by Erin Stewart
In the glass of the curio cabinet, I examine myself. Beneath the hair, the edges of each skin graft chop my face into harsh sections, the bright white of my forehead contrasting with the pinkish hue of my chin and neck.
My nose is new, too. It’s more bulbous than my real one, but that one went the way of my ear. My lips puff out below my new nose, seeping beyond their bounds like I applied permanent bright pink lipstick while driving on a gravelly road.
And while my eyes are mine—the only thing that looks exactly like before the fire—my eye sockets sag into my cheeks.
I tug up the corners of my drooping eyes. Under the wig, my face isn’t as horrific. It’s like when I used to put on my costume before a play, like the clothes and makeup and hair gave me permission to be someone else.
Someone better.
I let my eyes fall again and smooth out the hot-pink strands of the wig. I’m not delusional. I know this wig won’t fix my face. But at least it’s real, not pipe dreams hidden in a drawer.
In the glass, my eyes are extra blue against the pink.
It’s dumb. It’s loud. It’s completely not me.
Piper’s right: it’s exactly what I need.
18
I wait until picture day the next week to debut the new me.
My hot-pink hair causes a definite uptick in the stare factor. A girl in my Spanish class tells me she “loves the look.” A group of boys whistle and whisper-laugh as I walk by in the hallway. Piper “accidentally” rams her wheelchair into one of them.
“I should just take it off,” I say. I pull a bandana from my backpack, which Piper promptly grabs and throws into a trash can.
“No way. You look amazing.”
I fidget with my new hair in the back of science class and try not to smile too big when Asad tells me he “digs the wig.” What world have I allowed Piper to pull me into, where I get worked up over a boy and wear punk-rock wigs from stores with mannequins sporting fishnet stockings?
When Mr. Bernard tells us to partner up, Asad grabs my sleeve.
“Dibs,” he says.
“Did you just dibs me?” I say.
“Totes.”
“I’m not sure if I’m more distressed by your use of the word totes or by the fact that you think I’m dibs-able.”
“You’re stage crew now. We stick together.”
Side by side, we lay out the materials for today’s lab, which involves mealworms and petri dishes. Mr. Bernard spent the first half of class regaling us about the insights into human nature we will gain from watching these squirmy little dudes for the next few weeks. I have my doubts, considering I can’t even tell which end is the head and which end is, well, the end.
“Each group of organisms create a community, and these simple mealworms are no exception,” Mr. Bernard says. “In life, community is key, whether you’re an arthropod or a Homo sapiens.”
A snicker waves through the back table, where three hulking boy-men in varsity football jackets repeat the word homo.
“Homo sapiens are humans,” Mr. Bernard says.
“Whatever floats your boat, buddy,” the tallest meathead says. Mr. Bernard looks at him for a minute and tries one more time.
“No, literally, Homo sapiens is a classification of people. It follows Homo erectus.”
This only ignites another round of laughter, whereupon Mr. Bernard sits in his chair and begins to read rather than attempt to enlighten these modern-day knuckle draggers.
While we prep our luxury plastic habitat for our segmented charges, Asad talks about set design and his lighting concept, which is apparently going to “blow my mind.”
“I think of lighting as its own character, you know? Like how I illuminate the stage tells a part of the story,” he says.
I fill our petri dish with wood shavings as he talks, which is basically nonstop, telling me how he wishes we were doing Wicked instead of the original Wizard of Oz because it’s his favorite musical of all time and he’s been lobbying to do it since freshman year.
“It changed my life.” He looks straight into my eyes when he says this, as if he’s revealing a part of himself. All I know is his coffee-black eyes reveal me in their glassy darkness so clearly that I look away.
“I’ve never seen it. It came to Salt Lake once when I was little, but we couldn’t go,” I say.
“But you know the songs, right? Everybody knows the songs.”
I shake my head.
“Nope. Personal rule: no music until I see the play. Don’t want to spoil it. But isn’t Wicked just like The Wizard of Oz on acid?”
Asad puts down the handful of wood shavings he was making into a small mealworm bed, props his elbows on the counter, and drops his head into his hands like I’ve betrayed him.
“It is nothing like The Wizard of Oz. It is like taking the yellow brick road and twisting it until it snaps in half and then you look inside and there’s a whole other world in that road that’s dark and deep and soul-exposing.” Asad’s face is solemn. “That’s it. We have to go.”
“You and me, we?” I’m surprised I can even get my sentence out when the only word bouncing in my head is we, we, we, we.
Asad nods matter-of-factly.
“Yes, you and me. It’s coming to Salt Lake in a few weeks.” A sheen of urgency covers his face. “I don’t want to oversell this, but after this play, you will never. Be. The. Same.”
He picks up our petri dish habitat and walks to the front of the room. On his way back, he holds out the dish, where three small and squiggly worms roll around on top of each other.
“Congratulations. Triplets!”
