The first few weeks, I thought she’d go away if I ignored her long enough.
I emptied my bathroom drawer into a Piggly Wiggly bag and moved to the half bath downstairs. For the first time in a year and a half on the team, I started showering in the locker room after practice instead of making my mom pick me up early. I put on my joggers and my hoodies and my Vans in my bedroom. Dad asked if there was something wrong with my toilet and then took the whole thing apartand put it back together when I panicked and said it was broken.
What was I supposed to tell him? The truth?There’s a drippy girl in the mirror who apparently only I can see, and I can’t pee when I know she’s watching.
I only caught glimpses of her that month. I still had to use my shower, so I’d keep my eyes shut and leap from the bath mat to the door as fast as I could, trying my best not to slip and break my legs. All I saw of her was a thin elbow drenched in viscera, or the corner of a red-spattered jaw, or a bored expression under curtains of blood-matted hair.
I always heard her, though.
Every time I got out of the shower: “If you’re worried about it, I promise I don’t look. I’m not a creep. I always close my eyes. You’re the one making this weird, not me!”
Every time I passed by the door on my way downstairs for breakfast: “If you’re not gonna talk to me, could you at least maybe leave some music on? A podcast or something? I’mbored.”
Every night, after I shut the door on her before bed, I’d hear her talking to herself for hours. That was how I knew she wasn’t just in my head, because she talked about things I didn’t know anything about. She recited the names and plotlines of characters from fantasy books I’ve never read. She gave lectures on color theory. She conjugated verbs in Spanish like she was practicing for AP exams. I take French.
Nobody else ever saw her. Not my parents, not my brother, not the guy my dad called to look at the pipes when he couldn’t figure out what was wrong with my toilet.
It was just me. She was only there for me.
It’s the prom dress ordeal that changes things.
It took me months to recover from the birthday party thing, so getting invited on a prom dress shopping excursion at all was huge progress. I had to be cool. It had to go well.
Which, of course, meant I took one look at myself in the mirror of a Dillard’s fitting room, had a panic attack, and called my mom to pick me up. Everyone else was zipping up zippers and discussing sticky boobs and holding each others’ hair up in pretend updos, and I was running through the food court with my hoodie on inside out.
Mom asked, but I made up an excuse about a stomachache from bad Auntie Anne’s and locked myself in my bathroom the second I got home.
And now my ponytail is lying on the bathroom counter like a dead fish, and Bloody Mary is staring at it like she’s horrified.
She hasn’t said anything else. It’d be even better if she would just disappear completely, but at least she has the decency to stand there dripping silently.
I look at my reflection beside her, and the rush of adrenaline that carried me through the actual cutting shrivels up and tumbles down the open sink drain to join a lifetime’s worth of lost earring backs. I lookderanged. I look like that one Pokémon that’s a twenty-foot-tall palm tree with eyes.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” Mary asks.
“No.”
I think about another mirror, the one in the fitting room. My reflection in a lilac dress with spaghetti straps. I looked like how my dog looks when Mom forces those little boots on him to go outside when it’s raining. And I thought maybe it was because my hair was scraped back into a topknot like always, so I took it down, andthat’swhen I really freaked out.
“I went prom dress shopping,” I hear myself say. I don’t know what else to do. I lost my shit in a Dillard’s and now I have no hair. Talking to Bloody Mary probably can’t make things any worse.
“Ah. Nothing fit, right?”
“No, the dress fit. That’s the problem. It looked the way it was supposed to look. I looked like—like—”
“Like a girl?” Mary suggests.
I feel like I might throw up.
I’ve been avoiding this for a long time. I thought it could be enough to tie my hair up and wear two layers of sports bras under too-big sweats and hear the affection in my mom’s voice when she called me her little tomboy. I’ve been pretty sure I was gay since fourth grade, and there are gay girls who don’t dress like girls. I figured I could be one of them.
“I think short hair looks good on you,” Mary says.
I look back at her, surprised. “You do?”
“Yeah... Just, um. Not exactly like this.”
My eyes slide from her face back to mine. The longer hairs up top are kind of flopping over in either direction, and the back is so short that it stands straight up in places. All of it is orange, which isn’t new, but now it gives the impression that my head is on fire.
