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

look normal?
    “Great idea, Mom!”
    She nodded again and grabbed not another piece of peanut butter toast but my hand. She squeezed. “You’re going to be so beautiful.”
    I couldn’t tell which one of us was lying — me with my fake enthusiasm or Mom with her eyes set on the shimmering mirage of my beauty. The timer on the oven buzzed, and we both jerked back in our seats, surprised. Both of us giggled nervously as if we had been caught doing something illicit, something forbidden, simply by hoping.
    Every map tells two stories: its contents — the physical, social, or political landscape. And its creation — how the cartographer came to make the map. I told other people’s stories. Not mine. But that night, while Mom and Dad slept, I couldn’t help it; I had to create my own collage map, chart the terrain of my thoughts. The urge was insistent, undeniable.
    So in the privacy and security of my locked room, I assembled my materials. My best tools were in my studio, but I had the basics here: a matboard I kept meaning to bring to Nest & Egg, now dented from tossing shoes carelessly on top of it in my closet. An ancient bottle of gluey medium that I inverted now so that the substance would drain to the top. An old makeup brush losing its bristles. And the hundreds of images from my Beauty Box.
    Sitting on the ground, I dumped everything out of the box and pawed through the ads, the articles, the marketing brochures. I almost laughed. Brochures, maps — they were both as much fantasy as they were fact. What mapmakers didn’t know, they just made up. Uncharted territory? Heck, toss in a man-eating monster. Unexplored ocean? Throw in a sea serpent. An abundance of imagination and guesswork defined unknown lands.
    I winced at the sudden sharp pain pricking my cheek. The memory of laser treatments, like beauty, was skin deep. I cupped my cheek, comforting it. So what if the surgery was just a Band-Aid? Or the promises in the brochure as trustworthy as fabricated landmarks on an antique map?
    I selected a magazine ad for colored contact lenses — the model’s eyes an unnatural violet, the shade Karin declared perfect for me. That, I centered on my blank board. I layered other images around that focal point of Beauty, spiraling out into a large circle. Models with thin, muscled thighs. Models whose foreheads could never fashion a frown. Plumped-up lips. All with smooth, smooth skin as unblemished as new canvas.
    I stood up, looked down at my collage of a map. Here, then, was the Land of Beautiful that I would try to breach.

Chapter seven
    The Topography of Guilt
    YOU WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT after years of laser therapy, nothing about the treatment would have fazed me. And in fact, for a while, nothing did. Not the pre-surgery preparations. Paperwork, check. I had filled out all the forms — insurance, medical history, HIPAA — in my studio, where Dad wouldn’t discover them. Emla cream, check. Right on schedule, an hour before heading for Children’s Hospital, I rubbed on the numbing lotion outside of Costco. Soon after, our mammoth load of groceries chilled in the trunk, my cheek chilled in the driver’s seat.
    It was the operating table that unnerved me. Still, I put on the hospital gown. I sat on the operating table. I lay down. Clearly, my four-year hiatus from treatment had softened me so I forgot what it was like to recline supine on the table, control stripped from me as effectively as if I had been strapped down. But as soon as the back of my head rested on that table, I remembered. My earliest memory of Dad was of him pinning my arms so I wouldn’t flail when the laser beam worked on my three-year-old’s face. I didn’t realize that a tear leaked from my eye now until the nurse touched my shoulder gently and asked, “You doing okay?”
    “Yes,” I lied, and disguised my furtive wiping away of the tear by brushing my hair back.
    “You need me to get you anything?” Mom asked from where she hovered