Inhabited - chapter 16 (with images) (Patreon)

The room dissolves slowly this time. No violent slam, no sensory shutter. The walls just go white from the edges in, like a Polaroid in reverse, and gravity goes after them.

Then she reaches up. The hands are different. Longer fingers, a thin silver ring on the right index finger.

The room is dark. Cold air. The faint smell of cardboard and old radiator heat.

She is sitting upright on a sofa, the cushion firm under her, the fabric rough against the backs of her thighs. The console in the corner casts a weak green glow across the floorboards.

She waits for the nausea.

For the last three days nausea had been the central organizing principle of her existence. A hot, sour wave at the back of her throat every time she moved too fast, every time some smell hit her sideways.

Nothing happens.

The stomach is just a stomach. Air goes all the way down into the bottom of her lungs without snagging on a reflex. The pregnancy soreness, the one that made her wince whenever she crossed her arms or rolled over in the night. Gone. She pulls in a long breath and lets it out. She is light-headed with how easy it is. She isn’t pregnant. She isn’t Meg.

She is somewhere else.

The knowledge surfaces the way a memory does, unsummoned.

Maren Jones. Thirty-eight. Hoboken. High school history teacher.

And Brigid’s wife.

She stops breathing. Sits perfectly still on the rough sofa.

She is inside the woman Brigid has been fighting a cold war with. The woman Brigid is separated from, eight months into a fracture neither of them has managed to fix or finish. She has sat across café tables from Brigid and watched the guarded, tight edge enter her voice whenever the past brushed up against the investigation. She knows Maren is the source of that edge.

Now she is sitting inside the origin point. She sighs, pulls the blanket close, goes back to sleep.

She wakes properly some time later. Gray pre-dawn light through the blinds. She sits up. The knees pop, a dry cracking sound in the quiet room.

The body is taller than Meg’s, older than Cara’s. The center of gravity sits higher. It’s a capable body, but carries a different kind of history. A dull, established ache along the lower lumbar spine, the receipt of fifteen years spent standing on hard linoleum, holding a room.

She looks around the apartment. Streetlights bleed through horizontal blinds, casting thin yellow stripes across the walls.

One bedroom. It doesn’t feel like someone lives here yet. Three taped cardboard boxes in the corner by the window, stacked in a way that suggests they were set down with intention and not touched since. The walls are bare. Not minimalist, just bare. There are nail holes in the off-white paint, small dark marks where things used to hang. Someone else’s things, maybe, or Maren’s things she hasn’t decided yet whether to put back up.

The console in the corner sits on the floor beside one of the taped boxes. It’s plugged in but not on a desk. Provisional. Like everything else.

She walks to the bathroom. Feet cold on the wood.

The fluorescent bulb flickers once before it holds.

She looks in the mirror. Light brown hair, cut practically to the collarbone. Fine lines around the mouth from smiling, though the face isn’t smiling now. Dark eyes. A steadiness in them that isn’t contentment, just endurance.

She strips off the oversized t-shirt and shorts and leaves them on the tile floor.

This body is softer around the edges than Cara’s tightly managed frame. When she leans forward they shift in a way Cara’s never would have, settling lower, and the nipples are already up from the cold bathroom air. The hips are wider. There’s a give at the waistband when she pulls her hands away from her sides, soft skin moving against her own forearm. A small, faded scar runs along the top of her left thigh. She can’t recall its story. Just the fact of it.

She opens the medicine cabinet.

A row of small brown prescription bottles, half of them the same medication in different refill dates. Maren refills early, keeps a buffer, the way organized people do. A tube of something for eczema, mostly used. Dental floss. Two different moisturizers, one for face and one presumably for body, neither labeled. A contact lens case probably empty, a nearly spent tube of lip balm, an old eyelash curler. She picks up one of the prescription bottles and reads the label. Sertraline, 50mg. Once daily. She sets it back in line with the others, parallel.

Below the sink: a cardboard box of pantyliners pushed to the back, behind a box of tampons and a heating pad still in its packaging. The heating pad has never been opened. She tries to decide if that’s an optimistic purchase or a pessimistic one and can’t.

She stops.

There’s a low awareness she’s been learning to read across each new body. A diffuse warmth, a slight fullness, something she’s gradually mapped to where in the cycle she is. With Cara it had been a dull weight, a premenstrual pressure. With Diane something flatter, more neutral. This is different. A faint pulling deep in the low belly, not painful, more like a door slightly open. A thought arrives from the feeling.

Ovulation.

She takes two pantyliners from the box and sets them on the counter. Turns on the shower and waits for the water to come up.

The hot water hits her back and she lets the breath go out of her shoulders. Without Meg's morning sickness, without the cellular wrongness of the first trimester, the shower is just a shower. She'd almost forgotten what that felt like. Steam. Soap. The pull of thick hair when it's wet and you're trying to work product through to the ends.

She stands under the spray longer than she needs to.

The warmth she'd registered earlier as a faint pulling deep in the low belly is louder under the hot water. A fullness, a low pressure that sits where she's now learning it always sits at this point in the cycle. The nipples are still up, even with the steam warming the air. The water moving over her chest is doing something the water did not do in any of the previous bodies. A different kind of awake. Something near sensitivity but not quite there yet, just the dial turned up a click.

