It Sounded Better in My Head

by Nina Kenwood

  On the other hand, I had wanted to go so badly it made my chest ache. I had actual heartburn from wanting it so much, and knowing I would probably let myself down. I wanted to go to this camp more than I had wanted to go anywhere in my life. I was chosen because I was an A+ English student and I won the school’s short story competition the year before (for an admittedly very melodramatic but honestly amazing story, if I do say so myself, called ‘Remember Me’ about a girl whose boyfriend is dying of a mysterious disease that causes him to forget his past a week at a time and he is cured just before he is about to die, but he’s lost his last memory of her), and possibly because I spent so much time in the library reading at lunchtime. But, looking back, a little part of me thinks I was chosen because of fate. I was destined to go on this camp and find the two people who would help me survive the rest of my teenage years—and the rest of my life, I hope.

  Mum and Dad were overjoyed by the news I had been chosen. It was as though I’d been picked for the Olympics. I know they fretted about having an unbearably self-conscious hermit for a daughter, but if they broached the subject with me, it would usually end in a meltdown of tears and self-pity (mine, obviously, although Mum has a flair for the dramatic, which is where I get my best material), so my lack of social life and friends became the Topic Not To Be Discussed.

  The camp invitation had opened the door to that topic again, and Mum wouldn’t let it be. We went around in circles: Mum telling me I had to go, and me telling her I would probably go, I would almost certainly go, I would try my best to go, but never quite agreeing that I would definitely go. It calmed me to know that there was still the option to not go. Because what if I woke up on the day of the camp with a huge, disfiguring pimple between my eyes? This was not a theoretical concern, but rather something that had happened to me already several times in my life. I have had a pimple so big that it looked like a third eye. I have had pimples so big they should be featured on those awful, voyeuristic, disgusting pimple-popping videos.

  It’s hard to explain how bad skin makes me simply give up on things, but it does. I can go from being excited to feeling numb, empty and resigned in one minute flat. I don’t ever want anything badly enough that I’d still go with a giant disfiguring pimple on my face.

  The heavy-duty acne medication should have given me confidence, but I didn’t trust it. My body could always, always betray me. That’s what I knew. And even if it was okay now, it would betray me in the future. Even my dermatologist said that—if the acne was caused by my unbalanced hormones and problematic ovaries (official name: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome), as we suspected it was, then it would probably come back. Maybe a year after I stop the medication, maybe sooner, maybe longer. My skin was a ticking time bomb, poised to explode in the most public way whenever I let down my guard. My GP said if I go off the pill in the future then, as well as a return of acne, I should watch for symptoms like a disappearing period, thinning head hair, increased facial hair, weight gain and general depression. That’s a fun checklist. Also, by the way, this was a condition that would continue for a lifetime.

  It wasn’t just my skin and hormonal stuff though. Meeting new people was hard and I hated it.

  But Mum didn’t let up. She was so scared of me missing this opportunity, the fear became palpable in our house. The signed parental consent forms were stuck to the front of our refrigerator for days, and I kept catching Dad looking at them with a worried expression. Mum surrounded them with Post-it notes, on which she drew arrows and wrote ‘Don’t forget!!’ and ‘The deadline is Friday!!’ and ‘Do it!!’

  They were going to be so disappointed in me if I didn’t go.

  Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I took the forms to school and handed them in. I was going. Definitely, definitely going. Mum danced me around the kitchen in delight.

  I made several trips to the dermatologist to beg him to fix the shiny red patch on my face, to no avail. (‘Unfortunately, Natalie, this is just something you’ll have to endure while you’re on the medication,’ he had said, with a tone that implied he thought I had a limited capacity for enduring things.) I packed and repacked my bags. I chewed my fingernails. I had nightmares. I thought about changing my name. (Surely if I introduced myself as Roxy then I would magically have the confidence of a girl called Roxy.)

  And I went to the camp.

  Mum and Dad drove me there. It was a three-hour trip and Mum kept up a relentlessly cheerful commentary for practically every minute, as if a moment of silence would allow me to change my mind. She kept telling me I was going to have a great time, which made me want to have a terrible time just to spite her.

