DEBBIE HUDSON / THE FURRING
It starts happening just after you turn fourteen.
You and Aaron sit on the swing set in his back garden, sipping dilute orange juice from Disney cups, watching wasps sway drunk over the neighbour’s hedge. It’s late August. The sun is still ripe and the backs of your knees sticky. You’re looking at Aaron’s arms, at the sudden sprouting of fine hair gone gold, the skin underneath pink as a newborn’s scalp. You’re looking at this and your Disney cup is sweating through your fingers. You’re looking at this when the wasp hits.
It pings off your forehead like a pebble and you blink, confused. Then it missiles back into your eyeline, stinger cocked, and you yelp. Yelp and flail. Splash orange juice all over your neck as you tip backwards off the swing.
Aaron folds over, laughing. The wasp darts towards him. It teleports, appearing at ear, then chest, then knee. When it materialises by his nose, Aaron jerks his arm, and with one bold blow, swats it into the grass.
You lie in the dust beneath the swing set. Watch for the wasp to perform its magic trick, reappear—TA-DA—in a yellow flash, but it doesn’t. Aaron offers you his hand. He’s smiling, but there’s something of a snarl about it.
You hesitate. His teeth are suddenly a bit too wet, a bit too sharp.
*
That evening, after Mum calls you inside, you sit cross-legged on your pink bedspread, surrounded by stuffed animals. The sun squats on the horizon. A shard of red light pushes through the window and you thrust your arms into it, twist them slowly side to side, scrutinising the skin.
Unlike Aaron, the hair on your own arms is visible only if it’s angled into a light just right, and even then, it’s so short, so sparse, that it flickers in and out of existence.
*
When you go back to school in September, the other girls have all got taller, their skirts shorter. You wear the same trousers as last year, now browning and torn at the bottom, and while you stand in queues for changing rooms and toilets, deodorant and sanitary towels pass over your head, as easily as gossip.
The boys have become more like Aaron. Or perhaps Aaron has become more like the boys. Hair tufts out of shirt cuffs, curls in the strip between trouser hem and sock, sometimes threatens to show itself off on the ridge of a top lip. And Aaron often slinks out of the dinner hall before you’ve finished your sandwiches, reciting excuses about having to hand in homework or sit in detention, only for you to find him later, lounging on the playing field in a cluster of boys.
He doesn’t acknowledge you when you approach him those lunchtimes. None of the boys do. They go on jostling each other, roaring and yawning, mouths wide open as though broken at the hinge.
*
One Friday, you overhear an older girl in the school toilets. My mum says you shouldn’t shave as a woman, you know. Only wax. She read in a magazine that shaving makes the hair grow back thicker. That’s why Becca’s got that big mad monobrow. And you spend all evening perched on the side of the bath, dragging your mum’s Venus razor over every millimetre of your legs, arms, chest, face, slicing off hints of hair until the blades are blunt and clogged with grey fluff.
You go to bed slippery, dotting the sheets with blood. You dream about walking to school with Aaron on Monday, both of you wearing short sleeves, the dense dark hair on your arms velcroing to his.
But come Monday morning, you are still smooth, still maddeningly soft. And worse, covered in so many plasters that Aaron eyes you warily, as though worried you’ve got something he can catch. He spends the whole journey walking ahead, dismissing any attempts at conversation with one shouldered shrugs.
At the school gate, a group of boys loiter. They split open for Aaron. Fold him inside. Rub shoulders as hello in the way that pack animals do.
*
Over tea, Mum asks if you’ve fallen out with Aaron. You’ve been staying in a lot recently. Is everything alright? The kitchen is stuffy with the smell of hot meat. The damp collar of your school blouse rubs the back of your neck raw.
You tell her Aaron’s just busy, with you starting GCSE’s and all. You leave out how he’s started sitting at the opposite side of classrooms to you, how whenever you go to his house, his mum says he’s out with his mates already, how she says that she’ll tell him to come round afterwards to see you, but he never does.
Mum pours gravy over your roast potatoes. What about the girls in your class? Don’t you fancy a sleepover? You spear a potato in half with a fork, tell her how the girls in your class are interested in nail varnish, Top of the Pops and reading articles in Cosmogirl that teach you how to snog.
Mum arranges her face into something that looks like a smile. Don’t worry, sweetheart, I was a late bloomer, too. You’ll catch up to them soon. Her blue mascara is smudged under her eyes like a bruise.
*
You stand naked in front of your bedroom mirror. The curtains are drawn and the bedside lamp is on. Mum’s snoring hums a tune through the wall.
You prod yourself. Lumpy shoulders, lumpy uneven chest, fingertips pressing into mounds of flesh the colour of dead things. All over you are misshapen, strange.
When you met Aaron, it was over a table of playdough at nursery. He made a lion that you guessed was a monkey because it had massive ears and no mane. You made a duck he thought was a dolphin.
Your body is that memory. Some indistinct creature thumbed out of modelling clay.
