It starts with an inch-long slit in my neck.
Mom notices first. “Got a secret you want to tell us?” she says with a laugh, chewing on the waffles that she makes for me and Dad every morning before school. She grins at me as wide as the scar on her neck where her own truth-song had been sung when she was my age.
I try to ignore her. I only have two years left before college. Two years of making them believe that I’m normal, that I’m just like them. That I can follow in their footsteps and snag a life-partner in my sophomore year of high school. A fairy tale ending to my sixteen-year-old life.
“Don’t pressure him,” says Dad as he marks up the last of his algebra quizzes, a red pen in hand. The way that he grimaces at one of the wrong answers makes me think of all the quizzes I failed in his class, all the disappointing pats on the back and forced smiles. Mr. Plume’s stupid son. Now, one year later, I’m no less of a disappointment. I still don’t have a girlfriend. I still don’t have a date for the Homecoming Dance. And now, I have a mouth that will tell my parents why, tell the whole world why, that will sing all my secrets that I’ve tried so hard to keep.
Mom leans over and pokes at the purple-pink lips that protrude from the widening slit. My first neck-mouth. A mezzo-soprano, I would guess by its shape. The first time my body has tried to betray me, to squeeze out the truth that has started to fester. “I think I know why this is here,” she says. “You’re worried about the Dance.”
The Homecoming Dance. The only thing we’ve talked about for weeks on end. Questions of which color tuxedo I’ll wear, or which flowers I’ll buy, or whose limo I’ll be riding in. And the worst one of all: who’s the lucky lady that I’m going to invite? They ask this while standing by the photo on the mantelpiece, now faded with age—of Mom and Dad posing in an awkward embrace, a corsage on Mom’s wrist and a blue satin scrunchie in her platinum blonde hair, both of them squinting into the flash of the camera.
That corsage still lives. It lies in a vacuum-sealed cellophane tomb that Mom and Dad pray over with tears in their eyes every year around this time. Hoping that soon I can stand in Dad’s place, and I can have my own photo to rest on the mantelpiece, the three of us worshiping a shrine to our love.
Too bad my love will never be the kind they want.
“It’s nothing,” I say as I feel my neck-skin tug, the purple lips plumping up thick with fresh blood. “I just don’t know who I should ask.”
Dad looks up, foggy-eyed, from his papers. “What about Jojo? She seems pretty nice.”
I smile and try to keep as calm as I can manage, wishing that Dad wasn’t a teacher at my school and that he didn’t have a backstage view into my life. Knowing every girl that stops my locker, every snickering boy that throws my books onto the floor, every rumor that makes me cry alone in the bathroom. Untouchable topics that we never speak about.
But Mom likes to pry. “That’s your study-buddy, right?” More like the buddy that studies my face when she thinks I’m not looking. “She’s a beautiful girl. You’d make a great couple, Burgundy.”
I look at them, trapped, from the other end of the table. I cringe as the lips on my neck start to split, start to pull into a smile and hum into the silence, my whole body abuzz with the fear of what they’ll sing.
“Maybe,” I whisper, standing up from the table. Anything to keep me from saying what I shouldn’t, from drowning in their hope. Thankfully, my neck-mouth is as silent as I am. No tongue. No teeth. No voice.
Not yet.
XXX
When I get to my locker, Jojo’s already there. She sits on the floor, two croissants from the cafeteria balanced on her books, and when she sees me arrive, she pecks me on the cheek and says “I got you a surprise,” baring her braces-laced teeth in a grin. That’s the thing about Jojo: she always has a gift or a reason to see me. Sometimes, it’s croissants; sometimes, it’s coffee. Sometimes, it’s an offer to help me with geometry (which I desperately need). And every time, she sneaks a little touch of our hands or an overlong hug or an innocent kiss that we never acknowledge, pretending it’s nothing even though we know it isn’t.
“What’s with the neck-mouth?” says Jojo, all smiles. She pokes at the lips that whisper “me-me-me-me” like the warm-ups we used to sing in chorus last year.
I can still see the scar from where her own neck-mouth grew and then decayed and then detached, leaving her skin a mottled purplish-pink where the lips used to be. She never told me what it sang—what she was trying to hide—which is fine, because I didn’t need to know. Until now. “How long did yours last?”
Jojo takes a bite of her now-cold croissant. “About a week, give or take. But I was lucky—it was only one mouth, thank God. And by the time it could sing, I was home by myself. It just shriveled up and never came back after that.”
