North of Beautiful (7 page)

I packed my foundations while Karin’s brainstorming spooled out from her brain to her mouth, apparently bypassing her ears. She didn’t hear my unspoken “no comment” or “I’m really not interested” and certainly not my “Hello? I want to be an artist, not a makeup artist. What are you thinking?” Finally, Karin paused in her monologue about my future megabillion cosmetics company that would take on Revlon and Estée Lauder. “You’ll stay, right?” she asked uncertainly. “In case I need a touch-up?”

The photographer wasn’t from the New York Times. Or even the Seattle Times. This was our Valley’s little paper with a total readership of not many.

“Please?”

How could I say no when I knew the fear of having my own mask slip? I nodded even though I could have been skiing with Erik. Well, maybe not that. But I could have been in my studio, working.

Fifteen minutes later, the photographer arrived complete with her huge pack of equipment. I had never been to a professional photo shoot before, and despite my misgivings, it was fascinating how she set up the shot, posing Karin in front of her. She didn’t take the picture so much as make one.

“Why don’t you get in this one?” the photographer asked, gesturing me to sit next to Karin. “We could show people how Karin conducts her interviews.”

I recoiled. But before I could decline, Karin did it for me: “Terra never has her picture taken if she can help it.”

I bristled, wanting to tell Karin to stop assuming things about me, but it was no random assumption. She was right. I hated having my picture taken, loathing every single shot I was in. If I could get rid of my pictures in the yearbook, I would.

The photographer glanced sharply at me to confirm. But Karin smiled, well-meaning, understanding, an I’m-in-this-with-you-Terra smile, the same as in ballet class when we weren’t even three feet tall and she stood up to my bully.

“That’s right,” I said, nodding benignly at the photographer.

So I stepped far back from the action and watched as the photographer repositioned Karin yet again to create my best friend’s first fifteen minutes of fame.

An hour later, my cheek throbbed to a dull drumbeat of pain. That’s what I got for trying to show Dad. What would the researcher, Dr. Holladay, say now if I told her: See, I wanted to take control of my face, but — out, out damned spot — my birthmark yet again bested the latest and greatest that new pulse-dye laser technology had to offer. I quickly checked my cheek in the rearview mirror. There it was, my port-wine stain in all its blazing glory, eggplant purple now from two hundred and fifty shots of the laser and swelling turgid like a newly pumped soccer ball. My cheek looked even worse than any other treatment that I could remember. So now I kept my eyes firmly off the rearview mirror, off my face, and on the road ahead.

“Terra, you look great,” Mom chirped, filling in my silence as I looked both ways down a street I didn’t recognize. With a few turns here and there, we somehow went from the Children’s Hospital parking lot to one of Seattle’s hilly streets, and now I was lost. Mom continued, “Just great. I really think this doctor knows what she’s doing.”

My face, slick with antibiotic ointment, pulsated in disagreement. How the hell was I going to drive the five-hour trip home when I just wanted to curl up in the backseat, pop another two Tylenol, and sleep until I didn’t feel anything? I clenched the steering wheel and made a mental note to tell my brother Claudius that the mnemonic he taught me to remember Seattle’s street order — “Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest” — only worked if you knew where you were. I didn’t. Were Mom and I heading toward James or Madison — or had we already overshot and were well past Seneca, University, and Pike? Face it, I was the blind driving the blind, and had been ever since I got my driver’s license and Mom staked her claim to the passenger seat.

“So which way should we go?” I asked, more rhetorical than anything since I knew Mom would shake her head.

“This street isn’t on the directions.” She helplessly rifled through the pages I had printed last night.

I know, I know. I should have taken a closer look at the map before putting the car in gear. But all I could think about was making a fast getaway from the new doctor and her useless laser, and how irritated I was with Dr. Holladay. And irritated at myself for lashing out at Dad with my face. And my mom for dragging me here, with her “Oh, Terra, you’re going to look so beautiful” pep talk.

On cue, Mom hoisted around to look at me. “You really, really look wonderful.”

More cars surrounded us than on the busiest summer day in our one-street town. I needed to pay attention, focus on the traffic. Still, I brushed my hair over my right shoulder so that Mom couldn’t miss — couldn’t deny — what everyone else saw so clearly. I demanded, “How can you say that? It looks the same as every other laser treatment.”

