Faceless

by Alyssa Sheinmel

  I shake my head. I didn’t really look at my schedule. And when exactly did Chirag start referring to physical therapy as PT like he’s so familiar with it? Does he know what I do with Marnie? Know that sometimes I spend the full hour doing nothing more than bending and straightening my stiff left arm, forcing the scarred skin on my left side to stretch until it feels like it’s ripping wide open?

  But I can’t ask those questions without risking some kind of further explanation, so I say, “Why are you meeting me?”

  “Your mom said she couldn’t leave work early three days a week. So I volunteered to drive you on Mondays. The administration tweaked my schedule so I’m not missing anything.”

  “You have track practice on Mondays.”

  “Coach will understand.”

  I open my mouth to protest. Coach is inflexible about missing practice. She once suspended a runner after he missed practice because he had food poisoning and didn’t tell her until after the fact. Even when I sprained my ankle sophomore year, I didn’t miss one day of practice. I sat impatiently on the sidelines, waiting to be well enough to run again.

  Before I can say anything, Chirag says, “Your mom and I worked everything out with the teachers.”

  My pulse quickens, and I press my left fingernails into my jeans. If I were anything like my mother, this would be the time when I raised my voice. But Chirag and I have never had an actual fight and I’m not about to start now. Not over something as small as scheduling.

  Even if it doesn’t feel small. I swallow and silently order my heartbeat to slow. “I guess you and my mom have been talking a lot lately.” Behind my back, I think but do not say.

  Chirag shrugs. “She called me last week to work out a schedule.”

  I look at my sneakers. “I didn’t know that.” Why didn’t you include me in these conversations?

  “I thought your mom told you.”

  Well, she didn’t, and since when do you count on my mom to tell me anything that has to do with you and me?

  How can Chirag act like this isn’t a big deal? He knows how I feel about my mother treating me like a little kid, something she did plenty even before the accident. Maybe he thinks I don’t mind that kind of thing anymore. Or, I want to say, maybe you agree with my mom—maybe you think that now I need to be treated like a little kid?

  But instead I nod and say, “Okay. I’ll meet you out front at two-thirty.”

  “Great.” Chirag smiles as he stands. He hovers above me for a second, like he’s trying to decide what to do. Before, I’d have tilted my face up for a good-bye kiss. Now I keep my gaze fixed firmly on the ground in front of me. Finally, Chirag leans down and kisses the top of my head.

  “You smell different.” He has such a deep voice that everything he says sounds solemn. I nod. That stupid soap my mother made me use. Plus, I threw away my old perfume last night. I hate the way it smells now.

  “You still smell good,” Chirag says, but it sounds forced, like that’s the kind of thing he thinks he ought to say.

  “Thanks,” I mumble. Chirag loved the way my old perfume smelled. I should have kept it, for him, whether I liked it or not. He would have done that for me.

  “I gotta go,” I say, packing up my now-empty pillbox and shoving it into my bag. “I’m going to be late.”

  “What for?”

  The bell rings; it’s sixth period. “Late for staring at the ceiling in Mrs. Culligan’s office.”

  As I walk away, I hear Ellen saying, “I’m gonna catch five minutes of sunshine before gym.”

  The nurse’s office is quiet and cool. I guess there aren’t any other sick kids on the first day of classes. I lie down on one of the beds in the dark, the paper Nurse Culligan puts over the pillowcase crinkling beneath the weight of my head. Serena, Samantha, and Ellen are getting ready for gym right now. They’re probably complaining as they change in the locker room; we all hated gym class, even me. They probably think I’m lucky not to have to go.

  Being here now is just another in the long list of today’s humiliations. I never knew you could be humiliated alone before. I roll over to face the wall even though I’m not supposed to lie on my side. Wow, how pathetic. Other kids rebel by staying out late, breaking curfew, drinking, doing drugs. My rebellion is to roll over.

