Plastic

by Sarah N. Harvey

  I nod and edge away. I’m used to being invisible around Mike. But I’ve never been happy about it until today. The cop car drives away with Mike in it. I go home to break the news to Mom and Dad.

  They don’t take it well.

  “Protesting is one thing,” Dad says grimly. “Vandalism is something else.”

  Mom shakes her head. “Where on earth would he get such an idea? We never damaged property. Never. Maybe Daisy—”

  The phone rings just as I say, “Not Daisy, Mom. Daisy thinks Mike’s an a-hole.”

  “Is that true, Jared?” she asks my dad.

  “Judging by the fight they had after you left this morning—yes.”

  The phone keeps ringing. Mom finally picks up. She listens to whoever’s on the other end. Then she says, “I don’t think so, Mike. Not this time.”

  “Bail?” Dad says.

  Mom nods. All I can think is, What did she mean by “Not this time”?

  Chapter Twelve

  “How many times has he been arrested?” I ask.

  “Counting this time? Seven,” my dad says. “Or maybe eight.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “It’s always for a good cause. Or it starts out that way, anyway.” Mom sounds tired. “Save the coral reefs. Save the rain forest. Save the whales. But Mike always takes it a step further. Protesting isn’t enough for him. He gets carried away. Does stupid things. Trespassing, vandalism, a couple of fights. The last time he had court-ordered angermanagement classes. We thought things were better. He was in a relationship—”

  Taking a dump on someone’s desk. Trashing an office. Suddenly it all makes sense. In a totally horrible way. Mike’s always been kinda out there, but violence? I couldn’t get my head around it.

  “He’s out of control, Rachel.” Dad pours himself a cup of coffee and puts the kettle on for Mom’s tea. “We can’t keep bailing him out. He has to figure it out himself.”

  “But…jail?” Mom’s eyes fill with tears.

  “They won’t keep him long,” Dad says. “I never thought I’d say this, but maybe it’ll be good for him. A dose of reality. I don’t know.” He sits down at the kitchen table and puts his head in his hands. I wonder if they worried that I would get carried away with my protest too. I doubt it. They know Mike and I are chalk and cheese. For the first time, I think being the chalk isn’t such a bad thing. You can communicate with chalk. Cheese just makes you fat and clogs your arteries.

  “I’ve got homework,” I say, “and I’m gonna shut down my blog. I think my protesting days are over.”

  “Oh, Jack,” Mom says. “Are you sure? Don’t quit because of Mike.”

  “I told Mike this morning that I wanted to quit. He convinced me to stick with it for a while. But now? No way. Not gonna happen.”

  “I understand,” she said. “And we’re proud of you. Very proud of you.” She mists over again, and I leave the room before I start to cry.

  I post one final entry on my blog, thanking people for sending me their stories. I turn off the function that allows comments. I explain that I’m shutting down the blog for “personal reasons.” I don’t provide any details. It’s nobody’s business. I scroll through the last few comments. There’s the usual grab bag of horror stories, abuse and porn. It makes me tired just reading them. The last message, though, wakes me up. I’m heading back to Maui. I hope Mike gets some help. He needs it. You’re a great kid, Jack. Good luck. Aloha, Daisy. PS call Leah.

  A kid. She called me a kid. I sigh and shut off my computer. I wonder what Mike is doing. Sitting in a cell, shooting the breeze with another inmate? Sleeping on a hard bench under a thin gray blanket? Eating watery stew with stale white bread? Fighting off a guy named Bubba in the shower?

  I shudder and go downstairs to the kitchen. Mom and Dad are still sitting at the kitchen table, an unopened bottle of wine between them.

  “One more time,” I say.

  “One more time what?” Dad looks puzzled.

  “Bail him out one more time,” I say. “He did this for me. He was trying to help. We can’t let him rot in jail.”

  Dad snorts. “It’s not like he’s in Attica, Jack. He’s in a city holding cell.”

  “It’s still a cell, Dad.” I look at Mom. “What do you think, Mom?”

