TWELVE MINUTES

by Kathryn Hewitt

As those eyes locked with mine, I felt a deep heat rising inside of me. Adrenaline flooded my body, an all too familiar sense of fear and anticipation practically swallowing me. I reminded myself of what Rachel had said. Adrenaline was one of our most vestigial qualities, our fight or flight instinct. It was now employed in another way, one that was the result of evolution and fewer T-Rexes sneaking up on us.

  Excitement.

  Yes, that feeling of pure energy, that heat that washes over you as your heart speeds and the throbs echo in your ears…well it no longer represented danger every time.

  Just sometimes.

  I coached myself: this was the good adrenaline that Rachel spoke of. Enjoy it, she said. It was a free high, she’d joked, one you couldn’t artificially induce without some work.

  Enjoy it.

  “Yes, Charlie?” I blinked a few times, trying to clear my head and quiet my heart. Charlie proceeded with a complete lack of insecurity or hesitation. Everything Charlie said had purpose, and he delivered it with such sincerity and certainty. I admired that quality, that pure self-assuredness that I only dreamed of. Shut Up, Cass!

  “I was wondering if we’re still on for dinner. If you would do me the honor of your presence?” Charlie flashed his dazzling smile, his face lighting up not in hopefulness, but in confidence, as if he knew I’d never decline. “Text me your address and I will pick you up. 6 work, Cassandra?”

  I nodded and smiled shyly, and only after getting home did I realize that I’d never said yes.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Ok, Wait. What? I’m sorry…Replay?

  I don’t know how I made it home. Autopilot is truly a wonder of the human condition. It’s actually kind of scary how much you can do without conscious intent. Focus! I was screaming inside of my head, and yet the interior of my bedroom was completely silent. Loudly silent. The worst kind of silence.

  Fuck this. I was sick and tired of being a prisoner of my mind. Throwing out caution, and everything I knew and everything that defined me, I got in the shower and allowed my brain to shut off. Despite the staccato of the shower spray, I found the silence that I had so long been craving.

  The good silence.

  Or so I thought.

  In that moment, I found the only medicine that had worked.

  Pure, self-induced, mind scrub. I refused to look too closely at this, nor could I consider the concept of ‘denial.’ But it was working and that, in the moment, made it worth it.

  It wasn’t forgetting.

  It was just omitting the event from my daily mind. I would no longer be shackled by my attacker. Enough. I was in control, and whether I was approaching this in a Rachel-approved manner or not made no difference. I closed my eyes and there was nothing.

  There was no jagged stone indenting my soft cheek that hadn’t yet lost the last little plumpness of girlhood. There was no broken face, no one eyed witness to her own attack, no tearing and pushing and pressing and crushing. There was no lying broken, scuffed shoes splayed limply, no re-robing with disobedient limbs, no agonizing stumble home.

  There was just Cass, heading on a date.

  I deserved that.

  Refusing to think too hard, I grabbed some skinny jeans and knee high brown leather boots. It was the beginning of Spring, but the chill of winter was still a not so distant memory. Selecting a soft heather green v-neck sweater, I fasted a simple gold chain around my neck, from which a delicate gold star hung. The necklace had been a gift from my dad, who had never held back in material affection, but it was still pretty and I appreciated his attempt, a completely undemonstrative man by nature.

  Or he just had a stick up his ass. At least, that was what Diane thought. I laughed every time she said it, because honestly, from an outside perspective, it was his most easily identifiable attribute. But, he was my Dad and I loved him. And I knew that he loved me. He was just a little obtuse.

  Putting a slightly heavier amount of make-up on, I refused to look too closely at what I was painstakingly preparing for. I’d gotten used to my face; I only ever felt alarmed by the newfound beauty of it when I saw myself in pictures, mostly taken by Kara. But I’d also gotten used to the jarring feeling of realizing objectively that you were beautiful. And that you didn’t care.

  As I side-braided my hair, I allowed myself to inspect my profile. People would kill for what I’d almost died for. For the first time, I was secretly pleased with my new face. It was shockingly the same as it had been, I’d always been attractive, but it was all of those micro-tweaks and the calculated reassembly that had created this masterpiece.

