by Ariel Kaplan
“Where’s B?” I asked Sophie, when it was clear she wasn’t coming.
“I think she went to the bathroom,” she said, then went to talk to Coach Kim.
I knew Bethany didn’t love the big regattas. They’re super crowded and very loud, and usually she doesn’t like to walk off by herself because she’s got this irrational fear she won’t be able to find her way back to the tent. I scanned the area where they keep the porta-potties until I found her, talking to some guy in a Great Falls uniform I’d never seen before. He was standing way too close to her, and she kept trying to back up, but there were so many people she couldn’t really get away from him. He was smiling, and she was not. He was talking, and she was not. She shook her head. He leaned in and touched her shoulder.
From where I stood, I could see the shape of her mouth say, “Stop.”
I bolted toward them. Or tried to. I weaved through the crowd, throwing my elbows to make a path. “Hey!” I shouted. “HEY!”
By now, I could hear what he was saying. “Come on, just come sit with us. You can ride back on our bus after.”
I grabbed Bethany by the hand and said, “Let’s go.”
She blinked at me in surprise. The boy said, “Hey, we’re talking here.”
“Coach Kim is looking for you,” I said to her. “Come on.”
Bethany looked relieved. The guy said, “Give me your number, okay? We’ll hang out later.”
He was, I realized, bigger than us. Usually I’m not all that aware of the size of the guys I talk to; like, I know Greg is bigger than me, but I never thought about the relationship between our sizes that much, because Greg doesn’t make a big deal about it. He doesn’t loom. This guy was looming. In this very quiet voice, he said, “Just give me your phone so I can put my number in it, okay?” He tried to take Bethany’s phone out of her hand, but she pulled her arm back.
“She wants you to leave her alone,” I said.
“I think she wants you to leave her alone,” he said. “We were doing just fine before you busted into the middle of this.”
I said, “Let’s go, B,” and started to leave, which was when I heard Bethany shout, “HEY!” and turned to see that he’d grabbed her butt.
I didn’t even wait to see what she would do. I screamed, “I don’t think so!” and stiff-armed him in the gut with my good hand.
He doubled over, grunting, and I thought, We should probably run away now, and then something hit me in the chest and there was an almost simultaneous explosion in my face.
My feet lost contact with the ground, and for a second everything went numb. It had been his fist, I realized. He’d punched me in the face. I hadn’t even seen it coming.
What I did see, though, was Bethany screaming, “You fucking asshole. YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!” And she kicked him in the groin. He went down silently, which was how I knew she’d gotten him good.
Beyond the pain in my face, I could see Bethany absolutely whaling on this guy, and I thought, She is actually going to kill him, which seemed perfectly okay to me, until I realized that you generally go to jail for that kind of thing. I watched her fist connect with his kidney as he curled around his crotch—once, and then twice, and then two great big guys I didn’t know were pulling her off him and she was screaming more bad words than I realized she even knew, like somewhere inside my Fluttershy-loving friend was a rage demon and it had just woken up.
There was a lot of blood running out of my face.
“Shit,” Bethany said, having wrestled herself free of the boys pinning her arms back. “Shit. Shit. Let me see, Aphra, let me see.”
But both my hands were over my face now. I was shaking. Suddenly, everything seemed very, very funny, and I said, “It’s fine. You should see the other guy.”
The other guy was still doubled over in the grass whimpering. A bunch of adults were sprinting toward us.
“I could have handled that,” she said, but she was crying.
“Of course you could,” I said. “Obviously.”
Someone handed me a wadded-up T-shirt, and I used it to sop up the blood coming out of my nose. Blood was running down both my arms, and my bruised hand was covered with nose blood. “Thanks,” I said to the owner of the shirt I was bleeding on. Then I realized it was the shirt he’d actually been wearing, because he was pressed up behind me and I could feel his bare chest against my back, and I thought, This world is full of creepers.
“Ten feet,” said the male voice in my ear. “I was ten feet behind you. If you’d just turned around.”
Of course it was Greg. I found myself leaning back against him, because I was really, really tired. “It’s just as well,” I said into his shirt. “Your face would have been a bigger loss.”
Greg sighed. His hand was on my shoulder, and he said what we both knew: “He wouldn’t have punched me.”
I closed my eyes. Bethany kept saying my name over and over, and then, “Are you okay?”
“He…he hit me twice. How did he hit me twice?”
“What?”
I touched the place on my chest. “It hurts,” I said.
“He didn’t hit you there,” Greg said. “Bethany pushed you.”
“I was too slow,” she said.
I managed to open my eyes long enough to say, “I think my nose is broken,” and then I really didn’t feel like saying anything else at all.
In the ER, I lay on a gurney with my parents on one side and Delia on the other.
“We’ll need a CT scan,” the doctor—the same one who’d seen Kit the day before, incidentally—said, “once that stops bleeding.”