  “We agreed—your father and I— that we wouldn’t enable him anymore.”

  Now it’s my turn to snort. “Enable him? Jeez, Mom, since when are you Dr. Phil? And since when do you give up on people?”

  Mom takes a deep breath—in through the nose, out through the mouth. Yoga breathing. For relaxation.

  “He’s right, Jared,” she says to Dad. “Sitting in jail isn’t doing him any good. I’m bailing him out and then I’m taking him straight to Roberta. If he stays in therapy, he can stay here. If not…”

  The thought of Mike sitting across from Dr. Smithson makes me laugh. Talk about tough love. A hot chick who could kick his ass in more ways than one. Oh, to be a fly on the wall.

  “This isn’t funny, Jack,” Mom says, although a tiny smile has crept onto her face.

  “It kinda is,” I say. “Right, Dad?”

  He nods and heads for the door.

  “You guys coming?” he asks.

  I don’t get to be a fly on the wall when Mom takes Mike to meet Roberta. As a matter of fact, I barely see him at all. I’m too busy taking calls from the media. The headline in the morning paper reads: Prominent Surgeon Puts Down the Knife for a Good Cause. Underneath a picture of him from about 1978, Dr. Myers is quoted as saying, “From now on, my practice will concentrate on patients nineteen and older, unless there are true medical reasons for surgery.I call on my fellow surgeons to adopt similar policies.” He doesn’t mention me or the picket line or the red paint. He sounds noble. Dedicated. Giving up all that income. Looking out for the kids. Making the world a better place. And in a strange way, he is. I know he’s just trying to get out in front of the story. But the end result is the same: he won’t be doing boob jobs on fourteen-year-olds anymore. This is a very good thing. And that’s what I tell the media. Over and over again.

  Chapter Thirteen

  After Dr. Myers swears off underage surgery, I get both the blame and the credit. Blame from some of the girls at school. Blame from their boyfriends. Credit from a lot of adults. A few teachers come up and actually shake my hand, like I’ve won the Nobel Prize or something. In the dim halls of Warren Academy, I am a celebrity. I have been on tv. More than once. Girls ask me to sit with them at lunch. They slip me notes on scented pink paper. They wait for me at my locker, giggling and offering me gum or a ride home. Guys ask me to join their study groups. Study groups at Warren are like fraternities at college. Snobby, with hazing rituals. The hazing is usually a really tough trigonometry test or an essay question about medieval Iceland. I try to be polite, but I turn everybody down. The sooner I can go back to being plain old Jack, the better. My mom says the average teenager has the attention span of a gnat. Tomorrow they’ll move on to something or someone else. If not tomorrow, then the next day for sure.

  All I really care about is Leah, who comes back to school with two black eyes and a swollen nose. She isn’t talking to me, but she’s here. She seems okay, and she didn’t have her boobs done. She must have listened to me. Me. Skinny, pale, notebook-keeping Jack. Now all I have to do is think up a way to get her to be my friend again. For a minute I consider picketing her house. Bad idea. I might end up in a cop car. Mom and Dad would freak. It would reflect very badly on their parenting skills. I wonder if skywriting might work, but it’s probably super-expensive. And how do you make sure the right person sees it? Maybe I should buy her roses. Too cliché. A card? Weak. I could buy a star and name it after her. Everything I think of seems either too romantic or too dumb.

  A few days after she comes back to school, I’m walking down the hall to my locker before lunch. Something hits me between the shoulder blades—hard. I yelp and turn around. On the floor is an apple. Beyond the app
le is Leah. Her fists are clenched, and she isn’t smiling. She looks like she does on the pitcher’s mound. Focused. Kind of mean. There’s no way this was an accident. I bet it’s gonna leave a bruise.

  “Hey, that’s a waste of good food,” I say. “There are starving children in, like, Africa.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” she says. “We haven’t talked for a month, and you’re worried about kids in Africa?”

