The Glory Hand (22 page)

They clambered into a creek bed. After weeks of hot, dry days, the brook had dwindled to a trickle, and they had to pick their way around muddy pools that smelled of rot, where yellow jackets swarmed.

And then Cassie saw her on the trail.

At first all she could see was Robin's face smiling through the trees. She was leading the seniors on horseback behind her, down the dry creekbed, a rocky trail impossibly steep for horses, Cassie thought.

She's okay. She's never looked better.
Cassie ran towards her.

And then, as they emerged from the trees, Cassie saw that Robin was whipping her horse's flanks with a thorn branch to force it over the sharp rocks.

'What are you
doing?'
Cassie had meant to sound calm, but her voice rose shrilly. It only seemed to make Robin beat the horse more mercilessly, until the welts on its flanks bled, staining its black coat. Under the hail of blows, the horse took a few more steps down the sheer slope. Then a boulder gave way beneath its hooves and it groaned in pain, its muzzle flecked with foam.

'Robin, are you crazy?' Robin had loved animals. People don't change like that, Cassie thought. They don't change overnight, so drastically, so cruelly . . . But Robin was beating the horse again, the barbed switch wet with blood. 'Stop!' Cassie grabbed her arm, but Robin took a swipe at her with the crop.

'Get out of my way, cunt!' The other seniors caught up with Robin, their horses raising a cloud of dust, and Cassie stared up through it at her friend, trying to make some sense of her transformation. Her face hadn't changed. Robin still had the same pixie nose and curly blonde hair. But she held her body differently, her shoulders thrust back, her spine stiff. Her body . . . that was what had changed. What could they have done to her last night?

The seniors riding bareback behind Robin were clad in bikinis, defying the forest's brambles and poison oak to flaunt their bodies. And Robin's breasts . . . her hips . . j they seemed to have developed overnight, her bathing suit suddenly two sizes too small for her.

Robin tried to force the horse past her. 'Get out of my way, Cassie. I don't need to put up with your bullshit anymore.'

Abigail reined her horse up beside Robin's. 'Looks like that Jew's got Cassie creaming in her pants.'

'Too bad,' Robin laughed. 'He's got the hots for Sarah.'

'Go to hell!'

How did they know?
Cassie thought.
How could they?

'Look at her,' Robin smirked. 'She's going to come just thinking about him.'

'She'd like to suck his cock,' Abigail said.

'Maybe she already has!'

Cassie lunged for Robin and dragged her off the horse. Robin lashed out with the thorn branch, swinging it so hard that it flew from her grasp into the dirt. Suddenly the fury that had been bottled up inside Cassie for weeks erupted, and she shoved Robin into the creekbed, driving her fist into her belly. Before she could twist Robin's arm behind her, Robin tripped her, and they rolled into a muddy pool.

Maybe their friendship had always been a sham, Cassie thought as her rage took hold. Maybe they had always been enemies . . . competing over Todd . . . locked in a breakneck race over who would get to be a woman first. Well, the race was over. Robin had won, and that was reason enough to fight back.

No more thinking.

It felt good, this chance to escape her thoughts in the fury of the moment, as completely as she lost herself in her dancing.

Then it hurt. Robin fought with a ferocity Cassie had never seen in her before, and it was all she could do to defend herself.

Rolling on the ground, Cassie grappled for a hammerlock on her friend, and was amazed by what she found. She had thought she knew Robin's body as well as she knew her own. They had played together, wrestled and showered and skinny-dipped together since they could walk. But Robin's body ... It wasn't Robin's body anymore. Robin's baby-fat was gone, replaced by solid muscle. Whenever they had fought as kids, Cassie had won - she was in good shape from dancing, while Robin, so self indulgent, so flabby, got winded easily, or just gave up. But now Robin was the one with the strength. And even more incredibly, she was the one with the will. Robin seemed to have the same visceral hatred for Cassie that Abigail had shown at the dance pavilion. But why?

