Archive of Our Own

I AM HUNGRY, I WAS BORN HUNGRY

She doesn’t remember much about that night.

Jennifer said she was wearing some low-rise jeans, a coat, a plain hoodie. Her hair was half pulled back, glasses sliding just down the bridge of her nose. Her clothes were clean. She doesn’t remember that.

Jennifer said she’d talked to the lead singer of the band, some black-haired dude with these intense, beady dark eyes. Got real starry-eyed around him, doubly so when he began to scream and shout into the mic. She doesn’t remmeber that.

Jennifer said there was a fire. It skittered up the wood panelling and chewed its way through the ceiling; vaulting beams dropped like rain and flames began to eat every inch of the building. Needy couldn’t move, she said, and Jennifer had to haul the two of them out of the building through a boxy window in the bathroom. Needy was slurring every vowel and consonant, gaze cloudy and unfocused. Weak from the fire and with Needy as dead weight in her arms, Jennifer couldn’t stop that band leader from prying Needy’s limp body away. He’d shut her in his band’s van before she could so much as cry out. And Jennifer — exhausted and hysterical — could do nothing but watch the dust kicked up by their tyres as they sped into the forest.

She doesn’t remember that.

But she remembers moonlight. A waxing moon, swelling against the black sky through the gaps in the trees. Bark against her back, against her head, drilling into her skull. Twigs scratching against her forehead. Bracing wind against her cheeks, stinging like a handprint. (Maybe it was a handprint.) Rhythmic voices, strewn and messy against the gentle breathing of the forest (birdsong, rushing water). A thousand or a few Stygian eyes. Blood in her mouth, blood on her shirt. Under her ribs, into her belly; like something was crawling there, trying to rip up and out of her flesh, or rip into her. Bracing wind in her open chest — a bloody cavity. Her heart spilling out.

And after that...

"Ahmet?"

She hadn’t seen her face, not yet. (Her clothes she had looked down and seen, bloodied and ripped, stained with grass and mud and an assortment of other fluids which she couldn’t name but felt sticky under her touch. It was a nightmare, she’d told herself. That was that.) She guessed from the look on Ahmet’s face — eyes blown wide, mouth pulled down — that she didn’t look pretty. He looked like he’d walked through Hell. His clothes were half-singed, hair ruffled, shoes missing. There was soot on his cheek. She attempted a grin and his terror gave way to something close to dazedness.

"Are you... lost?"

Her stomach rumbled. It’d been rumbling incessantly since she’d gained this hazy semblance of consciousness, and she’d been sinking into a deeper hunger than she’d ever felt before. What for, she didn’t know. But for some reason, watching Ahmet nod a tentative yes seemed to taunt her empty stomach all the more. It was more than hunger she felt. (The way her whole body worked in sync to try to sate it: her eyes buzzing in their sockets, the warmth skittering across her skin as his eyes met hers. Not shyness, no — bolder than that.) This... hunger was something dark and primal and inhuman. It was something she knew she couldn’t give into. And yet: "Your host family. Do they know—" It was something of a last chance, that pause. A silent plea for him to just leave, please, please turn your back to me and run home. "—Where you are?"

He shook his head. Pain, unlike any other pain she had ever felt, shot through her stomach like a stake.

"Oh," she said. Ahmet’s eyes wandered across her torn clothes. She lowered her voice and tried at a soft tone to soothe away his scrutiny, but her voice came out scratchy and hoarse. "Does anyone?"

Again, he shook his head, and Needy near doubled over. Her head, it pounded. And a scent seemed to hang like invisible mist between them, thick and persistent and delicious. Needy could almost taste it, and — fuck — how she wanted it on her tongue, down her throat, filling up that damned vacant space in her stomach. Like meat, but better. Her whole digestive system felt as if it were contracting and expanding in anticipation. She knew, then, that this was what she needed.

He was what she needed

For a few more moments, they stood in silence, strides away from each other. An owl trilled gently from a tree nearby and a breeze tugged her hair as if trying to pull her away from him, as if it knew exactly what she was on the precipice of. But each second that passed like this only increased that scent, and she was past humanity. Needy wasn’t into the occult — Jennifer called it weird goth shit — but whatever happened in that forest (in her nightmare, of course) had... done something to her. Whatever it was had given her this weird craving.

For people.

