4.08: Scars

I spoke to my parents again before heading back to school, because I felt like I kind of had to, but the conversation was stiff and awkward. I hadn’t explained the nature of my fight with them to Chelsea and Melissa; I didn’t want Melissa’s gentle reassurance of Chelsea’s ‘totally joking but not joking if you want me to be serious, just say the word’ offers to beat them up or something. I just wanted to digest things myself for a bit.

It wasn’t until I was back in Instruktanto Cooper’s van that it occurred to me that I’d have to digest things myself for a while. There was no one at Refujeyo with the context to vent to, and it would be awkward to explain it to Chelsea and Melissa in text messages.

I caught up with Kylie in the van (being in proximity to her magic again made me feel better in general, although not in specifics), checked in with Max when we got to school (his arm was healing fine, but not being able to exit the school even for a bit of fresh air without undoing Malas’ work was making him stir crazy), and marched straight to Malas, dramatically flinging the ward door open in a fit of angry determination.

And then stopping and sitting to wait for a bit, because he had patients with actual injuries, and even I knew that they took priority.

When we were alone, I asked, “Can you look at my heart, please?”

His gaze sharpened. “Complications? Heart pain?”

“No! No, I mean the skin over it. The… scars.”

“They’re not technically sca – ”

“You know what I mean! I want to know if you can tell anything more about them. Anything at all. I want to know what made them, and how.”

Malas frowned. “Shouldn’t you know that already? They’re your injuries. I thought you made them.”

I shook my head. “I’d never heard of them until you found them. Meaning I was too young to remember, meaning my parents must have done it to, to try to bind the curse or something, but I confronted them and my dad denied it, and I want to know what they tried to do to me. If they won’t tell me then I have to find out some other way. So. Anything you can tell me.”

Malas’ expression darkened and he muttered something in Ido under his breath. I caught words like ‘commonfolk’, ‘stupid’, and several words that I was pretty sure were not in the official Ido lexicon but carried the definite tone of extreme cursing. “Alright,” he said, in English. “Let’s have a look at you, then.”

I knew what to expect from the feeling of Malas’ magic pushing through Kylie’s, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant. I gritted my teeth and tried to breathe through it while Malas took a lot longer than usual to magically inspect the area around my mage mark.

After a while, he pulled back. “Hmm.”

“What?”

“These wounds have healed extremely well. Some of the best healing I’ve ever seen, I think. Most of what I can detect is subcutineous.”

“It what bad?”

“No. Skin replaces itself rather quickly, so the lack of interruptions in the surface layer isn’t impossible. But these wounds were inflicted with amazing care, and taken care of exceptionally well after being caused.”

I nodded. “They were probably terrified of accidentally releasing the curse, so they’d have been extra careful about making sure it all healed up. I guess this means it definitely wasn’t an accident, right?”

“No, this is master surgeon level proficiency. I wouldn’t have been able to do this. For them to heal without interrupting each other, they must have been cut one at a time and allowed to heal – it would have taken weeks. Months, even. You don’t remember?”

I shook my head.

“Hmm. And yet there’s not as much stretchign and deformation of the pattern as I’d expect, if it was done when you still had so much growing to do.”

“Pattern?”

“Oh, yes. It’s hard to see, since this is rather like looking at a fifth generation photocophy of a low-resolution photograph, but it’s definitely centred over your witch mark. Here, I can show you.” He fetched a pen and paper and, scanning my chest again with one hand, used the other to draw a network of quick, precise lines. The places where they met were vague and tangled, and even I could tell that the pattern was incomplete, but a pattern it was; a sort of cobweb of lined centred over my heart. I could see what he meant about doing one cut at a time and letting it heal; cutting all that at once would’ve turned my chest into hamburger.

“I’m not saying that doing this to you was excusable,” Malas continued, “but I’d sure love to meet the surgeon who did it. I’ve never seen such consistency of depth in cutting before.”

“So my parents couldn’t have done it themselves.”

“Not unless one of them is a world-class surgeon and never mentioned it. They probably hired a cursebreaker. Someone could have used magic to do this, I suppose, but no cursebreaker would risk pouring this much magic over a dormant curse.”

“So they hired either a master surgeon or an idiot,” I concluded.

“It would seem that way, yes.”

I sighed. “Right. Thanks.” I picked up the paper. “Can I keep this?”

“If you like.”

I thanked him again, and left.

At least this was a problem that my friends would understand.

Kylie would get it. Talbot and Hua would get it. We should schedule more coven meetings to vent about stuff. Why had I been so reluctant about the coven initially?

Oh, and we should find out if there were any new witch initiates, too. They’d need the coven, especially if they planned to stay on at Refujeyo.

But I couldn’t exactly call a meeting right now, and I had other stuff I was more upset about, so I headed for my favourite place to be alone and grumpy – Agreabla Insulo, the little island with the cabin. I sat on the beach and let myself sob silently for a little bit, until I heard a familiar voice behind me. “Koala?”

I froze. Mae. Sounded like two people were there, so probably Terry as well. Why were they always here when I wanted to be here?

I hastily rubbed my eyes and willed my voice steady. Give my face like, a minute to stop looking flushed, and I’d be able to safely turn around, right? I could do that. “Hey, guys. Have a good holiday?”

They came and sat in the sand beside me. Turning away to hide my face would be weird, so I stared resolutely out over the ocean.