She rinses the conditioner out and tips her face up into the water.

Her hand goes to her stomach, low, just under the navel, and presses there gently. The body answers. A small, unmistakable yes. Not an invitation. The body just confirming what she already knows. This is what it feels like when the body wants something. When the body is asking.

She takes her hand off her stomach. Watches the water pool around the drain. Not now, not yet.

She turns the water off and stands there dripping for a few seconds before she pushes the curtain aside and reaches for the towel.

The closet is soft cardigans and tailored slacks and flat shoes with good arch support. Nothing delicate. A wardrobe for surviving a high school. She pulls out dark gray trousers and a thin navy sweater, then opens the underwear drawer. Two clear categories in there. The everyday cotton ones and a small stack of nicer things, silk and lace, pushed to the back as if they’d been there before the separation and nobody’s moved them. She leaves those alone.

She puts a pantyliner in a fresh pair of underwear before she pulls them on. She’s used to having to look at what she’s doing. A constant unfamiliarity. Now it’s becoming habit. Another small piece of practical knowledge she didn’t have six bodies ago.

The bra goes on next. She reaches back and hooks it on the first try. The muscle memory she didn't have a week ago. The wire settles into the crease below her ribs. She adjusts both cups and pulls the sweater over her head.

The three-inch binder sits on the small dining table that doubles as a desk, its cover worn and the paper edges soft with handling.

She opens it. Meticulous typewritten lesson plans with handwritten annotations in blue ink down the margins. Period two: The Pullman Strike of 1894. Period three: Prep. Period four: Review session for the sophomore midterm. The entire week is locked down into forty-five-minute blocks. She runs her hand over the tabbed dividers. It is the work of someone who needs absolute structure to keep the rest of her life from bleeding in.

The microwave clock says six-forty.

She makes coffee. Finds the beans, grinds them, the noise violent in the quiet apartment. Drinks it standing at the counter, looking at the blank wall above the sink. There’s a single magnet on the fridge, holding nothing. From somewhere. A city she visited and forgot.

She packs the binder into the leather messenger bag, puts on the long wool coat and scarf, locks the door behind her.

The walk to the school takes twenty minutes. The Hoboken air is brittle, wind cutting off the Hudson and biting at her cheekbones. Maren’s stride is long, efficient. She doesn’t have to manage the waterlogged shuffle that had dragged Meg through every day. This body runs on a different kind of tired. Thin, alert, the baseline adrenaline of someone who has to go stand in front of thirty teenagers and perform authority for six hours and knows it.

A man walks a golden retriever past her. Doesn’t look at her.

She’s been noticing this. The threat-monitoring that ran constantly in Cara and Diane (the shoulder-draw, the tracking of footsteps, her route bending around whoever was ahead of her) is quieter here. Maren is thirty-eight in a thick coat and flat shoes and she projects something. Competence, maybe. Worn-in authority. The street doesn’t make claims on her the way it made claims on a twenty-four-year-old in Cara’s body. It might also just be the cold. Hard to say.

The school is a sprawling brick building, a city block. It smells of industrial floor wax and damp wool and bleach.

She navigates the hallways without thinking, steering past the cafeteria and up a flight of stairs. The noise is a physical thing. Lockers slamming, overlapping shouting, the thud of backpacks. Cheap body spray and something sweet, probably someone’s breakfast.

Room 214 is empty. The fluorescent lights buzz.

She drops the messenger bag on the desk at the front, takes off her coat, drapes it over the chair. Fifteen minutes before the bell. She opens the binder to the Pullman Strike and reads through Maren’s notes. The historical facts she can reach without effort, but facts aren’t teaching. She remembers Nadia’s office, the way she’d miscalibrated the authority there, pressing too hard instead of guiding. A classroom is the same problem scaled up.

The warning bell rings. Loud, an electronic buzz that hums in her back teeth.

They pour in. Twenty-eight sophomores. Loud, completely unbothered by her presence, dropping bags on the floor, pulling phones out. The energy in the room is feral.

She doesn’t ask for quiet. She walks around to the front of the desk, leans against the edge, and crosses her arms. She understands Maren’s technique from inside it now, from the hands and the set of the shoulders, the small authority of not-yet-speaking.

She waits.

Forty seconds. One by one they notice the silence. Conversations trail off. Phones slide under thighs. A girl in the front row stops twisting a strand of hair around her finger and looks up.

“Good morning,“ she says. Maren’s voice is clear, pitched to reach the back wall without yelling. Just expectation in it. Nothing else.

“Morning, Ms. Jones,“ a few of them mumble.

“George Pullman built a town for his workers,“ she begins, pushing off the desk. “He owned their houses. He owned the grocery store. He owned the library. Then in 1894 the economy tanked. He cut their wages by a third. But he didn’t lower the rent on the houses he owned.“

She walks down the center aisle. The slacks swish quietly against her legs.