"If you want, I’ll help you home." She lied. This was her last-ditch effort to save him. She couldn’t trust herself, so she gave him all the power. But stupid, stupid Ahmet. He nodded. She pulled him by the elbow. Into the forest. Pushed him up against a tree. (Bark against her back, against her head, drilling into her skull. Twigs scratching against her forehead.) Tenderly, she gripped the hollow between his jaw and neck and pressed her lips to his.

Then she bit his face off.

"Needy?"

She doesn’t know where else to go. She clambers in through the open bedroom window, at once dizzy and pumped with pure energy, and finds herself sprawled on Jennifer’s plush carpet. Jennifer stands over her, peering down. This time Needy knows exactly what she looks like. Reflected in a pool of Ahmet’s blood was her own face, blood like red lipstick smeared across her teeth, lips, chin. Sunken eyes as if trying not to see anything else; clothes more blood than their original pigments. Yet Jennifer looks at her not like a spectacle — with the horror she deserves — but with something soft, something utterly strange on her features.

"Oh my God Needy, what the Hell happened to you?"

Needy is delirious, drunk on something (or everything, every part of the world seems as if it has been tuned up to one hundred), but she still registers how un-Jenniferlike Jennifer looks. Her long, glossy hair frizzed-up and thrown into a messy ponytail, her perfect complexion now dulled, her eyes once smeared with smoky eyeshadow now red and rimmed with bags.

Needy stands up.

Blood drips from her mouth and onto the carpet. Blood rushes in her ears. Blood lingers in the air. But it’s not hers.

She pants, a dog in heat. A hand on her shoulder.

"Needy, can you hear me?" She pants. Why can’t she stop panting? "Please, Needy. Needy, what happened? Are you hurt?" It’s like all the air in the world has been sucked up. None left. "Needy, can you say something? Please? Needy, please just fucking—"

Like that rushing water, laughter bubbles up inside of her and gushes. She laughs and laughs and laughs and then she screams and Jennifer screams and suddenly something is crawling its way up her chest and it doesn’t feel so good and now it’s in her throat and on her tongue and it’s throwing itself out of her open mouth and onto Jennifer’s pink carpet and, "Oh my God, Needy."

It’s black and it’s bile and it splashes Jennifer’s socks and Needy’s blood-soaked converse. It’s the most disgusting shit she’s ever seen; even Jennifer is recoiling in disgust. But it won’t stop coming. Gradually it becomes made of bones, almost, as inky black spines start to rise from it. Needy clamps her mouth shut and it stops coming. It skitters across the floor like it’s gained sentience. She can’t bring herself to be confused, apologetic: to feel anything but nothing. Finally, she breathes. She finds she’s used up Jennifer’s supply of softness; she looks at her with equal parts horror and pity and something else, something entirely unknown, and it sends Needy reeling for the window.

"Needy!" Jennifer calls. Her voice is thick with tears. Needy doesn’t bother with climbing. She drops down to the ground and feels nothing. "Needy— fuck, Needy. Wait, please!" She stumbles down the road and into the mouth of darkness.

It’s late when she leaves Jennifer’s, even later when she arrives back at her own house. She doesn’t turn any lights on — not the living room, nor the kitchen, nor the bathroom, even as she scrubs her bloody face until her skin is red and raw and soaks her naked self in a steaming bath. She can’t bear to see herself and what she has become. If she doesn’t look in the mirror — a clear mirror, where she can see every evil and desecrated part of herself under the light — she can deny that there are things she has done that she can’t take back. Bad things. Things people don’t do. At least now she can take refuge in the night and in the darkness. By day... Her jaw shudders as if a wind has blown past; she doesn’t want to think about daytime. Her fingers are pruned as she steps out of the bathtub and she feels a stranger as she dresses in soft pink pyjamas, tucks herself under frilly, floral sheets.

This bedroom, she thinks as she slows her breathing, this thing of pink and femininity, is not her own. It belongs to somebody who is dead. Somebody who died tonight, under the moonlight.

For a few quiet seconds after dawn, she is Needy Lesnicky. In her pink pyjamas and under her pink sheets and in her pink room. Then she closes her eyes. Behind them, in the dark emptiness (like a ghost waiting to haunt, except still pulsing with life) is that waxing moon. She is back to being something else.

Yet she finds, as she pushes she sleep from the corners of her eyes and actually looks, that she is Needy after all. Her face is clean, glowing, even — if a little sore as she prods her cheek with her finger (checking she’s not dreaming again, of course). Her stomach, once fierce, has settled — more than settled, actually. She feels good. Like how she thinks those hippie stoners at school probably feel. Just... good. Fulfiled, and filled. She inhales, exhales. A nightmare, she tells herself. One big fucking nightmare.