  This Unnatural masterpiece that was my face.

  Thank god my mom had finally stopped dating my plastic surgeon. Talk about feeling weird when you found someone staring appreciatively at you, only to realize that it was in the manner of an overly satisfied artist. His utmost self-pleasure in you being his ‘work,’ disturbing to reconcile.

  But today, right now, as I applied a nude sparkly lip-gloss to my rosebud lips, I was the one who was pleased. This new face had caught Charlie’s attention, and for the moment, it was all that I had going for me. Fake it ‘til you make it.

  I needed work on that.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “I’m not going to say it again.” Diane had this annoying habit of giving up on people. I actually stifled a laugh when I had this thought. Diane had an annoying habit alright, or about twenty, but it was that she didn’t give up on people. She just didn’t like to take a lot of shit, and felt that her personal time and state of mind were of higher priority than that of others’ who refused to listen to her sage wisdom.

  And Diane, at her very core, was wise. She’d seen some shit. She’d taken some shit…and walked out the other side. Sort of. The Diane that I knew, was not the same one who had existed for the first half of her life. This was Diane: New And Improved.

  Diane 2.0.

  I secretly hoped that Diane would one day reach 3.0. She was Amazing, but there were a few aspects of her psyche that could use an upgrade.

  I knew that Rachel would say that I was deflecting. Or avoiding, or something. I was focusing on Diane, and what I perceived to be my concern for her welfare, to avoid looking too closely at my own wounds. Diane’s scars seemed coverable, and not even with that special foundation for concealing tattoos and burns. Like, she could put on a light coverage and then a sweep of mineral veil, and viola! Brand New Diane.

  My own damage was far too fresh and gaping for the whole world to see. This, I argued with Rachel, was what gave me the right to focus on stuff other than my own festering sores. Graphic, I know.

  When they first ‘unveiled’ my face, following Dr. McElhatton’s miraculous feat, my first thought was that I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to see my old face, the face that didn’t know how often truly horrible things happened to good people. That face that worried about lip-gloss and whether her trainers were getting too dorky looking…the face of Cass.

  Then I thought, hey, maybe I’m hideous. That might not be too bad. If I were unrecognizable, then my outside would match my inside. It was less disquieting that way. Cut and Dry.

  But cut he had, delicately, infinitesimally, rearranging nerves and muscle, smoothing facial tissues, mirroring the unscathed side, all with the finesse and intricacy of an artist. A very trained artist.

  It was at that same moment, the moment in which I realized that neither of my fears had been realized, because let’s be honest…I didn’t really want to be Hideous…that I comprehended two things.

  I wasn’t Hideous.

  I was Beautiful.

  A little fresh looking, shiny and reddish, the glow of newly stretched and arranged skin settling into its new home. But even subjectively, I saw that I was the new and improved Me. As I was grappling with this bombshell, I understood the second truth of the moment.

  This wasn’t about Me. As everyone stared at me, examining me as the specimen that I had become too comfortable being, as they cooed and awed, I unders
tood. As my own mother pointed to an area of my nose and said, “See, you even got that little bump out that had always prevented her from having a perfect nose!” I got it. This was all about the glory of Dr. McElhatton. His amazing execution of scalpel and finely mastered sutures, practically invisible to the naked eye, his eye for detail, his ability to identify and reconstruct symmetry, all of it boiled down to this: He was the hero in this story. My story.

  And, it was all to help my mom and sister, help them to avoid and deny the damage that had been inflicted on me. It made it easier to look at me and not see the brokenness that I was, remember the horror that I had endured. I couldn’t blame them, either.

  Life Sucked.

  My unveiling, as abstract as that sounded, was just that.

  “She looks the same…but Better…” My sister marveled, trailing off as if this was the part of all of this that confounded her. She. This momentous event, this Ultimate presentation of a highly anticipated piece of artistic exhibition, as esoteric and meta as it could get, was Me. But Better.

