Now I tried to sit near her in class. The only thing I wanted was for her to talk to me, to explain it all to me. I wanted to visit her house. I wanted to know everything. Someone told me they were talking about putting her away. I imagined the hospital with a gray marble fountain in the yard, and violet and brown plants, begonias, honeysuckle, jasmine—I didn’t picture a mental hospital that was sordid and dirty and sad, I imagined a beautiful clinic full of empty-eyed women staring off into the distance.
Sitting beside her, I saw what was happening just like everyone else did, only from close up. We all saw it, and we were scared and astonished. It started with her trembling, which wasn’t trembling so much as startled jumping. She shook her hands in the air as if to scare something invisible away, as if she were trying to keep something from hitting her. Then she started to cover her eyes and shake her head no. The teachers saw it, but they tried to ignore it. We did too. It was fascinating. She was shamelessly breaking down right in front of us, and it was us, the other girls, who were embarrassed.
Not long after that she started pulling out her hair from the front of her head. Whole locks of it piled up on her seat, little mounds of straight blond hair. After a week you could see her scalp, pink and shining.
I was sitting next to her the day she got up and ran out of the classroom. Everyone watched her go; I followed. After a while I noticed that my friend Agustina had come out behind me, and so had the girl who had helped in the bathroom that time, Tere. We felt responsible. Or we wanted to see what she would do, how it all was going to end.
We found her in the bathroom again. It was empty. She was crying and screaming like a child having a tantrum. The bandage had fallen off her face and we could see the stitches in her wound. She was pointing toward one of the toilet stalls and shouting, “Go away, leave me alone, go away.” There was something in the air, like too much light, and it smelled more than usual of blood, piss, and disinfectant. I spoke to her:
“What’s wrong, Marcela?”
“Don’t you see him?”
“Who?”
“Him. Him! There in the stall. Don’t you see him?”
She looked at me, anxious and scared but not confused; she saw something. But there was nothing on the toilet, just the beat-up lid and the handle, which was too still, abnormally still.
“No, I don’t see anything, there’s nothing there,” I told her.
Disconcerted for a moment, she grabbed my arm. She’d never touched me before. I looked at her hand; her nails still hadn’t grown in, or maybe she pulled them off as they grew. You could only see the bloodied cuticles.
“No? No?” And, looking toward the stall again: “But he’s there. He’s there. Talk to her, say something to her.”
I was afraid the handle would start to move, but it stayed still. Marcela seemed to be listening, looking attentively toward the toilet. I noticed that she had almost no eyelashes left, either. She’d pulled them out. I figured that soon she’d start in on her eyebrows.
“You don’t hear him?”
“No.”
“But he’s talking to you!”
“What’s he saying? Tell me.”
At this point, Agustina butted into the conversation, telling me to leave Marcela alone, asking me if I was crazy, didn’t I see no one was there? “Don’t play along with her, I’m scared, let’s call someone.” She was interrupted by Marcela, who howled, “SHUT UP, YOU FUCKING BITCH.” Tere, who was pretty posh, murmured in English that it was all just too much, and she went to find help. I tried to get the situation under control.
“Just ignore those morons, Marcela. What did he say?”
“That he’s not going anywhere. That he’s real. That he’s going to keep making me do things and I can’t say no.”
“What does he look like?”
“He’s a man, but he’s wearing a communion dress. His arms are behind him. He’s always laughing. He looks Chinese but he’s tiny. His hair is slicked back. And he makes me.”
“He makes you what?”
When Tere came back with a teacher she’d persuaded to come into the bathroom (later she told us that there’d been around ten girls gathered at the door, listening to everything and shushing each other), Marcela was about to show us what the man with slicked-back hair made her do. But the teacher’s sudden appearance confused her. She sat down on the floor, her lashless eyes unblinking as she said, “no.”
Marcela never came back to school.
I decided to visit her. It wasn’t hard to find her address. Though her house was in a neighborhood I’d never been to, it was easy to reach. I rang the bell with a trembling hand. On the bus there I’d rehearsed an explanation for my visit to give her parents, but now it seemed stupid, ridiculous, forced.
I was struck dumb when Marcela opened the door, not just by the surprise that she was the one to answer—I’d imagined her drugged up and in bed—but also because she looked very different, with a wool cap covering her head that was surely bald by now, jeans, and a normal-sized sweater. Except for her eyelashes, which hadn’t grown in yet, she looked like a healthy, normal girl.
She didn’t invite me in. She came outside, closed the door behind her, and the two of us stayed in the street. It was cold; she wrapped her arms around herself, and my ears stung.
“You shouldn’t have come,” she said.
“I want to know.”
“What do you want to know? I’m not going back to school; it’s over, forget the whole thing.”
“I want to know what he makes you do.”
Marcela looked at me and sniffed at the air around her. Then she looked off toward the window. The curtains had moved a little. She went back into her house and, before she slammed the door, she said:
“You’ll find out. He’s going to tell you himself one of these days. He’s going to make you do it too, I think. Soon.”
On the way back, sitting on the bus, I felt the throb of the wound I had cut into my thigh with a box cutter the night before, under the sheets. It didn’t hurt. I massaged my leg gently, but hard enough that the blood as it spilled drew a fine, damp line on my light blue jeans.
No Flesh over Our Bones