My brother disappeared when he was thirteen.

I returned from ballet-class one day to find an empty house. Right then, I knew something was terribly wrong. Jaime was not the kind of boy to simply disappear.

So we informed the authorities. Search-parties were organized. A picture of him was printed on milk-cartoons. We did a tear-filled TV-spot. During all of it, my parents were strangely calm. Heartbroken, that’s for sure, but their quiet sadness was so… resigned.

Like we had already lost him.

But this wasn’t true. Jaime was alive. Somewhere. He had to be. So why the hell were they acting like he was dead already?

Every time I looked at them, I felt the anger bubbling inside me, the hole my brother left behind turning into hot rage. So, I lashed out. I destroyed stuff. I yelled, and I hit the wall, and I even tried drugs. But I could never drown out the heaviness of the world.

I mean, I had known that life was unfair since my birth-parents lost their battle against their addiction, leaving me to wander the streets naked, ribs poking out under my pale skin. But then, everything got better. I was adopted. Mom was an angel. Dad was very strict, but he told us a bed-time story every night, and when he said that he was proud of me, I knew he meant it.

But the best thing was Jaime.

He was five when we first met. He had a gap in his teeth, and his steel-blue eyes sparkled with joy. I had never seen this little boy before, but when he opened up his wobbly arms, I ran. I knocked him over in the process, and Mom let out a little gasp, but he just laughed and laughed. From this day on, we were inseparable.

I gained weight rapidly, and was a quick learner. Although I always stayed thin and small in comparison to Jaime, our relationship didn’t have the typical older-brother-annoying-little-sister-dynamic. He was my best friend.

And I thought, maybe, everybody gets one terrible thing in life. And then everything is okay eventually.

I mean, sure, no family is perfect. Sometimes, Dad suddenly got very, very quiet. He exchanged strange looks with Mom. Eventually, his bedtime stories stopped. But I didn’t worry about it. I had my brother. Everything was alright.

And then he disappeared, and my world came crashing down.

Why was this all happening again? Why did I keep losing the people I loved? Why him? Where the fuck was he? My skin had gotten dry and very itchy when I was in my drug phase, and when I asked myself this questions, I sometimes had this overwhelming urge to peel it all off. To tear at the vessels under it, to rip out my eyes until I finally was dead and nothing could happen to me anymore.

Of course, I resisted. My parent’s only had me left. So, I hid it all from them.

Even the nightmares.

​

Jaime was kneeling in a painfully dark room. The only light came from his skin, which glew from within. I stepped closer. Everything in my body resisted against it, but my legs seemed to develop a life of their own. Something inside me was screaming. Very loudly. Because… because this creature on the floor… it was not my brother. I mean, he was, but he was just so… off. His hair was hanging in his face. His skin looked like a bad mask. Bloody, uneven teeth stuck out of his mouth. They grew bigger and bigger as I approached. When he saw me, he tilted his head. Further than any human being should be able to tilt their head. His blue eyes sparkled with joy.

“Hello Yuna.”

I took a step back. I couldn’t breathe. Jaime ran a hand through his hair. His muscles did not move properly, like someone had cut through half of them.

“It’s your fault I’m down here”, he sighted, “but don’t worry. We can fix this.” With that, he crawled towards me. And finally, I started to scream.

The closer Jaime came, the more of his skin peeled off, more, and more and more. Like string cheese. In the end, he was just a bloody creature on the floor. A creature with very sharp teeth. I wanted to run, but a pair of ice-cold hands held me in place.

I turned my head and saw the devil staring back at me. He giggled silently. “Don’t worry, my child. You can fix this. It is how it always is.”

A sharp pain exploded in my hand. My brother had torn his teeth in my flesh. I whimpered as the devil sighted in satisfaction.

​

I sat up in bed. My rapid breathing would not slow down. It had been a dream. All a dream. As always. I was save. I was save, and he was gone. Except…

I held my breathe, which is not a good idea when you are still hyperventilating. Stars exploded in front of my eyes. But…

The whimpering was still there. And this time, it was not me.

Silently, I got out of bed. The moonlight illuminated the stairs in a weirdly unnatural light. The further I descended, the louder the sound got. Impossible. There was no way I could hear something as quiet through three stories. But on the other hand, something deeply inside me knew that this was real.

