Cherish Farrah, page 21
Instead, I uncoil a little more. Not too much, but enough to let them know I’ve decided. Enough to prove to Kelly, and Nichole Turner, and Jerry Whitman that I trust him.
That I choose them.
That this is home.
“Yes, Dad,” I say, and petulantly roll my eyes to match the emphasis I’ve laced around the word—the title. “I trust you.”
XIII
T his isn’t going to hurt.
I’m edging out of sleep, but I don’t want to. My mind is trying desperately to rip me back into consciousness, but I fight. From inside my dream, I try to rein myself in even though the pain is arresting.
This is like nothing I’ve ever felt.
I don’t want to wake up. I don’t want to go back to it because from the brink of waking, it feels like what Jerry Whitman did to me—only worse.
I fight to stay even though it’s an inferno where I am. Inside the dream, I’m on our bed in the room I share with Cherish, but it’s ablaze. All around me, the air is thick, yet somehow there isn’t any smoke though every direction is bright with flames. The expansive room is full to the point of claustrophobia with fire, hot and smothering and alive. It dances while it devours, lapping at the vaulted ceilings, curving down toward me at times, and then rearing back as though it is saving me for last.
I am lying on the bed, my wounded arm tucked between the mattress and my side—but I’m not afraid. I am quiet inside the wreath of flames that have covered the wall behind me like living wallpaper and left the bed untouched.
Where is Cherish? I don’t ask it aloud, but I listen for the fire’s response.
Fire pits crackle, small and contained. This is different.
This blaze roars. It bellows. Sometimes it screams.
It wants me to scream back, to cry out, but I won’t. The way I didn’t when Jerry painted my wound a thousand times over with liquid skin.
I did not cry out.
This isn’t going to hurt.
Except that it was agony. From the moment the silky brush and liquid compound touched the rawness of my wound and the still-stinging edges of freshly trimmed skin and the cut he’d accidentally made, I wanted to plead with Jerry Whitman to stop.
This isn’t going to hurt.
So I didn’t show it. All the time I could feel the bristles, could feel the liquid adhering to the shreds of remaining epidermis too small for the eye to see. All the time I felt the liquid move into the cut, seep into the shallow slice, I didn’t make a sound.
It was a test. It had to be. When I anchored my gaze on Jerry Whitman, looking through his pupil and into the stabilizing darkness, he was watching me. Waiting for a reaction. Waiting perhaps to see if I’d meant the words I’d said.
This isn’t going to hurt.
So it didn’t. No matter how it felt. No matter how the ravaged area burned and tightened, the way it felt like tiny teeth were sinking into my raw flesh.
He said it wouldn’t hurt, so it didn’t.
The dampness that had been pool water became sweat, the effort of swallowing my pain and my tears sending it boiling to the surface until I felt it slip down between my shoulder blades. It beaded along my forehead and above my lip, but I tensed, and reached further into the dark of Jerry Whitman’s eyes.
When he was done, he smiled and cupped my shoulder.
“All better?” he asked, and I mirrored his expression.
I never broke, not even when I was climbing the stairs to bed and I could hear him setting the kitchen right again. I didn’t complain to Cherish before we turned in. I only changed from my wet suit in the bathroom and stole a single glance at the spot.
I didn’t let myself gasp at the way it looked like he’d skinned another layer, not added one. How I wouldn’t have had to see it if we’d bandaged my arm with gauze.
Sneaking her grandmother’s bracelet back into her bedside drawer was the last thing I did before joining Cherish in bed. I know I’m all but awake because as I lie alone, curled at the foot of the bed, surrounded by the shrill screams of a fire that has raged but kept a distance from me, I am remembering it all. As though this is waking, and that was a dream.
The pain has followed me here; I cannot escape it.
Rah!
I pull up from the bed with a start and search the flames.
“Che?”
RahRah!
“Cherish!” I’m up on my knees and the fire responds by stretching higher, as though wherever she is, it wants my Cherish hidden.
The fire screams, and it is beginning to sound like me.
RahRah, please! Wake up!
The light is sharp when it cuts through the inferno and the dream breaks. The bedroom explodes into view around me, and I am looking around wildly, aware only that I am burning.
“Mom!” Cherish is at the door, yelling out into the house, and then she’s running back to my side, her eyes wild and worried.
I am still screaming.
I am still burning.
My arm is hideous. I cradle it but I don’t dare touch it now. The rim of the wound is somehow both swollen and shriveled, and alarmingly black, as though there really was a fire. It feels tight and tearing. No matter how closely I study it, I cannot stop myself from believing there is something unseen chewing into and under my skin.
“Get it off!” I beg Cherish, and when I stumble out of the bed, the damp sheet tangled up in my legs, she runs to help me.
We make it into the bathroom and I turn the faucets on full blast. I don’t know whether the water should be cold or hot; I don’t know what will soothe the nightmare of this.
I’m emitting something like a panting growl, and Cherish involuntarily replies with a humming whine, her face a constant replay of tension and collapse, her eyes wide. She will never get a handle on the situation, never be clearheaded or cunning enough that I can fall apart.