“Imagine your boss cuts your pay, but your landlord - who is also your boss - demands the exact same rent on the first of the month. What do you do?“

She catches herself doing something she hadn’t consciously decided to do: pitching the voice a note or two lower than she’d naturally started, keeping it from climbing when a kid in the back row starts talking to the kid next to him. She stops mid-sentence. Looks at him. Doesn’t say anything. He physically shrinks and puts his head down on his desk. The room stays very still for a moment.

She keeps going.

She runs the forty-five minutes on instinct and the binder. It mostly holds. One moment a boy in the third row says something quiet to the girl beside him and she sees, feels, actually, in Maren’s posture, her own attention cut sideways to it without her choosing. She isn’t watching her own back wall. She is watching the room’s temperature. It’s exhausting in a way she hadn’t expected, this continuous, invisible peripheral scan.

She keeps pitching her voice low and flat, dropping a register when a kid by the window starts laughing at something on his phone, not stopping, just lowering the tone, and the room feels the change before any individual person does. She doesn’t know if she’s doing this or Maren is. The boundary is getting blurry.

A boy in the front row is looking at her sweater. Not her face. She pulls the hem down a quarter inch by reflex, the small adjustment happening before any decision. Then she continues talking about the Pullman Strike, about Eugene Debs and the railroad workers, and she does not look at the boy again because looking at him would make it a thing.

This is what fifteen years in a high school looks like from inside it. The continuous calculation. Every movement watched, assessed, used. She’d thought teaching was about holding authority. She hadn’t understood it was also about being watched, constantly, and having to decide every few minutes what to do with that.

Period three is prep. The room empties. The radiator under the window clanks, a metallic rhythmic banging that fills the silence.

She sits heavily in the chair behind the desk and presses her knuckles into the lower back. The ovulatory warmth she’d noticed this morning is just slightly louder than it was. Not painful. A kind of fullness in the low pelvis she’s learning to read. She’ll need to check the pantyliner before the next period.

The phone vibrates.

Ros: Thinking about you. Hope the sophomores aren’t wild today. Dinner later? Thai?

The name on the screen. Ros.

Her chest opens a fraction before she's read the words a second time. A small warmth low in her belly that wasn't there a moment ago.

She doesn’t type back. Not yet.

The shape of the relationship surfaces. A few months in. Remembers Maren’s coffee order. Texts in the middle of the day. And Maren finds it slightly suffocating. The marriage to Brigid is still the largest thing in the apartment, taking up most of the available room, and Ros’s constant attentive hovering is like someone trying to wrap a blanket around a person who is still trying to figure out which direction to run.

She looks at the phone. She doesn’t have the emotional history to draw on. Just the surface tension and the mild guilt Maren feels when she doesn’t reply fast enough.

Me: Surviving the sophomores. Rain check? Tired today.

She sets the phone face down and pulls a blank sheet of printer paper from the tray.

She needs to think through what she has. Michael Osei’s name. Ruth’s routing rule syntax. The shadow-banning directive. She takes a pen.

She draws a box for the intake server, a line down to the null bucket. Brackets the token refresh cycle off to the side. The secondary port routing is where the door gives. If the legacy key is old enough that nobody’s watching it, the spoofing should work. A second arrow, then a third. The shape of the thing is clean once you can see it.

She folds the paper and puts it in her pocket.

The check-in tomorrow. Brigid will be in Greenpoint, expecting a stranger.

She won’t be expecting Maren.

The dread settles low in her sternum. Maren’s grief and her own anxiety are not easy to tell apart in here. She has to go. She can’t skip the check-in. She just has to walk in wearing this face and watch Brigid’s composure come apart and put it back together and work through it. There is no other option.

The bell rings.

She stands, smooths the front of the sweater, and goes back around the desk to wait for the juniors.

Period four. Period five. Lunch duty in the cafeteria, standing near the double doors while four hundred teenagers generate enough noise to be felt in the sternum. Institutional pizza, spilled milk. Her lower back tightens into a block of wood by two o’clock.

By the final bell at three-fifteen the exhaustion is different from anything in Meg’s body. Not the heavy cellular depletion of the first trimester. This is abrasive, vocal-cord-fraying, the tiredness of performing authority for six hours in a room that required it every minute.

She packs the binder into the bag, puts the coat back on, turns off the lights.

Outside, the afternoon light is a bruised gray. Wind pushing trash down Washington Street. The cold cuts through the slacks and bites at her shins on the walk back.

She goes to the bathroom when she gets home. There’s discharge on the pantyliner, clear and slippery, threading between her fingers when she checks, more than she’d noticed before. The fertile window. She changes to a fresh one, washes her hands, stands looking at herself in the mirror for a moment. The face looks tired. It’s a tired she recognizes.

She drops the messenger bag by the door, hangs up the coat, and lies down on the unmade bed. Stares at the ceiling. The mattress is firm, the sheets tangled around her ankles. The light fades. Off-white walls going flat gray.

The boxes in the corner are still taped. She looks at them for a while. One is labeled in Sharpie in Maren’s own fast handwriting: Brigid’s, return? The question mark doesn’t seem like something Maren added consciously. It seems like it just happened at the end of her pen and she left it.

A few blocks away a car alarm starts up and then quits. She lets Maren’s silence settle over her.