Calli DeSerio is a short fiction writer from the Philly suburbs who loves to read and write weird shit. Her fiction has appeared in RiverCraft and her nonfiction has appeared Flagship and The Daily Item. You’ll probably find Calli crocheting or playing Stardew Valley in her free time. Find her here.
when did i become
The change starts when I find my makeup drawer empty. Not perfectly empty—my mascara sits, intact—but empty enough. When was the last time I used any of this stuff? I can’t remember the last time I reached for eyeshadow and blush, but I do know that tonight, my hands come up empty. I scrutinize myself in the mirror, eyes bare. The first time you put on mascara as a girl, you don’t realize that you’ll never be able to go without it again; that you won’t look put together without it, not ever. I stare into my eyes until I don’t recognize myself.
I search every possible place, consider every possible hiding spot. In a few weeks I’ll give up on looking, assume that I brought it all out to get ready with friends and lost it somewhere along the way. My friends will insist it’s been stolen, jokingly tell me I’m a victim. I’ll buy a new supply of nice makeup, slowly. But right now, I’m reaching for meaning and reason and I can’t find it. I have a feeling I won’t find it again.
"Mary.” Claire looks afraid when she says it, but only for a second. “When did I become so anxious?”
We’re sitting on the floor of my room a few days after the makeup went missing, and I’m still a little preoccupied with that, but I’m trying to be a good friend. As I consider the question, it feels like I’m sorting through a thick, gelatinous swamp in my mind. Claire had always been the level-headed one, the one who reassured me when I was in a bout of terror. When had that changed? When had she started obsessing over every detail?
“I don’t know,” I say, trying to draw out the acceptable time before I answer. “Maybe in high school.” We’re about to graduate college now, far from those awkward days.
She nods. “Yeah. Maybe.”
I want to know more about why she’s asking. I probably should have noticed the change. “You know I’ve always been anxious,” I say.
“Right.”
My eyes flutter over to a photo of us from the fifth-grade end-of-year party. We had a few years of friendship under our belt then, and I think we thought we knew everything there was to know about each other and ourselves.
I think we thought we’d always be friends, which has turned out to be true, so far. But I didn’t know that I’d have to come out to Claire in high school. That even though being a lesbian wouldn’t change who I was to Claire, it would lead me to an obsessive, toxic relationship that would nearly kill our friendship. I didn’t yet know how time could warp and alter.
We end up going for a walk in the small woods that lead to the creek behind Claire’s house. The air is sticky today, and I feel all manner of bugs clinging to me as we walk. Out here, it’s like we’re the same kids we always were, running out into the creek in our bare feet that summer we decided we’d clean up the woods and make them our own. We’d clear away the brush and dirt and creepy crawlies and build a fort and a clean path to the creek. Nature and our parents had other plans, of course. We were busy with summer camps and only made it out there a few times. The woods claimed our meager attempt at a campsite.
This moment feels like that summer, though. Right at the start, when we were on the precipice of something good. Except this is the hottest summer we’ve ever experienced. And it’ll probably be the coolest one for the rest of our lives.
We wipe sweat off our faces as we get closer to the creek, crossing over a wooden path I’ve never seen before.
“Did you do this?” I ask, gesturing to the boards beneath our feet.
Claire shakes her head. “It was there when we moved in. Don’t you remember? You got a splinter from it once when we were ten.”
I’m trying to remember the splinter, but a bunny distracts me. It doesn’t look like any animal I’ve seen in real life. Its ears are comically large, and it stands on its hind legs. I can’t look away.
“And that’s how you got the splinter,” Claire is saying.
I nod. “Uh huh. Right.”
The bunny moves deeper into the woods, and I follow it. Claire calls after me, but I don’t stop. It moves really fast for a bunny. Okay, I guess as fast as most bunnies. It’s just the way it’s moving. How it darts through the brush like an out of focus photo. It leads me to the creek, then jumps in. I don’t see it come back up.
Usually the creek’s got a nice flow going, but this summer, the water is low. I peer in, trying to get a better look at where the bunny might have gone. Instead I see myself staring back. I’m wearing a look of shock, but the me in the water is grinning.
“Mary!” Claire calls, emerging from the woods. I nearly fall into my reflection. “There you are, thank god.”
