I’m at my aesthetician’s office when my mother calls me with the news that my eighty-eight-year-old grandfather has fallen and broken his hip. I take the call even though my aesthetician is standing right there with the needle in her hand, seconds away from injecting me.
“So he can’t walk?” is the first thing I ask my mother.
My aesthetician looks annoyed. Her face is perfect: brows lifted with Botox, smooth milky skin, and black hair that, even pulled back into a chignon, I can tell is as lustrous as agate. Straight skinny nose. Plush, pillowy mouth.
I grimace and hold up a finger. I can feel my pencil-thin lips just begging for that needle.
“That face you’re making?” my aesthetician says in her chilly Russian accent. “You won’t be able to make that face with two syringes in your lips.”
“Erica?” Mom’s voice squawks in my ear. “Who’s that?”
I hang up before Mom can protest, and then the aesthetician is swooping in. “Just a slight pinch,” she sing-songs. It’s the exact same thing my gynecologist says right before she inserts the speculum and cranks me open like a Thanksgiving turkey. I brace myself for agony, but it doesn’t come. It really is just a tiny pinch. My lips yield, soft as flower petals, welcoming the needle.
___
I wake up the next morning with the sensation that my lips weigh ten pounds and are about to drop off my face. I’m too scared to look in the mirror, so I just touch them at first. This is a mistake: my immediate thought is hot dogs. I’ve got two uncooked sausages stapled to my mouth, so fat they’re about to burst out of their casings.
Fuck, I think. What am I going to tell Jake? I take a picture, which confirms all my fears. I look like a freaked-out duck. A duck with post-op regret. I text it to my best friend Julie, because I send everything to Julie. Then I text it to the number the aesthetician gave me. I also type a frantic message (trying not to sound frantic and, of course, failing miserably), and when I send it, it shows up in a green text bubble—making it clear that this isn’t an iPhone, probably not even her real phone. But of course she wouldn’t give customers her own personal phone number.
My aesthetician calls me back moments later, and at the same time, Julie’s texts start rolling in. I’ve got the phone on speaker so I can watch the texts as they appear, one after the other, so fast that I hardly have time to read each notification before it’s eclipsed by the next.
OHMYGOD
ERCIA
*ERICA
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO YOURSELF
“Hi, Erica.” My aesthetician’s Russian accent sounds a little warmer and more comforting than it was the day before. Less ice queen, more babushka. “How is everything? Your lips feeling okay?”
WHY DIDNT YOU JUST LISTEN TO ME
“Um not really they feel and look like sausages is this normal I mean they looked okay yesterday in fact they looked great right after the injections but now they’re sticking out super far and they’re super thick and they feel hard and it’s difficult to even talk…”
DAMMIT ERICA
I TOLD YOU YOU WERE PERFECT WTIHOUT THIS BULLSHIT
“Erica. Remember what I told you about one versus two syringes?”
“Um,” I say. I sure do. “Yeah.”
“Okay, so don’t worry. We always get a bit of swelling the morning after injections. Just use that ice pack I gave you, keep your head elevated, and it should go down within the next day or two. But I will say….a more conservative approach really would have been the best bet.”
“A more conservative approach wouldn’t have changed me enough,” I snap. I hate when people tell me what would or wouldn’t have been the best decision when it’s too late.
“Why did you think you needed to be changed so much?”
I’m stunned into silence. When I finally find my voice, I croak, “Wait, are you an aesthetician or a therapist?”
WHY DONT YOU EVER LISTEN TO MEEEEE 😭😭😭
Instead of getting angry, she laughs. “You really think there is so much of a difference?” Her voice is low, amused, intimate. I hold my breath, waiting for her to continue in this vein, but she doesn’t. Instead she switches back to a more businesslike tone. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“No—no thanks.” I realize I don’t even remember her name. Too late to ask now, though. Way too late. “I’ll put the ice on and—yup, elevation—okay, thanks, bye.”
I’m left with her voice echoing in my ears. It’s not as cold as I first thought, but certainly not warm. It reminds me of falling snow: each point glittering as it spins, catching the weak winter light, before falling to the earth and suffocating it.
__
Over the next day, my lips lose most of their enormous size, but not their weird hardness. I keep the ice pack pressed to them nearly all the time, that pair of red cartoon lips the aesthetician gave me. I’m not sure why, but I keep imagining they’re her lips, freezing and painful and soothing all at once. The lips of the Queen of Winter. There was a Hans Christian Andersen story about that, wasn’t there? Dimly I remember a book with lush, baroque illustrations: an ice castle and a witch dressed all in white, two children and a horse-drawn carriage. But I’m pretty sure there was no kissing involved.
I wait for the swelling to go down further, but then I realize it has gone down all it’s going to. This is the final product.
