Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

Eleven of the twelve doctors said the same thing to Bianca and her mother: “It’s a dermoid cyst. There’s really no reason to remove it.”

The twelfth doctor said the same plus some. “It’s what we call a ‘vanished twin.’ It never developed in your womb,” he pointed to Bianca’s mother, “so your forehead absorbed it,” he pointed to Bianca. The doctor leaned his face so close to Bianca’s as he made this pronouncement that she could smell what he’d had for lunch—Italian sub. “It’s nothing to fret over. I see these all the time.” He scribbled something on a prescription pad and handed it to Bianca’s mother. “There’s no need for surgery unless it turns problematic. Now scoot, young lady! Live your life!”

In the car, Bianca’s mother wept. Bianca hoped it was because her mother was blaming herself, but she knew it was because the doctor had deemed neither the cyst, nor Bianca, problematic. Bianca tried to remember a time her mother had looked her in the eye and not at her forehead, but she could not think of a time like that. As they drove out of the parking lot, Bianca pulled the prescription from her mother’s purse. “Get bangs!” was all it said.

That night, Bianca read in an old encyclopedia that dermoid cysts produced their own hair and teeth and fingernails. In the accompanying color illustrations, she saw dissected cysts that she knew she would never forget. Some of them looked like beefsteak tomatoes cut open and jammed with cat fur and seed pearls. That day, Bianca saw herself for what she really was: a host for a monster.

When she went away to college, Bianca finally followed the twelfth doctor’s orders and cut thick bangs to hide the cyst. She began sleeping with whomever, wherever. Boys, girls, teachers. Beds, floors, bleachers. Her efforts worked until they didn’t. By sophomore fall, a recurring nightmare had begun. Desperate and haunted, Bianca went to see the campus psychologist.

“I have this dream that a baby hatches from my temple,” Bianca said, quietly and ashamed. “It’s my long-lost brother, and my father is the happiest I’ve ever seen him.”

The counselor put a hand over his mouth and cleared his throat. Both gestures, Bianca could tell, hid his amusement. She was so humiliated, she never went back—to the counselor or to school. For a week, she slept in her car. She cried and cursed and cradled her forehead. On the eighth day, she bought the webcam and rented the furnished apartment. On the ninth day, she began undressing for strangers on the internet. She made no attempt to hide her identity, only her forehead, and with the money she earned, she had necessities delivered to her front stoop: soup and toilet paper and tampons, lipstick and push-up bras and thongs.

For months, Bianca didn’t leave her apartment for any reason or person or thing. She kept the blinds drawn and let her skin turn the color of skim milk. She sent her parents a postcard telling them she had left school for a stable job and that she didn’t know when she would see them next. Bianca knew her mother was frantic. Not because she wanted to see Bianca, but because she needed to see the cyst.

Bianca did not go home for Christmas, but she did send her parents a gift box of twelve Royal Verano pears. They cost her fifty dollars, but they were perfect. On the internet, Bianca zoomed in on the pears and knew her parents would approve; they were nestled in their padded crates like one dozen flawless foreheads. She had them shipped certified mail so her parents would have to sign for them.

On New Year’s Eve, she found a life coach online and spent three hours messaging about her cyst and her nightmare. The life coach told Bianca that she suffered from a classic case of “survivor’s guilt,” and that she needed to start calling the cyst what it really was: her brother .

“Have you even named him?” the life coach asked. “Because you need to give him a name.”

Bianca thought about this. She thought about what sort of name went with Bianca. Bianca and Ben? Bianca and Brian? Bianca and Bill? “Bjorn,” Bianca said at last. “Bianca and Bjorn.”

The life coach was quiet for a pause, and Bianca could tell this choice pleased her. “Excellent,” the coach said. “Now. Go and write your brother’s story. Start a journal. Get to know Bjorn. Learn to love him.”

Getting to know Bjorn was harder than the life coach had made it sound. Bianca tried to think of what her brother might have looked like and what he might have been able to do. She gave him red hair and green eyes and put him in a cowboy outfit. She tried to imagine him firing two cap guns and wearing a coonskin cap. She gave him a toy drum and a bullwhip and other things she had seen little boys use on old-fashioned television shows, but as soon as she’d written these things down, she scribbled through them. Bianca knew the truth. She knew Bjorn was weak, terribly so, because she had overcome him in the womb. Bianca could barely open a new jar of strawberry jelly, so what did that say about her brother? It said that if her brother had been born, he would have worn thick glasses and hearing aids and braces on his legs. He would have been unable to control his saliva, his bowels. He would have garnered the pity of her parents even more than he did now.

Bianca filled two notebooks on this predicament—on Bjorn’s endless doctors’ appointments and the exorbitant medical bills and the tears her parents shed for him and only him. She wrote all of this at her bedroom window and allowed herself to crack the blinds while she did so. Through the aluminum slit, Bianca could see into the neighbors’ backyard. They had a rusted, metal seesaw with faded red-and-white candy stripes, and as she wrote about her brother’s condition, she saw herself, and him, on the seesaw. She saw him on one end of it, tiny and malformed and high in the air. And she saw herself on the other end of it, staring up at her brother, his fate in her weight. Every time she looked at the seesaw, Bianca saw this, and then she saw herself getting up and off the seesaw and walking into the woods, while Bjorn crashed and fell.

The cyst began to grow. It grew so much that Bianca had to order a wig and undress at certain angles for her webcam customers. She lost a dozen subscribers because she wouldn’t lay back and moan like she once had. If she did, her bangs fell to one side and she could feel the stale apartment air wafting over her cyst. She knew the men weren’t looking at her forehead, but still: knowing it was exposed made her self-conscious and she couldn’t do what she had once done as well as she once had.

The nightmare also grew worse. Now it was no longer a baby that hatched right from her temple. Now it was a full-grown man dressed as a Navy pilot. He stepped out of Bianca’s head in his shined shoes, and her mother and father ran, tear-stained and rejoicing, to embrace him.

Bianca knew the time had come for action. But action meant leaving the apartment, so she found someone on the internet who would come to her and do what needed to be done.

Bianca didn’t know if he was a real doctor or not, but he arrived when he said he would and he gave the secret knock that Bianca had insisted he use. More importantly, he carried a black leather bag that looked expensive and he didn’t smell like an Italian sub. In Bianca’s living room, the doctor put on surgical gloves and a headlamp and asked Bianca to lay on the couch. Then he brought out five giant needles, two Valium, a scalpel, and a CD player. “Vivaldi,” he said. “ Four Seasons .” He handed Bianca a blindfold and she put it on and the doctor did what she had paid him to do. When it was over, he helped Bianca to a seated position and held up a mirror so she could look at herself.