Incognita 1 * Incognita 2 * Incognita 3 * Incognita 4

Change is a peculiar thing. When it’s for the worst, it can happen overnight and typically comes in threes, and people learn the folly of security when they watch everything they built so carefully fall apart so easily. When change is for the better, it arrives at a tortoise’s pace. Positive change isn’t measured in leaps and bounds, it’s measured in centimeters, and that’s how it was for Incognita.

Nita was able to fake her way through therapy and she did this after watching a documentary about a Christian camp that tried to use the fear of The Almighty to expunge the gay out of youthful sinners. She was sure that if she were sent to one of these camps that they couldn’t break her, but why go through all that hassle? Besides, what she had wasn’t a same-sex attraction, it was a vibe attraction.

Certain people had a vibe that she was drawn to and she wanted to absorb as much of it as she could and share a bit of herself in the process and she couldn’t give a good goddamn whether they were boys or girls, but how do you explain that to the so-called people in charge who were locked in their binary ways of thinking?

So, Nita just nodded and played along and either she was really good at pulling off her ruse of realizing her mistake and choosing to be normal, or the therapist just didn’t give a fuck and signed off on her. Either way, no more therapy past the apocalypse that was 4^th Grade.

The rest of grade school was more of the same but Nita was developing a thick armor coating and let most of the nonsense slide off her back. Junior high, however, was when things began to turn around. In those three years, Nita honed her skill at fighting back. She lost as many battles as she won, but now the bullies understood there was a fifty-fifty chance of them getting away with a cheap shot or cruel prank, or having Nita explode in their face like a preteen M18 Claymore mine.

High school was when it changed for good, as a result of two physical altercations.

The first happened in the cafeteria when a girl accidentally-on-purpose tripped and tried to spill a milk, corn and applesauce concoction all over Nita’s brand-new jacket. The girl hadn’t counted on Nita’s reflexes being quick enough to grab the tray, tilt it away from her and bring the hard-plastic tray up into the girl’s aquiline nose. The girl fell back and her nose sprayed blood in every direction.

“Oh my god, are you okay?” Nita said, her tone dripping with fake concern. “I think you slipped. Come on, sit up straight. No, no, don’t tilt your head back, that’ll only cause the blood to run down the back of your throat, and you may swallow it. Lean forward slightly.”

Sure, it was a ham-handed performance but it was enough to fool the teachers into thinking it was merely an unfortunate accident. What the teachers hadn’t realized was that Nita recognized the bloody girl as one of the Barbie clones from grade school who probably thought she could carry that Mean Girl shit over to high school.

When the Barbie clone returned to school wearing a nasal cast and sporting two black eyes, Nita leaned in while passing and whispered “Who’s the raccoon now?”

The second incident involved some lunkhead whose name Nita couldn’t remember if someone held a gun to her head, he was that unimportant. He was a grade above her and wanted to show all the fresh meat who was in charge, so he went down the line shoving and intimidating newbies. When he got around to Nita, the idiot actually tried to grab her boobs, but she put a stop to that quick fast in a hurry with a rabbit punch to his solar plexus. Knocked the wind right out of the dumb bastard and he crumpled like a paper bag. Nita could have told him to sit in a crouched position, calm down and take slow, deep breaths, but instead she stood over him and laughed like a loon before eventually walking away.

No. One. Messed. With. Her. After. That. Day.

Word quickly went around that sure, you could take a swing at the chubby girl if you wanted to, but the chubby girl was out of her fucking mind and she always hit back.

Kids being the little assholes they are, still talked about and made fun of her but they did it behind her back when Nita was well out of earshot. Ever since that day, Nita noticed a peculiar thing begin to happen. Girls began following her around, inching their way closer and closer, and eventually worked up the courage to sit at her table during lunch period.

She hated to call these girls mousy, but they were the timid and shy girls who got picked on the most by bullies who went after easy targets. None of the girls ever asked for her help, but Nita assumed they hung close to her figuring they were safe within her sphere of protection. She never guaranteed them anything but she didn’t chase them away, either. And they became an unofficial clique because sometimes things just worked out the way they worked out.

She actually became chummy with one of the girls, Charlotte, and one lusciously breezy day, when Nita had a few extra bucks burning a hole in the pocket of her Target jeans, they went to the mall together. Nita passed Express and The Limited with no interest because Lane Bryant was having a Spring sale.

“Let’s go inside,” Nita said.

“Oh, come on now,” Charlotte started, all doe-eyed and rosy-cheeked. “You don’t need to shop there! You’re not that big!”