“Baby steps,” she said stoutly. “It’ll be three months before we see the full effect of the procedure.”

“That’s what they all said.”

“You know, at your next appointment, we’ll be able to hit all the spring sales.” From the corner of my eyes, I could tell Mom was ogling all the boutiques we passed, filled with clothes that she wanted so badly to buy for me, as if I could actually wear that edgy shirt, that clingy skirt in my high school where girls go hunting with their dads.

“Mom.”

“We’ll need to get you all new makeup, too, once your birthmark’s gone. Won’t that be fun?” My mother’s hope is two parts determination, one part delusion. Even through my annoyance, I envied that. She continued, “I bet you’ll be able to pull off purple eye shadow now. Maybe for the prom —”

“Mom,” I interrupted, unable to listen to any more of my mom’s fairy tales about my ugly duckling face. “Look, after six doctors and eight different types of treatments, my cheek isn’t going to get any better. I’m part of the ten percent who can’t be fixed.”

“Terra, you just need to have some faith.”

I let out a small sigh, her hope smothering me like mulch too thickly applied, and stretched my fingers from their death grip on the steering wheel. “Do you have any idea which way we should be going?”

“If we keep driving, we’re bound to bump into the highway, don’t you think?”

“Mom, you lived in Seattle for ten years!” I heard the accusation in my tone. So did Mom.

A tiny furrow of hurt puckered her forehead, and Mom fussed with the seat belt, loosening it for more breathing room before she admitted, “But your dad did most of the driving.”

And now I did most of the driving for Mom. She’d never been a comfortable driver, but after her sister, my Aunt Susannah, died in a bus crash, Mom practically had panic attacks whenever she got behind the wheel. Still, there it was, another opening, like the ones I’d been seizing since my admissions letter came from Williams. Maybe Massachusetts wasn’t part of my plan, but some college was, even if it was in Bellingham. Straightening in my seat, I said, “You know, you’re going to have to drive again next year.”

That uncorked her firmly stoppered denial, and Mom’s breath released, sharp and explosive. Getting admitted into college was easy compared to getting her to admit that I’d be leaving next year.

I eased off the gas and coasted to a stop at the red light. More gently, I added, “We’ll practice in the spring when the snow melts, okay? It’ll be fun.”

Mom fidgeted nervously with the directions in her lap, not believing me any more than I did her beauty pep talk. “Why do you have to rush through high school?” she demanded. “You’re going to miss your own senior prom.”

“Technically I am a senior.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Mom, I’ll probably be going with Erik to his senior prom.”

“It’s not the same.”

I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. Unbidden, my hot, swollen cheek throbbed uncomfortably, the way I’d imagine guilt would, laid open. I should have taken the doctor’s advice, been knocked out for this treatment, but then who would have driven us home? Not Erik. The way things were going between him and me, even being his date to the senior prom was hardly a given. Yesterday, when I was supposed to get together with Erik for a quote-unquote study session in his pickup truck, I had outright lied: “Sorry, I’m starting to come down with something.”

“With what?” he asked.

I didn’t answer right away. I just didn’t want to get into the whole fixing-my-face conversation again, which only made me uncomfortably suspicious that Erik would never be with me if I hadn’t mastered the Art of the Makeup Mask.

“Look, I gotta run,” he said abruptly, and hung up before I could make amends.

Two hours after navigating our way out of Seattle, we drove into the pseudo-Bavarian town of Leavenworth, marking the halfway point home. Mom pointed to King Wilhelm, one of those awful touristy joints that served a healthy portion of oompah-pah accordion music with their sauerkraut. “There,” she said, “just what I need.”

As surreptitious as any look that had been leveled at me, I glanced at Mom’s hands locked together in a permanent state of worry. Her fingers were so bloated she didn’t wear jewelry anymore — not her wedding band, not a bracelet, not even a watch.

“Maybe we should just go home,” I said. I couldn’t bear hearing one more of Dad’s comments about her weight.

The traffic light shifted from red to green, and suddenly Mom said, “You’d be able to come home for the weekends if you went to Western Washington.”

