Sweet Romance18 min read
The Little White Seed on My Thigh
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I noticed the little white dot on my thigh the way you notice a pebble in your shoe — absurd, nagging, impossible to ignore.
"It looks like a birthmark," Daria said when she saw it first, leaning over my laundry basket in our cramped dorm.
"That's not a birthmark," I told her. "I would have known."
"It’s so small. Stop fussing," Olga said, tying her hair with one hand while scrolling with the other. "You worry about the strangest things, Ivy."
"Fine," I said. "I’ll check it later."
But I kept touching it anyway. In the mirror, under the fluorescent dorm light, that dot was a pale pinprick against my brown skin. At night it seemed to glow a fraction brighter than it should. I pressed my finger to it and felt an alien smoothness. Not rough, not scabbed — almost like the skin of a ceramic doll.
"You're paranoid," Joyce said when I told her in whispers. "Maybe it's a pimple."
"It feels like something is trying to come out," I admitted, and they laughed at me and went back to their gossip.
I was already thinking about it too much. I am a biology major. I read journals for fun and knew the words for everything that could go wrong. I knew rationally — the dot was probably nothing. But that knowledge didn't quiet the new urgency humming in me.
School that morning felt exaggerated: the clouds were tight and heavy, and everyone walked without umbrellas as if umbrellas themselves were immoral. I kept mine up. It felt like a thin shield between me and the rest of the world.
Five boys blocked the stair landing outside the lecture hall, leaning and laughing like they owned the building.
"Is she in third period?" one asked.
"Yeah," Aaron Crawford said. "Go see."
They hugged each other and made the kind of crude jokes boys make when they spot a pretty thing they think is a prize. I knew who they meant. They were talking about a girl in the class next to mine — the girl whose skin was porcelain and quiet and impossible to look away from.
I followed them up the stairs because some stupid part of my brain wanted to see her the way you look at a painting when you can't afford it.
She stood under the fluorescent light and the boys came close, leaning like predators. They commented on her skin the way the world comments on anything pretty and safe from consequences.
"Skin's so white..." Philip Andrews said. "Is she the one?"
I cleared my throat and tapped my umbrella on the linoleum. "Excuse me. Could you move, please?" I tried to be civil.
Philip looked at me with the kind of bored annoyance people save for the inconvenient. "Am I in your way?"
"You are. The hall's narrow."
"Everyone else can get through."
Aaron pointed at a knot of freshmen scrabbling through the gap. "They get by, why can't you?"
"I'm telling you, you're blocking the way," I said, and suddenly I wasn't calm. My cheeks flamed.
"Black pig," one laughed, and it was a sound like striking a match in my chest. The laughter pushed hot and cold through me.
I didn't plan it. I threw my bag. It missed Philip's face because he stepped aside at the last second. The boys howled.
"Black pig bites!" Cillian Bates jeered.
Tears came hot and immediate. They tasted like iron. I wiped them away with the back of my hand.
Then a pale face cut through the scene like a blade of moonlight.
"How pathetic," she said. "Are you really going to harass a girl like it's a sport?"
Her voice was cool and soft, like someone who had never had to shout. Every boy turned toward her as if the sun had moved.
"Who said anything to you?" Aaron asked.
"Get lost," she told them, and they melted like wax around a candle. One of them tossed a kiss over his shoulder and wandered away.
She bent, picked up my bag, dusted off the dust with slow deliberate movements, and handed it to me.
"Thanks," I said, breathless.
She smiled, a little crooked and a little bright. "No problem."
Then her mouth twitched and went thin for a second. She clapped her hand over her lips and laughed again like nothing had happened.
"You're Clementine?" I asked, because I had to know who she was.
"Clementine Gutierrez," she said. "Don't make a big deal out of it."
She was light and crisp and smelled faintly of citrus and soap, nothing like the boys' cheap cologne. She walked away and I watched her like people watch a comet: briefly, and with something alive in their chest.
After class, a boy I didn't know came over and said, "She wants to see you."
"Who?" I asked.
"Clementine." He wore his excitement on his face like a new jacket. "She's waving. Go."
