Recoveries Read online

  “You hated being in jail. You hated being on probation.”

  “That won’t happen again.”

  “How do you know that? You can’t know that.”

  Vanessa waves her hand dismissively; she can’t know, but she doesn’t care. She just wants to feel the booze sliding down her throat. She’s ruled by her craving. You know the feeling. There’s nothing you can say, and the train’s at your stop anyway. The two of you get out and trudge up the stairs, Vanessa a few feet ahead of you because she’s so much taller. You glance at your watch: 11:30.

  In the apartment, you ease off your backpack as Vanessa hurls herself into her bedroom and slams the door. You hear her rattling through her closet, hear bureau drawers opening and closing. When she comes out again, she’s wearing a slinky red dress and high heels.

  “It’s 11:45,” she says. “It will take me five minutes to walk to the bar. So I guess I have to listen to you lecture me for another ten minutes, right?”

  “Right,” you say, and hold up the can of beer you’ve been lugging around in your backpack all day. Vanessa blinks, clearly startled. She forces a smile. You’re her surrogate parent now; she’s relying on you for the disapproval she could never get from her actual parents. You wonder why you’ve never realized this before.

  She stares at the beer. “Is that for me, Kat?” Her voice is shaky. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “I didn’t,” you tell her, and pop the tab and down the can in one gulp, the same way you did on that night in the woods fourteen years ago. Vanessa gapes.

  “Kat?”

  Alcohol’s a disinhibitor. You let go, unclench, and watch yourself reflected in the apartment windows. You’re seeing what she sees. Your limbs turn green and knobbed; your signature black cotton clothing distorts because now it’s draped over too many joints; your eyes expand, huge and faceted. That’s as far as it’s ever gone before, but tonight, hoping you’ll still be able to call it back, you let it go a little further. You grow mandibles. Your hands become claws.

  “You’re not drunk yet,” you tell her, forcing English words through this new anatomy. Each syllable blends with clicks and chirps. You hope she can understand you. “You’re really seeing this. It happened on your fourteenth birthday too, when I chugged that beer, and I was so relieved when you didn’t remember it, because I was afraid you’d hate me if I showed you that you were wrong about your parents. Aliens are real. I don’t know if I’m the same kind who picked them up. I don’t even know if that’s really what happened to them. But it’s certainly possible, okay? They weren’t telling those stories to hide drinking, and you don’t have to drink to feel connected to them.”

  Vanessa, who sat down very suddenly on the couch at the beginning of this speech, whimpers. You take a step closer, every part of your body screaming in pain, yearning to transform further. You don’t let it.

  This is the hardest thing you’ve ever done.

  “Now you know why I’m so fascinated by changeling stories. You think you don’t fit in? Cry me a river. I’d give anything to have a group like you do. I’d give anything to be able to say, ‘My name’s Kat, and I’m an extraterrestrial who got left here by my parents and left behind again when they picked up my best friend’s parents and couldn’t bother with me.’ You think you’ve got abandonment issues, Vanessa? Get in line.”

  You take another step, and Van shrinks into the back of the couch. “And you know why I’d love a group like that, aside from the fact that I’m horribly lonely? You know why I always eat salad and fucking protein powder even though they make me sick and I hate them? You know why they make me sick? They make me sick because you aren’t the ultimate carnivore, Vanessa. I am. I’ve wanted meat every second I’ve been aware, and not just any meat. Not cow meat. Human flesh. You. My parents must have loved me, because they left me somewhere with lots and lots of food. And the whole time you’ve known me, I’ve never let myself eat it.”

  A third step. Vanessa’s eyes are almost as big as yours now. She fumbles in her bag for her phone, and you force yourself to start turning back. “Van,” you say, and she looks up. “Van, I’m changing back. I’m going to be the Kat you’ve always known. Don’t call anybody, okay? I’m not going to eat anybody, and I don’t want to be dissected. That’s why I never told your parents or the others what I was. I didn’t want them to worship me. I didn’t want them to put me in a lab. I didn’t want to eat them.”