“But I don’t want to come home!” There it was: the truth leaping off the edge of my thoughts where it had been balancing precariously since forever. I didn’t know if Mom recoiled or if I jerked away, but we both scooted to the edges of our seats.

Mom’s hurt swelled in the car, her feelings banged up by my one unguarded comment. Softly, she sniffled. “It’s just that it feels like yesterday when you were born. You know, I always wanted a girl.”

The topography of guilt must be made up of hidden crevasses and needle-sharp spires, because I felt sliced up as I bumbled my way to common ground. I knew that she had pushed for another try at a girl when Dad was completely done with having kids. Even as I stared resolutely out the window — I can’t back down now, I have to go, I have to get away from Dad — I knew Mom was blinking back tears. God, why did I say these things to her, of all people?

It was freezing outside, and the heater was pumping but not warming up this old Nissan. Still, I cracked my window open and breathed. My first whiff of rain-wet air was mixed with exhaust.

“Once your birthmark is gone, everything is going to be better,” Mom promised. “Everything. See, we really do need to celebrate.”

“What?”

“Progress! Your face!”

Stick to the agenda; don’t stop until she acknowledges college, I commanded myself. But I couldn’t. Her insistence about my beautification rubbed me raw in a way that my father’s comments about my ugliness did not.

The traffic light turned green, and I hit the gas, wanting nothing more than to go go go. And we were still only halfway home.

“Pull over there.” Mom pointed to an empty spot behind a so-shiny-it-looked-new Range Rover. A boy my age dressed head to toe in black was pulling something out of its back. “I need coffee.”

Coffee meant scone, which meant needless calories.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“I really could use some. But if it’s too much trouble . . .”

Which was Mom’s way of saying “yes, now.” So I slowed down, turned toward the empty spot just as we hit black ice, hidden under this innocuous, innocent snow. The car wheels spun out of control.

“Terra!” Mom cried.

I whipped around to make sure she was okay — knowing full well she was — when the one I should have been concerned about was standing bull’s-eye in our trajectory. Mom was gripping her seat, bracing herself. I pumped the brakes the way Dad had taught me.

The last thing I should have done was close my eyes. But that was what I did, unable to watch as our car slid into the truck and killed that boy.

Chapter eight

Longitude

NO SOONER DID WE SLAM into the Range Rover than Mom’s dirge of oh-my-God, oh-my-God started. I lifted my head off the steering wheel. It wasn’t Mom whimpering. It was me. I bit my lower lip to stop from making another sound too out-of-control for comfort and then forced out a question: “Are you okay?”

Mom’s panicked little breaths hung in the cold air inside our car, frozen in fear. That damned broken heater. This damned broken car. I gripped the steering wheel even tighter, hoping it’d stop my trembling. It didn’t. I turned to Mom, asked her so loudly, I could have been yelling across a long divide, “Mom, are you okay?”

She barely nodded in response, her wide eyes on my forehead, confirming what I knew but was too afraid to check in the rearview mirror. The skin above my eyebrow stung. Only then did I feel a slow trickle making its way down the side of my face. Since Mom wasn’t grabbing a Kleenex to stanch the flow from my forehead, the cut couldn’t be that bad. And then I remembered the boy.

God, the boy.

“Oh, no!” I yanked on my door handle and ran to the front of the car, catching a flash of crimson jumping out of the black Range Rover at the same time.

A woman’s worried voice cried through the still, cold air, “Jacob!”

I swallowed hard, took a deep breath as though preparing to plunge into a fast-running river. And then I crouched and peered beneath my car.

No boy, no blood, no guts.

“Thank God,” I muttered, leaning my head against the truck in relief.

“You know,” said a deep voice from behind me, “there are easier ways to meet a guy than to run him over.”

I swiveled around to see a guy near my age, very much wearing black, very much alive. Outside of Halloween and my infrequent trips to Seattle, I’d rarely seen anyone quite like him: an Asian Goth in a black trench coat, black jeans, black rock concert shirt. Apparently, neither had the good people of Leavenworth who were gathering on the sidewalk on the other side of my mangled car. They watched him vigilantly as if being a Goth guy was vaguely dangerous, like those homeless men shambling about downtown Seattle, muttering to themselves in a whiskey haze.