Monstrous

I never understood the world. Never fit in it. Other people seemed like unsolvable puzzles, and from the time I was able to speak, I seemed to evoke the same feeling in them. Even the small things I said or did made them frown and cock their heads with tight, confused smiles.

At six…I walked in late again, and my classroom burst into laughter. Befuddled, I smiled back. They screamed. Teacher grabbed me by the ear and pulled me to the principal’s office before I’d even put my things in the cubby with my name on it.

Arms crossed, face red, the principal loomed over me. “What is this, Josephine?”

I shook my head and shrugged. I didn’t want to tell her. Mom’s steady stream of friends coming over at night was our secret. She said she had a right to sleep in.

“It’s scaring the others, child.” Her tone grew a little softer.

I nodded. This seemed like an overreaction to my tardiness, and except for the screaming, the other children seemed more entertained than frightened. I stayed mum. Always a good policy when I didn’t understand what was going on.

“Is there any way you can make it stop?” she asked.

Lying was another good policy when trying to appease unreasonable adults, so I nodded.

“Well, then, Teacher will take you to the bathroom, and you take care of it before heading back in, hear?”

I nodded, smiling my biggest smile. Both teachers reared back, their eyes wide. Thinking maybe this was a grown-up thing I hadn’t seen before, I did the same. They stifled screams.

“Josephine, stop it!” Teacher cried, breathing hard. “Now, follow me properly.”

I followed her as properly as I knew how out into the hall and down to the girl’s bathroom.

Once there, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing. I tried to go potty. I washed my hands till they were pink. I looked down at my clothes. Cleanish. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. A normal little girl in wonky pigtails I‘d done myself this morning.

I headed back out to Teacher, and her smile appeared along with a sigh of relief.

“Good girl. Now run along to the room. I’ll be in soon.”

At 12…Mom’s friends still came over, but not as much. She got a job at the Hyvee cash register in the afternoons, so I got clothes that fit. I took a bus, on time to school every day for three years running. Classmates avoided me, so I brought books to read during lunch and recess. I read My favorite, Jane Eyre, three times before Thanksgiving. Mrs. Rochester in the attic—alone, ignored, misunderstood. Monstrous. She fascinated me. She made me feel almost normal.

I usually sat on the playground bench in the cold shadows to read. Today was no different.

Except, smash. My neck snapped back. Sharp pain seared through my nose, my cheekbones, my skull. The ball fell away, and blood poured from my mouth, my nose. My front teeth wanted to fall out of my head.

No one apologized or offered help or ran for the nurse. No. My fellow middle schoolers just grabbed the bloody ball near my feet and kept playing, as if I were invisible.

As if I were no more than a thing.

Bastards, a word my mom said about her friends before I never saw them again. Well, I’d show them, these careless bastard Janes and Rochesters ignoring me, carrying on as if I didn’t exist, year in, year out.

I stood, blood and hot rage pouring from me. Shooting from my eyes.

“You bastards!” I screamed, sputtering red. “Go to hell!”

They grabbed their heads, all of them, and began to howl in pain. They crouched on the frozen ground. “It’s burning! Make it stop, Josephine, make it stop!”

No, I would not. I would blot out the sun and make their brains liquid, and—

“Josephine!” A sharp voice cut through the roiling storm inside me. “JO-SE-PHINE.”

The storm halted.

The nurse stood before me, not afraid, not disdainful. She stood before me and stared into my eyes with a feeling I didn’t understand.

But she saw me. She saw into me.

Her brow crinkled. “Josephine, I know you hurt, but hurting others will not make you feel better. Come with me to my office and we’ll fix you right up.”

In her office, she had me tilt my head back to stop my nosebleed, then gently washed the blood from my face and neck.

“What just happened?” I asked, body trembling so hard I thought it would make the world shake. “How did I do that?”

She brushed my hair out my eyes with her hand, and looked into my eyes again. It made me uncomfortable. Sad.

I looked down.

“Dear girl, you have something. More than they ever will.”

“They hate me, I think. I think they’ve been scared of me since I started school, but I don’t know why. Most of my teachers, too.” I looked at her to see if I had crossed a line.

But she smiled. “They don’t understand you, that’s all.”

“I don’t understand them!” I wailed. “And I sure don’t understand me!”

She turned to her desk and pulled a mirror from her handbag. She held it out to me. “Look.”

I looked.

My face was horribly wrinkly, my teeth crooked and yellow. My hair had turned gray and wild. My eyes glowed purple with otherworldly light

I shrieked and dropped the mirror.

The nurse laughed. “You won’t look like that permanently—you’ll keep shifting. Next time it will be something else. It will always be strange to those around you, but the powers that come along with it will remain constant. And with those powers, you can hide your true being.” She shook her head. “Let me show you how I really look, at least at the moment.”

Suddenly, she grew to six, seven, eight feet tall, so tall she had to bend at the waist not to hit the ceiling. Her face became a horrifying thing, one eye in the center of her face, a wide mouth with rows and rows of teeth, no nose. I held myself taut so I would not shy away from her. My new face was positively beautiful in comparison.

“You can use your power to hide your real face,” she said, slipping back down into her nurse self as easily as slipping on a glove. “You can use your power for so many other things.” She smiled. “And I will teach you. But the one thing you should never use it for is to harm others. Do you understand?”

I nodded. But I had to know more. “Why are we like this? Who are we?”

“We are the dreams people dream, the stories they tell and receive. We are the magic they weave and leave behind. Forget.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Did your mother read fairy tales to you?”

“She didn’t read at all to me. But I read them to myself. One of my favorites was Hansel and Gretel. I loved that there was a witch who ate horrible children.” I didn’t add “like my classmates.”

The nurse laughed. “Mine was Jack and the Beanstalk. I loved that old giant. I didn’t think it was fair that Jack won in the end. Why did Jack think he should just be able to steal the goose and get away with it? And what kind of values does that teach children?”

“Yeah! So true!” I said. “So, is that what we are,” I ask, “fairy tale people?”

“Sort of,” she says. “We’re like echoes of fairy tales, remnants that float out into the real world, neither part of this world or another. We sort of reflect parts of them that might be floating nearby when we call them down. I call them aspects.”

I thought about this. It explained so much about how strange I felt all the time, how out of place and wrong except for the few rare moments that felt stronger as I got older.

“So as long as Fairy Tales are read, we’ll exist? We can be their aspects?”

She nodded. “You’ve got it. These aspects will always appear frightening to regular people, but I’ve come to love it. Very useful in a pinch. And the bonus is we have the magic of those tales inside us that, like I said, we can use for good or bad.”

“So, you use it for good? Like, to heal people?”

“Exactly.” She smiled crookedly. “To heal all these horrible children.”

I smiled back. “Okay, how do I hide this aspect right now?”

“Look into the mirror and focus on your regular world face and shape. Say, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, show the fairest me of all.”

I did it, and sure enough, the reflection began to resolve into plain old me.

My whole body relaxed. “Thank you.”

But my relief was short-lived. I glanced out the window and the other children were still moaning in teachers’ arms. I groaned. “Is there any way I can make them forget what I did? They hate me enough already.”

“You must weave another story than the one that is playing out. It will take many, many lessons to learn to do it with the precision required. But I will do it for you this time.”

She stepped closer to the window and closed her eyes. “Once upon a time,” she began, “there was a school full of happy, healthy boys and girls, and there was also one girl who was very different than the others, but no one knew…”