Faceless

by Alyssa Sheinmel

  “Six months?” I echo incredulously.

  “Hey,” Adam says, pretending to be defensive. “You’ve gone four months, way to horn in on a guy’s record.”

  “Watch out, Adam, I’m coming for you,” I say mock threateningly.

  Adam shakes his head. “They were the worst six months of my life.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was pretending that I was still the old me. Like you said, I wanted to forget what had happened to me. But then, whenever I did catch a glimpse of myself—it was impossible to avoid it entirely—it was like losing my face all over again.”

  I nod. “It’s strange the tricks your mind can play on you,” I agree. I accidentally saw myself when I was brushing my hair this morning. I was so surprised that I actually dropped my brush. It fell with a clatter onto the tiles in my bathroom and my mother came running in, worried that I’d fallen.

  Adam says, “I was like an addict in denial or something.”

  “I’m not in denial,” I say firmly. I gave in and took my pills, even though they make me feel useless. I tried to run and practically passed out. I broke up with Chirag even though I never got to tell him I love you. I walk through school each day and everyone stares. I’m perfectly aware that I’m not the girl I used to be. “I’m not in denial,” I repeat, more softly this time.

  “Sure you are,” Adam counters. “You don’t even know what you look like.”

  “You want me to believe that looking in the mirror has magical powers?”

  “Of course not. At first, it was torture, staring at this new noggin. But until I looked, I wasn’t mourning what I lost.”

  The word mourning sounds out of place, at odds with all the lucky talk I’m used to.

  “I didn’t die,” I say softly.

  Adam nods. “For a long time, I didn’t think I had the right to mourn, no right to feel sorry for myself when I had plenty of friends over there who didn’t make it home.”

  I swallow. “I keep thinking about my donor’s family. They lost a daughter, a sister, a friend—I don’t even know, since I don’t know anything about her. And I’m not allowed to ask, because then the doctors will start worrying about the psychological impact the transplant has had on me and suddenly I’ll go from a success story to a failure.” A loser, I think wryly, remembering the story of the hand-transplant recipient in New Zealand who gave up. “And everyone keeps saying how lucky I am—”

  “That’s the worst!” Adam interjects, laughing. In a high-pitched voice, he says, “You’re so lucky the doctors got to you in time. So lucky that the fire missed your eyes. So lucky that you still have your hair, your lips, your jaw.”

  “Wow, how do you know the exact words my mother says to me?”

  “You think I don’t have a mother, too?”

  We’re laughing so loudly that the other patrons’ stares aren’t about the way we look anymore.

  “But there is something that our parents and our doctors and our friends don’t understand.”

  “Just one thing?”

  Adam winks and shakes his head. “Part of us did die. Literally—that tissue on your face, the part they removed. It died. And you can’t recover from any kind of death without mourning it.”

  Adam reaches across the table and takes my left hand in his. I try to pull away, but he holds fast. The scars on his hand press into the scars on mine, all ridges and lines, pink and white. He squeezes tightly, and after a moment, I squeeze back.

  Before Adam drops me off at home, he gives me his number.

  “Does this make you my sponsor?”

  “What?”

  “Like in AA, in the movies. You get a sponsor to show you the ropes. To call before you fall off the wagon.”

  Adam grins. “Sure, I’ll be your sponsor. Call if you need anything.”

  It feels like we’ve been flirting all night, almost like this was a date. But Adam doesn’t lean in to try to kiss me, or even hug me good-bye. Maybe he thinks I’m not interested. Because he knows he looks even worse than I do.

  I smile. “I need a lift to Group next week.”

  “You got it.”

  In my room, I undress slowly. There’s a full-length mirror on the back of my closet door. My father hung it there when I was twelve. Before that, the only way I could see myself from head to toe was to stand on a chair in the bathroom facing the mirror above the sink. But then I fell off it once and Mom burst into the room yelling. She was scared that next time, I’d break my arm, my leg, my nose.

