“Why would I have seen him?”
“Oh, I don’t know, just because you two have been attached at the hip for the past year?”
I shake my head. Doesn’t Eric know we broke up? I thought the whole school would know now that finals are over, the new year stretching out ahead of us. I study his face, looking for a sign of mockery.
“Anyway, when you see your boy, tell him Coach changed the practice schedule around this semester. Again. What a pain. A whole new roster to memorize—”
When I see my boy? He really doesn’t know?
“I’ll tell him, Eric,” I say, interrupting his latest rant about the freshmen on the track team who just can’t keep up. He laughs at his own pun. “Later,” I call out as I turn around and head down the hall and around the corner to my homeroom.
Chirag is waiting for me outside the classroom. His lips curl up into the beginning of a smile when he sees me, a habit left over from before my accident, when we couldn’t see each other without grinning.
“Didn’t you tell anyone that we broke up?”
Chirag looks startled. Maybe he thought I would open with Happy New Year, or at least Hello.
“No,” he says slowly. “I didn’t.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “I just didn’t think it was anyone’s business.”
I exhale.
“How was your break?” Chirag asks.
“Fine.”
“Get any good presents?”
“Not really. Did you want to talk to me about something?”
“What?”
“I mean, what are you doing here? I made my way to homeroom just fine by myself after we broke up.”
“I know,” Chirag answers quietly, and the string around my rib cage, the one up near my heart, tightens again. Was he watching me—keeping an eye out for me, even after the breakup?
“I just wanted to ask if you needed a ride to PT this afternoon. I thought maybe now that some time had gone by and you’d calmed down, you might—”
“I might want to get back together?” Oh my god, my voice sounds hopeful. I’ll have to add Chirag to the list of things I cannot have: running, alcohol, staying up late.
“Of course not,” Chirag answers quickly. “I just meant, maybe we could—maybe I could—still help.”
Ouch. This hurts more than when he said out loud that I wasn’t pretty, more than everything I heard him say on Halloween. Because we could go back to the way things were before the breakup and still be completely broken up. There was nothing romantic about what we were doing, and Chirag knows it; he said as much on Halloween. He could chauffeur me around town all while dating Alexis Smith. I bet she wouldn’t even mind. A girl who looks like me couldn’t possibly be a threat. To her, I’d just be Chirag’s good deed, part of what makes him such a great catch.
But doesn’t Chirag care? Isn’t it just a little bit hard for him, to imagine me sitting in his car every day, all the while not being his girlfriend? But then, I guess he’s had more time to get used to it than I have. Breaking up was, after all, the rational thing to do, and Chirag understood that months ago. He waited for my sake.
For my emotional, irrational, foolish sake.
I shake my head. “My mom said she’d drive me,” I say.
“And you’re okay for Thursday, too?”
I shake my head. Sometime over the holidays, our insurance company decided that they were only willing to pay for my outpatient PT once a week. So I’ll only see Marnie on Mondays now.
“No more Thursdays,” I say to Chirag finally.
“Okay, then.” He reaches into his bag and pulls out a blue umbrella. “Here,” he adds, holding it out to me. “You left this in my car.” I take the umbrella without saying thank you, squeezing it so hard that its metal bones dig into my hand. I turn and walk into homeroom. By the end of the day, the whole school knows we broke up. But Chirag isn’t the one who said anything.
Chirag would never do that.
At Group on Wednesday, I wait until two people have shared and then I raise my hand. When Clyde nods in my direction, I smile, my cheeks warming slightly.
I can blush now.
“I regained sensation a while back,” I say. “My parents practically stood up and cheered when I told them. I mean, literally, they hadn’t been that excited about my SAT scores.”
