The Cult by Mel Kassel
Cass’s mother is on TV, crouching and rocking with the other cultists. Her closeness to the camera makes her a set of flesh-pieces, never a whole person: thighs, stomach, breasts (blurred, but anyone can see where the blur changes color around her nipples), chin, cheeks, slipping in and out of view.
Some of the cultists are crying. Their queen has died, the way all their queens have died and will die. Soon, they’ll choose a new one, and they won’t be on TV again until the next bit of drama.
Cass is alone on the couch, but she says aloud, “I’m not calling her.” She imagines sending a small ship into the recesses of her body to scout for sympathy. The crewmembers, their mission, doomed.
Imagine it, Cass tells herself. She steers the ship, scanning for crevices. The queen was your mother’s friend. Perhaps all that should matter is that your mother has lost a friend.
The inner voice, the ship’s drive, morphs. Now it sounds like her ex, Vera. If nothing else—if you can’t muster organic compassion—maybe you can respect that she’s in mourning.
Cass tries. It feels like a cosmic squinting, an effort to see the world in a whole new way. She can catch just a glimpse of it, a reality in which her mother is more pitiable than offensive, where everything is softened. That was how Vera saw things. Vera could access the most generous view on any issue, report it as though she was summarizing a book she’d read. She’d tilt her head, stare upwards at nothing, and say, “Well, if you look at it like they do . . .”
Cass turns off the TV. Her dad will call soon. He calls every time the cult gets coverage. She considers getting into the shower so that she’ll miss the call, but doesn’t, because it’s better to power through, talk him down. She wants to text Vera, but can’t. They agreed on no contact for at least a month.
The cult started when Cass was in high school. They called themselves the Colony. It was a tone-deaf name, given that its members were almost all white and wealthy and Californian. They were trying to emulate the hierarchies, diet, and behavior of naked mole-rats; and naked mole-rats, the cultists would explain to anyone who asked, live in groups called colonies, governed by queens. Just like ants, just like bees!
Cass and her friends laughed at these interviews. The nude middle-aged cultists, all paunch and desperation, smiling as they assured reporters that they knew it sounded crazy, but they’d seen the results.
“It’s actually really sad, though,” someone in Cass’s friend group would say, when the laughter stopped. “They’re just going to die sooner.”
Everyone in the Colony had some kind of cancer. Most of them had run out of treatment options. They became versed in mole-rat lore and shared it as a slurry of science and religion: naked mole-rats are inexplicably resistant to cancer. They perceive pain much less acutely than we do. They don’t wither with age—their cells defy senescence. They eat clean, mostly roots and tubers. They have designated chambers for sleeping, dining, shitting. They are humble, nearly blind, hardworking, denizens of the earth. The only eusocial and ectothermic mammal.
The interviews irritated Cass. She flinched at the nudity, how these people made their bodies everyone’s business. To her, they already looked vaguely tumorous, bulging where her eye wanted flatness. Even the really skinny ones had patches of skin that were loose or pitted. Was that how she would look when she was older? Her parents looked like that already, although her mother tried not to. Sometimes at dinner she would use her spoon to measure out a single dollop of casserole, potatoes, or meat, then fill the rest of the plate with romaine lettuce. “I love the crunch,” she told Cass. When it wasn’t lettuce, it was fat-free chocolate bars that crumbled into dust when pinched, or tiny microwaveable troughs of vegetables and soggy rice.
Despite her efforts, despite daily runs and twice-weekly spin classes, her mother’s shape was cemented. She was big and soft and thought herself hideous. Cass marveled at the size of her bra cups on the drying rack, first enviously, then fearfully.
Her father seemed like a different species. Skinny chest, slight potbelly, skinny legs. He ate whatever he liked.
Cass had seen pictures of them from when they were younger and couldn’t reconcile the images with the people she knew. Footage from the cult confirmed her suspicions: as you aged, you became a lump-ridden, pathetic thing.
“It’s like, you’re already in a cult—do you really need more attention?” She and her friends huddled around her phone, watching another interview.
“Right,” someone said. “No one wants to look at your old ass anyway.”
“Especially when you get all sick and wasted and stuff.”
“What do you think it smells like in there?”
