Medusa

When I grew breasts, I stopped taking the bus to school. Instead I walked along the edge of the wetlands that protruded like a dank finger between my home and school. It was seven and a half times longer than the walk to the bus stop, but it was safer to be alone. Although, Katie was usually there too. Most mornings we were each alone in the marsh, together.

I had to leave early to arrive on-time. I didn’t mind. I was happy to leave my house, my covetous mother, the way her eyes excoriated my soft, new curves, as if she could gouge them away.

Our home was on the right side of the finger, just below the knuckle, and school was on the left side, halfway down the nail. There was no cutting through the marsh, which deepened at unpredictable intervals. Even if I could’ve, there were too many Grimm tales in me to risk the full embrace of the woods, the creatures that lurked there. I kept the rumble of semi-trucks in earshot as I picked over the devouring ground.

It was spring, then, the wetlands, the overbright green of a toxic snake. Contrasting brown trunks, upright, or rotting in the water, created a crude chiaroscuro. Shadow and light. Dull and bright. Living and dead. Me and her.

Katie wore a red backpack, so it was easy to spot her in the gloaming. Last year, when she disappeared from her usual seat at the front of the bus, I thought she had dropped out. There had been rumors. A video. Some pictures.

“Trouble waiting to happen,” my mom had called her at a school volleyball game, sucking her teeth at Katie’s exposed sliver of stomach, the bounce of her breasts, as she dove for the ball. My older sister crouched at the net, in front of Katie, a plank to her plump.

“Trouble,” my stepfather agreed, his gaze lingering.

I crossed my arms over my chest.

“That kind of body is a liability,” Mom said, clapping for my sister.

Katie tapped a tree branch as she ducked under it, a football player heading out to the big game. Katie’s house was a few blocks up from mine. Each morning, five minutes into my walk, she would stride into the swamp ahead of me. She kept a militant schedule, as I did.

Today, she was singing. I caught snippets of her raspy voice over the shrieks of cicadas, the ambient noise of animate water. “My Prerogative,” Britney Spears. I hummed along. She slowed through a particularly muddy patch, and the distance between us shortened. I could have caught up with her. But I stopped, slinking behind a pin oak.

I liked to imagine she, too, had left the bus to avoid the eyes, the hands, the popcorn, and the pencil erasers tossed into her cleavage. She, too, had a mother who jealously guarded her new husband’s attention. From this distance, Katie was just like me. I didn’t want to shatter that sisterhood. I’ll always wonder if it would’ve made a difference if I could have helped her.

Monday, she wasn’t there. I checked behind me. Maybe she had gotten a late start? I walked along the usual path, straining ahead and glancing behind for a sight of that red backpack. And then, there it was, past a curve in the cattails, on a stump a few feet into a vernal pool. I stepped towards the splash of red, wading into the water.

“Katie?” I said. “Katie!”

The mud sucked at my boots as I pushed through the rushes behind the stump.

“Katie,” I said.

Later, when they wrapped an aluminum blanket around me, they told me it had something to do with the proteins in her hair. That it was explicable. To be expected, even, in these circumstances.

Katie was lying there in the pool. Her body was submerged from her breasts, but her head floated on a thick bank of sedge, surrounded by pussy willows. Common elderberry sprouted by her left shoulder, its white-gray blossoms the same color as her necrotic flesh.

But it was her long, black hair that riveted me. I don’t know how long I stood there, staring at it, before I pulled out my phone to call 9-1-1, before my mom shoved me into the passenger seat, before she called my aunt with the hands-free, before she spoke the words saw this coming a mile off into the yawning crackle of the car’s speakerphone. Before the town found out. Before they asked why a girl would go into the wetlands by herself? Before the vigil. Before the heartfelt Facebook posts. Before everyone cared so much. Before they all wished there was something, anything, they could have done to save that poor, lost girl. Before all that, there was me, truly alone now, staring at Katie.

Her hair was alive, writhing with salamanders. They thrashed amongst the strands, a slick brown amongst the tangled black. They climbed over each other, flat paws and flat eyes and tentacular bodies seething into a wreath around her face. They didn’t scuttle when I approached. They continued burrowing, claiming her hair with their slithering, snake-like bodies. They were attracted to something in her, felt entitled to it.