The Worm in Every Heart

by Gemma Files

  Choose her spot, avoid the trees, and there wouldn’t be anything to break her fall but gravity. A mercifully short plunge, brief downward rush of wind and queasy freedom, with maybe one short, sharp shock as her head met the rocks below . . .

  “Jenkins, Jason. Jowaczyk, William. Lien, Elvis.”

  Deadly Nightshade (Atropa belladonna); Looks like: Drooping white bloom over broad, veiny leaves, berries couched in beds of wispy leaflets; Toxic part: Entire plant, especially bright black berries; Symptoms: Dry mouth and difficulty in swallowing and speaking, flushed dry skin, rapid heartbeat, dilated pupils and blurred vision, neurological disturbances including excitement, giddiness, delirium, headache, confusion and hallucinations. Repeated ingestion can lead to dependency and glaucoma.

  Not exactly deadly, then, is it? She thought, annoyed—and raised her head right at the same time that Wang raised his voice, all eyes already skittering to check her reaction: “Heather Millstone.”

  (You mean Hepzibah. Don’t you?)

  “Present.”

  Name after name after name, a whole limping alphabet of them—the roster of her “peers.” She watched Wang’s chin wag through the remaining call-and-response, counting freckles: Two faint ones near the corner of his mouth, one closer to the centre—a lopsided, tri-eyed face. From upside-down, it almost looked like he was smiling.

  Mr. Wang paused, apparently out of breath; sweat rose off him in every direction—a stinky heat haze, like asphalt in summer. He wore the same pale blue pin-striped shirts every day, and you could usually mark what time it was by how far the matching yellow circle at either armpit had spread. Whenever he gestured, waves of cologne and old grease spread in the direction of his ire. She was vaguely aware of having spent the last few minutes experimenting with his voice, even as her conscious mind turned lightly to thoughts of suicide—turning it up, turning it down, letting the words stretch sideways like notes of music. Shrinking it to a breath, a hum . . .

  “ . . . Heather?”

  Aware of his attention, finally, she looked up, met his eyes. And: “Yes,” she replied, reflexively—knowing that usually worked, even though she hadn’t been listening well enough to really know what she was agreeing to.

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes—Mr. Wang?”

  An audible giggle, two desks to the right: Jenny Diamond, self-elected Queen of Normal, Ontario. They’d been friends, once upon a time—or maybe Jenny had just tolerated her, letting her run to keep up with the rest of the clique while simultaneously making sure she stayed pathetically unaware how precarious her status as token Jenny wannabe really was. The last to know, as ever.

  “I said, you’re up. Yesterday’s journal entry?” Another pause. “Sometime this week might be nice, especially for the rest of the class.”

  Oh, I’m sure. Especially for them.

  The particularly funny thing being, of course, that she actually had done the work in question (for once.) Poem, any subject, any length. She could just see the corner of it poking from her binder, if she strained—an uneven totem-pole of assonant paragraphs, neat black pen rows on pale blue-lined sheets, whose first lines went like so:

  Always a shut door between us

  Yet I clung fast

  out here on the volcano’s rim

  For five more years or a hundred,

  Whichever came last;

  How tall this pain has grown.

  wavering, taking root

  At the split mouth of bone.

  Your love like lava, sealing my throat.

  Words, piling up like bones . . .

  “Well, Heather? You know the drill. Stand up . . . ”

  . . . and let’s get started.

  Students normally stood to read, displaying themselves in front of everybody else. The class listened, kept the snickers to a minimum, clapped when you were done. Big flourish. Good mark. Centre of attention, all that—

  But. But, but, but.

  Staring down at her own lap, caught short like some idiot fish half-hooked through the cornea. Staring at her poem, the binder’s edge, one blue-jeaned leg, the other. The edge of her peasant shirt, only barely hiding the area between, where well-worn fabric slid first to blue, then pale, then white along the seam. Normally, that is.

