Dodo Eraser

After school, her skinned knuckles still throbbing, Sophia logs onto the family computer and pores over haute couture. 

The bathroom was empty when she punched the wall, of course. Sophia can’t even sneeze in front of an audience, let alone punch something. So, in between Biology and Algebra, she crept down to the sub-basement of the school, where the air smells of wood dust from the carpentry room and resin from the costume room and hot water from unseen but constantly gurgling pipes. She ensconced herself in the rarely-used bathroom there and directed her fist at the rough white wall. The first blow was so painful she almost stopped, but the second was more satisfying. And the third one was best of all—the grit of the painted-over concrete finally opening her skin, finally scraping blood onto the paint. After, she licked her skinned knuckles and spat red into the sink, hoping it would shock the next person who wandered in.

Now she hunches in the computer chair, clicking through page after page of clothing. Clothing that an eighth-grader like herself could never afford. Clothing she shouldn’t even be thinking about. Silk tank tops that flow like glimmering waterfalls. Metallic jacquard gowns that glow like oil paintings. Tulle blouses, as thin and gauzy as the cast-off exoskeletons of giant insects. Pumps covered in white glitter, sparkling like the first crust of snow. She drinks them all in, imagining herself lifted from this life into a beautiful and glamorous one, even as her knuckles throb and pain hums through her body like electricity coming down a wire.

~

The next day, when it’s time for lunch, Sophia follows the other girls downstairs to the cafeteria. This place is sunk below the ground, and everything in it—benches and chairs, tables, wallpaper—is black or dark green or maroon.

Sophia takes a tray and utensils and stands in line for the hot food, scanning the milling students. She doesn’t see anyone she can talk to, let alone sit with. Her mouth sours as she inches closer and closer to the hot food station. Her stomach is full of brambles. She takes a plate of something she barely glances at—chances are fifty-fifty that she’ll even get to eat it at all—and proceeds, her movements stiff with dread, to the salad bar. The progression of food serving stations forms a relatively narrow throat that opens up at the far end into the enormous stomach of the cafeteria itself. There, students sit and talk over their trays and styrofoam cups: giggling over inside jokes, smiling, eating.

Sophia is still. Sophia is quiet. Sophia waits her turn in the line for the salad bar as student after student walks past her to the seating area. Maybe she’s moving too slowly. Maybe by the time she gets there too, there won’t be any room left for her among the people she can sit with. But those people number so few in the first place… no, it’s better to move slowly. Better to put as many minutes between her and them as she can.

When it’s her turn at the salad bar, she takes the tongs and deposits a normal amount of lettuce onto the edge of her plate, then shaved baby carrots, then a single cherry tomato.

Finally she has to enter the cafeteria. She walks slowly into the seating area, feeling everyone’s eyes on her like the prickling of invisible insects. Of course no one is looking at her—everyone is absorbed in their own meals and conversations—but she can feel her awkwardness, can practically see it like a miasma around her.

Sophia passes a table full of the popular girls, including Annabelle, and she looks away quickly before they can see her. She remembers the time she tried to sit with them a few weeks ago, on a day when there were absolutely no other empty chairs. Her throat feels like it’s being squeezed. She’ll never forget their frightened, wide-eyed stares, as though she were threatening them rather than meekly asking a favor. They goggled at her, glancing at one another with perfect synchronicity, as though they’d rehearsed this very situation. Then they broke into helpless giggles. She moved on, her face feeling as hot as the surface of the sun, and that was the first day she’d gone hungry. 

Sophia is five-foot-eight, with heavy shoulders and a broad back, her body a grotesque rarity at thirteen. Other girls pretending to be afraid of her makes her feel even more ridiculous than she already does: a hulking, powerful beast with the personality of a timid mouse. 

She keeps walking, sticking to the perimeter of the room. In the largely unrecognizable mass of faces, she spots girls she recognizes, but she can’t sit with any of them. They’re all perfectly formed groups of friends, and she is no one’s friend.

By now she’s nearly completed a full lap of the cafeteria. The cherry tomato rolls stupidly on her plate, back and forth, back and forth.

Finally she walks to the conveyer belt, her steps light and casual, like this was her intention all along. She deposits her full tray on the belt. Then she walks away, out of the cafeteria and down the stairs, to the only place she can hide from the teachers until her lunch period is over. And although she can no longer hear any of the noises from the cafeteria, she is still imagining that all of the laughter in the room is directed at her.

