Pipsqueak
CW: misgendering, body horror, and gore
“Miss, can you help me?”
A shockwave of revulsion radiates from the nape of my neck and across my body. None of it mattered until I decided to pay attention, now every feminine address is an additional tick in my bomb.
I don’t turn around. I need to count to seven first, calm my nerves by pretending I didn’t hear. It’s getting worse. I used to only have to count to three, but now my frustration is a living thing. It’s harder to keep myself in check when I’m tired, and after three double shifts in a row, the leash is beginning to fray.
“Miss, where do you keep the sangria?”
My spine straightens and I stand to my full height, not setting down the whiskey bottle I was shelving. I turn and show her the full picture. My undercut, septum piercing, and bound chest sporting an apron with an array of enamel pins. The largest pin there says “they/them” in bright purple.
Her face relaxes and she smiles. Her voice takes on the cadence of one talking to a particularly skittish child. “Hi, hon,” she says. “Do you know where they keep the sangria?”
I’m eye-level with her chin. I take a breath and prepare to force a smile.
There’s a crash. It takes me a moment to realize where it came from, but it’s at my feet. The neck of the whiskey bottle has snapped in my grip, sending all but the cap to the concrete floor to shatter and spread. The color looks like piss, but for an instant I see blood red.
“Oh my god!” The customer’s hands are on my shoulders and she’s guiding me away from the mess with a too-tight grip. “Oh goodness, sweetheart, are you alright?”
I mutter an excuse. My voice sounds harsh, and lower than it has ever been. It’s a soft bark, or an inarticulate growl. I want to tell her to take her hands off me. I want to take them off for her.
She lets go as I step back. She’s concerned, pitying. She yammers something about a factory flaw, says I should sue. She has no idea that my thin, delicate fingers are what broke the bottle.
I wonder what they could do to her windpipe.
I slip away as soon as Anthony walks up with the mop and requisite yellow sign. He smiles at me, that half smile I used to be so into when we were in high school. There is a me who wants to stay and help. He was the first one who offered to try out my new pronouns.
He almost never fucks it up anymore, and when he does, he’s quick to apologize. He’s the only person I know who’s even trying.
When I ask my manager if I can take five, he nods without looking up from his inventory sheet.
“See you soon, Pipsqueak,” he says.
It’s Pippen, but I bite back the correction and walk away at a brisk clip.
Most of my coworkers have taken to my new name more readily than they took to my new pronouns. I never got why until I realized that changing my name does nothing to change how they see me. No matter how bright I make my badge or how masc I make myself, all they see is a girl with a quirky streak. Eccentric young female.
Spicy woman.
I slam the door of the staff bathroom. Something is happening to me. I can feel it.
I’m in the men’s because I refuse to melt down in the ladies’ room. I refuse to be caught dead where they want me. When I pound my fists into the porcelain of the sink, it groans and cracks under the force.
The growl hasn’t left my throat. I can’t breathe around it. My chest feels like it’s about to explode.
I yank off my apron and uniform shirt, the boy’s model with the collar. Nearing the end of an eight-hour shift, my binder is crushing me. If I take it off, they win. If I suffocate in its grip, they win.
I can no longer tell if my rage is a creature or if I am.
A scream chases the growl out of my mouth. There’s something else behind it. My mouth is full of the hard edges of a million things I wish I’d said. When I snarl at my own reflection, the edges are all unfamiliar teeth, and every one means the same thing.
Not. A. Girl.
A voice streaks my vision bright red again. The door has opened and whoever has entered has asked me if I’m alright.
When I recognize my deadname on his lips, there is nothing I can do to stop the motion of my body.
I see a fearful face when I turn around. A man. I can’t understand what he’s saying anymore and I don’t care.
I lunge.
I know who I am. This is me, and this is not me. I am animal, and I am human.
I am neither.
I am both.
I bear down on this interloper, this man in my den, this pathetic, useless wisp who dares to come in here and call me by a name that is not mine. If he wanted to call me something not my name, he could call me Beast. He could call me Monarch. He could call me God.
I tear my deadname out of his throat with my teeth.
Blood spatters my face, my neck. It soaks into my binder from the gargling fountain of his throat. My senses light up. I feel his pulse slowing against my tongue. I breathe his scent.
I know that scent.
By the time I pull my face back, there’s nothing left to do for him. I sit back on my heels, the haze of anger dissipating into something nebulously worse. I reach out and swipe the bloodstained mess of Anthony’s bangs from his brow with my slowly receding claws.
He’s always been the only one who tries to see me. Now, I’m the last thing he’ll see. He doesn’t deserve the brunt of my rage. He shouldn’t have to die. The look on his face when he dies is one of terrible understanding, and for that reason alone he should have lived.
The sound that leaves my mouth is a horrible, baying wail. It does nothing to capture my grief. A million daily wounds from a million careless words have led me here, and somehow Anthony is the one who caught my wrath.
I slide behind him and pull his head onto my lap. His slack face is angled up toward mine, eyes mostly closed.
We dated for a few months, back in high school. It was right around when I stopped painting my nails. He told me I kissed like a boy, and I told him “girl” was a sweater three sizes too small. I try not to remember him glancing at my chest.
“I bet you’d look good in a tight sweater.”
He apologized, later, but he also broke things off. I’ve spent a lot of time trying not to remember how he was, how slowly he learned. His apologies were patches in my armor. For every slur that cracked me open, he pointedly called me “bro.” Every time someone called me “little lady” he told me I was a short king.
Why was it that when I went to his house when I’d been openly nonbinary for six months, his mother was surprised by the revelation? Why did I accept his proffered patches when half the time his sword had made the wound?
There’s a wet knock as Anthony’s head slips from my knee and onto the bathroom floor. His neck is bent at an odd angle, but I can only stare at his face. I know that face. I have spent years thinking that it’s the face of someone who knows me.
If Anthony knew me, if he saw me, then how could he still call me by that name?
“Pipsqueak?”
I don’t turn my head. In two syllables I know who opened the bathroom door. I can picture him there, my manager, surveying the massacre in stupefaction. It’s almost enough to make me laugh, except I’m not sure there is any laughter left inside my body.
Until a moment ago, I thought I had one friend. Now I’m alone, and I think I have been for years. Every hit I’ve taken in that time, Anthony has dealt me similar blows. He just never left without placating me. Why was I willing to deal with the same treatment when it was followed up by pretty words?
Anthony told me he called me “they” even when I wasn’t there. I think Anthony was always full of shit.
“Jesus Christ,” my manager says. There’s nausea in his voice.
I turn to look at him at last.
He’s fully in the room, avoiding puddles of blood with his high-top sneakers. His hair is parted to one side, and his face is disgusted, bewildered.
“You did this?” he asks me. Behind the shock, he’s almost laughing.
There’s a rumble in the back of my throat, but I can tell by his lack of terror that I must look totally human. I am used to being mistaken for things I’m not.
“Fucking Christ,” he says. “How could one little girl do all this?”
My mouth fills with fangs again.