First period is English. She trudges down the hall with her books in hand, heading straight for it, but instead is thrown off-course; she yelps as she is yanked by the collar into an empty classroom. The door slams shut behind her. Hands — soft hands, with perfect, slender fingers and immaculately manicured nails — clasp around her shoulders and spin her around. It’s Jennifer, obviously, sat on a mahogany desk. She’s watching Needy expectantly, but too expentantly, as though she were exaggerating it to cover for some other emotion. "So what the fuck was that, Needy?"

All traces of the nightmare’s un-Jennifer Jennifer have been glossed over with perfect Jennifer — perfect makeup, perfect hair and (Needy glances down) perfect tits. In addition to this is the removal of Jennifer’s softness, now filed down to just her usual sharp edges. Needy shies from her gaze, attempts to shy from her grip too, but Jennifer only loosens it slightly and begins to rub up and down on her shoulders — some decidedly unorthodox form of comfort (for Jennifer, anyway).

The ‘nightmare’ excuse is already collapsing in on itself like that rickety old bridge over the river up North, and normally Needy wouldn’t conceieve of not telling the complete and utmost truth to Jennifer at a time like this, especially when Jennifer is attempting, in her own weird and twisted way, something dangerously close to consolation. But yesterday (for as much as she wants to rewrite it as some elaborate night-time vision) has imbued her with some type of cloud-nine feeling, and for once she feels like Needy Lesnicky, girl of her own free will.

So with unnatural ease, she says, "What do you mean?" Even though she does know what she means. She knows so much and so little and so well and so terribly what she means.

Jennifer is visibly thrown. She furrows her brows and a fleeting trace of hurt flashes through her pale eyes. But she always meets a challenge, so she finds her footing and balances her features almost instantly. There’s an invisible hierarchy in conversation with Jennifer: one who leads and one who follows. And, of course, Jennifer always leads. So now her aim isn’t to get on the same level as Needy, to speak girl to girl, friend to friend: it’s to put her in her place. So she scoffs, the ultimate act of derision, and raises a single, skinny brow. "You know what I’m talking about."

Needy would never dream of overthrowing the Queen, but she’s not Needy anymore, not really. She looks at her straight, speaking at once a truth and a lie. "I really don’t, Jen."

"Bull-shit." Jennifer rolls her pretty eyes. "You practically launched yourself through my window covered in someone’s blood, laughed, screamed, chucked your weird black guts up on my carpet and then left like some fucking Batman wannabe. Those events are pretty hard to forget, Nee."

Oh. Needy flushes. The few scraps of sanity she’d managed to haphazardly sew together this morning crumble, and she feels immediately like she’s drifting in place. How had she ever thought she could deny it? It comes rushing back to her like that water, a shock of cold all at once, drenching her mind and body: under her ribs and into her belly, that scent, that scent materialised on her tongue, the black bile and its moving bones, hot water and her own nails scratching her skin raw, a monster in a girl’s clothing. She crumples.

"Shit, Needy!"

When she wakes, she is in the back of a van. It’s not unfamiliar. In fact, she knows it well. That must in the air, warm and heady, like sweat and alcohol and men’s natural musk mingling together; the vehicle’s rattling breaths as it scrapes across the road; the low buzz of chatter draped in jarring city accents. Needy knows exactly whose van this is. Yet, how did she get here?

She peers up and around her. Three guys around her, two up front — all of their faces dangling just beyond recognition. They’re talking, though she can scarcely make out what they’re saying. It sounds like gibberish, or maybe another language like Latin or something. None of them even acknowledge her presence. Feeling at once exposed and invisible, Needy settles aginst the wooden panneling behind her back.

The van glides around a corner and hits a bump. One of the guys nexts to her curses, and the one driving turns around momentarily.

He is the only one who can see her. His eyes are black as night and fix on hers as if pouring their ink into her perfect blue. He does not startle or scare. He simpers. He mouths only two words very slowly: Stay dead.

His address tugs the last thread that holds the fabric of this reality together, and everything — the van, the men, the road ahead — bursts into plumes of dark smoke. All around her is black. Needy falls into an abyss of nothing. No sights, scents and no sounds save for the perpetual whisper ‘Stay dead’, echoing like a prayer.

