Scarred

by Joanne Macgregor

  SCARRED

  Joanne Macgregor

  Other Young Adult books by this author

  Turtle Walk (2011, Protea)

  Rock Steady (2013, Protea)

  First published in 2015 by KDP

  The right of Joanne Macgregor to be identified as the author of this work

  has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Copyright 2015 Joanne Macgregor

  ISBN: 978-0-620-67859-9

  ISBN: 978-0-620-67865-0 (epub)

  All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form of by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission from the author.

  www.joannemacgregor.com

  For Emily,

  my inspiration, my first reader, my biggest fan.

  “To be alive at all is to have scars.”

  John Steinbeck

  1

  Full Frontal

  Question: Can I do this?

  Answer: Do I have a choice?

  I’m not sure I can do this, but I am sure that I can’t carry on not doing it.

  I am dead sick of hiding out like some wanted criminal, so I guess that means it’s time to face the world. It’s been nine months since someone pressed ctrl-alt-delete on my life, and it’s time to reboot.

  Today is Monday the fourteenth of August, the first day of the new school year. Today my life needs to change. Again.

  This morning I will start my senior year at West Lake High – a different high school, in an old red brick building, right on the other side of town. I just couldn’t face going back to my old school – the old classrooms, the old faces. That time now belongs to another person, to another life.

  Today people can see me as I am and they, and I, will just have to deal with it. So I put down the foundation and sponge, take a last look in the mirror and grab my bag.

  “Wish me luck,” I say to the framed photograph of my mother perched on the living room shelf. (There is not, and never has been, a dad photo.)

  Then I head for the door, pausing to snatch the newspaper article from the printer tray.

  American Student in Africa mauled by chimp … loses ear, eye and parts of face.

  Worse, yes, that was definitely worse. At least I still have my facial bits and pieces.

  I stick this report – the latest in my collection of encouragingly bad news articles which have overflowed the confines of my corkboard and now trail in a steady line along the wall to the door – next to the piece with the headline, Toddler, 3, sustains third degree burns to 80% of body and face.

  I can do this.

  I am still telling myself this an hour later as I walk down the school hallway that leads from the administrative offices to the classroom to which I am headed, clutching my registration papers in my hand. I keep my chin up high, my hair tucked back behind my ears, my face on show for everyone to see. A few gazes linger a moment, then flick away, but mostly people just smile and nod in a friendly way and I smile back, full of determination and confidence, knowing to my bones that I can do this, and that I. Am. Beautiful!

  Okay, so that’s not what really happens. The bell for the first period has already rung and the hallways are mostly deserted as I scuttle along to room 33, clutching my registration papers in my sweaty hands. I keep my eyes on the floor and my head down so that my long hair swings in front of my face.

  The classroom is on the ground floor. The door is already closed. I pause, flick my hair back over my shoulders and take a deep breath, then I push the handle down with my elbow and stride inside. This time my head is held high and I look straight at the teacher as I hand him the paperwork. I can do this part easily, because the left side of my face is all the kids behind the desks in the room can see. I’m aware of them, the scuffling and chatting and scraping of chairs, but I don’t turn to face them. Not yet.

  Oh, get a grip! And get on with it already.

  Aloud, I say, “Mr. Perkel?”

  The teacher looks like a wannabe intellectual refugee from some hipster university. He has thinning hair, a neatly clipped goatee beard, round John Lennon type spectacles, and he wears a worn, corduroy jacket with leather patches at the elbows.

  “Aah,” he says, quickly looking away from my face and staring down at the registration form like it’s the one sheet of paper that might save humankind.

  “We have a new student starting with us today.”

  I tilt my head slightly and look sideways at the class with my left eye. I take in many things at a glance. One wall of the classroom consists mostly of big windows which open onto grassy lawns just outside. Curl-cornered posters of Byron, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain are stuck on the back wall, and the floor is red and green checkered linoleum. There are about twenty students in the room, and all of them are turning to look at me. But my eyes have snapped to just one face.

  It’s him! Luke Naughton – from swimming meets, from before. All caramel hair and hazel eyes in the middle of the second row. And he sees me, recognizes me. Time stretches out slowly and sweetly like a piece of soft toffee. I can feel a smile beginning to curl my lips, see one sneaking up lopsidedly onto his, when Mr. Perkel introduces me.

  “This is –” he checks the paper again, and my moment to go full-frontal has arrived. I turn to face him, the class and the world as Mr. Perkel says, “Sloane Munster”.

  All eyes flick to my right cheek – I know it, I can feel my response in the heat rising up from my neck – but I see only him. His eyes move to my scar. He actually turns his head to take it in, the smile stillborn on his face. His lips twist, but in a sneer, not a smile. Then he looks back into my eyes and this time his are full of deep revulsion.

  2

  Exposed

  It’s like a kick in the gut, that look from Luke. What the hell …?