A murmur of laughter floats through the room. “They called my doctors to arrange a spontaneous meeting with my team. The mood in the meeting was triumphant. You’d think everyone in the room—about thirty doctors and nurses, plus my physical therapist and my parents—had regained sensation, instead of just me.” I pause, almost sighing. “I know it’s a big deal. There was no guarantee that I’d ever regain sensation, and the doctors didn’t know just how long it would take if I did. When they attached my new face to what remained of my old one, they just kind of crossed their fingers and hoped for the best. I mean, okay, they probably did a lot more than cross their fingers. But we just had to wait and see if the nerves from my old body would grow into my new flesh.”
I bite my lip. Maybe I’ve said too much. Across the circle, Adam nods encouragingly, his sandy blond hair falling across his scars. So I start again. “Dr. Boden—he’s my plastic surgeon—said this was a big deal, not just physically, but psychologically. He said patients who regained sensation had the best chance of really acclimating to their new features. Soon, he promised, this nose, these cheeks, this chin, would feel more my own than they had before.”
I swallow. “And everyone looked at me, like they were expecting me to—I don’t know. To be excited about that. To be thrilled that this nose and these cheeks and this chin were going to feel more my own than they had before. But I couldn’t. I’m not exactly thrilled. I mean”—I play with my hair, untucking any strands that are hooked around my ears—“I know it’s a good thing. And the truth is, I’ve kind of already started thinking about them sometimes as my nose, my cheeks, my chin. The semantics are just too confusing otherwise.” Another murmur of laughter, which feels good. “But I’m not sure I want to get used to these features. Not completely. Not entirely. Because if I start thinking of them as my own …” I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
Clyde speaks. “I know,” he says. “I wanted to hate this prosthetic arm. I didn’t want to wear it. It wasn’t mine, it wasn’t real, it couldn’t replace what I lost. I didn’t want to get used to it. Because getting used to it meant I’d accepted what happened to me.”
He doesn’t continue; doesn’t say that I should just suck it up and accept it, doesn’t regale me with stories of how much better he felt once he did. He just shrugs, silently pointing out the obvious truth: There is no going back.
Maureen raises her hand. “Is it okay if I ask a question?” she says, looking with her good eye not at Clyde, but at me. I nod. “I don’t understand—what exactly do you mean about regaining sensation?”
“Oh, right.” I guess I forgot that not everyone here is familiar with all the details the doctors have drilled into my parents and me, time and time again. “When they transplanted the new features onto my face, they attach the blood vessels immediately—that way the transplanted tissue survives. But it was just sort of sitting on my tissue bed, not yet integrated in my nervous system. So it felt kind of like just a flab hanging off my face, for lack of a better term.” Oh, if Dr. Boden could hear me now. “But as my nerves grew into the tissue, the weight lessened, until it disappeared. A literal weight being lifted off my shoulders,” I add, and everyone laughs again.
I continue, “But I wasn’t going to be able to move or feel the new tissue until the nerves grew to reach the new muscle. And nerves have a growth rate all their own—they grow a certain amount every day, but depending on the distance between my nerves and the new muscle, it could take months to a year for them to reach the new tissue, if ever. And actually, the ability to move is a totally different set of nerves from the nerves that control sensation. Though for me the movem
ent nerves weren’t as big a deal because you don’t really have to move your nose and cheeks and chin the same way you have to move, say, your mouth if they’d had to replace my jaw. So I was able to smile from day one, eat from day one. Just very very carefully.”
I stop. That’s the closest I’d ever come to really calling myself lucky. Lucky that I hadn’t had to worry as much about the nerves that control movement, because I got to keep my own jaw.
Maureen shakes her head. “Wow,” she says. Adam lets out a low kind of whistle.
“I know,” I say apologetically, running my fingers through my hair. “It’s super gross. I shouldn’t have gone into that much detail.” I probably should have edited myself more. The truth is, I sort of just got used to how disgusting it is.
But when I glance around the circle—much to my surprise—everyone looks impressed by me. For the first time in a long time, despite my slipping grades, I actually feel smart about something. Dr. Boden used to say that this was such exciting medicine, so thrilling. Chirag said it was cool. Finally, I kind of understand what they were getting at.