Feeling like death, Needy navigates her way back to consciousness. She opens her eyes as a cat might, slitting one tentative eye open first and then the other. It’s dark and she startles: she’s not in school anymore. Breathing quietly, she angles her head to the left only slightly and finds herself sinking deeper into an arrangement of plush cushions under her head. She reaches blindly for what looks like the hazy outline of a lamp on the bedside table and fumbles for the switch. At last, she flicks it on, throwing the room into dim light. It isn’t hers, nor Chip’s—

"Finally." Jennifer leans against the doorframe with the suggestion of a smile on her red lips, as if asking permission to pull through with it. Needy grants it, smiling lightly, and Jennifer’s grin stretches like a cat. She strides over (every walk is a stride for Jennifer, as if perpetually imbued with flair and grace) and drapes herself beside Needy on the edge of the bed. Even as Needy shuffles over to make room, Jennifer remains tucked up at the far end. Her voice hints at strainedness, her laugh nervous. "You, like, totally pulled a H2O or something, just flopping down on the floor like that."

Needy scoffs, put off by Jennifer’s lightheartedness. Yesterday she had clawed her way — bloody and pale — into Jennifer’s bedroom too late at night and spewed her black guts all over her carpet, and now suddenly Jen is laughing about something so normal as her fainting? What?

Keen as ever, Jennifer catches the confusion on Needy’s tired features. "Aww, don’t be embarassed, Anita. Nobody saw you faint, so at least you didn’t make yourself look like a total gaylord."

Jesus, what? "Saw?"

"Well, duh. Everyone knows you fainted, obviously. So maybe you looked like... only half-gaylord."

Oh my god. Needy takes a moment, inhaling deeply, exhaling shakily. Did she really dream all of it? An idea seizes her. She throws off the abundance of blankets and sits straight up, slammed at once by the heaviness of her limbs, but she swings her legs to the edge of the bed anyway and looks down at Jennifer’s carpet. Sure enough, it’s stained by something large, round and black. Behind her, Jennifer holds her breath. "Jennifer—" Needy turns back, gestures wildly, eyes wide and terrified. "—I chucked up black vomit on your carpet and there was blood in my mouth and all over my front, and you’re more concerned about me looking like a... gaylord?"

Jennifer sighs, grabs a pillow and brings it against her chest. "So now you want to talk about it? Forgive me for trying to be a nice person or something." Needy’s mouth opens and shuts. Her brows furrow. Jennifer tucks her legs under her chin. "Jeez, you literally dropped dead when I brought it up. I wasn’t gonna, like, interrogate you like a fucking shitty beat cop after you just recovered from whatever that was, was I?"

Laughing, Needy shakes her head in disbelief. Her mind feels like a barrage of thoughts, memories, feelings. It’s too much, and she almost feels as if she’s going to vomit some more black bile onto Jennifer’s carpet. Again. But she steadies herself. In, out, in, out, in, out. She couldn’t tell Jennifer, could she? What was there to say? ‘Well I think I was part of some satanic ritual that didn’t kill me but made me into some weird, flesh-eating demon. Oh, and I’ve already killed Ahmet from school, so you don’t have to worry about me munching on you anytime—‘

"Needy, you’re kind of freaking me out right now."

As if on instinct, Needy’s gaze snaps to Jennifer, who’s staring wide-eyed and still clutching her heart-shaped, velour pillow. She doesn’t want Jennifer’s pity, but she wonders if she could handle that over Jennifer’s terror. Which of those will Jennifer pick, if Needy tells her? Which of those would crush her most?

"Did the fire give you brain damage?"

What?

She says it simply, as if it were a straightforward question and not derailing everything Needy thought she knew about yesterday night.

"Fire?"

"Yeah, the fire I kind of had to drag your ass out of? Literally half the people there ate shit. It was fucking crazy! You don’t remember it?" Neither pity nor terror: Jennifer wears genuine confusion.

As far as Needy knows, last night was confined to the forest, and there was no fire in the forest. Nothing existed on that day before that waxing moon. Her mind flinches back to what she’s been trying to stuff down. Ahmet... there was soot on his cheek.

"Do you seriously not remember, Needy?"

She doesn’t trust herself to wield words. She shakes her head slowly. She catches the tail end of Jennifer’s expression as she lowers her gaze to the duvet — it’s something she doesn’t deserve: concern. And it’s tender and hesitant, but it’s there nonetheless.

Softly: "Do you want to?"