  Mr. Perkel stuffs books and notes into my hands and urges me to take a seat. Desperate to turn my back on Luke’s angry look, I fling myself into the first empty chair I see – behind the first desk in the row alongside the windows which overlook the football fields. This is a mistake. Now the right side of my face is exposed for the whole class to see. Good. Let them look their fill and get it over with. I can hear a few whispers and snickers and “OMG’s” from behind me, but I ignore these – they were only to be expected. What gets to me is his look. I can still feel it now, burning into me like a laser from where he sits, behind and to the right of me.

  In an attempt to convince myself that I’m being paranoid, that I imagined his expression, I turn to glance quickly over my shoulder. He’s still doing it – glaring at me – his eyes livid and repelled and condemning. What is his problem? He’s looking at me like a monk would look at a naked drunk vomiting in the street. Like I’m something obscene.

  Well, this is a first.

  I’m used to blank looks of shock, quick winces of pity, curious stares and careful avoidance of same. But never has someone scowled at me as if I did something wrong, like I voluntarily acquired my disfigurement to ruin their view. I sneak another glance and this time he’s actually shaking his head as if in disgust at me.

  I’m hurt, there’s no denying it. But I would rather eat sloth spit than show him that. So I take comfort in anger, in mentally abusing the kind of pig who shows his repulsion and aversion to disfigurement – shows it clearly and honestly to the disfigured person in question, no less, rather than sniggering over it with his buddies in private. The rules of civilized society say we must conceal our automatic reactions of disgust. It might be natural to respond with repugnance, but we’re supposed to hide t
his under a nice false veneer of polite indifference. He, obviously, is too stupid to master the rules of social pretense and insincerity. Moron.

  I resolve to ignore him – after first shooting back a glare of my own – and spend the rest of the lesson alternating between listening to snatches of Mr. Perkel and making strategic plans to find, in future, seats on the other side of the classroom and preferably toward the back, so as to minimize facial exposure. This doesn’t count as a retreat into the concealment closet. Just because I’ve stopped hiding doesn’t mean I have to be on full display.

  When the bell rings, I let the rest of the class leave the room first. When Luke passes my desk, stepping deliberately and carefully over my bag as if the touch of it on his toe might contaminate him, I can feel the sneer. I hold myself still, unbreathing – like a small critter playing possum until the predator passes, my face hidden in my hair.

  3

  Eyes

  I have red hair. It’s a true dark red, not orange, so I don’t get called carrot-top or ginger or worse, orangutan – which is what some kids called an orange-haired girl at my old school. I didn’t used to get called anything nasty about my appearance, I used to be pretty. The GG’s – short for Gorgeous Girls – that’s what our clique of girls was called, in my old school. We gave ourselves the name. It makes me cringe to think of it now. Who was that girl that looked like me, but behaved so obnoxiously?

  I still have the oval face, the milk-pale skin with only a few freckles over the bridge of my nose which turns up slightly at the end – it’s called retroussé, according to Mom – and the blue eyes. But it’s not these things that anyone notices, not anymore. All anyone sees now, all I see now, is the scar which stretches in a red diagonal slash across my right cheek from just below the outer corner of my eye, to the edge of my upper lip.

  I know that it could be a lot worse. The scar is not puckered and it doesn’t have a thick, raised ridge. At the hospital they told me that they got a plastic surgeon to stitch it up and they say he did a great job, but plastic surgery can’t fix all scars and mine is here to stay. The doc told me that, in time, it would probably fade to a whitish-silver line. I read up all about scars on the internet. Turns out that “in time” means “in a few years”, and “probably” means “maybe”. In the meantime, I’m stuck with it.

  It ends in a little sickle, as if it was a hook just slightly lifting up the edge of my mouth. I worry that it makes me look as if I’m sneering at everything. My shrink, Eileen, says it makes me look as if I’m smiling at life. She says that I am still beautiful. Ha, no chance of that. You can tell by my eyes that I’m definitely not smiling, and anyone can see that I’m no beauty.

  My shrink also said I had to “take back my eyes”. (She has said a lot of things; some of them have stuck.)

  “You’ve stopped seeing,” she said. “You’ve stopped looking at anything or anyone else. It’s like your eyes have rolled back inwards and all you can see is yourself and that scar. You’ve reduced yourself to a three inch red line!”

  “It’s actually closer to four inches.”

  Shrinks aren’t supposed to let their emotions show, but I guess she was pretty frustrated with me by then, because her ears went red and she banged the palm of her hand on the arm of her chair.

  “It’s ridiculous! Take back your eyes and look around you at the world. Look at a sunset, watch ants walking in a line on the sidewalk, look at other people – and not just to see how they notice and react to your face!”

  “Okay, okay! I’ll try.”

  “Either do or do not – there is no try!” she said in a Yoda voice which made me smile – a real smile, not my scar-smirk – but it disappeared with her next words.

  “This week, I’m giving you homework.”

  “You get homework in therapy?” Figures.

  “You do. Take some of that money you feel so guilty about having, and buy a nice new digital camera.”

  “My homework is to buy a camera?”

