Scars Like Wings Read online

  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.

  22

  Neither Cora nor I mention the surgery all the way home.

  A new message beeps on my phone. The drama demigod with my audition time, Friday at three-fifteen.

  I don’t write back. Not yet. Two hours ago I would have said absolutely no way. But then Dr. Sharp lifted my eyes and offered me a glimpse of the girl I used to know. A girl who wouldn’t let anything keep her off that stage.

  But first, I need Cora and Glenn to agree to the surgery. I at least need to wait for Glenn to try my luck. Sara could give him a hug and an “I love you, Daddy,” and he would give her a kidney without batting an eye.

  Unfortunately, Cora ushers Glenn into their bedroom and shuts the door before I even have a chance. When they emerge, the conversation is already off to a bad start.

  “Hey, kiddo, want to help me touch up some paint in your bedroom?” Glenn asks.

  I recognize a consolation prize when I see it.

  So even though it’s late and I have a math test I haven’t studied for, I agree, hoping I haven’t missed my chance to make my case. While we paint, I conjure every therapy buzzword I know, laying out my plan on how the surgery could help with my reintegration and my self-perception, and I remind him how he and Cora were the ones who said I should try to make a new life for myself.

  When I’m done, I notice Cora standing silently in the doorway.

  “You’ve been through so much this year. Your body needs time to heal. Now is not the time for elective surgeries,” Glenn says, dabbing his brush into the seam where wall meets ceiling.

  “Yes, now,” I say. “I need the surgery now.”

  “Why?” Cora asks. She supervises our painting but can’t seem to bring herself to pink over Sara’s blue. “There’s no rush, and you’re already doing so well at school.”

  I pick at a fleck of pink paint that’s hardened on Mom’s charred handbell.

  “There’s a spot in the spring musical. But I can’t do it like this.”

  Glenn stops painting midstroke.

  “Who says you can’t?”

  “I say.”

  I’m losing the argument. Losing the surgery. I know I could get on that stage right now without most people noticing or caring about the state of my eyelids.

  But I care. In all my dreams of getting back on the stage, I look like Ava Before the Fire, the girl who sings in spotlights. And this surgery would bring me that much closer to finding her again.

  Glenn balances the paintbrush on a can of paint on the top rung and steps down the ladder, toward me. He leans against it, his hands together in front of him like he’s about to say a prayer.

  “Ava. The surgery is optional.”

  There’s that word again.

  “Yes. I opt to do it,” I say, but I know that’s not what he means. Optional equals expensive.

  Optional means no.

  Glenn runs his hand through his hair, his eyes on the ground.

  “We just can’t afford it right now.”

  Silence settles on the three of us. The Smith’s Manager tag on Cora’s shirt glares at me. Glenn is hardly home anymore, and even though they try to hide it, the collectors call at all hours now.

  “What about the money f
rom the fund-raiser?”

  Cora shakes her head.

  “No, not for this,” she says. “Who knows how many surgeries you’ll need in the future—surgeries you have to get, not elective ones. You need to save that.”

  “I’ll get a job,” I say, starting to feel desperate. “I can work after school and weekends. I could pay you back in no time.”

  Glenn shakes his head, reaching out his hand for mine. Deeply entrenched oil stains outline each fingernail. Every night, he washes his calloused hands, trying to scrape off the overtime.

  For me.

  “It won’t be enough,” he says. “It’s just out of our reach right now, Ava. That’s all there is to it. If it’s not a surgery you absolutely need, we’ll have to wait.”

  I lay my hand in his and feel the tears dribbling out of my sagging eyes. Yesterday, this surgery wasn’t even in my realm of possibility. But now that it’s here, a small but real fix, the pain of it slipping away crushes me.

  “I do need this surgery. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”

  My head feels woozy from the paint. I sink onto my bed, tossing my schoolbag onto the floor. The bag Cora was convinced could make me normal. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

  “We’d do it if we could,” Glenn says, his voice tight until it breaks.

  “In a heartbeat,” Cora says.

  I know it’s the truth. They’ve done their best. But standing here in this half-painted room that’s not even mine, something ugly rises in me. Another truth I keep pushed down deep where it can’t get me: I’m an orphan.

  The only two people in the world who loved me unconditionally, who would do anything for me, are gone.

  I am no one’s.

  So even though I know I shouldn’t, I ask the question anyway.

  “Would you do it if I were Sara?”

  Glenn straightens up, meeting my eyes.

  “We’d do it if we had the money. That’s all it is. There’s just not enough.”

  “You mean I’m not enough,” I say.

  “No, that’s not what—” Cora begins.

  “It’s fine,” I say.

  But it’s not. Nothing’s fine. I want to tell them I’m sorry I’m asking for this. I’m sorry she died and I lived. I’m sorry they got stuck with me.

  But guess what. I got stuck with me, too.

  Instead, I tell them I want to go to bed.

  Glenn opens my window before hauling his ladder out of the half-pink room. Alone, I put my lotion on haphazardly. A petite pair of slippered feet blocks the light under my door for a second, but no knock ever comes.

  I shouldn’t have asked. I should just be grateful. They took me in. They sat by my hospital bed all those months, ever-positive Cora trying to distract me from the fact that I was lying there like a charred Tater Tot.

  They’ve done enough.

  On Sara’s bed, I open my laptop and stare at the profile pic I’ve avoided so long. I force myself to click on Ava Before the Fire, filling the screen with square, digital time capsules of who I used to be.

