The Pretty One(79)

I hate it when Mom does her Dr. Phil imitation. I start crying again. I grab the last tissue and blow my nose. “I’ve made such a mess of everything. I kept trying to make everybody happy and it just made things a million times worse.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Mom says and sighs. “Anyone would be having a tough time right now. To have everything coming at you at once, all this attention and on this magnitude, well, it has to be overwhelming.”

I take another tissue and blow my nose.

“I want you to know that what happened to you—your new face—was never anything I would have chosen for you. I thought you were perfect before. But after the accident, well, we didn’t really have any choice. I told myself that maybe it would all work out for the best, that perhaps your new face would give you more choices. And it has. Unfortunately, you’ve also inherited all the complications of being beautiful without having the skills to deal with it all.”

“I’ve been trying but I keep screwing up. Everybody hates me.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“What about you? You used to love spending time with me. And now…”

“I’ve been busy with work. You know that.”

“You haven’t been working Saturday nights. You’ve been going out with your friends.”

“Oh, Megan,” she says sadly as her eyes well with tears. “You know why I keep making plans on Saturday nights? I was afraid if I didn’t have plans you would feel too guilty to go out. I wanted you to have some fun and develop your own social life and I didn’t think you would if you felt obligated to me.”

My mom has been making plans to go out every Saturday night for me? “But I loved our Saturday nights.”

“I know, but that was before you had other choices…better offers, so to speak.”

“Oh, Mom,” I say as I begin to cry again. “I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

“I do,” my mom says, grabbing another tissue box out from under the sink. “And I think deep down, you do, too.”

“So who am I?”

She pulls out a tissue and wipes my nose for me. “You’re who you’ve always been and who you’ll always be. And it has nothing to do with the way you look.”

I appreciate where my mom is going with all this, but she’s wrong. As much as I hate to admit it, Lucy’s right. I have changed.

And it has everything to do with the way I look.





twenty-nine

feedback (noun): a loud whistle or rumble emanating from a sound system in an auditorium, caused by a sound’s being amplified many times.

The morning after the fall festival, the school is quiet, the halls empty. I walk toward the auditorium with a pit in my stomach. I enter through the back door and wander toward the center of the stage. I arrived early so that I could practice my lines onstage before our last rehearsal, but as I take my place and look out at the empty auditorium, I realize I don’t want to be here by myself.

I turn to leave and stop as I notice a stack of freshly painted screens leaning against the back of the stage. I walk over to the screens and thumb through them, silently evaluating each one until I reach the end. There, up against the wall, is an old background scene that Simon and I painted our freshman year for a senior production of The Wizard of Oz. It was our first project together and Simon and I worked hard on the design, creating a stylized farmhouse that was designed in three pieces so that when the tornado hit it could fly up and off to the sides simultaneously while splitting up. Instead of making the farmhouse all drab and gray like it was in the film, we took the opposite approach. We researched the era and decided that Aunty Em would have too much pride to let her house get all trashed. After all, why would Dorothy keep saying “There’s no place like home” if her house was a pit? And so Simon and I had created the farmhouse of our dreams, using the brightest, most cheerful colors we could find.

I feel like whistling the theme to “Moon River” (an old song I have always found inherently sad). Everything seemed so simple back in the days when all Simon and I would argue about was the color of the paint we should use. I let the background screens fall back into place and turn away from the stage, heading toward the production studio. I walk to the door and stop, staring through the glass window at all the hubbub inside. Besides Simon and me (and Laura, who ended up attending the dance with George), no techies were at the dance and therefore were no more bleary-eyed than usual. The sound of laughter ricochets off the walls as everyone rushes to take care of the last-minute details, putting the final touches on the various sets for the senior productions. They’re so busy that no one notices me as I open the door. I pause for a minute, taking time to listen to the comforting whir of the circular saw while breathing in the familiar smell of wet paint and turpentine. I suddenly wish that I was at school this morning not to act, but to design the sets; that tomorrow I would be at the performance not standing onstage, but in the audience, watching with paint-stained fingernails.

The saw stops and I open my eyes. Simon is in the corner of the production studio, standing on a ladder, finishing up the purple and gold wildflowers for the backdrop of Drew’s set. He’s wearing his glasses again, along with his black T-shirt, Bermuda shorts, and trademark silver sneakers. He seems to sense my presence. He stops painting and turns to face me.