Scars Like Wings

by Erin Stewart

  “It smells like a morgue back here.” She looks right at me when she says this, then adds, pointing to my wig, “Don’t let her fool you, Ava. When she’s done playing dress-up, Piper will only look out for one person. Fair warning: it won’t be you.”

  She turns on her heel, kicking the extra paintbrushes as she goes.

  “Save the drama for the stage, right?” Piper says after she’s gone.

  I nod. “Seriously. She’s the one who wanted you gone in the first place.”

  Piper turns back to her green skyscrapers.

  “Technically speaking, I quit. I am not about to spend my time where I’m not wanted, and trust me, she did not want me. No one wants the sad cripple around bumming everyone out.”

  Asad finally looks up from his painting. “Nobody said you weren’t wanted.”

  Piper gasps and raises her hands heavenward.

  “It’s a miracle! Your selective mutism has passed! Funny how you never shut up when you’re with us, but someone a few rungs higher on the social ladder appears and suddenly you’re at a loss for words.” She turns to me, gesturing her paintbrush toward my wig. “And you. I don’t care if you wear that thing or not, you know. I was just trying to help.”

  I straighten the hair on my head, which has crept down my forehead while I was painting.

  “I might be beyond help.”

  I pull my headphones out of my bag and put them on over the wig, trying to block out today. We paint together for the rest of the hour, mostly in silence, me mulling over today’s photo disaster, Piper no doubt fuming at her Kenzie run-in, and Asad trying not to get mocked again. I brush up and down the canvas, finishing the final curves of the yellow brick road.

  Follow the path. Click the shoes. Go home.

  If only life were so scripted.

  * * *

  When we’re the last three in the auditorium, Asad and I lug the canvases to the back wall, and when we return, Piper is sitting on the edge of the stage, her legs dangling, staring into the dark auditorium with her empty wheelchair behind her.

  “So you wanted to face a fear today, huh?” she says, her lips half smiling but her eyes in full blaze.

  “Yeah. And I failed.”

  Piper gestures toward the empty auditorium.

  “We got a stage.”

  “And?”

  “And screw the yearbook photo. Face an even bigger fear.”

  “What? Sing?”

  Piper nods. Asad jumps up and pulls the curtains all the way open, his usual smile returning.

  “No. Way,” I say.

  Asad strides to the end of the stage.

  “Here, I’ll go first. Warm the place up a little.”

  He faces the empty auditorium, hands outstretched toward the invisible audience, face contorted with artistic anguish as he sings an off-key (okay, not even key-adjacent) version of “Circle of Life” from The Lion King complete with an earsplitting vibrato that makes Piper grimace. When he finishes, he takes an over-the-top bow, his black shock of hair falling dramatically over his eyes.

  “Well, that I can follow,” I say.

  “A dying cat could follow that,” Piper says. “Pun intended.”

  “Haters gonna hate.” Asad grabs my hand and pulls me to my feet, half dragging me to the front of the stage.

  Piper waves me forward, rolling her eyes. “It’s just us, Ava. One of us who loves you to pieces, and one who is clearly tone-deaf.”

  Asad scowls at her. “Rude.”

  Facing the darkness of the theater, I tighten my hoodie around my waist. The last time I sang on a stage, Sara was in the audience with Mom and Dad. My people—unseen but buoying me up from the darkness.

  Now, only empty seats look back, and I’m definitely not the same girl looking out.

  “Just sing the audition song,” he says. “You know it, right?”

  I nod. After years of singing along with my mother as she brushed her fingertips up and down my arm at bedtime, I know it by heart.

  But that was before I traded lullabies for lotion and spotlights for stage crew.

  I’m not even sure I can sing anymore.

  I stand at the lip of the stage and sing the first word, which comes out shaky and uncertain.

  “ ‘Somewhere—’ ” Halfway through the word, my unfamiliar voice cracks, falling short of the high note.

  I touch the spot just below my voice box where my skin puckers around my tracheotomy scar. I clear my throat, fearing the smoke and tubes and flames changed more than my skin.

  “It’s been too long,” I whisper.

  “I have an idea!” Asad says. “An old theater trick for stage fright.”

  “I am not imagining you in your underwear.”

  “Only if you want to, sicko,” he says with a wink. “But that’s not part of the exercise. For real. Close your eyes.”

  I blink out the light.

  “Now, imagine you’re anywhere you want. Alone. At Abravanel Hall. On Broadway—”

  “Hiding behind stage curtains,” Piper adds.

  “You be quiet over there,” I say in the direction of her voice.

  With my eyes closed, I go somewhere else in my mind.

  Somewhere without photoshopped scars and wigs and empty seats around the dinner table.

  Somewhere safe.

  A place where a song scares away nightmares.

  I’m in my bed, tucked in tight, while my mom sings about blue skies and rainbows, her voice soft and sure.

  Quiet and unsteady, my own is barely recognizable.

  Somewhere over the rainbow—

  I peek down at Piper, who motions for me to keep going. I shut my eyes tight and force my voice to swell as I sing about blue skies and wishing on stars.