I would always recognize my brother's voice.

Jaime in the dark, his glowing skin peeling of as he ran towards me to get a bite of mine…

No. This could not be happening. Once again, I silently begged my legs to stop. Stop moving, go back upstairs. Fall asleep. Tomorrow, this would all be a bad dream. Just a nightmare. This was all just a silly evening I would forget about eventually, and…

The crying got louder. I pressed my lips into a thin line and made the last steps downstairs. The ground floor.

And there it was, the basement door.

I hated our basement. It was dark and cold and disgusting, and every time my father made me go down to get something from the freezer, Jaime would hide in the shadows, scaring the shit out of me. I remember the panic I felt down there. The quiet noises from the corner. The sounds I made, a whimper in the darkness. And then, the BUH. After that, he laughed his ass off. What a jerk. To be fair, I had gotten my revenge often enough. Eventually, it became a game, until Mom got annoyed and confiscated the key. The key to the basement.

Now, the door was looming over me in the darkness, like the portal to death.

I pressed my ear against it. It was cold. I had never realized that it was made out of metal.

“Jaime?"

Nothing. Maybe this was stupid. Maybe I was losing my mind.

“Jaime?”, I repeated.

Still, nothing. What the hell was I doing here?

“Jaime?”

And then, I heard my brother’s sob.

“Jaime!”, I must have jumped three foot in the air. The emotions came crashing down on me. He was alive! Ignoring the implications of that, I grinned in the darkness. He was alive, and well. Definitely well. I tried to open the door, but it was locked. Of course. I pressed my eye in the keyhole, but there was nothing I could see. “Jaime!”, I kneeled down again, trying to talk louder through the crack in the ground, “it’s okay, I will get you out, I will tell Mom and Dad that you’re here, and then…”

I stopped. My stomach turned.

There was another sound.

I had overheard it through my talking. The symmetrical clanging of boots coming towards me. I whirled around, but I already knew who it was. If you are close with your family, you know every member by their footsteps.

My father tilted his head. “We need to talk.”

​

“It all began about five hundred years ago. They say the devil has many faces. And so do his demons. Unfortunately, some idiotic ancestor of ours… violated a psychic woman, and she cursed us. He was an identical twin, so she could not tell which of them did it. She said when she looked at them, they both seemed like god men, but something was off about one… like he was just imitating the other, wearing his brother’s face like a mask. Nobody believed her, of course. She was just a freak, after all.

So, she had a little séance with Lucifer. To get revenge for the community’s betrayal. The devil came up with something hilarious: Make one of the brother’s faces a literal mask, him a literal shifter. So now, every time our family births twins, one has those unnatural powers. To use it, they need to… get skin.

I think it is better if you do not think about this too much, child. The shifter brought misery to everyone around them. They made the world a worse place, especially for their twin, as Lucifer had not been able to tell which one was the scoundrel and wanted to hurt the both of them. We had no other choice, Yuna. So, from there on, we eliminated the evil twin. And prayed for only children."

​

I looked my father in the eyes. “This is stupid.”

Dad frowned. “This kind of language is entirely unproductive, young lady. However, I am proud of you for speaking your mind freely. Why is it ‘stupid’?”

“Well, Jaime and I are two years apart? And not even related by blood?”

My father cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, you are James’ twin sister. You know, I had sworn to never have children, so when your mother got pregnant unexpectedly, I prayed every night. When Jaime was born an only child, the weight of the world was lifted of my shoulders. Despite his zodiac sign… twin”, he chuckled sadly, “I thought the devil was just messing with me one last time. But he could not hurt us anymore. We were free at last. Your mother always wanted a large family, but I did just… couldn’t go through all that again. My own brother… well", he sighted, "Anyway, I wanted to make your mother happy, so we looked into other options. But it was no use. You cannot beat the devil”, he tilted his head, “you know, I got a little suspicious at the rapid progress you were making, considering we thought you were two years younger than your brother. Especially when your teacher asked us to move you up the grades. So, I did research of my own. They found out your birthname, child. Your addict mother did somehow manage to check herself into a hospital. They also found your birth date”, he looked straight at me, “they estimated your age wrong because you were so undernourished. You were born on the same day as your brother. Not only that, you were born in the same second.”

