My Life in Black and White

by Natasha Friend

  MY LIFE IN BLACK AND WHITE

  MY LIFE IN

  BLACK AND WHITE

  by

  NATASHA FRIEND

  Viking

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Viking

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Natasha Friend, 2012

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Friend, Natasha, date–

  My life in black and white / by Natasha Friend.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When beautiful high school student Lexi is involved in an automobile accident that leaves her disfigured, she must learn who she really is beyond a pretty face, and she must also learn to forgive.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-57210-8

  [1. Self-acceptance—Fiction. 2. Beauty, Personal—Fiction. 3. Peer pressure—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 6. Boxing—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.F91535My 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011021436

  Printed in USA Set in Dante Book design by Nancy Brennan

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For my mom and dad,

  who knew me when I was fifteen

  and loved me anyway.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Two Things

  It’s Not What You Think

  Pussy Galore

  Talk to Me

  How Do You Make a Venetian Blind?

  A Lifetime Supplyof Antimicrobial Soap

  Bogus, Bulimic, Smack Shooters

  Make Yourself Comfortable

  Burnt Toast

  Just Shoot Me Now

  You Don’t Mean That

  Delinquent

  Ifonlyifonlyifonly

  The Point of Baked Chicken

  There Must be a Reason You’re Dressed that Way

  Specks of Dust, Atoms

  Meow

  Petty Little Problems

  I’d Rather Be Cleaning Litter Boxes

  The First Breath Is the Worst

  Kissing the Canvas

  It Doesn’t Take Nancy Drew to Figure It Out

  So Unbelievable

  Never Is a Strong Word

  Peace Offerings

  Just Happy Not to Be Barfing My Guts Out

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  HERE IS A picture. I am three years old, and I am perched on a stool in front of a dressing table, sweeping blush over my cheeks with a feathery wand. In the background, my mother hovers. Her hair is a waterfall of gold, her waist the circumference of a cantaloupe. She is wearing a sheath dress, pearls, and crocodile pumps with sensible heels. The image is so clear I can actually smell her Shalimar perfume. I can hear her voice—smooth, with the hint of a Carolina accent. “You,” she says, “are my beautiful girl.”

  Ha!

  It is unavoidable. Wherever you go in my house, there I am. Hanging in the alcove over the stairs, propped on the mantel, stuck to the refrigerator door with alphabet magnets. After what happened, you would think that someone would tear down every photo in the universe so I wouldn’t have to look at myself. But no one has.

  This used to bother me. I used to skulk around my house, staring at all the shiny, happy Alexas and imagining the ways I could destroy her. Knock her off the wall and watch the glass shatter. Hole-punch her face. Microwave her into oblivion.

  In the end, though, I didn’t remove a single photo. I left that girl exactly where she was, suspended.

  Poised in time.

  Waiting to become me.

  Two Things

  WHEN I WAS in fourth grade, my best friend, Taylor LeFevre, and I would ask each other these crazy questions: “Would you rather be burned alive or frozen to death?” “Would you rather be deaf or blind?” “Would you rather have a genius IQ and a butt the size of Texas or be model thin and dumb as a box of rocks?” While other girls were skipping rope and scaling the monkey bars, we were pondering worst-case scenarios. Like, what if tomorrow you got leukemia like Jenny Albee’s brother? Would you take the chemo that makes you bald or hold on to your hair so you’d look good at your own funeral? “Hair,” Taylor said at the time. “Definitely hair.” A tragic choice, but classic Tay. She had the best hair in fourth grade, the bi-level cut—short on one side, long on the other—which my mother would not allow me to get. She also had the best clothes—Juicy Couture hoodies in every color and jeans with a rip in the thigh—which my mother would not allow me to buy. Taylor’s mother, Bree, let Taylor wear whatever she wanted, unlike mine, who insisted on “classic lines” and “quality fabrics” whenever we went shopping.

  But at least I had one thing going for me that Taylor didn’t. The one thing that drew her to me on my first day of kindergarten, my first week in Connecticut, when she marched over to the dress-up corner where I was trying on shoes and poked me in the arm. “Hey,” she said in her low, gravelly voice. “You’re pretty.”

  “I know,” I told her. Because by the age of five, I had already heard it a million times. Not just from my parents, either. From total strangers. Every morning, I would sit at the kitchen counter while my mother brushed out my long, butter-colored hair until it shone. I stood patiently while she fussed over the pleats in my smocked dresses. It didn’t matter where she took me that day—the park or the mall or the grocery store—someone would always comment. “What an enchanting little girl. Look at that skin. Those eyelashes.”

