The sky was overcast and the surf was rough, but that didn’t stop the Australian men from taking cannonball after cannonball into the water, whooping and laughing and pushing each other off the rocky outcrop a few meters in from the shoreline. Children hung onto the edges, waiting for the adult men to finally cede the territory, but it seemed like this segment of their lad’s holiday might extend until sunset. Between their shouts and the sound of the waves, Greta could tell that Molly was distracted—in fact, not listening to anything she said. “I keep telling you, it was not a fine date.”
“Wait, so what was the problem?” Molly asked.
“I told you—his coffee order. Anyone who returns their latte because of ‘mouthfeel’ is basically a serial killer.”
“But oat milk does have a better mouthfeel, right?”
“That’s the thing. He said they gave him oat milk. He wanted almond.”
“Well, if that’s the worst thing about him, maybe you shouldn’t be so picky. The only thing that matters is that he’s kind to you, right?”
Greta wanted to protest. In the wake of his first sip, he was unking to the barista at Mokka, even complaining about his 50¢ tip. How nice could a man really be if he saw the woman at the cash-register as barely human, there simply to fulfill his desires? And even if that had been a display of nerves rather than personality, was kindness really all that mattered? But as she shook her head and formulated her thoughts, she saw an object coming towards her, actually hitting her hand just as she raised it to protect her face. “Oww,” she exclaimed, rubbing the sore spot at the base of her wrist.
“Could you toss that back?” One of the Australian men called from the rock. She stared for a second at the frisbee, bright red in the sand before her. Then she stood and then flung it off into the opposite direction. It only went a few yards, and the men booed audibly. She could hear one yell, “Cunt!”
Back on their shared beach blanket, Molly’s disapproval was obvious. “Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously. They’re being assholes. They didn’t even apologize.”
“It was an accident. You could have just tossed it back.”
“Why would I?”
“To make things easier for yourself.”
Greta shook her head, sighed, and announced she was going for a swim. She headed off to the right, away from the rock and then men and towards the families at the further end of the beach. As she approached the shoreline, she could feel the men looking at her, wanting to incite another confrontation. She ran into the water, still warm in early September despite the chill in the air. At the first breaking wave, she dove into its depths, coming up salty and cool and relieved. No matter what Molly said, she knew she should settle for no less than this: a feeling of complete happiness, total oneness. Otherwise, what was the point of being with someone else? She threw herself into wave after wave, the water cleansing her of their debris from her little tiff with Molly, and the wet sick kiss on the side of her mouth from the night before. She swam down to the bottom, her hands in the sand as her legs poked up into the air in a suspended handstand. She did round-offs and flips, water getting up her nose and into her ears and algae getting into the mesh between the two black pieces of fabric coving her bits. She played in the water like that, alone by herself, until her eyes stung and her heart started to beat so loudly in her ears she could no longer pretend it was only the sound of the ocean crashing against the sand.
Out of the water, Greta squinted into the breaking sunlight, the salt on her contact lenses making everything appear iridescent and segmented. Weaving and panting, she made her way back to the blanket where she collapsed next to her roommate and reached for the water bottle. As she chugged, Molly spoke hesitatingly: “Soooo, I don’t want you to panic.”
She froze. “What?”
“Okay, like I said, please don’t freak out, but I think you might have something in your suit.”
Greta bolted up, standing and looking at her torso, squinting through her salt-cased eyes and wringing her hands. “Oh God. What? What?” Then, finally, she saw it: a tiny little creature right above her navel, brown and hard—a miniature lobster or a large insect, almost the length of her pinkie finger. She started to let out a whimpering groan.
Molly stood up beside her, holding a towel. “Okay, look, I’m going to hold this around you, and you can take off your suit to check if there’s anything else in there.”
It took her a full minute to stop making animal sounds and start making words. “I don’t want to look.”
“Well, I don’t want to either. They’re your sea bugs, okay?”
Greta was dimly aware of herself moaning and stomping at the sand, shaking her arms like a hysteric—and of the distant Aussies looking at her laughing, surely feeling like whatever was happening was fitting punishment for failing to return the frisbee, but as Molly told her to breathe, she found the courage to stand still, drop her suit to the ground and look down at her body, where indeed there were close to a dozen more writhing sea bugs that had collected in the dark parts of her suit. She brushed them off, one by one, saying “Ohgodohgodohgod” until the task was done and she clasped the clean towel away from Molly and around her body, close to tears.