I slipped out of the lecture hall like I had somewhere to be. She was there, leaning against the locker, porcelain and calm.
"You dropped this," she said, and produced a cheap hairpin from between her fingers.
"Oh," I said, embarrassed. It was my ugly home-made hairpin, clumsy and practical.
"You're welcome." She took my hand and shook it like we were old friends. "I'm Clementine."
"Ivy," I said. "Ivy Aguirre."
"Nice to meet you," she said, with the easy air of someone who never felt like she had to prove anything.
We started to talk and it was absurdly easy. She didn't slant her chin up at me or condescend. She smelled like rain even before the rain came.
When I mentioned the dot, she froze. Her mouth went sweater-tight.
"Oh," she said at last. "You think it's...?"
"What? A mole?"
"No, nothing like that." She laughed, then winced. "Do you want to try something?"
"Try what?"
"You'll see. Come tomorrow early."
She gave me a look like a secret passing between conspirators and left before I could protest. I carried the hairpin like a token.
That night I slept badly, thinking about what she might have meant. The internet has remedies for everything, and I scrolled for hours reading old forum posts and recipes that claimed to change the chemistry of skin. I read about creams and diets and ancient rituals whispered in comment sections.
The next morning she was waiting in the corridor with a heavy grocery bag.
"I dug these up for you," she said, and opened the bag like a magician to reveal a heap of red-stained mushrooms. They were dark-capped and glossy, smelling like iron and rain.
"Can you eat these?" I asked, and my voice sounded small.
"Absolutely. You must." She placed a mushroom in my palm and her fingers brushed mine. The skin on her hand was impossibly smooth.
"How much?" I asked.
"All of it." She held my gaze. "Eat it all."
"All of it?" The bag was heavy.
"It's on me," she said. "I want you in white, Ivy. Do you want it?"
"Yes," I said before I thought. She gave me a look like someone pleased at a correct answer, like a teacher seeing a student finally believe the impossible.
She had an easy generosity about small things. "I can't take your money," she said. "Consider it a gift."
I took the bag back to my dorm and hid it under the bed. My roommates came in that night, noses in the air when they smelled the cooking.
"What are you making? Smells amazing."
"Just a mushroom stew," I said, trying not to sound like there was anything at stake.
They ate a little of it and made faces, then swallowed. "Nice," Olga said. "This is... fatty."
The mushrooms tasted like meat, oddly rich and fatty, like marbled pork you could chew forever. After the first bowl I felt lightheaded. After the second I forced myself to swallow, and by the third I felt something else unspool in my chest like a thread.
"Stop," Joyce teased. "You're acting like it's magic food."
"Maybe it is," I told them, because in the first week it was the only thing that made the white dot feel less like a threat and more like a promise.
Every day I ate. Clementine encouraged me in messages: "Don't give up. Keep eating. It's working from the inside." She was warm, attentive, and in the classes that followed she always seemed to appear when I needed help. I thought about how fragile the skin is, how skin can make a life and ruin it too.
Two weeks slipped by and the dot did not whiten. I felt desperate. I cooked mushrooms into everything — rice, soup, plain steamed rice soaked in mushroom broth — until the smell was a second skin in the dorm.
"You're pale already," Daria said one morning.
"See? I told you." Olga smirked.
My thighs still looked like themselves, and my stomach tightened with the fear that if this did not work I had risked everything for a rumor.
"Eat more," Clementine said when I confided my doubts. "Better to finish the bag."
There were more oddities. Sometimes I couldn't move, like my limbs were glued to the mattress. Sometimes my voice sounded swallowed, like someone had taken a wool cloth and shoved it into my mouth. Once, at a late-night class, my whole throat constricted and I had to leave, dizzy and dizzy.
"You're avoiding class," the math professor scolded once. "You need focus, Ivy."
"I have a stomachache," I lied.
"You have to take care of yourself."
I started to notice patterns after the small white started spreading. It didn't spread evenly. It branched, a little limb sprouting another twig. The white skin looked almost like roots or veins, pale on top of dark soil. It started at the dot and then branched across my thigh like a delicate fungus.
"It looks like a seed," I said to myself one night, afraid to say it aloud.