Who knew that not editing yourself could be so rewarding?
Later, when Adam asks me to get coffee with him, I say yes.
“What about your pills?” he asks, the tiniest bit of a teasing smile playing on the edges of his lips.
“Shut up,” I answer, but I’m laughing.
I text my mother that I’m getting a ride home and turn off my phone so I can’t see the slew of questions she’s sure to send in response, then follow Adam to his car. I don’t ask him where we’re going and I don’t watch the clock. Instead, I look out the window and gaze through the darkness at the fog.
When I was little, my father told me that walking through the fog was the same thing as walking through clouds and I didn’t believe him. Clouds were fluffier than fog, I argued. They’d be warm as cotton blankets, not cool and damp. And anyway, I insisted, surely you couldn’t just walk through clouds. They’re too thick. My father laughed out loud at that, at his precocious little girl and the adorable things that came out of her mouth. I wonder if he would have laughed so hard if I’d had scars then.
I know this is a terrible thing to say, but I used to wonder whether all parents thought their children were beautiful. Like, were the parents of truly ugly children so blinded by their love that they simply couldn’t see what the rest of the world saw? Now I know the answer. I mean, I don’t think my parents would have loved me any less had I been a less attractive child, but I know they liked it that I was pretty. When I was little, my father used to rock me to sleep repeating my name in a little singsong: Maisie Rose Winters, a pretty name for a pretty girl. Maisie Rose Winters, a pretty name for a pretty girl. I’d protest that I wasn’t pretty, but my father insisted.
“You’ll see it for yourself, someday,” he promised.
Now Adam pulls into the parking lot of a coffee shop. He holds the diner’s swinging front door open for me and walks inside without waiting to be seated. On one side of the restaurant is a row of booths beneath the windows; on the other side is a counter and behind that, the kitchen. The place is full of cooking sounds—hamburgers being flipped, the sizzle of butter melting and the rhythm of onions being chopped. Adam slides into one of the booths; he’s such a regular here that when the waitress stops by our table he doesn’t even have to place his order. The waitress just says, “Your usual, honey?” and Adam nods. Quickly, I glance at the plastic menu and order a sandwich and coffee.
“Milk?” the waitress asks me, and I answer, “Black.” Ever since the surgery, I like stronger tastes: I take my coffee black, I sprinkle Tabasco sauce onto my hamburger, I ask for extra wasabi when I eat sushi. It must be connected to the changes in my sense of smell. Still, my favorite scent hasn’t changed: Ivory soap and clean sheets with a hint of curry. Chirag.
I sigh heavily. Adam doesn’t ask why.
When my coffee comes, I take out my pillbox and begin swallowing one after the other. It takes me a second to realize that no one here is staring at me. The waitstaff here may be used to Adam’s damaged face, but the other customers certainly aren’t. My face looks almost normal next to his.
“How can you stand it?” I whisper, nodding in the direction of the people at the next table. A mother and her little boy, who hasn’t taken his eyes off Adam since we walked in.
“I don’t blame them,” he answers with a tiny shrug.
Adam was the kind of person who was always going to be stared at. Before his accident, they would have all turned to look at the tall, handsome man taking up almost his entire side of the booth with his long arms and legs. Before, he’d have been the kind of handsome that would make Serena swoon and make me shy. Now he leans back against the vinyl, stretching his arms overhead. I can see his muscles beneath his T-shirt as he arches his back.
I guess no one ever told him no rigorous exercise.
“But it’s so rude,” I say, though I keep my voice down. I don’t want people to know we’re talking about them, even though they’re the ones who are staring.
“Most of them don’t even realize they’re doing it. And little kids—” He stops and turns to face the little boy sitting in the booth behind us. His mother is trying to distract him by offering him a french fry. Adam smiles at the boy. “He’s cute,” he says to the mom, smiling his crooked smile. The damaged parts of his lips are more purple than pink, like a bruise that just won’t heal.
