My Life in Black and White (9 page)

Normal.
There’s a funny word. No one in their right mind would be using
normal
to describe me now.

“Alexa?”

“Hmm?”

Dr. Kamath was looking at me expectantly.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, taking a seat—awkwardly, with both feet tucked up to the left. “Could you repeat the question?”

“I was asking about the pain. How you’re managing physically.”

I shrugged, shifting my position. “Okay, I guess.”

“Are you uncomfortable? Would you like to try a different seat?”

“I’m okay.”

Dr. Kamath nodded, scrawled something down on the notepad in front of her. “Have you looked in a mirror yet?”

Just like that, she said it. Like she was talking about the weather.
Have you been outside yet? Is it warm enough for shorts?

I cleared my throat. “Not yet. No.” I thought about all the times I’d almost looked but chickened out. There was a hand mirror on my bedside table. One of the nurses, Claudia, had left if there, for whenever I felt ready to look. But every time I thought I was, I wasn’t. I’d pick up the mirror and then I’d think,
Shit
. And I’d put it right back down.

“Okay,” Dr. Kamath said. “What about friends? Has anyone been to visit?”

I let out a snort. I didn’t mean to, but there it was.

Dr. Kamath smiled. “Care to elaborate?”

You sound like my mother,
I thought.

Every day in the hospital my mother had been hounding me about my friends. Who’d called, who hadn’t. Who’d sent flowers, who hadn’t. My whole
life
, she’d been hounding me. My friends were a constant source of analysis and discussion. Which was ironic since I never said a word about
her
friends—and there were certainly grounds for complaint. The annoying church ladies who dropped by the house without warning, the high school friends who called in the middle of the night, crying about their cheating husbands. Did I bug my mother about
them
? No. But she had no problem bugging
me
. Why didn’t I invite anyone besides Taylor over to our house? That pretty Kendall, or Rae, or Marielle Sisk who went to our church? I made up excuses, like the LeFevres’ house being more centrally located than ours or me and Marielle having nothing in common. But the truth was, Taylor was the glue. If it wasn’t for her, I never would have met Kendall and Rae. Without Taylor, I felt weird, even with the girls I’d known since kindergarten. I hadn’t forgotten sixth grade, when someone wrote
snob
on my locker. Or eighth, when Heidi invited everyone but me to her sleepover. Afterward, when I asked her why, she accused me of acting “too cool” for the rest of them. My mother always said the same thing: “They’re jealous.” “I don’t think so,” I’d say. “Oh, yes,” she’d insist. “They’re jealous. Because you are a beautiful girl.”

Well. Not anymore.

“Alexa?”

I realized Dr. Kamath was still waiting for a response. My palms felt hot and moist against my knees.

“A bunch of people came to visit,” I said, shifting my weight in the chair to take more pressure off my left bun. “But they’re not really my friends.”

“No?”

“Well, two of them are. One of them can’t stand me. And the rest are just … I don’t know … other girls in my grade.”

“I see,” Dr. Kamath said, adding something to her notepad.

I felt, suddenly, as though I were being graded. “Are you, like, not planning to let me go home if I don’t tell you exactly what you want to hear?”

“What do you think I want to hear?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“Do you
want
to go home, Alexa?”

“Yes!” I said. Then, “Why wouldn’t I want to go home?”

Instead of answering, Dr. Kamath cocked her head to one side like some exotic bird. She didn’t say anything, just looked at me. And looked at me. And looked at me.

I’ll bet she thinks if she looks long enough I’ll start spilling. I’ll bet this is lesson number one in shrink school.

“Okay,” I said finally. “The guy who was driving the car … that caused the accident, you know? Jarrod…? He came to visit me, too. He’s not a friend exactly, but his sister Taylor is. Well, she
was…
I threw ice cream at the wall when they were here.”

Dr. Kamath nodded as if this made perfect sense. Then, out of nowhere, she started talking about some author I’d never heard of who wrote some book about dying.

“The process by which people deal with grief can be broken down into five distinct stages.
Denial
, the first stage, is usually a temporary—”

“Jarrod didn’t die,” I cut in. “He just broke his collarbone.”

Silence for a moment. Then Dr. Kamath explained that she wasn’t talking about Jarrod. She was talking about me.

I gave her what must have been the world’s blankest stare, because she went off on some crazy tangent about grief coming in many forms and traumatic injuries being a kind of death. “Traumatic
facial
injuries,” she continued, “like the one you’ve endured, can be particularly devastating, triggering feelings of loss not unlike those felt after the loss of a loved one.”

While Dr. Kamath psycho-babbled on, I focused on her teeth, which at first had seemed just a tad yellowish, but now appeared to be getting yellower by the second.
She must drink a butt-load of tea,
I thought. I pictured the bleaching trays that my mother, also a tea drinker, kept on her bedside table and used religiously. Maybe I should share this information with Dr. Kamath. She might not realize what an easy fix it was. Just pop ’em in your mouth at night, and in the morning … voilà!

“Alexa? Does what I’m saying make sense to you?”

“Mm-hm,” I nodded. “Absolutely.”

Dr. Kamath jotted something down on her notepad.
Why does patient insist on lying?
Or,
Why are patient’s shorts unbuttoned? Are shorts too small for rapidly expanding waistline? What has patient been eating?

