When the chrysalis appeared, a huge, translucent-green pod fused into a wall of lockers in Saint Mark’s School’s tenth-grade quad, Clarissa was the only one who recognized it for what it was. Everyone else stood in a half-circle around it, snapping photos and speculating. One of the lacrosse boys, egged on by his mulleted friends, reached out, touched it, and immediately recoiled, wiping his hand on his shorts.
“I swear I felt something move in there,” he said. “I think it’s some sort of, uh, cocoon.”
“Chrysalis,” Clarissa blurted. In elementary school she’d looked after caterpillars until they became monarch butterflies, so she recognized the difference: a cocoon was fuzzy, spun of silk, whereas a chrysalis was smooth, hardened skin.
“Same shit,” the boy said.
Clarissa caught herself. “Sure, whatever.” Yikes. She’d almost pulled an Amy Q—deluded herself into thinking anybody cared about whatever nerdy fact was on the tip of her tongue. “Chrysalis just sounds prettier, you know?”
The boy smirked. Clarissa dug her nails into her palms.
The last time Clarissa had seen Amy Q had been in English yesterday, where Clarissa had covertly recorded Amy Q comparing Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to her “number one all-time favorite anime,” Neon Genetics something-or-other, a comparison that made less and less sense the more Amy Q talked, rambling about her cringey obsession to a captive audience. At the end of class, Clarissa pulled Amy Q aside and showed her the video.
“Can you imagine if I acted like this?” Clarissa imitated Amy Q’s performance—her hunched posture, her flailing hand-motions, that hitched, too-loud voice that set Clarissa’s teeth on edge. Amy Q stared back with her usual flat incomprehension.
“How do you not realize that’s what you sound like?” Clarissa said. “How can you have so little self-awareness, seriously?”
Amy Q mumbled that she was late for her next class and shuffled out of the room, head bent towards the floor, backpack dangling awkwardly from one arm. Clarissa glanced around and was relieved to see classmates roll their eyes in commiseration, even though she’d failed, yet again, to help Amy Q see herself the way everyone else did.
Today, Amy Q’s seat in English had been empty. Amy Q never missed school. Like, ever. Now, looking at the chrysalis, Clarissa found herself wondering if its droopy form didn’t kind of evoke Amy Q’s uniquely bad posture. If it’s location blocking Clarissa’s locker might not be a total coincidence.
The bell rang, and clump by clump, kids headed to class. Clarissa alone stayed behind.
“Amy Q?” she said, keeping her voice low. “Hello, hi. Are you in there?” She approached the chrysalis. “Anyone home?”
No response. She placed a hand against its surface. It was cool and palpitated beneath her touch. She pressed harder. At birthday parties as a kid, she’d liked to test how much pressure she could apply to a balloon before it popped. She’d felt in control, watching everyone else startle, knowing the balloon couldn’t catch her by surprise.
The palpitations remained steady, indifferent.
“Hello?” she said. “Listen, if you are in there, Amy Q, you should know I was just trying to help.”
Nothing.
Clarissa pushed more firmly, fighting down nausea as she felt clumps shift inside.
If she broke the chrysalis, what version of Amy Q might spill out? What if Amy Q emerged a total stranger, likeable in the most boring possible way, capable of blending into any crowd, blank face where Amy Q’s used to be?
“I hope you’re in there, Amy,” she whispered. “I hope you’re still yourself, even if you’re, like, a weird human-bug hybrid or something.”
But in her gut Clarissa knew Amy Q was transforming, and that letting the transformation run its course would produce answers Clarissa wasn’t sure she wanted. She braced herself and drove her arm forward until the chrysalis ruptured open. Lukewarm goo squelched between her fingers, smelling of overripe fruit pulp.
Her legs wobbled.
Your-self? she heard, the word reverberating in her skull. Any-self dissolved. Self, a worksheet full of blanks, indistinguishable from any-body.
Clarissa froze.
Lately, whenever she bit her tongue or feigned interest in some boring conversation among her friends, she was afraid that what made her her was atrophying. She had nightmares in which everyone but her knew the secret of who to be. In these dreams she’d walk from person to person, often familiar faces from school, begging them to tell her—please, she had to know—but no one would. A sense of absolute helplessness would chase her into her waking hours.
If she continued, would anything be left of the person she was?
She stuck her other hand into the chrysalis and pried the opening wider, peering into darkness. “Amy?” she called. “Amy Q?!” The name echoed back at her, the chrysalis’s interior more cavernous than seemed possible.
Clarissa stepped inside, her feet sinking ankle-deep in mush. It was hot and humid, sticky with congealing liquid. Still, she kept going, feeling her way along the slimy walls. All sound subsided but her own breathing and the sloshing of her steps. She hoped that she wasn’t wading through liquified Amy Q. That she wasn’t already too late. Where are you? Clarissa wanted to shout. Who are you? Who am I? What does the Q in Amy Q even stand for? Clarissa grew unsure where her legs ended and the muck began. All was dark, and sounds and sensations reached her like the remnants of a dream somebody else was dreaming. She trudged into the deeper darkness. With every step, she felt herself dissolving. Clarissa becoming clarissa becoming ________. Soon, she’d try to trace her way back to the person she’d been, but for a moment, just a moment, she could allow herself to exist as unadulterated possibility — infinite, free.
Santiago Wilson Heredia is a Peruvian-American writer from Boca Raton, Florida. He has a BA in Behavioral Decision Science and Literary Arts from Brown University and is currently an MFA candidate at Syracuse University, where he’s Fiction Co-Editor of Salt Hill Journal. His fiction is forthcoming in Gulf Coast and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
