North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley Read Free Book Online

couldn’t have been an accident that he moved to the one part of the planet Dad never wanted to discuss, never wanted to visit, never wanted to acknowledge existed: China.
    On my second set of sit-ups, focusing on my lats for that ultimate, well-balanced abdomen, I heard a faint murmur downstairs, barely audible. Mom. I stopped and hugged my knees to my chest hard, listened even harder. Nothing more came from her.
    Dad and his storm cloud of doubt? That, on the other hand, was loud and clear: “No. She’s not going. And how would you know anything about the right choice for college?”
    Silence.
    Then Dad: “Oh, that’s right. You didn’t go to college.”
    In rebuke, without fear of consequences, Dad slammed the door, his special way of telling Mom she didn’t deserve his respect. Mom’s hurt silence echoed all the way over to my bedroom.
    A better daughter would have run down the hall without hesitation, without thought, to soothe her mother, but I knew how important alone time was after a Dad-thrashing. In history last year, we watched a grainy video of Jackie O, half a moment after JFK had been shot. Her first instinct was to pick him up, press him together, make him whole. That’s how I bet Mom felt now, except that it was her own shattered pieces she was trying to press back together, to make whole.
    Then, like a broken movie reel — sound effects delayed after the action has long since rolled — came Mom: pot clanking against the iron of the gas stovetop. I had no doubt that Mom was crying while she cooked, salting domesticity with anguish, the recipe of her life.
    Outside, Dad’s truck revved. He usually sent his flunky (that would be me, since Mom never drove in the snow) to do his errands. I couldn’t imagine what took him out this early in the morning, and I didn’t care. He was gone.
    Another crash from the kitchen. I gave up on stomach crunches; my stomach ached enough as it was. I flipped over and started on push-ups. God, how many times had I begged Mom to divorce him already?
    “I don’t want you to have a broken family” was Mom’s standard response.
    “Mom, it’s already broken.”
    “I’ve never worked” was her other favorite excuse, and she’d flush with embarrassment while she scoured or baked or continued whatever chore she was doing.
    “You could get a job,” I’d tell her.
    “Doing what, exactly?”
    Now, I headed to the shower, let the water cascade over me, washing me clean. Over my arms, down my back, on my face. Then it was time to start the laborious task of covering my cheek. My vanity table — a present from my parents for Christmas when I was eight — could have doubled as a chemistry lab, filled with so many vials in a spectrum of beiges to cover my birthmark year-round: darker shades to match my tan in the summer, lighter for my winter paleness. I picked up a cotton ball, spritzed it with toner, and dabbed across my forehead, down my nose, my good cheek, then my bad.
    That was the only thing Mom lived for these days: my face.
    My face.
    Hastily, I scooted my chair out from behind the vanity table and scrabbled under my bed, my cheek to the floor, stretching until my fingertips skimmed the rough cardboard edges of a box. For a good two months, I hadn’t looked at this box. Weird how twice in twelve hours, I was pulling it out, my Beauty Box.
    In the morning light, I could see the smudges that my fingerprints left in the dust last night. I wiped the lid clean with my sleeve, revealing the plain brown of the box. At first, I kept meaning to decoupage it, lay down strips of beautiful, handmade papers from India, Japan, and China in glowing reds and fiery oranges, but I never got around to it. First, I couldn’t find the exact papers I could envision so vividly in my head. Then primping the box didn’t seem worth the bother, since I’d stopped believing in the articles I clipped out of magazines: the fairy tales of girls my age who dropped fifty pounds, whittling