“So,” Dr. Kamath said, glancing up from her pad again. “Would you like to look in a mirror now, with me? Or would your prefer to do it back in your room, with your family?”

Um. What?

“It’s your decision,” she went on, “as long as you take that first step here, at the hospital, where you have a support system.”

And if I refuse?
I wanted to ask.
Then what? You won’t let me go home?
But I already knew the answer.

I thought about the girl I’d seen in the elevator, on my way here. She was maybe seven or eight, and her entire head and neck were covered in pink, shiny scars—thick and raised, like mountain ranges on a relief map. I knew I shouldn’t stare, and I tried not to, but I couldn’t help myself. I kept thinking,
No
way
can I look that bad. I didn’t get burned. I still have hair.

“Alexa,” Dr. Kamath said gently. “Seeing your new self is the first step toward healing. Toward accepting your loss.”

I wanted to tell her that I didn’t lose anything. I was still here. Still me. “Listen,” I tried to explain, making my voice calm, my words deliberate. “I’m not planning to kill myself, so if the hospital’s worried about getting sued, they can relax.”

Dr. Kamath raised her eyebrows.

“My dad’s a lawyer.”

“Oh?”

“Uh-huh. A public defender. Which is, like, a really important job … He’s taking time off to be here. Otherwise, you know, he’d be in court.”

“Ah.” She nodded.

“Yeah,” I said, picking at a stray thread on the hem of my shorts. “So I know all about liability and negligence and … you know … all that stuff.” My voice trailed off. Words seemed pointless, suddenly. I didn’t want to talk, yet I didn’t know what else to do, so I yanked at the thread on my shorts. Yanked and yanked until it broke free.

“Alexa,” Dr. Kamath said softly. “I have a mirror, right here in my desk. Why don’t we look together?”

I shook my head, thinking no way was I going to do this. Not here. Not now. No fucking way.

I tried to think of my options, and I floundered. Because there weren’t any. What was I supposed to do? Stay in the hospital forever? Break every mirror on Earth?

Finally, I looked up from my shorts and gave Dr. Kamath a tiny nod. “Okay,” I told her. “Okay, let’s get this over with.”

Burnt Toast

FUN HOUSE MIRROR
. That’s what I thought when I saw myself.
No way can this be real. No way in hell. Fun house mirror.

It came from this movie I saw once, a true story about a kid who was born with some freaky disease that made his head grow out of control. It kept growing and growing, and he looked more and more deformed, until finally his brain gave out and he died. That isn’t the saddest part of the story, though. The part that rips your heart out is when his mom takes him to the fair and he goes into one of those fun houses with all the mirrors—the kind that make everyone’s face look warped and hideous. Only for this kid, it’s the opposite. When he enters the fun house and sees his reflection, it’s like some kind of sick joke. He looks normal.

I hadn’t thought about that movie in years, until the moment in Dr. Kamath’s office when I saw myself. Despite all the ice and anti-inflammatory meds, the right side of my face was still swollen almost beyond recognition. Puffy and purple as a plum, zigzagged all over with stitches. And right in the middle, the tour de force: a square of graft skin so black and crusty it looked as though a miniature slice of burnt toast had been stapled to my cheekbone.

“Oh my God.”

“Alexa,” Dr. Kamath said gently. “The sutures will dissolve, the swelling will go down, and the bruises will fade. Keep that in mind.”

Something came out of my mouth, a cross between a whimper and a moan. I didn’t even sound human.

“Listen to me, Alexa. I know the doctors told you already, but I’m going to say it again. It’s perfectly normal for the graft to look this way now…. Scabbing is … Color changes are … It’s actually a sign of … In a few weeks…”

Dr. Kamath’s lips kept flapping, but the words no longer registered. I was thinking back to the morning of ninth-grade yearbook photos, when I woke up with a zit on my nose and flipped out. I spent half an hour covering my face with my mother’s foundation and powder so my picture would be perfect.

A zit.

A single zit, the size of a poppy seed, which would be gone in two days.

If I could go back in time, I would slap myself so hard my head would spin.

Just Shoot Me Now

WHEN I GOT home from the hospital, the number of reflective surfaces in my house seemed to have multiplied. Not just mirrors, but things I’d never noticed before. Computer screens, shiny countertops, glass doors, spoons, even the well-buffed mahogany of the dining room table. As I walked around the house, they all seemed to be saying the same thing:
look, look, look
.

The best place to be was my room, which only had one mirror, and
that
I had already taken off the wall and shoved in my closet, so … problem solved.

I lay in my bed, wearing the same pajamas I’d worn yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that.

Outside my window, the ice-cream truck jingled.

In an alternate universe, Taylor and I would be dashing across the lawn in our bathing suits, dollars in hand. Instead, here I was on this beautiful August afternoon, staring at the ceiling. The same ceiling that Taylor helped decorate. One night when she was staying over, we’d pulled a stack of magazines out of my closet—
Rolling Stone
and
Seventeen
and
Elle
—and we’d cut out pictures and made a giant collage, right there over my bed. I remember the two of us standing on pillows, pounding the ceiling with our fists to make the tape stick.

Tear it down,
my brain said.
Rip the whole stupid thing down right now
. But my body wouldn’t listen. It was too tired, too comfortable lying here under the covers, with the fan blasting.