I blinked. “So?”

He sighted. “So you are both twins. Might not be in blood, but you are twins in the stars, twins in your soul. When we adopted you, Yuna, you became part of this family. So our curse passes onto the two of you, I am afraid.”

“This is not only stupid, it is very, very fucking stupid.”

“Please, be more precise.”

“This is a maybe. You want to KILL Jaime on a MAYBE.”

“I want to exorcise Jaime on a maybe”, he corrected, “until now, it has not been successful. The curse is… different. I cannot allow mistakes”, he stepped forward and placed his hands on my shoulders. For a moment, the shadow of a smile wrinkled in his eyes. “I need to protect you from him, darling. And if it does not work, I will eliminate him, so you do not have to.”

“This is BULLSHIT”, I shook off his hands, “just let me see my brother!”

“No”, my father looked me in the eyes, “I am going to sleep. I encourage you to get bed-ready. If you feel like it is in your best interest, you can contact authorities… but then, again, rumors have it the foster care system is not much better than the crack-house we got you out off”, he turned around, “I trust you to make a smart decision. You are my child, after all. My only child.”

With that, he left. The metallic tapping of his shoes send shivers up my spine. And his words echoed in my head long after he was gone. I stared at the basement door, silent tears streaming down my face. This was wrong. Everything about this, everything about me, was wrong. But I knew what I was going to do. Slowly, careful to not make any sound, I followed my father upstairs.

My brother’s whimpering got quieter as I left him alone in the dark.

​

I was brushing my teeth. It was not easy. My hand was shaking. But slowly, I was getting bed-ready. Like it was any other night. Like tomorrow would be any other morning. And it would be if I listened to Dad. I could not lose this. I could not lose my life. But then, I had already lost everything I stood for. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and suppressed a shudder.

The dark, sunk in eyes, the pale, tear-smitten face. The snot coming from my nose and mouth.

“Pathetic”, I mumbled, “you’re so fucking, fucking pathetic, you fucking traitor, you bitch, you…”

I spit out every curse I knew. Dad would not approve of my language. I hated him. I hated him so much, but not as much as I hated myself. Here I was, killing my best friend. To save my own skin.

You can fix this. It is, how it always is.

I left him in the dark, on my father’s threats and the Devil’s words.

God, how I hated my pathetic, pathetic face.

I had wanted to hurt others before, but now, all my rage turned against myself. I stared into my eyes and saw a creature straight from hell. My lips where dry because I bit them. I slammed my nails into the bloody skin, got hold of a thread, and pulled. But it didn’t stop at my lips. I pulled down to my chin, to my neck. To my chest, where it finally fizzled down. The sound of my ripping skin made me want to gag. Blood came from the wound, but under it, there was a second skin. Slightly paler than mine, and with the shadow of a beard on the cheek. On my cheek.

I looked myself straight in the eyes. Got hold of some skin at the ear. And pulled again.

Imagine a snake sheading it’s skin, just with flesh.

It was as painful as you would expected, but once I started, I couldn’t stop myself. It had to come off. It all had to come off. My hands got faster and faster, and suddenly, my face seemed to melt, to change it’s shape into something else. My pink-dyed fingernails clawed at everything I could find, ripping it all apart. Next, I gripped said fingernails and tore them off.

Crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack.

My arms stretched, and I could not help but scream when my bones snapped out of their joints, growing and growing to fill my new skin. I bit on my toothbrush to shut myself up.

Next, it was time for my toe-nails. While I ripped at them, my feet grew, becoming disgustingly large. My spine snapped as well, and I shot in the air. One last thing had to be done.

Slowly, my new hands reached into my eye sockets. Got a reach of the slimy, squishy balls. And pulled.