Control. Control. Control.
I keep the arm stiff and angle it away from the rest of me, and from Cherish, lest she do something ridiculous and try to touch it. With the skin bubbling black around the rim and the rest of the wound swirling red and orange like magma, I can see the layer Jerry Whitman applied, like cellophane on top of it all.
“I have to get it off,” I say through the low rumble still escaping me, snatching a towel from the ring hanging closest to me. I wet it and first press it against the area to saturate the liquid bandage before trying to scrub it from my flesh. Immediately, I crumple forward and howl with regret.
“RahRah!”
I cast the towel at Cherish, who grips it tightly enough to wring the excess water out of it and onto the bathroom floor while she rocks from one foot to the other, too confused and afraid to successfully cry.
“Cherish? Farrah?”
Brianne is in our bedroom now, and Cherish, who was already horror-struck but at the sound of her mother’s voice turns frantic, rushes out as though the woman will need a guide.
“Something’s wrong with her arm,” she’s crying when they appear. “She was crying in her sleep, she wouldn’t wake up—”
“Farrah, let me see,” Brianne tells me, but at the sight of the ugliness she recoils.
It’s only wet because of my attempt, but at first glance it must look like my forearm has exploded in a mess of tar and rainbow sherbet puss.
“I have to get the skin off,” I say, using a shaking, hesitant fingernail to test the cellophane surface for the smallest breaks that I can use to peel the stuff away.
“Farrah,” Brianne protests, because she doesn’t know I only mean the liquid skin her husband applied.
“Is it supposed to do this?” I ask her, and when she has the same wild, worried expression as her daughter, I turn to Cherish. “How does liquid skin usually work?” I demand. “How do you get it off?!”
She’s shaking her head and now her mouth gapes.
“Cherish!”
She jumps, and the tears come.
“Jerry!” Brianne cries, turning to run from the bathroom. She’s no more help than her ridiculous daughter.
No.
Control.
Somehow, control.
They’re all going to descend on the bathroom again to nurse me back to health.
But this time is different. I can’t wait that long. This pain is searing, stinging, burning. I could tear my own skin away, if that would stop what looks like a bacteria spreading, like necrosis devouring my arm. It can only be the middle of the night; it’s already widened the wound at an alarming speed.
“Cherish!” I grip her arms and sink my fingers in. Deep. I try to pierce her flesh, to ground my pain like it’s electricity and I can channel it through my friend to purge it from myself.
Control, I tell myself. But I can’t.
“How do you usually get it off? How do you take off liquid skin?”
She can’t focus when she’s in pain. Just like at the renovation site, her brain shuts down. She’s a wounded animal whose only recourse is to bleat until a savior comes along and rescues her.
I sink my fingers deeper. I dig into her nightshirt, pretend her flesh is something inanimate, like there will be no consequence to gripping until my fingers and thumb meet in the middle, where her bones must be. Like there are no nerves in the unfeeling thing I am boring into.
Onetwothreefourfive.
“Please, Cherish,” I beg, and push my forehead into hers while she struggles to loose herself from me.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
“Cherish.” I am kneading my head into hers, until it’s like there’s nothing soft between us. We are bone against bone.
She screams, but she can’t get free.
I know what she’s trying to say but she can only mouth it. Her words can’t get around the sobs.
“It’s hurting me,” I tell her. “Please! How do you take it off?”
Cherish shakes her head, and I shake the rest of her.
“How do you take it off?”
“RahRah, I don’t know,” she cries. I try another approach, let my fingertips ease up ever so slightly. She knows the instant I give her relief and she tries to wrestle out of my grasp again, this time gritting her teeth when I resist and punching my forearms—despite my wound. “I don’t know!”
I release her and pull my arm back where I can protect it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what liquid skin is!” Cherish crosses her arms over her chest, hands splayed to cover the damage my fingers have done to her arms. She looks like someone being laid to rest, except for the confusion and anger on her face. “I thought you were still dreaming!”
One two three four fiiiive.
“You’re lying.” I stumble back a step. “I know you’re lying.”
“Rah! I don’t know!”
I shove past her, sending her hard against the counter on my way out of the bathroom.
She calls after me, but it isn’t to confess. She’s pretending she’s the one being hurt. She’s pretending she doesn’t know I know. That I didn’t see her tally marks. That she isn’t the one keeping track.
I have to find Brianne and Jerry. I have to get this off, make it stop.
The bedroom door is open, like Cherish’s mom threw it wide in her harried haste, like it might seal and lock behind her otherwise—but I hear her.
I stop. The top half of me sways forward when the motion comes to an abrupt halt, as though I might topple head over feet.
They’re close—but they aren’t coming.
Their voices have made it up the stairs, but I’m alone in the bedroom, listening to them from just behind the open door.
I know the timbre of a hurried conversation. A hastily delivered summary so that Jerry knows what’s going on, when there isn’t a moment to waste.
This isn’t that.
I can hear their voices but not their words. There’s too much blood surging through my ears, my own pulse drowning out everything else I should be able to hear.
Control.
“Control.”
