by Erin Stewart
Piper turns to me and nods toward Braden, who continues to wipe his face with a tissue.
“Forget the scars, he’s gonna blow his first time by crying the whole way through it. Blubbering is not hot.” She props her head on her hands and grins wildly. “Speaking of which, time to dish on your backstage Romeo.”
“Nothing to tell. He’s on stage crew and didn’t recoil at the sight of me.”
Piper nods, eyes blazing like I’ve just read her a page out of a smutty adult novel.
“Hot. It’s just a matter of time before you’re making out behind the curtain.”
Heat rushes to my face, and I look over at Braden, talking through tears, terrified his girlfriend will run screaming once she sees him in all his fleshy splendor.
“Yeah, right. Boys are off the table for me.”
Piper cocks her eyebrow.
“So Dr. Sharp will be the last man to ever see you naked? I hope it was as good for him as it was for you.”
“Okay, now you’re just being disgusting.”
“Hey, a girl could do a lot worse than Dr. Sharp and his bang-worthy dimples,” Piper says. “I’m simply suggesting you shouldn’t shut the door on boys so quickly.”
“And I’m just saying that door has already been shut.”
I don’t even know why we’re talking about this, especially when we need to be talking about why Piper let me walk blindly into a theater run by her newly minted archnemesis.
Piper pretends to write on her palm with an imaginary pencil, her face mockingly somber.
“Now would you say that living a life of virginal celibacy is your biggest fear?” She says this last word extra loud. Dr. Layne smiles, satisfied we’re discussing our deepest, darkest terrors.
“Right now? My biggest fear is Kenzie King, your ex–best friend.”
Piper drops her hands along with her smile.
“Who told you?”
“Asad.” I don’t mention my social media stalking.
“That kid should mind his own business.”
“Is it true?
“Yes.”
“How is that even possible?”
Piper shrugs, and for the first time since I’ve known her, she avoids meeting my eye.
“I don’t really want to talk about this. We were friends. Now we’re not. End of story.”
“Yes, but why are you not friends? She clearly hates me because I’m friends with you. You can’t send me into a mean-girl massacre without at least some intel.”
Piper’s nostrils flare as she points her finger at me.
“Being friends doesn’t give you the right to snoop around in my past.”
Her voice rises as the conversations around us stall and all eyes shift to Piper, frantically trying to wheel her chair away from me. She rams another chair, a sharp, metallic sound piercing the circle as the chair’s legs intertwine with her spokes.
“Piper, why are you freaking out?”
She wrestles her wheels free and answers without looking at me.
“Because I don’t want to talk about it. Because I don’t want to think about it. Of all people, you should understand that.”
By this point, Dr. Layne is walking toward us.
“Girls, is there a problem?”
“Everything’s fine!” Piper says, finally detangling the chair from her own wheelchair. She half throws it out of her way and abruptly backs away from Layne and out of the circle.
“It’s therapy—everything’s always fine, right?” Piper says.
“Now, Piper, I just—”
“I know, I know, you want to know my biggest fear so you can fix me. Well, get your clipboard ready, because here it is: I’m sixteen and I have to start my life over because of a split-second error on the highway. But every time I get close to actually enjoying my new life, you all dig into the past and make me relive it. I just want to move on. And my biggest fear, Dr. Fix-It, is that I never will.”
Turning her back on the group, Piper pumps herself furiously toward the exit, the heavy door banging shut behind her.
16
I find her by the community-center roundabout, streaky mascara dried on her cheeks and the front wheels of her chair teetering precariously over the curb. I slow-clap as I plop down next to her.
“Wow. You will do anything to win therapy points. You should see Dr. Layne in there scribbling furiously on her clipboard.”
The corner of Piper’s lips lift reluctantly, but her eyes stay trained on the ground as she rocks her wheels over the curb until they’re just about to fall, and then snaps them backward.
“Don’t you have things you’re tired of talking about?” she asks.
Across the parking lot, Cora watches us from the driver’s seat of Glenn’s truck, probably trying to figure out why I’m sitting on the curb with a tearstained Piper instead of “recovering.”
“I just can’t believe you were ever friends with Snartface McGee.”
Piper wipes her face with the back of her zebra compression garments.
“Since fourth grade.” Piper turns to me, her eyes almost as pink as her sleeves. “But now she’s erased me, along with the memory of what she did.”
“What did she do?”
Piper continues to stare at the mountains now bathed in pink-hued shadows as the sun goes down behind us. Sitting at the base of her wheelchair, I can see the burns on her neck more clearly, the way they wave upward toward her face like a plume of smoke from a candle.
“This,” she says, pointing to her leg. “Well, technically, the streetlight she hit broke my leg.”
“Kenzie was the one driving?”
Piper nods. “Yeah. Crossed the median. Plowed into a pole.”
She tells me how she and Kenzie used to be inseparable, and how Kenzie had a few too many drinks on New Year’s Eve and crashed driving home. She didn’t visit Piper in the hospital, and when Piper went back to school, Kenzie turned their friends against her and looked right through her in the halls.
