“I wasn’t interrogating him,” I insist defensively.
“When are you gonna do it?”
“Do what?”
“You know what,” Adam says. “Give him the old heave-ho.”
“The old heave-ho?” I echo. “What are you, eighty years old?”
“Wise beyond my years, darlin’,” Adam answers. When he smiles, the left side of his mouth doesn’t curl up nearly as much as the right, and the result is a crooked almost-smirk. “Anyway, I had to break up with my girl, too, back in the day.”
Before I can stop him, Adam is jogging across the lot toward Chirag’s hybrid car, which is still parked exactly where it was when he dropped me off. He looks back at me and winks. “I gotta meet this guy before you give him the slip.”
I let myself in the passenger side, ignoring the sound of Adam’s voice telling Chirag how special and brave I am. Chirag has rolled his window down and the two of them talk with the familiarity of old friends. I always loved that about Chirag, how he could step into any situation with ease. If I’d let him come inside tonight, they probably would have loved him.
But if he’d come inside tonight, I’d never have asked Michael the questions I asked.
“I’ve got to get home,” I interrupt.
Chirag turns from the window to face me. “Adam invited us out for a cup of coffee.”
I shake my head. I should do it tonight, with Michael’s story still fresh in my ears. Give Chirag the old heave-ho. The slip. Adam made it sound so easy.
“I have to take my pills.”
“You have a dose with you, don’t you?”
“It’s for emergencies,” I protest. “Anyway, how do you know that?”
He shrugs. “I guess your mom mentioned it.”
I didn’t know she knew I carried extra pills around with me. Did she check my bag when I wasn’t looking or something?
“I guess you talk to my mom all the time now, ever since she enlisted you to be my nursemaid.” The old Maisie never would have said that. She and her boyfriend never fought. Now, when Chirag tries to smooth things over with a Maisie, don’t be ridiculous look, I shake my head.
Smoothing things over won’t get this done any faster. But being angry might. Fighting might.
I certainly know how to pick a fight. I’m an expert, in fact, after years of watching my parents.
“I know driving me around town is the last thing you want to do.”
“I only wanted to help—”
“Help what? Help my parents take care of the freak who used to be their daughter?”
They use words like freak and creepy and ugly in Group all the time. Out here, in the damp December air, the word sounds harsh and out of place. I shiver.
I wonder if Chirag sat in his car in this parking lot for the past hour. Maybe he didn’t drive away, didn’t get a drink or a bite to eat, didn’t pull out a book to pass the time. Maybe he just sat here, waiting for his girlfriend to walk back across the parking lot. I exhale heavily, so that my stomach curls in like the letter C.
“Chirag,” I say finally, “we have to go.” He nods a good-bye to Adam and rolls up his window. I wave as we pull away. I think Adam mouths the words Good luck back at me.
I’m going to need it. Because I know what to give Chirag for Christmas. And I’m giving it to him tonight.
As we drive, Chirag opens his mouth at least a dozen times, like there is something he wants to say but doesn’t think he should.
“Say it already,” I demand as we pull onto my street, past the place where the tree used to be, past the stump that used to be our finish line, past the redwoods whose bark looks spongy in the rain.
“Say what?”
“Clearly there’s something you want to say to me.”
“Maisie, there are about a million things I want to say to you.”
Quietly, I whisper, “Then say them.”
Chirag pulls into my driveway and parks. He shakes his head. “I can’t.”
“Okay, then,” I nod. “I’ll say them for you.” I unclick my seat belt and take a deep breath, trying to ignore the angry butterflies in my stomach, the rush of nervous adrenaline shooting through my body.
Finally, I manage, “You want to break up with me.”
“What?”
I swallow hard and set my shoulders the way I used to before crouching into position at the start of a race. “You can admit it. You want to break up with me. You want to go out with Alexis Smith.”
“What does Alexis Smith have to do with anything?” He sounds defensive. Or maybe just surprised. I can’t tell.
