Scars Like Wings

by Erin Stewart

  I used to think of skin as one continuous unit, but mine is more like Sara’s bedspread beneath me—a morbid quilt stitched together. Some pieces are original, some are scarred over, and some are grafted in from other parts of my body after the doctors played epidermal musical chairs. During the early days, I even had some pig and cadaver skin stapled in while we waited for a lab somewhere to grow more of me from postage-stamp-size cutouts from my back.

  Cora works my arm like it’s bread dough, her fingers pushing in and spreading the lotion. It’s the one time Cora doesn’t act like I’m an eggshell about to crack, probably because the nurses in the hospital told her the rougher she massages, the better for my scarring. And if it’s “aiding recovery,” Cora is all about it.

  I lift my left leg before she even gets to it. After eight months of this full-body rubdown routine, we’re like a synchronized-swimming duo. I’m flexible enough now that I could do my own lotion lathering, but honestly, it’s nice to be touched by something other than Dr. Sharp’s icy fingers. Besides, the massaging relieves the itching, which is a side effect of the dryness, which is a side effect of having no oil glands. That domino effect culminates in a constant buzzing itch beneath my skin I can never quite reach.

  “So I read an interesting article,” Cora says.

  I almost laugh out loud at this utterly not shocking fact. Burn Survivor Quarterly comes to our house every few months to fill Cora’s head with ideas on how she can help me. She reads every word of every issue, often leaving cutout articles on my bed.

  “It said how important it is for burn survivors to have a support group of peers who understand them.” Cora talks as she rubs. “And I just know tomorrow you will meet some new friends, and I think it’s really going to help you, Ava. I can feel it.”

  I roll on my back so she can rub my knees.

  “It’s two weeks. Don’t get your hopes up,” I say, although it’s clear her hopes have already rocketed out of the earth’s atmosphere.

  “Well, you’re always saying how you don’t need friends—”

  “Which I don’t.”

  “And I’m saying, stay open to the possibility. Don’t let your fears stop you.”

  “I’m not afraid.” I flex my puny arm muscles. “I’ve got my scar armor to protect me.”

  Cora’s lips seal into a tight line as she rubs hard into my shoulders, working the lotion into my thickest scars. The wide bands of skin grafts pull in from my neck, my back, my arms, gathering like steel suspenders. Until recently, Cora had to help me put on my shirts because I couldn’t move my arms high enough.

  I hold my arms out to let the lotion air-dry before we begin the task of getting my compression garments over my tacky skin. I snake each leg and arm through the tight fabric, and Cora zips me up. She rubs lotion on my face last, using one finger to spread it across the graft lines that dissect me.

  “I hear Crossroads does a musical every year,” Cora says nonchalantly, like she didn’t make sure the school I’ll be going to has a stellar drama program. Like we both don’t know I haven’t sung a single note since the fire. Before, I couldn’t stop singing. Pouring my heart out to the showerhead microphone. On the highway with Sara with the windows rolled down. At the dinner table, subjecting my poor parents to my latest Broadway obsession.

  With all the smoke and tubes and surgeries, who knows if I even can sing now. Dr. Sharp says my throat has healed and all, but I have my doubts. Not that it matters. The girl who loved spotlights and solos doesn’t exist anymore.

  My eyes drift around the room where Sara and I used to have cousin sleepovers every few months. Even though I lived an hour south, in Utah’s farm country, we’d grown up in each other’s rooms, sharing each other’s lives. She called my mom Momma Denise, and I called hers Momma Cora.

  Now I just call her Cora, and this room feels more foreign than familiar.

  Most of Sara’s things were gone when I arrived from the hospital, but a few haunting echoes remain—clothes in the closet that fit me, Sara’s pointe shoes on a corner shelf as if she’s going to sashay in at any moment, and, of course, the vintage Barbie collection that stares at me from behind the glass of a massive curio cabinet. Apparently, the dolls are super valuable. Not that Cora and Glenn would ever sell them or anything else in here.

