III. Unbiased

It took three weeks for my tail to grow in all the way. I still don't know how long it is--Dad and I stopped counting at sixteen vertebrae, and I never bothered to count again. Somehow, he made every change something exciting, instead of something gross or scary. He called me 'Snowball'. Me, with my midnight fur. That's his sense of humor for you. I think it was kind of a challenge, too, since he knew I was going through hell. But I could see in the dark, so he would send me down to the basement for his tools when he needed them. He rubbed my sore fingertips when my claws erupted and told me not to use the couch to sharpen them. And when my venom turned on, he went wild with--I don't know. He was a scientist. All sorts of weird things used to excite him.

Mom called me beautiful and told me she was proud of me. The stuff parents are supposed to say, I know, but she meant it. She was an artist, did I mention that yet? She never actually showed me her sketchbook, but I used to sneak peeks after she'd gone to bed. It was filled with drawings of me. From her perspective, I guess I really was beautiful. I tell you what, seeing yourself from your own mother's point of view is... well, I don't know if embarrassing is the right word. I started feeling kind of uncomfortable around her.

I'm not sure I really want to talk about this part, but here goes.

I woke up in the middle of the night--and why the hell does the truly bad stuff always wait till the middle of the night?--feeling like my insides were burning. I tried to get out of bed, but my legs, which I was still kind of unsteady on, wouldn't support me. Mom heard the crash and came to see what was the matter. I was crying with the pain, so she held me carefully and yelled my dad out of bed. Then she saw all the blood on my mattress, and she really started yelling.

I hadn't been back to school in--jeez, months, I guess; not since Ellis Island, anyway. I didn't complain, of course. I suppose I must have missed my friends, but.... Hell, what would they say if they could see me now? Mom and Dad had pulled me out of the school's roster and informed the state that they'd be home schooling me from now on. Of course, they kind of neglected to mention that 'home schooling' included how to groom myself, how to talk around my fangs without sounding like my mouth was full of marbles, and how to sit on my new tail without hurting myself. I know, it sounds silly, but trust me--the damn thing's sensitive. No wonder cats don't like you pulling theirs. And of course, there was always Dad going on about how fascinating all these mutations were. Yeah, right. Not from my point of view.

Don't get me wrong, now, they still made me study math and history and Latin and all that shit. Seriously, though. What the hell am I supposed to use it for? Estimate the number of leaves on a tree? Translate its Latin name? Sure.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, in the bedroom, with my mom screaming bloody murder. Emphasis on the bloody.

Shit, shit, shit. I don't know if I can talk about this, even now. It's not just the memory of the pain, you know? It's all the crap that going to the hospital caused. No, I guess you don't know--but shit, you can probably guess what the ER nurses thought when my Dad carried me in. Remember what I look like, now. Black fur, long tail, dorsal spines.

You know how long emergency room waits normally are? Hours, it seems. I remember going in for an ear infection when I was little--fat chance of that happening now, of course--and it took fucking forever for anyone to see me. Now, though, I was a mutant--no. I was a mutie. A monster. A goddamn animal. Some smartass told my dad to take me to a vet--this was a human hospital. That really got me crying then, more than the pain in my stomach. Goddammit, why the hell do people have to be like that?

I was still bleeding down below, but the chair was vinyl, or something. Mom had grabbed a big sheet to wrap me in, but it was cotton. There were big holes in it now where my blood had eaten through it.

Before you ask, no, this was not me getting my period. I was fifteen by then, and I'd been having it regularly for long enough to know the difference, though I hadn't had one since the change.

After a while, Dad was pacing and cursing. People who'd come in long after us were getting seen already, but that shouldn't surprise you, right? Well, it surprised Mom and Dad, and they were pissed. I don't know about parenthood--I never will, either--but I saw them scared that night. Really scared. I think they thought--well, I don't know what they thought, but I was afraid I was dying.

I remember everything going gray, and feeling horribly cold, and wanting to go to sleep. That's when the nurses and doctors finally got off their asses and did something. Mom was going nuts, and Dad wasn't helping, either--the internist in him kept trying to give the real doctors advice. If I hadn't been so out of it, I'd have been really embarrassed.

Fuck this. I can't talk about this shit anymore. I'll cry on my new notebook, and God knows where I'd get another one in such good condition. Let me just say that by the time I got out of there, my uterus, one ovary, one kidney, and about a third of my liver had melted away before my body's defense against itself finally kicked in. It was my own immune system that had done it--my T-cells attacking what they thought was alien tissue, because the cells of that tissue weren't sending out the right chemical white flags.

If mutation is supposed to be the next step in evolution, then Mother Nature's still got a few kinks to work out. Homo sapiens superior, my furry ass.

Mom and Dad's faces were pasted all over the TV and newspapers for the next few weeks. Mom lost her job at the university. No one would even look at Dad's research anymore. Science is supposed to be unbiased, you know. Only people without mutant families can be fair about mutation. I'm not even going to go into how hard it was for them to sell the house. I told them I'd stay in the basement whenever it got shown, and they made sure I locked it, so no one could come in and gawk at the neighborhood mutie.

Shortly before someone finally took it--at less than half what it was worth--Dad's old college roommate came to visit him. "Doctor Dave," I always used to call him when I was little. He wouldn't look at me at dinner. Mom and I both went to bed early to give them a chance to catch up, since they hadn't seen each other in a few years.

My bedroom was close enough to the living room that, even with the door closed, I could still hear their conversation.

"How long had you known, Ian?" That was Doctor Dave, so quiet and calm that I knew he must have been angry.

"Mary Elizabeth's amniocentesis. The OB-GYN asked her if she wanted an abortion."

Dave said, "So why didn't she have one?"

"Jesus, Dave! You know how long it took us to get pregnant! Did I ever tell you how many miscarriages Mary Elizabeth had?" Dad sighed, and I heard the ice in his brandy clink. "You don't turn down a gift like that. No matter what." There was a long silence, then Dad spoke again. "Almost everything Melody's got should have been latent. It was that radiation at the UN summit that triggered it."

"Have you spoken to Erik?"

"He's been... out of the country." Dad coughed--you know, the kind of cough that men make when they're trying not to cry. "You're a doctor, David. What do you think?"

"Yes, I am a doctor. And all I see is how many people that... girl... has the potential to kill."