North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley Read Free Book Online Page A

themselves from size huge to size nada. The promised land of skin peels where women lost a decade from their faces. The magic wand of a laser beam: now you see the spot, now you don’t.
    On top of all those articles lay the brochure from Dr. Holladay where I had slid it in last night. As I removed the dermatologist’s information from the box, I could hear Erik’s “Why wouldn’t you fix your face?”
    Good question. Why the hell not?
    Sitting back on my heels, I almost smiled at the look I could picture on Dad’s face when he finally saw mine, unmarked, blemish-free. How he’d be forced to realize that no matter how hard he tried to control me and Mom, he couldn’t. If I had to use every last penny I had saved on the surgery, so be it. It wasn’t like I had a snowball’s chance to fund my own college pick anyway.
    “Hey, Mom!” I called as I ran to the door and down the hall. My hair was still wet from the shower, dampening my shirt. I ignored the cloth clinging coldly to my back. “Mom!”
    Before I spotted Mom at the kitchen island, I saw the lone defiant cube of butter in front of her, stripped of its wax paper, teeth marks gouging out a corner.
    “Are you hungry?” Mom asked as though everything were normal, even as she dabbed her greasy mouth with a dish towel.
    I felt like throwing up, thinking about what Mom was doing to herself in this kitchen. “No, not really.”
    “How about eggs? I can make you scrambled eggs.”
    “I’ll get myself some cereal later. Mom —”
    “Peanut-butter toast? Doesn’t that sound good?” She was already bending down to the lowest cupboard where the food processor was stored, her sweater stretching tight across her back so that it clung to her dimpled rolls.
    “The jarred stuff is fine.” I headed for the refrigerator to retrieve it.
    “I’ll make it fresh.”
    “Mom . . .”
    “It’s no trouble. I want some, too.” Only then did Mom look at me, daring me to object to her high-fat comfort breakfast.
    I sighed and nodded. “Sounds great. What can I do?”
    “Nothing.” Then as an afterthought: “Just keep me company.” From the pantry, Mom collected a bag of honey-roasted peanuts (I tried not to think about the fat grams) and dumped a good cup, cup and a half, into the food processor. Loud grinding displaced our silence until the nuts were reduced to a thick paste. Then she sliced the bread she had baked yesterday, toasted it while I watched.
    Once the bread was slathered with peanut butter and plated, the scones taken out of the oven and buttered, and Mom and me at the table sitting across from each other, she looked lost again, her job done. She took a bite of the toast, then without chewing, took another.
    “A guest scientist visited our school yesterday,” I told her, and placed the brochure on the table that last held my admissions letter. I slid my sacrificial offering to Mom. “She gave me this.”
    Her eyebrows lowered quizzically while she read the headline, her lips moving as she formed the words: “New Port-Wine Stain Breakthrough.” Her mouth fell open, face brightening. In that moment, Mom shed more than ten years. She shed my father. Like a before-marriage and after-marriage makeover, a vestige of the local beauty queen she had once been could have been sitting before me. But then Miss Northwest Apple Blossom Rodeo Queen 1960 disappeared, consumed inside Mom’s body again.
    She breathed my name, “Terra,” each syllable gilded with hope. “I’ll try to make the appointment for the day before Christmas break. You won’t miss anything on the last day of school, right? And that way you can recuperate without anyone seeing you.”
    This was worth it, I assured myself. Don’t we all need something to hold on to, something that tells us it’s going to be fine — whether it was an explorer in the New World, armed with only a map whose edges faded into the Unknown? Or Mom with a brochure, rich with promises that my face would finally