"Don't say that," my roommate hissed. "Don't be dramatic."
It wasn't just the look. The new skin felt slick and cool, less like my body and more like an attachment. Sometimes it tightened when the sun hit it. Sometimes it made me feel as if something else was very close, like an animal coiled beneath the ribs.
Clementine's messages grew more frequent and more urgent. "We need rain," she wrote. "Tonight if possible."
I thought she meant metaphorically at first. Then she wrote: "There's a spot. Near the old banyan tree at the edge of the campus. Come when the rain starts. Bring only yourself."
When the rain finally came a week later, heavy and sudden, I walked to the field with my umbrella and found her waiting under a big banyan. The ground was slick, the light under the canopy green and shimmering.
"Quick," she said. "We don't have long."
She had a plan that was straighter and stranger than I expected. She'd dug a long rectangular pit behind the banyan, half a meter deep, as if for a grave. My shoes sank into the wet sand.
"Take off your clothes," she said.
"What?"
"Just your outer clothes. We need skin-to-skin contact. It's the last step."
I laughed because laughter can hide panic. "You want us to hug in the mud? I didn't sign up for a cult, Clementine."
"Trust me," she said, sounding both coaxing and authoritative. "We have to let rain penetrate the skin; it's the water that triggers the seeds to sprout."
"Seeds," I repeated. "Clementine, this is insane."
"You won't be the monster," she murmured. "You will be beautiful."
She smiled with an intensity that made the hair on my arms stand up.
In the half light of the rain we stripped down to our underwear and crawled into the pit. Wet earth clung to our backs. It was ridiculous and obscene and somehow intimate. She snuggled against me and then — the motion surprised me — she pressed her bare face into my neck.
"Hold on to me," she said. "Close your eyes. Count down with me."
"One." My breath escaped in fog.
"Two."
"Three."
She drew my closer, and the wet earth pressed against our bodies, cold and soft. Beneath me, my skin went taut as if something under the surface had found a shape to match.
"Don't move," she whispered. "This is the last minute."
I didn't know whether it was the closeness, the mud, or the suggestion of a ritual, but I felt myself go somewhere else. My body hummed with a new attention. It was almost pleasurable, like a root finding soil.
When she told me we were done I tried to stand and my muscles refused. She pushed me lightly.
"Come on, silly," she said. "Let's get cleaned up."
I dressed, dripping, embarrassed and strange and oddly hopeful. I left the pit with a smear of earth that dried and flaked as if it were a memory.
"Clementine," I said later, "what was that?"
"It was the last step," she said, smiling a small private smile that did not reach her eyes.
Two days later I awoke to the sensation of strings constricting my throat. When I looked in the mirror, I couldn't hide the shock: the white had grown across half my body. It didn't look like skin anymore — it looked like a graft, a lace of pale branching growth that hugged my limbs and crawled up my neck. It was cold to the touch and impossible to ignore.
"You're beautiful," Clementine said when she saw me. "Finally."
I felt panic bury me like a stone. "This wasn't the plan."
"It was always the plan," she said calmly. "You just had to believe."
The growth sped up after that. Fingers became pale-crested like the tips of mushrooms. My voice sometimes faltered because of the bands tightening around my throat. Food tasted like iron and rain. I couldn't cry when I wanted to. I watched myself in the mirror like a stranger would watch someone else die slowly.
People started to notice. My roommates were insistent, not cruel but concerned: "Are you okay? You look... different."
"Different good," Daria said, making brave noises. "Maybe you should see a doctor."
I kept the truth hidden. How do you tell people that your friend fed you flesh-scented fungi and made you lie in the mud to mutate? How do you confess you might be changing into something else?
At night I had a dream where I saw the campus at dawn. In the dream, the banyan tree stood taller than a cathedral, its girdling roots threaded with cap-like growths. Beneath it I saw rows of neat, dark shapes like sleeping bodies, and when I leaned closer I saw that they were not bodies — they were mounds of red mushrooms bursting through uniforms.
I woke from the dream with my mouth full of mud.
"Stop being dramatic," I told myself. "Stop inventing horror."
