Free The Liminal People by Ayize Jama-everett Page A

unaware of which sensory input they are reacting to. We’re a little more subtle about it than animals, but that person at work you can’t stand? That girl whose number you just have to get? Stank. I read an article that said there’s no evidence of pheromones existing. I really wish I could tell them about what I smell.
    Teenagers are the worst. They reek of pheromones, like baby skunks that unleash all their odor at once, or adolescent rattlesnakes, full of venom. Human children spray their pheromones everywhere. Catholic schoolgirls are the worst of the worst.
    I hit the playground exactly at noon, but I hold back a little bit, across the street from the bricked yard. The younger girls come out first. They go for balls and jump ropes. Then the older girls descend from their high tower of protection, hoping to take on whatever dangers the real world may have to offer. I keep my senses open for seared lungs. When I feel it, it comes from behind the playground, on the other end of the school. Makes sense. That’s where the cool girls go to smoke. Tamara is either a cool girl or a freak. All of our kind are. We either lead the pseudo-outsiders, or we truly live the outsider experience. I’m banking on her mother’s desire to make her “normal” affecting her enough to at least try for the outcast friends.
    I take my time getting over to the girls but increase my perspiration rate and kick the “I’m sexy” hormones into overdrive. I’m making sure I’m downwind of the nuns, scared of what they’d do if they caught a whiff of me now.
    â€œAny of you know a girl named Tamara?” I say, standing in front of five girls out of a bad eighties punk video. Two try to hide their cigarettes. Two take long drags and stand, looking at me with a scowl. One blushes. Girls respond to “I’m sexy” in different ways.
    â€œWho wants to know?” A girl with a Southie accent. One day she’ll be fat and bloated, like her mother; I can already feel a slower metabolism than normal. Which is why she smokes, so she doesn’t have to eat and so she doesn’t have to work off those calories. It’s all unconscious for her, and that’s what makes her the cause of stains on many teenage boy’s sheets right now. But her cavity-ridden mouth and pockmarked face make her tough-girl impression almost laughable. Only I’m not playing games right now, so I give her the respect she thinks she wants. She doesn’t realize she’s standing so close, or that she’s pressing down her skirt with her free hand, trying to make a good impression.
    â€œLook, I’m not a cop, OK? I’m an intern down at the hospital. I know she’s been missing for a while, but look, she’s sick, OK? I can’t say what. I’ve just got to find her.”
    â€œA bit much, the personal attention, enn’it?” the blushing one says, still not standing and not intrepid enough to look in my face. She’ll grow to be gorgeous, provided she deals with the ulcer eating away at her intestines.
    â€œWe were . . . are . . . friends. I’m not trying to get her in trouble or anything, I promise. Look, if she’s run away I won’t tell anyone.” Heart rates go through the roof on that one. Not sure what that means, but they’re focusing on my words.
    â€œYou some kind of perv?” the second unabashed smoker is asking, leaning on her friend’s shoulder, glaring hard, trying not to lick her lips. She tries for a posh accent, but her Brixton roots won’t let her go. Although she’s five shades lighter than me, even now with me at my lightest, one of her parents came from the Caribbean recently.
    â€œListen to me. She’s sick. Really sick. But she doesn’t know it. She could die. Plus, she’s contagious. If you’ve seen her, if you shared drinks with her or ate from the same plate of food, you could be sick,