“Oh, come on, Chirag. Alexis is totally your type.” She’s what I used to be. Pale and freckly, a runner. Never had so much as a paper cut.
“Maisie, you know I think you’re—”
I press my hand over his mouth before he can say anything like You know I think you’re beautiful/pretty/attractive/special no matter what. It’s the first time I’ve touched him in months and for an instant, I can feel the warmth of his breath and the press of his lips. It takes me a second to realize that I’m covering his mouth with my left hand. He can probably feel the scars on my palm against his lips.
“Don’t, Chirag. Please.”
He shakes his head, my hand still on his face. His beautiful, smooth face. I used to touch him every day: slipped my hand carelessly into his, pressed my cheek against his, rubbed his nose with mine. Gestures that seem impossible now. How did I ever touch him so easily? I can’t remember how it felt anymore.
I drop my hand and tuck it beneath my legs. “It’s okay,” I say. “I’m not the girl you fell in love with.” It’s the first time I’ve said the word love out loud to him, unless you count saying things like I love Indian food or that shirt or beating you when we race, which I certainly don’t.
“Maisie, you’re still—”
“I’m still what? Still beautiful on the inside?” I laugh again, but it comes out sounding like a cackle, struggling to get around the lump in my throat. “Come on, Chirag, you don’t actually think I’m going to fall for that, do you?”
My palms begin to sweat. I’ve never yelled at him, not once, not ever. But Maisie 2.0 can’t be scared to shout.
“Why have you been taking care of me all this time? Driving me around, missing track practice? What, did you think those acts of charity would look good on your college applications?” I’m mean, meaner than I knew I could be. “You want a girlfriend you can kiss and hold and look at without gagging.” I shake my head: Which of us am I trying to be mean to—him, or me?
“Maisie, I never—”
“Come on. I look like something out of one of your sci-fi movies. Like Frankenstein’s monster, made up of someone else’s spare parts.” Immediately, I regret referring to my donor that way. She didn’t deserve that.
“Maisie, stop,” Chirag says, and even now, he isn’t yelling. His voice is as calm and even and solemn as ever. “I’m trying to be a good guy here, but you’re making it really hard.”
Can’t he see that for once, finally, I’m trying to be the good guy, too? “You are a good guy, Chirag. Nobody says you’re not a good guy. And nobody will think that you’re not a good guy if we break up. You’ve more than paid your dues. Everyone thinks so.”
“Do you really believe that I want to be good to you because I’m worried about what other people will think of me? You know me better than that.”
Why is he making this so hard? Why is he fighting back? He wanted this. He should be relieved.
He takes a deep breath and continues, “Look, your new face has taken some getting used to. Maybe you’re not as pretty as you used to be—”
My hand flies up from beneath my legs, across the car, toward his face. A string of panic tightens around my rib cage, but it’s different from the one I felt the day I woke up from my coma. This one is higher, somehow, closer to my heart. I was freezing before, but now I’m hot. I feel so hot that if I don’t get out of this car soon,
I think I’m going to suffocate.
Oh my god. I can’t believe I slapped him.
And I can’t help thinking Wow, I did it with my left hand, Marnie would be so proud. Although, when I bring my hand back to my lap, it’s shaking uncontrollably. For a second, I wonder if I might have damaged it beyond repair. But the shaking slows, and finally stops.
Chirag takes a deep breath and—softly, calmly—says, “Maybe we should just hit rewind and pretend we never said any of this.”
I don’t answer right away. Because it’s tempting: go back in time, not that far, just back to the church parking lot. Say yes to Adam’s offer for coffee and spend a pleasant evening in a diner somewhere. Adam would be able to tell Marnie he was taking good care of me like she’d asked, earning one of her triple-megawatt smiles. And Chirag and I could go on like we have been, him chauffeuring me from place to place, waiting for me to be better so that he could break up with me.
But what would be better enough? When my scars fade just a few shades lighter? When I can stay up past ten and sleep through the night?