But the rational mind cannot always hold a place against certain truths. Evidence accumulates: a toppled bag at the edge of the campus with damp fabric like a uniform soaked and blackened, a rumor in the cafeteria about a senior who never returned from her fieldwork, a nurse whispering something about "missing students" when I passed the infirmary.
Detectives came one afternoon to the campus office. I sat in a plastic chair and answered questions in a voice too small for my body.
"When did you last see Clementine?" a man in a plain jacket asked.
"Yesterday morning," I said. "We came to class together. We... we ate."
"Did she seem odd?"
"No," I lied. "She was herself."
He scribbled something on his pad. I watched him like a scientist watches a specimen — dispassionate and horrified. I didn't tell him about the pit or the mushrooms. I didn't tell him about the scent of iron in my hands or about the way the pale branched growth had started to strangle the sound of my voice.
After that, my white skin spread more aggressively. It braided at the throat and tightened. It was like some living embroidery being sewn onto me without my consent. In the lecture halls people glanced. One boy I had liked, the one who had smiled once, tried to speak to me and I watched the moment curdle when he said hello and I saw him stumble away as if I were a contagious fog.
I watched myself in the mirror a lot. I watched someone I knew become someone I did not.
One night I followed the dream. The moon was a thin coin and the campus was empty except for a janitor and my footsteps. I went to the banyan. The pit was refilled. Above it, the roots were glistening and full of pale caps. And there, like a pile of used rags, was a shape that had once been Clementine.
She was not completely human: her face had the suggestion of her old cheekbones, but it had been stretched into a curve like a mushroom cap. Where her lips had been, there were soft ridges that glistened with damp. And strewn around her, like offering petals, were uniform pieces — a list of names printed on fabric.
She looked at me with a face that was still mostly Clementine. "Ivy," she said.
"I thought you were gone," I whispered.
"I wanted a body worth the light," she said. "Some things need sacrifice."
I wanted to run. I wanted to tear the growth from my own skin. I wanted to ask every question I had in my chest. Instead, she reached out and touched my arm with a finger as cool as mortar.
"You're halfway," she said. "Finish it."
"No," I said. I took a step back.
She smiled in a way that looked like hunger. "You already ate most of it."
I wanted to tell someone, to make them come and tear this whole place apart. But even as the thought entered my head I felt the pale vines tighten and I felt my throat constrict into a thin reed.
In the days after that I realized I was changing not only in skin but in thought. There was a pattern to what I wanted. I found myself avoiding open air and liking the sweet metallic tang of mushroom-broth more than anything else. I became adept at hiding the little seedlings breaking the surface of my arm.
The campus was quieter after the detectives left. People whispered. I thought I could hear the campus itself breathing, like a sleeping animal.
The final night came in slow motion. I woke to the feeling of being pressed from the inside. My lungs felt as if someone had wrapped them in cord. My skin felt like it contracted. The growth had reached my neck and I couldn't make a sound without pain.
I stumbled out, dizzy and disoriented, toward the banyan tree as if some internal map led me. The rain began, thin and perfect. My hands trembled as I reached the pit. I thought of running away, of the things I had left undone, of a thousand small lives I would never live.
Then Clementine — what's left of her — crawled from behind a root. Her eyes were milky and wet and she spoke with the voice I had known and also a chorus of others.
"Finish," she said.
"I can't move," I whispered, which was not entirely true.
"Close your eyes," she said. "You don't have to watch."
"Don't," I tried to cry, but instead something thin and inhuman uncoiled in my throat and I felt my mouth fill with a sludge-sour taste.
They told me later — at least the versions I had heard on other people's lips — that I had lain down in the pit and let the wet sand swallow me up. That I had wrapped myself in the last breathing of my skin. That I had gone quiet on the inside.
Perhaps I did. Perhaps I was too tired to fight. Perhaps I believed the colonial myth that if you changed enough you would be loved. I had been trained to be steady and patient and to measure things in microscopes and to be humbled by slow processes. It is folly to trust that patience in a thing that is actively eating you.