  My bedroom floor rumbles as the garage door opens. Dad’s home. Mom’s voice lulls me to sleep as Dad locks the front door behind him.

  My voice crescendos in the space, filling my head, my ears, my memory with words about a place where troubles melt and bluebirds soar. Air fills my lungs. Tingles snap across my skin.

  Waking me up.

  For a time-bending second, I’m me again.

  I fall asleep, safely wrapped up in my family in our corner of the world. We’re home, together—what harm could ever reach us here?

  My voice whispers.

  Birds fly over the rainbow

  Why, then,

  Oh, why

  Can’t I?

  Salt on my lips tells me I’m crying, but I don’t open my eyes. Not yet. I soak in this moment.

  The feeling of the stage and the music and the electricity in my skin.

  The sound of a forgotten voice.

  The memory of home.

  When I open my eyes, Piper holds up her unburned arm. “Goose bumps. And if I had hair on my other arm, it would be standing, too.”

  Asad stares at me, his mouth slightly agape, eyebrows furrowed in thought.

  “Explain to me why you are on crew again?”

  I point to my face, but he keeps shaking his head.

  “No, seriously, Ava. You are better than most of those cast girls. You should try out.”

  I gather up the paintbrushes, my shaking hands clinking the wooden handles together.

  “Well, even if I wanted to—which I absolutely do not—tryouts are over.”

  Asad wags his finger at me.

  “Not so fast. Cynthia Chang just found out she got mono for Valentine’s Day, so they’re holding last-minute reauditions for Glinda.”

  “As in Glinda the Good Witch. The beautiful, angelic fairy? You’re kidding, right?”

  Asad shakes his head while we gather painting supplies, but Piper stares at me.

  “Not everyone has a voice like yours, Ava,” she
says.

  “Or a face,” I say.

  “We’re not talking about your face.”

  Asad closes the curtains, eclipsing the make-believe audience.

  “ ‘Everyone deserves the chance to fly,’ ” he says quietly, almost to himself, before he realizes Piper and I are both staring at him. “My favorite line from Wicked. Gah, how have you not seen that?”

  A few of the paintbrushes slip through the gap between my toe-thumb and my fused fingers. They hit the ground like pickup sticks as I try to get Asad and Piper to see this idea is a nonstarter, no matter how good it felt to sing again.

  “Life is not a musical, okay?” I say. “I can barely look in the mirror, and you’re saying I should get up on a stage in front of the whole school?”

  Piper reaches out and picks up the paintbrushes for me.

  “I’m saying the same thing I was about that bonehead photographer,” she says. “The fire didn’t take your voice. So use it.”

  March 27

  Nobody tells me my parents are dead for two weeks.

  Buried while I slept.

  "We needed you to fight," a nurse says. "We were afraid you'd give up if you knew."

  She's right.

  I do.

  I fade away.

  Away from the truth.

  Away from a world

  with no parents.

  Cora chatters by my bed.

  Nurses ask me questions.

  I talk only when I have to.

  They want me to look at my face.

  Not yet.

  They want me to walk.

  I'm not ready.

  They want me to say where it hurts.

  Everywhere.

  Nurses change me

  wash me

  manage me.

  But I'm already gone,

  tucked deep inside my broken body.

  A dying star

  collapsing.

  My voice feels broken, too.

  It's not.

  I just can't find the words.

  20

  Piper and Asad take turns all week pointing out the audition list hanging outside the auditorium door.

  On the last day of sign-ups, Piper does her best chicken impression with her hands tucked into her armpits to make wings. “Bok, bok, bok.”

  “Nice,” I say. “I don’t see you trying out.”

  She puts away her wings.

  “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  “It just is.”

  “So it’s not because you think it’ll bug Kenzie to have me in her play and you’re using me as a pawn in your feud?”

  Piper stops in the middle of the hallway, eliciting a dirty look from a boy who nearly trips over her wheelchair. She flips him off.

  “I want you to do it because you can. I can’t walk. That crying kid at group can’t play the piano. You can’t look in the mirror. But you can sing.”

  During drama, Asad not-so-subtly mentions the sign-ups while we sort through the disheveled costume closets backstage. He pulls a ginormous Pepto-Bismol-pink hoop dress from the back and holds it up to me.

  “I really think you could get it.”

  “Getting it and actually doing it are two totally different things.” I push aside the layers upon layers of satiny fabric. “And this dress? Are you trying to get me to audition or run away screaming?”

  He stuffs the dress back in and puts a Tin Man’s hat on his head, locks his arms at ninety-degree angles, and does an indescribably bad robot dance. I put on a pointy black witch hat as he swaps out the tin hat for a lion’s mask with a matted mane.

  “ ‘Courage cannot erase our fears.’ ” He strikes a nowhere-near-ferocious pose. “ ‘Courage is when we face our fears.’ ”

  “Newsies. Too easy.” I pull off his mask. “And too easy to say for someone hiding up in his lighting booth.”