We stick our toes in the shallow water, sitting on the rocks in silence. I push the bunny out of my mind and try to go back to Claire’s question. When had we changed? It felt like one day we were close and understood all the same things, and one day we didn’t, but I don’t remember when we grew apart to grow back together again. Maybe that’s when I became whatever I am now and Claire became anxious. It’s hard to think back and remember things, really. Sometimes it feels like my past is a collapsing bridge. I’m scared I’ll get stuck on one side or the other and never be able to cross back over. I can’t mark in my mind the day the bridge started to break.
I lean over and look at myself in the low water. I can’t get a good view this time; it’s distorted by mud and rocks.
“You’re my best friend,” I say, and I mean it.
Claire smiles. “I know.”
The next morning I wake up with a fever and a sore throat. I feel like I’m walking through marshmallow clouds. I brush it off as allergies at first, but I sleep that night like I’m being poked by a thousand needles. I never feel still or comforted.
I try taking a shower to clear my head, but it doesn’t change much. Instead, I start to notice small red bumps the size of bug bites populating the backs of my hands. As the day goes on, they spread around my hands, filling in the crevices between fingers. I suspect they’re starting to grow on my feet too, but every time I look too closely at them I start to panic. Is that a new bump, or just something that’s always been there? Is it starting to spread up my ankles?
Instead of resting, I spend time asking everyone I know what it could be. I’ve been forced to swear off Googling symptoms by my friends, who are convinced I’m a hypochondriac.
Sleep that night is even more fitful than the first. My hands burn, almost itch. I sleep with my feet off the bottom of my twin bed, arms flung above my head. Still, I wake up scratching my feet against the covers. Minutes feel like hours feel like days. The few times I do sleep, I dream of giant bunnies leading me into open graves. When I see the sun coming up, I wake my mother. She tells me to go back to bed, that she’ll call the doctor in a few hours.
The bumps get worse and my anxiety grows. I tick off the food I’ve eaten in the last few days. Nothing that I’m allergic to, unless I’ve developed a new one. I think about the places I’ve been, the products I’ve used to moisturize my hands and feet. Nothing has changed in my life recently.
The heat is increasingly oppressive as I drive to the dermatologist that afternoon. I shouldn’t be driving. My hands burn when I touch something, and putting pressure on my feet feels like standing on a bed of needles. Or worse than standing on a bed of needles, since the spread out pressure averts the pain or something. It just fucking hurts.
They call my name, and I shuffle to the room, concealing my grimace beneath my surgical mask. As the nurse points me to the exam room, I hear someone call my name. I peek into the waiting room, hoping my mom decided to meet me here. The only person in the waiting room is a woman about my age. She has her head down, and even though I can’t get a good look at her face, I know it’s me. Or that she looks like me. Or something.
“Everything okay?” the nurse asks.
“Oh, yeah.” I sit on the thin paper and wait for the doctor to come.
When the dermatologist comes in, she tells me I’m dying. Well, dying-ish.
After asking me a few questions, the derm shakes her head and says, “Having sex with women lessens your chances of getting syphilis, thankfully.” It’s the first time anyone’s seemed relieved when I told them I was gay. “But you were in the woods last week, so we can’t rule out a tick. This is exactly how Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever presents.”
I nod my head, pretending to know what she’s talking about.
“It’s fatal. But we can get you on antibiotics.”
“But I’ll still die?” I ask.
She laughs a little, though not unkindly. “No, no. We caught it early enough. You’re lucky you came in when you did.”
“Okay. How do we know it’s actually,” I struggle to remember the name of the rare and fatal tick disease she named, “the tick thing.”
She says we’ll do a biopsy on my thumb and we’ll know in two weeks. Until then, I’ll have to be on a strong antibiotic. If it’s spotted fever, I’d be dead before the two weeks were up without them. I know what a biopsy is, but I don’t really understand it until they start. They cut a chunk out of my thumb and stitch me up with bright blue wire. I feel the pull of my skin as she weaves in and out.
At first, I can’t even look at the stitches without gagging. In a few days, though, I’m comfortable cleaning my wound, and the bumps go down considerably as I take the antibiotic.
