by Robert Hoge
The conflict attracted a lot more attention now that it was no longer just the occasional kid with water down the back of his shirt. The teachers’ security council gave a few kids detention and we were all threatened with serious repercussions if the combat continued. Chemical warfare in the schoolyard was frowned upon.
The game was over.
• • •
One lunchtime I’d retreated to the classroom to escape the conflict and finish some math homework I hadn’t done the night before. A few minutes later one of the other kids, Ben, came in too.
“Hey, Toe Nose,” he said.
“Get stuffed, Ben,” I said.
“Original,” he said. “Original like your nose.”
“You only just worked out that my nose is like this?”
“It’s been obvious for a while,” Ben said.
“No joke,” I said.
“I don’t know how you cope with a nose like that—it’s all big and round and squishy.”
“Really,” I said. “Taken a look at your own nose anytime recently? It’s pretty huge.”
He did, in fact, have a rather large nose.
Ben scoffed something under his breath and walked out of the classroom. It wasn’t the end of it as far as I was concerned.
Instead of finishing my homework, I grabbed an exercise book, ripped a page out and set about drawing a portrait of Ben. In profile. It wasn’t the most lifelike portrait, but I absolutely nailed one part of it—his nose. It took up half the page, emerging from his face like a massive mountain. I colored in his hair, drew on ears and lips, but the nose got special attention—it was giant, pendulous, overpowering. I drew gaping nostrils, then held my artistic creation up and smiled. It was beautiful. But it was missing something, something to give it scale and put the size of the nose in context.
I drew several spaceships entering and leaving his cavernous nostrils, like they were docking at a spaceport. I titled it “Spaceport Ben” and slipped it into his desk. Proud of myself, I went to lunch and promptly forgot about it.
As with such things, though, a day of reckoning was to come. And it reckoned soon enough.
Later that week I was called down to see Mr. Fuller, the deputy principal. Most of the school lived in a vague, unspecified fear of Mr. Fuller. He was the perfect second-in-command. He delivered the bad news when needed and administered a strict, no-nonsense form of discipline that mainly worked by keeping students so in fear of the threat of getting in trouble that they behaved.
I had no idea what I was being called down for. What Michael and Gary had told me about discipline at Iona started and stopped at the consequences of spitting, not what happened when you were called to the deputy principal’s office.
I sat waiting outside his office for a few minutes before I was called in.
He sat behind a big desk, papers neatly piled on one side. On the wall he had shelves with books and sporting trophies.
“Sit down, Robert.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know why you’re here?” he asked. I wondered if it was meant to be like confession at church and I was supposed to say, “Forgive me, Mr. Fuller, for I have misbehaved. It has been about forty-two days since I last admitted to my bad behavior.” Then I’d confess to talking in class, answering back to teachers, swearing, not doing my homework, and a range of other sins.
I settled for a simple “No, sir.”
“I understand you and Ben have been having some disagreements,” he said. “That there’s been some teasing going on.”
I relaxed. At least I wasn’t getting in trouble, I thought. It was just teasing incident number 8,024 in a long line of teasing incidents. I knew there would be more. It hadn’t had much impact.
“Well, sir, it wasn’t anything, really. Nothing that got me very upset, anyway.”
Settling scores in the deputy principal’s office might seem like a good idea to some, but Dad had always taught me it was better to face things head-on. You might not always win, but getting someone else to fight your battles for you just encouraged more fights in the future.
Unfortunately, I’d misunderstood what Mr. Fuller was saying.
“It’s fine that you didn’t find it very upsetting, Robert, but that doesn’t mean Ben didn’t,” he said.
It took a moment to sink in. I wasn’t the teasee this time, apparently. I was the teaser.
“Oh, okay.”
“Not really okay, Robert, no,” he said. “I’d expect that you more than most boys would know how hurtful teasing can be.”
“Yes, sir.” I started to go red.
“Surely you know that it can be a very mean thing to pick on someone because of the way they look?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was there a particular reason for what you did? What you drew?”
I thought about that for a moment. “No, sir,” I said. I made a note to never, ever draw anything again.
Even if the spaceships going in and out of the nostrils did look cool. And very funny.
“Well, Ben has been down here twice in the last two weeks, very upset. Don’t do it again.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Fuller waved me out the door and sent me away with no further punishment than my shame and having missed lunchtime.
• • •
I was genuinely surprised to learn how much my drawing had upset Ben, because I was teased so often myself, and I became better and better at dealing with it as I got older. Sometimes it wasn’t just kids who were cruel, though. Sometimes it was adults, and somehow that was much worse.
In grade ten we had to do a week of work experience, to see what life was like in the adult world. I signed up to do work experience as a teacher. It was the default for a bunch of us. I didn’t know why I chose it. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be a teacher, but it seemed as good a choice as any.