“Fucking gross,” Cass said.
Her dad doesn’t call until the next day. Cass’s phone lights up next to her computer and she ignores it to finish a sampler of logo proposals for a boutique tea company. She calls him back during her lunch break.
“What’s up?” she asks, mouth full of salad.
“Sorry, I know you’re at work.”
“Yeah. What’s up?”
“Well, I’m worried about your mother.”
He only refers to his ex-wife as “your mother,” or, if they’re around others, “Cass’s mother,” as if the crucial connection is between her and Cass. But it’s his own sad obsession that keeps the woman in their lives. He reminds Cass of one of those dogs that won’t get up from its dead owner’s grave.
“In a new sense, I mean,” he says. “I think she’s going to put herself up for . . . the leadership role.” He also refuses to use the cult’s lexicon. He won’t say “queen.”
“Okay?” Cass says, stretching out the word.
“I really think that if we both talked with her, she might be less likely to . . . endanger herself further.”
“How do you know she wants to be queen?”
“Well.”
“Have you been talking to her?”
“We speak on the phone sometimes. She reached out about a month ago.”
“You’re such an addict!” She laughs. This flavor of disappointment is comfortable, almost satisfying. “Does Trish know? I’m sure she loves that you’re still talking to your cult-wife.”
“Trish knows. She actually agrees with me.”
“I’m not doing this. I can’t believe you called me with this.”
“Your mom is sick. She doesn’t realize . . . Look, you know what they do to the leaders. I don’t want that to happen to her. Please, Cass—”
Cass hangs up. She taps her front teeth with the tines of her plastic fork, pushes at her gumline.
Her father told her about her mother’s cancer diagnosis during her senior year of college. He called her and read facts from a handout.
Lightheaded from confusion and embarrassment, Cass told her roommates that her mother had breast cancer, not colorectal cancer. Breast cancer was easier to talk about, its milestones somehow familiar to the three of them. They closed their eyes and shook their heads at words like mammogram and mastectomy, words with a grim, feminine poetry, located an immeasurable distance from bowel and stoma and polyp.
She moved back home after graduation to “help out,” a phrase that terrified her in its expansiveness. She couldn’t say no when her father asked, but there were so many things she did not want to see. The blood and shit of it all. Mostly the shit.
A resectioning surgery had been scheduled, and Cass began having nightmares about the aftercare. In one, she had stacked her mother’s used bedpans in her closet at college and forgotten about them. The university was calling and calling her, demanding that she retrieve them immediately. But years had passed since she’d left them there, and she could not imagine what had festered in that closet since, what had happened to the human waste after all that time.
Back home, her father told her that he only needed help driving her mother to and from appointments at the hospital. Her relief was overwhelming. She couldn’t stop smiling and laughing during her run that day, feeling the residue of terror leave her body. Afterward, she brimmed with generosity. She resolved to be patient and leash her pettier thoughts. She would allow her mother to probe about her life, and she would share choice morsels that would amount, in her mother’s mind, to a new level of intimacy.
This strategy worked better than expected. For a few months, it seemed as though the cancer might actually bring them closer. They talked about Cass’s ambitions in graphic design, her social life, television, and neighborhood gossip with a newfound playfulness. Her mother was so subdued that they rarely had cause to argue. She couldn’t go out to eat, so she couldn’t ask servers and cashiers if they thought her daughter was gorgeous. She couldn’t exercise, so she didn’t register both of them for 10Ks or buy them matching athletic wear that was a size too small, a challenge to “work into the shorts.”
Cass meets Richie after work at the Cuban place between their train stops. He looks good, and their hug lasts a beat longer than it has to. She decides she deserves a spontaneous, we-love-each-other-as-friends fuck after everything that’s happened in the past two days. She orders them both drinks and takes his hand.
“I’m exhausted,” she tells him.
“Work?” he asks.
“And everything else.”
They argue over which empanadas to order and have the server settle it for them. Cass flirts and over-strategizes. He knows about the breakup, but might think it too recent for them to safely sink back into their pattern of affectionate hookups. She doesn’t think he’s seeing anyone. She gets the perfect amount of buzzed and keeps tearing small pieces off her paper placemat instead of eating more plantain chips. Midway through the meal, she becomes direct.