“Are you alright?” Terry asked.

“Yeah. Fine. Just caught up with my family and stuff. How’s your veggie garden going?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them exchange a glance.

“Fine,” Terry said. “But we’re having some trouble with the carrots. Maybe you could come and see if you have any advice?”

“I don’t know anything about carrots, sorry.”

“You want to talk about it?” Terry asked.

“Carrots? As I said, I don’t know – ”

“Kayden.”

I sighed. “It’s fine. Just family stuff. You wouldn’t get it.”

“Because we’ve never had teen family fights before,” Mae mumbled under her breath.

“You wouldn’t get it,” I snapped. I wasn’t up for running Cursed Kids 101 or Trans Kids 101 classes today. I wasn’t going to sit and patiently justify to a couple of outsiders why I was so upset.

More silence. A longer one. I glanced at the pair; they were exchanging a look that I couldn’t read.

“We’ve got a friend’s wake to attend next Sunday,” Mae said. She took a drag on her cigarette. “Want to come?”

“A wake? I’m sorry to hear – ”

“No, no; not like that!” Terry waved her hands pacifyingly. “Maemae, don’t introduce it like that! It’s a graduation party.”

I stared. “Then why did she call it a wake?”

“It’s kind of a tradition,” Mae explained. “In our group. We do this whole transition to another world thing, it’s… anyway, it’ll be a fun time, and you should come.”

“Isn’t a graduation party for the friends of the graduate?”

“Mostly, yeah, but the way we do things is different. Trust me, you’d absolutely be welcome. Please?”

I hesitated. I had my own friend groups and enough commitments of my own; I had no idea why they wanted me to come to a party for someone I presumably didn’t know. But both of them were looking at me in hope and apprehension. They wanted me to come, and I was too tired to pull apart why.

“I’ll look at my schedule,” I said.

“Great. Well, we gotta go bully some carrots. We’ll message you the details later. Coming, Ter-pear?”

“Mm-hmm.” Terry reached out as if to touch my shoulder, seemed to think better of it, and followed Mae into the forest.

I stared out over the ocean, letting their voices fade into the wind.

A vessel for this fucking curse was all I’d ever been, really, wasn’t it? My whole damned childhood had been built around suppressing the damned thing. I’d come to Refujeyo and spent six months defined by it, being one of The Cursed Kids, careening between trying to make it do something and terrified that it had done something to Matt and Alania and just sick of everyone caring about it and frustrated at people who couldn’t see why I cared about it. And then it had turned out that it did matter, what with the whole Hero and Child prophecy, and it was dangerous and I really was just a vessel for the curse, the stupid fucking curse, a vessel that was going to rupture and kill everyone if we didn’t figure out how to kill the curse first, but when we did… who would I be?

What would even be left?

I knew I was someone, under the curse. And I’d thought, my whole life I’d thought, that my parents knew that too, that they had my back. That they knew who I was. Over and over, I’d overlooked evidence to the contrary, because they were just parents, they weren’t omniscient; no parents actually knew their teenage kids all that well, that was fine. But they’d gone to bat for me. They’d kept me safe, defended me when I’d told them I was a boy, believed and supported me, which was more, so much more, than most trans kids got.

Except they hadn’t been. They, or at least Mum, had just been protecting herself and everyone else from the curse in her house that she had to raise.

If I hadn’t been cursed, would she still be calling me Kelsie? Would she be sitting back when people made fun of me, be telling me not to make waves, be telling me that there was nothing wrong with being a girl and all this denial was silly and I should be proud of who I was? Or would she have genuinely accepted her son if she didn’t have the convenient excuse of the curse messing with my identity to fall back on, if she had no recourse but to either believe me or not?

If we did manage to destroy the curse without killing me, would she call me Kelsie?

Would Dad eventually step forward and protect me, or would he sit back and let her, tell me to be understanding and not make a fuss, in the name of peace? Did he secretly agree with her, perhaps, and had denied it to me in the name of said peace?

Did I have anyone in my corner at all?

Melissa and Chelsea. I’d always have them. But they were so far away, and it wasn’t the same thing as parents. Nobody close, nobody here, even knew, except for a handful of staff who didn’t count; if my friends here found out, how would they react? Would Max and Kylie look at me different, as their girl friend who they’d indulge with male pronouns when she was in earshot, or would they still see me? Would I be able to tell the difference? With Mum, I hadn’t been able to tell the difference.

There was a sharp pain in my chest. I looked down to see that at some point I’d started digging my nails in, like I was trying to claw the curse out. No – not into my heart. Into my breasts. Like I could just peel the evidence away and they wouldn’t be there, always lurking beneath my baggy robes, a reminder to myself of my own body and a threat to expose me to everyone else and throw my very identity onto their unreliably merciful judgement.

I pulled my hands away, because I wasn’t allowed to do that. That was a rule that I’d made for myself a long time ago. I wasn’t allowed to be ashamed of my body.

I wasn’t ashamed of my body. I wasn’t. And if, if I ever did get into a situation where other people were wrong about my gender, then they were just going to have to suck it, because I could just decide that what they thought didn’t matter and they couldn’t… they couldn’t…

I couldn’t get my mother’s gentle expression and concerned voice urging me not to do anything permanent while I still had the curse out of my mind.

And no matter how many times I told myself that her opinion didn’t matter, it wouldn’t stop hurting.