Come work experience week, another boy and I were shipped off to a Catholic elementary school I’d never heard of. The week before, we’d all been given a lecture about taking the opportunity seriously and behaving appropriately. When we turned up to the school, we were neatly dressed and minding our manners. The two of us went to the administration block and waited outside the principal’s office for what seemed like ages. Then she came out, introduced herself, and told us that I would be working with the grade-seven class and the other boy would be working with the grade-two class.
At Iona, relief teachers, student teachers, and work-experience kids were all fair game for students to pick on, but the kids at this school were just fine. The kids in the classroom were smart and engaged, and the kids in the playground were well-behaved. None of them said a thing about my funny face or my legs. I got the occasional stare from a student here or there, but nothing I wasn’t used to.
My biggest problem the whole week was correcting the grade-seven students’ spelling in class and trying to work out whether the proper spelling was “potatoes” or “potatos” (hint: it’s “potatoes”). The week sailed by and was capped off with a half-day Friday for us. I said good-bye to my grade-seven class and thanked the teacher who’d looked after me. Before I could go, though, I was sent to the principal’s office. I thought maybe the other student and I were going to get a quick thank-you, but he was nowhere to be seen.
I waited outside the office for a few minutes before being called in. The school principal seemed nice enough. She was a well-spoken middle-aged woman who seemed popular with the students.
“It would have been appropriate,” she said, without a hello, “if we were warned before you came.”
I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Warned?” I asked.
“Yes, warned,” she said. She raised her voice slightly, like I was a kid in grade two. “About you.”
“About me?”
�
�When you arrived on Monday, we had to quickly swap the class you’d be in. You were supposed to work with the grade-two teacher.”
I wondered for a second whether kids in grade two would be tested on how to spell the plural of “potato.” My next thought was that until we’d arrived, we were just names on a piece of paper anyway, so it couldn’t have been that hard to change. Then it dawned on me what she meant. She was talking about the way I looked.
I hadn’t given any thought before I arrived to what the younger kids might think of me. I doubt my teachers at Iona had either. I did okay there. Surely I’d do okay at another school. What was there to worry about?
I didn’t know what to say.
I started to cry.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Good,” she said, and got up to open the door for me.
I cried all the way across the school oval to where Dad was waiting to pick me up. I did my best to compose myself before I hopped in the car, but he knew something was going on and asked what was wrong. I explained, and then pleaded with him not to get out of the car and go give the principal a piece of his mind.
“And don’t tell Mom either, okay? I can handle it.”
He thought about it for a minute, then decided it was up to me. “Okay.”
It wasn’t the last time I cried about the way I looked, but it was the very last time I apologized to anyone else for it.
21
The Choice
Okay, go find that imaginary clay baby’s head sculpture you did. Any version is okay—pretty, ugly, or not-so-ugly. This is the last time you’ll need it. Promise.
Imagine you’ve got this grand plan to give it one last big effort, to finish it off. You think about what you might do, start working out which tools you’ll need and whom you can ask for help. Then someone goes and takes it away. You’ve spent ages working on it and now you’ll never know how it would have turned out. How annoying would that be?
My doctors felt a bit like that. They were artists, and they didn’t like leaving their work half-finished. They had done a tremendous amount of surgery on my legs and my face and had made a very important difference to my life. Now they wanted to finish their masterpiece.
I’d known for years that my surgeons wanted to do another major operation. This would be “the big one,” they said—the operation that would make everything right. And one day, just after I had turned fourteen, I arrived home from school expecting to eat some snacks, watch some television, and begrudgingly start my homework, when my parents said the day had arrived. My doctors had discussed it with Mom and Dad, who in turn raised the prospect with me.
Most importantly, they told me, it would mean a massive improvement to how I looked.
“My last operation didn’t make that much of a difference,” I said.
“That last one was mostly about getting ready for this one,” Dad said.
Mom nodded. “This one’s a lot bigger, Robert.”
“They’re going to do a heap more work,” Dad said. “Almost as much as you had with your first big operation when you were four.”
My bumps would be ironed out, my nose would be made almost normal, and my eyes would be moved slightly closer together. I would look much, much better.
By then I’d started to notice girls. And I’d started to notice girls noticing how I looked. I think my doctors were also starting to notice me noticing how girls noticed how I looked.
While the idea of another big operation had always been in the back of my mind, I hadn’t really given it much thought. Now I wondered what it would be like to look normal. Would I feel different if I had a regular nose? Would girls notice me more if the dents at the sides of my head were filled in? Would other kids tease me less?
Would I still be called Toe Nose?
Over the next few weeks I asked my parents a question here, a question there. Then they sat me down and said it was time to talk properly. I wasn’t surprised that they wanted to hear my opinion before they made their decision. They were good like that.
“Robert,” Mom said, “you know we’ve been talking about you having another operation on your face. A big one.”