  I pick up the apple and drop it in the garbage. “Well, yeah, I mean…”

  “Don’t you want to know how I am?” she says. “Why I have two black eyes? Why I haven’t been at school?”

  Instead of saying, What do you think I am, a moron?, I say, “You wanna grab some lunch? Sit outside? Talk?” I figure the worst that can happen is that she’ll throw a sandwich at me.

  “Okay,” she says. “But I’m still mad at you. You’re not getting off that easy.”

  “Fair enough,” I say. And just like that, we head to the cafeteria, pick up some food and go to “our” bench.

  I’m halfway through my burger when she puts down her yogurt and says, “Is it true Mike got arrested?”

  “Yeah. Mom sprung him. He’s in therapy. With a woman who used to be a man.”

  Leah’s eyes widen. “For real?”

  “Yup. I met her. She looks like Cameron Diaz, but with really big feet.”

  Leah giggles. “Ouch.”

  “Does it hurt a lot?” I ask.

  “Not as much as it did right after.

  Now it’s just when I laugh. Or bump it.”

  “I wish I’d been there for you,” I say.

  She shrugs. “You sorta were. I kept reading about you and seeing you on the news. Even though I was mad at you, I decided you were right. Then this happened.” She points at her nose.

  I’m confused. “Plastic surgery doesn’t just happen. And I thought you decided I was right. So why did you do it?”

  “Why did I take a line drive to the nose? Not because I wanted an emergency nose job, that’s for sure.”

  For a second I can’t speak. Then I manage to stutter, “You mean you didn’t have a nose job?”

  Leah glares at me. “I just told you. I took a line drive in the face. And then Dr. Myers put me back together. So I guess, technically, I did. But not on purpose.”

  “That’s awesome,” I say. “I mean, not that you got hurt. Awesome that you left your boobs alone. And you know how much I like boobs.” I’m babbling, and I can’t stop a huge grin from spreading across my face. Something I did made a difference. That’s no small thing.

  She giggles again. “Stop making me laugh, you asshole. I’m still mad. You didn’t trust me to make a good choice. You acted like I was a total dimwit.”

  “But you were so excited about it, and I thought—”

  “You thought I wouldn’t listen to you if you weren’t on TV? If you didn’t picket my doctor’s office?”

  “All I wanted was for you to have the facts,” I say.

  “I get that. But we’re friends. Even if I’m mad at you, you can still send me an email or a text. You just went into full-on protest mode. It was…” She looks away, but not before I see the tears in her eyes.

  “It was what?”

  She turns back to me. “It was hurtful. Insulting. Embarrassing. Pick one.” Tears are running down her swollen face. I reach up to wipe them away, and she grabs my hand. “Don’t touch. And don’t start crying.” She sniffs and then moans. “Dr. Myers told me to ‘avoid crying.’ It makes the swelling worse. And you can’t blow your nose or anything.” She rummages around in her purse and finds a tissue, which she uses to dab at her face. “Ow, ow, ow. Don’t laugh.”

  “I’m not laughing,” I say. “I’m sorry, Leah. Really sorry. I didn’t mean for it to get out of hand.”

  “You know what else I’m pissed about?” she says.

  I shake my head.

  “I’m pissed that I didn’t see Mike get arrested. That must have been so awesome. He’s such a tool.”

  “You think Mike’s a tool?” Didn’t everybody—especially girls—think Mike was a god?

  She nods. “A high iq doesn’t make you a great guy, you know. What you do with it is more important. And Mike’s iq is just a waste. You’re better than that.”

  “I am?”

  “Don’t make me punch you,” my best friend says.