In front of the mirror for the fifteenth time today, I realize: My lips are wrong. It’s not that they’re too big, exactly. I’ve seen girls with much fuller lips—the product not of nature but injections—who still look great. Maybe it’s the shade. But I try on lipstick and the feeling sticks. Maybe it’s the projection. But they look strange even when viewed from the front. No, it’s not the shade or the projection or anything else I can name. It’s the fact that—probably due more to sensation and association than anything visible—my lips are starting to remind me of an open wound.
___
That evening, no longer able to put it off anymore, I meet up with Jake at the mall parking lot. We have plans to get smoothies or ice cream at one of the shops, like we usually do, but as soon as he gets close enough to see my face he stops dead.
The first thing Jake says, as he resumes walking towards me, is: “Jesus, Erica.” And then, in the same disapproving tone: “I don’t know if I can keep going out with you.”
“Are you serious?” A hole opens up inside me. I try not to think of what the aesthetician would say if she were watching us.
“Are you serious? Look at what you’ve done to yourself.”
“What? I just did it to be more attractive for you.” I’m not even sure if it’s completely true, but a good guilt-trip never hurts in times like these. “I know how you always lose your mind over those bitches who’ve had their entire faces worked on. My lips aren’t even as big as theirs. They’re the exact same size as the ones Dove Cameron has got, and Madison Beer, and Kylie Jenner, and—and—” I stop before I regurgitate his entire Instagram following list.
He makes a face. “Yeah, but on you, it looks….weird.”
“On me? What does that even mean?” The crevasse inside me opens further. It’s yawning, bottomless. “Are you saying that no matter what I get done, somehow I’ll never be good enough? That what differentiates me from girls like that is more than just thin lips and a pig nose”—I mean to say big, I really do, but it comes out pig—“and a flat chest and all that other shit? That what makes me worse is something inherent, something, like, inside me, that can’t be fixed?”
His eyebrows have been moving further and further up his forehead the whole time I’ve been talking. “You need a therapist.”
The air turns dry and hot in my mouth, like it’s been burnt. “I need a therapist because I wanted to be good enough for you?” Even as I’m saying it I think, Well, duh.
He raises his eyebrows even more, something I didn’t think was possible. “You wanted to be good enough for me? Yeah, you’ve got a funny way of showing it. When you won’t even let me—” He breaks off with a sarcastic laugh, gazing not at me but at the mall behind me, its sanitized rows of family-friendly restaurants and cheap clothing stores and chain dessert spots. When looks back at me, his gaze is still distant. “Whatever. Good luck, Erica. With those lips, you’re gonna need it.” He shakes his head and turns, walks back to his car.
“Well fuck you too,” I bellow after him.
I fumble for my phone, scroll to his contact info, and press the Block button. The Block This Contact option has a little hand emoji to go along with it, the stiff palm you would hold out to someone to say, Stop! You may come no further! Perfect.
Except he’s the one doing that, isn’t he. He’s the one holding his palm out to me in disgust.
I start crying. I don’t look up as I hear his car peel away. Instead, I text Julie. Where’s the hand emoji for her? It would be a couple of palms, not stiff and rejecting but held together, soft, face-up. Beseeching.
__
When I get home, Julie is sitting on my bed. She has come to my rescue with a huge package of chocolate cookies and a bottle of vodka.
“Your mom interrogated me when I came in,” she says. “Seems to think I had something to do with the…” She nods at my lips.
“How wrong she was.” I’ve stopped crying by now, but my nose is still running. Classic me. I sniffle. “Yeah, she was shocked when she first saw them, but she’ll get over it. She always does. She didn’t see that bottle, did she?”
“Nah, I hid it in my bag.” Julie tilts her head, scanning my face. “They’re not that bad,” she says eventually. “Way better than they looked in that picture the other day. So—Jake dumped you?”
“I blocked him,” I say defensively.
“You literally texted me saying he dumped you.”
“Well, okay. He did. But I blocked him after.”
We take tiny swigs out of the bottle and stuff cookies into our mouths and somehow, after a while, I end up on my computer, looking at nose jobs. Julie watches over my shoulder. At one point she asks, “Do you really think getting more plastic surgery is going to bring Jake back?” I can sense her warmth, the heat coming off her body, as she leans further into my space. She smells of rosemary shampoo.
“Jake?” I sniff hard and get a big whiff of rosemary. “Who cares about him?” I can feel the snot trying to slide out again, gallons and gallons of mucus percolating up there in my sinus cavities, and I sniff harder. I imagine the aesthetician saying icily That sniff you just made? You won’t be able to do that with a nose job. I banish her from my mind. It would be pretty ridiculous if you couldn’t even sniff with a nose job. “This is for me.”
“Just like the lips were for you?”