My feet gave away under the pain. I slumped down against the wall, just a whimpering bundle of flesh, and waited for it to end. My new eyes stared at my old, which slowly disintegrated to ashes. I was shaking and crying and clattering my teeth, as it all slowly died down and my bones snapped back into their enlarged joints. Finally, I forced myself to grab the sink. Pull myself up. I looked in the mirror with terror. The only face I hated more than my own stared back at me. There were still strands of skin all over my body, so I searched for my mom’s face-peeling and washed them off. Under the blood, uncaring, steel-blue eyes stared right back at me. I forced myself to smile. Not all my muscles reacted. Like a marionette on which someone had cut half the strings.

But it was a start.

“Hello, Yuna”, I whispered, and shuddered. My voice was disgustingly male. I had just gone through unbearable pain, but the urge to rip my nails into the skin again, to get my own face, my own voice, myself back, was strong. But I balled my large hands into fists and forced myself to calm down.

Because I had a job to do.

​

I barricaded my room the next day, pretending to be sick. My father stood at my door before he left the house. He sounded resigned, but not surprised. “Take your time, child. I am very sorry. About everything”, he said, “I love you. Good Day.”

I held my breathe and didn’t answer back. I loved him, too. Shit, I still do. When he had left for work, I waited twenty minutes, then I silently descended the stairs, left the house through the back door, and re-entered through front.

“They let me have the day off at the office”, I claimed, carefully mimicking my father’s speech pattern.

“I’m still in the bedroom”, Mom answered, “come upstairs.”

My heart thumped against my chest as I followed her voice. Please, dear God, I prayed, do not make me seduce my own mother. I could not do this. I should transform into Jaime. I needed to. That would give her a bigger scare. Or maybe, I should transform into her. Then I would at least feel more comfortable in my body. Definitely. Yes, that would be a good idea. My skin was already starting to peel off, anyway. But when I half-heartedly pulled one of the strands on the back of my neck, there was no second skin under it. Just blood and bone.

Fuck.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. You need skin. A shiver came down my spine, and when the hairs on my arms stood up, they took a little skin with them. My shirt covered it up. Barely visible. But more would come. I knew it. FUCK. No. Not now. I closed my eyes, forcing my skin back with all my might. I could not focus on my body now. Even if I would not survive this, those disgusting powers had to be used for good at least once. To teach the devil a lesson. So I balled my fists, marched through the floor, and finally opened the door to my parent's bedroom.

Mom was still reading in bed. She was wearing an orange morning gown. Her blond curls hang loosely around her head. Something silver shimmered around her neck. The key. “Oh, great, honey”, she exclaimed, her eyes still lighting up at the sight of me, “I don’t have clients for another hour.” She put her book aside and stood up. “So…. do you want to… have some fun?”

She attempted to wrap her arms around my neck. I shoved her off of me quickly. She frowned. To make up for it, I kissed her on the cheek quickly. I could not bring myself to aim for the lips. “Sure, my love”, I said, “but let me check on James, first.”

She frowned. “We agreed not to say that anymore, Stephen.”

“What? Check in?”

“James.”

I blinked.

“Don’t you remember? It was you who suggested it”, Mom frowned, “I must admit, from a therapist’s perspective, repression is an unhealthy strategy. But it works shockingly well. Just like last time”, she closed her eyes, “she is my daughter, she is my daughter, she is my daughter”, when she opened them again, her smile was a little too wide. “See? It has worked before. It will work now. But only if you participate.”

“Sure…”, I forced myself to laugh. I felt more like crying, or vomiting, but something told me my skin would not take liquid well. I cleared my throat. “So, can you give me the keys to the basement? To check on… the boy?”

She shook her head. “It. We have talked about this.”

“Right, sorry. Then let me check on…”, I gulped, “it.”

Mom tilted her head. “You know what? Let’s go down there together for a change.”

So, she exited the bedroom in front of me. While we walked through the floor, I could not keep my eyes of off the back of her head. Her blonde curls bounced. The curls which used to tickle my cheek when she leaned forward to kiss me. This was the woman I loved most in this world. This was my Mom. This was our Mom. And yet, she was ready to do this. To escape the curse. My curse.

“You alright, Stephen?”, Mom turned around at the top of the stairs, “you are so quiet.”

“Sure”, I coughed, “I think I am just getting sick, you know. I cannot wait to put all this behind us.”

For a moment, I saw a flash of sadness in her eyes. “Me too, my darling child. Me too.”