“Would you be interested in fooling around tonight? No pressure.”
“Oh, uh, yes! Yeah.” He studies her. “That’s okay?”
“I need it,” she says, and he’s so flattered he almost starts glowing.
They walk through a light rain to his apartment. They delight in the awkwardness, knowing that they’ve dismissed it before, teasing each other with the imaginary threat of it. They’re half an hour into a movie they’ve both seen when Cass slides her lips up his neck, and that’s enough to turn him urgent, his hand at her collarbone, pressing her into the couch even as he says they should move to the bed.
It’s quick, and as soothing as sex can be for her. He doesn’t investigate her like Vera did, with a frenzied delight that could be equally arousing and unnerving in its force. He doesn’t burrow into her armpit and tell her he just wants to breathe there. He doesn’t smack his mouth loudly around her clit, which made her come even as the crudeness of the sound made her wince. She redirects him when he focuses on a specific part of her, moves against him with all of her body so that he can’t narrow in. She wants to be cloudy, something wholly pleasant and indivisible, unexamined. She goads him into selfishness, into a practical rhythm. He thanks her as he wipes his semen off the small of her back.
He doesn’t investigate her like Vera did, with a frenzied delight that could be equally arousing and unnerving in its force.
They lie in bed facing each other, her with the sheet up to her shoulders, him uncovered. She can feel the smear of sweat under her leg where her stomach had been. She imagines their sex as though she had been observing it from the side, watching the fat on her belly and arms shudder. She tries to sweep the scene out of her brain.
It was nice, she tells herself. It was nice.
“You okay?” Richie asks. “What’s up?”
He doesn’t do social media, he probably hasn’t seen the news. He knows about her mother, though—she told him the story, back when they worked in the same office.
“Mostly family stuff,” she says. It’s a test to see if he really wants to talk about it.
“Your mom? How’s she doing?”
“She might be the new cult leader. The old one just died. Of cancer, shockingly. And my dad—classic codependent, apparently he’s talking to her still, which I just learned today—is trying to recruit me for an intervention. Because—”
“She’s getting worse?”
“No—well, maybe—but it’s because they do something to the queens.” She closes her eyes and talks with them shut. “In a regular mole-rat colony, when a new mole-rat becomes queen, she gets longer. She becomes the biggest mole-rat. By a lot.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.” She doesn’t add what she knows about reproductive hormones, about the increase in space between queen mole-rat vertebrae. She doesn’t want to allude to all the research she used to do. “It’s crazy.”
“Holy shit.”
“And the cult tries to recreate it. All the queens at the Colony somehow get taller. It’s a surgery they do. My dad’s worried they’re going to kill her.”
“What?” His face is concerned, clenching. “That’s awful.”
“Yeah, but I can’t get involved. She made her batshit choice and I need to just live my life.”
“Yeah. Of course. This definitely isn’t yours to take on.”
“Right. I know.”
She’s punctured the mood. If they fuck again, he’s going to try at tenderness, and she can’t handle that. She watches him, searching for the moment when he puts the new information about the cult aside. But it’s too weird, of course it’s too weird, he can’t table it.
She asks if they can sleep, because she really is exhausted, and, still wearing the same troubled expression, he reaches over her to turn off the light.
She runs her fingernails down her sides, over her hips, giving herself goosebumps. She sucks in her stomach, tries not to let it round out again. She doesn’t feel exorcized. If anything, she feels more bloated than before she told him. It’s always like this, when she talks about her mother. It’s like she’s coughed up a mass—hair and clotted spit and something buzzing in the center—held it up above her head, then pushed it back down her throat. And now, Richie’s been reminded of it. He knows it’s still in there. Nothing gets untangled in talking about it, but she forgets that, every time.
The resectioning surgery seemed successful. But months later, the cancer recurred, and her mother started chemotherapy. It made her so nauseated that she couldn’t eat much at all. She shed weight, visibly, for the first time in Cass’s life.
“At least something good’s come of all this,” she would say, squeezing her thigh.
“Don’t say that, Mom,” Cass would respond. “There’s nothing good about this.”
