Work Text:
In the dressing room, her mother eyes her carefully.
Callie, in turn, eyes the way Mom circles the small room, like a shark amidst its prey, about to take a bite. It makes her unconsciously bring a hand up, then an arm, covering one breast, made too bare in only a bra and her jeans.
“I don’t think that one fits you,” Mom says. “The band looks tight.”
“It’s a little tight,” Callie says stiffly. She looks to her mother and sees that careful look again, the way her eyes narrow when she returns Callie’s gaze.
Her mother breaks the eye contact with a loud sigh.
Callie drops her arm, then, lets it fall to her side limply.
“What do you want?” It comes out more blunt than she intends for it to. Callie looks, almost frantically, at her mother, bracing for impact.
“For you to stop being a brat and listen to me.”
Like a knife. Callie stiffens again.
Her mother takes the silence as her cue to continue. She starts pacing the room again, one foot crossing in front of the other, careful steps that leave behind little echoes of heel clacks.
“Oh, Callie,” she says, almost mockingly, meant to hurt. She looks Callie in the eye again and Callie can’t look away. “If you want all the boys at your school to look at you, you can just, I don’t know,” and she pauses to shrug. It stabs at Callie again, that familiar feeling, that she’s being played with, picked apart by a shark’s fangs. “Get that bra you have on, and maybe it’ll even get those boys to sleep with you.”
“Mom!”
Too close to her, almost leaning in:
“I don’t know,” Shauna whispers, “I think you want that.”
Callie fails to bite her tongue.
“I think you wanted that,” Callie hisses, “and we know where that went.”
Her mother puts a hand on her shoulder, and leans in further, hot breath on Callie’s face. Callie almost shakes at the touch, hand to bare skin, pinching her bra strap.
Briefly, Callie wonders if she’ll pull and snap the strap. She thinks about how it’d sting so much less than anything her mom could say.
Instead, her mother pulls away, steps back until her back is to the dressing room mirror. Callie looks in the mirror, tries to piece out the parts of herself unobstructed by her mother’s figure.
“How about we get that bra then, Callie,” Shauna says. She smiles something sickly sweet.