  But wait. Dr. McElhatton had done something even more amazing than reconstructing my poor mediocre I-thought-it-was-pretty-good face, the face that ‘God’ had given me. Dr. Richard McElhatton, trained by the hand of man, had done something even God couldn’t: He’d made me Better.

  So how come I felt so much worse?

  Later, after everyone had gotten over how Gorgeous I’d come out, as if I’d gone for some routine freshening up, a little tightening and maintenance, I locked myself in my room. Not that anyone would bother me; it seemed that they wanted to be reminded of me as little as I did. Go figure.

  Wearing just my nightshirt, an oversized one that Kara had picked up for me during a Spring Break that said, “Palm Springs…You’ll Have the Best Date of Your Life Here,” I sat down at my vanity. Pulling my hair back, so as not to miss a square inch of this masterpiece, I sat before my dual sided mirror, the kind that was magnified on one side. Scared to look into that side on a good day, I righted the mirror to the standard reflection side. I was treated to a straight on image. Me. Cass… It physically hurt to look at myself. It was probably my imagination, but all of my injuries flared; my surgical sites, my mutilated and reconstructed arm, my face, all throbbed. Rachel was going to have a field day.

  How could I reconcile this new exterior with my war-torn insides? I was ravaged; everything inside of me felt held together with a rubber band and some paper clips. I was afraid to breathe too heavily, in case a twist-tie came loose.

  But I was flawless to everyone. Flawless and scarred and stripped bare. But no one knew…and those who did, mostly chose not to remember. I didn’t blame them. Wouldn’t you erase something more horrible than you could imagine from your psyche? Self-preservation is the inherent reason that humans exist today. Darwinism at its finest. I smirked to myself and even that looked pretty in my reflection. My blue eyes were the only part that remained, but you’d have to look closely to see the slight dullness of the color, the lack of that hottest blue flame.

  And no one really looked me in the eye these days.

  Like I said, I didn’t blame them.

  Giving up on my face, because let’s face it, talk about First World Problems, I crawled into my old familiar bed, pulling my fluffy duvet up to my chin. Inhaling the comforting scent of detergent, I forced myself to let it go.

  ‘Letting it Go,’ was what I called a trick that Rachel had taught me. I’d complained about repetitive thoughts preventing me from sleep and she knew how I felt about pills…I’d had more than my share during my recovery and I’d hated how they made me feel. Rachel said to harness and focus those thoughts. Turning them off was difficult, so take them and use them meditatively. I was to focus on all of my body parts, starting at my extremities, willing them and focusing on making them ‘heavy.’ Sink in, your feet are feeling heavy and they’re sinking down. All of the way through my body, and shockingly, it worked. And trust me, I’ve spent entire nights telling myself to stop thinking. Yeah, not so successful.

  I was at my shoulders when I must have fallen asleep.

  ✧✧✧

  “You’re more beautiful up close,” he huffed into my left ear, turning a compliment into something grotesque. His heat was almost unbearable, but it was getting hard to differentiate it from the blood that was oozing down the side of my face. That was scalding. It was so hard to be Present; I was Everywhere. I was the soul that was being violated in the most violent way, I was outside looking down. I was the brain that couldn’t reconcile that this was happening, I was the brain that was meticulously cataloguing every detail of the event as it transpired. I was the body that hurt so much more than I knew possible, the body that was ultimately focused on living.

  And I was the heart.

  I was the heart that was so hopeful and full. The heart that continued to beat from beginning to end of the assault, which gave reassuring thunderous pounds in my ears as if to remind me that I was still alive. The heart that had never beat so fast, never had this level of adrenaline pumping through it.

  The heart that had never had a chance to love.

  The heart that only wanted the chance to love.

  The heart that now simply wondered if it would ever be able to sew itself back together from the tatters it had become.

