by Erin Stewart
Another girl swirls a brush of powder around her forehead.
“I skipped school two days last week for a zit. If I looked like that, I’d crawl into a hole and never come out.”
The girls nod as they pack their tools back into their bag. Through the curtain gap, I watch them give themselves a final, affirming glance in the glass.
Smooth hair: check. Quick glance at their butts: check. Lean in for spinach-in-the-teeth investigation: check. Girls like that never have dental meal remnants. Karma is too kind.
They’re on their way offstage when my phone vibrates loudly with another Cora text. The girl who called me Freddy Krueger stops and turns, and for a split second, her eyes catch mine through the slit. I tug my legs closer as she whips her long black hair around, with her finger pressed to her lips.
“Guys.” She points in my direction as she whispers. “We’re not alone.”
My knees protest as I pull them all the way to my chest, praying she leaves. This can’t be how they find me, the weirdo going all Phantom of the Opera on my first “normal” day.
The “it” hiding backstage.
The girl’s black hair fills my line of vision through the gap as she walks toward me.
“Hey, who’s back there? It’s not nice to eavesdrop.”
I bite my lip as my knee splits open. Blood soaks through my pants.
Please. Not like this.
“Let it go, Kenz. It’s probably some terrified freshman.”
Yes. Let it go. Let me go.
Her footsteps stop right in front of me, her shoes nearly touching mine beneath the black divide. She grips the curtain, sending ripples across my fabric shield, and I watch helplessly as she yanks it away.
6
The girl pulls the curtain all the way back, revealing me, my legs pulled tight against my chest, my face no doubt as surprised as hers.
“Oh,” she says, covering her mouth. “We didn’t know it was you.”
I continue to hold my legs, mostly because I don’t know what else to do. Walk out like it’s totally normal that I was back here, desperately trying to disappear into the wall?
I look away from her, tilting my head too late. A few tears burst the bounds of my droopy eyes, making this pathetic moment even more hideous.
The girl with black hair lets the curtain fall back between us. I hear them confer with each other, half whispering, half giggling in a choppy, nervous way.
“You say it,” one girl whispers, prompting another one to yell, “Sorry. Welcome to Crossroads High!”
They scurry off the stage like it’s on fire. I wait until their laughter and footsteps fade before lowering my legs.
My right knee screams at me as I pull back my compression garments. Blood outlines the baby-pink square of skin covering my joint. Dr. Sharp will not be happy I busted up his handiwork.
The bell rings, but I stay put, soaking up the blood with my brown paper sack. I wait until halfway through the next class period to emerge from my hole. When I do, I peek around the curtain first before venturing out. I pick up a stick of forgotten lip gloss on the vanity, a shiny pink shade just like one I used to wear.
In the mirror, my reflection gawks back. My tightened skin tugs down my bottom eyelids, revealing so much pink moistness that my eyes look like they’re threatening to turn inside out. Cora says it gives me an endearing puppy-dog look. I think it makes me look like an extra on The Walking Dead.
I push up my drooping eyelids with my fingers.
Those girls have no idea that I used to be a normal girl with friends, and eyeliner in a pencil bag, who reapplied lip gloss between classes and covered my sun-induced freckles with foundation. They mocked me without even meeting me.
If my life were a Greek tragedy, I would have been a major mean girl in my life before the fire. At least then I’d learn some poetic lesson about kindness in a classic cosmic twist.
But I wasn’t a mean girl. I was a normal fifteen-year-old who went to football games on weekends and spent way too much time rehearsing for the spring musical. I was a daughter. A friend. A brunette. A singer.
I was a million things.
I release my eyes and fade back into the scars.
Now, I’m only one thing—the Burned Girl.
And between this backstage diva blitz and back-row Captain Clueless in science, I may have seriously miscalculated my ability to disappear.
* * *
By the time Uncle Glenn picks me up at the end of the day, my body aches from my full day of “being normal.” My beleaguered muscles scream at me as I climb into his truck.
“So how was it?” he asks, chipper to the max. Aunt Cora probably coached him on how to keep upbeat about my foray into normalcy.
“Fine.”
“Make any friends?”
“Loads. I’ll probably have to hold auditions.”
Glenn smiles and puts his hand on my arm. “That bad, huh?”
I slouch in my seat as we drive past a row of jocks flirting with field hockey skirts. Glenn and I both pretend not to see them turn to look as we pass.
“It’s whatever.” I shrug. “It’s high school. I’m just ready to go home.”
I use the term loosely, of course. My real home would be a place I could retreat after a day like today. I’d turn the corner onto our street and enter my own little refuge. Just Dad and Mom and me, and the calming assurance that I don’t have to be anything or anyone else.
“I’m sure you are,” Glenn says. “I hate to remind you, but the support group is today.”
Groan. I forgot about that little stipulation Cora sneaked in as part of my return-to-life extravaganza.
“Are you really making me do that?”
“Cora feels strongly about it. Says you need support during your reintegration.”
The word sounds foreign coming from Glenn, who generally steers clear of therapy talk. He’s a member of the Committee on Ava’s Life and all, but Cora holds most of the executive power while Glenn mostly represents the actual bloodline.
