Helen has a bloody smile.
When she opens her mouth, I see vindication, crowned in laurel, the copper fumes on her breath whispering the memento mori in my ear. We were right. I was right. The blank spaces on the walls, this crappy couch creaking beneath my back—victories. I might be a casualty, but we’ll win the war. The others know what Helen is, and they know where to find her. Helen won’t leave. If she could, she would’ve left already.
And then her jaw widens, and I see that I was very, very wrong.
Two months ago. Shivering indoors because we’d dressed for the sudden burst of June heat, and the air conditioning was up to maximum, in anticipation of a full crowd. But the bar was quiet right now, so early on a Saturday night. If we waited the twenty-one-year-olds would turn up, and we didn’t want to deal with that. Amazing how a five-year difference made them look like children.
I slid closer to Geo. The legs of my stool screeched on the laminate flooring. He unfolded from his slouch, leaning towards me. The bartender caught his glance and turned towards the other end of the long counter, polishing the mirror-bright wood.
“Is Helen a vampire?” Geo whispered, lips almost brushing my earlobe.
After three whiskey sours, hard to pretend it wasn’t funny, even though we were friends. Hard to pretend I wasn’t laughing at him. I snickered into my drink and said, “Vampires are fairytales.” Maybe we could tell the kids once they got here, tuck them in with stories and White Russians. Sweet dreams.
Geo was retreating into a defensive hunch. I forced my jaw shut and raised my eyebrows at him until his mouth stretched, emphasizing the fine lines that had etched themselves around his lips—and mine—within the past few years.
“Not fairytales”—Geo shook his head. “I know it sounds ridiculous,” Geo said. “But . . . you know I dug deep. No responses. Even the paid services couldn’t turn up anything, and they found our elementary school teachers, for fuck’s sake.” He sucked on the rim of his empty glass. “So we need to brainstorm.”
Geo had watched me bitch about project management training for months. He knew I could not resist what he was asking for: creativity unrestrained, a loose trip through the back alleys of the brain. I nodded at him.
“You hang out all the time, you must’ve seen her eat or drink, right?” Unsaid: you can ask her, right? Because friends can ask each other anything.
His question wasn’t funny anymore.
We stood in the ambiguous blue of dusk, between puddles of sodium lighting. Our movie wasn’t for another fifteen minutes, and it was too nice to go inside just yet. Helen’s feet shifted with her drifting gaze. I wanted snacks. I knew she would refuse, and that would make me feel bad.
“Hey,” I said to her. “We don’t have any photos together.” I smiled and took out my phone. “Come here, let’s get a selfie.”
She shrugged. Good enough. I aimed carefully, but she kept maneuvering so my shadow trailed across her face and bare shoulders. “Here, let me get one of just you,” I said. And, so it wouldn’t sound weird, “Then you do me.”
Helen nodded and stood against the brick wall, head turned slightly. Not the best angle, the lights hollowed out her cheeks and eyes, but still recognizable. I took a few pictures and then handed my phone to her. “I could send these to you,” I said. I couldn’t imagine what she’d use them for. As far as I knew, I was her only friend. Which, as Geo had said, was weird for a person who clearly liked socializing.
Again Helen shrugged.
“I’d like to put them on Facebook. Let people know what I—we’ve—been up to.” Normally I wouldn’t have even thought to mention it. But Helen—I wanted Helen’s permission.
“I guess that’s alright,” Helen said.
That was the last time we went to the movies together.
Helen’s mouth, open wide before me, open so I can see the bloody gums, the ragged remnants of teeth. All of my attention slides to the tips of my fingers, exploring the universe of uneven chenille pressed against my back. This is not the beautiful white couch she had last year, it’s pilled half to death and reeks of grandmother. I try to remember the original, but all I see is Helen as she showed me around her apartment, her great foray into independence.