“Fuck that tick,” Claire says later that week as we go for a walk around our neighborhood.
I kick a rock and it skids a few yards in front of us. “If that’s even what it is.”
She cocks her head to the side. “What does that mean?”
“The doctor was so sure that’s what it was. I checked for ticks, Claire. Like always.”
“I don’t know, Mary,” she says, and I realize this is the first time someone’s called me by my name in a long time. “They can hide in your ears sometimes.”
“Or in your lady bits,” I laugh, and Claire punches my arm. One time, when we were twelve or so, Claire was convinced she had a tick on her vagina. It turned out she was just growing pubes. Go figure. “I’m serious, though. No ticks.”
“Let me see your hands,” she says, and I hold them out to her, palms up.
Claire runs her hands over them gently, then flips them over. “Jesus.”
“I know. They’re a lot better than they were before.” They are. Before, they were raised, red bumps. Now they’ve mellowed into pink stains. Claire lets go, and we keep walking. I point to a house coming up around the bend. “Look, it’s Mrs. Gene’s old house.”
It looks exactly as I remember it: pink shutters, a tire swing, the front stoop we’d sit on when she’d bring out cookies for the neighborhood kids.
Claire’s brow furrows. “No, that’s not it.”
“Come on, Claire, stop gaslighting me.”
“I’m not. Mary, you seriously don’t remember Mrs. Gene’s house? It’s two blocks in the other direction.”
I don’t believe her, so we walk toward what she says is the real house. It’s blue, with yellow shutters and little statues of angels in the garden. There’s no front stoop, just a door surrounded by bushes. Mrs. Gene’s daughter, who owns the house now that she’s gone, waves to us from the window. There’s something bone-chilling about it.
“See?” Claire says, since I’m not offering anything up.
“You’re right. How could I be so silly?” I laugh, but I don’t stop staring at the bushes.
I go to the store to replace some of my makeup. I browse for a while, looking in the little mirrors they have next to the samples, trying to find the concealer with the right color. It’s the thing I’ve been missing the most, especially with all these weird bumps on my hands. Some of them are starting to dry up, and I’m afraid of what they’ll look like next.
I settle on a travel size of an expensive concealer and buy it, eager to take it home and fill the empty spot in my makeup drawer. When I get back, I place it in carefully, smiling until I realize I don’t have any setting powder.
So that went missing too. I’m trying to wrack my brain and think of everything I’ve lost when my phone’s incessant buzzing brings me back. It’s Claire.
“Hey, is that tick thing contagious?” she asks.
“Do you get how ticks work?”
A thud comes from her end. I’ve seen her frustrated enough times to know she’s kicking her wall. “What are the odds we both got bitten by a tick with that deadly thing?” she asks.
“Not zero, I guess.” I’m searching up our symptoms online before I finish my sentence. I’m not supposed to do that anymore, but I figure this is an exception. “What are the odds I gave you hand, foot and mouth disease?”
Claire guffaws. “Fuck you.”
“The symptoms match up exactly.”
“We weren’t around any kids.”
That unsettles my stomach. “Okay, but I still think we could have gotten it somewhere.”
“That’s really strange. Adults usually don’t get it,” she says.
Are we really adults? “Well, this says—”
“Mary—”
“I know I’m not supposed to be on Google,” I grumble. “But I’m being serious. It’s our symptoms to a T.”
“I didn’t find any ticks either,” she says, relenting.
“Exactly. We aren’t stupid.” Except that we totally are. “I’m sorry that I gave you hand, foot and mouth disease.”
“It’s whatever. How soon did it get better?”
“Pretty quick. But now I’m peeling,” I say. My hands look like a child’s who just found out about Elmer’s glue.
“Shit.”
“Shit,” I agree.
I call the dermatologist later, telling her that I gave this to someone so I’m sure it’s not Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. She brushes me off, insisting we both must have been bitten by ticks carrying the disease.
“A terrible coincidence,” she says. “Keep taking your antibiotics. Send your friend in too.”
I stop the antibiotics and don’t call Claire. That night, I dream that my bumps are scales, and they fall off my fingers like a snake shedding its skin. They fall off all at once, and I can feel the texture of them as I brush them off my hands. I will have this dream for months, even years. I don’t know if I will ever escape it.