“Whoa, someone’s been learning the lingo,” I say. “Cora giving you extra credit for reading the recovery binder?”
Glenn’s hearty laugh fills the cab of his truck.
“I know Cora can be a little much—”
“A little?”
“Okay, a lot much, but you have to understand she couldn’t—” His voice breaks for a split second. I look out the window, pushing down the guilt. “She couldn’t save Sara. So she’ll be damned if she lets anything happen to you.”
Snow flurries flit by outside. A single white seagull circles aimlessly like it missed the migration memo, the pure white peaks of the Wasatch Range towering behind it.
Glenn pats my leg as we roll to a stop at the light.
“Whaddya say, kiddo? Give it a chance?” He looks at me so earnestly, my mom’s nose making me wish I were driving home with her, heading to my regular life, where reintegration and headshrinkers didn’t exist. “You know Dr. Layne only wants to help.”
Dr. Layne also holds a seat on the committee as my psychologist during the sixty days I spent at the regional burn unit. Sixty days for 60 percent of my body covered in burns, not counting the almost two months I spent comafied, sleeping while doctors salvaged what was left of me.
Dr. Layne has tried to coax me back to her support group ever since I left the unit eight months ago. I’ve avoided it mostly because I didn’t want to disappoint her again. Everyone was always barfing up their childhood sadness, having these emotional breakthroughs and breakdowns, but I couldn’t seem to reach any sort of epiphany.
Plus, the whole point of therapy is to pinpoint the pain, dissect it and stick it under a microscope.
Why would I want to feel the hurt more clearly?
Forgetting is no accident—it
’s survival.
“It happened. It’s over,” I say. “Swapping woe-is-me stories with a bunch of other weirdos won’t undo the past.”
“You’re not a weirdo.” Glenn glances at me sideways as he drives. “You know the most basic cowboy rule? If you get thrown from a horse—”
I complete the well-worn adage often used in our family: “You get back on.”
Glenn nods. “Unless you land in a cactus. Then you have to roll around and scream in pain for a bit. I hope you know, kiddo, that’s okay, too.”
Right. Like my having a total breakdown wouldn’t disrupt the unspoken truce Glenn, Cora, and I have developed over the past year. Cora cries behind closed doors. Glenn buries himself in work. I tiptoe in Sara’s shadow.
We’re constantly fine-tuning the arrangement, but it boils down to this: we all have grief—no need to share.
When the light turns green, Glenn turns left, which means he’s headed to the community center. The committee has spoken.
“Where is Cora, anyway?” I ask.
It’s not like Cora to miss a big “recovery moment.” I would’ve expected her to meet me at curbside pickup with pom-poms and a cheer about getting psyched for psychotherapy! Rah-rah, sis-boom-bah.
“She wanted to be here, but she got that second interview at Smith’s,” Glenn says, his voice artificially happy about the possibility of Cora managing a grocery store. I sink into my seat.
“Oh.”
Glenn’s fingers grip the steering well, his nail beds stained oil black from the auto body shop he owns. He’s been coming home later and later, and now Cora’s super pumped about this grocery gig because she says she “needs a new project.” I’m not buying it. Before I got here, Cora never worked and they still had plenty of money for vacations and dance camps and anything Sara wanted.
But nineteen surgeries put an end to that. A bunch of people from my old town even ran a big fund-raiser after the fire, but it’s clearly not enough. Through their closed bedroom door, they talk in low voices about depleted life insurance policies, and Cora argues on the phone about copays and deductibles.
Tragedy isn’t cheap.
Glenn puts his right hand in his lap when he catches me staring at his overworked nail beds.
“Oh, Cora says to tell you there’s a girl in the group from your school. Your age and everything.”
Classic Cora. As if finding a friend can make all my problems disappear. I agreed to move to this stupid town because I don’t want friends. I saw the way my old friends looked at me in the hospital, like they didn’t even know who I was. I kept waiting for Chloe’s deep belly laugh, or for Emma to gush about a new boy. But they all just kept staring at me, trying not to cry. I knew right then that our familiar flock would never be the same. I was too different, from them and from who I used to be.
They tried to contact me after I moved, Chloe especially, but I never responded. No one needed me around making them uncomfortable. It’s better this way—they don’t have to deal with me, and I don’t have to watch them try.
So I’m not in the market for replacement friends or a replacement life.
Besides, Sara was my cousin—my closest lifelong friend—and she’s gone.
I lived. She died.
End of story.
“I don’t need friends. How many times do I have to say it? I don’t need anyone.”
Glenn pats me on the knee again and reassures me that this group may be exactly what I need. He smiles that crooked smile, hopeful this support group will heal me—body and soul.
I just hope they have refreshments.
7
The instant I walk into the community center rec room, Dr. Layne wraps me in a hug.
“I’m so glad you came,” she says.
“Cora and Glenn made me,” I say, trying to keep her expectations low.
Guilt needles me for wasting her time—again. Of all the headshrinkers who tried to fix me with their clickity-clack pens and legal pads, Dr. Layne actually seemed to care about me beyond our thirty-minute sessions. Maybe because she’s lived it. She’s a makeup wizard, though, so the burned side of her face looks like nothing more than a rough swath of skin. Her scars pull her mouth a little tight in one corner and crisscross down her arms, but other than that, she looks and acts normal. Two kids. Husband. Career.