I’ve made up my mind. I’m setting him free tonight.
I open the door and step outside, leaving my umbrella beneath the passenger seat. The rain soaks my hair, drips down my neck beneath my shirt. I let the damp air fill my lungs, lower my temperature. Even from the driveway, I can hear my parents yelling, though I can’t make out what they’re fighting about this time. Something ridiculous, I’m sure, like cleaning the grout from between the bathroom tiles or sorting the laundry. Nothing so serious as Chirag and me.
I bend down so that Chirag can see me. “I never loved you anyway,” I say, and I hope he can’t hear the way my voice wavers beneath the weight of the lie. “Don’t come back here.”
“Maisie—” Chirag begins, but I slam the door shut before I can hear what he says next.
I walk up the steps to my front door, but I don’t go inside. Instead, I turn around and watch Chirag restart his car, slide the gearshift into reverse, and drive away.
I wait until he’s out of sight to collapse onto my front steps. I can’t believe I told him I didn’t love him before I ever got to tell him that I did.
I don’t care about the rain soaking every part of me. I’m crying so hard that I can’t breathe, crying so hard that my throat aches and my teeth chatter and my eyes sting. I’m crying so hard that it takes me a while to notice that something has happened that hasn’t happened in a long time.
I can feel the tears dripping down my nose and falling onto my chin.
I call a cab to drive me to school the next day, and the day after that. Luckily the day after that, finals are over and Christmas break begins. But by the first day of school after the new year, I’ve run out of cash left over from babysitting gigs and birthdays to use for cab fare, so I ask my mother to drive me to school. She looks surprised by the request. I should have gotten up earlier and asked my dad. Lately, he leaves for work before I’ve even woken up.
“Chirag’s not taking you?”
I haven’t actually told my parents that Chirag and I broke up, even though it happened almost three weeks ago. I kind of just assumed they’d figure it out. I didn’t even tell Serena at first. It wasn’t hard; like everyone else, she was distracted by end-of-semester finals, and then she left town with her parents for Christmas. But on New Year’s Eve I finally told her. It was the first time I said it out loud and I hated the way the words sounded coming out of my mouth.
Afterward, we sat in my living room waiting for the clock to strike midnight, Serena gently shaking me awake each time I nodded off. We both knew there were at least a dozen parties Serena could have danced her way through instead of sitting quietly on my living room couch. Before my accident, I’d been looking forward to going to one of those parties with Chirag, to kissing someone at midnight for the first time in my life. Instead, Serena and I hugged and then fell asleep in my bed. In the middle of the night, she rolled onto her side, and the tickle of her hair falling on my nose woke me.
Now I say to my mother, “No. Chirag’s not taking me.”
I step from the doorway into her bedroom. She’s sitting at her desk—she calls it a desk but it’s really a vanity, with a mirror propped up behind it and drawers for makeup and lotions and curling irons and rollers. When I was little I used to sit there playing for hours, staring at my reflection, imagining that when I grew up, I’d have a desk just like my mother’s, with a mirror that I could gaze into every morning. Sometimes I’d play at being the wicked queen from Snow White, chanting Mirror, mirror, on the wall. I believed that if there was such a thing as a magic mirror, it looked like this one.
I wonder what my six-year-old self would have made of the handheld mirror Dad gave me that night in the hospital, the first time I saw that my face was gone. Surely she’d have thought that such a big moment deserved a special, beautiful mirror like this one instead.
“I wish you’d told me that sooner, Maisie.” Mom sighs heavily without taking her eyes off her reflection as she brushes blush onto her cheeks. “I’m going to be late for work now.”
“I’m sorry it’s so inconvenient for you,” I mutter sarcastically.
“Don’t you think it’s a little early in the day for that tone?” She sighs again putting her makeup down. “You used to be such a morning person. My goodness, when you were little, you’d wake up with a smile on your face.”
She looks so wistful that I want to pick up the alarm clock from her nightstand and hurl it at the mirror, smashing the glass into a thousand pieces.