  Tomato-red flower blooming at the juncture now, spreading pinky-gross back along the track of her hidden zipper, her crotch’s bleached denim ridge. Evidence that she had yet once more left the house at that particular time of the month unsupplied, probably because her mind was frankly elsewhere: Choking on the thought of how unexpectedly soon Doug might return home from his latest “buying trip,” maybe. Spitting it out like an unchewed cud of cereal into her napkin . . .

  And: “8:30,” said Janice, grabbing her bowl; the chair, pulled out from under her, shrieked protest. “Up and at ’em, pie.”

  Muttered: “Whatever.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.”

  Janice turned, abruptly—a bad move, considering how you didn’t ever want her full attention on you, not more than you could help. Best just to stay background noise, an optical illusion: The amazing vanishing kid, briefly glimpsed from room to room. Because backtalk inevitably set Janice thinking of stove burners set on one, or pepper rubbed in the nostrils—enough to hurt, bad, yet too little to leave a (permanent) mark.

  “Seems to me there’s been a bit too much nothing been said around here lately,” Janice said. “Seems to me, somebody might want to keep that in mind.” Pause. “Well?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?”

  The exchange woke another surf-curl wave of memory, washing her right on back to the moment at hand—homeroom, Mr. Wang, her poem. The impossibility of movement, without flashing her shame to the room at large. Her breakfast placemat’s pattern swum briefly before her eyes, just for a second: A laminated rose-garden under improbably blue skies. Here and there, wherever the lines blurred, faces peeped out—pale and wizened features, ginseng death-masks, leering back up at her like tubers left to dry.

  Thinking: Yes. Yes, Mr. Wang. Yes . . .

  . . . Mom.

  Her tiny store of delaying tactics worn through at last, she swallowed hard and felt the vise inside her throat snap shut—tight, and hot, and dry. Jenny’s clique were snickering openly now; the rest of the class just leaned forward, mouths slack in anticipation of tears. Nothing quite as amusing as a post-pubertal monster hemmed in by pre-teens, after all: Face stretched and straining, eyes aflutter while a grown man impatiently panned for public apologies.

  And: Oh yes, you’re so right, I’m so sorry sir. Like anybody but him really gave a shit.

  She stared down at her own feet, the one knee visible through a rip in her jeans, scabby from crouching in the back yard—head bent, intent, waiting for monk’s-hood to flourish. Then looked up again to find herself suddenly risen, blood-spotted ass flapping free in the wind, face-to-surprised-face with Wang himself.

  “Ask her,” she meant to say, giving a pert flip of the head towards Jenny—but the words came out in a scream, and took her desk with them. A general flurry ensued: Much ducking, the desk hitting the nearest window dead centre, with a concussive thump. Cracks rayed.

  By the time Wang had uncrouched himself, she was already gone.

  * * *

  So who knows?

  It is well-fed.

  And once it has tasted blood,

  Who knows

  What seeds this thing may sow?

  But when the door closes this time,

  I won’t look back. Won’t check

  To see how little time it took

  For me to be erased.

  No longer plead my case

  Or tear my hair,

  That black engine behind your stare

  Pulling me away into darkness
:

  I’m nothing now but air.

  Not even fit to disappear.

  Two rats stuck together at the sewer-grate’s mouth: Carcinogens sprayed right and left as they thrashed together, squealing. She sat watching on the far bank, her fresh-washed jeans clammy against her thighs, burning with pollution. A stream of waste cut the Ravine’s heart in two uneven halves, like a diseased aorta; here it shrank to a mere grey trickle over stones. A doll’s face stared up at her from the nearest tangle of weeds—one eye gone, the other washed blind by the current.

  God, please, please, God.

  Not, of course, that she really put too much faith in that particular fable, any more than she truly “believed” any of the other mildly comforting stories she’d told herself over the years. Or maybe she did—but only at moments like these. Only when the stakes were high, and all other avenues of escape closed.

  Make Wang not tell. Make Janice not be home when the school calls.

  A bird sang suddenly, somewhere in the gathering dark.

  Make Doug not come home. Not yet. Not ever.

  It was cold.

