Boys with Sharp Teeth

by Jenni Howell

The mirror was saved when it should have been damned. So was the boy.

I could be anyone, with this many stories waiting for me. No, even more: I could be so many people, that maybe, just maybe, I could actually find myself.

“Didn’t like Kant?”

“Too much faith in man,” he says. “Hmm.” Breathe. Speak. Don’t scream. “Common failing. He should try woman instead.”

My smile is a grenade with the pin pulled out.

“You don’t sound like bourbon,” Henry says. “More like hollers and moonshine.” I didn’t even think about accents when I wrote that address. Henry’s is old money, sharpened by time and cold northern weather. Mine is all Amberdeen. Sam’s was, too, a voice like syrup on waffles, settling down into all the spaces that are supposed to be between words.

Henry looks at me, eyes wide and alive. If I don’t look away, I’m going to be eaten whole.

Mirrors are eyes stapled open. Ever-seeing, never blinking, there is no rest for their sight.

There, in the hollow curve of his jaw: the blunt-force trauma of her curiosity.

“I think you’d like it,” Henry whispers in my ear. For once, I think he might be right.

“I think, therefore I am. Should we rephrase to No thoughts, brain empty for you all tonight?” Baz says, “It’s the simplest premise. The self, reduced to its most pure form. No body, no senses, no external world. All that can be doubted, is, even the truth of what is being thought, but the fact that something is being thought by someone has to be true if it’s happening.”

How do we know that robots controlling our minds is, in fact, terrible?” “Cinematic lighting,” Henry says.

“Pain proves evil without proving truth. Hmm. I would posit that evil is itself a form of truth—there is no evil without its counterpart. Without good, evil is just reality.”

In searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted.

“That mirror devours. This one merely tastes.”

I know who I am—I don’t know if she’s Jamie or if she’s Marin, but I’m this girl, the one who doesn’t cherish her body, only her mind. The reckless one, the wondering one, always reaching, making others uncomfortable because she sees too much and speaks too freely. The one who hurts too much, feels too much, needs too much, and will take and take and take until there’s nothing left to take and, somehow, I’ll be the girl who’s still empty inside.