With that, she jolted at me. I instinctively moved to the left, but I still felt a sharp pain. My check was bleeding. A silver flash. A knife. Where the hell did she get that from?

“Darling”, I exclaimed, “wha… what the fuck are you doing?”

“Oh, honey”, she smiled, “we are a loving family. We know each other by the pattern of our steps.”

She came at me again, and I drew back and fell, knocking over a drawer. Sharp pain exploded in my elbow. I had knocked down a family photo. The glass was making my skin peel. String cheese. I had underestimated the weight of this body. The weight…

Mom stood between me and the stairs. She came closer.

“Please”, I raised my hands, “Mom... Mom, please don’t.”

Mom raised her knife. “I am sorry. I love you. But you are cursed.”

With that, she jolted at me again, and I pushed forward, slamming my head against her knees. It was not much, but it was enough to throw her off balance.

Mom tumbled. For a millisecond, time seemed to freeze and I saw the look of surprise on her face. She looked straight at me. She had wrinkles under her eyes from all the times we made her smile. But now, they were filled with anger. And... betrayal.

"Mom!" I reached for her, but she did not grab my hand.

I'm sure, she was fully convinced she had made the right call.

And then she fell.

I closed my eyes, but that meant I fully focused on the sound of the body. The breaking bones. And my descending ellbow-skin. Where her knife had wounded me, my cheek was turning into a bloody mess. And the tears streaming down my face were taking one little stripe after the other.

The sound stopped.

I forced myself to open my eyes.

The woman who I loved most in the world lay at the bottom of our stairs, limps broken. Blood came from a wound in her head. She was not moving.

I took one step, then another. I almost stumbled and fell as well, but somehow, I got to the bottom unharmed.

“Mom?”, I kneeled besides her. Felt her pulse.

Nothing.

Then, I saw the knife in her chest. She must have fell on it.

The realization hit me like a ton of bricks. I think I had disassociated so much, it was the first thing I really, really consciously understood.

My Mom was dead.

The woman who taught me how to ride a bike, who gave the best hugs in the world, who cooked us soup when we were sick, was lying at the floor. I never had gotten the recipe.

A large chunk of my cheek landed on her chest.

My Mom was dead, and I was about to be, too. If I didn’t do something about it.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. My vision became blurry.

I needed to get rid of the body. No evidence. And I needed to get rid of my Dad’s face. I needed to get my skin back to survive. I… I needed skin.

My whole body was trembling in panic as I realized what I was about to do. I fell to my knees, vomited once, then another time. It took large chunks of my face.

I stroke through my mother's hair. I could not pull it off any longer.

I remembered Jaime’s mouth in my vision, unnaturally open. A memory. An instruction. As I thought of it, my teeth started to grow, peaking through the flesh, through my lips. My jaw unlocked.

When I looked at my reflection in the knife, I saw the monster of my nightmares.

​

I will spare you the details of what happened next. Just know that I started with the face. Her blond curls tickled my cheeks. I could not look her into the eyes.

It is how it always was.

It took a long time. I really wanted to vomit again when I was done. But I didn't. Instead, I cleaned up the rests while a second skin started to form beneath my disgusting mask of a face. I felt it in my bones. My hands were trembling, my clattering teeth the only sound in our house.

What I quiet house. Too quiet.

The sun shone through the window. Yesterday, the moon had illuminated that very same case of stairs. It seemed like a long, long time ago.

But I knew I had to keep moving. Dad would come home soon. We had to hurry if we wanted to fool the authorities. So, I finally somehow managed to stumble to the basement door.

I took the key, the only part of my Mom I had not eaten. I remembered how she sighted when she took it away from us.

You guys with your silly games. Stop it. Stop it! There you have it. I’ll take this before someone gets hurt.

My brother was chained against the back wall. They had shaved his head, and there was blood everywhere. He was not moving.

“Fuck”, I whispered. “Are you… breathing?”

Silence.

Then, he opened his eyes. For a millisecond, there was fear in them. But it disappeared right away.

I kneeled beside him and pulled the gag out of his mouth. He didn’t draw back or anything. He just smiled weakly. “Yuna.”