“Do you want to rinse off or something?” Molly asked.
“I can’t put that swimsuit back on. Like, ever.”
“Okay, then maybe you’re ready to get dressed? And go?”
There she was, she realized, naked on the beach in front of all those families, those men, after the scene she’d made. She felt her whole body go hot with shame. “Okay,” she said, then took her dress to the port-a-potty by the boardwalk, lowering it over her head while trying not to breathe in the odor below.
Greta found Molly outside in the midst of exchanging numbers with one of the Australians.
“Seriously?” Greta asked as they walked back to the car.
“What? He was hot.”
“I just had, like, a major trauma.”
“Chill out,” Molly said. She let out a big, bright laugh. “It’s not like you’re going to turn into a bug.”
“That’s not funny.”
“But you have to admit it kind of is. After that, I bet Almond Milk Guy don’t seem so bad.”
Under the blast of the air conditioning, Greta felt cold for the entire drive back across the bridge to their apartment. At home, she took a hot shower, then went through the storage bins under her bed to find wool socks and a winter onesie. Dressed, she went on Seamless and started browsing seafood. She might be vegetarian, but after the day she’d had, surely she deserved whatever she wanted, and what she suddenly craved was calamari and clam cakes and half-dozen raw oysters. She texted Molly from her room to see if she wanted in on the order. No, I’m going out, she replied. When the food arrived twenty minutes later, there was no sign of Molly. Greta ate her food in bed, staring directly ahead at the wall. From time to time, her cell phone buzzed, and she looked over at its bright screen, not bothering to actually read the texts from Molly or Almond Milk or the man from two weeks ago whom she was also ghosting. After she’d finished her meal, she stuffed all the Styrofoam in a single plastic bag, dropped it by her bedroom door, and fell into a heavy sleep.
The next morning, she woke up with a rash—angry red spots on her belly and her chest, the tops of her hands, the right side of her jaw. She knocked on Molly’s door to get her opinion, but no answer came. Greta had a shift, and obviously no one wanted to see their barista covered in red spots. Yet they wouldn’t necessarily know it was a rash, she told herself; it could be psoriasis, and you couldn’t judge people for that. Besides, she shouldn’t make decisions based on what people thought, but how she felt. How she felt was cold and itchy and queer, as if she were about to molt. She filled up the tub with hot water and bath salts, then lowered into brine.
When her eyes were open, she saw what was in front of her: her bare knees, getting pinker by the minute. But every time she tried to relax and close her lids, she saw the dim imprint of her knees, and more disturbingly, what was beyond them—the kitchen table on the other side of the door, and past that, the neighbor in adjoining apartment, sitting on her bed with her cat perched on her chest. And if she could see or sense this woman, a woman who in fact she had never seen before but only hear singing through the walls, who could see her? She felt more exposed than she had on the beach with those men pointing and laughing, the corners of their awful toothy mouths upturned in delight. So she kept her eyes peeled open in the fluorescent light, fixed on her legs or sometimes her hands so intently that they began to lose all sense and shape.
How long had she been soaking like that when Molly knocked on the bathroom door? Greta startled awake—if asleep described the state she was in, her eyes open and roving over the places where the freckles gave way to red spots, and the place where those spots darkened at the center. “Hi,” she called, her voice thin and strained. “I’m just about done in here. Where were you last night?” She uncorked the tub and began to watch the cold water flow down the drain, gray with the debris from her hair and her skin.
“I went out with that guy. Hey, why does the whole apartment smell like a Long John Silver’s?”
Greta pushed herself up, put on her stolen hotel bathrobe, and opened the door behind which Molly stood with her blurred eyeliner and tousled hair. “I ordered takeout. But seriously, I can’t believe you went out with one of those jerks. What are they even doing here?”
Molly looked at her strangely. “Um, Greta, as much as I’d love to hear your judgments about my love life, have you noticed that your arms look really gross?”
“Oh. Yeah. I’m wondering if maybe I have a shellfish allergy.”
“Wouldn’t you know that?”
“You know I grew up vegetarian. I’ve maybe had a crab cake, like, one time, but I don’t know if it even had real crab in it.”