~

What would it be like, she imagines, to wander through the boutiques. To reverently sift through a row of hanging dresses, like paging through a treasured book. To feel their softness, all the textures—gossamer chiffon, liquid silk, buttery leather, cloudlike cashmere, crisp taffeta—on her hands, and even on her skin. To become someone other than herself. To blossom into who she was, perhaps, always meant to be.

~

She hit the bathroom wall because of what had happened only minutes before, in biology class. They’d been learning about the life cycles of butterflies and moths—the egg, the larva, the pupa, the adult.

But Sophia had read a book about insects earlier that year, and its words had imprinted themselves on her brain, so she preferred to think of the cycle as: egg and larva, sure, but then chrysalis, and then imago. Those words were so much more beautiful than the burp of pupa, the colorless, far-too-human correlation of adult.

So she had written these words, instead of the ones their teacher was telling them. And Annabelle, sitting beside her, had glanced over at her notebook. “It’s, uh, it’s pupa,” she said, too loudly, her lips shining with gloss as they pursed to make the repulsive sound of that word. “Not cryslis. And what’s…” She squinted at the last word.

“They’re the same thing,” Sophia muttered, but it was too late; the teacher was already approaching their desk.

“Sophia,” she said, frowning as she stared down at the notebook. “You need to write the proper names for the stages, okaaay?” She pronounced okay like Sophia was an unruly toddler. “Chrysalis is an acceptable synonym, although I would prefer that you use the words that we’re teaching….but imago? You can’t just make up words.”

Everyone in the classroom was staring at them. Sophia’s entire face and neck felt sunburnt. Next to her, the sound of Annabelle holding back giggles.

When she fled to the bathroom seconds after the bell rang, she pretended the wall was Annabelle’s face and the teacher’s face at the same time, and that when she directed her fist at it she was knocking out their teeth, breaking their noses, shattering the sockets of their eyes. 

~

The next day after school, Sophia doesn’t take the bus home. Instead she takes a different bus, one she’s never taken before, to Madison Avenue. She steps off into the cool air, the blue sky expanding stainless above her, strangers strolling past her on the pale glittering streets. 

She walks past boutique after boutique, pausing outside nearly every one, but isn’t brave enough to enter. The clothing in the windows throws off light like diamonds, like strange and unearthly jewelry. Dresses, lingerie—she turns away from that window quickly, her face reddening—shoes, coats. There are upscale restaurants here too, as well apartment buildings and banks and eyeglass stores, but the clothing shops are the only places that catch her eye.

She stops in front of one for much longer than the others. Four dresses are suspended in the window, each hanging from near-invisible wires at a different height, overlapping slightly. It’s more like a museum piece than a store display. Sophia’s used to garments on racks, on hangers, not garments that seem to float in midair like some trick of gravity.

The dresses themselves are gray, white, black, silver. One is asymmetrical and so glossy that it appears almost wet, like the torn wing of a drowned moth (imago). Another is as dark as the wall of darkness that descends whenever Sophia closes her eyes.

They’re like dresses from another world, Sophia thinks.

And then she doesn’t need to think anymore. She reaches for the ornate handle and swings open the door. It’s heavy, as though meant to discourage the unworthy from shopping there, but she’s tall (monstrous) for her age and opens it with only a bit of effort.

Her heartbeat quickens as the sales associates take notice of her entrance. They don’t say anything, only stand there: one behind the register, one further towards the back of the store. Their eyes are owlish and dark in their sculpted faces.

Sophia stands as tall as she can, pulse hammering in her veins, trying to fix a more mature expression on her face, glad that she changed out of her uniform after school in the lower-level bathroom.

The clothing blooms around her like strange flowers. White tulle, baby blue ruffles, silk and chiffon and satin. The late-afternoon sunlight slants in, turns everything in the shop gossamer, fragile.

At least there are normal clothing racks in here—the gravity-defying exhibition in the window was only for the display. Sophia flicks through some dresses, trying and failing to glimpse the prices hanging on the tags, which are, of course, buried deep in the necks of the garments. She doesn’t want the salespeople to see her looking. She doesn’t want them to think she’s come here to gawk. She wants to look like, in some small way, she belongs. Because then maybe she will feel that way, too.

One of the two salespeople smiles at her as she walks by carrying a heap of lace, but then she passes Sophia, and the smile unfolds into a smirk.

