Badass and the Beast: 10

by Shrum, Kory M.

  But you have to take her, her mother had begged her eldest sister. I love him and he doesn’t like children.

  “They’re perfect,” Claire said, pushing against the memories. She examined the women again. If she’d been asked to airbrush them by her editor, they would require minimal alteration. A trim here, a polish there. She wouldn’t need to rework all the lines of the body as she did with most women. She’d once photoshopped a photo of herself—just to see what she’d look like—and it took her nearly twice as long as it had to remake that month’s cover girl. Even then it had not been her best work.

  “Don’t you think so?” Claire asked.

  Toni opened her mouth and Claire braced herself. Sometimes Toni could be blunt, harsh even. The look on her face told her that whatever she was going to say next, would probably hurt.

  But then her expression softened and she linked arms with Claire instead. “If you say so.”

  Claire woke in the middle of the night screaming. Her skin was on fire. She threw back the covers in the moonlight and pulled her legs up into her chest. She touched her forehead and her fingers came away wet. For a moment, she was back in Louisiana, a swarm of fire ants on the mattress, eating her alive. But there was nothing like that here in San Francisco, and upon close inspection, using the bright moonlight through the window, she found no such pests between her sheets.

  “What’s wrong with me?” she whispered.

  The wound had healed. Audrey’s magical grandmother’s paste had seen to that. But her fever would rage, go away, and then return. This was unlike any illness she’d ever had in her life—and she’d been a sickly kid.

  It’s like you’ve never breathed fresh air, touched dirt, or been around animals, Aunt Lauraine had lamented. Claire tried to remember what animals she saw in New Orleans but she couldn’t, apart from the park squirrels, and an assortment of birds darting between balconies. And once she saw a tiger fish in an aquarium at a jazz bar where her momma sang.

  No pain had ever come at her in waves like that, at least not that she could remember. Just as soon as she would start to feel better, she’d break into a sweat, get hungry again, feel nauseous or an overwhelming and unexplainable sense of panic.

  She replayed the night she was bitten in her mind, stepping out of the Mothertongue Theater onto the street. The lights flashed from the old-fashioned Broadway sign overhead. The sound of chatter and laughter grew as people filed out of the bright building into the chilly night. A homeless man passing spoke loudly to himself, threatening a man none of them could see. She’d waved goodbye to Joss and Camilla, her breath white and spectral before her face, and turned to walk to the nearest MUNI station.

  She’d put her hands into her pockets to stave off the cold. And then—

  The dream twisted on itself as dreams often do. She was six maybe seven and trailing behind her mother as they walked through a dark street in the city. Frustrated by her pace, her mother stooped to pick her up and carry her.

  The man beside her said, “Vivienne, you’re the most gorgeous creature I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

  Her mother laughed. “You should’ve seen me in my prime sweetheart, before I had her.”

  Her. Claire. She’d known even then that her very existence had cost her mother something, robbed her mother of something precious. She tried to look into her mother’s eyes and apologize but couldn’t.

  She woke up and realized, she no longer remembered her mother’s face.

  Claire got off work early and met Joss and Camilla on the street outside her office building. As soon as they saw her, they each offered her the items she’d asked them to bring. Camilla handed over the yoga mat and Joss the water bottle.

  “Thanks,” she said and turned her wrist over to check her watch. “We’ve got half an hour.”

  “Plenty of time,” Joss said and twisted her brown hair up on top of her head. The three of them darted across the road as the WALK sign came on and fell into step together. Joss and Camilla in front, Claire trailing behind.

  It was cute to see them together, Claire thought. Joss and Camilla held hands every once in a while, and sometimes Joss would lean over and plant a kiss on Camilla’s cheek. Claire laughed to herself, thinking of the first time she’d ever seen two women kiss. After all, it wasn’t the peck she got from girlfriends throughout high school, and she’d been raised by a conservative Christian woman—who had views against queers. When she’d told Aunt Lauraine that she was going to attend college in California, her reply had been:

  “Do you know what California is full of?”