“You think he broke my nose?”
“Oh, he definitely broke your nose. I’m more concerned with your orbital sockets.”
“Her eyes?” Delia said. “Oh, God.”
“They’re pretty fragile,” the doctor went on. “A blow to the face can damage them pretty easily.”
“And how would you fix that?” Delia asked.
“Best case, we wait and they heal on their own. Worst case, surgery, which you may need for the nose anyway.”
“Surgery?” I said.
“We’ll do our best to make sure it heals straight,” he said.
He said a few other things, and my parents answered, but I didn’t really hear because I was thinking: Surgery.
On my nose.
Wonderful.
The doctor stepped out. To my parents, I said, “If you guys are all here, who’s with Kit?”
“Sebastian,” Delia said. “They’re like best friends now. I can’t believe that guy hit you.”
“I can,” I said.
“You’re lucky your friend shoved you,” the doctor said. “It could have been a lot worse if you’d gotten the full force of that punch.”
“My nose would be worse than broken?”
“He means you could have died,” Delia said. “People die from getting punched in the face in real life. It’s not like the movies.”
My mother put her hand over her mouth and my father looked distinctly sick. I said, “Is she here? She must be here somewhere.”
“I think she’s giving a statement,” Delia said.
“To the cops?”
“Yeah. They’ll probably want you to do that, too.”
I laid my head back against my pillow. “Would it be okay if I was alone, just for like five minutes?”
“Yeah,” Dad said. “Of course it would. Come on, guys.” And everyone got up and left.
I rolled to my side and looked at the poster next to me, which had little frowny faces describing the ten levels of pain. I’d given mine about a seven, but now I thought it was down to a six. It didn’t help that my hand still hurt like hell, but at least it didn’t seem to be broken. Unlike my nose.
It occurred to me that if they were p
utting me under and going in and messing around anyway, I could let them go ahead and fix me the way they’d fixed Delia. I could look just like her if I wanted to.
Hell, the insurance would probably even cover it.
I imagined my face looking like Delia’s, and a boy like Sebastian following me home from college and begging to sleep in my bed.
Well, maybe not like Sebastian. Maybe a linguistic wunderkind with nut-brown eyes and a cleft chin.
If I looked like someone else, would Greg have wanted me?
If I looked like someone else, could I have admitted that I wanted him?
I closed my eyes and dreamed of a world where I was so pretty Greg D’Agostino couldn’t take his eyes off me.
* * *
—
When I woke up, it was dark, and Delia was touching my shoulder. “Hey,” she said. “Time for your CT scan.”
I sat up a little. “How long was I asleep?”
“Half an hour. Probably stress and the pain meds.”
“Oh. God. They didn’t give me opiates, did they?”
She laughed. “No, I think it was just Advil.”
“Oh.”
“Delia,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“For getting punched in the face?”
“For being horrible. To you. About the nose thing. I get it. I get wanting to be pretty.”
She stared at my vital signs blinking on the monitor for a while. Finally, she said, “It wasn’t that I wanted my nose to be pretty.” I gave her the best incredulous look I could muster with my face all mangled. She said, “I just wanted it to be something I never thought about. I thought about it all the time. Every time I looked in a mirror, or saw a picture of myself, or walked by a reflective surface, I was thinking about it. I just wanted it to be like…like my chin or something.”
“Your chin? What’s going on with your chin?”
“Nothing! That’s my point. I never think about it, like, ever. It’s just there. I wanted my nose to be like that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. I get that, too.”
She smiled grimly. “Does that mean you’re thinking about getting yours fixed? I saw your face when the doctor said you might need surgery.”
“No. No, I don’t need it fixed. It’s not broken. I mean, I know it’s literally broken, but not…No.” I adjusted the too-tight wristband on my left arm. “I’m not getting it changed.”
“But you thought about it.”
“Yeah. I thought about it.”
“But why not—”
“It’s just like you said. I need it to be something I don’t think about. If I had it changed, I would always be thinking about it. I’d always be wondering when a guy was flirting with me if he’d still be doing it if my face looked like it used to. I’d just be focusing on it all the time.”
“But aren’t you focusing on it now?”
I sighed. “Yeah. But honestly, that’s kind of your fault, no offense.”
“My fault? Because I got a nose job?”
“Well. Yeah. I mean, I forgive you. I get it.” I patted her hand, which was resting on my blanket. “The world’s hard to live in, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. It is.” She looked at me and said, “I’m sorry for not thinking about how that would make you feel.”
I touched the bandage over my nose. “Maybe I could just leave it like this? It’s got a certain je ne sais quoi, right?”
She laughed. “You know the difference between you and me? You can pull that nose off. Because all anyone can see”—she poked me in the chest with two fingers—“is this.”
