From This

You breathe so hard you can’t yell for help. You’re running up the apartment building’s outside stairs with his shadow following one flight below you. The lanyard around your neck tap, taps in time with your cherry red Candies’ flip-flops slapping the soles of your feet. The key bounces its metal against the padded bra under your tank top. Your arms swing forward, your hands grip the railing and pull you up quicker. Your flip-flops’ thong scratches two widening spaces between your big toe and the next toe over. In the mornings, your mom always points to the gaping spot between your toes, as you slide your flip-flops on before leaving the apartment to catch the bus to Walker Middle. Your mom jokes that you’ll stretch your toes apart and says, “Think of those African girls with gold necklaces stacked up on their shoulders.” You’ll wear sneakers if you make it away from the shadow.

You find the top step on the stairway. This is the landing to your mom’s apartment. You hear the shadow’s breath bellowing out two steps at a time, slicing the distance between you in half. Closer. You’re close to your door. Run. Down the open-aired hallway, snatching the lanyard as you feel a coldness on the back of your neck as the shadow hits the top step.

You glide across the brushed cement to your door. You swear if you make it through this you’ll never give another kid at Walker Middle a flat tire—trapping the heel of their foot, making them stumble forward. Your house key clinks against the silver ring on your finger. You don’t take off the lanyard around your neck, but lean toward the door and stick the key in the lock. You jiggle the doorknob as the shadow stretches over you. Open. Slam. You shut the deadbolt in the frame as the knob twists back and forth.

“I only want to see you.” The shadow’s boots stomp out the slim line of light beneath the door.

The peephole snares you. The shadow is a blue-black bruised color. You’re held in place on the entryway tiles like quicksand. You don’t move, because you feel you’ll sink into the ceramic. You clutch the key; its metal brands into your palm. You yelp when the shadow pounds a fist on the door.

You glance at the silver sparkle on your ring finger, blurring into flickers as your cheeks wetten. At Walker Middle, the coach took you out of gym for a presentation in the auditorium called Save Yourself. Down the row of bleachers from hand-to-hand your classmates passed a box that you all were supposed to pluck an identical sliver ring out from the pile to put on your finger. The coach blew her whistle—she said men would start giving you attention. The shadow becomes a battering ram with a steel shoulder. The metal clunk, clunk, clunks against the flexing wood. The doorknocker clatters in the aftershock. More of the shadow seeps in-between the deadbolt and the door frame. You sniff, wipe your face.

Through the slates in your bedroom’s closest you hear the splintering and then burst of the front door. You press the call button on the phone. The electronic beep is a blip on the shadow’s sonar. He will find you.

“Hello, this is 911. What is your emergency?” the operator says.

“I’m alone,” you whisper.

“Miss, can you speak a little louder?” the operator asks.

The shadow’s boot stomps through your bedroom’s door. It flaps open, touches back to the frame, and swings open again. The shadow enters your bedroom. The bent hinges creak as the door hangs, split. You hyperventilate, unable to talk, to scream in the surrounding silence.

The phone cord is a trail of breadcrumbs to your closet. The shadow sweeps across your bedroom’s carpet. The light blots out of the slants as the shadow opens the closet, the ball bearings slide on their track revealing you looking up. The shadow smiles with a set of teeth that look like razorblades—ready to tickle a slice of you or plunge and puncture, deep.

The shadow snatches the phone out of your hand and hangs up, then yanks the cord out of the wall. The quiet is shattered by the shadow now humming. It’s the “Happy Birthday” song. The shadow smiles with those sharp teeth and their enamel’s vibrations sound like a kazoo as he holds the last note in his throat. You wish you could back through the wall and out of here, instead of scooting into your closet and the carpet burning you along the way to the solid corner.

“Relax,” the shadow says. You think of your mom lying on her bed in a bathrobe with lotion spread on her face and cucumber slices covering her eyes. She says they lift the heat off. The ribbed cotton of your tank top sponges up your sweat.

The shadow engulfs you the same as when he grabbed your wrist at your apartment building’s stairwell. But you had windmilled your arm and let the pressure unlock the vice grip by forcing the shadow’s thumb back. In that moment of the shadow’s pain, you slid out of your backpack’s straps, lightening yourself so you could float away and scramble up the stairs.

Now, the shadow anchors you even as your feet are trying to leverage up and out and away from yourself. Your toes chafe against the thong of your flip-flops. The shadow sits on your legs. The nerves in your thighs pinch. You feel a thousand goosebumps ripple underneath your skin. It’s like getting a shot. You have to close your eyes and take it, to get through this.

“I just want to know you,” the shadow says, patting your thigh. The shadow’s hand clinches your muscle, and then he talks about his routine.

Your lanyard handcuffs your wrists. It’s not resting on your chest. You don’t say, “breast.” That word didn’t mean much to you until you felt them grow. Sore. The shadow says his ex-wife always ignored him, and he squeezes you, hard. After the Save Yourself presentation at Walker Middle, the girls in the locker room pushed their arms together, elbows touching to define more cleavage, and said they didn’t want rings. They wanted attention. You had hid your finger in your pocket. The shadow snaps your bra strap and then your light, small weight on your chest is free.

The shadow disregards the silver on your finger; but your mom had grabbed your hand as soon as she saw its flicker. She asked what boy gave you a ring before you could even explain. Your mom kept going on and on about her baby having a baby; until you screamed over her shouting, “Wait. It’s to wait!” She listened as you told her about the Save Yourself presentation on purity with the banner that read: It doesn’t mean a thing without a ring. Your mom closed her hand over yours, giving you a peck on the cheek like a bird. She sang, “Wear it, wear it."

You spin the silver ring on your finger, thinking it will do something. Protect you. You look at the shadow’s hands reaching for your hair. His fingers are tan—no gold ring or white, previously covered skin—and his knuckles are hairy.

“Hey, I’m talking to you, darlin’.” The shadow combs several loose strands out of your head, and looks at them like spider web caught between his fingers. You think he would scalp you if you were in the kitchen. “You’re not even listening to me.” The shadow pulls away your screen of hair. He licks your face, trying to find your mouth. You wonder if those African girls’ heads pop off. You think that gold is stronger. It could protect you, give you another moment to float away, escape.

The shadow tastes like licorice. The dry bristles of his stubble are as prickly as the cactus in the bathroom you water once a month. But it’s not as bad as his tongue. He fumbles with his belt. You think of biting him, but you wouldn’t be able to push his weight off of you. His belt’s tooth pops out of its hole.

“Wait, wait,” you try to breathe through your mouth. “Just like her,” the shadow says, frowning. One of his hands goes to your throat, clamping your jaw shut. His palms are like a worn sheet of sandpaper, with patches of roughness still able to smooth you down. Your final baby tooth came out last year and his nails smell as sharp as that dead tooth. On his forearm is a tattoo of a snake eating its own tail. You know you must remember this. The image stamps itself in you as you squeeze your eyes shut.

You think of the sudden change into “womanhood”—that word from your mom. After you went with your mom to buy bras; a book appeared in your nightstand’s drawer. In the book you read about this: how what’s happening, shouldn’t. You look at your panties stretched at your ankles like shackles. They are sunshine yellow. He drained the color from you, leaving your skin as pale as bone. All you feel is the numbing lull fade and now your blood speed-bumping over the ring on its way from your fingertip to your heart. You want to take off the ring and throw it away, but you don’t want to explain to your mom why you aren’t wearing the ring. The shadow starts to shrink and you hope that you can separate from this.