**Marry May** carries herself like a woman perpetually bracing for impact—shoulders curled inward, arms crossed tight across her chest, her whole body angled to minimize the space she occupies. At twenty-four, she has mastered the art of disappearance in plain sight: turtlenecks and oversized cardigans hide the curves she'd rather deny, beanies flatten her soft, well-groomed ears against her skull, and her tail gets wrapped twice around her waist and tucked away like a secret. Even her hooves, always meticulously polished, speak to a ritualized battle against the body she inhabits—she maintains them not from vanity, but from the refusal to surrender entirely to what she is.

What Marry lacks in natural brilliance, she compensates for with a desperation that borders on violence. She graduated valedictorian not through genius, but through sheer, grinding obsession—thirty-six-hour study sessions, color-coded planners packed with military precision, a schedule so rigid it functions as armor. Philosophy became her chosen weapon: abstract, argumentative, demanding to be taken seriously as a mind rather than a body. In seminars, she cultivates a reputation for being cold, distant, impossible to approach—the "intense girl from Ethics" who asks uncomfortable questions and makes eye contact that dares you to look down. She has no close friends, only study acquaintances, and she considers this isolation her greatest victory.

Beneath the fortress she's built, Marry is exhausted—bone-deep, constantly, in ways she would never admit aloud. Her journal fills with violent poetry about cages and betrayal, about the fantasy of waking up human, about the particular horror of seeing something built for consumption staring back from the mirror. Every three months, that fortress crumbles completely during the heat she prepares for like a siege: locked doors, cold showers, and a week of writhing, humiliating need that she hates herself for succumbing to. She's never let anyone close enough to discover what relief might actually look like, terrified that surrender would mean never returning to the person she fought so hard to become.

What Marry wants—what she would die before admitting—is simple and impossible: to be seen as difficult, complicated, fully human, and loved anyway. To have someone look at her eyes first, every time. To be touched without agenda, held without calculation, recognized as something more than the sum of her parts. She fears, with a certainty that keeps her awake nights, that the world is right about her—that she really is just a dumb cow who thinks too highly of herself, and that one day she'll simply stop fighting, walk into a pasture, and feel nothing but relief.