Grandma can change her face.

Evie thought about that a lot whenever the weather started to cool, school began, and it was time to head to Grandma’s house for Thanksgiving, then Christmas.

She’d have trouble sleeping due to thoughts of Grandma making her eyes turn black, like her soul had left her body. Evie’s schoolwork suffered then, too, and her mother would get annoyed.

Evie’s stomach often hurt, and the only thing that felt good was when her mother made chicken noodle soup, which was rare, because her mother was very busy, as she explained often.

Otherwise, Evie picked at her plate, pretending she was full.

The six-hour car rides were the worst, because Evie would cry, which made her mother angry, as Evie thought about the time Grandma had turned her face to the appearance of drying mud, cracked and hardening.

There was the time, during a movie after dinner, when Grandma was sitting in a comfy chair, and Evie had looked over to see that Grandma had turned her skin to green scales that twitched and flipped if she moved.

No one else seemed to see it.

Evie would try different things, like not looking at Grandma at all, but her mother said it was rude, and she needed to hug and kiss Grandma hello. Grandma would grab Evie’s arm tightly, pinching her skin to cause a bruise, and sometimes when Evie brushed her lips against Grandma’s paper-thin skin, she would get a shock that burned her lips red.

“That’s just a static shock,” her mother explained. “Don’t rub your socks on the carpet before you say hello.”

The skin would peel off later, as it healed.

If Grandma asked her to help her cook or make cookies, Evie could pretend she didn’t hear her, if her mother wasn’t around. Sometimes, saying she was sick helped. Evie was sick a lot over the holidays, curling up in a corner with her fluffy blanket and her favorite book, her stomach twisting as she tried to forget how Grandma opened more eyes on her face the night before, twelve total, all blinking and staring at Evie across the room.

The day after Christmas was her favorite day, because they would head home, and she could enjoy food again since her stomach stopped hurting, and she had more pleasant dreams than of bees crawling all over Grandma’s skin.

“What an imagination you have,” her mother told her the one time she asked why Grandma turned her eyes bright red. “Perhaps you need to read less.”

Evie stopped asking after that. She would get big one day, she knew, and she would leave, like her cousins, and never go to Grandma’s house again.