“My stupendous cleavage?”
“Don’t do that,” she said. “Not everything is a joke.”
“You poked me in the boob!”
“I did not….Gah. Aphra.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I get it. And thank you.”
* * *
—
When the scans came back, they showed a clean, nondisplaced break of my nose and no breaks whatsoever of my eye sockets. I also appeared not to have a concussion, though sometimes those don’t show up for a while.
“Thank God for your ridiculously thick skull,” my father said. Delia, by then, had gone home to make sure Sebastian and Kit had not fallen down a YouTube hole.
“She got it from you,” Mom said.
“Thanks for that,” I said. “So can I go home now?”
“They’re going to splint your nose, and then we can go.”
Bethany came in through the curtain. Like me, she was still in her uniform. She had a splint on the index finger of her right hand.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
She held up her hand. “Broke my finger.”
“Punching the dirtbag?”
“Yeah.”
My mother said, “I think we should go find out what happened to your checkout papers,” and pulled my father out into the hallway.
Bethany sat down in the chair next to me. “You look like shit.”
“Yeah. I’ve heard that.”
“Is your chest okay? I think I might have hit you kind of hard. I didn’t mean to.”
“No, I know you didn’t mean to. Thank you for trying to get me out of the way. The doctor said you probably saved my brain.”
“Move over.”
“What?” I said, but I was already scooting over to one side of the bed. She lay down next to me and took out her phone.
“Please don’t take a selfie of us,” I said. She looked at me like I was stupid. Then she turned on an episode of My Little Pony, holding the phone so we could both see it.
She reached out and held my unhurt hand with her unhurt hand, my right and her left, and we stayed like that until my mother came back with the discharge papers and it was time to leave.
On Monday, I went back to school.
After I shut off my alarm, I went downstairs to see if Delia could help me do something with concealer that would help cover up my black eyes. Instead, I found Sebastian sitting on the bed looking at the photo of me and Delia in our Sailor Moon costumes. The rest of the bed was covered with badly folded clothes, and his suitcase was half full on the floor. I couldn’t remember whether his flight left that day or the next, because I’d been kind of distracted.
“Oh,” I said. “Hey. Uh. Is Delia here?”
“She already left for her internship.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Yeah.” He turned the picture toward me so I could see it. “Who is this?”
I fiddled with my ponytail. “Where’d you find that?”
“It was on her dresser this morning. Do you guys have another sister?”
“Um,” I said. “That’s, uh…”
He put his hand over his mouth. “Oh my God. Did she die? I’m sorry. Wow.”
“No,” I said. “No.”
“Seriously, though. This explains a lot.”
“No,” I said. “We don’t have a dead sister. That’s Delia.”
He looked at it again.
“Before her nose job,” I explained.
I could see the scales lift from his eyes as he understood. He said, “Oh.” And then he looked at the picture for a really long time.
“Well?” I said.
“Well what?”
“You don’t…you don’t have something to say about that?”
He set the picture on the dresser and went back to putting his stuff in his suitcase. “Look,” he said. “I get that you’re, like, the alpha around here or whatever, but my opinion on your sister’s nose job is none of your business.” He stuffed the last of his clothes into the suitcase before zipping it up.
It was…not an unrespectable thing to say, even though I really wanted to know what he was thinking, if he was disgus
ted by her earlier face or her current one or the plastic surgery itself. I wanted to know so many things. His face gave nothing away, like the whole subject was just a passing curiosity.
I said, “Okay.”
I waited to see if he might change his mind, or ask me when she’d had the surgery, or why, or what I thought about it, or if I felt bad about it, or if I wanted to do it, too.
He did not say any of those things.
I said, “Are you really not going back to UVA?”
“I’m really not.”
“So you’re just going to make YouTube videos in Denver?”
“I actually don’t want to go back to Denver. I’d rather be here.”
“In my basement?”
He rolled his eyes. “In the DC area. I like it here. Plus, I could still see Delia on the weekends. It’s just, I need a day job and a roommate, and I don’t have either of those, so I need to go home and figure shit out.”
“You need a roommate?”
“That’s what I said. It’s too expensive to live around here by myself.”
I said, “I might actually know someone.”
* * *
—
At lunch, I met Bethany in front of the cafeteria. People were staring at us: me because of my nose (ha), Bethany because she now had a rep as an industrial-grade badass, which seemed to have overwritten her rep as the girl who got dumped in front of the entire school.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” I said. “I really don’t want to be here.”
“Me either.”
“You want to go off campus?”
“We can’t,” she said.
“Oh yes. We can. I mean, if you want.”
I took her by the hand and walked to the back door, where Officer Barry was standing with his hands behind his back. “Hi,” I said.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“Yeah, right?”
“Does it hurt?”
“More to look at, I think.” I smiled. “A seven-layer burrito might help with that.”