We lie there, unmoving, dust motes swirling in the air.
Her hair is so long. I reach to my own head, feel that my hair is tied back in a heavy braid. I pull it around and look at it—it’s black and thick. The braid hangs down to my waist. It feels so silky, like it was recently brushed.
Someone put me in a coffin and fixed my hair? A shiver slides across my skin.
Maybe it’s okay. Maybe Mom brushed it. Or Dad. But if it was them, did they do that right before they sealed me in and left me to die?
The red-haired girl finally opens her eyes a little, blinking slits that show me their color: a deep green.
She blinks away tears. She sniffs, wipes at her nose.
“You saved me,” she says. “You set me free. Thank you, Em.”
She sits up. She brushes her thick hair behind her left ear, then her right. When she does, I see something on her forehead.
A black circle, as wide as the distance between her eyes, made of a material that clearly isn’t her and yet is also a part of her at the same time. The dark color stands in stark contrast against her white-pink skin. The outside of the circle is smooth. The inside is kind of jagged, with stubby points sticking inward. Eight of them, evenly spaced apart. Stubby points…kind of like…
Like teeth.
She’s a tooth-girl.
I feel a surge of emotion. Tooth-girls…they made fun of me in school…didn’t they? I can’t remember my school. And I can’t remember why the tooth-girls ridiculed me, only how their words and glares and jokes made me feel: small, unimportant, worthless.
I hate her.
No…I don’t even know this girl. At least I don’t think I do. We’re in this together. I will not hate her because of some decoration on her skin.
Wait—do I have one?
My free hand flies to my forehead. I feel something embedded there. A circle, like hers, but smooth, both inside and out. There are no stubby points, no teeth.
Our fingers remain locked. Her skin is warm, the only warm thing in this cold room.
“I’m afraid,” she says. “What is this place?”
“I don’t know.”
My fingertips lightly trace the shape that marks my skin.
She sees me doing that, reaches to her forehead. Her eyes widen with discovery.
“I have one, too,” she says. “Yours is a plain circle, but mine feels different on the inside. Bumps or something…what are they?”
Teeth, I want to say, because you’re a tooth-girl.
But I don’t say that. I like her, and she seems to like me. I don’t want her to know that phrase in case it makes her remember something and not like me anymore.
“They look like stubby bits,” I say.
She waits for me to keep going, but I don’t know any other way to describe what I see.
She thinks for a moment. She shrugs. “We both have symbols. I don’t know what they mean.”
“Neither do I.”
She looks around the room, taking it all in.
“This isn’t the birthday I was hoping for,” she says.
“It’s your birthday, too?”
She looks at me, doubtful, like I’m playing some kind of trick on her.
“Yes,” she says. “I’m twelve.”
She’s the one who is playing tricks. My instincts were right: the tooth-girl, whatever that is, is already making fun of me. I lean away from her.
“I’m not dumb, you know,” I say.
She blinks, confused. “I…of course you’re not. I didn’t say you were.” She blushes and looks away, like she knows she said something wrong but doesn’t know what that something was.
“Em, I would never be rude to my elders like that.”
Elders? What is she talking about?
“You’re not twelve,” I say. I point at her legs, her breasts. “Look at you. You think I’d be so stupid that I’d believe you’re the same age as me?”
Her expression of embarrassed confusion changes to one of total disbelief. She holds out her arms, looks at them, then down at herself.
“I don’t understand,” she says.
She pulls at the bottom of her shirt, but the material doesn’t stretch. Her belly—flat, pale—is exposed. This, too, makes me uncomfortable.
My belly is cold.
I look down at my blood-speckled shirt and realize, for the first time, that it’s too small for me. The bottom of it leaves my stomach open to the cold air. My sleeves end halfway up my forearms. No wonder it feels freezing in here: I’m half-naked.
I touch my belly, suddenly self-conscious. This seems…wrong, like showing bare skin is a bad thing.
The shirt is too tight against my breasts.
Or…are my breasts too big for my shirt? I feel them. They weren’t this size before…were they? No, they weren’t. I’m sure of it. I can’t remember anything, but I know my body has changed.
The red-haired girl stares at me intensely. I realize I’m touching myself right in front of her. I look away, put my hands in my lap.
She feels her own chest—her eyes widen with surprise. “What happened? They weren’t like this before.”
I shake my head. “Same with me.”