They found me two hours later, and they called my name as if names were ropes and they could throw them down a well. They called and then they stopped and the campus fell into a long and cinematic silence. My roommates screamed first, then the campus police shouted, and then the crowd gathered like a storm.
I do not remember the hand that lifted my face to stare at the sky. The sky was shallow and gray like a lid.
"Ivy?" someone said.
The last thing I felt was cold and precise: the white lace of new skin through which something else had threaded. It tightened like a loop and I felt my breath cut into small cheap pieces.
Later, there was a scandal. The campus erupted into accusations and phone cameras and hashtags. People wanted a story with an end where bad people paid the price. People needed an ending they could hold.
The investigation uncovered more than I imagined anyone brave enough could have borne to find. They found pits behind the banyan and under other trees, neat rectangles like graves. They found sacks of red mushrooms. They found scraps of uniforms, damp and torn. In a mattress under a bridge there was a bag of names stitched into a cloth. There were whispers — older students who had gone missing, girls who had been counseled into silence.
The police rounded up names. Two campus security guards who had turned a blind eye were put on leave. A small ring of students who had sold mushrooms to gullible girls for favors were suspended.
But the heart of the thing — the person most people wanted to pin it on — was Clementine. She had vanished for a time, but a woman who claimed to be her cousin produced messages, bank transfers, receipts. The media found every angle: jealousy, cult, trend. People made memes. People wanted a villain with a face they could name.
Then, in the most public and absurd moment of all, the council of the university organized a campus-wide assembly. They called it a "clarification meeting" and ordered every student to attend. Phones were forbidden. Cameras were not allowed. The sun beat down like a spotlight on a stage that no one wanted to take.
The head of campus security, Hernando Ford, stood at the podium and read a statement. "We have uncovered an illicit operation," he said. "It involved the distribution of dangerous mycological materials and the coercion of students."
"You mean mushrooms," a voice from the crowd barked.
"It means much more than that," Hernando said. "It means people were exploited."
Someone unfurled a sheet of photos and, one by one, they flicked them across the projector. Images of pits, of red mushrooms, of uniforms draped like flags. The crowd gasped and then hummed, the sound of nervous insects.
When names were called — students implicated, assistants who sold supplies, a handful of people who had directly harvested materials — they were asked to stand. Several stood with their heads down. Others looked at the crowd with a defiant half-smile that made the blood in my ears throttle.
Among those called was Philip Andrews. He straightened and looked at the sea of faces. "This is ridiculous," he muttered, loud enough for several rows to hear.
An elderly professor, Emery Patterson, cleared his throat. "We must discuss accountability," he said. "This is about abuse and coercion."
Then the worst of all punishments unfolded, not in a court but in the stadium where medals are given out and theatrical applause is rehearsed. The university had fashioned a public shaming.
One by one, each person took the stage. They were asked to describe their involvement. Cameras recorded their faces for the news that would run that night.
"Did you know what you were giving them?" Hernando asked Philip.
Philip shifted. "It was research," he said. "I didn't think—"
"Research?" someone yelled. "They were eating people, man!"
The crowd's voice rose. Phones rattled in pockets even though they were forbidden. Faces in the back craned.
"Why did you sell them to student groups?" the provost demanded of a young man called Doyle Jensen who had sold spore samples over the student forum.
Doyle's face went pale. He faltered. "I— I needed money," he stammered. "I thought if it could turn out to be a skincare breakthrough…"
"It was human tissue," Hernando said, and his voice was flat. "You sold them body spoors labeled as cosmetic mycobacteria."
Around him murmurs turned to disgust. "How do you sleep?" someone spat. "How do you look at your mother?"
The worst came when they put a microphone in front of a man who had been one of the leaders of a small clique who paraded campus in arrogance, Aaron Crawford. He too had been implicated. The microphone trembled under his sweaty palm.
"Do you feel shame?" a woman from the chemistry department asked. "Do you see what you've done?"
He opened his mouth and tried to laugh it off. "We were just having fun," he said. His laughter was thin.
Then a woman from the audience, a girl in the back with tear-matted hair, stood up. "You sold our sisters' bodies," she said. "You fed us dirt and called it beauty."