Her story gives me hope. I think of what I’d do if my neck-mouth were belting out my secret in this hallway, where Dad and my teachers and Jojo could hear. Not like I needed another reason for attention. The lacrosse kids were generous enough as it is. They follow me everywhere, they slam shut my locker, they dangle their wrists in imitation of my own. And not in a good way.
The thought makes me shiver. Makes me want to disappear. Makes me want to convince Mom and Dad that I’m fine, so that no one believes what my neck-mouth will sing. If that means a dance, and a night out with Jojo, then what the hell am I waiting for?
“Wanna be my date to the Homecoming Dance?” I say.
Jojo stops chewing; a croissant crumb falls from her O-shaped lips. She looks as utterly shocked by the question as I feel. Then she wraps me in a hug. “I thought you’d never ask.”
XXX
A second neck-mouth starts to grow in the middle of third period.
A baritone, this time. I press my fingers to my neck as the lips start to pucker up and croon into the silence. Every now and then, a kid will look up from his quiz and tell me to “Shhh!”, which Ms. Rosenbaum hears. She turns around from scraping yellow chalk on the chalkboard—a geometry proof that no one will solve—and she curls a yellow-dusted, sixty-year-old finger to summon me to the front. “Burgundy, a word, please?”
My first neck-mouth trills as I walk across the room, smacking its lips with a “plip-plop-plip,” each “plip” a different note like the popping of an overripe bubblegum bubble.
I try to be grateful that my mouths aren’t yet singing, that the words haven’t come. Just the soprano of one against the bass of the other, a two-pronged symphony as the rest of the classroom listens.
“Is there a problem?” I say when I reach the front of the room.
Ms. Rosenbaum eyes my two neck-mouths like they’re snakes, as if they’ll reach out and bite her. As if she doesn’t have a three-inch wide scar on her neck where her own lips had sung to us the morning of the mid-term— “I cheated on my husband with the janitor’s son!”—over and over. Each time louder, with different intonations, the “son!” a grand vibrato, the “ch-ch-ch-cheated” more at home in a jazz club, sultry smooth and full of verve.
I remembered how the students had treated her afterward; I could feel the disdain and their cruel, silent judgment. A judgment I very much wanted to avoid.
“Your neck-mouths are growing out of control,” she says knowingly. “Why don’t you ask the nurse to stitch them up for you?”
From the way that she looks at me, I don’t have a choice. So, I leave the room as quickly and discreetly as I can.
“Plip-plop-plip,” as I walk down the hallway, soon starting to run as the “plips!” become “pleeps!” and the two-tone melody takes on new life. Then I rush into the office, fall into a chair by a door that says NURSE, and wait for Ms. Pinkerton to come out and collect me.
When the door finally opens, she isn’t alone. Aside from her sequin-encrusted glasses and cane, I see a boy at her side—and not just any boy. Olive skin, black eyebrows as thick as a caterpillar, a shirt that shows the curves in his perfectly smooth arms. For once, he isn’t guarded by the rest of the lacrosse team.
Meeker. The boy who makes my neck-mouths want to scream.
He slumps into an empty plastic chair next to me. He has a cross-stitch of thread on the side of his neck—ink-black against the olive—and a dollop of ointment to soothe the irritation. I can see the skin tugging on the newly stitched thread, the lips of his neck-mouth struggling to break free.
Meeker doesn’t turn, doesn’t smile, doesn’t speak. He sits there and acts like he’s done for two years, alone in a world that I’m not allowed to join, no matter how much I want to.
“Next student,” says Ms. Pinkerton. She waves me to join her in the back of her office.
But before I can go, another voice stops me. Not one of my neck-mouths. A human voice. Meeker’s.
“Good luck in there,” he says to me, his voice like a song.
It’s the first time we’ve spoken, and I don’t know what to do, what to say, how to act. My throat is too tight, so I just turn around and smile.
My neck-mouths don’t stop humming for the rest of the day.
XXX
Jojo and I meet up at the mall the next evening. She waits by the entrance of Rent-a-Tuxedo like she waits at my locker every morning before school. “Our outfits have to match, after all,” she keeps saying. “It’s our first real dance. One of many to come.”
I smile and nod and try to keep the black thread on my neck from unraveling. Thankfully, it holds. Just as it has since Ms. Pinkerton sewed it and Meeker lit a fire in my already smoldering core.
