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From the snap of the willow, you're born just inside the front door of a house she knows like the back of her hand. You shake the cobwebs from her/your/her mind as you stand there on the porch, called to its yellow light like a moth.
Her/your/her throat is dry. Her eyes sting. There's a chain around your neck tugging you towards the boy in the car that's still idling on the curb.
The boy in the car. In her mind's eye you see him, twelve years-old with scraped up knees and perpetually untied shoelaces. She's leaning over to him in homeroom, grinning. I'll be in your band. He's starry-eyed. There's dread in the pit of her/your/her gut at that look, no no no don’t do that don’t fuck all of this up —
You look out at him now, meeting his gaze through his car window. No dread curling in your gut now, just something fluttering and wispy and wonderful.
He loves you. He's in love with you/her/you. He wished for her. For you. For her.
In the back of your mind, Nikki Freeman screams. What? No, no, no.
The two of you trip over one another like children in a race when you open your mouth to talk to him. She grabs the reins away from you and you snatch them back. You open her mouth and she bites your tongue. You bang around in the dark of your/her/your mind, a tangle of limbs — a childhood game with a mat, what's that one called? or a pit of dismembered remains.
You kiss him in his bed. She screams and shoves him away, throws her/your/her body over the side of the bed. Bruise on your tailbone. Bear looks mortified
That's enough. You crawl back into bed. You put your hands on him again. You shove her behind a door in your/her/your skull and lock it tight and leave her screaming there in the blackness, rattling the knob.
/
Ian drops you off at home, and all you want to do is be with Bear. But there are things that need tending to first.
You stalk through her bedroom, familiar-unfamiliar. The bed is unmade, sheets rumpled and a dip in the center where she/you/she must have last been lying. Taped to the mirror are photobooth photos of the four of them. A plastic bag of colorful little pills is hidden between pairs of underwear in the bottom drawer of the dresser.
In the dark kitchen, you find:
- a hand-painted coffee mug full of soapy water still in the sink.
- a slightly slimy bag of spinach on the refrigerator alongside a tupperware half-full of some kind of grey-brown stew that slides down your throat in cold chunks when you go at it with a tinny spoon from the cabinet.
- an open bag of cherry-chocolate granola on the counter with a sticky note that says IAN. (You do the only rational thing. You shred the sticky note into approximately six million pieces and dump the entire thing in the trash.)
- a bottle of painkillers with onetwothreefourfivesixseven pills left inside.
- four misshapen mini cacti lining the windowsill.
- her laptop sitting, open and dark on the table.
When you brush your fingers over the keys, the screen flickers to life. You tilt your head at the words she's written. NOT A ROMANCE. A LOVE STORY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.docx. A house made of sweets. Two children clinging to one another in the dark. I'm more than your wife. I'm your sister. Run her tongue over your teeth. Mark them down in her phone and jam it back in your/her/your pocket for safekeeping.
Deep in the recesses of your mind, she's still banging at the door. You shower, and this body begins to feel more like yours than it had earlier. You spritz yourself with her perfume and slide into her red dress and leave her sad, dark, lonely little house behind.
/
"How long?" Bear asks, mouth trembling with disbelief.
Christmas, you tell him, because it's the first thing that comes to mind, because it's easier than trying to explain: Bear, I was born loving you.
/
Nikki screams. She writhes. She kicks and thrashes. She begs, snarls, gnashes her teeth.
Still, the smile never leaves your face. These days, this body betrays her far more often than it does you. Your throat burns from the effort of holding her off. Your chin quivers. The muscles in your stomach twitch and flutter. It's not easy, but it is getting easier. You are strong. She is weak. You are loved, loved, loved.
The chain around your throat has been actualized in the cool kiss of a silver B against your sternum. You'd nearly vibrated out of your skin when you showed Bear for the first time. So now everybody will know I'm yours, you'd insisted, cupping his flushed cheek.
He touches you like he still isn't sure you're real, like he still can't quite believe this is real, and you want to pull him inside and show him yes yes yes Bear this is real, I'm real, you wished for me and I came. You wished for me and I stepped right out of your head. He says we can do whatever you like and she opens her mouth to protest and you bite down so hard on her tongue that it bleeds and while you swallow the hot copper tang of it you smile and tell him I like whatever you like, and it's true.
Nikki cannot claw herself out of the blackness the wish has banished her to. She cannot recover control of a body that, when Bear's eyes darken and he fucks you for the first time and every time after that, knows just what to do.
/
He says Nikki, I love you, Nikki, you're so beautiful, Nikki, Nikki, Nikki, and you throw your head back and say all the right things like a pull-string dolly Nikki had when she was a child: yes, yours, all yours, forever and ever and ever and ev—
/
The sound of the seconds ticking by is like teeth scraping against your skin. You piss yourself. Deep inside, beyond the door, you feel her shudder of revulsion. Or maybe just shame.
I used to do this, she says, when I was ten.
