He pushes me into the sink, and I hit above the hips. He sinks his hand through mine. And in the mirror, my skin brightens until it’s two shades paler than chestnut, and the brown irises of my eyes are wrapped in a cold blue. I smile against my will and find a snaggletooth in my mouth, an uncharacteristic yellow grime on my teeth.

A mental picture—Allister naked in front of me, his arms, wrists, and ankles wrapped in snaking ivy.

That thought . . . it wasn’t mine. Was it?

Pretty boy snaking with the spades of dark green flowers. It’s Sawyer’s voice in my head—a dark country melody. Pretty boy husk, pretty boy dust.

I lean over the sink, gag, and spit. I come back up to face myself—my half-white, half-Black self. There is a black thing moving in my ear.

It’s . . . a skinny, jointed fiber, like a piece of string. I drag it out of my ear canal. At the same time, hair follicles lengthen on my head, my curls straightening like springs pulled to the max, until my hair is falling in front of my face in drapes of straight black.

And the fiber stretches ever longer from my earlobe.

No, not a fiber. A leg. Two legs, creeping out of my ear cavity and catching my upper ear. A spider. Bulbous and brown with black patterns, wrenching itself out of my listening hole.

Blood trickles down my jawline as the spider crawls up the side of my face and nestles in my hair. I slap at my head and feel nothing but my head. Hair still short, despite what it looks like in the mirror.

I’m imagining this.

Aren’t I?

The spider crashes in the sink bowl, leaving a streak of my blood in its wake, boogying its legs.

The left side of my face is a hole for the wind to blow straight into my brain.

Whispers . . . whispers I can’t make sense of. Whispers and the taste of blood, and then bile, roaring up my throat. Me, bending over the sink to throw it up. A cockroach squiggling out the drain to greet me.

One roach, two roaches, three roaches. Four. Skittering up the basin with urgency.

“Oh . . . my God . . .”

It’s like . . . a flood of roaches escaping some colony hidden in the pipes of my house.

Is this real?

“What’s happening?” I scream to the sky, like God will answer me. Like he ever has.

I stagger back and fall on my butt and reach for the cabinet under the sink—backward and forward at once. My body doesn’t know what to do.

Sawyer is watching himself in the mirror, staring at an empty reflection. “I believe you took something that belongs to me.”

There must be some cleaner I can spray them with. The cockroaches spread. Yes, there must be a tub cleaner that should do the trick and kill them . . .