“Thanks,” she answers, blushing. I think she wants to apologize, but can’t figure out how to do it without acknowledging—out loud—that Adam is a freak. She winces, like it’s painful for her to look at Adam’s face. As though, looking at him, she can’t help imagining just how much it hurt to be burned like that.
To the boy, Adam says, “My face got burned in an explosion.”
“An explosion?” the boy echoes, his eyes going wide. Adam nods.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not anymore.”
The kid smiles. “That’s good.”
Adam grins back. “I think so, too.”
The boy goes back to his french fries; his mom looks visibly relieved. Adam turns back to me and says, “Little kids are better than grown-ups. They’ll actually ask the questions everyone else is thinking. And they don’t avert their eyes when you notice them staring.”
I shake my head. “I don’t care whether it’s a kid or a grown-up. I’m not some kind of sideshow for their entertainment.”
“They’re not staring because they’re entertained,” Adam counters. “They just want to know my story. They don’t understand how this could happen to someone. It’s human nature.”
“Chirag said that once.” After our disastrous meal at Bay Leaf.
“Smart guy,” Adam says and I nod. “The worst are the cheerful people who pretend not to notice at all.”
“Oh my god, yes!” I agree, adding in a singsong voice, “Oh, half your face burned off? It’s hardly noticeable!”
Adam laughs.
“But you’re wrong.” I shake my head. “Those people aren’t the worst. The worst are the people who know what you used to look like.” I shudder, thinking about the kids at school, the stares that still haven’t stopped, even though it’s been months now, even though each and every one of them knows my story. They can’t stop comparing my new face to my old one. “How am I supposed to forget what happened to me when the people who knew me before the accident stare at me like I’m Humpty Dumpty and they’re trying to figure out how to put me back together?” I can’t wait until I move to New York next year, where no one within a thousand miles knows my old face.
Adam shakes his head. “The point isn’t to forget what happened to us.”
“I didn’t mean forget, like, I wouldn’t actually remember what had happened. I just don’t want to be constantly reminded of what I look like now.”
“Like Clyde said, eventually you have to accept it.”
I shake my head. “That’s not w
hat Clyde said.”
“Yeah, but you know as well as I do that that’s what he was getting at.”
“Well, now you’ve deprived me of the chance to figure it out myself. I’m going to tell Clyde on you.”
“Tattletale,” Adam says, grinning. “Seriously, though, Maisie—acceptance is the key. Acceptance is everything.”
“Don’t use your motivational speech stuff on me.”
“How do you know I give motivational speeches?”
“I Googled you.”
“You Googled me?”
“Right after we met.” I don’t add that I haven’t looked up any other injuries since I Googled his.
“Guess I made quite an impression, huh?”
Wait a second. Is Adam flirting with me? He knows Chirag and I broke up—does he think that’s the reason I finally said yes when he invited me out for coffee? All that time, it never even occurred to me that he wanted to hang out because he liked me. I thought he was just doing it because Marnie asked him to keep an eye on me. Marnie, on whom he has such a hopeless crush. Marnie, beautiful and unmarred, the kind of girl he’d surely have been dating before he became damaged goods.
“Nah,” I answer. “I was just impressed you found a way to parlay your injury into a lucrative career.” Am I flirting back? Do I even still know how?
“Ouch!” Adam says, but he’s laughing. I blush, savoring the warmth in my cheeks, on my neck.
“Can I ask you something?” Adam says, his face turning serious. I nod. “When was the last time you looked at yourself in the mirror?”
“I look in mirrors every day,” I lie. “Getting dressed, brushing my teeth—”
“No,” Adam interrupts. “I mean really looked.”
It would be easy to clam up and ask him to take me home, easy to slam his car door shut in my driveway, the same way I did with Chirag weeks ago. But instead, I say, “Not since I got home from the hospital.”
“When was that?”
“September.”
Anyone else would tell me that I should look. Would tell me that my reflection won’t be as bad as I expect. Would promise that my scars have faded. But Adam says, “I went six months without really looking.”
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