  Yeah, and why not ask for a smaller rack while you’re at it, reality sneered back at her, from every visible angle.

  Rustling in the bushes, now, on either side. Snide whispers. Giggling.

  “Hey, Hea-ther . . . ”

  Just two weeks before, Mrs. Diamond (Jenny’s mother, the school nurse and that most contradictory of things, a nice adult), had maintained cheerily that all these girls would be jealous of her in a year—even, improbably enough, Jenny herself. In a year, they’d be desperate to have what she had, to be what they thought she was. The same Jenny who’d already decided it was real good fun to make sure an open box of Tampax somehow snuck onto her desk during Recess, or rifle through her bag at lunch and then leave one of her pads—oh so artistically arranged—where everybody could see it, snicker, make comments. A white-winged hunk of cotton squatting in the homeroom doorway like some flattened mouse: Ooh, hey, guys. What’cha think THIS is, huh?

  (Well, we know who it prob’ly BELONGS to, at least . . . )

  Snicker, snicker, snicker.

  Dropping squashed packages of McDonald’s ketchup in her binder, knowing they’ll smear and dry like brown Crazy Glue all across her journal, her poems. Just looked like the kinda thing you like, Heyyy-ther. Soh-REE.

  Didn’t matter how many words she strung together, or how well—how many plants she could raise, catalogue, research or harvest, to what mysterious and potentially fatal purposes. In the world outside her own freakishly pubescent body, it was the Jenny Diamonds who had the real power—always had. Always.

  But: Poor Mrs Diamond, bound and determined to put the best possible face on everything, however bleak. While she just sat there, thinking: Yeah, well. In a year, a thousand different things could happen. I could be DEAD in a year.

  Or rather: Christ, I HOPE so.

  “Yo, Heyyyy-ther . . . ”

  She levered up, made the stream’s far side in one long-legged jump. Heard yelps rise behind her at the flicker of movement (there she is, there she IS!), and ducked headlong into the underbrush without a backwards glance, heading directly up: Up through the poison oak, up under the shifting grey-green shadows of trees, up where the hiking trail’s woodchip-lined trail turned to mud and mush. Remembered the last time the clique had chased her down here, running her through the blackberry bushes ‘till she was breathless with stinging scratches. Like she’d accidentally grabbed the Black Spot and just not known it; like she was marked with fluorescent paint, invisible to everyone but them. Like she was some kind of, what was that word—

  —scapegoat?

  Chosen ahead of time, like around kindergarten, to sink and drown under a steady tide of bullying, or picked on simply because she’d been unlucky enough to have grown boobs a year earlier than everybody else—to have them when they were still age-inappropriate enough to be weird instead of jealousy-bait, before they were prized collateral on instant cool. On top of every other unlucky Goddamn thing.

  And then that older guy Paul—fifteen at least, a kept-back retard hanging with the Fives and playing Master Of The Universe ‘cause everybody else didn’t know any better—had caught up to her at last, shot out in front of everybody else to grab her by the sleeve and wrench, so the two of them went down in a heap together with her hair in the mud, and him on top. Grinning a wet, dumb smile as he stuck his hand down her shirt, like he was fishing for some kind of surprise gift-bag through a carny peep-hole.

  “Heather, baby—man, that set feels nice. Just like a couple a’ water-balloons.”

  “Get off—”

  “Aw, you know you want it. Just be cool and go ‘long, baby, everybody knows you’re fifty pounds of slut in a five-pound bag . . . ”

  (They can, y’know—just smell it on you.)

  She felt poison well in her heart, a cold black spurt; rolled and got on top of him all in one crazy lurch, using both fists to hammer his head down hard against the nearest hard thing: A root, a rock.

  “Crazy mother b—”

  He jumped back, bleeding, and the fear on his face was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

  But the rush of it drained away so fast.