  Me standing with my drama girls, arms around each other, leaning against our lockers.

  #dramagang

  Dad handing me flowers after the spring play.

  #mybiggestfan

  Josh with his arm hugging me around the waist almost as tightly as the green satin dress I’m wearing.

  #lookingspiffy

  In the final post, Sara’s frozen in midlaugh. I’m making a wannabe-sexy face next to her, showing off the smoky eye makeup we were trying to master.

  #bestcousinsforlife

  Smooth skin. Wide smile. Absolutely no idea that by morning, both of us would be gone.

  As I stare at the old me, my reflection comes into shape on the screen. My face pulled in all the wrong directions. The scars are all I see.

  I slam the laptop shut.

  A familiar darkness creeps into my chest. The same insidious ache as when I learned my parents were dead. The same tempting nothingness from when I lay on the grass, clinging to the stars.

  The blackness never actually left; I just keep it at bay.

  So it won’t drag me under.

  The darkness is easy.

  Quiet.

  Numb.

  If I stay too long, I’ll never leave.

  But as the dream of a better face, a stage, maybe even a boy slips away, the darkness tiptoes in.

  From across the room, my reflection assaults me again from the glass of Sara’s doll cabinet, where Barbies with perfect skin and anatomically impossible waistlines mock me.

  I rip off my wig and throw it at the mangled girl in the glass.

  Looking at her now, I feel the same way I did the first time we met: Who could ever look at a face like that?

  Who could ever love it?

  March 30

  I knew my face was bad.

  How could I not know?

  The way people looked at me.

  The purply-pink swirls on my body.

  I knew.

  So I didn’t look.

  For a month.

  Until Cora and the doctors say it's time.

  In the mirror,

  a stranger.

  A stitched-together face.

  Some nightmarish Tim Burton character.

  Scabby and raw

  and unrecognizable.

  White patches,

  Pink patches,

  Wrinkled patches like a melting candle, frozen in time.

  Skin tugged tight here,

  Loose there—

  A skeleton/zombie hybrid.

  Like a fun-house mirror,

  Everything is slightly off-too big, too small,

  too not me.

  Fat, puffy pink caterpillars for lips.

  Pointy, upturned nostrils with a whisper of cartilage clinging for dear life.

  No eyelids to hide the wet pink innards.

  No eyelashes.

  No eyebrows.

  No ear.

  "That's not me."

  "Look in your eyes," Cora says.

  Trapped deep within the monster,

  a familiar blue stares back.

  23

  Piper isn’t at school Monday to commiserate. I text her while walking the hallway alone.

  Where are you?

  Home

  Sick?

  Bad day

  Understatement of the century. Every day is a bad day

  Talk at group

  Minus two friend points

  Put it on my tab

  I squeak by on the math test I didn’t study for and eat lunch without Piper, her weird lunch partners staring at their phones the whole time. Asad waves to me from his table of crew buddies, all laughing and talking like normal people. I skip drama club, partly because I don’t want to face Kenzie’s wrath about Asad’s chivalrous curtain-bombing, but mostly because I know Tony will ask me about the audition. I’m definitely not doing it, but I can’t seem to bring myself to say no, either.

  Piper doesn’t show up to group, leaving me to suffer alone through Dr. Layne’s lecture on the power of pain. When she asks us to think of our most painful moment, my mind shoots straight to “the tank,” aka the torture chamber. It’s not really a tank but a sterile room in the burn unit where nurses hose down patients and peel dead pieces of skin from tender, charred flesh. The technical term is debridement.

  The layman’s term is hell.

  Muffled cries from the tank often filled the burn unit, so even when it wasn’t my turn, I could never forget the threat of it down the hall. The nurses hopped me up on morphine and let me pick the background music, as if finding the right soundtrack could make scouring off skin any less he
llish. The only way to survive was to go somewhere else in my head, to separate from my body.

  Olivia, the talkative girl with no scars, prattles about the pain in her past.

  “We have to be stronger than the hurt,” she concludes. “Or we miss the whole point.”

  Maybe it’s the memories of the tank, or the more recent pain of yesterday watching my new normal slip through my grotesque fingers, but something inside me snaps.

  “What could you possibly know about pain?”

  Olivia purses her lips, folds her arms across her chest, and looks to Dr. Layne.

  “Ava, this is Olivia’s pain, not yours,” Dr. Layne says.

  I hold my arms out so my toe-hand is pointed toward Olivia.

  “This is pain.” My voice bounces off the nothingness of the room. I point to my face. “This is real. You don’t even have any scars.”

  Olivia’s cheeks flush red.

  “I have scars.” She stands and starts to roll up the bottom of her shirt, but Dr. Layne jumps up.

  “No.” She lays her hand on Olivia’s. “Nobody has to prove anything. Not here.”

  Olivia lets her shirt fall back over her perfect skin and sits while Dr. Layne beckons me out into the hallway.

  “What’s going on, Ava?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s okay to be mad,” she says. “But hidden scars hurt, too, and Olivia gets to choose how much or how little she reveals about them.”

  I kick the toe of my shoe into the wall softly, keeping my eyes away from Dr. Layne’s.

  “That’s just it. She gets a choice. I can’t hide my scars. I can’t choose.”

  I didn’t choose any of this, actually. My dad pushed me out a window. Doctors saved me without my consent.

  “I get it.” Dr. Layne points to the rough side of her face, where her scars pull her lips downward slightly. “Trust me, I’ve been there. It took me a long time to accept this. To accept myself. But I got there. It just takes time.”