The relative peace between them leaked away as her mother’s silhouette sharpened and Cass’s stayed the same (not very fat, but, as her mother put it, “made of circles, not lines”). The treatments made her mother tired and snippy. She was bitter that she couldn’t take her new body out into the world. She picked at the clothes Cass wore and wanted to hear every detail of her day. She’d get frustrated if Cass couldn’t remember what she’d done in a certain window of time.
“Surely you did something this afternoon?” she’d say. “Even if it was just texting? Did you read? Did you go out? Close your eyes and think back!”
Cass never went inside the hospital; her father kept her mother company during the treatments. The chemotherapy slowed but didn’t stop the cancer. They recommended another surgery, and though her father and the doctors reassured her otherwise, her mother became convinced that she would wake up with a colostomy bag. An unthinkable outcome. She told anyone who would listen that she’d rather die.
She left for the cult while Cass was away at a bachelorette party. She wrote a short note with no apology: I’d like to try something new, and I have that right. I love you both and will be in touch.
Cass meets her father and Trish for lunch. It’s a two-hour train ride each way, essentially her whole Saturday, and she’s sure it’s a trap. But it’s Trish’s birthday—she has to go.
They act convincingly innocent. They ask what she’s designing at work, which clients request the most difficult logos. They gently steer the conversation toward the breakup.
“Are you speaking to each other?” her father asks.
“Not yet,” says Cass.
“Good riddance,” says Trish.
The check gets paid and they haven’t mentioned her mother once. Cass isn’t fooled. When her father suggests that they walk off the meal, she sucks on the inside of one cheek and waits for the opening move.
“Cass, is it alright if I bring up something rather sensitive?”
Trish, a dental hygienist who always matches her skirts with her tops, is much skinnier than Cass’s mother. But the two of them share the same oppressive warmth. To reject them outright is to be proven a monster.
“Sure,” Cass says.
“Your father and I would like to talk about your mother. We’re concerned that she’s not in the right . . . headspace . . . to consent to this procedure. The police can’t get medical records, but we know it’s most likely the equivalent of a back-alley surgery.”
It’s so sad, Trish talking about this, of all things, on her birthday. She had taken a single bite of the chocolate mousse that the server brought her, blown out the candle in the most prudish way imaginable, lips sphinctering tight. Her love for Cass’s father is steely, no-nonsense. Cass doesn’t know how he recruited her for this fight.
“I know,” she says. “Just, let me think for a second.”
They walk in the vague direction of the house, and she imagines them approaching the alcove with the dark red door, Trish’s cocker spaniel barking from behind it. She can picture the kitchen, stacks of those little instant coffee cups and the huge plastic wheels of pre-cut fruit. It’s much smaller than their old house, which sits just six blocks away. Her father sold it after her mother left.
She doesn’t want to go inside. She stops on the sidewalk, defeated. “What do you want me to do?”
“At least talk to her,” her father says. He might cry. She doesn’t want to see it, or see Trish comforting him. “Before they do it.”
“I don’t know how to contact her.”
There’s a new number. Cass taps it into her phone, labels the contact Mom 2, and walks back to the train.
The Colony wanted to dispel any rumors of coercion, so much so that they allowed journalists to tour the repurposed field house where they lived. A few months after Cass’s mother joined, a semi-famous cultist died. The media dialed up its coverage, re-discovering the cult with fresh agitation. Cass and her father watched the reports and looked for her mother in the footage.
“There she is, pause it,” her father would say. Cass was awed that he could pick her out so easily, especially when she was hunched over in the background, only her back and buttocks visible. It was disturbing, how hungry he was for the sight of her mother, how attuned he was to the specifics of her naked body. It felt equally important and wrong to watch for her together.
Back then, she spoke to her mother once a week. The Colony had a room with a single laptop where members could video chat for half an hour at a time. At Cass’s request, her mother positioned the camera so that only her face, none of the rest of her, was in the frame.
“But you won’t see how good I look! We used to shower together, you know,” her mother said.
“Yeah, when I was three,” Cass said.
She would tell her mother about the TV spots, trying to hint at how the outside world perceived the cult, but her mother seemed happy that they were being featured at all. She mostly spoke about her new social life. She acted as if the people were the same types she could have met anywhere. The gossip intersected with a jittery reverence for the queen, a woman named Miranda.