Cassie lay, dazed and breathless, in the mud, but Robin wasn't even breathing hard. She scrambled to her feet and jumped on top of Cassie, knocking the breath out of her. She pressed a knee to her chest, pinning her arms and thighs, but with a sharp elbow to her ribs, Cassie loosened Robin's grip long enough to rip her bikini top open. In response, Robin grabbed Cassie's throat, and rocked back and forth on top of her. Cassie struggled to free her arms, but couldn't. She tried to suck in a breath, but Robin's fingers shut off her windpipe.

No more air.
Cassie's mouth was wide open, but she couldn't seize one more breath. She was getting dizzy. The ground started to slip away from under her. Before she could black out, she shaped a word: '
Please.'

Robin tightened her grip on Cassie's throat and began to rock frantically astride her chest. Cassie realized with horror that Robin was approaching orgasm.

In a final, desperate lunge born of disgust, Cassie wrenched a hand from under Robin's legs and clawed at her breasts.

The growth under Robin's left arm. . . a fleshy polyp. . .It wasn't there yesterday when we took a shower together . . .

Cassie tore at the tiny appendage with her nails.

'Bitch!' Robin shrieked. Whimpering with pain, she shot her hand under her arm and staggered off Cassie. Abigail ran over to help her back onto her horse.

Without a word, the seniors rode off up the creek bed, leaving Cassie sprawled in the mud gasping for breath.

'I don't believe it!' Iris crossed herself and jumped down to help Cassie. 'What did you
do
to her?'

'I ... I don't know.' Cassie grabbed Iris' outstretched hand and pulled herself weakly to her feet. Her body ached and her neck was raw and red where Robin had choked her.

'You won!' Iris steadied her arm.

Cassie shook her head. Robin had died, the Robin she had known. Murdered suddenly, swiftly, in one night.

It was not until they neared the camp that she was aware of the moistness of her fingers. No matter how fiercely her mind resisted, she remembered: when she had scratched at the tiny protusion under Robin's left arm, a white liquid had spurted out, as sour-smelling as the milky poison in the Death Caps. She wiped her hand on her T-shirt, but the stickiness wouldn't go away. She sensed that it foretold of something terrible, as terrible as if Robin had throttled the life out of her in the dust.

Chapter 18

'A nipple,' Cassie said.

'Sure . . .'

'It was a nipple under her arm. A third nipple.'

Iris said nothing in reply, and it was too dark for Cassie to read her expression. In the windowless twilight of the cement-block shower house, green algae grew in a slippery mural across the walls. Iris had wanted to give the kitten in the box under her bed a saucer of milk, but Cassie had insisted they come here first, to wash off the mud and sweat of the fight . . . and the liquid from that nipple on her fingers.

The algae smell in the shower house reminded Cassie of the forest, and she wondered whether the poisonous things grew here, too. She pulled off her towel and turned on the water, scalding hot. 'Aren't you going to tell me I'm crazy?'

'No . . .' Iris hugged her towel around her as though to avoid facing her emaciated body, i've got this big medical encyclopedia at home. Some of the pictures are really gross, but there's this one of a woman with three nipples. It's some kind of inherited genetic thing, like freckles, or hemophilia. Hideous maybe, but no big deal.'

The explanation didn't soothe Cassie any more than the hot water that stung her skinned knees and bruised arms. 'But. . . Robin didn't have it before. I know she didn't.'

Iris hung her towel on a hook and stepped into the shower cautiously, as if she feared she might drown in the spray. 'She always had it. It's something you're born with. It doesn't just grow overnight.'

'Robin was my best friend. I would have noticed.'

'My mom had six toes on one foot and I never noticed until last year.'

'That's
your
problem.'

'Besides, it's not a
real
third breast.' Iris shied away from a centipede crawling across the wet cement floor. 'It's just a . . . growth . . . like a benign tumor, or a wart or something.'

Cassie started to mention the milky liquid that had spurted out of it, but stopped. She didn't want to remind herself. Scrubbing her body obsessively, she avoided washing under her left arm, as though afraid that a third nipple might have appeared there too.

