What’s Happening To My Body

I’m going to try to write this in order. I need it to make sense because nothing has made sense for three months and writing is the only thing that still feels like something I can control.

My name is Priya. I’m seventeen. I moved to Harwick in October because my dad got a new position and we relocated and I started a new school mid-semester which was hard but honestly fine — I’m decent at being new places. I make friends. I smile. I ask people questions about themselves and actually listen to the answers. It’s not a performance, I just genuinely like people.

I liked it at Harwick. I liked my classes. I liked the trail behind the athletic field where I ran in the mornings. I liked a boy named Caden who lent me his jacket when the radiator broke in third period and never made it weird when I gave it back.

I want to remember that I was happy there. Before I explain what happened to my body.

It started with my hair.

Mid-November. I was washing it in the shower and my hand came away with more than usual — a loose clump, maybe thirty or forty strands, dark against my palm. I told myself it was stress. New school, new city, my sleep schedule was off. Hair loss from stress is normal. I Googled it. I drank more water. I bought a gentler shampoo.

Two weeks later I was finding it everywhere. On my pillow in the shape of where my head had been. Coiled in the bathroom drain after every shower. I started wearing it up because the sight of it loose unsettled me in a way I couldn’t explain — it felt less like shedding and more like departing. Like my hair was trying to leave my body before the rest of me got the message.

By December I had a bald patch above my left ear the size of a silver dollar.

I wore my hair differently. I didn’t tell anyone.

The next thing was my gums.

I noticed them bleeding when I brushed my teeth, which again — Googled it, common, vitamin deficiency maybe, stress again. But it didn’t stop. It got worse. By Christmas break I was spitting pink into the sink every morning and two of my back teeth had developed this sensitivity to cold that made me flinch so hard my eyes watered.

My mom took me to a dentist in January. He looked in my mouth for a long time without saying anything and then he asked me — carefully, the way adults ask things when they’re worried about the answer — whether I was eating properly. Whether I was under unusual stress.

I said yes to stress.

He used a word I had to look up later: recession. My gums were pulling back from my teeth. He said it in the tone of someone describing something they didn’t fully understand. He said it was aggressive for someone my age. He said we’d monitor it.

I monitored it every morning in the mirror. I watched my own smile slowly become something wrong.

January is also when I started noticing Mara.

I want to be honest: I had noticed her before, the way you notice furniture — present, peripheral, not particularly significant. She was in my Chemistry class. She was quiet. She looked at Caden sometimes in a way I recognized from the inside — wanting something you can’t ask for — and I felt for her, the way you feel for anyone carrying something heavy in public.

But in January she started watching me.

Not subtly. Not the quick glances of someone trying not to be caught. She watched me the way you watch a car accident — with this horrible fixed attention, like she couldn’t help it but also didn’t want to. In the cafeteria. In the hallway. Once in the library when I looked up from my book and she was at a table twenty feet away and our eyes met and she didn’t look away. She just kept looking.

I mentioned it to Caden. He got a small crease between his eyebrows and said “that’s weird” and I agreed and we moved on.

I should not have moved on.

In February my left eye started watering constantly.

Not like crying — like a faucet with a slow drip. The inner corner, a persistent seep of moisture that I was always wiping away. My vision got slightly blurred on that side. I went to an optometrist who found nothing structurally wrong and referred me to a specialist who also found nothing structurally wrong and said sometimes tear ducts just behave strangely and gave me eye drops.

The eye drops did not help.

What was happening — and I know how this sounds, I know, but just stay with me — was that my left eye was becoming translucent. Not quickly. Not all at once. In the way that a dyed shirt fades in the wash, over repeated exposure to something that strips color away. I noticed it first in photographs. The iris, which had always been very dark brown, was lighter than my right eye. Then lighter still. By late February it was the color of weak tea. By early March it was the color of water with just the memory of tea in it.

By mid-March you could see through it to the red at the back.