Before he reaches our station, one of the back-row football boys shoves Asad’s arm so hard that the petri dish flies toward me. I reach out for it, but not fast enough, and it hits the ground, the mealworms ejected into the air and onto the ground like small segmented stuntmen.
“Drama queer,” the boy says, just loud enough for us to hear. “Shouldn’t you be the one in the drag queen wig?”
Asad bends down to pick up the worms and the chips like he doesn’t hear the boy towering above him.
“Uh-oh,” the other jersey boy says. “You touched him and now he’s getting Homo erectus.”
Football boy high-fives another kid in a Viking jersey in the back of the room. Asad plunks the dish on the counter in front of me.
“I know, I know. What kind of parent drops their babies, right?”
“What was that about?” I ask.
Asad rearranges the mealworm in the dish without looking up.
“Oh, that? Nothing.”
“It didn’t look like nothing.”
“It’s just part of this little game we play where he makes my life hell, and in return, I let him.”
I grab the mealworm dish so Asad has to look up at me.
“Aren’t you the guy who told me to stick up for myself? And you’re letting those jock straps push you around?”
Asad shrugs. “Ava, I’m one of a handful of brown kids at a school whose mascot makes Attila the Hun look like Mother Teresa.”
“And I’m what? Running for prom queen?”
“That’s why we stick together outside the safety of our stage—survival,” he says. He holds up the petri dish so I can see the mealworms burrowing deep into the wood chips, their bodies pressed up against the plastic. “Now. What shall we name these little guys?”
We decide on Magical Mr. Mistoffelees, Rum Tum Tugger, and Macavity.
“Now, that’s a community that would make Andrew Lloyd Webber proud,” Asad says, then pauses. “It’s stuff like that, isn’t it? That makes them think I’m”—he looks around and whispers—“a Homo sapien.”
I laugh. “And maybe the jazz hands?”
“What? A guy can’t do spirit fingers without having
his sexuality questioned anymore? See, this is exactly why I do stage crew instead of cast.”
I nod toward the back.
“To avoid that guy’s ridicule?”
“And my father’s.” Asad wags a finger at me and in a thick Pakistani accent says, “Theater is for girls, Asad. Men go to medical school.”
I sigh. “ ‘It’s the Hard-Knock Life,’ my friend.”
“Too easy—Annie,” he says, then quickly, “I’m not, by the way.”
“Not what?”
“Homo sapien.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Okay, just wanted you to know.”
My pink hair falls slightly in front of my face, just in time to hide my smile.
* * *
Piper tries to escort me to the auditorium for my photo, but Vice Principal Lynch busts her for not having a hall pass.
“No special treatment, girls,” he says.
I don’t know why this guy hates me so much. Maybe I remind him of a more scarrific version of his own loser teenage self. Maybe he’s just a jerk whose perpetually tight collar has cut off the oxygen to his frontal lobe. He points for Piper to head back to class. She mock salutes him.
“Ja, Kapitän!” She yells over him to me, “Don’t forget to say cheese!”
“Thanks, Mom!” I holler back. I’m sure I look as surprised as Piper to hear my voice ringing through the hallway.
“The power of the pink!” Piper yells after me with a triumphant smile.
I walk alone, but armed with my wig, I keep my eyes up instead of studying the speckles on the linoleum. In the auditorium, about a dozen students wait for their turn in front of a velvety purple backdrop on the stage with a barstool facing a tripod. I join the throng and await my turn, adjusting my wig the whole time. Picture day was terrible Before, but now, my skin itches beneath my compression garments, spreading little fiery twitches up my arms.
As if being a teenager isn’t harrowing enough, we commemorate it with wallet-size mementos of awkwardness. In middle school, we used to trade our photos like baseball cards. I’d sign mine with my name like I was a celebrity, turning the v into a heart. Back then, how many school photos you collected directly correlated with your cool factor.
I’ll be lucky if even Piper wants this year’s edition.
When my turn comes, I muster a smile that I know looks like I’m either eating rancid fish or trying not to soil myself. I can tell it doesn’t look good by the way the photographer smiles nervously and fiddles with the camera.
I think he may be having some sort of mini meltdown. He tinkers with his flash for a solid five minutes, even though with everyone else he snapped two rapid-fire shots and voilà, high school memory complete. He wipes beads of sweat from his forehead with the back of his shirtsleeve.
“Let me try one more thing,” he says, starting another round of button pressing.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” I say. We both know the equipment isn’t the problem here. “You can just take it.”
He resumes his position behind the camera. “Okay, on three. One, two…”
I swear he winces when he pulls the trigger. As I get up to leave, he waves me over behind the tripod.
“I have an idea.”
He pulls up my digital picture on a laptop next to him. My pink hair fills the top half of the frame.
“So, this is totally up to you, but we do offer an editing package,” he says. He moves the mouse over my image, hovering it above my nose. “Just watch.”
As he moves the cursor around my face on the screen, my skin blurs beneath it. The smudging effect erases the lines separating my skin grafts and washes out the wrinkles of my scars. He does one entire side of my face, which is now a little out of focus but still—better.