  “Touché, my friend. Touché.” He reaches deep into the closet, pulls out a pair of ruby-red shoes, and places them in my hands.

  I click the heels together. Three clicks—POOF!—you’re home. Dorothy had it so good.

  The sound of someone else’s feet entering the stage makes us both look up, and I chuck the shoes back into the closet. Asad presses one finger to his lips as Kenzie’s unmistakable voice reaches us.

  “I know Piper put her up to this,” she says.

  “It’s not even a big role,” says a high-pitched voice that I think belongs to Kenzie’s sidekick with the pixie cut.

  “That’s not the point,” Kenzie snaps. “This is all some twisted revenge plot. Piper blames me for the crash, so she’s throwing her new friend in my face.”

  Asad holds up the dress as if to ask if I’ve signed up for auditions. I shake my head decidedly.

  “Maybe she won’t even get the part,” Pixie Cut says.

  Kenzie scoffs.

  “Of course she will; what kind of monster could say no to her?”

  “You,” Pixie Cut says, making me almost like her.

  “I am not the monster here,” Kenzie half shouts. “I’m legit worried about her. She doesn’t even know she’s a laughingstock, walking around with that wig like Piper’s little dress-up Troll doll. Letting her on this stage is just cruel.”

  She lowers her voice, but it still reaches us through the curtains.

  “Unless it’s the part of the witch who gets smashed by a house. That part she can have.”

  They keep talking, but I’m distracted by Asad, who has slowly started pulling down a ladder attached to the wall next to us, one hand over the other to keep the squeaking quiet.

  “What are you doing?” I whisper.

  “What I should have done last time.”

  The ladder down, Asad climbs up, pausing when the bottom rung makes a loud creak. We both look to the stage curtain, but it stays closed, and the girls keep talking. He climbs up the ladder until he’s a full person above me and reaches out to the support beams that hold up the heavy grand curtain. Smiling down at me, he holds up his fingers, counting silently—one, two—

  “Three!” he says, snapping a metal clasp wide-open, and as he does, the thick, velvet grand curtain plummets to the stage, completely covering both girls and prompting an outburst of squeals.

  Asad hurries off the ladder.

  “Let’s go,” he says, running down the backstage steps, and I follow him at a full sprint through the aisle, my hand on my wig to keep it from falling off.

  We open the auditorium door and are almost home free when—

  “Ava!”

  Kenzie stands in the middle of the stage, hands perched on her hips and her hair sticking out at inexplicable angles.

  Asad pulls me through the door, rescuing me from my paralysis. In the hallway, he pumps his fist in the air as I bend to catch my breath. My heartbeat pounds in every part of my body, threatening to leap from my throat. I haven’t run that fast since Before.

  “Who’s hiding in their lighting booth now, baby!” Asad yells down the empty hallway. “Now you have to audition just to stick it up her I’d-like-to-thank-the-Academy butt.”

  “How’s that logic again?” I say between winded breaths.

  “Kenzie knows you were listening, so if you back down, she wins.”

  I shake my head, my heartbeat slowing to a trot from a racing gallop.

  “She wins, okay? There is no scenario where she doesn’t win. Besides, I can’t back down because I never signed up. All you did was paint a huge target on my back.”

  Asad scrunches up his face as he looks behind me and then turns me around by my shoulders.

  “I think that target was already there.”

  There, on the last line of the sign-ups, two words reignite my pulse: Ava Lee.

  21
r />   I know it was you

  No hablo inglés

  I’m not doing it.

  Doing what?

  You KNOW what!

  I know nothing

  You’re impossible

  Thank you

  At least think about it. You owe yourself that much

  Like I can stop thinking about it. I think about it the whole time Dr. Sharp works his fingertips across my scars at my monthly frisking.

  I think about how good it felt to sing again, and how much I’ve missed that part of me. I think about sticking it to Kenzie, waging my own war for backstage crewpies and Piper and girls with bandanas instead of hair.

  Mostly, I think about being someone other than the Burned Girl.

  But then I think about what it would feel like to stand on a stage again, all those eyes staring at me, inspecting me. Might as well dream of soaring over rainbows. I can’t face an audience. Not with this face.

  Dr. Sharp makes some computer notes as my brain wanders off the stage and back into this sterile exam room.

  “You’re healing nicely,” he says.

  Always healing, never healed.

  “And how is reintegration going?” he says.

  “Well, Doctor, the native species have accepted me into their ranks. I’d say the infiltration is a success.”

  Dr. Sharp smiles and shakes his head. Cora puts her hand on my shoulder.

  “She’s doing wonderfully. She’s even made a friend at support group.”

  “Piper, right?” he says.

  I nod, unsettled that Cora has clearly already given him—and probably the whole Committee on Ava’s Life—this update.

  “She’s a live wire, that one. When she was in the unit, I had to keep reminding the nurses that there were other patients. She just kind of took over—everything.”

  “That’s Piper,” Cora says from her usual position at my side, my recovery binder open on the desk. “But she did convince Ava to join the drama club.”