*
As autumn tightens its fist, the boys grow lean. Cheeks hollow out. Knuckles press up against skin as though threatening to split it. In corridors and dinner queues, boys nip at each other. Sometimes, voices are raised, chests thrust out. Sometimes, names are involved: mothers, sisters, what you assume to be female cousins. Then it’s thudding bodies, clashing teeth, the smell of leaves and sweat and wild things. A smear of blood on a bristly chin.
Aaron starts chasing girls across the playing field. Girls with slender, striding legs. Girls who sparkle with glitter body mist and wear lace bras that communicate in braille across their blouses. He pursues them until they slow, gasping. Then launches himself at their waists and tears them down into the grass. His friends circle, howling.
*
When the bleeding comes, you don’t tell anybody.
You fill the bathtub with water as hot as you can stand. You lower yourself in, skin screaming. Sweat beads on your scalp. Your head swims. By the time you’re submerged to the shoulders, every part of you is bright red.
Mum’s voice drifts up through the floorboards. She’s on the phone in the kitchen as she makes dinner. To tell you the truth, she’s starting to worry me a little bit…
Eyes closed, you imagine the tomatoes boiling in the pan. Shiny tough skin softening, wrinkling, sloughing away in chunks. The flesh exposed beneath, tender and swollen.
No. Not swollen. Swelling. Flesh swelling, swelling, bigger and bigger. Round body bulging, straining, pressure on pressure on pressure, until—POP—insides are out. Gelatinous pulp and tiny white seeds. Water red as a slaying.
You lie in the bath until your skin starts to blue. You lie in the bath until the water is so cold it bites.
*
The next morning, after breakfast, you dart to the bathroom and ram fingers down your throat. With exaggerated heaves, you throw up thick globs of Weetabix into the toilet. Force your retching to be loud enough for Mum to hear downstairs.
You tell her you don’t feel well, that you don’t think you can go to school today. You’re clammy from the water strategically splashed on your face and clutching your stomach for effect.
Mum presses the back of her hand to your forehead. Her eyes squint as though she’s thinking. Feel alright to me. You try to protest, but she shuffles you out of the front door, reciting the importance of your GCSE’s, her work, and if you still feel sick later, the school nurse can decide whether to send you home or not.
You walk to school alone with toilet paper wedged into your knickers. The air stinks of bleeding.
*
Before going to registration, you visit the toilets to make sure you’ve not started leaking. When you come back out of the cubicle, there’s two girls from the year above sitting on the sinks. They’re twisted to face the mirror, probing at perfectly smooth under-eyes and packing powder on top of freckles. A hoard of makeup and perfumes are piled between them.
As you edge in to wash your hands, the girl nearest swings around. She pushes something into your face. God, you should totally try this. It’s amazing. Do you want a spray? It’s body glitter, silver sparkles suspended in a thick pink liquid. You freeze up, unfamiliar with suddenly being noticed.
The girl’s smiling. The top button of her blouse is open and her skin shimmers as though she’s glowing from the inside. You attempt to shrink away, feeling like an intruder in your own body, but she takes hold of your wrist. Within seconds, there’s a big pink blob on the back of your hand, sparkling.
*
In the corridor, a boy’s eyes track you.
In Art class, a boy splashes paint water over your blouse and makes obscene noises.
In Geography, the boy at the desk behind you prods you in the back with his pencil, poking, poking, poking, until you cry out and the teacher snatches it away from him.
You hide in the library all lunchtime.
You spend the whole of last period sitting on the couch in the nurse’s office, pretending to have a headache, as you wait for the bell to ring.
*
Your inner thighs are damp on the run home. You skid through marshes of decomposing leaves and shoot over busy roads without looking. You’re at the garden gate three times faster than usual, and you’re scrabbling with the latch, gone stiff with rust, when something grabs you.
You whirl round in fright. Find yourself staring straight at Aaron.
He looms over, panting heavy with his mouth open. Are you alright? Just I saw you running and you nearly got knocked over and I-- Your hand scrambles for the latch again, but he grips your arm, pulling it away. Between his eyes, his skin is screwed up, like he’s trying to work something out, but his fingers are pressing so hard into your flesh it’s as though they’re digging for bone. Hey, seriously, what’s up? What’s wrong with you?
His teeth are too wet. His teeth are too sharp.
Autumn is a carcass, rotting.
And with one sudden twist, you jerk out of his grasp, barge open the gate and sprint down the path into the house. Mum won’t be home for another two hours. You lock the front door and cower in the bathroom.
Aaron shouts your name through the letterbox for ages.
*
That night, you look in the mirror at your rounded shoulders, your soft belly, the bruise coming up blue and purple on your forearm.
You know what you need to do.
You take a nail file from the bathroom cabinet.
You open your mouth wide, baring your dull teeth, square and stubby as a baby’s.
And in the glint of a full moon, you spend all night filing them sharp.
Debbie Hudson is a writer from West Yorkshire, England, whose work focuses on the working-class northern experience through a queer lens. Her short fiction and poetry has previously appeared in The Belfast Review, Umbrella Factory Magazine, Riggwelter, Isele Magazine, and Bandit Fiction, among other places.