  “No,” Claire admitted.

  “Steers and queers.”

  Claire hadn’t liked the joke then, and she liked it even less now. Camilla had her arm around Joss, holding her close as they headed for their yoga class. Because they so often passionately argued about books, movies, and absolutely nothing, it made their tender moments that much more endearing. Camilla whispered something in Spanish to Joss.

  Claire was distracted from her friends by a white man in a sports jacket stumbling up onto the curb ahead of them. Claire knew that stagger. She’d seen many drunk men don that walk in the French Quarter on a Friday night. She moved to warn her friends but wasn’t quick enough.

  Joss and the man brushed shoulders.

  “Fucking tranny,” a man said.

  All three women stopped.

  Joss straightened and stepped away from Camilla. “Excuse me? What the hell did you say?”

  “You heard me, you fucking he-she.” The man looked around Joss and pointed a finger at Camilla. “Get a real man if that is what you want.”

  Camilla’s mouth fell open in surprise.

  “What? Don’t you understand me?” the man said and yanked at the bottom of his sports jacket as if the very sight of them offended him. “Fucking spic.”

  Joss leapt for him, but she was too slow.

  Claire slammed the man against the wall of the building. She pushed him up by his throat and growled in his face.

  “How dare you,” she said. “What kind of bigoted racist fuck are you? Do you think you can just talk to people like that?”

  She released the man and he fell to the street. Seeing him there on the pavement, she saw red. She wanted to hurt him. Hell, she wanted to tear him apart. Before she could jump on him, Joss and Camilla had her by the arms, holding her back.

  The man pulled himself up and began backing away.

  “Don’t you have a megachurch to run or something?” Claire hissed and shook off the women holding her. The man was already running down the street. Still, there was something about seeing him run that made Claire want to give chase.

  Camilla laughed. “Don’t you have megachurch to run or something? Did you really just say that?”

  Joss joined in the laughter, her voice cracking in the middle. When Claire turned to face her friends, trying to push down the red anger and hunger seizing her, the laughter stopped. Camilla’s mouth opened as if to speak but she couldn’t seem to find the words in any of her four languages.

  Joss, who stood directly in front of Claire, also fell silent. Her mouth opening and closing, but making no sound.

  “What?” Claire asked. The red-hot fire twisted itself into panic. “What’s wrong?”

  All Joss managed was to point at Claire’s mouth.

  Claire raised her hand to her lips. Pressing against the back of them, was a strange bulge on each side. Four sharp canines jutted from her gums. Two on the top and two on the bottom, where her normal eye teeth had been. She whirled and looked into a storefront window.

  “Claire?” Joss asked. Her voice was high.

  The teeth didn’t go away, no matter how many storefronts she ran to along the street, each reflection showed her the same. Panicked, she turned toward her friends to see them standing there, staring at her as if unsure what to do.

  Claire knew what to do.

  She ran.

  When she reached her apartment, she realized s
he didn’t have her keys, wallet or anything, which she must have left on the street at Joss’s and Camilla’s feet. She had to ask her building supervisor to open the apartment for her, all while hiding her mouth with her hand.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked, his bald head shining in the lamplight.

  “I’ve got a bad cold,” she lied. “I don’t want you to get sick.”

  “That’s considerate,” he said, but Claire had already darted inside and shut the door.

  Running to the bathroom, she flipped on the lights.

  The teeth were still there.

  “No, no, no!” she cried out, lifting her top lip, then the bottom to see the sharp edges better.

  Her mind flooded with Aunt Jacelyn’s criticisms. She only saw Aunt Lauraine’s sister once a year, but when she came to their small house in the bayou, each visit was made memorable. She had something to say about everything. Particularly about Claire, who was never ladylike enough—with her elbows on the counter, her shoes untied and dress skewed on her shoulders. She spoke too loud and too often and wasn’t polite enough when asking for things—as if you should ask for anything at all.