It sounds like a way out. Needy doesn’t take it, so Jennifer tells her. It was Thursday, and Needy’s clothes were normal and and her face was normal and her hair was normal and she was not made of blood and monster parts just yet. There was a singer, a band, a fire. Smoke and flames curled around them like a hand closing into a fist. The blaze almost swept them, but Jennifer moved faster through the bathroom window. When she got out, she could hardly see. She was still coughing, eyes red and stinging, when they took her — when they took Needy. "Do you remember that?" Her warm hand is on Needy’s ice cold one, but she doesn’t shrink or shudder. She holds her tightly, like she’s afraid Needy will drift away again. Or maybe she’s afraid Needy will recoil. Afraid of the possibility of hard venom and cold blame.

In, out: Needy steadies. Outside of Jennifer’s window, the world holds its breath. Birds stop whispering, trees stand in their place with no more wind to toss them about. She watches the houses across the street, still and silent pictures of humanity.

"I remember after."

"After?"

Needy tells her.

She convinces herself that she’ll omit some details, the ones that shape it into something more supernatural, but once she starts she can’t stop. It’s like puking all over again. She talks about the waxing moon, the bark, the chanting, the eyes, the feeling of the knife reaching into her guts like an animal burrowing in and out. She talks about waking up, ravenous and delirious and terrified, staggering weakly down a black road.

"Oh, come on, Anita."

There are tears in her eyes. "What?" she croaks.

"You expect me to believe that they Scream-ed up your guts and somehow you’re here, alive in front of me, right now? Like, I know you said it was occult shit but, for real?" Needy sniffs. Neither pity nor terror. "You sound like that batshit, white-trash bible-basher who stands by the waterfall talking all that crap about the ‘end times’!" She wriggles her fingers at Needy, laughing as if there were something to laugh about. But as Needy stays silent, a steady stream of tears dripping slowly down her cheeks, Jennifer ceases her amusement. "What the Hell, Needy. Do you seriously believe they... did that?"

It just floods out. She can’t stop it if she tries. "I ate Ahmet."

"You what?" Jennifer lets go of her hand, clings to the pillow again and tucks her legs up. Her head rests on her knees. The warmth is gone.

Needy looks away. "I ate Ahmet, okay? He was alone and burned a little bit and I was so, so hungry and he smelled... I don’t know. Like nothing else could fill me but eating him—"

"Look, is this some, like, poetic metaphor for fucking? I swear Needy, you’ve been spending way too much time with that weird corpse-fucker Calvin, or was it Colin?"

"No, Jennifer, oh my God! I ate him! I ripped his face off with my fucking teeth, I—"

"Whoa, F-bomb from Little Miss National Merit Scholar!"

"Jennifer, shut up!"

Until it comes out of her mouth she doesn’t even register that she had even thought it. She’s never told Jennifer to shut up before. At least, not like that, anyway. There was a playful ‘shut up’ when she said something mocking but funny, a serious ‘shut up’ hidden under a lighthearted tone when she said something mocking and decidedly unfunny. But this ‘shut up’ was full of malice and frustration and exhaustion. Worry bursts in Needy’s chest, but it evaporates quickly as it grows. She means it. She won’t take it back.

Jennifer has a choice. "You really ate Ahmet?" Her tone is soft, words a rare type of considerate for Jennifer. She yields under her own hierachy. She choses Needy.

Though Needy knows it happened — she ate Ahmet — hearing someone else say it aloud makes it tangible in a way it wasn’t before. His blood on her tongue, his skin lining her full stomach. His heart tasted like heat. She sobs. "I did—" She can hardly stutter out the words. "—I really did."

For a moment, Jen goes silent. Needy braces for the worst: fear, disgust, everything one would expect when telling your best friend you’re a novice flesh-eating monster. But it never comes. Instead, Jennifer’s fingers flex, her muscles rigid, face shadowy and contorted under the dim, yellowish light of her bedside lamp. Her voice, when she finally speaks, is full of fury. "They killed you." Even amongst her anger, the words sound so easy when Jennifer says them. Like it’s a real thing, her murder. Then again, Needy supposes, it is. Jennifer turns to her. Though Needy doesn’t remember the fire yesterday, she thinks it must have looked something like the inferno, wild and frenzied, currently thrashing in Jennifer’s pale eyes. "Those tacky, indie, wannabe-Nirvana assholes killed you."

Real, genuine laughter escapes Needy’s throat amidst her sobs, and Jennifer smiles softly. With her newly acquired, unusual hesitance, Jennifer winds her arms around Needy and pulls her against her. It’s almost like they’re kids again and Needy’s in tears because she was supposed to be home by five, but it’s already five-fifteen, except they aren’t kids anymore. In fact, Needy might not even be Needy anymore. Might not even be human. Yet Jennifer’s hold, Jennifer’s soft hair against her cheek, Jennifer’s scent — fruity and enticing and familiar — ground Needy, allow her to forget everything else, even only for a few minutes.