  “You can play with me,” Taylor said, holding out her hand, as if there were a direct connection between my appearance and her willingness to be my friend. Which, of course, there was. But so what? I, too, was awed. Taylor was the only girl in kindergarten wearing earrings. Real ones. Tiny glass orbs that shimmered like disco balls. I thought of my own ears—bare and boring, because my mother didn’t believe in piercing. She wore earrings herself, but they were the clip-on variety. I shar
ed this information with Taylor as the two of us tied aprons around our waists, preparing to flip plastic burgers in the kid-sized kitchen.

  “Clip-ons?” Taylor raised a doubtful eyebrow. “That’s what grandmas wear. Real pierces are better.”

  She was right, of course. Real pierces were better. Everything, I would learn, was better in Taylor’s world.

  Two weeks later, she invited me over for a playdate. I walked into the LeFevres’ foyer, gaping like a fish at the splendor before me. It was nothing like our old condo in Charlottesville, or the Connecticut cape we’d just moved into. This was a McMansion—the type of dwelling my mother considered tacky—but I loved it, anyway. I loved the sky-high ceilings and the chandeliers. I loved the sleek, leather couches and Taylor’s canopy bed and the kidney-shaped pool in the backyard. I remember thinking to myself that this was a house, this was living.

  My mother had other opinions. “There’s a difference between a house and a home, Alexa,” she said the first time she picked me up at Taylor’s. Then, “Money can’t buy happiness, you know.” She seemed to believe what she spouted. There wasn’t a speck of jealousy on her face when she saw the size of the rock on Taylor’s mom’s finger or the apple-red Porsche in the driveway. The car, as well as the forty-two-foot schooner docked at the Millbridge Yacht Club, belonged to Taylor’s dad, a TV sportscaster who worked in Manhattan. “Your daddy is a public servant,” my mother loved to remind me. “A public defender.”

  “I know, Mama,” I said every time.

  “He helps people for a living, Alexa.”

  “I know.”

  But all this was beside the point to my elementary-school self: me being pretty, Taylor being rich, whatever our parents thought of each other. From the second we met, Tay and I were best friends, and that was all that mattered. We wore matching bracelets. We spoke in code. We loved the same things (Hannah Montana, peppermint-stick ice cream, the color green—kelly green, not hunter or lime). We joined Girl Scouts together. We slept at each other’s houses. We talked on the phone ad nauseam. We were, in a word, inseparable.

  There was one other girl we played with, Heidi Engle. She was Taylor’s oldest friend because Mrs. Engle and Mrs. LeFevre had been childhood BFFs. “We have no choice,” Taylor told me once. “We’re forced to play together.” But the truth was that Heidi worshipped Taylor. She had to be ticked when I came along and she got demoted to third wheel. Oh, she hid it well enough. Heidi was nice to my face, but I could tell from the minute I met her that she secretly wished my dad would get fired and we would move back to Virginia.

  I remember in seventh grade, when Heidi and our new friend Kendall were planning their joint thirteenth birthday party, which would take place in Kendall’s basement rec room and would consist mostly of Cool Ranch Doritos and spin the bottle. I said something like, “I’ll eat, but I’m not kissing anyone.”

  “Oh, great,” Heidi said, throwing both hands in the air. “We might as well not even have a party.” She glared at me, then shared her theory that none of the boys would come to the party if there weren’t at least a chance of making out with me. She called my reluctance to play spin the bottle “downright selfish” and said if I were really their friend I would “suck it up.”

  I turned to Taylor for support. She shrugged one pale, freckled shoulder. “Heids does have a point, Lex. Even if she’s being obnoxious about it. Loyalty to the girls.”

  Kendall, and her best friend, Rae, nodded in agreement.

  “Fine,” I said, not wanting to be a party pooper.

  The whole thing was a disaster. First off, the boys were jerks. By definition, seventh-grade boys are thoughtless and immature. Playing kissing games with them just proves the point. There’s nothing romantic about it, even if you’re the one they all want to kiss. Especially if you’re the one they all want to kiss. I spent half the party in a closet getting felt up and the other half in the bathroom bawling because Heidi called me a slut and Taylor did nothing to defend me.

  Later, when I recapped the story for my sister, Ruthie, she had no sympathy for my plight. Not a drop.

  “You know, Lex,” she said, frowning up at me from whichever tomb-sized book she was reading at the time, “you need different friends. Those girls are wenches.”

  For about a nanosecond, I believed Ruthie. I trusted my straight-A, honor-student big sister, who was smarter than I would ever be. But then I considered her X-Files sweatshirt. And the mustache of zits across her upper lip. And the trombone case propped against the edge of her desk. And I knew that she was jealous, pure and simple. Jealous of everything I had that she didn’t. Like Taylor. And Kendall and Rae, who, because they’d gone to the other elementary school, we had only started hanging out with the summer before junior high when their moms began playing tennis with Taylor’s mom. The four of us—Kendall and Rae, me and Taylor—were the only girls in seventh grade who ever got invited to ninth-grade parties. Which was more than I could say for my sister.