  At the camp sign-in, I stood in line behind a boy. Mum nudged me, and I refused to look at her, because I knew she would do something unsubtle like wiggling her eyebrows suggestively. She’d done that once before when a bunch of boys were standing near us at the cinema, and I had to go into the bathroom and deep breathe in the cubicle to recover from my embarrassment.

  The boy in the camp line (spoiler—it was Zach) turned around and smiled kind of goofily at me as he walked past. He was tall and skinny with messy dark curls and the friendliest face I have maybe ever seen on another human being. I quickly glanced away and didn’t smile back, which is my standard response whenever anyone looks at me, but in my mind I was smiling back, and it felt like a good sign.

  I was desperate for Mum and Dad to leave, but the minute I saw their car pulling away, I was hit with a wave of nausea and had to stop myself from running after them screaming, ‘Come back, come back, come back.’ I was alone, and I had to cope without them for three days. I had to sleep in a single bed with itchy-looking blankets. I had to share a bathroom. I had to eat meals prepared by people who had no idea that chicken sometimes grossed me out and I didn’t like the texture of cooked mushrooms.

  Lucy walked into the cabin then. She was assigned to the other bed in my room.

  Lucy was the other student from my school picked for camp. We had been in several classes together, but we’d never spoken more than a few sentences to each other before this moment.

  I knew about Lucy though. I spent a lot of time at school watching and observing, and I generally knew a lot more about my classmates than they knew about me. I knew Lucy liked poetry and YA fantasy novels, and that she always enthusiastically volunteered for things, from reading aloud a section of a book in class to creating posters for our school’s campaign for combatting climate change. She was on the debating team, she was in the school musical, she was vice-president of the social-justice club. She was a joiner and she was aggressively nice, two things I have a natural suspicion of, but with Lucy they weren’t fake or annoying. She acted like a good person because she really was a good person.

  Lucy had one strike against her, though—she had perfect skin. Ever since the first pimple appeared on my face, skin is always the first thing I notice about someone else, the first judgment I make, even when I try to stop myself. Do they have good skin? Lucy was small (she was fifteen at the time, but she still looked twelve), with unmarked skin and the kind of big blue eyes that could get you off a murder charge with a couple of well-timed blinks.

  It was hard for me to imagine a skinny blonde with flawless skin could have any real problems. Skin, hair, teeth: the holy trinity, as I once read in an article by a Hollywood talent agent. If you had those to begin with, you are miles ahead of the competition. Lucy had them. Well, almost. Back then, she had braces on her teeth, but that meant they would be perfect soon.

  Lucy’s face didn’t even have a mole or a slight discolouration. Almost three years later and it still doesn’t. The closest thing she has to a flaw is a scattering of freckles that appear in summer. Skin like this fascinates me. I google it sometimes. ‘Girls with perfect skin.’ ‘Flawless skin.’ ‘Beautiful skin.’ ‘Celebrities with amazing skin.’ It gives me that bad–good feeling to look at people who have what I want so much.

  I went to an all-girls school, which can b
e a harrowing experience, but I am happy I didn’t have to face boys in the classroom every day, because when my skin was at its worst, girls might have said nasty stuff behind my back, but boys straight up yelled at me at the train station with the least imaginative insults possible: ‘pizza face’, ‘fugly’, and once, ‘GROSS BITCH’. I couldn’t have dealt with that all day. My classmates wrapped their insults in the packaging of unsolicited advice, such as: ‘If you wash your face properly every morning and every night, it will draw out all the bad toxins causing the pimples’ or ‘Your makeup is the real problem, maybe if you went without concealer for a few days, it would get better’ or ‘Have you tried only using organic products and washing your pillowcase in vinegar and hot water every day?’ or ‘If you want clear skin, it’s simple: don’t eat sugar or carbs or fat or grains or coffee or red meat or anything processed or anything white or anything packaged or nightshade vegetables and especially not citrus fruit. And drink water.’

