The Plight of Halfness

A Short Story (originally called Proof of Teeth)

Sandra suffers from a terminal illness she calls The Plight of Halfness.

Reared by a Parisian psychology professor and a Chicagoan computer scientist, Sandra is the rope in an existential game of tug of war. In France, she feels too American, and in America, she feels too French. It’s the same with most facets of her life. She’s smart, but not a genius. She’s not tall, but not short either, not fat, but not skinny, not popular, not a loser. This is why Sandra lies.

She’s a good liar. Sneaking pudding cups from the pantry, playing her DS past her bedtime beneath the sheets—it’s all second nature. Sandra’s speciality, which took nearly her entire middle school career to hone, is lying about herself. She’s taken a habit of creating these elaborate backstories for her classmates: She is a descendant of the French royal family (there is no French royal family), and she had a brief stint as a twelve-year-old professional chess player (Sandra does know how to play chess, but she’s never played anyone but her cousins).

Sandra isn’t even really lying, she thinks. Everything she is treads a line between is and isn’t, and she’s simply pushing herself to either side. She is chronically half. Yes, that’s it, she is half of everything, half existence, half oblivion, which for someone geared in all or nothings, is a cosmic punishment.

Sandra doesn’t become entirely one thing until her cousins make her one.

It begins in the sea, off the coast of Normandy. Sandra spends every summer there, lounging in her grandfather’s beach house, picking mussels with her grandmother, enduring her cousins—who are unfortunately both boys, both older, and both bullies.

Sandra thinks they’re stupid, mongrel dogs, not boys at all. They howl and squeal, call her weird and flat-chested, exclude her from their soccer matches, and smack her with their superhero figurines. Despite all this, Sandra tags along on their adventures, half their cousin, half their punching bag. Sandra wishes she were half-boy, so that maybe they’d treat her the way they treat each other, so that just maybe, they’d like her, not just tolerate her weird, flat-chested existence. This makes her feel pathetic, little puppy half-ostracized by her litter.

The summer before Sandra turns thirteen, her cousins cave. They ask Sandra if she’d like to go swimming.

Sandra blinks, shocked. They’ve invited her, crossed the line from tolerance to wanting her around. She’s thrilled, but she can’t seem too eager. She wants to go swimming, she says, but her bathing suit is in the wash. Her cousin takes off his shirt, a white button-up, and tosses it to her. He tells Sandra she can wear that. Sandra tames her smile. She changes in the outhouse and sprints down to the beach.

For a while, Sandra has fun. Her bare feet smack the wet sand, her cousins splash her in the shallows, playfighting through the sting of salt in the nose. Sandra pops through the waves like a seal, laughing. Her cousins laugh too. Only when Sandra stops to catch her breath, her cousins’ laughter continues. They look at her, then at each other, snickering into the backs of their hands.

Sandra frowns. She feels like she’s missed a joke.

Then, she looks down at herself.

Her stomach sinks.

The white shirt clings to her like plastic wrap. Transparent and filmy. It bares her flat breasts, her tummy, her underwear as the sea molests her. Oh, she thinks, and for a moment, Sandra is entirely one thing. She is a joke, and her body is the punchline.

Her cousins’ laughter cracks and hisses like the slow press of a branding iron. It sears an ulcer on her stomach that spells out shame.

Her cousins play it off as a prank. Sandra pretends to believe them if only to put it behind her, to shake it off—the seawater and the ulcer—only she cannot. The shame clings to her, and though she cannot explain why, she becomes obsessed with her underwear, or rather, with making sure it never shows again.

Now, Sandra pulls her pants up so high that the seam pinches her inner thigh. Before leaving the house or getting off the school bus, really anytime she has to stand up, her fingers instinctively find the loops on her jeans, and she tugs until it hurts.

She usually tells her mother everything, but this she cannot. The shame is too fresh, even once she returns to Chicago for the school year. Sandra’s mother, the Parisian professor, is a Ph.D. candidate. Sandra takes pride in her mother’s career because it means her mom is smarter than other moms and she doesn’t even have to lie about it. The only downside is that a prof’s salary doesn’t cover babysitters, so, after school, Sandra must accompany her mother to classes.