Suddenly, tears started to scream down my face, burning on the paper-thin-skin and taking it down in stripes in the process. But now, I finally felt my own skin beneath it.

“How… how do you know?”

“Never heard Dad curse in my life.”

“Let’s… let’s get out of here.” I started to get the chain off of his wrists, but my vision was still blurry. He trusted me. But he shouldn’t. He really shouldn’t.

“Jaime, I am so… I am so sorry”, I sobbed, “I… Dad was wrong… or right, or… I… I am the evil twin. When he told me you were down here, I… I left, I left you, and then, I transformed, and I’m not even sure that I’m doing this for your sake or because I don’t… I don’t Dad to kill me when he finds out that I am the family psycho. I destroy everything I touch. I… Jaime, I just ate Mom.”

“You what?”

“Yeah, I fucking ate her, all of her, crushed her bones and everything. This curse is turning me into a fucking abomination, and my… my birthparents died, and you… look what he did to you because of me. I... I bring misery to everyone around me, he is right, it is my curse. I should not be alive, I really shouldn’t.”

The chain fell. My brother immediately slumped forward and wrapped his arm around my shoulder. “This is a… a Dad-issue,”, he whispered into my shirt, “Not a you-issue. Mom has... I mean, had, no relation to the curse, right? But she still… she still helped”, he started shaking. I hugged him back carefully. He cleared his throat. “I’m… I’m glad you ate her. They hurt me. You would never, never do that. When you shapeshifted, you could have ran away, right? But you stayed. You… you are not evil.”

I nodded, an then we just sat there for a moment and cried. Maybe my brother was right. When I carried him out of there while my skin peeled off, when we hid by the dumpsters and he watched me shifting back, when we called the police, when we sat side by side while they arrested our father… I didn’t feel like there was something evil inside of me. I only knew that my Dad had been right about one thing.

I was a twin.

​

Our grandma did not care about Dad’s threats. Nobody put us in foster care. She took our side over her son’s, and she supported us through everything. Granny knew about the curse, obviously, but she seemed fairly convinced that it had not been passed onto us. We never told her the truth.

Life went on. My skin is dry and still iches very badly. It's getting worse and worse. I get the urge to peel it off sometimes, just to see what's under it. But I resist. I also still have nightmares. The devil is annoying, but now, we often have a very special kind of family reunion.

I don’t sleep well. Neither does my brother. We don’t talk about it. I have gotten a lot angrier. Jaime has gotten a lot quieter.

But he is very determined to stay alive. He goes to the gym to get ripped, but he refuses to hurt anyone. He plays chess, and his hair has grown very, very long over the years, so he constantly steals my hair ties. Sometimes, he can be a pain in the ass, but he has never stopped trusting me.

We never gave detail about what happened, to anyone. But at my father’s trial, my brother’s body told a story of it’s own. Mine did, too, but it was a lie. The cracks in my skin, my bloody lips, which never properly moisturized no matter what I tried… nobody knew what to make of it, honestly, but since Mom and Dad had been staging Jamie’s “disappearance” very publicly, Dad was quickly convicted. As far as I heard, police are still searching for Mom.

​

So, this is our story. And now, you rightfully might ask, why am I here, three years later, whining about it on a very, very public Reddit forum?

And this brings us to this morning.

It started out normally enough. My twin took forever in the bathroom, I had not gotten enough sleep and was a dick about it, Granny complained that we would be late and left the house half an hour before us to go on a walk. She was wrong, we did manage to get there right in time to see local dickface Dave Nowinsky beat up a fifth-grader. Half the school was standing around them, but nobody made an effort to step in. The kid was wailing, snot coming from his nose and eyes. I gritted my teeth. My brother just looked at me and shook his head. I already knew the principal a little too well. I looked around for a teacher. Nobody in sight. The little boy’s wailing was starting to turn into screams. I threw my arms up in the air. Granny would be furious. But what can you do?

“Hey Dave”, I stepped forward, “why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

Dave stopped beating the child, who quickly disappeared into the crowd. His sole focus of attention shifted to me, the girl with the skin-condition who measured exactly five foot two. He grinned. “And who the hell would that be?”

