The Venus Fix by M. J. Rose Read Free Book Online Page A

mask? Why? Didn’t you want them to see you?”
    She lowered her head.
    “Blythe?”
    “I didn’t want to be recognized. There probably wasn’t much chance of that, but sometimes there are coincidences. Can you imagine if one of my professors…or another student—” She broke off and sat there looking down at her hands.
    Blythe reminded me of the pre-Raphaelite painting on the cover of a book I had read about adolescent girls. The painter depicted Hamlet’s poor drowned Ophelia in a river, her handsby her sides, her hair floating around her shoulders; the only color in her pale face was her still-red lips.
    “Do you still have the mask?”
    She nodded.
    “Have you worn it since you stopped going online?”
    “Not until last night. I took it out after I spoke to her. Took it out and put it on and looked in the mirror for a long time and tried to see myself the way all those men must have seen me. After a few seconds, it was like I was looking at a stranger. As if I’d separated from myself.”
    She curled her fingers into tight fists and frowned.
    “What are you thinking? You look upset.”
    Anger twisted her mouth.
    “What is it?”
    “What’s wrong with how I look?”
    “Nothing.”
    “You said I look upset. What does that mean? How does my face look?” Blythe’s anger excited me. We were getting somewhere.
    “You seem to be upset about something. I can see it on your face.” I repeated the words that I thought had sparked her reaction.
    She shook her head.
“What’s wrong with your face? What’s wrong with your eyes? Why do you look different?”
She was saying it all in a fake singsong voice and was clearly in distress.
    “Blythe, what are you thinking about?”
    Another moment of silence. She bit her bottom lip, held it between her teeth for a moment, then finally took a breath and made her confession. “When I was born, I had cataracts on my eyes. Did I tell you that?”
    “No.”
    “It’s pretty rare, but it happens. I had three surgeries beforeI was ten years old. I had to wear glasses. Normally glasses aren’t the worst thing. A few other kids had glasses. But regular ones. Mine were the thickest, most horrible glasses you ever saw. But that wasn’t all. It was my eyes. They looked weird.” She took a long pause. “It was awful. You know how kids are. If there had been another girl with a worse affliction, she would have been the one they picked on. But it was a small class and I was the only one with any kind of physical deformity. So I became the outcast. The one who was never invited to the popular girls’ parties. Always the last one picked for teams.” Her eyes teared up.
    I’d never seen her cry before and was surprised how much younger she suddenly seemed. Something inside of me lurched.
    “When I was fourteen I got corrective contacts,” Blythe continued. “You need to really see my eyes. To understand.”
    I wasn’t expecting what happened next. I thought she was going to describe it to me, but instead she lowered her head and plucked the contact lens out of her right eye.
    Then she looked up at me.
    Her left eye, the one with the lens still covering it, was green, intense and lovely, but the iris of her right eye was twice as large as normal and the black wasn’t a pure circle but seeped into the outer ring of green, spoiling it. She focused on me but her eye didn’t appear to be seeing me at all. I couldn’t find her, couldn’t connect to her.
    Yes, it was noticeable. I wouldn’t have gone so far as to describe it as a deformity, but to a young girl it must have seemed like one.
    Blythe didn’t let me look at her naked eye for long. She popped the painted lens back as if it was painful to let me see her. It hid the flaw.
    “Everything changed once I got these corrective lenses. Forthe first time, when I looked in the mirror I saw someone I recognized, and she was suddenly pretty, Dr. Snow. Boys noticed me. No one teased me anymore. One day I was a freak, the