She sits in the back row, scribbling in the margins of her homework and watching R-rated French movies on a portable DVD player. Chalk scratches the board, snores echoing through the classroom, undergrads snoozing through her mother’s lectures on frontal lobes and psycho-sexual development. The only one who’s still awake is the boy sitting in the back row.

“Trent,” Sandra’s mother calls. “At what age does sexual identity typically develop?”

“8-12,” he says.

Sandra’s mom shakes her head. “The correct answer is 12-18.”

Trent frowns. “No, it’s not.”

Sandra pauses her movie, one earbud in. She isn’t allowed to challenge her mother. She has tried testing boundaries before, like a pup nudging a bitch till it snaps, but she cannot correct her mother, not like Trent. It turns out he is wrong, but the fact that he stood his ground and rejected the shame outright, cast it aside as if it were nothing but air—it inspires Sandra.

From that day on, she watches Trent. She learns his habits the way elderly birdwatchers trail rare bluejays. She’s always wanted to be a boy, but now, she thinks she wants to be like Trent. As he chews the strings of his hoodie and picks at the pimples on his jaw, she mimics him, running her hands through her hair as he runs his hands through his.

Sandra nurses a fantasy of plucking one of his black strands, collecting a feather, if you will. She wants to hear Trent yelp. She wants to catch the same brow-scrunching glare he gave her mother when she corrected him.

Between lectures, Sandra’s mother spares Sandra five dollars for a snack. Sandra takes this opportunity to stalk Trent into the dining hall. She finds him in a corner booth, pecking at a bowl of cereal and flipping through a textbook.

Sandra creeps up behind him. She isn’t as smart as her mother, but her aptitude as a liar will carry her through. It’s fine, Sandra thinks. She won’t betray the truth, she’ll merely twist it.

Sandra has a keen awareness of her school’s ecosystem and its hierarchies. She used to trade her lies for social capital, but, in her mind, the incident in the sea has demoted her to laughingstock. No one at school knows about it, but they can tell she’s changed, become submissive to the ulcer, a slave to her shame. She wants to learn to tame it, as Trent does, and she can’t think of a better way to regain her lost coolness than cozying up to an older boy. Two bluejays, one stone?

Sandra opens her mouth, but she pauses. As Trent leafs through his psychology homework, she catches something underneath it. Handwritten sheets of paper smothered in numbers, strange symbols, and equations, a web of mathematics that stretches for miles.

“What are you doing?” Sandra asks. She pulls up her pants before Trent turns around.

He takes a second to recognize her. The sweatshirt string falls from his mouth, like a worm from a bluejay’s beak.

“Homework,” he says.

Sandra blanks. She tries to think up a lie as to why she’s here, but she’s taking too long, so she blurts out, “Do you want the answer key?”

“What?”

“To the psych homework. I know where my mom keeps the answer keys.”

Trent squints at her. The space between his brows pinches into an eleven.

“Is this a trap?” he asks. “Did the prof send you looking for rats?”

“No. I was just saying.”

“How old are you anyway?”

Sandra doesn’t like the way he asks the question, dismissively, like she’s a fruit fly buzzing around his lunch, so she lies. “Fifteen.”

Trent scoffs. The sound etches itself into her ear and burns, the same shape as her underwear ulcer. “No you’re not.”

“Yes, I am.” Sandra raises her voice. The five-dollar bill crinkles in her fist. “I’m fifteen. I’m almost sixteen, actually. Ask my mom.”

“I’m not asking your mom anything. She’s a hardass.”

Sandra looks at his homework again. “Are you good at math?”

“I guess. Why?”

“I need help with my math homework.” Another lie, but she doesn’t want to stop talking to him yet.

“Your mom can’t help you?”

“No. She’s bad at math.” That is, unfortunately, true. Her mother doesn’t know her multiplication tables and can’t calculate tips in her head, so Sandra is often tasked with both.