  Her first memory of Aunt Jacelyn came back to her, hard and fast. Claire, having only lived in Aunt Lauraine’s farm house for three months, snuck down the stairs one night. It was the voices that had awoken her, dragging her from the cot in the spare room to the landing. When she still couldn’t quite hear, she crept a little further down the stairs, stopping on the fourth step, knowing the fifth squealed.

  “I can’t believe you’re keeping her,” the woman had hissed, a shrill, Southern voice that she had never heard before.

  “Lower your voice,” Aunt Lauraine said.

  Claire heard the squeak of the rubber cane on the scuffed linoleum and pressed herself into the darkness, knowing the woman would check the stairs for the sight of her.

  “Your sister runs off with some man to N’Awlins, gets herself addicted to God-knows-what and then dies—and you’ve taken it on yourself to keep her brat. I just don’t understand it.”

  “She’s no other family.”

  “You’re barely family! If Momma knew you had her husband’s bastard grandchild in her house, she’d turn over in her grave.” Aunt Jacelyn hissed and for the first time Claire saw the slim, well-dressed woman in the kitchen door frame. Her ruby nails matched her shoes, shining in the kitchen light. Her hand clutched a hip. Long black hair was tied into a thick waist length braid. “It’s bad enough that I can’t talk sense into you about this damn farm house. I know you want to keep it because it was Momma’s, but now you’re going to stay here with a child. A dead woman’s child!”

  “We will manage.”

  “In Momma’s house! Momma’s house, God rest her soul.”

  “Momma was a good Christian woman. She’d understand. She forgave Daddy for sleeping with that woman. She never blamed Vivienne for what happened. She would’ve welcomed them both.”

  “She’ll turn out just like her momma,” Jacelyn said. “You watch.”

  What would Aunt Jacelyn have to say about her now?

  What could she say? About the elongating ears, the hair thickening on her head and side of her face. These fangs—because dear God, they were fangs—were about as unladylike as it got.

  She tried everything she could think of to get rid of them. She pushed on them until her fingertips bled. She took a metal nail file to one without success. She was sobbing, phone in hand, about to make an appointment with the dentist for emergency cosmetic surgery, not even sure if she could afford it. Someone pounded at the door.

  Face red and tear-stained, Claire poked her head into her hallway and called out. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Audrey,” a voice said, slow and steady. “Open up.”

  “I don’t feel well,” Claire called back. As she looked down at her shaking hands she saw her fingernails had stretched into claws. “Please come back later.”

  Camilla’s voice seeped through the crack. “Open up, chica. We can help you.”

  “No one can help me,” Claire said, but too soft for the girls standing in her hallway. “There’s something wrong with me. I’m—”

  A soft hand clasped onto her shoulder and turned her. Audrey wrapped both arms around her then, pulling her from the bathroom into the hallway

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Audrey said. She stroked her hair and several more hands came to rest on her back. Claire could feel them, soft and patient.

  Claire pulled back. “Look at me! I’m hideous. How did this happen? I don’t understand.”

  “Get her away from the bathroom and away from the mirrors,” Lex’s quiet voice said. “It is difficult to see clearly in front of a mirror.”

  “I’ll make her some tea or something,” Camilla said and turned toward the kitchen nook.

  “She needs something stronger than tea!” Toni laughed. “Where’s the goddam vodka?”

  Audrey steered Claire into the living room and eased her down onto the couch. Lex, Joss, and Toni gathered around her in a semi-circle, with Audrey kneeling right in front at her knees.

  Camilla moved through the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets in search of tea-making supplies. Once she located the honey bear, mug, and tea bags, she filled the kettle with water and put it on the stove.

  “How do you feel?” Audrey asked. She looked up into Claire’s face.

  “Crazy! This is crazy!”

  “Don’t listen to the voices in your head,” Audrey said. “Forget what anyone would think or say. How do you feel?”