“Well. Now they are.” I smile grimly.
After I’ve looked at a few hundred noses, I move on to boob jobs. These are a bit more interesting. I scroll past photo after photo, noting the differences between the procedures: silicone versus saline. Low profile, medium profile, high profile. And, of course, the sizes: 250 cc, 350 cc, 450 cc, and beyond.
“You don’t need a boob job,” Julie says through a cookie, frowning at the screen.
“Who needs one? Nobody needs a boob job like they need a liver transplant or gallbladder surgery or a blood transfusion. But there are people who could definitely benefit from a boob job. And I am one of them.”
“Erica. Come on. Your boobs are fine.”
“How the hell would you know? I can see your cleavage right now. But I don’t even get cleavage if I use my hands to press my tits together. I’ve literally never had cleavage a day in my life. Not even for a second.”
“I hate to break it to you, but cleavage doesn’t solve all of your problems.”
“Who are you, my aesthetician?” I snap. “I never said it would solve all my problems. Just one. The problem of not having tits.” I lift my shirt up. “Look! Fucking look!”
Julie rears back, and for a second her eyes are as wide as the starving person in the photograph. “Are you seriously flashing me?” She laughs nervously. But she doesn’t look away.
“No, I’m not. Because there’s nothing there.”
She bites her lip. Her cheeks are turning red, like she’s facing a sauna instead of my naked chest. “Looks fine to me.”
“Stop lying.”
And then she does something really strange. She reaches out, across the small gap between us, and brushes the bottom of my breast with one finger. She traces the contour at the base, that whole half-circle. “Okay, they’re not huge. And they are pretty far apart, which would explain the not-getting-cleavage thing. But…they’re really nicely shaped. And they fit well in my hand.” She demonstrates, cupping my breast. Her finger brushes my nipple and it hardens like a pebble under her touch. Her palm is warm, almost hot, and my skin grows hot too, like it really is a sauna, lit from inside. “It’s not as though you’re totally flat. You do have boobs, Erica.”
I’m conscious of every breath I’m taking, of the movement of my chest against her hand. I try not to breathe too hard; in fact, I think I stop breathing altogether. This close I can see each freckle dotted across her nose; her straw-light, barely visible eyelashes; the reddish ghost of lipstick staining the lines of her lips.
Suddenly she looks up at me, and when our eyes meet I feel a jolt at the base of my spine. Quickly, reflexively, I wrench my shirt back down.
“Sorry,” we both say at the same time. After a few moments we laugh, and drink more vodka and eat more cookies, and whatever weirdness that passed between us is gone.
Later that night, I change the aesthetician’s name in my phone from Cedar MedSpa to three snowflake emojis. One after the other. Identical, although they say real snowflakes never are.
__
In a gesture of generosity, or perhaps simple forgetfulness, Julie left the vodka in my room. So, the next evening, I take care of it myself. I grab a glass and fill it halfway with a mixture of Mom’s favorite gourmet juices, the ones she pays a dollar an ounce for: mango, peach, watermelon. I take it up to my room, slosh some vodka in it, and start drinking. I repeat this over and over again until I’m tipsy, then buzzed.
On my sixth trip, just as I’m finishing off the last of the mango juice, I lock eyes with my mother, who’s pacing around the living room. She’s talking—nearly shouting—on the phone. But she’s not angry. She’s speaking to my grandfather, whose hearing aids never seem to work properly. “It’s me, father! It’s Annabelle. It’s your daughter.” She enunciates every word as though they’re pieces of clay she’s shaping as they come out of her mouth. She sounds insanely happy. “I’m saying hello! I am sorry you broke your hip. I hope you feel better.” The false cheer in her voice makes me want to cry.
As she speaks, she eyes the glass in my hand. She knows exactly what I’m doing with her precious juice. She gives me a look of exasperation and walks in the other direction, but her voice doesn’t diminish. She’s talking more and more loudly, like she needs me, too, to hear every single word.
I slink upstairs, slug more vodka into my glass, fill it right up to the brim. The mixture shivers, surface tension the only thing keeping it from cascading over the edges.
I take a cautious sip and then pull out my phone and tap on the aesthetician’s contact info. The three snowflakes at the top of the screen glitter in anticipation. I write, Hi. I’d like to see you again. :) What are you doing tomorrow night? I’m so drunk I have to erase several typos before I send it.
Sip by sip, I drink the rest of my cocktail. I check my phone in between swallows, and then every five minutes, and then every ten. But even after four hours, she hasn’t replied. By the time I’m sober again, I realize she isn’t going to.
__
Julie and I are going to different colleges in the fall. Mine is all the way across the country, in Connecticut, and hers is in California. When we first learned of this, we attempted to cheer each other up with the matching Cs, but the fact remains: the rest of our time together is thinning out. Like the last strip of road leading up to the edge of a cliff, growing smaller and smaller before the front of an accelerating car.