“Yep.”
She looked at Dad and took a deep breath. “Well,” she said, “this decision isn’t up to us. You’re fourteen, and we think you should decide whether the doctors do the operation or not.”
“It’s your life, so it’s your choice,” Dad said.
What? Had I heard my parents properly? Were they really asking me to decide if I should have an operation? And not just any old operation—a massive one that might make me look normal?
My breathing sped up. My heart pounded so loudly I could hardly concentrate. I realized that was exactly what they meant. I couldn’t make a single one of the thousand thoughts racing around my head stay still for even a second. I panicked. Did I have to give them an answer right now? I had no idea what to think or even how to think it.
Mom must have noticed how worried I looked.
“We’re not asking for your advice to help us choose, Robert,” she said. “It’s entirely up to you. And you don’t have to decide right away.”
“The doctors are really eager for the operation to go ahead,” Dad said. “But like I said, it’s your choice.”
The surgeons understood that I had formed close friendships with my buddies, but I was entering that time the experts referred to as “the period when a boy will hopefully begin to form relationships with creatures known as girls.”
They were sending Mom and Dad a clear message: “Robert has done very well in life. So far. He’s survived childhood and made it into his teenage years. Now we need to prepare him to become a proper functioning adult.”
The doctors wanted me to have a normal life. They wanted me to have girlfriends. They wanted me to grow up and fall in love and maybe get married and have children, like my friends would. And they thought all of that would be so much easier for me if I weren’t so ugly.
They had been concerned about this right from the start. When I was first born, one doctor had examined me and told Dad that I’d have normal mental ability and hit puberty like every other kid, but be rejected by others because of the way I looked. At the time, Dad had a wife under sedation who couldn’t bring herself to see the massively deformed baby she’d just given birth to. He had four other kids at home who needed looking after. He had a job he had to keep because he was the breadwinner in the household. And he had me. What might happen if I made it to puberty was the least of his problems back then. Fourteen years later, the question seemed much more important. I was a million light-years away from being ready to go up and ask a girl if she wanted to go out with me—not counting playground attempts in grade four—but I understood, if only in theory, why the doctors were worried.
My face still looked like someone had driven a train across it and left tracks behind as scars. I knew the routes they traced across my head. I knew where they disappeared beneath my hairline. I knew the bumps. I knew my nose was so wide I could see it out of the corners of both eyes. I knew my ugliness like—well, like it was my own face.
• • •
We started talking it through in more detail. How long would the operation take? I wanted to know. What would they be cutting up this time? Where would they move things to?
First, the easy part. Doctors would fill the gaps in my skull from previous operations. I had slight depressions at the front of my forehead and a massive crater on each side of my head, running down to my eyebrows. This work wouldn’t be too hard. The doctors would simply find some more spare cartilage and I’d end up with a scar on the left of my chest, just like the one I had on the right.
Most of the work would be around my nose and eyes, though. Doctors would un-squish my nose, and raise the bridge and narrow it, so it didn’t look quite so much like a lump of clay that had hardened
before it could be properly shaped.
Unfortunately, fixing my nose would also highlight the fact that my eyes were slightly wider apart than they should be. They were close enough to allow me to focus both eyes on the same thing, but they were still a little bit farther apart than was ideal. When I had a big, flat nose this wasn’t quite so pronounced, but it would become obvious if the doctors fixed it. If they were going to fix one thing, they’d have to fix everything. And fixing it all would make me look much more normal.
Normal.
I’d had enough surgery as an older child to know that it was a lengthy, painful, distressing process, and that things could go wrong. But I’d also seen pictures of handsome men with symmetrical faces and proper noses—the kind of man girls found attractive, with a strong chin, chiseled jaw, and piercing eyes. They were on television all the time.
I was smart enough to know I’d always be outside of ordinary—no matter what the doctors did to my face, I would never go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning to discover I’d grown new legs—but I wanted to know what I’d look like after the surgery. I tried to imagine the new face the doctors would give me, thinking about what the operation could mean for my future. It all went around in my head for a few weeks: the pain, the risks, the uncertainty, and the awful, enticing thought of blending in.
Then, decision time.
Mom, Dad, and I sat at the kitchen table. Michael was there too, so he joined the discussion.
We sat around and talked in circles for a while, me and Mom and Dad and Michael. We guessed at what I might look like. We talked about how they’d do the operation at the end of the school year and hopefully have me back with my friends in January, new face and all.
“There are some risks involved, though?” I asked.
“Yes,” Dad said.
My parents ran through them one by one. I could die on the operating table, a risk with all surgery. I could get an infection, which had happened before. It could mean more pain, more scars, and might even undo the work the doctors had already done. It might not work as well as everyone expected, with doctors doing hours and hours of work and me looking the same at the end. Or worse.