And, superimposed on that rare, tight smile—this. The smoothness of a baby’s mouth littered with blackened stubs. The only blood on her lips is her own. But why did she hide it for so long? If she was injured, or ill—why not tell me?
“I thought we were friends,” Helen hisses, struggling to form each word clearly, wincing on each syllable, the creases in her forehead deepening. It’s not just the teeth, talking costs her in a way I don’t understand. But it doesn’t make her reaction any less of a cliché, and laughter bursts from my mouth, right in her face.
I moved into this apartment complex almost a year ago, just in time!, the office-person chirped at me, for management’s end-of-summer party. I was tired of all my friends being work friends. There had to be others like me around here, flitting glances to show we weren’t too invested in this inorganic party, it’s just hard to meet new people once your school friends have scattered . . .
And then I saw Helen.
Helen, back banana-curved against a wall near the snack table, holding a cup in her hand. I hadn’t paid attention back in college, but it was obvious now the cup was empty, even though she was trying to hold it as if it were full.
I slid past the photo booth with its inflatable palm trees, avoided eye contact with the manager who’d taken my deposit, and grabbed myself some punch. Sherbet ice cream melted pastel swirls into juice, into ice. No alcohol. The fluorescent lighting and overbright crêpe were struggling against a misery of roiling clouds, visible through the profusion of full-length windows. The few people who’d gone out to the pool were hunched on the chaise longues, but the groups indoors were equally unappealing.
I walked over to Helen for the first time ever and said, “How’s it going?”
She blinked, interrupting whatever she was thinking about. She stood there, scrutinizing me, and at least took out her phone. “Psych 101, right?”—tinny text-to-speech, comprehensible enough. Smartphones must’ve been a gift. Her thumb muscle wasn’t as overdeveloped as I remembered, watching her hand fly across paper that one day eight years ago.
“Yeah.” I hoped my smile wasn’t too crooked. I needed to look caring, not curious.
We ended up chatting for the next half hour, clumps of people drifting past to snap up the snacks all our rent money had bought. There were others my age, but it was easier to stay and catch up with Helen. She had a work-from-home job, something with computers, and nodded politely through my rant about direct sales.
“Want to meet up again?” I said, cutting myself off.
Helen shrugged, though not in an unwelcoming way. “Movies? I don’t do that much when I go out, sorry.”
“I like movies,” I said. True enough.
So we went to the movies on Tuesday nights when there was something good playing. Not once did she express the slightest interest in doing anything else. Never on weekends, never involving food or shows or any of the things people our age were encouraged to enjoy, and sometimes the light glinted off the twitching muscles in her shut jaw as emotion flooded, unrestrained, from the people around us.
I’m still laughing. I know it’s half-hysteria, I know it’s cruel because there’s no way Helen knows what’s going through my head. Not that I’m sure pity would be an improvement. Those broken bits of teeth are seared into my vision, even though she’s closed her mouth, lips wriggling. Is she going to say something more?
I shut my eyes and something cold splats on my hand. Hurts, enough to snap me out of it.
There is bloody spittle on my hand. Helen growls—bad aim, I bet she meant to hit my face—and then her eyes widen behind greasy hair. I’d come by a few times after she lost her job, when we stopped going to the movies, and her mass of curls was neat then. I should feel flattered, that she was only cleaning up to see me.
I rub my hand on my pants. The thin fabric snags and tears.
“What the fuck?”
Freshman year of college. First day, Psych 101. The professor paired us off for icebreakers, and I ended up with Helen. Back then, she had to write all the answers out by hand. That was why I remembered the details, my visual memory’s always been better than my aural.
So I knew her full name, and where she’d gone to high school: one district down from my own. Biggest college, second biggest town, in our state. Nothing surprising about it.
Easy enough to see my parents for Thanksgiving. Even easier to go out for an hour and find the right set of yearbooks at the library. I flipped through the pages, black and white photos of everyone but football players and yearbook staff, every vapid article that even the writers didn’t care about. Not a single mention of Helen, and no pictures of her, not even in the background of some club. I tried other yearbooks, too, for all the high schools in the area, several years before and after mine in case she was older than she’d seemed. Nothing and, again, nothing.