“Well, it looks like you should maybe use some cortisone.” Molly showed her where she kept the cream and offered to take over her shift. “I think Diane will ask you to leave anyway if she sees that. Just send her a photo.”
Back in her bedroom, she sent a picture to her boss, then read her long-lingering messages. Almond Milk had written, Hey, cool to meet you 🧊Just wanted to check in and see if you’d be interested in getting together again? Maybe for supper this time? As she got back under the covers, her feet cold, her eyes fluttered closed, and again she felt the strange sensation that she could see beyond herself to Molly in front of the mirror, moving her hand along her neck to inspect for hickies. To distract herself, she stared back at her screen, screenshotting Almond Milk’s text and sending it to her friend. She called into the hallway, “See? That guy was a total freak.” Without a response, she crawled in under the covers and looked at Diane’s message. It was a photograph of her arm, punctuated by the purple latex gloves she ordered in bulk. Had it always been covered in hair? What had given her the deep bite mark just below the elbow, surrounded by an area so puffed it no longer looked like human skin? Excuses, excuses. You don’t see me complaining… But if M can cover ok 4 today, Diane had written below.
Rather than getting dressed, Greta sat on her bed, stroking the leaves of the philodendron on her bedside table. She didn’t have insurance, and even if she could pay for the visit out of pocket, there would then be the tests and the steroids and creams—and she’d already splurged on the takeout the night before. So she looked at her plant, inspecting the undersides of their leaves for what felt like an eternity. It gradually dawned on her that this was strange, that she should enjoy her day off, so she navigated to Netflix on her laptop, letting Friends play in the background while she opened the curtains by two inches and let the sounds and smells of the outside world stream in. She sat on the floor next to the cracked window, her back against the wall and her eyes focused on the middle ground between the screen on her bed and the door behind it. The computer played episode after episode as the sun rose and then set, only once pausing to ask her, Are you still watching Friends?
“Yes,” she said out loud, “I am.” Brought back into herself by this address, she drank three glasses of water, then went into the fridge and found Molly’s cold cuts, turkey breast and some other unidentifiable sheet of gray. She ate it standing, her teeth gnashing, the wet sound of her chewing the only sign that she was not dreaming—or perhaps that she was.
She woke up again to Molly’s face shining brightly in the black of night, Molly’s hot hand on her bare shoulder, letting out a low-pitched wail.
“What’s going on?”
Molly scuttled backwards on the bed—Molly’s bed, Greta realized, with its rose gold frame and impractical white sheets—clutching a pillow in front of herself, staring at Greta wild-eyed. Standing just to the side was the Australian man, naked and cursing. “What the fuck is wrong with her?” He asked, clutching one hand in the other.
“What’s happened?” Greta asked.
“Jesus Christ, Greta. You were sucking his finger.”
“She fucking bit me,” the man told Molly. “Is she rabid?”
Greta backed up towards the door, looking down to find herself still in her bathrobe, her skin somehow still wet. “I’m sorry. I was feeling really weird today,” she whispered.
“Jesus Christ, Greta. Can you please just get out?” Molly asked.
Back in her own room, Greta could sense them through the door, argument swiftly giving way to pleasure as Molly began to kiss then suck the finger that Greta had supposedly bitten. She tried to blot out the image, turning on the bedside lamp to inspect her skin. The red was gone, and in its wake her skin looked pale, the freckles that had been darkening all summer suddenly given way to luminous streaks. They extended all over her body, a network of lines leading out from her belly down to her ankles and up to her neck. Was it her imagination, or did her skin feel hard? She breathed raggedly, trying to convince herself that it was all in her head, there was nothing wrong. She was not becoming something other than herself. It was just a trauma response, or a food allergy, or maybe even a 24-hour cold. It was not so strange that she had gotten into Molly’s bed—she wanted to be comforted, a completely human impulse.
In the morning, she would go to work. In the morning, she would eat normal things: a berry smoothie at home, a day-old croissant at the shop. In the morning, she would text Almond Milk back. She’d be just like Molly: she’d go on a date, and she’d accept his invitation back to his place. There, she would see if they could both truly be kind to each other under the dimming sky, and then in the dark of night, whatever cravings welled up from the depths of their hearts.
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Rebecca van Laer is the author of a novella, How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press). Her work appears in Joyland, TriQuarterly, Hobart, and elsewhere. She lives in the Hudson Valley.
twitter: @rebecca_vanl
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