  I don’t want to fall asleep; don’t want Nurse Culligan to shake me awake in time for seventh period. Worse, she might let me sleep right through it. Then Chirag would have to come searching for me because I wouldn’t be out front to meet him at two-thirty like he and Mom planned. And he would call my mother to say that I wasn’t strong enough to make it through my first day.

  Tattletale.

  I shake my head, hearing the paper wrinkle beneath my cheek. Chirag is just trying to do the right thing. And it’s not like there’s some playbook for how to act after your girlfriend has a procedure so rare that most people in the world don’t even know it exists.

  If I’d chosen not to do the transplant, I wouldn’t be here right now. Maybe I’d still be in the hospital, or maybe I’d be at home, taking long laboring breaths through my mouth beneath a skin graft. They said the grafts would never be more than a mask over what was left of me, but this face I cannot feel, this nose, these cheeks, this chin: What are they if not a mask? And with skin grafts, I wouldn’t be wearing someone else’s skin and bones, literally wearing death on my face. They’d have taken skin from the undamaged parts of my own body, my inner thighs maybe. Or my lower back.

  If I’d chosen differently, Ellen and Sam could have had their lunch in the sunshine. Serena wouldn’t have to explain me to them. And Chirag wouldn’t have to look at the remains of the girl he used to hug and kiss and hold.

  I don’t feel the tears that drip across my nose and my cheeks. Dr. Boden said there’s no guarantee I’ll ever regain full sensation. For now, we just have to wait and see.

  The mattress squeaks beneath me. At least this is only temporary. Next year I’ll go to Barnard and my mother will be too far away to coddle me, and Chirag won’t feel obligated to take care of me, and no one in New York will know that this isn’t the face I was born with.

  No one will know that I used to be an athlete, that there used to be freckles on my nose, that I used to have a dimple in my left cheek. They might wonder how I got these scars, but they’ll be too polite to ask, and I won’t ever tell.

  I’m dreaming, but not about my donor for once. In this dream, people are laughing. Even though I can’t see them, I can tell that they’re laughing at me. I want to ask them what I’ve done, but my mouth can’t make the words.

  I wake up only when my chin slips from the heel of my hand and my nose hits the desk in front of me.

  “Careful,” someone calls. “You don’t want to have to replace it a second time.”

  “Gregory Baker!” The teacher—Mr. Wolf, my English teacher—shouts. “Apologize this instant.”

  I blink. Oh my god, I was asleep in class. I slept through a discussion of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The laughter continues now that I’m awake—the giggles from my dream belonged to my real-life classmates. But more humiliating than the laughter, more humiliating than what Greg said, more humiliating than the fact that our teacher is forcing an apology out of him, is the fact that Mr. Wolf didn’t try to wake me.

  Greg mumbles an apology, and Mr. Wolf asks if I need to go to the nurse’s office. If anyone else had been dozing in class, Mr. Wolf would have woken them and sent them home with an extra paper to write. But me—the sick girl, the broken girl, the damaged girl—no teacher would begrudge me some extra shut-eye. Mr. Wolf doesn’t scold me. He doesn’t even ask for an explanation.

  I’d love to tell him that I’m tired. More tired than he could possibly imagine or understand. It’s a tiredness that comes from inside of me, that makes me aware of every heartbeat, every breath, every movement. My hands feel like they’re stuck in cement and I have to concentrate on gripping my pencil or holding my eyelids open.

 
They added some new drugs to my regime a few weeks ago. (My regime; war words again.) At any moment, my immune system could revolt and try to expel our new territories, i.e., my face. Now, in addition to taking the orange-and-turquoise CellCept capsules twice a day, I’m also taking the creamy-colored Prografs twice, too. And it’s not like I was full of energy before they adjusted my meds.

  Screw you, Greg. And you, too, Mr. Wolf. You don’t have any idea what it feels like to be drugged into oblivion.