“Sorry, uh—”

“Sandra.”

“I’m not a tutor, Sandra.”

“Are you not good enough to be a tutor?”

Trent smiles. He tries to wipe it off, tapping his pencil on his thigh, but Sandra catches it. One of his canines is crooked and sharp, like a shark tooth or an arrowhead. She wants to poke the point, let it make a dent in her fingertip. “If you help me, I can get you the answer key,” she says.

Trent laughs. He wags his pencil at her, shark tooth flashing. “You’re trouble.”

She likes it when he says that. It makes her feel older, like she’s actually fifteen. It gives her this sense of power she’s never had over her cousins or the boys at school. Being weird and flat-chested doesn’t help in that department, but Trent seems intrigued by her strangeness, or at the very least, not put off by it.

Sandra is particularly put off by stupidity. When she was little, she stole her mother’s reading glasses and life-sized brained model and gave riveting lectures to her stuffed animals. That short-lived position as professor to plushies gave her a snobbish contempt for idiots. Haley is by far the nicest girl in homeroom, but since she can’t point out Africa on a world map, Sandra refuses to associate with her. After Trent was loudly and objectively wrong in class, Sandra suspected he may be stupid, but he turns out to be smarter than she expected.

He won’t be easy to fool.

Sandra is decent at math. She skipped Algebra I, but Algebra II is still too young. She needs to present Trent with math worthy of fifteen, almost sixteen, like geometry or pre-calculus.

She uses her mom’s computer to print out fake practice problems with added name and date headers. To maximize her time with Trent, without making him think she’s Haley-level incompetent, she purposefully copies the wrong answers in for half of the questions.

So, while her mom teaches, Trent and Sandra go over her fake math homework in the dining hall. Sandra brings up the Psych answer keys again, but Trent cuts her off, tells her to focus. She isn’t sure why he agrees to help, whether he has an affinity for mathematics to such a degree that he must ensure its survival in future students, or if he just wants to put tutoring on his resume, but Sandra doesn’t care. All she wants is his attention. She wants to clip it to her jean loops like a keychain.

When Trent leans over the table to point out her mistakes, he sweeps the hair out of his face. It’s so black it’s almost blue, Sandra thinks. She spends the long stretches of his explanations on isosceles triangles studying his hair, his face, his hands: the chewed nail beds, frayed at the ends like his sweatshirt strings, and his knuckles, rough and covered in white dust. She has this urge to wash and put lotion on them.

“When’s your birthday?”

“Hm?”

“You’re turning sixteen, right?” Trent asks. “When’s that happening?”

She doesn’t want to tell him. She’s afraid he’ll ask her mother about it and unspool her little deception. Sandra’s mom has already thanked Trent for tutoring her, asked if he wanted extra credit. Trent said he was happy to do it for free, but had the conversation gone on a second longer, Sandra might’ve vomited if only to rip them from it.

“When’s your birthday?” she asks.

“June.”

“How old are you then?”

“Nineteen. Are you gonna answer my question?”

“I thought you wanted me to practice my proofs.”

“Yeah, about that, put your number in my phone.” Trent fishes the Blackberry from his pocket and slides it across the table. Sandra pales. She only just got her phone. She had cried over not being allowed to stay home alone after school like all her friends. There were more injustices to tack on: her classmates had phones and threw parties and had access to all these luxuries she was not privy to. Her mom caved, got her a flip phone, warned her not to give the number out to strangers. Sandra types it into Trent’s phone, thumbs trembling on the keys.

“I sent you a message, so you have mine,” Trent says. “If you have any more trouble, text me.”

He ruffles her hair when he leaves. It’s a second of contact, a lightning strike that fizzles down Sandra’s spine, and then it’s gone. She pets the apex of her skull, the spot he touched, and imagines her hand is his.

Past midnight, she’s still thinking about it. She lies in bed, drawing circles on the open screen of her flip phone with her finger, tracing the diameter, radius, tangent, and secant.