“God, she really is . . . I mean, the only word for it is regal,” she said.
“She’s just a person, Mom. Like you.”
“There’s something different about her. She’s six-foot-five, for one thing.”
Cass read everything she could about the Colony. They claimed that the life spans of their members surpassed doctors’ estimates by enough time to be statistically significant. They released what they said were comparative scans of tumors, fuzzy white voids that shrank or disappeared across images. Members shared a sleeping chamber, a latrine, a strictly vegan diet. Shoes were the only clothing allowed.
“But shoes mean you’re new,” her mother told her, whispering.
The Colony maintained that their queens grew taller in a “biological mirroring process,” their bodies changing to fit the authority of the role. But there were doctors and even ex-members who gave accounts of a grueling surgical procedure. There had been eight queens since the Colony began, and each of them had the telltale scars on their legs and backs. Undoubtedly, reporters said, the surgery hastened their deaths.
Cass visited websites where debunkers shot holes through each of the cult’s beliefs. She researched real naked mole-rats, even looked to see if any nearby zoos had them on exhibit. She shared her findings with her mother, carefully at first, then with a feverishness that made her yell and sputter.
“How can you believe this?” she asked. “How can you be this stupid? You’re not fucking rats. You just can’t accept that you’re dying.”
“Cass, honey, that’s enough.”
“You can’t address anything I’m saying. You won’t, because you can’t.”
“It’s not what I want to talk about with you.”
“Why talk to me at all? You’ve found a place where everyone has to like you.”
Her mother had taken a deep breath, her face serene. “I’m here because I like myself.”
She’s supposed to call her mother, but all she wants to do is call Vera. Cass goes for a run so she won’t have to think about either of them.
Her new neighborhood is more residential than the one she and Vera lived in. There are houses with porches and yards sprinkled among the apartment buildings, and a park with willow trees and a winding concrete path. Cass turns into the park just as a new song begins to play through her earbuds. She leans into the sense of serendipity.
There are other people in the park—families with strollers, dog walkers, kids using the softball field. She keys in on her fellow runners. Which of them are also avoiding their mothers and exes? There’s a woman in green shorts, a man with ankle weights, a jogging cluster of teens. Cass pictures lines of kinship stretching between them, the wires charged and rippling. They’re all out here because they want something to be different. If not their bodies, then the tides of their thoughts. She wonders how many of them started running because a parent pushed them into it. The teens in particular—did they really want to be out here? Had they done the work of delineating their own desires? Did they know that work was possible? Maybe, she thought, if you ran with friends, motivation didn’t matter as much. The running became something to share, a social event.
Running with her mother had sometimes felt like that, if they weren’t training for something specific and comparing their times. Vera, on the other hand, didn’t run and had never gone with Cass. She was naturally slim, a talented dancer, but a homebody, and not fond of regimented exercise. She could be graceful without working at it.
There had been a queasy sense of triumph in the running, when they were together. It burned calories, of course, and it impressed Vera, who would try and lick the sweat from Cass’s shoulders when she took off her sports bra to shower, Cass batting her away. It also made Cass feel quietly honorable, knowing she was doing something healthy that Vera refused to do.
Cass slows down, puts a hand against a tree, spits on the ground. She needs to reset.
No contact, she thinks. She imagines a large red X drawn over Vera’s face, then her mother’s. She should be running for herself, not anyone else.
No contact. She repeats it like a mantra, speeds up again, pairs each word with a step.
When they fought, Vera didn’t hear how smug she sounded. She spoke like she was levitating, like Cass couldn’t possibly reach her.
“You can’t just accept everything, or you’ll have no standards,” Cass told her near the end. They were arguing because Vera had defended a new-agey friend whose “full-body meditation practice” prohibited any physical labor after 6 PM.
“Imagine if I started living like that,” said Cass. “I couldn’t clean, so the house would be a disaster. I couldn’t work out. Your metabolism is blessed, but I’d get huge.”
“So get huge and live with me in a dirty house.” Vera had shrugged and continued to work on a crossword puzzle. “I wouldn’t care.”