And that’s when Sophia catches sight of the pale bouquets standing on high shelves, the veils hanging from another rack. Her heart rises into her throat, thick and pulsing, as she realizes: it’s a bridal store. These are all wedding dresses. Modern, un-traditional ones for the most part. The colors fooled her. Pink and black and gray and silver edging in alongside the white. Sneaky. Covering up the true purpose of this store, which is not one that would suit a thirteen-year-old girl, even one as tall as she is, standing here in her sneakers and baggy Gap jeans and the fake leather jacket she thought was cool and trendy but which probably betrays her un-belonging more than any other part of her ensemble.

She can’t move either forwards or backwards. So she buries her attention in the dresses again—face flaming, palms suddenly clammy. To turn tail, to run, would be the most humiliating thing she could do. It’s like when she’s in the school cafeteria. She must tread the expected track until an escape route opens up and she can duck away.

But there is no escape route here. There is only the store, and the expressions of the salespeople darkening as she continues to paw with her (grubby, childish, moist) fingers through the expensive garments, flicking up a price tag here and there when she can and noting the cost—$1,900, $2,500, $3,330. That last number brings her back to math class: one-third expressed as a decimal is “0.333…” or “0.3” with a line over the three, an endless road stretching into infinity.

She can’t walk away now.

So she turns to the saleswoman who smiled/smirked at her and asks to try on a dress. It’s a blue chiffon gown, so soft, so long, like a waterfall of matte spring water. Sophia hasn’t managed to see the price, but she thinks it might be one of the most expensive ones in the whole store.

The saleswoman hesitates for a fraction of a second. Sophia’s thoughts spiral: What, does she think I’m going to shove it in my backpack and make a break for it? For all she knows I’m one of the rich girls who lives a couple avenues east of here (wrong, idiot, none of them wear fake leather).

But then the woman nods and says in a voice like black honey, “Of course, sweetheart. I’ll just get you set up right in this fitting room over here.”

The fitting room is larger than Sophia’s entire bathroom. Three of the walls are mirrored; the fourth is bare, with only a seat, and a hook where the woman hangs the dress. There’s a plush carpet. The lighting is immaculate, entirely different from the glaring harsh overheads of the stores Sophia is used to.

“Just let me know if you need anything,” the saleswoman says, smiling, her perfect lips and teeth and cheeks saying something completely different from her eyes and voice.

Then she is gone and Sophia is alone with the dress. Its blue chiffon fabric trails steadily down, brushing the ground, laying flat on the plush carpet. It’s a train. A wedding-dress train.

She glances at her hand, suddenly fearing that she might get blood on the dress, but the scrapes have already begun to scab over. She licks her knuckles and doesn’t taste blood.

Slowly, she unzips the dress. This zipper isn’t like any she’s used to: it glides quick and smooth, like a knife through water. Within moments the whole upper back of the dress gapes open for her. The inside is silk, and as glossy as the outside is matte; her fingers slide slick over the material.

There’s no sign of the price tag. Sophia reaches around inside, feeling for a cardboard rectangle or the telltale string that leads to it, but there’s nothing.

Either way, she’s going to try it on. She steps carefully inside the dress, first one leg and then the other. She spins away from the wall in order to admire herself in the mirror, and just as there’s a horrible tug, just as she realizes she never took the dress off the hook—

—she falls.

The ripping noise is both as loud and as quiet as the sound of her own heartbeat.

Her pulse is so fast that it makes her vision go spotty as she contemplates the huge rip that has opened in the dress. The blue is torn, pale and dead, two halves of shredded sky.

She waits for the saleswoman to come running, but the rip wasn’t loud. So now Sophia sits on the plush carpet, swathed in a luxurious fabric that is not meant for her, one she’s just ruined. Her mother’s face floats into her mind, shadowy and featureless, like an insect silhouetted against a lightbulb.

Then, as she moves her leg: something sharp pricking her skin. Something that feels like a corner of cardboard.

She doesn’t want to know, but she reaches inside anyway. It’s easy now that the dress is practically in two pieces. The numbers on the price tag float and rearrange themselves for a second before she can focus on them.

$5,100.

Way more than $3,330, she thinks. Way more than infinity.

Despite everything, the zipper still works. So she reaches over and pulls it upward, slowly encasing herself in the material. Sitting on the floor like this, she’s entirely enclosed by the matte silk. She feels numb, noiseless.

And in the muted half-dark, she feels herself becoming wet-winged. Thin sheets of tissue fold back over her shoulder blades, her bones dissolve into mush, her body melts into itself: a transmutation beyond all comprehension or imagining. She sits there, changed, and waits for someone to come and find her.

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