  * * *

  If this was a movie, it only occurred to her now (as she pulled herself ever further upwards through the mucky treeline, her boots sopping-slippery with mud), then Jenny and her gang would later turn out to have cut the first girl to menstruate from the school herd every year. There’d be some conspiracy. These girls would disappear, never to be seen again—bleached bones under a swatch of weeds somewhere in the Ravine, after a terrifying midnight hunt . . .

  But it wasn’t a movie: Just life, nothing more or less. Considerably less interesting. Considerably more hurtful.

  Further up the hill, the house’s porch-light had come on. A car was pulling up outside—driver’s side door painted with a coal-bright tiger, crouched and ready to pounce. The other was hidden from this angle; a voluptuous woman, censored by flowers.

  God, you bastard.

  The tiger opened. So did the front door.

  She straightened, suddenly composed.

  Tell you what, she thought. Make you a deal. You don’t really have to make anything happen, okay? Just make me not care, when it does.

  That’s all.

  A heartfelt prayer. Yet God, as usual, stayed silent.

  And oh but she knew, so very very well, that her whole stupid life was an Afterschool Special cliché from top to bottom—her problems clichés too, each and every one of them. Plot twists so stale they all but gave off dust. Ludicrous. Laughable. Lame.

  None of which made the pain any easier to take, if and—

  (no, just when. When.)

  —it came.

  The rats, sated, had long since gone their ways. Janice was heading down the yard, already almost to the Ravine’s lip. Beside her was a shadow in embroidered jeans, sizeable hand on equally sizeable hip. No visible means of escape.

  Before her parents could start to call, therefore, she stood up. And waved.

  * * *

  “You decent?” Doug asked, pushing the door open; luckily, she was. This time.

  She stood in front of the mirror, flossing carefully. One side, then the other, each tooth in turn. Wrap and pull. Up, down and all around, like a see-saw.

  The dentist was a luxury. If she’d left it up to them, she wouldn’t have a tooth left in her head.

  Go away.

  “Missed you at dinner, pie.”

  Right hand on her shoulder, heavy as a full vacuum-cleaner bag. The warped mirror bent his fingers back, blurring them together: One strange flipper.

  “Ah elt ick,” she said, mid-wrap.

  “Put that down, babe. Let me look at you a while.”

/>   That’s an order, she thought, bracing herself. Floss to the garbage, with a flick. She turned, eyes shaded, as if to some erratic light-source more apt to blind than to illuminate. He grinned back, eyes glued to her chest, watching it bounce with the movement.

  “Jan told me you did some more growing up while I was gone this time,” he said. “And I thought she was joking. My oh my.”

  A whiff of dope from down the hall; Van Morrison on the stereo. She could almost hear him now, soft and infinitely plausible, at least to a woman kite-high on Doug’s own no-name brand of weed: Just leave us two alone to get reacquainted a while, Jan—play Daddy, y’know. All that good crap.

  “’Course, I already saw you when I got back.”

  The cap was off the toothpaste. “Driving up, you mean.”

  Big grin. “Naaah, I mean last night. I was just off shopping, that’s why I wasn’t there at breakfast. But I saw you, all right. Was about three, so you were fast asleep, cute as a button, lyin’ there in that big t-shirt . . . you sure you don’t remember?”

  She swallowed; the vise was back again. “No.”

  “Well, here I was watching you—and it being so long and all, I decided I’d give you a kiss. So I bend down, and you know what you did?” Pause for reaction. None forthcoming, so: “Took my hand, and then you start—licking it, right? Like it was some old lollipop. Licking and licking.” Still nothing. “Isn’t that just the sweetest?”

  “I’d never.”

  A shrug. ‘’Cept you did.“

  She finally spotted the cap, a red smudge wedged between divisions, halfway down the drain. Have to use the tweezers on that. “You’re lying,” she said, not looking up.

  “Now, would I lie?”

  Only every day of my life.

  “I gotta go to bed. School.”

  But he caught her in mid-stride, backing the door shut; licorice on his breath, rank with time. Pinning both her hands as he reached high over her head for the nearest bottle of moisturizer. “Dad, please don’t,” she whispered. “Not anymore. Please, it hurts.”