  Now I turn off the lights before I approach the mirror. Maybe some other night I’ll keep the lights on, but not today. Not yet.

  I sit in front of my closet in my underwear. First, I look at my arms, my legs, my stomach. The shadows of my old muscles are still there. I used to make Serena punch me in the stomach, just to show her how strong my abdominals were, how much better running was than yoga. Now I flex my bicep until it bulges, though not nearly like it used to.

  It’s not quite dark in my room. Moonlight shines in from the window, and a sliver of light comes in from the hallway outside my bedroom door. I take a deep breath and shift my gaze. I can just make out the angles of my face. I tuck my hair behind my ears and over my shoulders. My cheeks don’t look quite as round as they did when I left the hospital; I guess the doctors weren’t lying when they said the swelling would go down. I press my hands into them and I can feel my own touch, the ridges on my fingertips, the tops of my nails. I press harder, so that I can feel how the skin on my left fingertips doesn’t match the skin on my right: My left pointer finger has a rough scar right on its tip, but the skin on the ring finger is actually perfectly soft: brand-new, like a baby’s. When I was in kindergarten, my whole class got fingerprinted. Serena said it had something to do with finding us, in case we were kidnapped someday. But my fingerprints have changed.

  This nose is so much sleeker than my old one; it’s even slimmer than it was the first time I saw it. It must have still been swollen then. I stick up my chin, leaning back until I’m almost facing the ceiling. I try to angle my face so that I can see my own profile, feeling like an infant who’s just discovered she has hands and feet and can’t quite wrap her mind around all these new parts.

  Even stranger than my new features are the shadows of my old ones underneath them. Even though so many of my old bones are gone, even though they sewed on these new ones, something about my old face remains. I thought that having a dead girl’s face sewn onto my skull was walking around with death on my face. But it’s the old parts of me that seem like ghosts, like they’re haunting this new face. No wonder the people who know what I’m supposed to look like can’t stop staring.

  I shake my head, my hair swinging back and forth, tickling my shoulders. Not what I’m supposed to look like. What I used to look like.

  I try to imagine someone else here with me. Someone watching me undress. Someone undressing alongside me. After all the flirting we did tonight, maybe one day it will be Adam and me in the dark together. Maybe he’ll reveal his scars, too. Maybe it would be better that way than with someone like Chirag, someone with no scars of his own. Maybe that’s the whole reason Adam asked me out. It’s been a few years since his accident; I wonder if he’s been alone all that time, scared to let anyone see him.

  Until I came along, someone just as damaged as he is. Someone he wouldn’t have to be embarrassed in front of.

  Someone I wouldn’t have to be embarrassed in front of.

  I press my hands to my belly. Just thinking about Chirag used to fill my stomach with butterflies. I go over the past few hours in my head, trying to remember everything Adam said to me, every wink and every smile. But my belly remains butterfly-free.

  Maybe people who look like Adam and me don’t get to have that kind of butterflies. Maybe our butterflies are reserved for doctors’ appointments and test results. Maybe romance butterflies are another part of my old life that I have to say good-bye to. That I need to mourn, just like Adam said.<
br />
  There are steps to mourning, right—stages? I grab my phone and look them up: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I’ve definitely got anger covered, between fighting with my mom and breaking up with Chirag. And maybe giving up the pills was a kind of bargaining: I will take this new face if I don’t have to take the pills—and the side effects—that come along with it. And depression—that seems too big to be a single stage. That’s more like the undercurrent beneath everything else.

  If you ask me, the two stages that really count—the big ones—are denial first and acceptance last.

  I thought I would throw up or cry or scream if I looked this closely. Now I set my jaw and square my shoulders.

  I will look in this mirror every night. I won’t stop until I can look with the lights on. I won’t stop even then. Every race I ran, I used to keep going for yards past the finish line. I didn’t like to give up, even after I’d won.