  I felt bad for Ruthie, whose friends were not remotely cool. I’m sorry, but it’s a fact. You cannot play the accordion (Sasha) or wear a purple cape to school (Beatrice) and expect to be invited anywhere. But it wasn’t my fault Ruthie turned out the way she did. If my sister wanted someone to blame, it should be our dad, who gave her his beak nose and woolly eyebrows. He also stuck her with the name Ruth, after some great aunt we never met. (Incidentally, I was supposed to be named Harriet after his cousin, but I was born by C-section and came out so perfect my mother made him change his mind. She named me Alexa after the actress on the cover of that month’s Redbook, which she happened to be reading when her water broke.)

  Anyway, I told Ruthie she was wrong. My friends weren’t wenches; they were just upset at the party—understandably—because the boys were being tools. First, Jason Saccovitch called Heidi a porker. Then, Kyle Humboldt said Taylor was so flat you could bounce a quarter off her chest.

  “Whatever,” Ruthie said, shrugging. She wasn’t convinced, but I knew I was right. I thought about the look on Taylor’s face when Kyle made his crack, and how Kendall dumped a whole liter of Coke on his head for payback. Which is what friends do for each other. Which Ruthie wouldn’t understand. Sasha and Beatrice never even talked to a boy, let alone dumped Coke on him.

  That’s when it hit me: I was the bad friend for not defending Taylor to Kyle. If I had told Kyle off instead of just standing there, Taylor would have told Heidi off for calling me a slut. Quid pro quo, as my dad would say.

  So the next morning, I apologized to Tay. And she apologized to me. We cried, we hugged, and our friendship resumed stronger than ever. The two of us coasted through the rest of seventh grade. Then eighth. Then—with the exception of one tiny hiccup of a fight when Ryan Dano and I started going out—we rocked our last year of junior high together. The irony is, when the town first rezoned the schools, making ninth grade part of the junior high instead of the high school, we were mad. But ninth was the best. We ran that place. Taylor and Lexi, the Dynamic Duo. Cocaptains of the field hockey team; rulers of the center table in the caf; chairs of the yearbook committee, ensuring plenty of photo representation for us and our inner circle. The day after graduation, Taylor’s mom, who was mad at Taylor’s dad and needed to punish him, threw a lobster bake for our whole class. Tay wore a cherry-red halter dress with a slit up one leg, and silver, strappy sandals. It was her best outfit ever.

  Over the summer, I practically lived at the LeFevres’. My parents needed to do the college-tour thing with Ruthie, and Taylor’s parents said I was welcome anytime. Which turned out great because Tay’s dad was always working and her mom was always shopping, so we had the house to ourselves.

  Most days Taylor and I would hang out by the pool in her backyard, drinking Crystal Light and working on our tans. Sometimes Heidi, Kendall, and Rae would join us. On July Fourth, Taylor’s brother, Jarrod, invited a bunch of his varsity football buddies over. I wasn’t a big fan of Jarrod—who was loud and hairy and always stri
pping off his shirt in front of me like I was supposed to be impressed—but Taylor adored him. She also had a massive crush on one of Jarrod’s friends, Rob. And on that particular afternoon, Taylor happened to notice Rob noticing me in my bathing suit, and she got all weird about it. I told her not to worry: A) I was in love with Ryan; and B) I wasn’t the least bit attracted to Rob.

  I remember the look on Taylor’s face—the slight flush of her freckled cheeks and the furrow between her pale, almost nonexistent eyebrows. “I can’t compete with you, Lexi.”

  “Who said we were competing?”

  She shrugged, then eyed my plain, blue Speedo tank suit—the only thing my mother would let me buy. It’s a classic, Alexa. It will never go out of style.

  “You’re the one in the two-piece,” I said to Taylor, “from Barney’s, no less.” Which, while true, missed the point. The point was that Taylor still had the same body she’d had since kindergarten: tiddlywink chest; slender hips; knobby knees. No coral-colored Brazilian string bikini in the world was going to change that. Just as no amount of mother-approved Lycra was going hide my boobs. They were here to stay.

  “You look great,” I told Taylor.

  “Whatever,” she muttered.

  “You do. And you know what else? One of these days, Rob is going to notice how hot you are and he’s going to rip that bikini off with his teeth.”

  This time, Taylor smiled. Having Jarrod for a brother, she knew all about high school boys and their pervy ways. One time when Jarrod was at football practice, Tay and I snuck into his room and browsed his computer history. There were pictures of things I’d never seen in my life—not even in The Joy of Sex, which my parents kept hidden under their mattress. I was glad that my gorgeous but well-mannered boyfriend wasn’t into that stuff. For the six months we’d been dating, Ryan was perfectly content with my clothes-on hookup policy. Why wouldn’t he be? We were in love. Madly and deeply.