She wants to text him, but she’s afraid she won’t be able to stand the space between when she presses send and when he answers. She’s afraid the gap will swallow her like a black, blue hole.

Then her phone buzzes. The screen glows with Trent’s name.

Hey. You up?

She reads the text ten times. She tries to calculate an approach, acting the playwright, scripting his replies in her head, imagining the potential sequences of dialogue until another message comes through.

You never told me when your birthday is.

She waits again, birdwatcher listening for a chirp.

I want to get you something.

She shrieks into her pillow.

You don’t have to do that, she types and deletes it. It’s too coy, too preteen. She types instead, What are you getting me?

What do you want?

I don’t know.

I wanted a car when I was 16.

What car would you get me?

A semi-truck.

She chuckles under her breath, pulls her blanket over her head so her little outbursts won’t seep under the crack in the door and wake her mother.

If I can prove its shape, will you get it for me?

I’ll get it for you if you tell me when your birthday is.

Don’t talk to my mom about it.

Why would I talk to your mom?

I don’t know.

You’re being weird.

Sorry.

It’s fine. I kind of like it.

My birthday’s next week. November 13^th.

She swirls the truth around her finger like a whirlpool in a glass of lemonade. It tastes cool and sweet, and she slips it to him, like she slipped him her number, this real and true detail for him to swallow. Her real, actual birthday.

Friday the 13^th, Trent says. You should get a tattoo.

My mom would kill me.

Get it somewhere she won’t see it then.

Would you go with me?

He doesn’t respond to that. She thinks she’s gone too far. The thought of him ignoring her makes the ulcer burn.

I have to go to bed now, she says.

Okay. Goodnight.

Goodnight.

She falls asleep, phone in her hand, reading their conversation over and over.

On Friday the 13th, Sandra skips into the dining hall with a fresh batch of fake homework assignments under her arm. Trent, however, isn’t alone. There’s a girl with him, at their usual table. She pokes fried rice with chopsticks while they talk. Trent is looking right at her. When Trent and Sandra talk, he scribbles, chews on his string, or taps his pencil on his thigh. He never stares at her like that, and it lodges a jealous splinter somewhere tender in Sandra’s chest.

She eavesdrops until the girl leaves.

“Hey. Happy Birthday,” Trent says. When Sandra puts her binder down, he gives her a plastic box with a cupcake inside. “I asked, but they don’t have candles, so—”

“Was that your girlfriend?”

“What? Who?”

“That girl. She invited you to something.”

“So? It’s a house party.”

Sandra wants to ask more questions, but she’s afraid he’ll get suspicious or, worse, reject her. Trent touches the table, the spot where Sandra’s hand casts a shadow.

“Hey, you okay?” he asks.

“Could I go to the party?”

“They won’t let you in. You look like you’re twelve.”

Sandra grinds her teeth. “I’m not twelve.” Not anymore.

“I know. I’m just saying. Stick to high school parties.”

“You’re being a hardass.”

Trent smiles. He touches her hand, just barely, fingertips skimming the valleys between her knuckles.

“Sandra,” he whispers. There’s a slight hiss when he pronounces the S in her name. Sandra feels like she’s hanging on it, the underside of the S. “I can’t sneak you into a party. It’d be easier to sneak you into my dorm.”

Sandra blinks, confused. “What would we do in your dorm?”

Trent laughs. “You’re so cute.”

Oh, and that gets her spiraling. Thinking about the mountain of social capital this will earn. Her cousins, the popular girls, even idiot Haley won’t believe it. That she has a boyfriend. That he’s older, and of course, goes to a different school, cause he’s in college, and he’s good at math, and his hair is gorgeous, and he thinks she’s so cute. But Sandra doesn’t even care what they think anymore. Trent has eclipsed her shame. Her fantasies have evolved, and now she imagines running away with him, a tattoo on her upper thigh. She’ll tell her mom she’s dropping out of middle school to drive into the sunset with her boyfriend. She’ll pet his arm when he changes gears and listen as he muses on the many intricacies and equations that go into making semi-truck engines.