  I stand and hold my left arm out in front of me. Just above my elbow is a long white scar. I trace it with my right hand, imagining the flames that burned me there. In between the scars my skin is soft as silk.

  I turn to look at myself from the side. Where my shoulder and neck meet, the skin is almost completely normal. Somehow, the flames didn’t touch me there. Maybe I was curled up into myself, my shoulders hunched up around my cheeks. For the first time, I realize what a miracle it is that I still have my hair. My ponytail caught fire, but someone must have doused those flames before they traveled up to my scalp, so that only the tips of my hair were singed off. Someone in the hospital trimmed it for me before I left, so that the ends were even. I haven’t cut it since.

  It’s strange, when you think of it, that fire can travel. I imagine a flame packing up a bag, getting ready for a journey.

  I’ll wear black tomorrow. No one at school will think anything of it. People wear black all the time. It’ll be my secret that the color is symbolic, a sign that I’m mourning the part of myself that died, mourning all the things in my old life that are different now.

  No one will know that I’m waiting to get to the fifth stage, the one where I can accept what’s left of me.

  I decide to start driving myself. Adam says he doesn’t mind ferrying me back and forth to Group on Wednesdays, and Serena tries to be on time when my mother can’t take me to school or a doctor’s appointment, but I’m getting sick and tired of counting on other people for everything. If I’m going to make it on my own in Manhattan next fall—even though there, ironically enough, I don’t think I’ll actually need a car—I need to start making it on my own here first.

  On Wednesday, I text Adam that I don’t need a ride. I tell my parents that I’m taking my mother’s car, and they don’t argue. In fact, I think they’re relieved. Mom even says I can drive it to school in the morning. She’ll get a ride into the city with Dad, even though that will be the most time they’ve spent alone together since Christmas.

  Before I pull out of the garage, I take my time adjusting the rearview mirror. I’m getting good at looking in the mirror—last night, I even turned on the little light by my bed when I looked at myself, studying the shadows it cast across my face.

  As I drive, I stop to study my reflection in the windows and mirrors. Sometimes, I am truly startled to discover that there aren’t any freckles sprinkled across my nose. Sometimes, it feels like I’m looking at a stranger I’m desperate to get to know, but sometimes I understand that I’m looking at myself.

  When I pull the car into the parking lot of the church, I feel almost the way I used to after a race. My heart is pounding and I can’t stop smiling.

  Maureen smiles as I sit down in the circle. “You look like you’re in a good mood, honey.” I barely notice her glass eye anymore. “And it looks like those are fading,” she adds, pointing to my cheeks.

  “Really?” I ask. Lately, I’ve been thinking that the scars on my cheeks look less like war paint and more like poorly applied blush. “I kind of thought so, too. But I wasn’t sure.”

  She nods. “They are. Absolutely.” Anywhere else, even if my scars had vanished entirely, no one would have said a word. It’s not polite conversation. But here, I can take what Maureen said as the compliment she’d intended it to be.

  When Clyde asks who’d like to start, I raise my hand.

  “I drove myself here tonight,” I begin proudly. Adam sticks his fingers in his mouth and whistles. It’s a pretty weak whistle since his mouth is lopsided, but it starts everybody cheering and clapping nonetheless.

  The old Maisie wasn’t all that proud when she passed her driver’s test. It just felt like something I was supposed to do on my sixteenth birthday, something to check off of my life’s to-do list. Tonight actually feels better than that did. “My donor was killed in a car accident. I don’t know the details—I don’t know if she was the one driving or not. Maybe she wasn’t in the car at all; maybe she was a pedestrian on the sidewalk, just running errands, walking her dog.” I pause. “Maybe she was out for a run, like I was.”

  Maybe she was covered in sweat and panting, forcing herself up the next hill and the next and the next. Or maybe she was nearing that moment when you start to feel invincible, when you think you can go on running forever, through the rain and the fog and the wind and the sun.

