The Pretty One(17)

As I stumble down the school steps, the wind whips my skimpy dress around my legs as the rain pelts my face.

Nothing will ever make a difference because I will always be ugly, ugly, ugly….

I run down the crowded sidewalk and past the limos. Within minutes I’m blocks away from the school and alone on the sidewalk as cars speed past me, making their way toward the heart of Federal Hill.

Ugly, ugly, ugly…

By the time I get to Cross Street my elaborate hairstyle is sprayed across my face and over my eyes like some sort of helmet. My dress is soaking wet and clinging to my body. I barely look for cars as I dash into the street, determined to get home as quickly as possible.

Ugly, ugly, ugly…

I hear a horn and the squeal of brakes and twist toward the sound, just in time to see the headlights bearing down on me.

Ugly, ugly, ugly, ug…



“Megan,” I hear Lucy say. It’s as if she’s whispering in my ear. “Can you hear me?” she asks.

Everything feels heavy, as if I’m weighted down.

“Megan, it’s me. Lucy.”

I slowly open my eyes. Lucy is leaning over me. “Can you hear me, Megan?” Her hair is all messed up and her eyes are red and puffy. She’s still wearing her pink princess dress, but it’s spattered and smeared with something red, like ketchup.

I can barely breathe. It feels like there’s cotton in my mouth, cotton in my nose. Cotton everywhere.

“I’m so sorry,” she’s saying. “This is all my fault.”

I scan the room with my eyes. Everything looks unfamiliar. Shiny blue walls. Machines. Weird cotton curtains hanging from the wall.

“What…,” I begin, but I stop. I taste something horrible in my mouth, something so salty it makes me gag. Blood.

“You were hit by a car. On Cross Street.”

“Mom…” I mutter. I want my mother. I need my mother.

“She and Dad are talking to the surgeon but they’ll be right back. He said that you’re lucky Megan, that we’re lucky. It could’ve been so much worse. But you’re going to be okay. The doctors say that the worst damage is cosmetic, and they can fix that.”

Cosmetic…doctors…lucky…The words float in the air, empty and meaningless. “They’re going to make you look great, Megan. I promise. You’re going to be okay,” my sister says with a sob.

As I look at my sister wailing beside me, her tears spilling down over her beautiful face, I suddenly remember. I remember Lucy laughing. I remember the nose, the teeth. The watermelon.

I’m ugly, ugly, ugly…

“I’m so sorry,” Lucy whispers through her tears, squeezing my hand.

I close my eyes and the world once again fades away.




intermission (noun): a short interval between the acts of a play or a public performance, usually a period of ten to fifteen minutes, allowing the performers and audience a rest.





six

overture (noun): an introductory piece that contains many of the musical motifs and themes of the score.





Ten Months Later


The smell of chemical-infused bubble gum floats through the air as Lucy smacks her perfectly shaped pink and glossy lips together, admiring her reflection in the mirror. “Your turn,” she says, stepping away from the mirror.

I inhale deeply and take my sister’s place. I look into the medicine cabinet mirror that I’ve been brushing my teeth in front of for the past two years and give a big (openmouthed) smile at the stranger staring back at me. “Hellooooo Frankenstein,” I say.

I’m not sure why Frankenstein popped into my head. I know he is a mishmash of cadavers, and (to my knowledge at least) my new face is constructed solely from my own skin, but I can’t help but feel camaraderie with him. A new face will do that to a girl, I guess.

“Hardly!” Lucy says. “Frankenstein is ugly. You’re a babe!”


I suck in my cheeks and turn from one side to the other, attempting to evaluate my new face objectively, as if I’m trying it on for the first time. “Really?” I ask, even though Lucy has told me this before. In fact, everyone keeps repeating the same thing: “You’re beautiful.” And then they smile proudly as if they were personally responsible for my transformation and add, “It’s a miracle.”

They got that part right.

It is an unbelievable, incredible, bizarre miracle that I have a face at all considering that I got sideswiped by a car and slammed face-first into the asphalt, leaving my nose and three of my front teeth behind. After the accident I looked so bad the hospital’s trauma team called in a social worker to help prepare my family for the worst. First they told them that I had been severely brain damaged (due to the fact that I kept repeating “watermelons, red, green”), so when they found out that in spite of the fact that I had three broken ribs, a broken arm, and a broken leg, the worst damage was cosmetic, my parents were relieved. They didn’t really hear the part about their daughter resembling a monster from late-night TV, so awful-looking that she would remember her plain old ugly days with a sense of nostalgia.

As soon as all the major medical issues were cleared up and the ear, nose, and throat doctor had constructed a “nose” (in quotation marks simply because it didn’t look like any nose I’d ever seen before), my parents went to work, researching plastic surgeons. They settled on one in New York and thus began the rehabilitation of Megan Fletcher.