I saw a librarian I remembered from high school. I didn’t have any pictures of Helen to show her—where would we have taken a selfie, anyway?—but Helen was hard to forget.
“A girl,” I said. “My age, never opened her mouth?” Which sounded so milquetoast. Helen’s was not a passive act, it was constant tension, premature wrinkles in her forehead. But I figured the description was enough to trigger any lingering memories.
The librarian frowned. “No, dear, can’t say I do. Who are you, again?”
I smiled and shrugged. The librarian didn’t seem particularly devious, I could not believe that her snap response was somehow a lie. “Thanks and no worries,” I said, and left. I ate my fill of roasted turkey before checking out the two other libraries in the area. No one I spoke to paused awkwardly or otherwise looked apprehensive when I asked if they remembered her. They weren’t protecting her privacy. They’d never seen her.
By then I’d met a few people at the apartment gym, and as our mild gossip turned into more serious conversation—as I spent more time with Geo—my mind was detective-attuned. I knew, I realized, where Helen told me she’d gone to high school.
Helen was showing me her living room. The walls were covered in framed black-and-white photographs: high heels and weird angles, billboards and bird wings and a funny juxtaposition of an NYC Metro stop and two tourists. Street photography. The person behind the camera had allegedly walked into these well-composed shots. I preferred abstract art for my walls—no, I tried to not be home long enough to give a shit about my walls.
“They look great,” I said with the same enthusiasm I used on prospective clients. Helen’s lips widened, before bending her head to her phone.
“My grandmother gave me most of them,” she said. She listed off several names. Famous photographers, apparently. All limited edition prints. I could tell that was worth something to her, but I wasn’t sure if it was financial or personal.
Could I have asked her?
Helen had set the boundaries of our relationship. It would be wrong to breach those boundaries. We went to the movies. We watched the movies, and I watched her, so that I could tailor my thoughts afterwards. I wanted my contact with Helen to be frictionless. I liked that I could elicit her smile, which took her so much deliberation. I liked that I had this knowledge of her, which no one else did—and I liked that Geo was invested in me for it.
There is something shiny and small and sharp embedded in my hand. No blood, the pain’s dulled to the steady persistence of a three-day-old papercut. I nudge it and say, again, “What the fuck?”
It’s a diamond. An actual fucking diamond.
And now Helen is laughing, in sudden brays like a child before they’ve grown self-conscious enough to refine how they express joy, and the blank spots on the wall echo her, three squares gaping brainlessly. I think one of them was two people holding hands, I can’t remember the others. She must have sold them, and the couch, to pay rent these past two months. Her grandmother’s in a nursing home and she’s never mentioned other family.
Something hits me right in the middle of my cheek.
“We’ll do some digging online,” George had said in the middle of winter, sitting in front of the crackling fireplace he paid $100 extra a month for. This was before I remembered he preferred Geo, to shed the weight of four generations of men he described only as assholes.
“For what?”
“Just to get more information. You said it yourself, there wasn’t anything in the yearbooks at all. Maybe she was homeschooled.” He shifted, extending his long lean arms towards the gas flames. I took another sip of my wine, a deep Argentinian red I’d brought over. This intimacy would never exist with Helen. Had she been lying to me all this time?
I admired George’s sharp urgency—his maturity, I’d thought—too much to ask some naïve question about trust. “That makes sense,” I said confidently. “She probably gets care packages from home or something, then. I bet we could read that address, too.”
Not a crime, not even a greater intrusion of privacy than happens by accident in apartment complexes with shared inboxes. We weren’t going to stick her name anywhere. We were just asking questions.
