She’d shed so many times. Sometimes her skin lightly fell and gathered in icing-sugar piles on the carpet. Sometimes, snake-like, she sloughed off an entire girl-shaped shell. That Halloween, instead of decorations, her mum hung up her skin by a string on the door. The dermal amulet didn’t scare away children calling for sweets; but when she answered their knocks, pale moon-face cratered with holes from her nails, they tore back down the path, the thick October night dissolving their banshee screams.
The eczema phase was the worst. Skin so flaky that her grandma thought the winter storm had blown into the house. It coated the inside of their throats and clung to the tips of their lashes. Wherever she walked, she sprinkled skin on the floor until a fine layer built up, disturbed only by footprints. She’d swept for days to clear it up: slapping carpets against the outside wall and dusting clouds from countertops. Even now when they bite into dinner, specks of her skin stick to their teeth, gritty as sand.
The shedding wasn’t always painful, but it was always humiliating. Uncontrollable, unexpected, unwanted. A public display of something private. A secret diary read out loud by a crush. Blood spots on the seat of a skirt. Photos posed in bra and pants texted around school. The shedding exposed her more than nakedness, and burned her with a similar shame.
‘Stop itching,’ said the chorus of the two women in her house, their scolding multiplying her shame. Her grandma embroidered the two words on fifty pieces of cloth that were strung like prayer flags over her bed as a night-time reminder. Her mum, methods less subtle, screamed at her every time her nails even kissed her skin; if they dared go deeper, her hand would be slapped away. When she burst into tears, cradling her throbbing hand: ‘It’s for your own good.’
‘Count yourself lucky,’ was what always followed, a finger wagging in her face. ‘My mother did worse to me when I was shedding. Once, she almost cut off my hand with a bread knife, because I was peeling skin off to the bone.’
She’d shed so many times that she expected to see bone, no peeling needed. How many times, she wasn’t sure. Three years ago, when the shedding first started, she tried to make sense of it practically, scientifically. Pinning paper to her wall, she pencilled a tally, one stroke for every shedding, until they cut like prison bars across the page. But, when the frequency got too high, she lost count. Mixing shredded paper with the icing-sugar skin piles, she handed back control to her body and to fate.
On bad days – what was a good one and what was a bad one? – she climbed onto her grandma’s lap. Burying her face in soft breasts bound in scratchy wool, she’d ask: ‘When does it end?’
Her grandma would pause her knitting – a cross-stich of stop itching onto a blanket – to pat the shiny pink rawness of her hand with her own arthritic one.
‘When it ends, dear.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘There isn’t an answer.’
‘How does it end?’
‘When it ends.’
‘What if it never ends?’
‘It will. You’ll know.’
‘How?’
‘You will. It’ll just happen.’
She’d pull away, unsatisfied, uncomforted, leaving a smear of skin snagged on the fibres of her grandma’s cardigan. After those conversations, the shedding seemed less of a science and more of a mysterious magic that she’d yet to learn. Questions that never led to answers, whispered words between her mum and her grandma that always grew silent when she was near. But no-one had given her a wand to wave or a spell to cast to make it better. Even if science could help, the doctors had refused her pills to pop or cream to slather. A natural stage in a young girl’s life, they said, and, after some prodding and poking, which inflamed her skin even more: yours is just lasting a bit longer than most.
When her mum hosted friends for dinner, she’d lie on the floor of her bedroom with her ear pressed against the floorboards. Broken murmurs: worried that – very long, my daughter only – how old again? – too old – have you considered – so much skin – too much skin – strange that she hasn’t yet –
She’d pull away with a splintered lobe, heart thrumming with fear, and spend the rest of the evening papering the walls with dry strips flayed from her thigh.