“Fuck off,” Cass said.
“Anytime you want. I’d still love you.”
Cass felt as though she was speaking to her mother, trying to cut through a cocoon of blank-faced holiness. She spoke low and fast. “You can’t just say that like it’s nothing. Don’t act like you wouldn’t notice if I got fatter. Like it wouldn’t be a problem for you.”
Cass felt as though she was speaking to her mother, trying to cut through a cocoon of blank-faced holiness.
Vera put her pencil on the coffee table and looked up at Cass from the couch. “Woah, okay. Cass, I’m not with you just because of your body. It wouldn’t be a problem at all.”
“Oh my God, can you please just admit to some human feelings? Ones that don’t make you the most progressive thinker in the world for a second?” Standing over Vera, arms crossed, she felt anchored to the floor with conviction.
“You think you know better than me how my sense of attraction works?”
“I think you just don’t want to acknowledge that your attraction would change, because you’re more interested in being virtuous than being honest.”
“That’s so fucked up I don’t even know where to start.” Vera leaned back and Cass saw that she wasn’t mad at all; her face was anguished.
“Then don’t,” Cass said. “Don’t change anything, don’t clean, eat whatever you want, and hang out with your brainwashed friends. I’m going to bed.”
It wasn’t their last fight, but it’s the one Cass remembers most vividly. When she thinks of the breakup, she sees Vera’s face in that moment: That’s so fucked up I don’t even know where to start. She looked sad and surprised at once, her mouth slightly open, her forehead bunched into lines. It was insulting at the time, this sudden performance of concern, another judgment from the more enlightened party.
But perhaps it had been genuine. Maybe it had been as much of a jolt as Cass’s rage. And if that was true, what else had Cass misinterpreted?
The question follows her, a humming membrane she knows she could push against, and possibly pass through, if she wanted.
When she was six, her mother took her to get her tonsils out.
“You’ll go to sleep, and when you wake up, you’ll get all the ice cream you want. Sweet deal, Cassie-lassie.”
She counted backwards from ten, breathing cherry-flavored gas.
When it was over, she felt scraped raw. She was scared that her neck must be thinner, that they had taken too much. Her trust in doctors cracked down the middle. The ice cream hurt to swallow.
But the real betrayal came a year later, in the back of the car, on a road trip to see her grandparents in Florida. She was looking out the car window, asking why people weren’t climbing the palm trees to get the coconuts. She demonstrated how she would have shaken the trunks to knock them down, grabbing the side of the door and throttling her whole body. Something shifted, came loose in her right ear. She squirmed a finger in there. A small, white piece of tubing came out.
“Dad,” she said, trying for nonchalance, “what are ear tubes?”
“What?”
“You know, tubes that come out of your ear?”
“What?” Her mother twisted her torso almost all the way around in the passenger seat. But when she saw the tiny tube in Cass’s hand, she laughed. “Oh, sweetie, those were to help your ear infections. The doctors put them in when you got your tonsils out. I didn’t mention it back then because I didn’t want to scare you.”
“Did one fall out, honey?” Her father smiled at her in the rearview mirror. “They’re supposed to come out, it’s okay. It means they did their job.”
“Yes,” she said, and started crying in big, gulping coughs.
“Oh my god,” her mother said, and her father pulled onto the shoulder. Both her parents asked her why she was crying, but they were so worried that they shouted the question, which made her cry harder.
“It’s okay, honey, really, nothing’s wrong,” they said, over and over.
When she thinks about it now, she feels a fossilized place in her chest where the panic had burst. She remembers it from a distance, tries to dissect it. Of course, she’d been stunned by the revelation that objects had been put inside her without her knowledge, and that those objects were falling out unexpectedly. But the worst feeling, the rushing that made her cry in the car, had been a fear veined with shame. Was she so damaged that they were scared to tell her she needed fixing? Would they put tubes in other places? What else had to be done? She didn’t know what was inside her, only that it merited work, and some of that work had already started.
The news runs more features about the queen’s death, the cult’s upheaval. They’ve almost completed the clandestine process of choosing the new queen. Cass’s father texts her photos he’s taken of the television, and they look like pictures of cryptids. They show a stooping figure, a pale arm.