She stops crying. The world breathes again; a gull cries out, rain starts to patter like tiny feet against the window. Needy breathes too and immediately all the anxieties flood in once more. She really ate Ahmet. "How are you okay with this?"

"Uh, Needs, more brain damage or what? I’m not okay with it. Those total fucking d-bags—"

"Not them, me!"

At once, Jennifer pulls back, and Needy fears she’s misstepped. "Why wouldn’t I be?"

Though before the answer seemed obvious — why would you be? — Jennifer’s assuredness knocks the wind and the reason from her. Why wouldn’t she be? She’s a cannibal now, sure, but what other choice did she have? Um, I don’t know, maybe don’t munch on the foreign exchange student in the middle of the road when he’s just trying to get home?

Jennifer pokes her head and knocks lightly on her creased forehead. "Hello? Earth to Needy?" she called. "You’re doing that freakish Needy thing where you think too hard and your brows move weirdly like you’re trying to communicate with them. That’s a one-way ticket to wrinkles, AKA premature ageing. Gross."

"Jennifer, I ate Ahmet."

Jennifer shakes her head like she’d just told her she ate the last yogurt or something. "So?"

"So? I’m a literal cannibal!"

Somehow, Jennifer always has the ability to make everything sound sane and sensible; even the most outlandish concepts sound perfectly digestible leaving her lips. "Listen, I’m not some Hot Topic batcaver but it’s kind of obvious that that freaky band of freaks did some fucking freaky supernatural shit to make you... like this, and—" Jennifer’s eyes narrow in calculation. She’s doing that freakish Needy thing, now. After seconds pass, her eys widen. One of her hands is back on Needy’s — a beacon of heat, tethering her to reality. "Needy, it’s not your fault." Carefully, she slips her other hand against Needy’s cheek and slides her fingers under her earlobe. Her nails graze Needy’s neck and her thumb works small circles across her skin. Needy knows she’s cold as a corpse — Hell, she practically is a corpse — yet Jennifer doesn’t even flinch. "They fucked you up, Needs."

The tears she thought she’d run out of swarmed her again, stinging her eyes. That they have, she thinks. They lets the tears run their course.

"You’re not a monster, Needy. We can fix this."

From anyone else, Needy would have thought it was a joke, an admirable but futile attempt at coaxing amusement or hope from her. But Jennifer is different. Jennifer always gets what she wants. Shit, she’d kick God in His balls if it gave her something she was after. Everything in this world, one way or another, bends to her will. So Needy — despite it all — laughs into Jennifer’s warm palm. Kisses the soft skin there, timidly, pretends not to notice how all Jennifer’s features come undone with tenderness, and issues a quiet but firm, "Okay."

Later that night, she and Jen are back at her house. There’s no sign of her mom save for her work bag half-unpacked on the kitchen counter; Jennifer swipes a packet of cigarettes that spilled onto the table, but doesn’t manage to pocket them before Needy chastises her and she reluctantly puts them back.

"You don’t even smoke," she says from behind the fridge door. She’s hungry, but not hungry — not yet at least — and there’s nothing appetising enough in the fridge to fill the growing void in her stomach. "You say smoking is for people—"

"Who want janky-ass, piss-yellow teeth and corpse skin." With a sigh, Jennifer deposits herself on a chair behind Needy. "No offence."

In response, Needy hums. After a few more moments of rummaging and re-arranging — why would you put the butter in the vegetable drawer? — she slams the fridge door shut with a dissatisfied groan.

"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

Needy sinks to the linoleum and crosses her legs, growing increasingly too tired to move. After a moment, Jennifer stands back up and grabs the cigarettes. She flicks open the carton and runs her hot-pink nails across the tips. "They might come in handy."

"For?" Full sentences require energy she just doesn’t have.

Jennifer props herself against the counter by her elbows. Behind her, the kitchen window sits ajar. Wind flutters in, gracefully touselling her dark hair. Even nature seems to obey by Jennifer’s rules of beauty. "Obviously my powers of seduction are like, crazy-strong."

Needy snorts, picking at the loose seams in her jeans."Obviously."

"But certain people might be more swayed by... material possessions, rather than moi."

It’s times like this when Needy sees Jennifer for what she is. Clever, scheming, solitary. Too much goes on in that lonely head of hers. She has a plan, but for what, Needy doesn’t know. "I’m guessing this involves a plan for something?"