Murmurs shadowed her at school – from her classmates, not her mums’ friends. Because her mouth and her movements were clumsy, because she wore braces. Because her sleeves were too short, her skirts too long. And her skin, always her skin. Weirdo, freak, snake. Don’t touch her, you’ll catch the lurgy. The other girls, they’d finished shedding years before. They’d forgotten what it was like, chose to forget, their skin enviously smooth. Fuelled by bravado and a desire to show off to their mates, they would detach themselves from the group, become a rare single entity. Shrieking, they’d pinch off a strip of skin and wave the token above their heads. She’d hide in a toilet cubicle, holding her hand to stop the wound from bleeding and holding her breath so no one could find her. What was the point of the shedding, if, butterfly-like, it didn’t reveal a better version of herself?
She was alone. No friends at school; only her mum and grandma at home. Desperate, she’d hang the worst of her shedding – the complete shells of her skin – and drape them on clothes hangers like scarecrows on stakes. Transformed by the trickery of the evening’s half-light, they’d take shape into unspeaking copies of her, listening patiently as she unburdened her worries on them.
During the warmer months, her broken skin stung with sweat. A Wednesday afternoon found her in the toilets again, tears tracking yet more salt down her cracked cheeks, the pain making her cry even harder. She was shedding at a never-seen-before rate. It had stopped over the weekend, after her mum had bought her a lovely lavender coat for her birthday that fit better than her own skin. At the restaurant, compliments from the waiters. Excited, hopeful, Sunday became Monday, with her skin still firmly attached to her body. ‘It’s over, you’ve done it, you’ve survived,’ said the chorus of the two women in her house as she left for school that morning. When she shut the door behind her, they breathed a sigh of relief that their daughter, their granddaughter, had finally settled into herself.
But, that afternoon, the armour of her coat hanging next to her skin selves, she was vulnerable again to attack. The last to be picked by her classmates for the football team, she’d tripped up kicking the ball. When she staggered back up to flayed knees and laughter, she’d left a crime scene outline of skin on the AstroTurf.
That was hours ago. The bell had rung for the start and end of lunch. She was terrified to open the door, partly to face the world again, partly to face herself in the row of mirrors opposite the stalls. Her whole body was on burning in agony. Mountains of white flakes carpeted the lino around her. The mirror would reflect a monster.
A hard-knuckled knock on the door. ‘Are you okay?’
Her chest squeezed with the unfamiliarity of the voice and the question.
‘I know you’re in there. I can see your shoes and your skin. Don’t worry, I won’t bite.’
Tentatively, she slid open the lock on the door. A girl, the mirrors reflecting her twist braids, her broad smile reflecting the tube lighting. Her uniform, the only recognisable thing about her.
‘I’m new,’ said the girl. ‘We’ve never met. Are you okay?’
That simple, three-word question undammed something inside of her. Sitting on the lino floor, she unburdened her worries onto the new girl who, listening patiently, held the shiny pink rawness of her hand with her own soft one.
At some point in the conversation, she slipped back into herself. By the end of it, every layer, the epidermis, dermis, and the hypodermis, had knitted fully back onto her muscles and tendons. As her grandma had promised, it just happened, as if by magic or perhaps by science.
Now, the new girl loved her new skin as well as she did. She could retrace by memory every line and whorl and dip. She didn’t have to relearn the patterns every day, either, because they hadn’t changed since they first met. She hadn’t shed, and probably never would again. So, together, they packed away the coat-hanger shells, unpinned the string of fifty cloths, swept up every last scrap of her old self.
Her new skin wasn’t better. It wasn’t much different. But, like that lovely lavender coat, it fit perfectly, it was fully her own, and it was tattooed with the new girl’s touch.
Florianne Humphrey is a freelance writer, marketer, and travel journalist represented by Deirdre Power of David Higham Associates. Working for WriteMentor, Florianne helps launch and grow the careers of children’s writers, collaborating with agencies, publishers, and authors. She also enjoys developing and leading her own creative writing workshops for adults and children. Born in Paris, raised in London, Florianne studied English at Durham. She now lives and writes on the Norfolk coast, practising yoga, walking her bouncy Golden Retriever, and dreaming up her next travel adventure. Instagram: @floriannetravels