He grabs another tool with his curser.
“And this can just kind of fill in some…problem areas,” he says. He clicks around my eyes, filling in the skin beneath my eyelids. Then, he shapes the lines around my mouth so the pink of my lips doesn’t bleed into my face.
He turns to me, smiling. “What do you think?”
“I think that’s amazing.”
“So do you want it?
“Want what?”
My old face? How much?
“The editing package. This picture would go in the yearbook instead.”
I stare at the girl on the screen. Ava Before the Fire. A little blurry, but still—there she is.
“People really do this?” I say.
He nods. “Oh yeah. All the time—wrinkles, scars, unsightly moles. It all comes down to how you want people to remember you.”
The girl on the screen tempts me. I want people to remember her, not the thing they see in the hallways. I want them all just to forget about that girl. Photoshop her into oblivion.
“But it’s not really me,” I say.
The photographer smiles like we’re coconspirators.
“Yeah, that’s kind of the point—it’s better.”
A hushed whispering behind me makes me turn, instantly aware that all the other students in line are also staring at the fantasy me on the screen. Their eyes shift from the photoshopped version to reality and then back again.
Next to this smooth-faced girl on the computer, I feel more hideous than ever. Hot hatred for her rises in my chest.
“Just erase it,” I say under my breath.
The photographer leans his head toward me like he doesn’t understand.
I repeat myself. “I don’t want it.”
“Oh, okay,” he says, obviously confused. “So just the regular photo, then?”
I gather up my backpack hurriedly. This was so stupid.
“No, just delete everything. I don’t want a picture.”
“Are you sure? I—”
“Erase it!” My voice echoes through the auditorium. I turn to him and lower my voice. “Please.”
He drags the file to the trash icon on his screen.
“I was just trying to help.”
Tears threaten to spill out. I choke them back as I grab my bag and head for the door.
“I don’t need your help. I don’t need anyone.”
19
I’d rip the wig right off if Piper hadn’t trashed my only backup bandana, and there’s no way I’m going to drama club totally exposed.
I hang out in a bathroom stall, kicking the door. I’m so stupid—a wig and Photoshop can’t change reality.
I linger in the stall, partly to conveniently miss the circle of trust, but also to give the photo guy enough time to clear out. When I finally go to drama club, Asad is already painting the yellow brick road we started earlier this week, and next to him, Piper paints green skyscrapers in the Emerald City. She’s been rehearsal-crashing all week while the volleyball team is on the road.
“Hey hey! How’d the glamour shot go?” she asks.
I pick up a paintbrush and kneel next to Asad, channeling all my focus into the yellow brick lines up and down the backdrop.
“Imagine the worst scenario possible, and then make it ten times crappier, and you might be getting close.”
“It couldn’t be that—” Piper starts.
“He photoshopped me.” I say it quietly, hoping not to make this a big scene in front of Asad.
Piper pauses, her green-tipped paintbrush in midair.
“Who did what, now?”
I tell her about the nervous photographer and his airbrush-editing package. “I think he was just trying to be nice.”
Piper looks at Asad, who shrugs, and then back at me, her voice high and shrill, echoing across the empty stage.
“Ava! You have to tell people where they can stick their nice.” She shakes me by my shoulders, flicking paint on me in the process. “If we don’t tell them, who wil
l?”
“Tell them what exactly?” I say.
“That you don’t need Photoshop. That his definition of beauty is archaic and ignorant.”
“See, this is why you should have been with me.”
“I can’t fight your battles for you, Ava.”
“Yeah, well, apparently I can’t, either.” I run my fingers through the strands of my new pink hair. “I thought this wig was like some new beginning for me, facing my fears and all that. But I totally crumbled.”
Before Piper can affirm that yes, I am a huge coward, Kenzie walks across the stage toward us, her eyes glued to Piper.
“What are you doing here?” she says.
Piper doesn’t look up, almost like she’s waiting on one of us to defend her presence. She glares at Asad, who stares intently at the canvas. Piper mutters under her breath before turning to Kenzie.
“Free country,” she says. “I’m here with Ava.”
Kenzie’s eyes shift from me to Piper and back again.
“So when you said you didn’t want to do drama anymore, you meant you didn’t want to do it with me?”
“Yeah, something like that,” Piper says.
“Can we at least talk abo—”
“Nothing to talk about,” Piper says. “Don’t worry, I won’t rock your world by rolling back into your precious drama troupe. You can continue to forget the whole thing ever happened.”
Kenzie stares down at Piper, her face softening slightly.
“That’s not fair, Piper,” she says quietly, blinking away the tears in her eyes before they escape.
Piper half laughs and mock applauds. “Bravo! Two thumbs way up for this award-winning performance. Encore! Encore!”
And just like that, Kenzie’s momentary softness vanishes, replaced by her usual tightly pinched scowl. She folds her arms across her chest and huffs past me to prop open the backstage door with a classroom chair.