  Cora’s tried in her way to make this space my own, though. Framed pictures of my parents on the desk. On the walls, Broadway musical posters like I used to have at home.

  But this is not home.

  And I’m an interloper—an impostor trying to fill the space of two girls when I’m barely even one.

  Cora holds my chin so I’m looking right at her again.

  “Promise me you’ll give this a real chance. That you’ll let people in.”

  Cora’s earnest eyes search my face, and mine hers. Even in her pajamas with no makeup, she’s beautiful. Mom used to joke that her little brother didn’t stand a chance against Cora’s looks, which lured him all the way up to the city.

  I sigh. “Cora, the only way I’m going to survive the next two weeks is if I’m as thick-skinned as humanly possible, and lucky for me, hypertrophic scars are about as thick as it gets.”

  Cora’s lips press together again as I ba-dum-ching an imaginary drum set.

  “Oh, come on,” I say. “I can either laugh or cry about it, and I’m about all cried out.”

  Cora does neither. Instead, she holds my hands, my purply skin particularly alien against hers. At least my right hand still has fingers. Calling the stumpy, clawlike structure at the end of my left arm a hand is unspeakably generous. It’s more of a pincer now—fused fingers opposite a massive thumb that is actually my transplanted big toe.

  Cora squeezes my hand—or claw, or whatever it is—tight. “It’s your junior year of high school. Make some friends. Enjoy it.”

  I exhale long and slow. Cora doesn’t understand: even my old friends back home didn’t know how to be around me after the fire. Probably because I wasn’t really me anymore.

  I doubt many people at this new school are looking for that one special burn victim to round out their squad, either.

  So instead of a clan, I have a plan: do everything in my power to disappear. Not like a magic act or anything but more like a melt-into-the-background camouflage. The only way to get through these two weeks of feigned normalcy is to minimize exposure as much as possible—mine and everyone else’s.

  “I almost forgot—” I grab my headphones off the desk and sling them over tomorrow’s outfit draped on the chair.

  Cora tenses, probably using every ounce of willpower in her five-foot-three frame not to grab them off her perfect ensemble. She hates my headphones almost as much as I love them. Well, need them.

  “You and your music,” she says.

  I don’t tell her it’s not about the music. Most of the time I don’t even notice what’s playing. I wear them to block out the world.

  To help me fade away.

  Uncle Glenn stops at my doorway to say good night. Standing there with his signature awkward smile and the top of his nose turning slightly upward, he looks so much like my mom. Sometimes it makes me so sad I can barely look at him. Sometimes I can’t turn away. My mom was beautiful, too, but not in the porcelain-doll way Cora is. Mom’s beauty was more unbreakable—crow’s-feet by her eyes and calluses on her hands.

  My own nose used to turn up like Mom’s, too, a trait passed down from way back in her family tree. Dad used to slide his finger down the bridge and off the tip. “My little Swiss ski jumps,” he’d say.

  I touch my nose, which now ends in a round, bulbous cul-de-sac made of skin grafts. The fire was nothing if not thorough; it took all of Mom, even the pieces of her left in me.

  Glenn steps into my room, his cowboy boots heavy on the carpet until Cora scolds him. He stops midstep to take off the pointy-toed
boots that are as much a part of him as his skin, even though he hasn’t worked a ranch since he moved to Salt Lake. He neatly sets the pair against the wall and helps me take off my bandana after I get into bed.

  “Nice to only have to wear this at night?” he asks, adjusting the strap of my mask around my head.

  I nod.

  Glenn stands back, watching me wiggle the mask into place, the familiar pressure against my skin. “I’m proud of you,” he says.

  “For what?” I say through the small speech hole in the plastic.

  “For being brave,” he says. “Know what John Wayne used to say?”

  I shake my head. “I barely know who John Wayne is.”

  Glenn laughs. “Well, then here’s your first lesson: ‘Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway.’ ”

  I twirl my hand in the air like I’m whipping a lasso.