My brother waved, which could have been funny if he hadn’t looked David straight in the eyes. Something about the blueness in them seemed to unnerve the bully, so he did what he always did when he felt afraid, sad or slightly inconvenienced: He lashed out.

“Why are you even defending her?”, he snapped, “she ain’ t even your real fucking sister.”

I just snickered at that. Honestly, this is one of the moments where I probably would have had a witty comeback if this was a movie, but I didn’t know Dave well enough to get personal. However, us not taking him seriously seemed to do the deal. His fists clenched. He stared at me.

And then, his mouth curled up into a little smile. I knew right then that something was very, very wrong. Because this smile was the most disturbing thing I have ever seen in my life. Simply looking into his eyes made me want to tear my skin off again. Not because there was something under it, but because I wanted to die. Everything so I would not have to keep looking at it.

I commanded myself to stay in place. Do not show fear. It felt like the entire school was hearing my heart thumping against my chest.

Dave came forward. “Well, I heard your folks weren’t so keen on your brother either”, his eyes sparkled with joy, “so maybe, you are his real sister. Maybe, love is not related to blood. Though I heard your Daddy spilled a lot of Jamie’s on the floor.”

I felt my brother tensing up behind me. To make up for it, I forced my legs to take a step forward. It took all my strength. I was sweating. Why the hell was I sweating?

“I bet that’s why you never change in sports with us, right?”, Dave crossed his arms, “So we can’t see the whipping marks on your back? You…”

“SHUT YOUR MOUTH.” Oh. I could speak again. That was good, right? I took another step, until we really were eye to eye. I refused to break contact. It made me want to vomit. “Shut your mouth you little prick”, my voice turned so quiet only he could hear, “or I’ll shove it for you.”

“Bring it on”, Dave raised his arms, “just as your Mommy shoved his mouth so he couldn’t scream for help. But it was never enough, right? Sometimes, they even heard him whine over the prayers”, he tilted his head, “Most glorious Prince of the Heavenly Armies, Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in our battle against principalities and powers…”

My brother made a little sound, barely audible. A whimper. Dave’s smile broadened. “…against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high pla…”

Finally, the hot rage I was so familiar with exploded in my chest, washing this terrible, terrible fear away. I stepped back and got in position, but just as I raised my arm, somebody held me back.

“Jaime, Yuna”, said Mr. Henderson, “what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Well, I was about to punch this little fuck”, I turned to our teacher, secretly thankful to be allowed to take my eyes off of Dave, “maybe I wouldn’t have too, if you would do your damn job for…”

I felt my brother’s hand on my shoulder. A warning. Mr. Henderson just frowned. “Yuna, please. Language. You don’t want another meeting with the principal, do you?”

I shook my head reluctantly. Dave looked at Jaime one last time, and the smile curled around his lips again. Then he was gone.

I whirled around. My brother looked straight through me. His eyes spoke of a time I thought we had left behind. “He knows.”

I shook my head. “No. Fuck, no, there is no fucking way. We told no one about the exorcism. No one knows, except…”

I could not continue.

​

We ended up skipping school that day. Granny wasn’t home yet, so we had enough time to use up all the internet in the house doing our research. Nothing. Fucking nothing. I mean, we had tried to investigate the curse before, mainly to find a way to get rid of my shitty skin, but it had not been a success then and it wasn’t a success now. We are at our wit’s end.

The only thing Jaime found was this forum, but he ain’t the most chatty and I was more keen to vent, to be honest. For the Grammar-Nazis: English is not my first language and I have never been good at spelling, so sorry if not everything of me encounting my life's worst moments is gramatically perfect.

For privacy reasons, I will not tell you my country of origin, I made sure to only share everything Jaime and I were willing to share, and all names except Dave’s were changed.

Because honestly, fuck David Nowinsky.

So guys, what the hell am I supposed to do? Shift again? Eat Dave? I want to. The urge is always there. It has never left me over the years. But I fear it might get stronger the more often I do it. Maybe addiction does run in my family and I have discovered a new fucked up kind. But I need to do something against this dude.

My brother is the only one besides Granny that my sheer existence hasn’t destroyed yet. And I will sure as hell not let this be the end of him.

I need help.