Jennifer’s eyes take on a dangerous glint. "You need food, right?" Though it’s just the two of them, she inclines her head in secrecy. Still shaking off the last vestiges of shame, Needy flushes and nods quickly as if trying to get the conversation over with as fast as possible. "Don’t get me wrong, I’m not doubting your sex appeal, Needy—" Needy rolls her eyes. "—I just want to lift some weight off your shoulders. You know, do some of the work for you. So I figured I would, like, lure them out with my beauty and charm and stuff, and then you would pounce like a wolf or something and do your face-eating thing and, boom! It’s done! Well, until you get hungry again, obvs."

That familiar doubt and confusion is welling up again — the: so you’re just okay with this? — but she swallows it down. They have to be okay with it. She doesn’t want to know what would happen if she doesn’t feast. Something tells her it will be much worse than yesterday’s hunger pangs. Can she die for a second time? Probably, she surmises, and it would likely be infinitely more painful than before. So Needy inclines her head and aims for humour. "I’m sure nobody would be able to resist you, Jen."

Jennifer flicks her hair. "Flatterer. But some would," she says suggestively. Needy can tell she’s veering into gossip. "Like Leland Crossley."

"Leland Crossley?" Needy rifles through her memory for a Leland Crossley; that night has given her perpetual brain fog over the smaller things, and things move slower upstairs now than before where importance isn’t concerned. "Track team Leland Crossley?"

"Duh, the only Leland Crossley in the school." Jennifer pockets the cigarettes and makes her way over to Needy, offering out her hand. "Up," she orders. Needy complies, letting Jen pull her upright. She stumbles for a moment and Jen steadies her, holding her firm by the arms.

"But hasn’t he dated literally every girl in school?"

"Right, I know. But like—" she makes a show of pretending to scan the air as if it were a person, waving an invisible detector over them. She pauses and emits a sudden, off-key beeping sound and Needy laughs, unabashed. "Total gaydar alert, right?"

She’s still laughing as they trudge together upstairs. Their pace is slow because every part of Needy feels like a heavy weight. "What? No. Not him."

Needy can hear the smile in Jennifer’s voice, tinged with laughter. "Oh, definitely him. Him and Craig... more than a bromance there. I thought at least you would be able to tell, Lesbo-nicky."

Outside of her room, hand on the doorhandle, she pauses and throws an unimpressed glare over her shoulder at Jennifer, who smirks innocently. "Don’t call me that. And no, he’s—" She stammers, blushes. "—Had sex with half the population of the town. Moms and all."

Jennifer laughs like she didn’t expect to and pulls of her coat, folding it and placing it on Needy’s dresser. "True. He is a total man-slut. I swear its like the ocean in his junk or something."

Brows wrinkling, Needy reaches up to draw closed her bedroom curtains. The movement elicits a sharp pain in her stomach. A familiar pain. No. She pushes it down, swallowing. "What, like he’s... wet?"

"No, he has crabs, duh. Well, either that or like mutant junk." The sound of clothes crinkling. Needy blushes and peels back the curtain with a single finger, focusing on the smudged, pale grey sky through a smatter of raindrops that lay still on her window. She can’t look behind her. (Well, maybe she could, but she won’t.) "Like imagine his dick is so sick that it can like speak. He takes off his pants and it’s green and all—" Jennifer puts on the creaking voice of an old man. "—‘Needy Lesnicky, please help me’" That rouses laughter from Needy. She shakes her head, at once forgetting the momentary flashes of hunger and embarassment. "‘Needy take me to the hospital. My life depends on it. My sperm is dying, Needy.’"

In a moment of forgetfullness, Needy turns around to playfully chastise Jennifer and finds Jennifer in a state of undress. It’s not like she hasn’t seen her half-naked before, but this... this is different. Then, they were fourteen and Needy was all pudgy softness (most of which she still hasn’t dropped) and Jennifer was childishly thin and angular, made of bone and lean sinew. But years have given her best friend a womanly shape: a perfectly sloped stomach, legs long and just thick enough, delicate collarbones and a gently curved waist. Needy has always known that Jennifer is beautiful where she’s plain and juvenile, yet she’s never felt there were competition between them. It’s something distinctly different, something that warms her chest and leaves her mind buzzing. Something she didn’t want to confront then and still doesn’t now.