  As if I hadn’t tried everything that every random person on the internet ever happened to recommend. Honey, toothpaste, olive oil, avocado, hot water, cold water, apple-cider vinegar, fish-oil tablets, spearmint tea, the juice from a sweet potato, the official ten-step Korean skincare routine, the keto diet. My skin usually got worse. It always, eventually, got worse.

  I needed professionals, prescriptions, medication strong enough to deform an unborn baby. (That’s what the consent form I had to sign to take the medication said: I cannot, under any circumstances, get pregnant while taking it. It gave me hope—my dermatologist thinks I’ll have sex with someone one day!) After my skin got better, I needed steroid injections and laser therapy to help fix the scars on my back. And still—after all the drugs and laser beams and appointments and diets and exercise and creams and gels and injections and money and tears and worry and thousands of hours on the internet—still, my skin doesn’t look half as nice as most people’s. Especially on my back, which is pitted, red and lumpy, like a constellation of the ugliest stars imaginable.

  My parents tried their best to be understanding, but whenever Mum said, ‘It’s just a pimple, Natalie, it’s not a disease, there are a lot of more serious things going on in the world right now,’ it made me feel more alone and more awful than anything any boy at the train station did. Because half of me would agree with her—Oh, god, I’m a pathetic, weak, spineless, selfish, vain, privileged loser—and the other half would be furious—You don’t understand a single thing about the pain I am in.

  I dreamed of waking up and not having to think about my skin. Imagine the freedom of someone who had never thought about their skin, ever. Whose first thought wasn’t to rush to a mirror and check what had happened overnight—which pimples got worse, and which might be slightly better.

  Lucy was that person. Of course, it didn’t occur to me that Lucy might have other things to worry about when she woke up—to me, it truly seemed like if you didn’t have to worry about dragging a problematic face into the world, then you didn’t have to worry about anything.

  Later, Lucy would tell me about how she lay awake at night worrying she wasn’t doing enough: enough study, enough preparation, enough exercise, enough reading, enough homework. That she, herself, wasn’t enough. For who, for what, it wasn’t clear to me, but she was tormented by a voice in her head telling her not good enough, never good enough.

  Lucy’s life, I would discover, was exhausting in ways I hadn’t imagined.

  But on this day, our first day, Lucy was just a perfect-skinned almost-stranger who was sharing my room. We smiled hesitantly at each other. Lucy made some small talk about school, and then we lapsed into silence, and I feared we had reached the end of all possible conversations we might have and the silence would stretch on forever, or at least for the next three days. But then Lucy pulled a bunch of books out of her bag, and it turned out we were reading the same novel, the final in a long-running series, and we spent the next half hour passionately discussing the love lives of various fictional characters.

  Later, when we were called down to the main hall, Lucy hooked her arm through mine and she told me she was nervous about meeting everyone. No one had ever hooked their arm through mine before. The way she did it so casually, I still remember vividly, because it was the first time in years I’d felt properly okay around someone my age.

  We sat down together in the hall, and everyone was looking around at everyone else. Most people hadn’t even introduced themselves to anyone and I was already three-quarters of the way towards making a friend. It felt miraculous. I wasn’t even worried that Lucy might abandon me for someone cooler. I already trusted her.

  We had to play getting-to-know-you games, which is the kind of thing that normally sends me into a panic spiral but, for once, it didn’t.

  The first thing everyone had to say was which Hogwarts house they were in. Zach said he was Ravenclaw, Lucy said Hufflepuff, and I said Slytherin, and later we were instructed to pair up with someone who wasn’t in the same house as ourselves, and Zach slid towards me saying he lived in a house full of Gryffindors and needed more Slytherins in his life. We got into a discussion about time travel, which segued into a discussion about board games and then books. Lucy joined us, and that night I went to bed with my heart full. I’d done it. I’d survived. I’d made friends.

  The next three days were, without exaggeration, the best of my life. The teachers told me I had potential as a writer, and I should develop ‘Remember Me’ into a full-length novel one day. Lucy, Zach and I were inseparable, and I wasn’t even mad that my mother had predicted it all.

  I left the camp on a high. I had truly never been happier.

