Beastly by Alex Flinn Page B

until it was smoother than before my transformation.
    I waited, staring at my arm. Nothing happened. Maybe the secret was to get it as smooth as possible, not to trim it, but to obliterate it. Even if Dad had to pay off someone to pour hot wax on me every day, it would be worth it if I could just look a little more normal. I walked back to my room, feeling a surge of something – hope – that I hadn’t felt since that first day I’d called Sloane to get her to come kiss me.
    But when I returned to the bright light of my bedroom, the hair had grown back. I looked at my arms. If anything, the hair on my left arm seemed thicker than before.
    Something – maybe a cry – was stuck in my throat. I rushed to the window. I wanted to howl at the ever-loving moon like a beast in a horror movie. But the moon was hidden between two buildings. Still, I opened the window and roared into the hot July air.
    “Shut up!” A voice came from the apartment below. On the ground, a woman scurried, clutching her purse. A couple made out in the shadows away from the lamppost. They didn’t even notice me.
    I ran to the kitchen and chose the biggest knife from the chopping block. Then I barricaded myself in the bathroom and, gritting my teeth against the pain, I sliced away a section of my arm. I stood watching the blood ooze from the gash. I liked the raging red hurt of it. On purpose, I looked away.
    When I looked back, the hole had healed. I was indestructible, unchangeable. Did this mean I was superhuman, that I couldn’t die? What if someone shot me? And, if so, which was worse – to die, or to live forever as a monster?
    When I returned to the window, there was no one on the street. Two o’clock. I wanted to go online, IM with my friends like I used to. I’d gone along with Dad’s pneumonia story until school ended, then told them all that I was going to Europe over the summer, then boarding school in the fall. I told them I’d see them before I left in August, but that was a lie. It wouldn’t matter. They’d barely e-mailed. I didn’t want to go back to Tuttle, of course, not as a freak. At Tuttle, we’d treated people bad if they had cheap shoes. They’d come after me with pitchforks, the way I looked. They’d think I had some disease like Dad thought, and stay away from me. And even if they didn’t, I couldn’t deal with being a freak in a school where I used to be one of the Beautiful People.
    In the street below, a homeless guy trudged by with an enormous backpack on his shoulders. What was it like to be him, to have no one expect, no one want anything from you? I watched him until he disappeared, like the moon, between the two buildings.
    Finally, I stumbled to bed.
    When my head hit the pillow, there was something hard there. I slid my hand under the pillow and pulled out an object, then turned the light on to see.
    It was a mirror.
    I hadn’t looked in a mirror since my transformation, not since the day I’d broken the one in my room. I picked up this one, a square hand mirror with a silver frame, the same one Kendra had been holding that day at school. I thought I’d smash it into as many pieces as possible. You have to find your bliss where you can.
    But I caught sight of my face in it. It was my own face – my old face, that blue-eyed, perfect face that was still mine in my dreams. I held the mirror close, using both hands, like it was a girl I was kissing.
    The reflection melted away, and there was my beast face once again. Was I insane? I raised the mirror.
    “Wait!”
    The voice came from the mirror. Slowly, I brought the mirror down.
    The face inside it had changed again. Kendra, the witch.
    “What are you doing here?”
    “Don’t smash this mirror,” she said. “It has magical powers.”
    “Yeah?” I said. “So?”
    “I’m totally serious. I’ve been watching you for over a month now. I see you’ve realized that you can’t get out of this with Daddy’s money – dermatologists, plastic