally.

I whisper, “They are.”