'She's a freak,' Cassie said, more loudly than she needed to, hoping to silence the voices in her mind.
There must have always been something wrong with her . . . something hidden, like that ugly growth under her arm you never noticed before.

Iris turned off the shower with a nervous yank of her arm, and darted over to the lockers, the reflex, Cassie thought of someone used to being teased about her pigeon-breasted body. Cassie lingered under the spray long enough to covince herself that no amount of soap and scalding water would ease her tension. By the time she reached the lockers, she had expected Iris to be fully clothed, in her usual eagerness to conceal her body. But Iris was naked, standing frozen in front of her open locker.

'What's wrong?'

'I got it. . . Cassie, I finally got it!'

Iris turned around, holding up her panties. My mother lied to me, Cassie thought, there was nothing beautiful about the moment of becoming a woman. Even in her worst fantasies, Cassie had never imagined that there would be so much blood. 'We'd better get back to the cabin,' she whispered, hoping she had hidden her disgust.

Iris let the panties drop to the floor, dazed, and Cassie wrapped a towel around her. 'I got it,' Iris repeated as she walked unsteadily towards the door.

'You feel okay?'

'I don't know . . . I'm so nervous . . . What should I do?'

Cassie stopped and looked at her: 'Didn't your mom tell you about it? I mean, what it would be like?'

Iris shook her head. 'She doesn't like to talk about things like that.'

'Oh, great!'

'But I read about it. I mean, that medical encyclopedia has this whole chapter on it, with illustrations.' When they reached the porch of their cabin, Iris put a hand up to cover her eyes. 'I guess it didn't say how I would feel.'

'It won't be so bad . . .'

'No. Cassie, you don't understand.' She wiped her eyes. 'I'm
happy. I
mean, I guess I never really thought ... I never really believed it would happen to me. I've always felt so different from everyone else. But now . . .' She didn't have to finish. Cassie read the look in Iris' eyes:
Now, maybe they'll accept me.

Cassie squirmed. Iris was staring at her as if Cassie were the needy one. 'Wow! I didn't realize you
hadn't
yet. I'm sorry . . .'

'Forget it,' Cassie said quickly.

'You'll get yours . . . soon,' Iris said, and Cassie knew she must have sensed the envy in her voice. 'I mean, if I can get
mine . . .'

'I said, forget it.'

The cabin was deserted, and at the sight of the empty bunks, Iris slouched down on hers, seemingly disappointed that she couldn't announce the news to the others.

Cassie rummaged in her footlocker. 'Here . . .'

'What?'

Cassie held up a tampon. 'I brought a box along. Wishful thinking, I guess.'

'You've got to be kidding. No way am I going to stick that thing inside me!' Iris lay back on her bunk. 'When you get cramps, you're supposed to put your feet up. That's what the book said. Losing all that blood ... it can make you weak.' She glanced up at the crucifix on the wall and crossed herself, as if grateful a prayer had been answered. 'Wait till I write my mom . . .' She leaned up on an elbow and for the first time since Cassie had known her, Iris smiled. 'No ... I don't think I
will
tell her.'

Then Iris seemed to forget Cassie was there, lost in her private bedtime ritual: lifting the top sheet just enough to slip in one leg at a time, plumping the pillow, then wriggling down until the top of her head poked up above the blanket.

'No . . .!'

Like a marionette jerked up by the strings, Iris pulled her legs up quickly and kicked back the covers.

Something at the foot of the bed riveted her, something that had been hidden beneath the sheets.

'The blood,' she whispered. '
The bloodV

Cassie stared at the contorted form that stained the sheets at the foot of Iris' bed. Blood from its slit throat matted its fur. The kitten.

'The blood . . .!'

The blood in Iris' panties ... it had not been her own. Cassie knew where it had come from and who had put it there. Iris broke into sobs and huddled in a corner of the bunk, her chest heaving, and Cassie slipped an arm around her. it's all right. . .' she whispered. Everything's going to be okay.' But she didn't like the way her voice rang hollowly off the rafted ceiling, in the still air.