For the next half hour, I walk beside Jojo as she surveys the store. Pretending to listen as she picks out a jacket and a green silk vest and tries to decide between necktie or bow. “Looks wonderful,” I say, too preoccupied to care.
Jojo doesn’t notice. “Why don’t you go try it on?”
We find a dressing room in the back. She sits on a stool as I pull shut the curtain, take off my t-shirt, and stare into a mirror that’s as tall as my head. “You okay in there?” she says as I step out of my jeans and they catch on my ankles. I reach for the curtain to keep from falling over, only dressed in my underwear, my arms and legs bare.
Suddenly, the curtain falls out from the other side. Jojo swoops in. She pulls it back into place.
“Jojo,” I say. “Wha—what are you doing?”
She grins, doesn’t answer. Just pushes me back into the cold of the mirror, my shoulder blades sticky as they press against the glass. Then her hands on my waist and her mouth on my lips—my face lips, the ones that I can’t seem to use.
She kisses me, hard. The tip of her tongue rolls over my teeth.
My neck-mouths stretch. The more that she kisses me, the deeper she goes, the louder they hum, a rumble that creeps up the cavern of my throat.
I try to like what she’s doing. I want to like what she’s doing. But all I can think of is Meeker’s “good luck” and Meeker’s soft voice and Meeker’s sweaty chest after gym class in the locker room. All of which builds until I can’t hold it in. And as Jojo starts to creep into the band of my underwear, and I cringe at the womanly touch of her fingers, the black-thread stitching on my neck-mouths rips and they both sing “Meeker!” full-throttle into the silence, the soprano of the “Mee!” bursting into vibrato.
Jojo pulls away. “What did you just say?”
I stare at her, silent. Nothing but the slowly fading echoes of “Meeker!” as my neck-mouths devolve into incoherent babble.
“How could you be thinking of Meeker right now? That guy is so mean to you.”
I shrug it off, hoping the red in my cheeks and the thunder in my pulse don’t conspire to betray me.
Jojo’s voice cracks. “Try the rest on yourself.” Then she throws the tuxedo jacket onto the carpet and runs out of the store.
XXX
Jojo avoids me for the next few days. Probably for the best. Ever since my neck-mouths started to sing—ever since they found their voice—one new mouth after another has grown. Inch-long slits up my gullet to my chin, their purple-pink lips all constantly humming, strangled with thread.
Except for the two that I can’t get to shut up. The ones that Ms. Pinkerton stitches every day, after almost every class. “Meeker!” they gurgle when the thread comes loose. “Meeker! Oh, Meeker!”
Dad can sense my worry. He catches me one day on my way to fifth period. “So many?” he says. “Well, the more you try to hide it, the worse it’ll get. What could be so bad that you don’t want to tell us?”
Chewing on my lip, I consider my options. Maybe he’s right. Maybe Mom will understand. Then I think of the mantle and their Homecoming shrine and the weight of their expectations crushes me to dust.
Better to risk it than to feel their disappointment. To live in the fact that I can’t be who they want.
Even worse, the lacrosse team guys come to notice. They follow me, making their lips plip-plop in imitation of my mouths, singing “Meeker, oh Meeker,” their hands over their hearts in a mockery of my pain. And no matter how desperately I uncross my legs and I straighten my stride, I can still feel their eyes and their laughter in the hallway.
Meeker laughs with them. But he never says anything. Just hangs in the back. I imagine him telling his friends that they’re wrong, that he starts to feel guilty. Imagine him walking up alone to my locker and wrapping his perfect, olive arm around my waist.
Then, one day, he does. He breaks from the group. He stops right in front of me. He smiles so wide that my body starts to vibrate with the mountain of words that my mouths want to sing.
“Wanna meet me tonight at our Homecoming float?” he says.
I stare, my mouths open. My lips start to tremble as I swallow the question. To realize the danger.
“Don’t worry,” says Meeker, and he leans in and winks. “The team never goes. We’ll have the place to ourselves.”
I nod as he leaves, too nervous to speak. For the first time in days, every mouth on my body goes totally silent.
XXX
The track field is empty when I arrive that evening. No cars, no people. There’s a caravan of floats lined up on the track, each of them made by a team or a club, most of them only painted stages and scaffolding. A pirate ship here, a magic castle there, a miniature beach made of fake waves and sand. Meeker sits alone on the lacrosse team’s float—a spray-painted green stage with Styrofoam goal posts—and when I walk up to greet him, my mouths start to drool through the collar of my t-shirt.