  Chapter Fourteen

  From: Daisy Frobisher

  To: Jack Conroy

  Sent: June 25, 2009

  Subject: Thank you

  Hi Jack,

  I wanted to let you know I’m going home— back to Toronto to go to school. Yeah, I know—surfer-girl Daisy is kind of my alter ego. Fun for a while, but it’s time to get real. Which means school and student loan debt, etc. My folks say I can stay with them. They’re actually pretty cool—kinda like your mom and dad. I’m going to finish my degree in environmental studies. Only two more years. And then maybe a master’s after that. There’s a great co-op program here—maybe I can swing a co-op job out west. Come see you guys. Anyway, I wanted you to know how much you inspired me. I’m serious. When I saw how passionate you were about the whole plastic surgery thing, I just looked at Mike and asked myself what I was doing with him. He’s a good guy, but sooooooo unfocused. Wish me luck and stay in touch. Or I’ll see you on the news! LOL! XO Daisy

  From: Mike Conroy

  To: Jack Conroy

  Sent: June 28, 2009

  Subject: Aloha, Baby Bro

  Sorry I didn’t say goodbye, buddy. I had to split—therapy’s just not my scene. And that Roberta chick? Scary. Mom and Dad were so freakin’ intense about the whole thing. Tell them I’m sorry about the money. I’ll pay it back. You should get your bony white ass out here sometime. Tons of chicks even hotter than Daisy, lots of awesome parties. Gotta run. My minutes are almost up. Later. Mike

  From: Jared Conroy

  To: Jack Conroy

  Sent: August 1, 2009

  Subject: Miss you guys

  Jack,

  Hope things have calmed down out there. Mom told me Mike took off. I’m not surprised, but I’m worried about your mom. She really hoped Mike would stick around, get his act together. Maybe next time, right? It’s super hot and humid here. No air conditioning— just a big lazy ceiling fan. Tomorrow we’re hiking into some village in the hills. Wish me luck. I know hiking’s not your favorite thing, but I’d love it if you came to visit me sometime. Maybe when I go to Norway next year. I promise—no camping, no hiking, no outhouses. You could bring a friend along— someone to hang out with when I have to work. Think about it. Write when you can and take care of your mother. Love, Dad

  From: Paula Morgan

  To: Jack Conroy

  Sent: August 15, 2009

  Subject: Internship

  Dear Jack,

  I am writing to offer you a part-time student internship at VTV this fall. This is a new program, aimed at giving students such as yourself— motivated, intelligent, passionate—a chance to get some hands-on experience at a television station. You would be able to use your hours at the station as a credit in Media Studies. I have already cleared this with the principal at the Warren Academy. Ideally, I would like you to spend at least ten hours a week at the station or out in the field with reporters, videographers, etc. The position (which pays just above minimum wage) would start in the third week of September and run through until June. Please let me know if you are interested. All the best,

  Paula Morgan

  From: Jack Conroy

  To: Leah James

  Sent: August 15, 2009

  Subject: Fallout

  L,

  You’re not going to believe this! VTV just offered me a job—a student internship! The pay’s garbage but who cares, right? Ap
parently my passion is inspiring—I have it in writing from two—count them, two— women. Plus, my dad wants me to come to Norway when he’s there next year and he wants me to bring a friend. Pretty cool, huh? You and me and the fjords.

  Come over after you finish work, okay? I’ve got lots of stuff to tell you. And I need your help with the retirement ceremony for the Big Book of Boobs. That book kick-started a lot of amazing things. I figure it deserves its own little altar—some incense, maybe a candle or two. I’m going to recite a poem or maybe read from the Kama Sutra…heh, heh, heh. You can help me shop for a new notebook. Crap. Now I have to research what kind of notebooks reporters use. What would we do without Google? See ya.

  J

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks, as always, to Andrew Wooldridge for his support and his sense of humor. Dr. David Naysmith patiently answered my questions about cosmetic surgery and teens, lent me some large scary books about plastic surgery and let me play with some breast implants. A brilliant surgeon and a dedicated humanitarian, Dr. Naysmith is in no way the model for any of the bad doctors in Plastic. Any mistakes in the book, medical or otherwise, are entirely my own.

  Sarah N. Harvey is an editor and author of other novels for teens, including The Lit Report, Bull’s Eye and the upcoming Better Off Dead. Sarah lives in Victoria, British Columbia, and has never had cosmetic surgery.