Piper Teenage Girls Can Be Demons

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83541-147-6
Verlag: Titan Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

13 terrifying coming-of-rage stories from the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth, perfect for fans of Clive Barker, Mariana Enriquez and Eric LaRocca 13 coming-of-rage stories the way only Bram Stoker Award-winning author Hailey Piper can tell them-wildly inventive, brilliantly imaginative, and completely and utterly enthralling. A vicious group of college upperclassmen prey on the freshman girls in 'Why We Keep Exploding;' an impossible world of sinister desire opens beneath a family basement in 'A Living Piece of Time;' a girl on a night out realizes a bizarre cop is hunting her in 'The Long Flesh of the Law;' and in the acclaimed novella 'Benny Rose, the Cannibal King,' a Halloween prank goes horribly wrong when a murderous ghost steps out of an urban legend and into the real world. These stories take our most difficult years of transformation and twist them into new and terrifying shapes, where the monsters are real and you'll do whatever it takes to get away, or get even.

Hailey Piper is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth, A Light Most Hateful, The Worm and His Kings, No Gods for Drowning, and other books of horror. She is an active member of the Horror Writers Association, with over 100 short stories appearing in various publications. She lives with her wife in Maryland, where their occult rituals are secret. Find her at www.haileypiper.com.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Piper, Hailey

Leseproben

WHY WE KEEP EXPLODING

Just a joke

The first girl explodes on the final evening of orientation weekend.

Allison Greer, Sutton University freshman, joins us in the dining hall, where all levels of college kids pack the inside, clacking dishes and loud voices bounding off every surface. Beneath that cacophony, no freshman would fear silence.

The boys who join us at our table are upperclassmen. They forego hoodies and torn jeans for stiff button-downs and slacks, like they have job interviews scheduled after dinner. Juniors? I can’t say for sure.

The tallest, a blond boy with razor-straight teeth and a narrow face, sits across from Allison. I can’t make out their conversation through the noise, but he points repeatedly to a cup of yellow liquid, likely beer, and then taps a penny on the tabletop, and I understand this is some kind of challenge.

She tells him she doesn’t like games. When he doesn’t let up, she curses him and throws her glass of fountain soda into his face.

I stare, awestruck, while Tall-Boy sputters. Shaking my head always felt like drawing too much attention, let alone cursing and splashing. I dread the glint in others’ eyes, how I’ll turn from human to thing in the flick of an internal switch the moment they realize I’m different. Vocal training hasn’t come as easily to me as other girls still recovering from early testosterone infection. Some self-teach or find others to teach them. A few like their voices and insist everyone else had better deal with it.

I should be grateful that silence is my friend, that others don’t clock me at a glance and figure out how I’m different from other girls. Lucky little Laurie started estro at fourteen.

Most days, I keep strict posture and bite my tongue. I would never throw soda into anyone’s face. Had Tall-Boy challenged me instead of Allison, I would have agreed to whatever game he wanted. Boys like him twist sorcery on their tongues. They insist you play with them, and I’m easily witched.

Allison is my heroine for a few brief moments. She turns to stride from the table, a victorious warrior abandoning a corpse-choked battlefield. Carbonized droplets skitter down Tall-Boy’s face while his friends laugh at him.

But then he weaves sorcery. “Chill, sweetie,” he says, wiping a paper napkin down his face.

She turns to snap at him, dark hair coiling: “Chill yourself, asshole. Goodbye.”

He leans over the table, and I see the witchcraft swirl in his piercing eyes. “Somebody has an attitude problem,” he says. “It was just a joke.”

Allison’s lip curls back, but she hesitates. Her gaze darts back and forth, uncertain, sizing up witnesses and how they might judge her reaction. Was she the kind of girl who couldn’t take a joke? She had to get her words just right or else see the dining hall condemn her a stuck-up killjoy for all time.

“Try—” she starts, fighting tooth and nail to get the words out. “Try. Being. Funny.”

Tall-Boy turns on his debate me voice. “Humor’s subjective,” he says, smooth and smarmy. “Asking me to adjust for you when we barely know each other, that’s completely irrational.” His eyes stab through her, reading when she’ll try to speak again. He doesn’t let her. “Just a joke,” he repeats, this time coated in slime.

Allison’s lips fight her face to make words. I don’t know what she would say if she could speak. I would like to.

Instead, the silence clamps over Allison’s paling complexion, her dark hair shimmering with milky starlight. She clutches her gut, as if the unspoken words now burn her belly. Her legs stagger back from the table.

Tall-Boy and his friends lean in, like they know what’s about to happen. Sorcerers must have that power.

Allison’s skin ripples. Every muscle twitches. If there’s a sound building toward what’s about to happen, I can’t hear it beneath the dining hall din, Allison rendered silent. I read words in her face, the ones that have done this. Just a joke. Attitude problem. Irrational.