“I got you something,” Trent says. He seems excited, like he’s about to tell a joke. He pulls something out of his bag, about the size of an eraser, and rolls it across the table.

It’s a Hot Wheels semi-truck.

Sandra lies to her mother that night. She tells her that Haley’s having a slumber party. Her mother is suspicious, says she thought Sandra didn’t like Haley. Sandra says it’s okay to be friends with idiots. Her mother says not to call people that, and Sandra apologizes, asks again if she can go. It’s her birthday after all.

Her mom says fine, but someone needs to accompany her on the subway. Sandra says Haley lives near campus, that Trent, her tutor, can take her.

His dorm room is smaller than she expected. The furniture competes for floorspace, the desk creeping up on the bedframe, the bedframe scraping the pale blue paint off the cinderblocks. Trent makes the most of it with trinkets: a lava lamp, a gray suede blanket with a crusted corner, a bong on the nightstand. Sandra wonders if this is what masculinity is. She’s always reckoned it was this earthy scent, like dirt under her cousins’ nails, but now she thinks it’s this. Trent’s room. Old movie posters, a sad, flat pillow, and tangled computer wires on the floor.

“Does your mom know you’re here?” Trent asks. He uncaps a beer bottle with his shark tooth and shuts the mini fridge with his foot.

“She thinks I’m at my friend’s house,” Sandra says. Trent sits on his bed with her, throws his head back.

“Trouble,” he breathes. He pokes her nose with the rim of the bottle. Sandra catches a whiff of bread and vinegar.

“Can I try it?”

He hands her the bottle, lazily.

She’s been courageous up until now, even when Trent told his RA that Sandra was his little sister. She’s nervous, but she can’t let him know that, so she braves the beer’s foul smell and takes a long drink.

Trent watches her. She almost gags, her tongue slapping the roof of her mouth. “It tastes bad.”

Trent snorts. “It’s not supposed to taste good. It’s poison.”

“Wine tastes good.”

“When have you had wine?”

“In France.”

“Oh yeah, you grew up there, right?”

“Kind of.” She spent almost half her childhood there before her mom scooped her across the pond. It makes her interesting; she likes that, but she dislikes the half-hearted nature of it. The halfness.

“So,” Trent traces the tendons on the back of her hand, the same paths he traced in the dining hall. “You speak French then?”

“Yeah.”

“Say something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Anything.”

“Rien et tout.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Nothing and everything. We don’t have a word for anything.”

“What, so French people don’t say ‘anything is possible?”

“My mom says Americans are delusional.”

“Do me a favor, don’t talk about your mom right now.”

Maybe it’s the coffin of a dorm room, but his presence is larger here. Sandra can smell him, like laundry left too long in the machine, that put-away-wet odor.

He shifts to face her. Stares at her. So close she can see the wisps of facial hair on his upper lip. She wants to take a weedwhacker to them. She wants to wash his hands, clean him. She doesn’t fully understand the urge, but if he’d let her, she’d take a wet washcloth and scrub his body from head to toe.

His eyes drift to her lips. She wants to ask what he’s thinking.

“Say something else in French,” he says.

“You have to tell me what to say,” she whispers.

“Figure it out. C’mon.”

“Tu me rends nerveuse.”

“What’s that mean?”

Sandra shrugs. “Figure it out.”

He kisses her. It’s gentle, a quick sweep, like a calligraphy pen brushing paper. Sandra straightens, her head tapping the wall behind her.

“This your first kiss or something?” Trent asks.

“No,” Sandra breathes. “I kissed a boy at camp two years ago, but I bit him by accident.”

Trent’s shark tooth flashes. He doesn’t bother to push the hair out of his eyes, half-lidded. “I don’t bite.”

He cups her face and kisses her again, this time with more pressure. At first, she likes it. His lips are chapped, but plump, easy on hers, and the contact scratches an itch she’s had since the day he challenged her mother and gave her a glimpse of true, rebellious power.