  I gather up my books and shuffle down the hall to the nurse’s office. I spend more time there than any other student, more than the slackers who fake illnesses to get out of class, more than the football team with their injuries so constant that the parents are talking about eliminating the football team altogether. After the first week of school, the administration decided that I’d have to take my medication in the nurse’s office each day, instead of on my own where everyone could see me. At first, I thought they were doing it for my benefit, like they thought it would be less embarrassing for me to have to slip off to the nurse’s office than pop a pill in front of everyone. But when I tried to argue that going to the nurse’s office was even worse, the real reason became apparent. They were concerned that if my classmates saw me taking drugs, they’d want to buy them from me. As if anyone would pay to feel like this.

  It’s October. The days are getting shorter, the nights longer, and everyone is talking about their costumes for the school’s annual Halloween party. I haven’t decided what I’m going as, but I know one thing for sure: My outfit will include a mask.

  School has never been so hard for me. Dr. Woo wasn’t kidding when she warned me about the side effects of antirejection drugs. In addition to fatigue, there’s migraines, weakness, and nausea, to name just a few. My GPA is slipping, slipping, sliding down out of the acceptable range for Barnard. I should ask Dr. Boden to write some sort of note to go along with my application: Please excuse Maisie’s grades; she used to be really smart, she just can’t stay awake in class because of the myriad drugs her team and I insist she take.

  But even if Dr. Boden does write me a note, even if all my doctors and nurses sign it like some kind of petition, it won’t be enough. What will I do once I get to New York? I’ll never be able to pull an all-nighter to finish a paper. I won’t ever stay up late bonding with my roommate.

  Oh god, my poor hypothetical roommate. She’ll have to live with a girl who goes to bed early, then wakes up screaming in the middle of the night.

  Maybe I can get Dr. Boden to put something in that note about how I’ll need a single room.

  But then what? What about graduate school and my first job, and the rest of my life? I will never not have to take these pills. They will never not be fraught with side effects.

  How will I make it through the rest of my life if I’m always this tired?

  I can’t remember what it feels like to have energy. How did I ever get straight As, and run track, and shop with Serena, and kiss my boyfriend, all in the course of a single day?

  It would have been easier if I hadn’t been a miracle, if the rest of me had died along with my face. I’m not saying I wish that was what happened, but it certainly would have been a lot simpler that way.

  We’re about halfway through dinner when the phone rings. Serena jumps up to get it. She has dinner with us at least once a week, mostly to help me with our calculus homework since I have so much trouble paying attention in class.

  “Winters residence,” she recites politely. After a moment, she hands the phone to my mother. “It’s Nurse Culligan,” she whispers, sinking into her chair beside me as Mom disappears into the kitchen. My father isn’t home from work yet. He’s been working late ever since I went back to school; I guess he has a lot to make up for after taking off so much time over the summer.

  Or maybe you just don’t want to come home to the daughter you can no longer recognize.

  “Nurse Culligan?” I echo. “Why would she be calling here?”

  “She said she heard about Mr. Wolf’s class this afternoon. What happened?”

  I sigh. I’d been hoping to keep it to myself. “I fell asleep.”

  “You fell asleep?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How?”

  “What do you mean how? I closed my eyes and I guess I just forgot to open them back up again until Greg Baker made a crack about my nose job.”

  “You didn’t get a nose job.”

  “I know I didn’t get a nose job.” I shove my plate away. I wasn’t all that hungry to begin with (nausea from the pills, of course), and now I’m not hungry at all.

  “What book are you analyzing this month?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “When I had Mr. Wolf for sophomore English, I could’ve fallen asleep in every single class he spent talking about Moby Dick. If I had to hear him rhapsodizing about the whiteness of the whale one more time—”

  When Serena talks to me, she looks me directly in the eyes. My eyes, at least, are the same.

  “It’s the drugs, Serena,” I say irritably. “Not the book.” In fact, I hate having missed a second of Mr. Wolf’s talk on One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s the most beautiful book we’ve ever read in class. And anyway, Serena knows full well that before, I never would have fallen asleep in class, no matter the subject.