  Glenn kisses the top of my head. “Good night, kiddo.”

  In the dim light, if I squint just right, I see my mom standing above me. I can almost believe she’ll be right down the hall, waiting for me to crawl into bed with her and tell her I’m terrified to face tomorrow alone.

  Glenn and Cora walk out together, his broad shoulders hulking over her tiny frame. He stoops to pick up his cowboy boots with one hand while holding Cora’s slender fingers with the other. I watch them through my mask as they walk down the hallway.

  I look down at my own hands, my claw on one side and my scarred fingers peeking out of my compression garments on the other.

  Cora wants me to let people in. Problem is, no one’s knocking on my door—now or ever.

  So whatever high school launches at me tomorrow, I have to be ready.

  Bulletproof.

  I put on my headphones, turn up the music, and close my eyes under the stitched-tight grip of the compression garments and the weight of my face mask. Normally, my burn-survivor getup makes me feel like a creepy King Tut entombed in a sarcophagus.

  But tonight, it feels good.

  Like a protective layer between me and the world.

  Like it’s the only thing holding me together.

  3

  As Disappearing Act One, I ask Cora to drop me off thirty minutes early to avoid the crowded halls of my new school—Crossroads High, home of the Vikings.

  I picked it because it’s across town, where no one knew Sara. I’ve already stepped into the void formally known as my cousin at home; I don’t need to slide into her shadow at school, too.

  Cora’s been a one-woman whirlwind since the Dr. Sharp visit, getting my school records and talking the Crossroads principal into a boundary exception so I can attend. She’s been on the phone with all sorts of school personnel making a plan to best handle my “condition” this year, clearly having selective amnesia about the whole “only two weeks” deal.

  When we pull into the parking lot, she tells me the principal’s expecting me for a quick preclass meet and greet to “get to know me personally.” She insists on parking and gets out with me in front of the school, bracing against the frigid February wind to hand me the messenger bag she’s decided is my all-access pass to the social hierarchy of high school. I sling it over my shoulder and plug my headphones into my phone while Cora gives me a final rundown of How to Be a High Schooler, complete with instructions on “putting myself out there” and something about my medications.

  I don’t really hear this last part because (1) I know how to take my meds and (2) another girl gets dropped at the curb behind us.

  She stops midstride when she sees me, eyes wide, like she’s paralyzed. I look down at the phone in my hand, releasing her, and the girl power walks into the building, her quick footsteps disappearing into Crossroads High.

  For a second, I almost run, too—back to the car, back to my room, back to my out-of-sight existence. Cora puts her hand on my arm. I can barely feel her touch through my compression garments.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you?”

  I shake my head. That is a big fat no. The last thing I need is a chaperone walking me through the halls of high school. As if my face doesn’t draw enough attention to the fact that I. Do. Not. Belong.

  That’s a pretty big problem when the first commandment of high school is Belong.

  I swallow my fears—a skill I’ve nearly perfected in the past year—and fake a smile. If you don’t laugh, you cry, right? I hold out my arms wide, turning side to side.

  “So…how do I look?”

  I mean it as a joke, but Cora’s eyes rove over me seriously.

  “You look great.”

  “You know you’re sending me into a full-on slaughterfest, right?”

  She half smiles and adjusts my blue bandana, which is tied in a knot at the base of my neck so it covers my whole scalp.

  “We’ll pick you up right here, okay?”

  “What’s left of me.”

  Cora takes both my hands in hers with a firm squeeze. Does she wish I were Sara right now half as bad as I wish she were Mom?

  “Think of everything you’ve been through, Ava. You’re stronger than you realize.”

  I put my headphones on, making sure the left earpiece covers the spot where my left ear should be. With the music drowning out the world, I grip the shoulder strap tight and walk through the front doors, wishing I could believe as firmly as Cora does in the transformative power of the right accessory. The familiar smell of teen spirit (two parts dingy football pads and one part Axe body spray) wafts to me as I reenter the linoleum-floored, fluorescent-lit world of high school.