“I guess smiles don’t fit on my new face so easily.”
She spins around to face me. “They’d fit just fine if you’d try smiling once in a while,” she counters.
“Maybe I just don’t think I have all that much to smile about.”
“Are you serious? Do you have any idea—”
“I know, I know. I’m so very lucky,” I say, and my voice sounds so ugly I barely recognize it. “I’m the luckiest girl on the planet. Lucky to have been such a morning person that I was out running the day of a thunderstorm. Lucky to have survived the fire that should have killed me. Lucky to have been waiting in a hospital bed the day a car killed a total stranger so that I could have her face plastered to what was left of my skull.” I am so sick and tired of the word lucky that I nearly gag every time I say it. “Lucky that I had a boyfriend who was such a good person that he’d chauffeur me all over town even though I didn’t look a thing like the girl he fell in love with, even though I barely talked to him and never let him touch me, up until the day that we broke up.”
I stop then, my heart pounding.
“You and Chirag broke up?” Mom asks. She doesn’t look angry at me, despite my outburst. She looks kind of sad.
“Yes,” I answer, and I start to cry.
“Oh, sweetheart.” Mom stands up and puts her arms around me. I can’t remember the last time I let her this close; not since I’ve been home from the hospital, at least. And not for a long time before my accident. I used to think maybe she’d gotten so used to being angry at my father that sometimes she forgot she wasn’t angry at me, too.
Her sweater is fuzzy against my cheeks. “I’m so sorry,” Mom coos. “I know exactly how you feel.”
My muscles stiffen. I wipe my eyes and pull away. “Are you kidding? You don’t have any idea how I feel.”
“I know it seems that way now. But believe me, I’ve had my heart broken, too—”
“Not like this.” Does she really think that whatever heartbreak she had can compare to mine? I mean, seriously, she never had to break up with someone because she literally wasn’t the same person she’d been in the beginning of a relationship.
She continues, “I just never thought that Chirag would do that. He seemed so devoted to your recovery.”
My hands curl into fists at my sides. I savor the tightness of the skin over my left hand. Of course she assumes that Chirag broke up with me. Everyone at school wil
l think so, too. Eric and Erica have probably been high-fiving him in the hallways behind my back, proud that he finally did what they thought he ought to have done months ago. Maybe some people will think that Chirag was a bad guy for having broken the deformed girl’s heart, but once they hear what really happened, they’ll change their tune. The whole school will agree that I was the jerk. All poor Chirag wanted was to help me. They’ll shove him into Alexis Smith’s waiting arms.
Now I tell my mother, “I broke up with him.”
“You did?” I don’t think I’ve ever seen my mother look so confused. “Why?”
I shrug. She’ll never understand that deciding to break up with Chirag took so much more time and felt so much harder than deciding to go through with the transplant.
“But—” she begins, then stops herself. I know what she’s not saying, because I’m thinking the same thing: I was a fool to end it. I’ll never have another boyfriend, not the way I look now.
“You can just say it.” I shrug.
“I thought you loved him,” she says finally, surprising me.
It’s because I love him that I broke up with him, I think but do not say. It was my turn to be the good guy. Out loud, I say, “I’ll be waiting in the car.” The old Maisie would have wanted to wash her face, make sure she didn’t look too splotchy, after all that crying. The new Maisie just stomps out to the car, tearstained.
Walking into school without Chirag at my side is disorienting, like I’ve forgotten my chemistry textbook at home or didn’t do my French homework last night. I keep my head down on my way to homeroom. Without Chirag, the whispers are a little bit louder, the stares a little bit longer.
Had they actually been holding back when Chirag was here? Are the floodgates open even wider now?
Eric stops me in the hallway. “Yo, Daisy-May,” he says, a name that no one has ever called me before.
“Hey, Eric,” I answer as I enter in the combination for my locker.
“You seen Chi-Dog this morning?”
What is it with this guy and the nicknames?
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