Free The Chaos by Nalo Hopkinson Page A

bit sticky. I rubbed the ointment into it. It tingled, probably from the peppermint oil the guy in the little shop behind the market had told me was in it. He’d been kinda vague about what else was in it. I rubbed and rubbed until the ointment had all soaked in. I resisted the urge to scrape at the patch of skin. It’d only hurt if I did; I’d found that out long ago. I stopped rubbing, peered at it. Had it spread since last night? Was it edging up onto my hand a little? They did grow. The one on my shoulder had started out as a quarter-sized patch. Now it was bigger than my hand, edging its way around to my armpit, with a little piece of it, like a tributary, heading toward my collarbone. I could never have let Tafari see me like this.
    No one knew what was causing my skin condition. My parents had taken me to doctors, skin specialists, allergy specialists, a nutritionist, even a psychologist. I’d been given antibiotics, antihistamines, injections, special diets. I’d been scanned, biopsied, had an MRI. All negative. And none of the treatments worked. Okay, so sometimes I’d cheated on the diets a little. It just wasn’t fair to have to put apple cider vinegar on your popcorn instead of butter and salt.
    Whatever we did, the marks just kept on coming. There were three streaks of black on my tummy, from my left side almost all the way to my belly button. The oval patch on my right shoulder blade. I hadn’t told Mum or Dad about it, but I’d found a patch on my scalp, hidden by my hair.
    When the conventional pills and potions hadn’t worked out, I’d started hunting down the other kind. The zit treatments advertised in the ads on my MyFace page. Handwritten cure-allnotices taped to telephone poles, the kind of notes that had scrappy tear-off fingers with telephone numbers written on them. Business cards thumbtacked to the notice board in the grocery store. Glory’d been after me to check out this botanica place that she knew about. I’d had to look up what a botanica was. My mom would have sneered at it and forbidden me to ever set foot in an “establishment that pandered to superstition.” That’s what she called churches, tabloids, CNN. Bet you Dad wouldn’t have been so dismissive. When his great aunt had died back in Jamaica last summer, he’d stuck a ton of blue glass bottles upside down over all the branches he could reach on our old crab apple tree out back. To keep her duppy from coming to haunt him. “That woman was mean in life,” he’d told me. “Wouldn’t surprise me if she was vengeful in death, too.”
    As my blemishes got bigger, I’d stopped talking to Glory about them. I’d let her think they were fading.
    Botanicas didn’t sound so dumb to me. Mom didn’t have any trouble trusting in the herbal tinctures from the nutritionist, or in the vitamin and mineral supplements from the drugstore. Looked like botanicas just did the same kind of thing, with a little bit of faith healing thrown in. Mom even believed in the placebo effect. Said it was the marvelous power of the human mind at work. But I just knew the major shit fit she would throw if I suggested a visit to Seer Angel’s Healing Palace, or whatever it was called. That was the kind of thing that got on my last nerve about my parents. The hypocrisy.
    If I concentrated on the marks, I could feel them itch ever so slightly. I mostly didn’t feel them unless I was really quiet and thought about it. But at night, when I was sleeping, I could sense the new ones as they were coming in. Gave me nightmares, and when I woke up, sure enough, there’d be a new one. Mom and Dad didn’t believe me that they showed upovernight. They were sure the marks came in slowly, and I just didn’t notice until they were way obvious. “You young people,” Dad would say with a mocking smile he meant to be a gentle one. “Heads so full up of yourselves that you can’t see your own nose to spite your face. You think I forget what it was like to be