  It was impossible to still the voices. So many of them. Some she recognized, her aunts’, her mother’s—the things she’d told her before she’d died in a dingy French Quarter bathroom—your beauty is all you’ve really got, Poppy. It’s the only thing that’ll get you anywhere.

  “Scared,” Claire admitted. “I’m scared.”

  Audrey squeezed her knees. “Power is terrifying at first. But it’s yours, Claire. It’s always been yours.”

  “Why is everyone so calm?”

  “Because it happened to us,” Lex replied in a very matter of fact voice. She rolled her wheelchair forward by turning the large silver rims. Her face was perfectly calm and her straight hair grazed her jaw bone.

  “This has happened to you?” Claire looked to each of their faces. “You were bitten?”

  “You didn’t see it, did you honey?” Toni said, one hand on her wide hip.

  “Well—no—but—” Claire began.

  “And you won’t ever,” she went on. Joss nodded in agreement. Her dark ponytail bobbing. “Go ahead and try. What do you remember about that night?”

  Claire thought hard about coming out of the theater into the dark. About cutting a corner toward the MUNI station and then the growl she had heard—low and she thought from somewhere in her own head. Then it grew louder and the pain that ripped through her was blinding. Her legs had been knocked out from under her and she turned to see but—

  “I had just finished seeing that movie with you guys.” She pivoted toward Joss and Camilla. “And then I was walking home and—” And she couldn’t see it. No matter how she replayed it—she couldn’t see it.

  “I was reading Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilmore in my dorm room,” said Lex, raising herself up for a moment, before settling into a more comfortable position in the chair. “I rolled down the hall to get a Coke from the machine and that’s the last I remember. The next thing I knew I was changed.”

  “It was Thelma and Louise for me,” said Joss. She stretched to one side and touched her toes. “It was my mother’s favorite movie and when she remarried her dick husband, I got this box of all her crap in it, things she had no room for in her new life. I gave most of it away, but I couldn’t pass up on the movies. One night after work, I put it on and watched it. I must’ve fallen asleep, because I woke up to a sound of something moving around the house. I can’t remember if it got me in the room or if it go
t me in the kitchen when I went down to check out the noise—I can see it happening, both ways—but I know it couldn’t have happened like that.”

  “It was a movie for me too—” said Camilla. “If These Walls Could Talk. I had rented it from the tiny lesbian section of the movie store in Kileen and rode my bike home to watch it. I must’ve been 16 or 17. I can’t remember. Anyway, I remember I watched it at least five times before I finally took the damn thing back. And I was almost home after having returned the video and it just came out of nowhere. Tore me up right there on the street. People were around but no one reacted—it was as if they hadn’t seen a damn thing.”

  Claire looked up at Toni expecting her to tell her story next, but she said nothing. Nor did Audrey.

  “It will get easier,” Audrey said.

  “I’ll always be like this,” Claire grabbed the sides of her furry face, touched her sharp canines with her claws. She wept.

  “Hey now,” Toni said and wrapped a thick, warm arm around her.

  “But why me?” Claire cried. “Why me?”

  “Because you wanted it,” Audrey said.

  “Who the hell will want me looking like this?” And as soon as she said it, she felt stupid. But it was true. It was truly how she felt.

  Joss patted her knee. “You’re perfect.”

  “I can’t walk around like this forever! None of you look like this! Tell me how to make it go away.”

  “Only you can do that,” Lex said again.

  The kettle squealed and Camilla pulled it hissing from the stove top.

  Joss took the cup from Camilla and passed it to Claire. Then Toni said, “In the beginning, you’ll be very aware of your claws and teeth. You’ll feel like you’ve got to use them at every chance. It was the same for all of us—well, maybe not Audrey—but you’ll like feeling strong. You’ll like telling people to go fuck themselves after so many years of letting them step all over you.”

  “But that will go away.” Camilla filled in the semi-circle around Claire huddled with a cup of tea. “You’ll learn that just because you have teeth and claws doesn’t mean you have to rip everyone apart.”