“Pretty sure I got her in this next batch,” he texts. “Do you see her?” The pictures are so grainy, it’s impossible to tell who’s even on the screen. Cass doesn’t want to see them. She doesn’t watch the news or listen for the cult’s name.
At night, she stands in front of the bathroom mirror, naked, hearing Vera in her head. I want to french your belly button. I want to put your whole ear in my mouth. I want to kiss you all over, every part of you. Here, here, here.
When the month is up, she and Vera get coffee.
Cass keeps stretching in her chair as they talk, touching her toes or lifting her arms to the sky, unsure how to be at rest.
“Do we talk about how we’re doing?” she asks.
“I just assume we’re not great,” Vera says, and Cass relaxes, slightly.
They’re methodical as they run through their updates. They laugh at the appropriate points, and it’s both scripted and genuine, an exercise to which they’ve both committed.
Cass doesn’t tell Vera about her mother. They’d never met. When Vera asks, Cass waves a hand to the side and says, “Oh, she’s still in there,” which is true.
They agree that it’s been hard, not talking, but they don’t make solid plans to meet again. It still feels early.
Vera hugs her before she leaves. Cass knows it’s coming and tries to memorize it: the placement of Vera’s arms, the pressure, how unthinkingly she enfolds her body. There are still so many parts of herself she cannot imagine knowing.
Later that night, she calls the number her father gave her. A man picks up, and she has to tell him, then another man, who she is and who she’s trying to reach.
Then her mother is on the line. “Cass?”
“Hi, Mom.”
“Why are you calling? Is something wrong?” Her voice is different. It’s slow and airy. She sounds sick or drugged, blatantly fragile. Cass’s stomach flips as though she’s crested a hill too fast.
“No,” she says. “Dad wanted me to call you.”
“He’s worried, I know. It’s okay.”
Cass can hear fumbling, her mother’s body shifting on sheets. She feels herself blushing. The call is already too intimate.
“Cass?”
She tries to rank her questions in order of priority. She’ll have to eliminate some of them. Something has progressed. The cancer, maybe, or her mother’s indoctrination, or both.
“Yeah, sorry. He just wanted me to talk to you before you . . . become queen.”
“I’m already close to six feet,” her mother says.
“What?”
“I’m already close to six feet. You start growing, even before the last one dies. That’s how they know who will be next. I told your father this, he doesn’t listen.”
“I thought they made you queen, somehow. With an operation.”
“Yes, but you start growing on your own first. It was my turn.” A creaking noise. Other people in the room? “They’re measuring me every day now.”
“Congratulations.” The word leaves Cass gently. It feels like it’s using a different kind of air, drawn from a new chamber inside her that has been pressurized open. It’s out before she knows she’s going to say it.
“Thank you. They say I’m growing faster than most of them. They make lines on the wall, and every day the line goes up a little. I can see them right now. You know, I was born for this.”
“Sounds like it.”
“I thought you might try to talk me out of it.”
“As long as they’re treating you well.”
“Of course they are. Let me show you. How do you turn on the video?”
Cass knows, but doesn’t tell her. “I just called to say hello.”
“I can show you how tall and skinny I am. I feel like a new person.”
“That’s okay.”
“No,” her mother says. “I want you to see. For you, I mean. You were always so shy about this sort of thing. I embarrassed you.” More fumbling.
“Mom?” Cass says. “I’m going to go now.”
“No, I want you to see. Hold on. Cass?”
“I’m happy for you. Good luck. Seriously.”
She cries as soon as she hangs up. The warmth in her face and chest crowds out everything else. She can barely feel the bed beneath her.
She walks to the bathroom, dizzy, and stares at her face in the mirror as it reddens and shines. Her eyes are small, her lower lashes clumped together into points. Her mouth is pulled back like she’s about to rub her lips together and even out some lipstick. Her cheeks are swollen. She can feel the muscles beneath them tightening in the way they only do when she cries.
She tries to feel disgusted by her reflection. She exaggerates the pinched expression on her face, puffs out her cheeks. She presses her hands against her stomach and feels her flesh pool out around them.
It doesn’t work, not all the way. She can’t distract herself. Whatever’s happening to her is too strong.
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