She spoke with a voice that was both thin and terrible. People around her wiped their eyes.
They made each of the accused walk across the stage and face the families of the missing who had come to the assembly. The families had signs. They had photographs. They had a calm, terrible endurance.
"It's not enough," one mother said, voice cracking. "I'll never get her back."
Faces were filmed for news, for the social feeds, for the judicial records. The provost promised expulsions, criminal investigations, and lifetime bans. "We cannot undo what has happened," he said. "But we can take action now."
Philip's face went slack. A film crew hovered. A crowd's anger circled like a storm.
As the assembly closed, a group of students — those who had been close to the missing girls — marched to the edge of the banyan tree where the field was cordoned off by police tape. They carried signs that said "Remember Her Name" and "No More Experiments." Someone put a single white cap on the base of the tree like an offering.
In the end, the punishments were administrative and legal: some expulsions, some arrests, a few suspended sentences for the less involved, and the promise of a full criminal investigation. It was not the mythic televised fall of a kingdom that everyone craved. A lot of fingers would point, a lot of careers would end. In a way, it was public enough: the campus had watched. The campus had judged.
People talked for months. The story spread. The banyan tree became a place students dared not pass without lowering their eyes. News vans parked outside the gates. Protestors came and carried amplifiers. Heads rolled: Doyle Jensen lost his scholarship, Philip Andrews was put on administrative leave pending charges, Aaron Crawford had his name paraded on listservs. They were punished, publicly. Their faces were recorded and replayed. Students who had once laughed at me watched as their laughter turned to ash.
But no punishment could bring back what was lost. The women who were taken did not return to sit in the same lecture halls. The campus found a way to heal in official ways — committees, memorial trees, scholarships in the names of those who vanished.
People whispered whether the mushrooms themselves had been planted on purpose — whether this had been an elaborated tradition or a monstrous prank that became an epidemic. They debated ethics and broken boundaries in loud, careful tones. Newspapers wrote think pieces on "the cost of beauty" and "campus negligence." Psychology classes held forums on manipulation.
I sat in my dorm and watched it all from the sidelines like someone who had a ticket to the end of a show and could not get closer. They came, they punished, they marched, and they declared that this would never happen again. The campus would change. There would be reviews. There would be safety protocols. They would make a history out of my body and give it a chalk outline of meaning.
There was a gap in their narrative, though. No one seemed to know what to call what had happened to us. "A cult," the tabloids said, and later the scientists said "a mycological contamination." Catholics called it a sin; some said we had been the victims of a perverse experiment; some said we had carried ourselves willingly into a ritualized goodbye.
I lay in bed and watched the white map on my skin pulse and thrum like some slow instrument. I wanted to believe I had chosen it. Maybe that was a kind of kindness we offer ourselves — the illusion that we were free.
Eventually the white took the rest of me. It crept up my arms, across my ribs, around my neck until the thing that had been my face was a pale mask that moved as if under water. The last thing I remember seeing was the light through the banyan leaves, precise and unremarkable.
I am telling you this because something that is true remains even after names have been made into headlines and punishments. You can punish people for their crimes. You can stand in a stadium and call them out, and you can film them, and they can be expelled and arrested. You can make them answerable to the public in a way that is slow and humiliating and comprehensive.
But you cannot necessarily stop the seed that has taken root. You cannot pull back the tide of what has already grown in someone. The white spread like a story that knows how to self-propagate; it fed on attention and fear and secrecy.
When it was over, when the cameras left and the riotous nights turned into a long gray semester, a single truth remained lodged in my thigh like a fossil tooth: a little white seed had started it all.
If you cross the campus now, you will see the banyan tree cordoned off, a small plaque at its base, the names of those who disappeared carved into granite. Students still cluster beneath its shade and try to joke about the hashtags. People in the square still say, "Remember to be careful," like a prayer.
But my thigh kept the seed like an abscess. Even now, in the dark before sleep, I can feel it pricking against my skin like a secret.
I do not know if the song of punishment is worth the price. I do not know whether the hands that were dragged across the stage paid enough. I do know that the white seed grew and grew and would not stop until it had eaten everything.
The End
— Thank you for reading —