  Lucy and I hung out at school after that, but it wasn’t easy at first, because no one in the group she sat with was particularly warm to me. Lucy had a lot of friends—or, at least, girls who were friend-adjacent—and she was involved in seemingly endless clubs and committees. I was the opposite. My camp confidence disappeared pretty quickly once I was back.

  Zach went to a school near ours, and the three of us began to hang out on weekends and message each other daily. We had game nights and movie nights. We lent each other books. We started our own little three-person TV club. We shared the creative stuff we were doing: fan fiction, short stories, poems, plays. We planned a screenplay we wanted to write together. We contemplated starting our own YouTube channel. We had running jokes. It was what I’d always dreamed having friends would be. My parents were overjoyed.

  But I still didn’t go to parties or join any groups. I didn’t magically become cool or popular or less self-conscious. Some days I still hid in the library when I didn’t have the energy to negotiate lunchtime with Lucy’s friends. She would come and find me in the library though, and our status as best friends soon became a known thing among other people in our year level. Natalie and Lucy. Lucy and Natalie. Having a best friend was like having a protective armour, something I’d never experienced before, and something I desperately needed. Lucy navigated social situations for me, and in return I made her laugh and helped her deal with her mother. In Lucy and Zach, I’d found my group, and it was small, but it was enough, more than enough, to keep my head above water. They saved me.

  So yes, I probably do owe them some good gossip from my first solo party experience.

  ‘Maybe you should text Owen,’ Lucy says to me now.

  ‘Why would she do that?’ Zach says.

  ‘To say thanks for the party invite.’

  ‘That’s terrible advice. Don’t do that. Nobody does that,’ Zach says.

  ‘It’s good manners, Zach,’ Lucy says. Her family is big on good manners.

  ‘Look, the thing is, Owen is really just not that interesting. I don’t want to text him,’ I say, before they can get any further into the discussion.

  Lucy and Zach solemnly nod as if I have said the greatest truth they’ve ever heard.

  ‘And also, he winked at me,’ I add.

  ‘Yuck. Okay, don’t text him,’ Lucy s
ays.

  ‘You are way too good for him,’ Zach says. I hate it when Zach gives me compliments like this. If I was so amazing, Zach would have chosen me over Lucy. Which is a terrible, awful, self-pityingly, pathetic, desperate, bad-friend thing to think, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Zach and Lucy chose each other, so they have to say things like ‘You are too good for him’ to me to hide the fact that no one chose me. Also, ‘You are too good for him’ usually means ‘You are the less-attractive person in this equation’.

  At that moment, Alex appears on the deck.

  ‘Hi,’ he says.

  I gulp and sit up a bit straighter because there’s no point in wearing the Boob Top if you’re going to slouch.

  ‘Hi. Hello,’ I say. I try to sound very casual but somehow instead sound very formal.

  ‘How are you?’ he says. Does he sound casual or like someone who is trying to sound casual? I can’t tell.

  ‘Good. How are you?’

  ‘Good.’

  Zach is looking back and forth between us. Alex and I don’t usually exchange pleasantries.

  ‘So, did you have fun at the party?’ Zach asks Alex.

  ‘Yeah, it was all right,’ Alex says.

  Oh, god. There are so many bad ways I can interpret that answer, and no good ones.

  ‘Anything interesting happen?’ Lucy asks.

  Why is she asking that? Would she normally ask Alex such a question? It sounds like I’ve set her up to ask that. I am sweating.

  ‘We played spin the bottle,’ Alex says, grinning as he sits down in one of the deck chairs and props his feet on another.

  ‘What?’ Lucy and Zach both pretty much yell in unison.

  Fuck.

  Alex’s eyes flick to me very quickly and then away again. I hope, in that nanosecond, I have communicated the millions of pieces of information I wish to convey to him, including: why the hell did you bring that up; don’t tell them we got each other; don’t tell them we sort-of kissed; don’t tell them we didn’t actually kiss; don’t say anything about me at all; is this all a huge joke to you; are you trying to ruin my life; I hate you; your hair looks good today.