Spring and all its cloudbursts arrived halfway through April, soaking the world in misery. I’d gone out the night before with friends. In the grey light filtering through my crooked plastic blinds, I regretted overindulging. I’d see these people around all the time, I didn’t want to be on my best behavior in my own home just to balance out whatever stupid shit I’d done the night before. And my head fucking hurt.
When I heard the pounding on my door I rolled over and moaned. Groaned. I’m not sure which. My phone said it was barely past 9. Too goddamn early. But it kept going, and at last I slithered out of my sheets and looked through the peephole, and then I opened the door.
Helen stood before me, shivering, curls transformed to tangled string beneath a halo of frizz. The unexpectedly heavy rain had plastered her clothes to her body, sports bra outlined through her thin shirt, the divot of her bellybutton, shorts dripping water down the hard flesh of her thighs.
For the first time ever I wondered about sex with Helen. Not me and her, I don’t mean that. But what was it like for her partners to encounter not silence, but a stillness broken only by the clenching of her muscles? Did it make them insecure? Or were there people who preferred it—did she, then, have to filter out those types? How did she know, when a potential lover might have the wrong motivations? Did she avoid closeness altogether?
While my thoughts meandered, she stood there, shivering, raindrops magnifying her goosebumps. Her jaw vibrated slightly, but I didn’t hear the sound of chattering teeth. At the time this was a relief, considering the ferocity of my hangover.
“Come in,” I said, and at last she crossed the threshold. “Hang on, I’ll get my spare towel.”
“Thanks,” Helen said with her phone, pulled from a waterproof pouch strapped to her arm. “I got caught in the rain, but I think someone’s been following me. Do you mind if I wait here for a bit before heading back?”
A yawn cracked my mouth wide. “I’ll make coffee,” I said before realizing she wouldn’t have any. “Um, if you want to shower, I don’t think my clothes will fit you. Hang on, let me grab that towel.” I shuffled over to my linen closet.
“I’ll just wait, thanks.” She took my towel and sat down, back slouched as ever. I expected her to explain what she’d meant about being stalked, but she sat there with her hands on her knees, nose flaring as I poured the grounds into my French press. No need to mention it to Geo, then. He wouldn’t do something like that anyway.
Later, when Geo asked me if she was a vampire, I remembered her waiting on the threshold of my apartment, waiting to be invited. And that was when asking questions stopped being enough.
“Nice filter,” I said, pushing as much sarcasm into my voice as I could manage. Geo had produced an image that was emo goth poseur crap, turning a blue sundress into black vinyl. Her skin would never be truly pale, but it was blanched out, courtesy of whatever Geo’d done to twist around the unflattering sodium lighting.
“Don’t mock,” Geo said, pushing the laptop towards me. “There, check it out.”
The website was . . . the best word I could think of was absurd. It was the opposite of that arrow focus Geo had. It was a mess of fonts and drop shadows and graphics that should have been left in the 90s.
“It’s . . . nice,” I said, because I didn’t want to say that I was embarrassed for him. I wiggled my hips slightly further from his. My legs pressed against the cool leather of my recently delivered couch.
He laughed. “Nice isn’t the point. This kind of thing—look, no one reasonable believes in vampires, right? So you need to get the conspiracy nuts in first. Convince them you’re authentic. Too glamorous and they’ll know. Once we have the mainstream audience, we can clean this shit up.”
‘We.’ Fuck, I loved the sound of that. So I didn’t ask if having her full name right there, on this website he’d designed to be scrapable by robots, SEO whatever, first page of Google, was a bad idea.
That was just under two months ago.
“Diamonds,” Helen says, spitting them onto me, under my skin. “You—no, I bet no one would have to warn you about helping a stranger in the woods.” She hacks another glob onto my leg. At this point I can’t move—I need to know what happens next. I don’t even brush the spit off my leg, I just lift my eyes long enough to meet Helen’s, and then back down before I see her mouth open.