  “Your homework is to take pictures. I’m hoping,” she said “hoping”, but from her expression it looked more like she was begging and pleading, perhaps even praying, “that it will force you to look outside of yourself. To look at other people, other things, and to stop focusing so obsessively on your own face. You’re more focused on your appearance than a beauty queen – it’s a kind of reverse vanity!”

  That stung.

  I did what she said. I bought the camera and I learned how to work it (no mean feat, given the number of buttons and settings), so now I take pictures and, actually, I quite enjoy it. I don’t know that I’m any good, but I can confirm that a nice big camera, held with hands on either side, covers up most of the photographer’s face. It also makes people self-conscious about themselves when you point a lens at them, and then they stop staring at you in a hurry.

  At our last session, Eileen gave me more homework. And this assignment is going to be a lot tougher than clicking off a few pics. She got me, by dint of persuasion, arguments of logic, appeals to emotion, demands, pleas, and every other kind of therapeutic manipulation, to agree to come out of the camouflage closet. Today, when I started at my new school, I had to stop disguising my scar and show my whole face.

  I have been in hiding – there’s no denying that. Like a winter creature in hibernation, I have stayed close to my den of an apartment. My venturing out has mainly been online and inside. When I have had to brave the world, to go to my weekly therapy session or for a doctor’s checkup, I’ve spent hours in front of the mirror on disguise detail. I ordered this thick, skin-colored goop called Derma Cover from an online shopping site. Whenever I go out, I smear it over the scar and the rest of my face. From a few feet back, it looks okay, but there is no denying that up-close, it looks nasty-ass. Like I have a gross skin disease. So I have taken to putting it on not quite so thickly – there’s no way to fill in the dent of the scar, anyway – and resorting to other disguises: giant J-Lo type sunglasses, carefully draped scarves, and hair styled to hang in a wave over my right cheek. I briefly toyed with the idea of getting one of those Groucho Marx plastic moustache-nose-glasses disguises but, while it would hide my identity, it would do nothing to cover the scar.

  “This camouflage is not necessary. You would care less what people thought of you if you knew how seldom they did,” my shrink said. She says this often.

  “They stare,” I always reply.

  “They’re probably staring because you wear sunglasses inside, scarves in summer and keep your head permanently tilted to cover your face with hair like some Wookie!”

  “People stare,” I merely repeat, nestling my cheek in my hand to ease the crick in my neck which the head tilting has given me. Resting your cheek in your hand is also a good hiding trick, but I can confirm that it looks weird if you do it while walking or standing.

  People do stare. I don’t get angry at them – well, not anymore. I know they’re just curious. I see how they try to avert their eyes immediately after the first shock and I know they mean no harm. Heck, I would probably stare, too – if the scar was on the other face. But it means I can never forget. I can never lose myself in a moment or an experience because their stares always remind me of what happened. I am tethered by the scar to that day, the day when everything changed.

  The me I was then is gone. It’s like an alien spaceship hovered over my life, sucked me up, transmogrified me and then spat me out into another existence. I’m different – inside and out. Those girls I used to hang out with, with their silly preoccupations and worries – I don’t belong with them anymore. They came, some of them, to visit me in the hospital, but it was obvious they felt uncomfortable. They couldn’t look me straight in the eye, couldn’t see past the injuries and didn’t know what to say. I didn’t encourage them to return and when I told them I needed to be alone to heal, they didn’t force the issue. After I left the hospital and moved to my new apartment, I ignored their calls and allowed them to drift away. There were a few messa
ges on my seventeenth birthday, but eventually the calls stopped.

  I have become my scar. It is what people notice first and remember last about me. Out of embarrassment, or perhaps fear of embarrassing me, they look away quickly and whisper to their gawping children not to stare. They look around me, behind me, to the side of me – anywhere but directly at me. It is as if I am both glaringly obvious and completely invisible. Those who stick around beyond the first few seconds don’t last much longer. They try – I can see them almost breaking out in a sweat with the effort of it – not to look at the red slash. But it pulls their eyes irresistibly, a magnet on iron filings, until they look, and then look again and then give up and move off to something or someone less exhausting, less riveting, less ugly.

  But I have promised Eileen, and made a vow to myself, to start this school year differently. This is the trade-off for giving in to the temptation to run away from my old school and begin somewhere new instead.

  And so here I am, at West Lake High, having my bare face stared at by a whole new set of faces and eyes. Or, to be more accurate, having my bare face glared at by Luke.

  4

  Freaks

  When Luke leaves the English classroom, air rushes back into my lungs and I can find enough of my voice to get directions to the next class – Art – from the teacher.

  As I walk into the art room, I notice two things. One, he’s not in this class. (Of course not – he’s probably brushing up his skills in an advanced program rudeness tutorial.) And two, there’s an empty desk about halfway up the row alongside the hallway wall, where the scarred side of my face would offend only the beige paint. I make a beeline for the seat while the teacher – a skinny woman who smells of cigarette smoke and peppermints and wears several layers of floaty clothes – introduces me to the class. This, according to my schedule, is Miss Ling.