A teenage witch in suburbia doesn't brew in a cauldron. Maybe she does in some other dimension where broomsticks fly instead of sweep, and horned toads speak. Here, in this one, she brews in a porcelain sink, and much like a cake, iced with mounds of dried toothpaste.

The bathroom was stuffy, choking me with the lingering smell of feet and spearmint. Being the only girl in my family, it was mine. Ninety percent of the time, that is. My brothers brushed their teeth in there and pretended they were Jackson Pollock. My poor mirror became a canvas for their spit. Before you ask why I didn't clean it, I'm an untidy individual, to put it gently. My family assumed I liked to stew in filth and was content to turn every room I went into a pigsty. That couldn't be further from the truth. Mouldy cups of tea littering my desk in my bedroom, just down the hall, didn't bring me a smidgen of pleasure.

I overcompensated with bathing, a lot. At least three times a day. It didn't pick the clothes up off my floor, but it gave me some semblance of hygiene. I could have used the hours I spent in the bath to tidy instead of wrinkling my fingertips and toes, but I didn't. I'm not sure why.

That afternoon, I was going to clean my body. Inside of it. I ransacked the cabinet for everything it owned: bottles of chemicals.

Nobody remembered where the sink stopper had disappeared to. It made no difference to me because I turned the faucet on and watched the water rise, then settle. A thick tumbleweed of my hair did the job fine, clogging the drain and creating a stagnant pond fit for mosquito larvae to fester in a month much warmer than this. While I did the headcount of cleaning agents, I asked myself why we had Drano, since it was clear we weren't using it.

I looked for my reflection in the pond instead of the mirror above it, not because I couldn't see through the smudges and streaks, but because it was the thing sad anime girls did while dissociating. I found an unusually ugly witch blinking back at me. Instead of polluting the pond with chemicals, I plucked one lucky random spray bottle off the tile. It contained blue liquid. I had assumed it was off-brand window cleaner, but with the label scratched off, I couldn't be sure.

The spray top popped off with my forefinger and thumb. Some drops burned down my throat before the bottle hit the floor with a plasticky thud.

What am I doing. What am I doing.

My face plunged into the pond, and I drank that too. A memory surfaced of my basement, where I had brought down a blue garden bucket brimming with water, my head held down by my hand, sloshing over onto the carpet. It was a breath-holding contest with no opponents, lasting until I prayed to whoever might be listening for oxygen. Afterwards, on that same day, we took a family trip to the zoo, where I remember feeling a kinship with the sea life in the marine exhibits.

When I freed my head, my bangs clumped into a sheet that dribbled onto the countertop. I stuck out my tongue, hoping I would regain feeling in my taste buds and that the soapy coating would dissipate. It didn't right away.

Is this… it? How… anticlimactic.

Sometime during this, my knees hit the cold vinyl floor. I reached for the door; the doorknob must have wanted to join the sink stopper in where missing things wind up, because it drifted fifty feet above me. I gave up and lay on my back to watch the dust dance around the flush mount ceiling light.

Stargazing, I remember thinking I would never again have to sit through another Socratic circle or any other frivolous class activity. To me, it would be a perk of death. I had a long-standing reputation for being a crybaby in school. Even in the subjects I excelled in, like French, I could hardly bear to muscle through a presentation without ribbons of tears and snickers from my peers.

Stargazing, I remember thinking I would never again have my photograph taken despite my pleas, only to have it texted back to me, digitally marked with red circles over parts of my face like it was a test I’d failed. That happened only once, but once was enough to solidify my conviction about my unsightliness.

By the grace of heaven above, I did, somehow, have a couple of friends. Without those friends, I would have floated aimlessly through the hallways of my school as a weeping ghost, doomed to haunt it until graduation freed me to the spirit realm. They were my tether to the mortal coil. Reminiscing about how I treated them, I could puke; not only were they good friends, they were good people. I could have learned from them. I let the bitterness of how I felt the world had wronged me bleed into our friendship and soil it completely. Blood doesn't wash out so easily.

I would never again watch a girl explicitly flick her tongue between two fingers parted into a V, cackling amongst her coven of friends. I fled, carrying the humiliation of youth. But not before I stuck around to be convinced to mime the same gesture, of course. I was under their spell of wanting to be liked, or perhaps they'd slipped me a love potion. When I foolishly complied, as if they would initiate me of all people, the coven burst into rancorous laughter.

They conjured their theory of me being a lesbian from magic dust or thin air, as I first heard the sordid word from them. Girls I hardly knew would sprint across the tarmac of our schoolyard to get away from me, beet red by the time they'd stopped, never once looking back to check if I was still chasing, which I wasn't. Life never granted me athletic talent; it placed only a foolscap upon my head. If I had died that day, playing a sport would not make my list of regrets.

I did attempt to play dodgeball in gym class, but I was a detriment to either team. Whichever team ended up with me treated me like the filth you wipe away from your neglected windowsill — crumbs, dust, dead flies, cobwebs and all. After class I'd go to the locker room and hear how I was flatter than the Great Wall of China. I never believed in God, because if there were a God, he was not all-loving if he made me socially inept and gave me the unshapely body of a slug. I was flexible as one, though. My gym teacher berated me for the twisty way I sat, like a pretzel. Stop freaking me out, he'd say, like I set out each morning with the goal of being odd and unsettling others.

In my mid-teens, one of my two friends got dragged into the crossfire. Our shared class had a boy, unrelated to the girls before, who would hunt us down during and after class and fire the ever-coveted ammo at us, lesbians. It was one thing for him to shoot me. It was another for the bullet to ricochet onto her. Although I wanted to land a left hook against his jaw, I didn't. In books, or any fiction, the wallflower is powerful. I would decimate him in debate club with my sheer wit.

These events led me to a simple, juvenile conclusion: life is a big party I wasn't invited to.

Then came an insistent scratching at the door — my familiar, whom I received as a birthday present after my dad caved to my relentlessness. He wrote on a daffodil-yellow birthday balloon in permanent marker, YOU ARE GETTING A CAT!, and some unassuming day afterwards, I met her: a tortoiseshell cat of black and orange and white, her paw now sliding under the gap, mewling as if to ask, are you in there? I was a polyglot, but only for human languages. They never stocked cat dictionaries or textbooks at the library, much to my dismay.

I was still breathing. My vision stopped warbling, the room stopped revolving, and my legs finally held me up. I flicked the thumb turn and slipped out of what otherwise would have been a dingy mausoleum made of grout. Well, it would've been, had I possessed any actual guts. Guts, I preferred, to be splattered on a highway where magpies would feast on my viscera. Swandiving off an overpass, however, requires forgoing rationality. In my case, cowardice triumphed over everything.

I had pictured that night’s end like this: with my limbs inflated like my pastel birthday balloons and the putrid yet sickly sweet scent of necrosis and bleach, then a funeral conducted swiftly (to get it over with) and an open-casket where they could get a look at my bloated body, edema-like, swollen past feasible recognition as a human being, where I would appear more like a baby botfly.

Instead, I hobbled down the hallway to my bedroom. And I did not speak of these events again until now.