Friendship Is Temporary but Skin Suits Are Forever
Spareskin
I started by sewing together flakes shaken out from my bedding, unravelling fine cotton thread into finer strands to make my tiny stitches. But most skin cells were lost elsewhere, and of those I gathered, only a small fraction were large enough to sew, however delicately I did it. Then I learned to use Petra’s razor and peel off a long, smooth strip of skin every morning, which I’d fold gently into a tissue and add to the suit in the evenings.
It started by accident. I always stopped at Petra’s on the way to school, early enough to hang around and use her bathroom, where I’d take out her pink razor, shave my legs in long, fast, strokes, and carefully replace it in the drawer. I’d done this every weekday all year. No one had explained how, or how often, girls should shave their legs; I’d only gleaned that they should. Petra would be making her lunch and never noticed me enough to care how long I spent in her bathroom. Then, one time, her brother knocked on the door and in haste I pressed a little too hard, so that a gauzy layer of skin, one inch by two, folded up between the blades.
I pulled up my navy knee-high uniform socks, cleaned the razor with toilet paper, and flushed that away. When we were halfway to school, I finally felt blood-moistened fabric rubbing against flesh where it should have been touching dead outer skin, and thought about how I’d discarded one more part of me into city sewage.
This was all before I started working lunchtimes in the school canteen and earning my own pocket money. For two years, a supply of pads had appeared silently and regularly in our bathroom cupboard, and one time Dad gave me twenty dollars and waited in the mall carpark—as far away as possible from the entrance—while I tried on cheap bras in the department store. But I guess he never thought about his daughter wanting to shave. I owe that first suit to Petra and her razor.
The newly peeled skin was fresher and thicker than dry flakes, and grew over my stitches so the thread became invisible. I measured myself with the tape in Dad’s toolbox and made the skin to fit. I began to wear winter uniform year-round, long socks hiding where I’d taken skin to graft. I forged notes to skip PE and dropped out of swimming.
I resented having to hide it. Why would anyone remove hair when they could remove—and create—skin?
When it was finished, I repaid Petra’s friendship by wrapping the new skin around a chestnut sapling in my garden on the evening of the school dance, pulling the satiny dress she’d lent me over its crown.
“Be glamorous,” I said.
A liquid shuffle of branches into hunched shoulders, roots into flat feet, knots into dark brown eyes, autumn leaves darkening into black hair, and this smoother, firmer me stepped into the borrowed heels I’d placed on the ground. I waited until she strode around the corner and went to sit in silence next to Dad, who was watching TV.
He was astonished to find the tree uprooted in the morning, though he missed the blue nail polish stains on its bark. When I arrived a few hours later with the jewelry I’d found in the grass beside it, Petra yelled from behind the door that she would never forgive me. I didn’t learn what that version of me had said or done, but I glimpsed her in photos passed around at school the next week, wavy hair gelled and neatly held by Petra’s silver-beaded hairpins. She had indeed been glamorous.
Despite her solidity, the costume had already begun disintegrating along the early skin-flake stitches when I pulled it off the trunk. I let the remnants flutter apart in the warm nor ’westerly wind.
I had to use Dad’s razor to start again, discovering it was no different to Petra’s for my purposes.
Although I didn’t miss her razor, I missed her—her careless benevolence, the shield of her popularity. My classmates had started to notice me since the dance, but I didn’t want to be noticed that way. And I was lonely without her.
I stuffed the second skin with bedsheets on Athletics Day, drew on eyes with a ballpoint pen—I could paint them brown later—and told her, “Be powerful,” before I let her out the door and went back to sleep. She was round, sleek, and better muscled than the first. She was for me, not for everyone else. When she got back, we’d divide my chores between us, and I’d have a new confidante.
But swollen sheets were tearing through her skin when she returned dripping to my room, and the blue ink of her eyes had run. Even after I squeezed out the water, I couldn’t get the sheets back inside. I pulled the skin apart and discarded it, a little at a time, into rubbish bins and the toilet. I kept the swimming trophy that had dropped from her bloated fingers.
The next term, I was allowed to start working at the canteen and could buy my own razor. This time, I haven’t rushed. I used skin from all over my body, sewing multiple layers so the suit would be thick and strong. I waited until Dad was away for work to dig out the hole where the chestnut once grew, and fill the skin with its fertile earth.
And here you are.
I don’t need glamour from you, or power. Those never last—not even in those of us who grew into our bodies the usual way. Maybe you’ll have what it takes to reconcile with Petra. Or maybe you’ll find new friends.
Maybe this life will be worth something to you. If not, I hope you’ll find your own freedom later, when we’re older.
In the meantime, everything I leave behind is yours. Be me.