"Stare much?" Jennifer says, but her usual sarcasm is misplaced — only a low, indiscernible tone is left. A palpable sensation stretches between them, bordering on tension, only less firm. It feels like it might just snap, and for some reason Needy gets the feeling that wouldn’t be good. Or it might, but it’s still brewing, unready. Before she can speak, a second pang strikes her and her stomach. So she shakes her head, mutters an apology and alights on the edge of her bed, curling into herself.

The only sounds in the silence are the gentle swishing of Needy’s stomach and the rustle of fabric from the corner as Jennifer dresses hastily. Soon she’s sprawled herself beside Needy, stretching to lay on her back. She wears one of Needy’s old tank tops and a pair of sweatpants, and the top rides up to show her pierced bellybutton, the deep red gem gleaming under lamplight.

(Through the fog, a memory emerges. She was thirteen and trying to seem grown up, and Jennifer was thirteen and always succeeded effortlessly at being grown up. Her step-mom accompanied them to the mall. Jen didn’t cry or scream. She said it felt like a pinch, and pinched Needy’s own bellybutton to demonstrate. "You should get one," she coaxed. Needy looked at the youthful bulge of her stomach. She never did.)

"Are you gonna change or what? I’m not a creep, so I won’t watch you, zombie girl. I promise."

"Don’t call me that," she says half-heartedly. While it is true she changed in darkness yesterday, she still felt it — some kind of ridge in her front, a thick and protruding scar that trails from her navel all the way up to the valley between her breasts. Jennifer is perfect, all hairless and pale, unblemished skin, like something ripped out of the cover of a magazine or every person’s fantasy; Needy, as much as she hates it, is just a girl — zombie girl. But she’s too tired and hungry to put up a fight, too tired and hungry for shame or guilt or whatever it is she’s supposed to be feeling.

"Okay," she says resignedly, and her fingers dive for the edges of her shirt. But she can’t seem to properly grasp it. Her fine motor skills seem to have escaped her, and her fingers can barely bend enough to hook the fabric. Instead, they brush the hem lightly in her attempts to pull it up. Though she means to groan, she ends up crying out in dejection.

Jennifer sits up. "Needy, what is it?"

"I can’t—" she sighs. "I—" She feels a baby, on the brink of tears once more. She doesn’t remember the last time she saw Jennifer cry.

Jennifer slides off the bed and kneels in front of Needy, rests her palms on Needy’s knees, the heat from her skin warming her bones. "Come on then, senile Anita. Arms up!" Jennifer grins, though Needy can tell it’s tinged with sadness. She complies anyway, raising her arms so Jennifer can yank her shirt over her head. The collar gets stuck on her hair, then her glasses, but they manage it in the end. With more care than she affords even her own things, Jennifer folds it and sits it neatly on Needy’s pillow, tucking in the loose bits on the side.

Needy doesn’t dare look down at herself, to see what those men made of her, and a part of her itches to grab that shirt and stuff it back on. But she knows it wouldn’t matter, really. The scar wouldn’t magically vanish.

So she tucks her arms across her midsection, hiding what she assumes is the worst of it, and as Jennifer turns back to her she shrinks even smaller. Jennifer — perfect, airbrushed Jennifer — strokes Needy’s arms, pries them gently away from her stomach, and Needy doesn’t have the strength to resist. Soon her hands are hanging limp at her sides, her scar bared to the night and to Jennifer. She shudders in equal parts fear and relief. Something warm and soft meets her stomach, trails down lightly to her own bellybutton. It’s Jennifer, her mouth laying light kisses across the landscape of violence on her front.

And Needy, for all her upset, stares down. Jennifer’s eyes are inscrutable, big, but not cold. For once there is no jest in her words, no embellishment, no front.

She’s all heart.

"Do you want to kill them?"

The answer should be easy. They killed her. She should want them to know what it feels like: under their ribs, into their bellies. She should want them to stay dead. But does she?

"I want them to hurt," she says, but it isn’t killing. She thinks of her own heart falling from her chest. "I want them to feel the way they made me feel."

So she doesn’t really answer the question, but it’s okay because Jennifer doesn’t press her further. Her slender hahds slip off Needy’s shoes, her jeans, unhook her bra; slide on one of her mom’s old shirts and a pair of shorts. They clamber into bed side-by-side and Needy’s stomach swells and cries. Jennifer shifts, slings a tanned leg across Needy’s own, tugs her closer. She buries her head in the juncture of Needy’s neck.

On the edge of sleep: "Your heartbeat." Her voice is quiet. "I can’t hear it."

"They took it," Needy whispers. "They took my heart."