I know it was you
No hablo inglés
I’m not doing it.
Doing what?
You KNOW what!
I know nothing
You’re impossible
Thank you
At least think about it. You owe yourself that much
Like I can stop thinking about it. I think about it the whole time Dr. Sharp works his fingertips across my scars at my monthly frisking.
I think about how good it felt to sing again, and how much I’ve missed that part of me. I think about sticking it to Kenzie, waging my own war for backstage crewpies and Piper and girls with bandanas instead of hair.
Mostly, I think about being someone other than the Burned Girl.
But then I think about what it would feel like to stand on a stage again, all those eyes staring at me, inspecting me. Might as well dream of soaring over rainbows. I can’t face an audience. Not with this face.
Dr. Sharp makes some computer notes as my brain wanders off the stage and back into this sterile exam room.
“You’re healing nicely,” he says.
Always healing, never healed.
“And how is reintegration going?” he says.
“Well, Doctor, the native species have accepted me into their ranks. I’d say the infiltration is a success.”
Dr. Sharp smiles and shakes his head. Cora puts her hand on my shoulder.
“She’s doing wonderfully. She’s even made a friend at support group.”
“Piper, right?” he says.
I nod, unsettled that Cora has clearly already given him—and probably the whole Committee on Ava’s Life—this update.
“She’s a live wire, that one. When she was in the unit, I had to keep reminding the nurses that there were other patients. She just kind of took over—everything.”
“That’s Piper,” Cora says from her usual position at my side, my recovery binder open on the desk. “But she did convince Ava to join the drama club.”
Dr. Sharp looks up from his computer screen. “Theater?”
“Stage crew,” I clarify quickly. “It’s not like I’m in the play or anything.”
Dr. Sharp searches my face in a way that’s different from his usual scar scan. Like he’s seeing past my skin.
“Do you feel your physical appearance is holding you back?”
“It is what it is.” I lift my thighs off the paper, and it crinkles beneath my shifting weight. Dr. Sharp scoots backward on his little doctor stool, folding his arms across his chest as he studies me.
“What if it wasn’t?”
Cora’s face tells me she’s as surprised by this question as I am. We both know I’ll have surgeries for the rest of my life to fix and remix my scars as they heal, but we were taking a break from the blade. The committee decided.
Dr. Sharp taps a pencil to his chin and screeches his stool toward me.
“It may be time to consider some more specific reconstruction.”
“Like plastic surgery?” I say, my mind jumping immediately to the collection of eyes and ears and “after” photos in my room.
Cora tenses, but Dr. Sharp looks only at me, like I’m finally part of the committee. Like I am the committee.
“Like reconstructive surgery,” he says.
I start talking quickly, barely able to catch my breath.
“I have so many ideas. I have a folder—oh, I should have brought it—I didn’t know we’d be talking about this. Okay, so definitely my eyes first—right? And then there’s this really cool thing I read about where you take donor hair for eyebrow transplants, and it doesn’t look like a real eyebrow exactly, but it’s amazing, and I don’t even know—”
Dr. Sharp holds up his hand.
“Whoa, whoa, slow down, there. Let’s start small.”
He pulls the sagging skin below my left eye up slightly, closing the gap between my bottom eyelids and my eyeballs.
“I’m thinking something like this.”
He hands me a mirror, and I feel like I’m back on picture day, watching time reverse, revealing the old me. I think of all the times I’ve lifted my drooping eyes, a momentary dalliance to make sure I’m still in there.
“It would be like that permanently?” I ask.
“Yes. It would be a fairly simple procedure. We’d graft a small strip of skin from behind your ear to patch this area. You’d be looking at about a week back in the unit, and you’d have your eyes sewn shut like before.”
The last time Dr. Sharp sealed my eyes, I was in a postcoma morphine haze. I remember nurses globbing gel onto my eyes so I wouldn’t go blind. I remember being able to blink after the surgery because I had eyelids again.
Most of all, I remember the impenetrable darkness.
“I could do it again,” I say.
To look more like me, I could do anything.
Dr. Sharp shines a light into my eyes, telling me to look up, down, sideways. Then he calls in a nurse to hold an optometry board for me to read the capital letters. I make it almost to the bottom.
Dr. Sharp turns to Cora now.
“The good news is her eyes are stable. No corneal ulcers. No waning sight. The bad news is, that means a surgery at this stage might be considered an optional procedure, so you’ll need to talk about it.”
“We’ll think about it,” Cora says, her voice tight and quick, so unlike the usual friendly banter she exchanges with anyone with a name badge in the unit.
“Of course,” Dr. Sharp says.
Cora tells me to give her a minute to check out, but from the waiting room I see her talking heatedly with Dr. Sharp, who just went up like a thousand points in my book for going rogue without the express permission of the committee.
I turn my attention to a series of black-and-white photos on the walls from former burn-unit patients, each one rock climbing or swimming or something equally awesome, and each one has a one-word moniker: COURAGE for the ziplining girl with swirling scars up and down her leg. SURVIVOR for the burned boy playing baseball with one arm.
My nurse asked to take my picture before I left the unit. Said she was going to label it FIGHTER. I said no. I didn’t belong on the wall of inspiration. The people in these pictures have earned their titles, earned their triumphant “after” photoshoot. A man with one leg crosses a finish line under the word ENDURANCE.
I look past him at my own reflection in the glass, holding the skin taut around my eyes.
It’s a small change, maybe not even noticeable to anyone else. But it’s a step.
Toward the old me.
To finally earning my after.