  I bolted upright in bed and then lay back and cried. I hadn’t been doing too much of it lately, pretty much completely dried up and all, but today was just too much. Too damn much for my tiny shredded heart to withstand. It felt like I had nothing left that was Mine. Dr. Richard had stolen the final piece. The tears cascaded down my ideally curved cheek, the symmetry of my face lost on the pillow that absorbed my burden. Tonight, He’d Won.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I was on a date. Holy Mother of All Cockatiels, I was currently riding in Charlie’s car, sitting shotgun on some very nice leather interior. I’d always seen his car, a pretty snazzy gunmetal BMW, which stood out in a sea of students’ hand-me-down clunkers. But now that I was riding in it, admiring how his denim-clad quads were flexing as he stepped on the pedal, the luxury set in. Wood grain paneling, manual transmission, (I was not ready to inquire as to his need for that kind of ‘power’), sun roof, the works. And temperature controlled seats.

  My ass solutes you, BMW!

  Charlie had been right on time, and by some stroke of universes aligning, no one was home. I knew I looked good, but that was not my concern. Could I act like a non-alien species?

  Charlie didn’t give me much chance to contemplate my fluency in Klingon, grabbing my hand and looking searchingly into my eyes. His hazel ones seemed to flare like they had a golden flame in them when he looked at me, and it heated me to my core. I felt a blush creeping but ignored it and just gave him what I could: a smile.

  “Beautiful,” he breathed, before he kissed me on the forehead. Good thing he couldn’t see my cheeks now! “Breathe!” Diane said in my head. I inhaled and got a lungful of Charlie: Man, Heat, Spice, Detergent. Wow.

  Before I could turn into a molten puddle, he tugged the hand that he hadn’t released and led me to his car, which he’d parked in the driveway. My mom would have Hated that! I smiled, allowing Charlie to interpret it as he chose. I’m pretty sure that he thought it was about him. That made my smile grow, knowing that I’d been thinking about my Mom!

  “So, Cassandra, you look gorgeous as usual, but that’s a given.” He’d settled in and we both had our seatbelts on. Charlie was putting the car into gear as he said this, turning to wink at me before he pulled out of the driveway. My heart sped up with the speedometer.

  “I have to admit, I haven’t gotten you out of my mind since you accepted my invitation…Well, truthfully?” He looked at me with sincerity in his eyes, which I tried to mirror back but probably only succeeded in displaying my own confusion. “You’ve been in my head for a long time.” He’d turned back to the road, but the electricity that accompanied his statement remained, shooting through my whole body.


  Not entirely pleasantly.

  Shaking it off, I forced a laugh. “So, isn’t there like some rule against TAs dating their students?” I asked teasingly, hoping to shift the mood to a more playful one. I hadn’t realized how intense Charlie was when he had me as a captive audience. And I kinda didn’t mind…but I was Bambi and my legs were a little wobbly. I needed solid footing.

  Chalie laughed and it warmed me again. He laughed with his whole body and it was like music. “Maybe. But I’m pretty sure they don’t really care. And I’m pretty sure that we’re two consenting adults.” He said this last part as a joke.

  I wasn’t Normal.

  Statements about Consent scared me.

  I pushed that out of my head. I was Not going to ruin this. I was on a Date with a Super Hot and Smart guy, and he liked me. Me. The weird ruined Me who he had grown to know. The quiet observer, the constant analyzer. For some reason, he liked me and I was Not Going To Ruin It.

  “So tell me about yourself, Charlie. I know that sounds lame…” I trailed off, feeling just that: lame. Charlie’s smile buoyed me.

  “I grew up in Missouri, but I knew I needed to get out. I needed more than that life. I graduated from undergrad and was done. So I moved to Northern California with nothing but my shitty Oldsmobile, my guitar, and my degree. It’s kind of boring…” he paused, glancing at me as if seeking permission to continue to bore me, and I guess he saw what he was looking for because he pressed on. “I’ve had just about every transient job you can have, busboy, waiter, retail worker, I was a sommelier…” Ok… no clue as to what that was… “So I know a lot about wine.” Oh. “Even worked at a winery for a while, doing just about everything there. Worked my way up here to Washington and found my niche.” He completed his summary with a smile, and an apologetic shrug. Did he think I’d suspected that he was Special Ops? C’mon Charlie.