The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(101)

But not today. I have space for no humor inside me.

I turn from my blank stare. Look the hunter right in the eyes.

“Fuck you,” I say.

“I’m just kidding,” she says, sighing like having to explain this is exhausting. But her knife is glinting as she picks her teeth with its blade. Her sword is sheathed against her side.

“Fuck you,” I say again, not dropping her gaze. My hackles are raised.

“Chill out. Jesus,” she says. “You know I’m kidding.”

I do know, but my teeth are chiseling themselves inside my mouth. The idea is unbearable. That I am a shitty performer. That after these months, after this literal blood, sweat, and tears, I’m no good.

“Get over it, come here,” she says, standing and starting toward me with her arms out wide.

“Don’t come any closer to me,” I tell her. I am coming unhinged. My organs might explode out of my body, because I’m suddenly so filled with anger. My head is rocketing straight to outer space.

“Come on, come here, baby,” she says, stepping toward me.

“I’m serious.” I do not want her love. I cannot bear a body forcing its love on me.

“Hug me, baby.”

“Leave me alone,” I snarl, and my mouth makes blood and calls for her blood and my skin is hot with the memory of stage lights and the burning possibility that I’m no good out there. I put a hand up as a stop sign to warn her to stay back.

“I’m hugging you,” she says, and she is upon me. She is standing. I am still sitting in the chair, and her arms close around me like terrible shackles. I push them off, but she is stronger, and she leans down to bury her face in my shoulder, and I punch at her side, my eyes gone from my head, my face hot and throbbing, and she leans in even harder, grabs me tighter, trying to smother me with her love, and my mouth opens up on her shoulder. My teeth clamp into her skin. Bite down.

I feel her arms loosen. She stands up, laughing at first, and rubs at her shoulder.

“Teeth marks,” she says, rubbing the skin on her shoulder and then looking at me, still laughing a little with surprise. But then the laughing stops. “Jesus Christ, Tessa. You bit me.”

*

Let me start again.

Two months earlier, three fairs and four and a half weeks into the season, I turned thirty. On the morning of my thirtieth birthday, I found four different bags of Doritos on my bed. Big bags, not the kind you buy at the fair for walking tacos, but the giant air-stuffed bags, all with different flavors—Nacho, Cool Ranch, Taco, Pizza. I ripped into one immediately, first thing in the morning, tasted that salty chemical crunch and crumble in my mouth. It was the greatest luxury I could remember, something unattainable in this closed system. When I turned around, Cassie was standing in the hallway, beaming. She started jumping up and down and clapping her hands. “Do you love it? Do you love it? Do you love it?” she chanted, and I did, so deeply, hadn’t even remembered telling her my birthday tradition, which was to give myself this gift once a year: unlimited Dorito-eating. This secret self-love nobody else had ever paid attention to before.

But she had, Cassie, and procured them by some unknowably complicated means, this pile of salty love, this unexpected kindness that nearly made me weep.

The part of my mouth that had tasted those Doritos and then later had come down on her skin were the incisors, maybe a bit of the canines.

*

I don’t apologize. Not right at first, still flushed with anger. But later in the evening, when my adrenaline cools, I start feeling sour in my stomach. I’d punched Cassie. Bitten her. Even if she’d initiated it, even if she hadn’t stopped when I asked her to stop, the difference in our actions was huge. I’d never physically hurt anyone before, never had an eruption of violence. I hadn’t been able to control myself. I couldn’t stop thinking about that part. Some internal animal had taken over and hurt someone else and I had not stopped it. I had not wanted to stop it. What worried me was that the bite felt good. Like I was finally able to scratch an itch that had been bothering me for a long, long time.

I try to make it up to her. Leave a dumb apology note on her pillow. Give her space. Text her sorry. Try to chat here and there. No response. She walks away. And then, as I am blathering on to her four days later about some dumb idle thing, hoping that perhaps the best thing is to pretend as if nothing has happened, to sweep the whole thing under the rug, she spins toward me.

“I will not ever be your friend,” she says. “You are an abusive person. I know about abusive people. I get to choose who I want to be around in my life, and I choose to have nothing to do with you.”

I am struck silent.

The sickness in my stomach almost spews right out of me. I am an abuser. I am as bad as they come.

*

A month or so before, Cassie, slumped beside our bunks after another fight with one of the other performers, had told me about her life. She was on our truck’s dirty ground in fishnets and a hoodie. We were closed for the night. She told me stories about her mother. Her ex-husband. I wasn’t sure how often she shared these stories with people in her life, but they were tough stories about people who’d hurt her and things she’d come through, and I was grateful for her trust. It was hard to imagine these histories happening to the quick-witted, loud-mouthed talker on the bally stage who was always smiling. Remembering this made what I did—hurting her—feel a thousand times worse. That she had been through pain and I’d hurt her in a way that connected me to the worst people in her life.