I finally get the lip filler dissolved in early August. Weirdly enough, this hurts more than getting it injected. A different aesthetician takes care of me, and I can’t even ask where mine is because, of course, I don’t know her name. But I’m pretty sure I know why she isn’t here right now. The shame of this takes the sting of the needle away, blurs the pain into an icy white nothing.
A few days later, Julie and I take a nighttime trip to the local drugstore to stock up on college essentials. We planned this excursion for ages: as nail-biting seventh graders, as giggling ninth graders, as suave and worldly (or so we thought at the time) eleventh graders.
But the atmosphere is far more solemn than I anticipated. As soon as we walk in, the cash register lady glares at us, like she thinks we’re two teenaged hooligans about to knock all the shelves over. And as we stock up on the items we’ve been planning to get for years—vitamins, Band-Aids, rehydration salt packets, Aspirin, Purell—it’s grimmer than I imagined. It feels less like we’re two best friends preparing for a new stage of our lives and more like we’re stocking up for the apocalypse. Every stick of deodorant, every box of tampons, seems to be reminding me that in a few short weeks, Julie and I will be separated by almost three thousand miles.
Julie doesn’t get any condoms. I don’t know why, but I don’t, either. “I guess guys will have them,” I offer.
“Yeah,” she says, nodding wisely. “Don’t sleep with a guy who doesn’t have condoms! Or,” she says, pausing and holding a finger to her lips in mock thoughtfulness, “should you only sleep with the guys who don’t have a stash of condoms? Like, the more condoms he has, the more likely it is that he’s a ho?” Her voice and eyes are bright, but there’s something fixed in her smile, something forced. Like Mom on the telephone with Grandpa.
I shrug. “I guess I’ll just have to find out.” We leave the contraception aisle and move on to makeup. Eventually our baskets are almost too full to carry, and we can delay no longer; we pay for our stuff and move toward the doors.
Before we can reach them, Julie presses a folded piece of paper into my palm. “Something for you. Don’t open it until after I’ve driven away, okay?”
“Yeah, right.” I laugh and start to unfold it, but she snatches my hand.
“I mean it! Not until after I’ve gone.”
“Okay, okay. Geez, what is it? A murder confession?” I try to make a joke of it, but with the expression she’s making, it’s difficult. Her eyes are burning; her mouth is tight.
“Not a murder confession. You can open it after you hear me drive away.” She smiles, her green eyes suddenly softening, and I know I’ll do whatever she says. “I’ll walk out first.”
“This is weird, but okay.”
She laughs to herself, softly, like a secret. Then she turns and exits the store.
“We’ll talk about this tomorrow,” I call after her, not caring if the sour-faced register lady is judging me, “and how silly you are!”
I stand right up against one of the windows to watch her walk to her car. When she reaches it, she gives me a little wave. Why do that, I wonder, if we’re going to see each other again in only a couple of days? Why hesitate by the door and smile like that—so sadly, no longer fixed or forced but with a closed mouth now, her lips only a thin, wobbling slash, an underline with no words above it.
I can do nothing but wave back. She gets into her car and drives away, and I wait until the sound is completely gone. The parking lot is deserted now, tall lamps illuminating its emptiness like tiny cold suns. As I look out into the night, a horrible suspicion strikes me: she’s done something she thinks I’ll never forgive her for. She’s slept with Jake, or another ex-boyfriend of mine. She’s stolen money from me. She’s on heroin.
I’m no longer so eager to open the letter. But, slowly, I do.
Erica,
I love you. Not only that: I’m in love with you. I’ve loved you ever since high school. I stole your lip gloss in tenth grade because I wanted to know what it would feel like to taste you. Sorry, I know that was creepy. But I do love you. I know you don’t like girls and that saying this will probably end our friendship, and that’s why I never said it before. But after that, after the other day, when I caressed cupped touched your breast tit you—I can’t not say it anymore. To not say it would be to lie to you.
I’m leaving for college tonight. I know it’s only early August, but they’ve got a dorm all set up for me already. Cool, huh? And I hope it doesn’t sound too harsh, but I’m also changing my number. This is a way for me to make a new beginning. Limerence isn’t for me—at least, not when I’m only eighteen years old.
Please don’t follow me. I hope you understand.
Love,
Julie
I read the note twice. The familiar letters—the clumsy way she has always crossed her T’s, the playful way she loops her E’s—brand themselves into my brain. My throat feels clogged, as though with weeds, or ashes.
I run out into the parking lot and call her name. The sound cracks the night. I call for her again and again. I shout so loudly I think my voice might reach the stars. But she is long gone.