“Not that big?” Nita actually liked this scrawny girl but she had the sudden urge to dropkick her into next week. “Sorry to disappoint you, Char, but I am that big and I do need to shop there. I actually enjoy shopping there. So why don’t you just slowly step away from my fat ass and go to the skinny store or something.”

Nita entered the store and it was liberating. She had been in chubby denial for the past two years or so, and to her coming out as fat was akin to coming out as gay or bi. Both of which she had to do and the former she actually found harder.

She remembered the exact moment that she came out to her mother as fat. She went to her mother’s job one day and her mother asked, “Where did you get that outfit?”

“Lane Bryant,” Nita proudly exclaimed. Okay, maybe it wasn’t so proudly, but damn it, she was just starting to get a handle on things.

“Oh, um…they have nice clothes there.”

Nita noticed the emphasis on nice. She could almost hear her mother’s insides screaming, “My God! Has it come to this? My little girl is fat!”

In Lane Bryant, while passing one of the store’s wall mirrors, Nita noticed she had a shadow. Charlotte, walking five paces behind with her head held down.

Nita spun on her heels and confronted the smaller girl. “I shop at Lane Bryant, so what? Sleeves on jackets go past my wrists for once. Shirts actually button around my chest. I don’t feel like a fucking freak here!”

“I don’t think you’re a freak,” Charlotte said. “I also don’t think of you as fat, I’m sorry, I don’t. You’re my friend and okay, I said something stupid and I hope you can forgive me. I mean, haven’t you ever said something, meaning well, that was taken the wrong way?”

Thoughts of Lorelei Kilgareth sprang to mind.

A long moment passed before Nita slowly exhaled her pent-up anger. She offered Charlotte a slight smile and said, “C’mon, help me pick out something nice. Let’s see if you’ve got any taste in big gal clothes.”

Nita was forced to admit to herself that shopping with Charlotte was actually fun. When their arms were loaded with outfit options, the girls went into the fitting room. Nita was so anxious to try on the new clothes in front of an audience that she stripped down to her underwear without even thinking about it. She realized the mistake when she saw the expression on Charlotte’s face change.

“What happened to you?” Charlotte asked, staring at the scars on Nita’s inner thighs.

“Nothing,” Nita said, snatching the nearest bit of clothing to cover herself up.

“Bullshit. That’s not nothing. Who did that to you?”

“Why do you care? Get out of here! It’s none of your goddamned business!”

“Of course, it’s my business! You’re my friend! If someone hurt you, I want to know about it!”

“I did it to myself, okay?” Nita admitted and had no idea why she did it. “Happy now?”

“But why?”

“I like scars,” Nita said, but it came out slowly, like she was struggling to get the words out. “At least that’s what I used to tell myself. The reality is that sometimes the world is just too sharp, you know, everything has edges, people, words, everything, and all those edges want is to stab at you, to cause you pain because they feed off your misery. And sometimes you want to feel you have some control over your life and if all you ever feel is pain then maybe you want to control that, too.”

Charlotte’s large and expressive eyes began welling up, proof that her soul was good and deep within she knew the true meaning of love and compassion. She hadn’t befriended Nita for protection, she actually had some sort of feelings for this tough girl who harmed herself in secret. The smaller girl knelt and moved the clothes Nita was hiding behind.

“What are you doing?”

Charlotte didn’t answer. She just lifted her hand and touched the scars. Delicate fingers traced the path of the razorblade cut marks gingerly, as if the wounds were still fresh.

Nita wanted to push Charlotte away, to beat her up for being so dammed nosy, and threaten her life if she ever told one single solitary soul about what she saw and heard in here, but she found that she was paralyzed, locked in the grip of something she didn’t quite understand.

Then Charlotte did the unexpected by pressing her pink tulip lips to the scars, the way a loving mother would try to kiss a child’s boo-boos better. And something inside Nita melted. Not because this clueless girl was kissing the insides of her thighs, but because she was showing tenderness to something that was much more private, more personal. She was kissing Nita’s secret pain, something she never shared with anyone, not even her own mother.

Then Charlotte wrapped her arms around Nita’s legs, gave them a gentle squeeze and said, “No more, okay? Promise me, no more.”

No one outside her own mother had shown Nita the slightest bit of gentleness and since she didn’t know how to accept it, her body trembled as her own eyes began to fill with tears as if all her emotions had condensed into a deluge of rain.

And the two girls remained in that fitting room for a long while, each crying for entirely different reasons.

©2021 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys