Chapter 7: Unwanted Inheritance
The morning light was wrong. It fell across the bed at an angle that meant Andrea had been up for hours. The space where she’d lain was cool, the pillow dented. I was alone. The silence of the house had a different texture than the hospital’s—it was a silence full of old memories that no longer fit.
I pushed myself up. The motion sent a wave of nauseating sensation through my upper body. My breasts, unbound beneath the soft cotton of my t-shirt, swayed heavily, a sluggish, separate pendulum of flesh that pulled at my chest. The nipple rings tugged minutely at the skin. I swung my legs out, and the new center of gravity made me list to one side, my hand slapping down on the mattress for balance. My feet, smaller, hit the floor with a soft tap.
I needed my glasses. The old, instinctive reach for the nightstand found nothing. My vision was 20/20. Another piece of me, gone.
Walking was a recalibration. Each step sent a jolt up through slender ankles, into calves that felt taut and strange. The shift of weight made my hips roll in a way that was unmistakably, biologically feminine—a side-to-side motion that felt both fluid and grotesquely performative. I held onto the banister descending the stairs, my new hand—the one with the web tattoo—gripping the polished wood. With every step downward, my chest bounced. Not a gentle jiggle, but a deep, aching oscillation that made my skin flush with a shameful heat. I clutched my free arm across them, trying to dampen the movement, which only made me more aware of their soft, overwhelming presence.
I heard voices as I reached the bottom step.
A man’s voice, low and professional. “Just need a signature here, ma’am.”
Andrea’s voice, thin and strained. “What is all this?”
“Personal effects release from the county morgue. Standard procedure once the… once the case is closed.”
I turned the corner into the foyer.
The air was thick with dust motes dancing in the slanted sunlight. Our familiar clutter—my stack of Sandman comics, Andrea’s knitting basket, the cracked wedding photo—was now dwarfed, surrounded by an invasion of cardboard. Five brown boxes, tape peeling, sat like coffins on the hardwood floor. One was open, its flaps gaping.
Andrea stood before it, a hand over her mouth. In her other hand, a pen trembled above a clipboard held by a uniformed delivery man who looked intensely uncomfortable.
The open box vomited up a life. A tangle of black lace. A strap of leather. The gleam of a silver chain. A faded band t-shirt for a group I didn’t recognize. The visual noise was overwhelming.
My eyes locked with Andrea’s. Her face was the color of paper. The delivery man followed her gaze to me, and his eyes widened briefly before snapping down to his clipboard. He saw a short, curvy young woman with bed-headed black and pink hair, wearing an oversized men’s t-shirt and nothing else. He saw Sabrina Mooers.
“Just sign, please,” he mumbled, pushing the clipboard toward Andrea.
She scrawled something. He ripped off a copy, thrust it at her, and was out the door with a speed that bordered on panic. The door clicked shut. The silence rushed back in, now poisoned.
Andrea stared at the paper in her hand. “Personal effects,” she whispered.
I took a step forward. The movement made the contents of the box seem to pulse. My heart was hammering, and yes, I could feel each beat in my breasts, a frantic drum against my ribcage. I looked down.
On top of the lace was a small, clear plastic bag. Inside it, jewelry. Several silver rings. A studded collar. And, unmistakably, a delicate silver barbell.
I knew what it was. The knowledge clicked into place with a cold, surgical precision. The piercing they hadn’t mentioned in the file. The one that would have been listed, clinically, as a ‘clitoral hood piercing.’ A wave of dizziness washed over me. My skin, all of it, felt suddenly tight, like a suit two sizes too small. The absence between my legs, that silent, screaming void, seemed to throb in sympathy with the metal in my chest.
“Don’t,” Andrea said, but it was too late.
I was already pulling things out. Not wanting to, compelled. A pair of impossibly tight, ripped black jeans. They smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume. A leather jacket, worn soft at the elbows. A handful of thin, silky camisoles. A skirt so short it was a belt. Another box, heavier. I ripped the tape.