And then she has no face. Her body flashes out, a sudden supernova of white light and viscera. I cover my eyes, but the boys keep looking, their heat oozing over the table, dwarfing Allison’s cold, starlit explosion.

She doesn’t even scream.

When I finally uncover my eyes, there’s nothing left of Allison. The white-light explosion has burned away her every cell. She’s erased, the boys having silenced her forever.

I’m not the only one looking—the place where she stood has the entire dining hall’s attention except for Tall-Boy and his friends. They’re looking around, making sure this explosion has been seen and understood.

They meant to make an example of her, and they have.

They leave us then, point made. We freshman girls sit quietly, out of respect for our deceased hallmate. The moment of silence stretches to dinner’s end. Back in the dorms, someone is sobbing.

Not me. I’ve seen quiet horror. In high school, boys used to silence with fists and boots; here they use words. This is the way of college.

Have my hallmates absorbed the lesson?

Quiet girls don’t get clocked. We aren’t made examples.

Quiet girls don’t explode.

Emotional

I watch the chattier freshman girls when crossing the quad or getting coffee at the open-air campus center—the ones who haven’t learned.

One of Tall-Boy’s friends reminds me that silence is a blessing. He circles the chatty girls, a shark sizing up swimmers, and intrudes with his debate me voice, egging the girls to engage him on human rights or politics or some superhero movie. Given time, one will speak, and then he mocks, and interrupts, and chastises. He puts her in her place. When she’s upset, he calls her “emotional,” and it’s a silencing nail hammered through her tongue. She’s learning terror, one syllable at a time.

Unspoken words can’t escape. I watch her swallow them, and they stew in her guts like trapped gas in a mine. The more she tries to talk, the worse the pressure. It’s slow for some girls, quick for others. Sometimes, when crossing campus, I hear a distant eruption, and I know we’ve lost another.

Survival requires silence. This is the way of college.

When do the boys turn from freshmen to sorcerers?

Who teaches them the silence spell-words?

Why don’t they warn us before it’s too late?

Allison wouldn’t have come here had she known what Tall-Boy’s tongue would do to her. She wasn’t the type to be silent.

Except getting a rise from her was Tall-Boy’s game. She didn’t know better—how could any of us? Freshmen mouths might spit fire, but we know nothing of spell-words.

Our fingers are smarter. On the way out of the dining hall one evening, I steal a knife.

Irrational

Alone in the dormitory shower, I slide the knife down my upper arm and cut a small letter into my skin—A. The shape is ragged; the blade could be sharper. I tell myself that this is how I’ll remember Allison when we took no selfies together; there is no body, no candlelight vigil.

We’re afraid our gathering at campus center will lure the boys. They would hear our sneakers squeaking across cobblestone and be drawn like sharks to blood in the water.

I want the second letter to be L, and then L-I-S-O-N, but I’m no longer certain Allison had two L’s. Instead of overthinking it, I let the blade take over.

Knives have always made sense to me. Hormone therapy has treated my features down to a cellular level, but deeper than that, our flesh holds bad habits holy. I thought I quit cutting myself in middle school, but a smoker smokes when the chips are down, and a cutter cuts. Transition during high school only pressed the pause button.

Still, I haven’t been trapped in that what am I? body for years. Things have changed, even the cutting.

When I glance at the knife’s work, I find the A is not the beginning, but the center. Before it, I’ve carved J-U-S-T. After, I’ve carved a J. I finish what the knife began and carve O-K-E myself.

I carve further spell-words. It’s nothing like my old cutting: every bleeding stroke less about dulling psychological pain, and more about creating protective sigils. Silence spells will find themselves carved in my skin and scurry back to their masters. The boys can’t witch me with words I’ve bled.

That’s the theory, anyway.

Smile

There’s a trick to keeping boys from telling you to smile. Most girls ignore or retort, but “smile” here is another silence spell. No comebacks, only combustion.

The trick is to always smile. The worst these boys can say is “Smile bigger” or “Show some teeth,” but they never do. No matter how rancid I feel inside, my cheeks tug the corners of my lips. The expression is reflex now; no need to think, no effort needed.

I probably smile in my sleep.

Maybe it’s that façade of cheery disposition that draws this boy to me as I cross campus center. He has a wolfish face, jaw hugged by scruffy dark hair, but his eyes look wide and unassuming, almost innocent. Their pretty gaze doesn’t fit his lupine form, two damp orbs stolen from some gentle giant.

His voice is likewise sweet. “This sounds weird, and it’s okay if you don’t want to talk to me, but I just—sorry, I’m not good at this. Hello.”

When I wave at him, he smiles, and my lips tug a little tighter from my teeth.

“You got a name?” he asks.

An invitation to...