  A huge cardboard cutout of a white guy with a Viking hat and a sword welcomes me to Viking Country: Be Bold. Be Brave. Be a Warrior. A handwritten banner hanging on the wall reads “Get your heads ready for piking! Here come the Vikings!”

  Slaughterfest may have been an understatement.

  It’s not like I’m unfamiliar with how people react to me. I’m used to the stares from randoms at stoplights or the store. I don’t blame them; I’m the human equivalent of a five-car pileup. You can’t not look.

  I’m quite the expert on these reactions, which I’ve narrowed down to several completely reliable responses:

  Revulsion

  Shameless staring

  Fear

  Pity

  Frantic friendliness

  Aggressive avoidance (like I’m invisible)

  Condescension (like I’m brain damaged)

  There’s really no telling who will have which reaction, although kids tend to start out around the 1 zone, yelling to their mothers about why my face looks like bacon.

  Adults are usually socially adept enough to skip the panic-stricken staring. Strangers at the store do an avoidance/pity combo, like the mothers who usher their loudmouthed little ones away from me, the real-life boogeyman.

  And teenagers? Well, they land somewhere in between, which means I have no idea what I’ll face today: pitchforks or pity party.

  The unpredictability tightens my stomach as I venture through the lobby, making my way toward the office. I luck out—empty hallways.

  Ava 1, reintegration 0.

  In the safety of the quiet, carpeted front office, I pause the playlist and slide my headphones down around my neck while also tugging my bandana over my ear hole. I don’t know where to go, so I kind of stand in the middle of the room, feeling as out of place as I’m sure I look. When the secretary behind the front desk looks up, her colossal grin falters for a split second.

  “Oh.” She exhales the word with more air than sound.

  Her eyes dart to her desk as she tries to recover. When she looks up again, she wears a perma-smile, her voice loud and singsongy.

  “What can I do for you, dear?”

  “I’m Ava Le
e. I think I’m supposed to meet with the principal?”

  “Oh, Ava, of course!” she half sings ten decibels too loud.

  Classic frantic friendliness. What scars? I’m too excited to even notice your deformed face! La la la!

  “Right this way!” she shouts, as if she’s introducing me on a game show rather than ushering me into a tiny office with two men. One sits behind the desk in a polo shirt, the other across from him in a stiff, too-small dress shirt and tie that make his head red and bulgy, like a zit about to explode.

  “This is Ava Lee! The new student!” the secretary half yells. Her message delivered, she shuts the door behind her and I can almost hear her sigh of relief. The polo-clad man gestures toward a chair.

  “Have a seat, Ava. I’m Principal Danner, but most kids call me Mr. D or Big D. And this is Mr. Lynch.”

  “You can call me Vice Principal Lynch,” the red-faced man says.

  Principal Danner reaches out his hand, but pulls back slightly when I stick out mine. The fingers on my right hand peek out from my beige compression garments like wizened purple sausages.

  “Is it okay?” he asks.

  “It doesn’t hurt, if that’s what you mean,” I say.

  He smiles weakly and shakes my hand like it’s a dead fish. I pretend not to see him wipe his palm on his pants as he sits down. His hair dips perfectly above his brow, and his expensive smile reveals a row of perfectly straight teeth. Behind him, a bookshelf shows off dozens of awards. He follows my gaze to a trophy topped with a gold football player.

  “Used to be the quarterback here back in my day. Now I’m the boss. Life is funny, isn’t it?”

  I nod. Yeah, life’s a real kick in the pants.

  “Well, Ava, we are so pleased you are joining our school community,” he says.

  His eyes search my face for a resting spot. Good luck, buddy. He settles on staring just to the left of my head, so he’s not really looking at me but kind of, sort of seems like he is. He might get away with it, too, if it weren’t a tactic used by basically everyone who has to talk to me. Not like I blame them: I can’t even look at me.