Sandra sighs, closes her eyes, leans into it. In her R-rated French movies, the couples kiss like they want to eat each other, and she’s always liked the idea of that kind of passion. This otherworldly devotion to consuming someone else, another level of obsession that would annihilate any shame she ever knew.

But then, Trent starts to touch her. He skids her shirt up an inch, finds the loops of her jeans. Sandra starts to shake. The itch she so badly wanted to scratch, it’s been taken care of, she has proof of it—that he wants her, that she’s won him over, that she’s pretty and smart like her mother, worthy of being desired despite the fact that her cousins unmasked her flesh—but Trent keeps scratching. His nail snags on the skin, cuts her open, exposes her.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m nervous.”

“That’s okay.”

He dives back in, sucking in a breath through his nose, cupping her face with one hand and gripping her wrist with the other. Sandra tries to wriggle, but not much happens, and now there is no shame at all. There is only awareness. She is aware of how small she is, how weak compared to him, how trapped. She could turn into a geometry problem, she thinks, write a proof of his shadow smothering hers.

“Sandra, relax.”

His smell suffocates her. His palms are clammy, like wet chains, and every kiss ends with a click, a click like closing handcuffs. When he unbuttons her shirt, Sandra squirms.

“Can we stop?” she breathes.

“Why?”

“I lied, I’m sorry.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I’m not sixteen.”

“I know. That’s okay.”

Trent forces his tongue into her mouth. He takes her hand and places it on the hard thing between his legs. It feels like a knife’s handle or maybe a glue stick wrapped in denim. Sandra’s breath hitches. She starts to wonder if she ever had any sway over him, or if he’s manufactured her power, slipped it to her like the semi-truck, a gesture of false submission. She feels like nothing now. Rien. A girl with a crown made of papermache and lies no one ever actually believed, a worm wriggling in the bluejay’s beak, a preything.

Sandra does what prey things do. She tries to fly. Then, she freezes. Then, she fights.

Sandra bites him. Hard. It’s a clean clamp on the tongue, a guillotine slice.

Trent jerks. The reflex drags his flesh between her front teeth and skins it like a peeler.

He yelps and jumps off the bed, cupping his mouth, like Sanda’s cousins laughing in the sea. Red seeps from his lips and pools in his palm.

Sandra sits there, clenched fist on his flat pillow, chest heaving.

His blood tastes like copper and beer.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

“Get out.” The end of Trent’s words slur, the letters swollen.

“I’m sorry,” she says again. The ulcer burns, and the back of her eyes heat.

Trent grabs her arm. He tosses her out the door. Sandra stumbles and catches herself.

Trent glares at her. Blood drips from the corner of his mouth, a hard line shifting as he grinds his pimpled jaw.

Sandra doesn’t understand why, still, even now, she wants to follow him back into his dorm. She still wants him to like her, to laugh with her, to ask her to speak French, but what her body wants, what it screams, is to run.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and slowly, she backs away. When Trent doesn’t follow her down the hall, she finds the courage to turn around.

Trent sighs. “Sandra, wait.”

Sandra speeds up.

“Sandra, come on.” Trent can’t raise his voice, not without everyone else on his floor hearing, so he comes after her. Sandra listens to her body.

She sprints down the stairwell and onto the street. She forgets her jacket and her shoes in his room. The sidewalk is cold and rough on her feet, like the wet sand in Normandy. The streetlamps cast halos through the fog, and somehow, Sandra makes it home without getting kidnapped or freezing to death.

She slips her key quietly into the lock to not wake her mother. She’ll think of a lie for her in the morning. She doesn’t want to wake her with the sound of the shower either, so she washes her feet in the sink and lets the hot water soak until the feeling in her fingers comes back.

When she looks in the mirror, there’s a streak of red smeared on her chin. She scrubs, but it won’t come clean, so before she turns the lights off, Sandra buttons her pajama shirt and pulls up her pants till it hurts.

Swan attacked by a dog, Jean-Baptiste Ourdy, 1745 (THE MET open source)