“She full-on ghosted me,” she says.
I shake my head in confusion.
“Wait, so if it was her fault, why does she hate you?”
“Who knows? Guilt? I became this constant reminder she didn’t want around anymore.”
The guilt of the healthy. The first time my old friends visited me in the unit, I felt it.
I was burned.
They were not.
A river of guilt between us.
I flick a jagged rock in the street with the big toe on my left hand.
“Trust me. I get it.”
“I should have known she’d take it out on you,” Piper says. “It probably kills her that I’m not alone anymore.” She holds out the golden bird charm dangling from a black rope around her neck, outlining the bird’s wings with her thumb.
“It’s cheesy, I know, but I wear this phoenix to remind myself that I can rise above all this. Just like in that song I played you, I can soar above everything—this chair, these burns, my friends cutting me out.” Piper rubs the phoenix between her fingers, her eyes still locked on the mountains. “I want to move on and never look back.”
I follow her gaze. Is it possible to move on so easily, forging ahead unhindered by yesterday’s scars? I stretch out my fingers in front of me, the tight tissue resisting.
What if you can’t escape the scars?
“You know what I think?” she says, suddenly sitting up straighter in her wheelchair. “I think we need to focus on the new part of Laynie’s new normal.”
I pick at the cuff of my compression garments where my fingers stick out, nervously waiting to hear the rest of her idea. The last time Piper got that “I’ve got a great plan” look in her eyes, I ended up on a stage, playing the starring role of leper in a circle of trust.
“Like what?”
Piper tilts her head back, thinking, her tongue clicking on the roof of her mouth. She turns to me decisively.
“Yearbook photos are next week. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Umm…if you’re thinking that there is absolutely a zero percent chance I’m getting in front of a camera, then yes.”
Piper rocks back and forth on the wheels of her chair, dismissing my protest.
“You have to have a yearbook picture. And I’m going to help you.” She claps excitedly. “That’s right—a makeover!”
Everything in me wants to tell Piper no. Why in the world would I want to commemorate this year with a yearbook photo just begging to be defaced with zombie blood dripping from my mouth or a Freddy Krueger fedora? God took a permanent marker and already went to town.
But the prospect of a picture-day makeover has eclipsed Piper’s anger, and I can’t bring myself to say no when she motions for me to kneel by her chair. She turns my head left, then right, studying my face.
“Lost cause, right?” I say.
“Not at all, dahling,” she says in a mock Southern drawl. “I don’t believe in lost causes, but I do believe in makeup.”
I shake my head. “No way. No makeup. Unless you’re going for an escaped-killer-clown vibe.”
Piper squinches up her face and clasps her fingers together, begging. “Not even mascara?”
I point to my eyes. “No eyelashes.”
Piper sighs heavily and yanks the bandana off before I can stop her.
“Then our first task is this mess you call hair.”
My right hand hides my head while I grab for my bandana with my toe-hand. Piper’s eyes land on the spot where my ear should be but says nothing about my missing pieces.
“Well, you can’t be photographed like this.” She shakes the bandana at me. “Or wearing this fashion faux pas.”
I snatch again at the bandana in vain.
“Exactly. Now you see the beauty of my no-photographs policy.”
“Not so fast.”
She nods toward Cora, who is doing a super-duper clandestine job of acting like she’s not watching us. She’s even killed her engine and rolled down her window to aid her eavesdropping.
“Will your aunt take us somewhere?”
Cora pulls up to the curb when I wave her over. Envelopes and hospital bills with big red FINAL NOTICE declarations screaming from the top of the page cover the passenger seat.
“You girls okay?”
“We need a ride,” Piper says.
“Where to?” Cora asks, gathering up all the paperwork.
Piper grins mischievously at me.
“To get Ava some new hair.”
17
“I must look like an undead hooker.”
I whisper because we are the only people in the creepiest store in the history of strip malls. A lady with wide eyeliner circles and innumerable piercings pretends to brush out a frizzy brown wig behind the counter, but she’s watching us through the rows of faceless dummy heads.
Piper directs me to a full-length mirror on the wall.
“See for yourself.”
I force myself to look in the glass to see the monstrosity of a wig Piper has placed on my head. It’s hot pink—of course—with short bangs tickling my forehead and a bob cut coming just below my chin.
“It’s exactly what you need,” she declares.
The curl of the bob does cover my earlessness perfectly, and the bangs draw attention to my eyes rather than the wrinkled skin around them.
I lean closer to the mirror.
“Don’t you think it’s kind of…desperate?”
Piper laughs as she smooths out a long blond wig with straight strands reaching down to her lap, like a Coachella flower child.
“Desperate times, my friend. Desperate times.”
I step back from the mirror and put my hand on my hips, trying to look normal. Oh hey, just here being super casual in my clown wig and scarred-up body.
“Maybe something a little more subdued. Like light brown? This feels like I’m trying too hard.”
Piper deflates and looks up at the ceiling like she’s praying for patience.