“You made it,” he says, as if he doubted I would come. He knocks on the scaffolding surrounding the stage, which encloses the hollow foundation underneath, and he holds out a hand to help me climb up next to him.
I breathe in his deodorant, the way that he effortlessly combs back his hair, how he cradles one hand on the small of my back. My whole body tingles with raw anticipation.
“Meet me underneath?” he says with a smile. A not-so-subtle wink. Then he pulls off my t-shirt in one smooth motion. Throws it onto the grass. Points to the trap-door leading to the darkness of the substage level, a four-foot-high clearing with no other exit.
I move, unthinking. Unwilling to let this opportunity slip. I think of Meeker’s skin and the ghost of his hand right above my underwear, and I slide through the trap door and land on my knees.
“Meeker?” I say into the cloud-gray moonlight.
But Meeker doesn’t follow. The trap door slams shut. There is wood above my head where the sky used to be, and the lock barely moves as I slam it with my fist.
I can barely see my hands. Can barely hear the humming of my goose pimpled mouths. Then I hear laughter. Knuckles on the exterior wood of the float. Voices I recognize from years in the hallway.
The entire lacrosse team is on the other side.
I press against the wood—punch, kick—with no luck. The lock holds strong. If I can’t get out, if I can’t find my shirt, then the whole school will see me half-naked at the parade, will see all my mouths, will hear what they sing.
But the more that I struggle, the more that I panic, the more that the stitching on my neck-mouths starts to rip. All of them take shape around the same word: “Meeker!”
And now, what’s the harm? He already knows. He’s used it against me. Burgundy, the stupid one who fell for their tricks. Who thought he could finally get what he wanted.
The laughter and voices and knocks fade away as my mouths start to sing, full acapella-style. “Me-me-me-me!” They roar each note in arpeggio fashion—louder, louder, louder, LOUDER. “Meeker, I love you! Meeker, I want you!” All of them in harmony. Swapping the notes as they reach a crescendo—the bass and the tenor and the sweet contralto—melding together into a falsetto shriek.
Then a thump on the stage. The lock-pin snaps. Moonlight pours in as the trap-door swings open.
All I can see is a hand reaching through and a voice I had thought I might never hear again.
“Grab hold,” says Jojo. “Quick—before they come back.”
XXX
The two of us sit near the back of the bleachers, hidden in shadow. Jojo keeps glancing at my uncovered mouths as their song turns to whisper, ready to die now that they’ve finally been heard.
I angle away, too embarrassed to see the disappointment in her eyes.
“You know…” says Jojo. “I think, deep down, I might have already known.” She wears a sad smile full of grief and self-pity. “In my head, we were perfect. You were everything I wanted. And so, I thought, if I tried enough, you might want me too.”
“Jojo,” I whisper, not knowing what to say. Tempted to tell her how much I understood, how I wanted myself to try to want her too, how similar we were, each of us craving what we couldn’t ever have. So, I settle for, “I’m sorry.”
Jojo leans in. Her fingertips brush against the lips on my neck, the “Meeker, I love you” coming softer and softer, until finally, it stops. The lips shrivel up and detach from my skin. They land on the dew-slick grass, unmoving. Nothing but a purple-pink scar in their place.
“Plip-plop-plip,” the rest of them follow. One by one, they whisper my secret and fall from my body. By the time that we leave, there are dozens of dead lips littering the grass.
XXX
Two nights later, I’m with Jojo at the Dance. It’s everything that Mom and Dad promised it would be—over-shiny dresses and rumpled tuxedos, a ceiling of balloons above a glitter-dusted dance floor. Ninety-nine percent of the sophomore class is here. Everyone but Meeker. An absence I ignore. It’s the first time my body doesn’t want to be near him.
“May I have this dance?” says Jojo. She sparkles in a silver dress that clings to her hips, and she holds out her hand, you-may-kiss-the-queen style.
I can feel Dad’s eyes all the way from the punch bowl and Mom’s eager smile by the chaperone stand, hoping tonight will help to soften the blow. To give me more time to find the right way to tell them.
A worry for tomorrow. A worry I can handle, with Jojo in front of me, and the knowledge of my secret so close to her lips. For once, it feels good to not carry it alone.
Tonight, though, I sing at the top of my lungs.
Tonight, I just dance.