I get my stitches taken out on a random Tuesday. It feels good to be able to extend my thumb all the way again, to maneuver my way around the world without worrying about catching the metal ends on fabrics.
I drive home, letting my thumb caress the steering wheel in a way it hasn’t for nearly a month. The world feels different than it did then. I’m not sure if I’ve changed or if everything else changed without me while I was busy babying my thumb and picking off my skin.
In my rearview mirror, another silver Toyota flashes behind me, but just for a second. I wish Claire were here to talk about the ways cars talk to each other. What if cars made people noises, she’d say. I laugh, and in that same moment, slam into the car in front of me.
I’m fine, my car’s fine, I’m just in shock. That’s what my mother is telling me on the other end of the phone. The paramedics won’t let me see the driver who I hit. Instead, I focus on the car itself. Another silver Toyota Camry XLE. My car. The same make and model. I go catatonic.
“It’s me,” I sob into the phone. “It’s me, I hit me.”
My mom thinks I meant I hit a car that’s identical to mine. I meant I hit myself. The crash wasn’t that serious, but why would the paramedics hide the person from me if it wasn’t my duplicate, my foil?
Of the similarities in the car, my mother says, “It’s just a terrible coincidence, sweetheart.”
Coincidences are prophecies. It only makes things worse.
I call Claire later that night and try to tell her that I saw myself in the other car, that it was another Mary.
“As your rational best friend, I have to say it. Mary, what the fuck?” Claire says. “But as your crazy best friend, I have to say, Jesus fuck that’s deep.”
I love Claire. We talk for a few hours about how it was a strange coincidence but also how it definitely wasn’t one. I feel better and worse and altogether more crazy.
I’m not involved in the insurance settling the crash. It wasn’t my fault. The other driver was weaving in and out of traffic, and we were coming to a stoplight. I was following the traffic laws. I sit in my room and stare at the wall instead, peeling off the skin that’s starting to come off my toes.
A few days after the accident, I stand in front of my bathroom mirror, my hair wet and my body towel-wrapped. I stare into my own eyes, at myself, at my wet hair that keeps brushing into curls despite my best efforts. I run the pink brush over it again and again, but the ends curl up like Pippi Longstocking braids. I think I’m trying not to cry. I’m not sure. I know I’m not blinking, but I also register that I’m afraid to blink lest tears fall.
I think, vaguely, remotely, in some part of me that still feels an emotion other than numb, that I’m seeing myself for the first time. I didn’t know I looked like that.
I drop the brush and hold out my peeling hands. The red bumps have become gaping holes surrounded by white, peeling skin. They look like craters in the moon’s surface or geysers at Yellowstone. I pick the brush back up and keep brushing, keep trying to brush it straight, thinking if I could just fix that curl on the end, if I could just get it to behave, if I could get it to—
I didn’t think I looked like this.
My mom thinks I threw out all my makeup to have an excuse to buy new stuff. But I don’t have any better explanation for her. I don’t know where everything is going. I don’t know why the menus of all the restaurants I like are unrecognizable. I don’t know why I remember a different ending of my favorite movie. She wants me to be unreliable, and I get it, that makes it all easier to swallow, doesn’t it? But what if this is my reality? Who is she to tell me that I’m wrong?
I reach through the mirror and find that my hand slips right through. I crawl through, legs first, and land on her vanity. I’ve finally found her hiding place. The other Mary’s. In her drawers I find the shirts I’ve lost and run my hands over their soft fabrics. I let my towel fall and search through her wardrobe for an outfit. Her clothes fit better than mine. I lie in her bed and sniff her pillow. How trite, I think, it is to have walked through a looking glass to find her. I wonder if she has her own Claire. I hope she understands her better than I do. When I check her medicine cabinet, I find it absent of the inhalers and Lexapro that make their home in mine. So she’s healthy. She doesn’t have my myriad of strange illnesses and anxieties that require a stocked cabinet. Instead she has the skincare regimen I wish I had. Good for her.
The last place I look is my coveted makeup drawer. It’s full, and I could weep, but I hear footsteps. I reach for the mascara and coat my lashes, looking in the mirror opposite the door.
Other Mary creeps into view, and I grin.