Books. Not my books. Dog-eared paperbacks with paranormal romance covers featuring shirtless men with fangs. A well-used makeup case spilling over with powders and pencils in violent shades. And at the bottom, a framed photograph.
I lifted it out.
Sabrina Mooers stared back, laughing. She was leaning against a graffiti-covered wall, head thrown back, mouth open in a shout of joy. She wore the leather jacket. Her hair was a vibrant pink shock. Her eyes were lined in kohl. One arm was slung around a grinning man with facial tattoos. She looked vibrant. Reckless. Alive.
I was holding her corpse’s smile.
My stomach twisted. I dropped the frame. It clattered on the floor, the glass cracking across her face.
“Justin,” Andrea breathed.
“This is her,” I said. My voice sounded wrong in this higher register, choked. “This is the… the donor. The healthy donor.” I kicked the box. A cascade of lace and fishnet spilled across the floor. “Look at it, Andrea! Look at what you put me in!”
She flinched as if struck. “I didn’t know! How could I have known?”
“You signed! You didn’t ask! You just wanted me back, and you didn’t care what cage I came in!” The words were bile, burning up my new throat.
“That’s not true!” She was crying now, angry, guilty tears. “They said it was a miracle! They said you’d have a body! They didn’t say it would be… would be this party girl’s discarded skin!”
I picked up the small plastic bag, dangled it between us. The silver barbell swung. “Did they mention this? Huh? When they talked about healthy donor tissue, did they specify the modifications?”
She turned away, gagging. “Put it away. Oh, God.”
I let the bag fall. It was all too much. The scent of her perfume on the clothes. The ghost of her life in these objects. It was a violation, a haunting. I was a squatter in a corpse that still had mail arriving.
I sank to my knees in the middle of the wreckage. The denim of the borrowed jeans I wore was rough against my thighs. I could feel every seam. The waistband dug into the unnatural, narrow curve of my waist. I felt the expansive, soft swell of my ass pressing against the back of the jeans, a sensation that was both cushioned and alien. My own breath felt trapped in my chest, rising and falling under the unbearable weight.
“We have to burn it,” I said, my voice flat. “All of it.”
Andrea wiped her face. She looked from the shattered photo to me, kneeling amid the ruin of another woman’s life. Her expression shifted from horror to a weary, desperate resolve.
“We can’t,” she said softly. “It’s… it’s evidence. Of who you are now. For documents. IDs.”
“I don’t want her ID!” The shout was raw.
“You don’t have a choice!” she shouted back, her own control snapping. “Justin is dead! He’s legally, medically dead! The only person alive in this house is the one who owns that face!” She pointed a shaking finger at the cracked photograph. “Like it or not, that’s you now. And we have to… we have to build from this.”
She gestured helplessly at the boxes. “This is the foundation. We have to sort through this hell and find what we can use.”
I looked at the lace, the leather, the silver jewelry. The costume of Sabrina Mooers. A costume made of meat, and now, a wardrobe to match.
The shopping trip. The promise of ‘my’ clothes. It felt like a pathetic joke. There was no ‘my’ anymore. There was only this body, and the detritus of its former owner.
I reached into the closest box, my hand moving of its own volition. I pulled out a simple item—a plain black, long-sleeved cotton shirt. It was soft. It smelled only of laundry soap, not perfume. It was the most normal thing here.
I held it up. It would be tight. It would stretch over curves I didn’t own. It would announce a shape that felt like a prison.
But it wasn’t lace. It wasn’t leather. It was a maybe.
“Okay,” I whispered, the fight draining out of me, leaving a cold, hollow exhaustion. “We sort.”
Andrea knelt beside me, her shoulder not quite touching mine. Together, in the sunlight full of dust, we began the grim archaeology of my new life, sifting through a dead girl’s things, searching for scraps we could use to patch together a person.