I went back to the optometrist. I went to a different specialist. I went to my GP. I went to a hospital. I have a folder on my phone with forty-seven medical photos and six referral letters and no diagnosis that explains all three things together — the hair, the gums, the eye — because there is no condition that does all three. Every doctor looked at the previous doctor’s notes and found something politely wrong with their conclusions.

During this time Caden held my hand in the hospital waiting room.

During this time I found out about Mara.

Her locker is diagonal from mine. I don’t know why I’d never registered this before — maybe because she was always gone before I arrived in the morning, maybe because I’d just never looked. But in March I got to school early because I couldn’t sleep and I was at my locker when she came down the hallway and stopped at hers and we were alone in that corridor and I watched her notice me.

The expression on her face lasted less than a second before she replaced it.

But I saw it. I have replayed it many times since. It was not guilt exactly — or not only guilt. It was the expression of someone watching a thing they made continue to move.

I asked Caden that night whether Mara had ever said anything about me. He was quiet for too long before he said no.

I asked if she had ever said anything about him.

He said: “She used to look at me a lot. Before you got here. I didn’t know what to do about it so I just — I didn’t do anything.”

I lay in bed that night looking at the ceiling and thinking about the word before.

Before I got here.

Before October.

Before my hair started leaving my body.

I want to be very careful about what I say next because I know what it sounds like. I know how it reads. I am a girl who has been failed by six doctors and I am looking for an explanation that makes everything fit together, and of course a desperate person finds patterns.

Except.

I talked to my aunt in Bangalore on a video call in March. She’s my mother’s older sister and she has always been the family member who exists slightly outside ordinary reality — the one who keeps neem leaves above the door and says certain things only at certain times of day. I showed her my eye on the camera. I showed her the photos of my hair loss, the dental records.

She was quiet for a very long time.

Then she asked me: Is there a girl at your school who wants what you have?

I said yes.

She said: Has she ever touched something of yours? Something you wore?

I thought about my cardigan. The one I left on the cafeteria chair in November. The one I assumed I’d eventually find in the lost and found.

I said: I think so.

My aunt closed her eyes. When she opened them she looked at me with an expression I had never seen on her face before. She is sixty-three years old and she has buried a husband and a son and I have never once seen her look frightened.

She looked frightened.

She told me what to do. I did all of it. I am not going to describe it here because if any part of it works I do not want it undone, and if none of it works I do not want to know that yet.

What I will tell you is what happened to Mara.

In April someone found her journal. I don’t know who, I don’t know how — these things move through high schools like weather. By the time I heard about it the relevant pages had been photographed and were on four different group chats. She had written about me in a way that was very detailed and very specific and not metaphorical.

She was called to the principal’s office. Then her parents were called. There was talk of a disciplinary hearing, of a police report, of restraining orders. I don’t know what ultimately happened because by that point my mother had already enrolled me in a different school across town, and I finished the year there, and I have not been back to Harwick.

Caden texts me sometimes. I answer when I can.

My hair is growing back. Slowly — thin and fine like a baby’s, like something learning to exist again. My gums have stabilized.

My left eye is still the color of water.

The specialist says it may continue to fade or it may stop where it is. There is no medical literature for what is happening to my eye. He uses the word idiopathic, which means we don’t know, which means we’ve never seen this, which means the chart has run out of room and we are now in the margin.

I look in the mirror every morning. I look at the eye that is no longer fully mine.

I think about a girl who wanted something she couldn’t have and reached into a place she didn’t understand to take it, and I think about the fact that she is still out there — not in prison, not hospitalized, not dead — just out there, in whatever remains of her life, with whatever remains of herself.

I don’t know what was in that box her grandmother left.

I don’t know what she let out when she opened it.

I know that sometimes, when I’m alone in a quiet room, the eye that is fading still sees things the other one doesn’t.

I’m not ready to talk about what it sees.