  “I miss running,” I continue. “I ran almost every day before my accident. I loved it. I miss being on the track team. Coach thought I might be able to get a scholarship someday. My boyfriend—ex-boyfriend—is still on the team. We used to run together.” I pause, and add, “I fell in love with him on a run.”

  In fact, I remember the precise moment I realized I loved Chirag. It was over a month before my accident. Long before he held up his sign saying that he loved me. It was after school. We’d started out on the track, running in circles, but Chirag said he felt like a gerbil and veered off into the street. I followed him. His legs were about six inches longer than mine and I loved watching his easy, loping stride. When he ran, he always landed on his toes instead of his heels; he’d read somewhere that it was better for your knees that way. Soon, I was running like that, too.

  It was the middle of March—almost exactly a year ago—that time of year when you think it should be spring already but winter hasn’t given up its hold yet. It wasn’t raining, but it was misty; the fog had never quite burned off that day. We were about a mile from school, on a path in the park, when Chirag reached down and took off his shoes, tossing them into the trees beside us.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted in between breaths. Step, breath. Step, breath. He was a few yards ahead of me. I took advantage of his pause to pass him; I wasn’t about to let him beat me.

  “There’s a tribe of Indians in Mexico who are the best runners in the world,” he shouted. “They run barefoot for miles and miles and never break a sweat.”

  “You’re not that kind of Indian,” I shouted back, and Chirag laughed, his golden skin shimmering beneath his sweat.

  “You should try it, too!”

  “No way!” I replied without turning around to face him. “The ground is filthy. There could be glass or splinters or something.”

  “Aw, come on, Maisie,” he cooed, coming up on my left side and getting a few steps ahead of me once more. “I dare you.”

  I never could resist a dare, and Chirag knew it. So I took off my sneakers and tossed them into the brush just like Chirag had. Then I put my head down and sprinted to catch up with him. I tackled him, but he was too strong, and instead of falling to the ground, he lifted me up over his shoulder.

  “I win,” he said, throwing his arms over his head.

  “You do not. I was just about to pass you,” I protested, panting. The bones of his shoulders pressed into my belly but I didn’t care.

  He turned his head and kissed my arm. “I have you,” he said simply. “I win.” He turned around and carried me back down the path. We spent the next half hour searching for his left sneaker. By the time he found it, I knew
I loved him.

  Now Clyde seems to understand that I don’t have anything else to say. He glances around the circle and says, “Who’d like to share next?”

  I drive to school the next day. I go early, and when I pull into the parking lot, the fog is still heavy. There are only a few cars in here at this hour: teachers who came in early to grade papers maybe, the janitor who’s inside somewhere, taking out the trash and wiping down the blackboards.

  I recognize Ellen’s car immediately. Cherry red, two doors; her parents gave it to her as an early graduation present. Or maybe it was a Christmas present. Either way, she’s been proudly driving it to school all semester long.

  I open the car door and slam it shut behind me, the thwack echoing across the lot. I don’t think students are even allowed inside the school building this early. Not that there’s ever much need for enforcing that rule.

  I push Mom’s keys into the pocket of my black jeans and pull my dark gray sweater more tightly around myself in the morning drizzle. I painted black nail polish onto my fingers a few days ago. It’s already chipped.

  I take a deep breath and walk around to the back of the building. I hear Ellen before I see her, the slam of her feet against the track. Step, breath. Step, breath. I can tell, from the sound alone, that she’s landing hard on her heels, exactly the way Chirag taught me not to. It’s the sound of someone running harder than her body wants; the sound of someone who will never run as fast as she hopes to.

  Ellen’s head is bent down low, her chin nearly on her chest, so she doesn’t see me coming. I could walk away, go back to the car and pick up One Hundred Years of Solitude yet again, read it until the bell rings for homeroom. Ellen would never have to know I was here. Instead, I stand at the edge of the track and watch Ellen run. Watch the strands of her ponytail falling out of its elastic, the sweat dripping from her chin to her chest, the way the muscles in her legs vibrate each time her feet hit the ground.