I’m sure Cora hopes Dr. Layne will sprinkle some of her magical recovery dust on me.
I pick a spot in a circle of chairs in the middle of the room, which is an overwhelmingly vast space with a noncommittal vibe that works as well for a group of burn victims as it does for senior bingo night. Only two other kids populate the therapy ring of awkwardness. A boy who looks like he might be a senior sits with his arms folded across his chest—one arm appears normal, and one with wrinkled burn scars culminates in a club for a hand. A girl on the opposite end picks at her dress. If she has any scars, I can’t see them.
After four months in a burn unit, I’ve become quite the skin reader. I can’t tell anything about the scarless girl, but I’m guessing the boy was holding some sort of explosive device, since his face and right arm have the worst scars, and because his hand no longer exists.
The girl and boy try to read the story of my scars, their eyes widening. Winner! I’m the freakiest freak of them all.
My scar story goes like this: The ceiling collapsed before my dad pushed me out the window, so my face, scalp, arms, and upper back got the brunt of it. My legs are a mixed bag: knees and calves are burned, thighs are not, thanks to the shorts I was wearing, and my Ugg slippers saved my feet. My pajama top also kept the middle of me—stomach, boobs, lower back—relatively unscathed.
Of course, harvesting skin for grafts mucked up my unburned areas, and then we plucked off my big toe for my hand, so now there’s really no part of me the fire didn’t claim. (By the way, harvesting is not my word, it’s a doctor’s word that makes me feel like I was abducted and probed by aliens. Like I need to feel any more extraterrestrial.)
Sometimes I fantasize about Dr. Sharp actually fixing me one day. I’ve even collected pictures and articles about surgeries like eyebrow implants and ear prosthetics and water balloons beneath the scalp to stretch the non-bald skin.
Of course, my drooping eyes are first on my to-do list of fantasy surgeries that will never actually happen. Insurance companies aren’t too fond of coughing up cash for co$metic $urgery. Plus, after my toe-to-hand transfer, we decided to take a surgery hiatus. Give my body and Glenn’s bank account a breather.
Honestly, I’ve enjoyed the respite from the never-ending cycle of surgeries and skin grafts and waking up mummified every few weeks, always believing when we peeled off the thin white gauze, I’d be me again.
Hope is exhausting.
Dr. Layne stands in the middle of the circle, appropriately dressed in the psychologist uniform of a pencil skirt and a capped-sleeve blouse I wouldn’t dream of wearing with the way it showcases her scars. She’s halfway through a formal welcome when the double doors swing open and a girl in a wheelchair maneuvers through.
“Pardon the interruption!” Her voice echoes through the vast room.
Her brown hair swishes from a high ponytail, revealing some serious burnage on her neck. The deep-purple discoloration reaches toward her face, stopping just shy of her chin. A hot-pink-striped sleeve covers her right arm, and it takes me a beat to realize it’s her compression garments.
The stripes continue down her right leg. A cast—also hot pink and signature-free—encases her left. She’s like the love child of a zebra and a psychedelic clown.
She wheels herself into the circle.
“Wait a second.” She looks around at each of us. “I’m beginning to think this isn’t the cross-country tryouts.”
I try to turn my chuckle into a cough when I notice no one else finds this funny. The
girl smiles at me, though, while Dr. Layne smiles patiently at her.
“We were just about to do introductions. Piper, why don’t you start us off.”
The girl straightens up in her wheelchair.
“I’m Piper. Car accident six weeks ago, on New Year’s Eve. Mostly deep second-degree on my right side. All sorts of bones in my leg shattered.” She taps the pink cast. “Have a touch of spinal injury, so the wheelchair is temporary, knock on wood. Scars are here to stay.
“What else, what else?” She strokes her chin. “Oh, I like long wheelchair rides on the beach, and I’m a Taurus.”
The boy goes next but can’t finish because he starts crying. Something about a campfire and an exploding gas can. Called it.
The girl with no burns talks for a full ten minutes about her invisible injuries from a propane-leak flash fire when she was a baby. What could she still have to talk about?
Hearing everyone swap burn stories morphs me back to the unit, where patients wear percentages and burn degrees like badges of honor.
I’m 60 percent mostly third-degree burns, which are the nasty buggers that devour every layer of skin, taking everything along the way—hair follicles, sweat glands, fat cells, and nerves. My hands achieved fourth-degree status when the flames reached all the way to my bones. I had a bunch of second-degree wounds, too, but those are kind of a joke among burn circles. They’re red and oozy and impressive, but they mostly only eat away the top layer of skin.
The funny thing is those shallow burns hurt like a mother when they’re fresh, but the deeper ones you don’t even feel. Nothing left to feel with no nerve endings. For these burns, the real pain doesn’t start until later, with the skin grafts and the cleanings and the nurses ripping off gauzy skin with tweezers.
When a wound’s that deep, it’s the healing that hurts.
I realize everyone in the circle is looking at me.
“What am I supposed to say, again?”