I wait for the hairs to stand up on the back of my neck. I sense as hard as I can. I feel nothing.

AT SCHOOL, THE OTHER STUDENTS SURround me. Their round faces bobble like bad balloons, screaming.

“LOOK AT HER! LOOK AT THE FREAK!”

Their bodies are lanky, pimpled, letting off new odors. Their voices echo off the metal lockers. Their eyes are all on me: blue, brown, green, gray, each eye making my flesh shiver, everyone an enemy.

“YEAH, LOOK AT ME!” I yell back.

I pull up my dress, bare my weak fangs, my knot bright in the sunlight streaming through the windows, a single eye of flesh daring them all to move, to come closer, to try me.

VISION

I’m the queen now. All the students surround me with their offerings at lunch.

“I’ve brought you an orange,” says a boy with one lazy eye.

“Thank you,” I say. “That’s very kind.”

“I’ve brought you crackers with cheese in the center,” says a girl in a plaid dress.

“Wonderful.”

They come forward one by one, each with a treat. I smooth my own dress down over my flat stomach. The offerings rise up around me, growing like sweet palaces.

IN BED THAT NIGHT, I SLIDE MY HANDS down. I run my fingers over my knot.

I try to tell myself I don’t mind it so much. Under the light of the moon, I picture my teeth growing into big fangs. I widen my mouth, let them catch the breeze. I close my eyes and try to believe, half-girl, half-snake.

THE NEXT MORNING, MY MOTHER SITS at the kitchen table. Her yellow house dress tents over her knot, big as a cheap sun. I spoon cereal into my mouth.

“Will you call the doctor?” I ask. “Will you ask him to unknot me?”

“That’s not how it works,” my mother says, smoking. “And it’s the weekend. They don’t work on weekends.”

“Why don’t you ever try?”

“We’ve been over this. The doctors don’t give a damn about it.”

“They screamed at me again. At school.”

“I used to spit at them when they spat at me,” my mother says.

Then she stares out the window into the long horizon as if in a deep trance, as if staring into another time, as if I were not there, never born.

THAT AFTERNOON, WE’RE IN THE LIVING room. We are cleaning again.

“These curtains are a mess!” my mother says.

She lifts the fabric of the curtains like strange brocade hair.

“And now what is this?”

She pulls one of my father’s bottles from the ground, half-full of liquor.

“Motherfucker,” she whispers. “Motherfucker.”

She slams the bottle on the living room table, then sits down beside me on the couch, so close our knees bang. We face the bottle. Anger shimmers off of her in hot waves. I stay quiet. I know how this goes.