I’ve never had to whisper it aloud before. I’ve never had to close my eyes—but this is like nothing I’ve felt. This pain feels unnatural. In my arm, in my head, in whatever part of me makes sense of everything but can’t. My hands are at my head, like I need pressure applied there, like I’m bleeding even though no one can see. Or like if I can make blinders for myself, if I can focus, I can regain control. Because it feels unrelenting. All of it. Like it’s been building to this for weeks. Every strange thing compounding the previous, escalating steadily. The vomiting episode after dinner with my parents. Cherish’s combative behavior. The tally marks. It’s warped me until I actually believe the Cherish who needs me to know she’s alive is trying to hurt me. Worse. That she wants me scarred, that being sick wasn’t enough.
Control.
That is the one thing that cannot be true. That isn’t.
“Did she wake Cherish?”
That’s Jerry.
“She was screaming in her sleep.” Brianne has regained her composure, the way she always does. She’s relaying the details to her husband, and not for the first time. She’s told him this before, and now she’s adding emphasis to her telling, so that he understands the severity of the situation.
But they still aren’t coming.
“Cherish is scared,” Brianne says, and between her even tone and the contemplative quiet that follows it, it is being factored into whatever is delaying them.
I close my eyes to keep quiet. A throbbing that began in my forearm has traveled through my veins and is against my right temple, threatening to drown out all other senses. But I have to wait. I have to hear what they say next.
In the bathroom, Cherish is crying. It isn’t feral or dramatic now that she’s alone. It’s perfect the way she says my name once, as though I’m still there with her, so that when her parents return, they’ll expect to find us huddled together on the bathroom floor.
“Cherish being scared isn’t the worst thing,” Jerry tells his wife in a way that makes me think she took the next step and he reached for her, asked her without words to reconsider. “Sweetheart.” Her hair must be what muffles his words. “What’s the point if she never sees what she’s done?”
Control.
Cherish did this.
Control.
What she’s done.
“Control,” I whisper.
Cherish has done something, and even her parents know.
“One two three four five.”
This can’t happen again.
“One two three four five.”
But I shake my head and take a step back. Because I was sick the same night Kelly fought Tariq for Cherish. I got sick the same night Cherish didn’t get what she wants.
Her parents made her take care of me. They made a girl of whom they require nothing but existence undress me and wash my hair. A girl who had no idea where her own spare toothbrushes were kept. Because, Brianne had told her, this couldn’t happen again.
But it obviously has. Whatever liquid skin is meant to do, it isn’t this. Whyever it burned when Jerry said it wouldn’t, Cherish has something to do with it. She wouldn’t go swimming with me—but that doesn’t mean she didn’t watch. It doesn’t mean she wasn’t close by when I scraped my arm. She would’ve known what would happen next. She had plenty of time. While her father squatted down next to me and studied my arm, while we talked about the bracelet . . .
She noticed.
If Jerry noticed it on my arm throughout the day, there’s no reason Cherish couldn’t have. But she left it for me. She took the tally journal from the drawer but left the bracelet—and then punished me for taking it?
“No.” I shake my head, squeeze my eyes shut to quiet the distracting pain, groan against the way it stabs and then courses from my arm throughout my body in a tidal wave. “She wouldn’t do that.”
However reverent Jerry Whitman is over his mother’s belongings, Cherish wouldn’t hurt me over something she doesn’t even want.
Tariq.
I remember the way she dropped her phone when I startled her in the garden, and I know. I know what she’s punishing me for. I know what she wanted today, what she thinks I’ll take from her again. I know why she’s upset every time she hurts me.
She hasn’t left the bathroom, not even to see if I’ve found her parents and gotten help. When I come back inside, she’s sitting with her back against the wall, her feet planted on the bathroom floor, her knees in front of her. She looks like she’s hiding underneath the sink, her temple resting against the exposed bowl of the basin. She looks up at me sullenly but doesn’t say a word. So I do.
“One two three four five.”
Cherish’s brow crimps briefly, and then it flattens and she’s just looking at me again.
“One. Two. Three. Four. Five.”
“One two three four five,” she parrots back to me as though to appease me, her eyes darting away from me and then back. “RahRah—”
“One two three four five,” I say, and I bring my hideous forearm in front of my body where I know she has no choice but to look at it.
“I heard you.” Cherish sighs—and then she screams.
The hardened magma-colored monstrosity protrudes where Jerry Whitman accidentally cut the skinned flesh, allowing whatever Cherish added to the small container of liquid skin to slip inside of me and erupt back out in a small volcano of shiny red crystals. A moment before Cherish screamed, I pinched the protrusion between two fingernails and tore.
I feel it separate in a flash. It almost doesn’t hurt. The small volcano and its crystals snatch some of the cellophane away with it, and after the pain, there’s the slightest relief.
Cherish is gaping at me, incredulous. Like she can’t believe what I’ve done. Like what she’s done to me makes sense, but not my getting free of it. She doesn’t care that the cellophane layer was cinched too tight, that it was pulling my skin so taut that it was buckling, blackening. That if it isn’t the liquid skin, then it’s however she tampered with it—or with me after the fact.