  “Okay, but seriously, they should record his lectures on Moby Dick and give them out instead of sleeping pills.” Serena, like everyone else, can’t understand this kind of tiredness. I didn’t know it was possible to be this tired before.

  “I’ll tell my doctors you said so.”

  Serena laughs. “Hey,” she says suddenly, “do you just want to copy my calculus answers?”

  “What?”

  “I had some time between classes this afternoon, so I went ahead and did the homework. Why don’t you just copy it?”

  “Cheat?”

  Serena rolls her eyes. “I forgot what a goody two-shoes you could be. It’s just that with midterms coming up …” She sighs, trailing off. Spending hours helping me with my homework is digging into her study time. Serena actually looks stressed. I squeeze the knife in my left hand, even though it hurts. I’m not the only one trying to get into college.

  I’ve never cheated on anything before, but it’s tempting: It would be so much quicker to copy Serena’s answers. I never understand anything anyway, no matter how much time she spends explaining. Feeling like this, it’s impossible to understand that one plus one equals two, let alone what x stands for.

  “Yes,” I decide. “I’ll copy your answers after dinner.”

  “Seriously?”

  I shrug. “Maybe I’m not such a goody two-shoes anymore.” Serena grins as my mother comes back into the room. Mom would freak if she knew what Serena was smiling about.

  “The school nurse would like our permission to call a special assembly,” Mom says matter-of-factly as she sits back down.

  “Why?”

  “To educate the student body about your injuries—”

  “They don’t need an education about my injuries. My injuries are right here for all to see.” I point at my face and without meaning to, I stick my finger into my nose. One of the more delightful side effects of not being able to feel my new appendages is that my depth perception is off-kilter, along with the rest of me.

  “Well, it sounds to me like they need a little education after what happened today.”

  “Nothing happened! I fell asleep. That has to do with the immunosuppressives, not the other kids’ lack of education.”

  My mother looks at me evenly. She takes in my whole face. She probably read that the best way to get used to how I look now was to stare at me every chance she got. “You didn’t just fall asleep. The other students—”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter that they were laughing at you? That they made jokes about your surgery as you walked out of the classroom and to
the nurse’s office, crying?”

  “Wait a minute,” Serena interrupts. “I thought it was just that idiot Greg Baker?”

  I close my eyes. So maybe it wasn’t just Greg Baker. Maybe a chorus of yawns and applause accompanied me out of the room. Maybe even after he apologized, Greg Baker pulled his own cheeks out perversely, so that he looked nothing at all like himself. And maybe I did cry, just a little bit. It doesn’t matter; it’s not like I could feel the tears.

  “According to Mr. Wolf, it was practically the entire classroom. Nurse Culligan thinks, and I agree, that a school-wide assembly would give you the chance to explain—”

  “Wait a second, they want me to talk at this assembly?”

  My mother nods. “You, and Dr. Boden, if his schedule allows it, and Nurse Culligan, and perhaps the guidance counselor—”

  “Okay, stop—”

  But my mother keeps going. “This is an opportunity, Maisie. You can do some real good here. Let this be a teachable moment for your classmates. People go their whole lives without being touched by someone like you—you could make a real difference. I’m sure if they knew what you’d gone through—”

  She says teachable moment proudly, like a little kid who’s just learned a new vocabulary word.

  I shake my head. She wants me to be one of those special people who make it through the other side of a horrific injury as a shining example of the human spirit. Someone who says she’s glad this happened to her, it made her a better person, made her life richer. Like those people they talk about in the last five minutes of the news, the human interest stories that are supposed to make you feel better about all the crappy stuff they spent the previous hour talking about. Tonight, it was a story about a surfer who lost her arm in a shark attack. She’s still surfing, and she just got married.

  Well, she wasn’t in high school.

  “Believe me, Mom, none of those kids give a—”

  “Maisie!” Mom shouts before I can finish. I roll my eyes. I don’t see the point in mincing words right now. Sometimes it feels like my mother is the only person in the world I’ll say anything to. Like I don’t care what she thinks of me.