Fucking cunt. You keep your unblinking gaze fixed on the door. You watch sunlight and shadows slide across the silvery tape. You don’t know how long Bear has been gone. You hope he’ll be home soon.
She's still there, talking inside your head. On the other side of the door. You wish you could tape her fucking mouth shut. Every night for months the summer after my parents sent me to sleepaway camp.
The smile stretching your mouth is starting to tear at the skin of your lips.
I begged and begged them not to make me go, but they sent me anyway.
Your fingers twitch briefly at your sides. You oblige her, just a little. Why?
Her tone is smug in a way that makes to want to put her face through a window. You're the one in my head. Look and see for yourself.
/
You wake up screaming. Every night now, you spiral into the blackness of your/her/your mind and she sends you visions or memories or fucked up, stupid, ugly fantasies. A father who cares too much and not enough. A father who runs away. Coward. Mama’s sick. The smell of it clings to her skin, her clothes, her insides. The smell of death, too. Cruel, cutting laughter and gum in your hair and so so so fucking lonely. Freaky Nikki, freaky Nikki, freaky Nikki! Loser, weirdo, fucking slut. You want Freaky Nikki to blow you? Just ask her about her daddy issues — but be ready to wait in line! Pale purple bedsheets soaked through with piss. Keen-eyed older boys. Arms crossed over her growing chest; she hacks them off with a kitchen knife but in the dream they always come back. Gretel cries the first time her brother fixes himself between her blood-slick thighs. Ecstasy or agony. Ecstasy and agony. This is what it means, doesn’t it, to be a woman grown? The inside of an oven like a gaping hungry maw.
You forgo sleep. Slip into his sweater and let his warm boysmell carry you safely through the night as you watch him dream, instead.
/
You want to pull Bear so deep inside of you he can never find his way back out, can never leave you again for silly things like work or errands or parties. Isn't that what love is?
You cut his hair while he sleeps and rest the strands on your tongue and force her traitorous spasming throat to be still and swallow.
You peel Sandy's fur and flesh away from her squelching grey insides. You can't love something without wanting to consume it, and Bear loved that cat. You imagine chopping off some piece of you, like the tip of your finger or an earlobe, and sticking it between the piece of sandwich bread laid out before you on the kitchen counter.
Then he'd carry you inside him, too.
/
She creeps out from behind the door when she thinks you're asleep. When she thinks you cannot hear her.
You could yank her back into submission by the scruff, but you let her speak. Let her think she's in control for just a moment. Soft and pleading and pathetic, she begs him to kill her while you watch, whisper-quiet and still, a hunter in the treeline. Please. Please, please, please kill me.
You feel the fight go out of her as he backs further into the blackness beyond the doorway, leaving her alone and despondent. Her voice cracks hysterically long after he's gone. Please, please, please, please, please, please please —
She's almost easy to pacify after that. Aw. Nice try, Nikki. Silly silly silly girl, can’t you see? He carved me out of you and every day he picks me me me even when he’s afraid. It isn't you he loves anymore, not really.
But it might not be you anymore, either. You, who’s been such a good good good girl, good girl pretty pretty pretty girl, who wears her face and waits for him by the door puppy dog-eager and tells him everything he wants to hear and lets him come over your thighs and back and smiles and smiles and smiles.
Your jaw clenches. You slide out of bed as soon as you hear his car peel out of the driveway, head swimming with visions of cutting Sarah Harper’s disgusting tattooed flesh away and placing it over your own.
/
Sarah's brains are hot and wet and all over your face and hair and the B around your neck, and it's almost as good as being fucked.
/
She isn’t kicking up a fuss from behind the door anymore. She’s gone utterly silent, or maybe dead. It’s just you now inside her skull, coming apart at the seams.
The box chirps when you slide the One Wish Willow out, gripping it in trembling fingers. Sarah's one remaining eyeball watches as you snap it in two. Your throat is raw and your tongue is coated with yellow stomach bile and your forehead stings, cuts still oozing lazily. Everything smells like dirty pennies. I wish Baron Bailey loved me as much as I love him.
Not her. You. You, you, you. Not Nikki but you, the real you, this bloody, Nikki-shaped thing that loves him. The thing in him will love the thing inside of her and the two of you will keep their voices locked behind doors and all will be well, yes, finally everything will be perfect and right —
The soft click of the bathroom door opening down the hall. Footsteps on the tile. Your heart sings and sings and sings.
/
You’re allowed the taste of your willow-born fledgling lover for only a moment before the foamy pink bile bubbles from between his lips. The cry that escapes you is animal, and you can hear her in your head again suddenly as the sagging weight of him pins you to the cushions, louder louder louder, her fingers skittering little spiders prying the door from its frame, wood splintering, louder louder impossibly louder now, the door is coming apart like tissue paper now and everything's spilling out, and she's coming, she's here, and you think you're almost grateful for it, that it's finally finally finally over —
It had been cruel, maybe, but you weren't lying when you spoke to Bear from the kitchen doorway last night: it isn't darkness.
There's just nothing.