From then on, she wouldn’t stop talking about the mole. That was the year I scratched at the raised brown skin with my soft little fingernails until all that remained was a yawning red crater which gushed blood like I’d never seen before in my life. I was hoping to cover it up before Celeste noticed, but she found me rummaging through the medicine cabinet, took one look at the red puddle creeping across the white tiled floor, and laughed in my face. She grabbed me by my cheeks, hard, and jerked the offending hollow up and into the light. ‘Oh, that’s even worse,’ she said, flicking it, then sucking off the blood that transferred to her finger. ‘It’ll scar, you know.’ I impulsively wore a plaster over it for the rest of the school year, even after it’d healed.

More scars. More hurt. More, more, more.

I’ve rolled it over in my head, of course: her cruelty, the reasons for it, the boundlessness of it. It seems as though being lovely was so adverse to her nature, but she wanted so badly to be – so she’d keep the act up at school, exhaust herself, then dedicate her domestic life to making mine hell. She told me aged five that Dad was not a real person and he was actually a robot incapable of loving me. I could not process this. I was too young to recognize the lie, to recognize the pain pouring from her like a tap. I watched her, once, press her thumb down on the back of a frog until it burst. This sent her to therapy. The collection of bloody pads strewn across my bed sent her back. And she liked to watch me cry; whenever I’d run off from her and hide away in my room, there was always a click of the door, an eye through the crack.

There’s one moment still as fresh as when it happened. I was six. I had a colouring book, a beach-themed one, and I was scraping indigo into the ocean when Celeste sat down next to me and said nonchalantly, ‘Myrtle, I’ve been thinking about something. Do you know what parasitism is?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Paris-tism?’

‘Parasitism. It’s a relationship in science where one organism benefits at the expense of the other.’

‘Do you mean animals?’

‘Sure. Any animals. We’re organisms. Or,’ she said, ‘a leech.’ She pulled my crayon from my hand. I looked up to meet her eyes. ‘Do you know what a leech is?’

‘An organism?’

‘Yes. They’re big and fat black slugs, but with tons of sharp teeth that can latch on to people and suck out all their blood.’

The words made me want to vomit. ‘Celeste –’

‘Do you know what happened to Mom? Has Daddy ever said? I think you’re old enough to know now.’