  She blinks. You force yourself back into fully human form, or as fully human as your form gets. You know she’ll never look at you the same way again. You know there’s no going back from what you’ve just done. You take a deep breath. “So, listen, you think you have trouble with your cravings? Well, so do I, and I have a lot less support than you do, and I’ve stayed vegan one lousy second at a time because I don’t want to hurt people who’ve tried to help me, because this is where I live. Okay? If I can stay abstinent, so can you. But if you drink, I will too. We both fall off the wagon together. Deal?” You see her swallow. “So do the right thing, Van, because now there’s a lot more at stake than your individual life. For all you know, you could be saving the entire planet.”

  She nods jerkily. The beer’s churning in your stomach. “I have to throw up now,” you say. “Excuse me.” You run into the bathroom, certain that you’ll be left behind again, that Vanessa’s fled the apartment, that she’s calling someone even now—as you heave and puke—and that you’ll live the rest of your life, however long that is, as a science experiment.

  But when you emerge from the bathroom, she’s waiting for you, standing with crossed arms, and once again you’re amazed by her courage. “You must have done it sometime,” she says. “Eaten, the, you know, meat. The whole time I’ve known you, you said, but you must have before that. Or you wouldn’t know. Would you?” Sometimes Van’s smart even when she’s not drunk. You look away, and she says, “Fair’s fair. You know everything about me.”

  You stare out the window over her left shoulder. “The first pediatrician. And that foster mother. And the nurse in the room. Of course the exam turned up abnormalities, so I acted in self-defense. I was just a baby. It’s a pretty famous unsolved case: four people, three adults and an infant, missing from a clinic, never seen again. You can find it if you do an internet search.”

  Vanessa shakes her head. “If you were just a baby, how—”

  “I grew. That’s what eating meat does. I was a baby and then after I ate I was what I am now, more or less. I haven’t changed much the whole time you’ve known me, right?” She shakes her head. “Yeah, so. I got into the hall—no one saw me leave the room—and then I just walked out of the building. I used the money from my foster mother’s wallet to hop a bus east.” You look back at her. “I have no idea what I’d turn into if I ate more.”

  “Vanished,” she says, her voice tight. “No bodies?” You can’t answer. All that blood and bone and flesh; you ate it all. Not a speck of any of those three people was left in the room. Vanessa shudders. “My parents vanished. Do you think—”

  “I don’t know,” you tell her, although you’ve thought about it. “I don’t think so, Van. I mean, they’d had some kind of contact before that, right? They knew it was coming. We don’t warn our meals.”

  Vanessa lets out a long breath. After a moment she says, “Well, I hope you’re right, even though I figured they had to be dead.” And then, cautiously, “It wasn’t you, right?”

  You recoil. “God no! No, Vanessa! I was the same before and after your parents disappeared, right? I’d have changed.”

  She nods, seems to accept this. “Do you think they came in a spaceship, or—”

  “I don’t know. I figure if it or they were still here, if they were meat-eaters like me, we’d have heard a bunch of horror stories. More missing people. So maybe a spaceship, if they were meat-eaters. Either way, they wanted nothing to do with me.”

  “Shit,” Vanessa says. “That hurts. I’m sorry.”

  “I’
m not. I mean, I kind of am. I was. But now I’m glad. Because I like people.” You’re embarrassed, but it’s true. Those sincere alkies at the meeting, the geeky students in your classes, the checker at the grocery store who frets over how thin you are and keeps asking you whether you have a warm winter coat. Vanessa. “It sounds corny, but I love you guys. I don’t want to eat any of you. I just want to go native, even if I have to live on salad and throw up all the time. I just want to belong.”

  You realize, right then, why you still hang out with Vanessa. You want to save someone, to be the hero instead of the monster. And maybe you want to give her the chance to be a hero, too. You swallow. “You’ll help me, right?”

  A tear slides down her cheek. “Hell, Kat. I’ve never helped anybody. But I will if I can.”

  * * *

  That was years ago. So far, both of you have kept your promises, one lousy second at a time.

  About the Author

  Susan Palwick’s debut novel, Flying in Place, won the Crawford Award for best fantasy debut. Her second novel, The Necessary Beggar, won the American Library Association’s Alex Award. She lives with her husband in Reno, Nevada. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Susan Palwick

  Art copyright © 2018 by Jasu Hu