Chapter 14

Mila stared at herself in the mirror, gingerly touching the nicks on her face one by one.

Why would anyone want this? she wondered desperately. She was free at last of the facial hair, and yet she could feel the stubble lurking just beneath the surface. The orderly who’d taught her yesterday to handle a razor had informed her that smoothness required daily diligence.

She sighed and turned away from her reflection. These days she looked all wrong no matter what she did. She expected to see a girl in mirror, expected to see herself, and yet, could not. She didn’t quite see a man, though, either. All she saw was a stranger. A lonely stranger who thought achingly of ShayAnne, and bitterly of her mother. Why had her mother sentenced her to this fate? Why would anyone torment their own offspring this way?

And what about her brother, Michael? Had he known that she was a boy? Was he really one? She tried to remember, but found the details fuzzy. He always seemed like a boy to her, but now everything felt jumbled and confused. She missed him terribly then, and her father, too. In death they had essentially abandoned her. She considered vaguely the thought of joining them, and tried to imagine what it would be like. She didn’t have any poison that she knew of, and she didn’t have any rope... She had a razor, though, and an idea forming at the back of her brain.

What would ShayAnne do? If she was stuck in this awful place and she was a boy suddenly because of her mother’s trickery, what would ShayAnne Hawke do? Mila tried to picture it, tried to imagine her gutsy friend, vivacious and sassy, trying to awkwardly adjust to Mila’s situation. It didn’t play well in her head. ShayAnne had to be a girl-- a natural one. She had boobs, and she evidently had other girl parts, since she noticed Mila’s differences in body.

And all that red hair.

A memory zoomed past her eyes at lightning speed; a picture of a pretty young woman with curly red hair wearing a yellow skirt and sitting on her father’s lap. It was a Polaroid, an old one, and Mila had found it stuck to the back of his desk drawer after he had died. The redhead was not her mother. Mila concealed it in its hiding place, but when she sneaked back to have another look, it wasn’t there.

Something was there, nagging at her, but she couldn’t quite get the tumblers to fall into place, and it remained locked inside her mind. With a sigh she padded out to her bed and lay down. Confusion was a dreadful thing. She wished she had ShayAnne or Marqi to talk things out with. One of them would know what to do, or would have some small way to make her feel better. She missed them both, although if pressed, she would have to admit that she missed ShayAnne slightly more.

She turned on her back and gazed vacuously at the ceiling. Where was the worth in this? Where was the meaning in her existence? She felt random, at odds with her own self. She couldn’t trust herself, and she couldn’t trust anyone else, and yet she had to. In order to survive she had to constantly put herself at the mercy of strangers. She was learning to dislike it.

She didn’t want to be treated like a baby anymore, she thought, getting angry. No, she wanted her freedom. What good was sitting in this hospital? She might as well be under lock and key at her mother’s house again.

She blew out a sigh. She needed to get out of here, to go somewhere far away. No matter what, she needed to be free.

She just had to be.