First were the headaches.

The kind that make you sick to your stomach. The kind that feel like burning daggers in your skull.

Mom didn't believe me at first. She thought I was lying, faking sick to get out of school, as if that had ever worked for me before.

“I know you can make some friends if you just try harder,” she said when I came to her crying.

“No, Mommy,  I have bumps.”

“Everybody has those,” Mom sighed, but she touched the tender spots I indicated. Then she frowned, pressed down harder on lumps that felt as big as apples on the sides of my head. I whimpered. “Hm. Let's go see the doctor, OK?”

***

“She’ll need to have the growths removed,” the doctor said, showing my mother the X-Ray. “If we take care of it now, while they’re still budding, it’ll be a simple outpatient surgery.”

“Surgery?” I repeated, eyes wide.

“Of course,” Mom said. She didn’t look at me. “As soon as possible.”

They never asked me what I wanted—but then, all I wanted then was to stop hurting.

***

I lost my baby teeth late, another thing the kids at school laughed about. When the grown-up ones came in, they were sharp. Sharp like rose thorns. Sharp like kitchen knives. I kept cutting my tongue; for a year my mouth tasted like blood.

Mom took me to the dentist, but he shook his head. “We can file down the incisors and canines a bit, but with the others we’d get too close to the root. That’s asking for a lifetime of pain and decay and extractions. With her mouth still growing, it could cause a lot of problems down the line.”

“Can't we do anything?” Mom asked, clutching at my arm with nails that dug in painfully. “She can’t go around like this.”

“Try not to smile too much,” the dentist suggested.

***

By the time I was a teenager, I wore gloves everywhere to hide my hands. They made me clumsy, as did my arms and legs that wouldn't stop growing. I hid surgical scars with my hair, and I tried not to open my mouth.

“Everyone's awkward at this age,” Mom assured me, and neither of us said that I was head and shoulders taller than everyone at school, that I was the only one who had to sleep with a mouth guard to keep from injuring myself on my own teeth. That there was awkward, and then there was me.

Finding friends hadn't gotten any easier. I didn't know how to talk without showing off how wrong I was. It was easier to slouch in the back of the room and try to be invisible.

***

When my face started to change, I didn't bother to complain about the pain. I just showed my mother how everything was getting longer, my jaw stretching forward at a cruel new angle. She sighed, exhausted by yet more growing pains.

“You look just like—” She cut herself off. “It’s fine. I'll talk to your school, get you permission to wear a face mask. No one will be able to tell.”

“Just like what?” I asked, but my mother didn't like to answer those kinds of questions. She grabbed a box of medical masks at the store and told me to keep them in my locker.

***

I found a stack of photos in a box in the attic. They’d been forgotten there years ago, covered in dust thick enough to make me grateful for the stifling mask. I flipped through them one by one, cleaning the glass with my sleeve.

My grandmother had a photo, her face familiar but strange in its youth, the colors grainy and faded. My great-grandmother had a black-and-white photo wearing pearls and a solemn expression. My great-great-grandmother had a photograph, too; she glared at the camera through wire-rimmed spectacles with disapproval so heavy you could carry it.

My three-times great-grandmother had a woodcut.

I traced the lines with a finger, feeling the world drop out from under me. She was tall, so tall, as tall as the trees behind her. Massive hands ended in spiky claws. She made no effort to conceal a mouth filled with nightmarish teeth like some deep-sea fish. Or the horns that spiraled upward from her skull, ending in vicious points.

She was monstrous.

She was beautiful.

I peeled off a glove and looked at my hand: my long fingers, the nails always growing too fast, too sharp.

Or, I thought, maybe just sharp enough?

***

I never put on a face mask again.

***

When my daughter grows horns, I will give her medicine and ice packs, but not scars like mine, or my mother’s, or her mother before her. Being different is painful, but I won’t take that inheritance away from her.

Instead, I’ll teach her to speak around a mouth full of knives and to smile an unsettling smile. We’ll learn together how to tower over others without shrinking back, how to use long fingers to play the piano or climb mountains, how to take up space in a world that was never made for us. To see our strangeness as a gift from ancestors long before, not dreaded but celebrated. Not shameful, but beautiful.

I can’t wait to see what she grows into.