Helen snorts. “When I was a kid, we used to go camping. This one time I got up in the middle of the night for a snack. There was an old woman by our stuff. I didn’t ask what she was doing there, but she asked me for some food, and I gave it to her.” Her voice is hoarse, the inflections wrong. Of course it is. I wouldn’t have spoken for most of my life, either, each one of my teeth cracking open on the slightest accidental noise. Had someone pulled them out, or had they rotted in her gums?
“She said she’d bless me,” Helen continues. I wonder how much flesh I have left to offer. “You know that Perrault fairy tale about the girl who spoke diamonds and roses or whatever? Turns out the details suck.”
I should get up. I should get away from her, this story that I wouldn’t believe if the proof wasn’t embedding itself in my skin with her every word, but I have to stay and atone. For when the website went viral, for when she lost her job because her employer decided it was easier to fire her than deal with the media-and-worse barrage. Worse than the bullies, she’d said, tears blinking in her eyes as she mentioned switching schools over and over again.
For when she told me all these things, thinking she was unburdening herself to me.
A nameless silhouette in the corner of every frat party they invited the freshmen to, clinging to her red Solo cup as the rest of us dipped into the punch bowl, laughing because we knew we weren’t supposed to, who knows when a punch bowl is spiked or full of drugs or whatever else. A million warnings we rolled our eyes at. We had youth and our parents’ money, so what could go wrong?
As we stumbled home after who knows how many drinks, my friend—I don’t remember her name—said, “That girl in the corner.”
“Helen,” I replied automatically. I knew that slouch, the mass of hair. I remembered Psych 101 at the same time I noticed flecks of vomit on my friend’s jacket, but I didn’t tell her about that. I remember deciding not to tell her in the middle of the street, when I just wanted to go home and lie down, away from the rotten smell rolling off her tongue.
“Helen, yeah. What’s up with her?”
“I dunno,” I said. Helen’s handwriting was vivid in my mind. No wasted strokes, an elegant blend of print and cursive. I wondered what it would be like, to be touched by such precise fingers. “You can’t just ask random people these things, you know? It’s not like we’re friends.”
“You could have asked,” Helen says. “You could have asked at any point!” Her voice is a scream, and a barrage, and then it trails off into silence. My skin burns cold. Something is rasping my cheekbones and the edge of my jaw. I don’t want to look. Good thing Helen doesn’t have a mirror.
“Whoa,” she whispers to herself, hand shading her mouth. A string of bloody drool, but nothing glimmering. “Whoa.” There are tears in her eyes, and mine, too, the last bit of her curse passing to me, a constellation of broken glass spread across me, becoming my skin. This is all Helen needed to end it, to be willing to pass it to someone else. But her mouth is still ravaged, the syllables come out wrong and rot is heavy on her breath. She sucks on her lip like they do in B-grade movies. A copied gesture. The noise makes me want to vomit.
“I’m going outside,” Helen says. “You . . . you do whatever the fuck you want.”
And I am, suddenly, weightless.
The light through her blinds is bright. Midday sun. If Geo’s still watching, he’ll see she’s fine. Human. She can get her life back together, ask her grandmother for new prints. No one will connect her with that strange silent figure, sunken-cheeked, not if she uses a different name—and who our age is named Helen, anyway? She has the perfect opportunity to reinvent herself.
The door slams shut. I push myself off the couch, snagging the chenille. My whole body is heavy, my hands clumsy as I pull the throw from Helen’s couch and wrap it around my torn shirt, resisting the urge to pick at the strange feeling of my flesh. I’ll have to work on that, relearn the feel of my own skin. I think about going to Geo, but he’ll have so many questions. I can’t. I can’t see him yet.
I’ll go away for a while, I think. Not too long. If Helen could do it, so can I. I’ll learn to talk to people without revealing my flesh is not only flesh, until one of them is willing to call me a friend.
Originally published in Death in the Mouth, edited by Sloane Leong and Cassie Hart.