“Ava, a brown wig is just sad. If you show up in this, you’re making a statement.” She stretches out her zebra-striped arm next to my beige one. “Like our compression garments. No one thinks those dullsville nude ones are your real skin anyway. Why not have some fun with it?”
The Goth lady behind the counter watches us as Piper’s voice gets louder. She spins her wheelchair in a circle, sending the blond hair flowing behind her.
“It’s like the universe dealt us this horrible hand in life and it’s our duty to scream back: ‘Well played, craptastic cosmos, but you haven’t met me yet.’ ”
“So zebra stripes and pink wigs are like your big middle finger to the universe?”
Piper smiles and wiggles her eyebrows at me through the glass.
“I also have my eye on a sweet tattoo, and if you’d hurry up and buy that amazeballs wig, we might have time to stop by the shop next door before your aunt gets back.”
The pink hair tickles my face as I whip around to Piper. “A tattoo? Are you kidding me?”
She nods, eyes wide. “You should get one, too!”
“More than half of me is scar tissue. Why in the world would I intentionally add to that morbid statistic? Why would you?”
Piper reaches up to bop me on the nose and says in a singsongy voice: “ ‘Every party has a pooper, that’s why we invited you.’ Ava Lee. Party pooper.”
I turn back to my reflection.
“One ridiculous cliché at a time. Let’s start with this zombie streetwalker wig, and then we’ll talk tattoos, okay?”
Piper squeezes in next to me so the glass captures both of us, me giving the wig one last shake. “So you’re getting it?”
“People are going to look at me.”
Piper rolls her eyes at me in the glass.
“Right. Might as well give them something to see.”
Before I can stop her, she grabs my phone, presses her cheek against mine, yells, “Cheese!” and clicks.
“See, that wasn’t so bad was it?” she says.
I stuff my bandana in the bag Goth lady gives me and wear my new hair all the way home.
* * *
“What in the blazes is on your head?” Glenn says before he even has his boots off that night.
“You like?” I shake my head so the bobbed strands shimmy in front of my eyes. In my peripheral vision, I see Cora giving Glenn a “cut it out” sign, as if I don’t know I’m sporting hot-pink hair and the best thing to do is ignore it like she did all the way home in the car, her eyes never veering from the road.
“Do you?” he asks.
“It’s different,” I say, shrugging.
“Good different?”
“Different. Piper thinks it’s time for a change.”
We sit to a cooking-channel-worthy spread for dinner, which means Cora has hauled herself out of her “down day” on Sara’s birthday and is now spiraling headfirst into an “everything’s-going-to-be-fine! recovery week,” aka competing for Chef of the Year. At home, meals were simple affairs, usually eaten off paper plates. But on days like this, we eat on china plates with small yellow birds on them, and every seat has a full place setting of silverware, except for Sara’s, of course. No one ever sits there, like we’re just waiting for her to dance in and claim her rightful spot.
Glenn passes me the mashed potatoes in a porcelain serving dish, not even trying to keep his eyes off the wig.
“That Piper’s a real spitfire, isn’t she?”
“She sure is,” Cora says, though not in quite the same innocuous, upbeat tone.<
br />
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.
“Oh, nothing. She’s just unique, that’s all. But if you like her—” Cora says.
“Yeah, I like her,” I say.
“Well, good then.” Glenn dings his fork like a gavel on the table.
Cora chews quietly, her eyes down.
“I was reading an article,” she starts. Here we go. “About these camps they do every year where you can go and spend time with other survivors.”
Cora produces a magazine from her lap and places it on the table next to me. On the cover, a black girl with a melted face like mine swings from a rope over a pond. “You might find friends who are serious about recovery.”
I put my fork down, the tines pinging against the china.
“My life is already dead serious. But if you want to say something about Piper, just say it.”
Cora fidgets like she can’t get comfortable, her eyes flitting from me to Glenn to her plate.
“It’s just. You know. The whole thing—this wig. Those terrible things she was saying that day in your room.”
“I was saying them, too.”
“That’s my point. Maybe she’s not the best influence—”
I push my chair back from the table.
“You were the one who made me go to group. You told me to make friends. Now they’re not the right friends? You’re giving me whiplash.”
“It’s just, Glenn is right: Piper has a big personality,” Cora says, her eyes drifting over my pink hair reluctantly. “I don’t want you to lose yourself in it.”
“It’s just a wig, Cora. It’s still me under here. Trust me—there’s no escaping that.”
Glenn and Cora look at each other across the table, a silent conversation taking place about what to say next. I get tired of waiting.
“May I be excused?”
Glenn nods. I leave the magazine next to my half-eaten dinner.
In my room, I pull out the folder of plastic surgery ideas I keep in my desk. Close-ups and clippings of reconstructed eyes and ears and lips, cutout fantasies from the people in Cora’s Burn Survivor Quarterly who are lucky enough to get real plastic surgery. I arrange all the “after” pictures on my bed into a bizarro face collage. On top of a dainty, perfectly constructed nose, I place a pair of eyes the same blue as mine.