Face (12 page)

You are evil
God has cursed you with Natural children who will walk the earth as a reminder of your...

The remainder of this posting disappears just as I am about to be enlightened as to Mum’s evil-doing. Immediately I think of Cliff, wonder if his ‘helping out’ includes deleting the offensive stuff. Perhaps an over-protective mum leaps in first to edit the messages her son receives about his place in the world. C.O.F had a good write-up; do the parents slip them in, innocently spaced?

             
The doorbell goes and I know who it is. Mum beats me to the front door, which doesn’t happen often these days.

             
“Hello Seven.” Mum says

Seven is practicall
y a part of our (reduced) family.

             
“Hi Adelaide!”

Seven flings an arm
around Mum’s shoulder and squeezes her, side-on.

             
“How come you haven’t had the baby yet? Surely you can’t get any bigger?”

T
hey both stare at the bump, like it might answer the question for them.

             
“I guess whoever is in there isn’t quite ready for...” Mum begins.

             
“Boy or girl?”

             
“Um-

“My mum reckons it’s
a girl because the bump is all out in front.” Seven says

“Yeah, I hear
d with boys you carry like a camel, a hump on the back.” I say.

It
works, Seven turns her face towards me. I’m not ready to talk to Mum yet, or to look her fully in the eyes, knowing what she’s kept from me about that bump. Mum looks frazzled as always, dark strands of hair wisp out from the back of her head. She steps back and gestures for Seven to pass. Seven makes a mock squeezing sound but Mum has already tuned out.

             
“I love your SexyFace by the way, so powerful. What a transformation.”

Same woman with
bigger lips, thicker eyelashes, I want to point out. Physically the lead part, mentally a walk-on player.

             
“Oh,” Mum places a palm on her cheek. “It was just a bit of fun.”

             
“Good for you.” Seven confirms, and turns her knowing smile to me.

“Upstairs, Miss M
averick?”

I am aware of
my face dent for the first time today.

             
“So, how are things between you and your stalker?” Seven says.

She
has taken the high-backed throne at my desk and swivels towards me; she’s reclining on leopard-skin velvet stretched across a gold frame, with mock crystal edging, a homework encouragement from Dad on my 15th birthday. (The last one he chose to attend.) Seven’s opener totally throws me as I’d just this second made up my mind not to mention him. Could she have seen me with him? Stupid. It was an empty park. Now I’ve paused too long.

             
“I met up with him.”

             
“Tell me you didn’t.”

It feels good to
get it out there; guilty-but-good, because the confession is to True. Her face says: betrayal, something of that magnitude.

             
“I feel weird about it.”

             
“So? How bad did he look?”

             
“Six foot Bugs Bunny suit, pure Natural underneath.”

             
“Shut up. He wasn’t was he? In a costume?”

I
t takes me a while to stop laughing. Seven watches my dimple with arms crossed.

             
“He had a scarf on,” I gulp some air. “I didn’t see his face at all.”

             
“You must have seen his eyes.”

             
“I didn’t get that close. I was trying not to stare- he probably gets that all the time. Plus, I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea, so I barely looked at him. He was um, tall.”

             
“He didn’t try to show you his face?”

I grab a
silver t-shirt from the recycling mountain, drape it over my lower face.

             
“What, you mean like ta-dah!”

I’ve got the giggles
again. Seven locks her arms over her face and shrieks.

             
“Hands off me you beast!”

             
“He didn’t touch me.”

             
“Not even an accidental brush?” Seven paws at my knee, one palm covering her lower face. She fixates on my cleavage, then the reedy voice: “True...I’m just like Dollar underneath...”

             
“It was nothing like that.”

             
“I believe you. Cleavage out today?”

             
“I was zipped up to the ears. I had no tits.”

             
“You had to be careful.”

             
“He’s the new boy, he has no friends. We chatted that’s all.”

             
“Could you see anything through the scarf? I mean, I bet your mind was going crazy the whole time, imagining.”

             
“Nothing. I guess I saw his eyebrows. He had a hat on, a fedora. I can’t describe his eyebrows so they can’t have been that offensive.”

             
“I hope you met in a public place.”

             
“Oh, just some alley after dark.”              

I con
sider dropping in the part about his eyes on me the whole time but I won’t get it right. The sliding closer and the scary itch and the
people need to see my eyes
and the stupid show-off exit and the
people like you
, and his whole delusional C.O.F family and what he found out about Mum and our family being about to change forever. But Seven doesn’t need these kind of details to make up her mind about him.

“True, be serious: how can you trust somebody who is hiding their face? Who knows what’s going on in his head.”

“They let him into scho
ol.”

“He’s hiding him
self. There’s a reason for that.”

“
Avoiding the stares?”

             
“You’re too kind- it’s getting to be a problem. Get a look in his eyes: damaged goods, time to walk away. Actually don’t- you’re right- he’ll think you’re interested.”

             
“He told me he’s Natural by choice- an
Original
.”

Seven snorts through
her Merlot nose.

             
“And you believed him?”

Seven
has this knack of pulling all these different expressions at once, wringing value for money from every Update. We had the same mouth in name alone.

             
“Who in their right mind actually does that anymore?” she says, “I bet he
can’t
change, I bet he’s EMS Natural.”

             
“No. He said not.”

             
“Then it’s like... it’s arrogant.”

“He’s not arrogant
, he’s...I don’t know. I guess he gets a better reaction masked.”

“Did you smile for
him?”

“What, d
id us freaks connect, you mean?”

“No!  Just...did he
say anything about it? You being a Maverick now?”

“T
here were no smiles.”

             
“Sounds like a right laugh. So when are you seeing him next?”

             
“I’m not. He left suddenly. I think he got fed up with my avoiding looking at him.”

F
or future reference: it is okay to look at me. It’s not against the rules.

             
“Good, he got the message. He’s not an honest person, True. He’s not like you.”

The doorbell goes again, three times.
The gang are late, we’ve only got thirty- five minutes gossip time remaining before school log-in.

             
“Please don’t say anything to the others,” I plead.

Seven fixes me wi
th an ambiguous look. We leave my room in single file, her shoulder grazing the wall of the newly-narrowed hall.

“
It’s only confidential because it means nothing.” I hiss.

“
True ‘n’ Cliff?”

“There is no True ‘n’ Cliff.”

Story hovers in the doorway to my bedroom; Day comes up behind her, overtakes and flops to the floor like a dog. He hasn’t stopped fiddling with his phone. Story joins me to sit on the bed, our backs to the wall. Seven saunters in last to take the desk chair, my throne, and complete the circle.

             
“Did your room shrink again?” Story says, glancing around.

             
“No Chance! Mum and I had strong words about that. She changed it back weeks ago- when she could still get up ladders.”

             
“I still can’t believe she did that to you.” Story says.

             
“Yeah, a rubbish plan on her part. She must have figured I’d start feeling more and more claustrophobic- without noticing why- and eventually skip downstairs to embrace the
family arena
. Spend some
quality time
with her.”

I don’t know why I’m blaming Mum because it
was almost certainly Dad’s idea, remote-control parenting. The truth is less amusing. Story shakes her head like she’s struggling to grasp the size of it, the depth of deception, which makes me feel all warm inside.

             
“So sly!” she says, a rightful recognition of my suffering.

Day zones in to our conversation
grinning straight whites, cheekbones that could cast a shadow. Day looks like a lot of other boys from school right now, flawless and on trend. Eyes a solid crayon blue that are meant to mean dependable- but not today. He is the only one who hasn’t commented on my Maverick smile. Not to my face, anyway. He goes back to his phone. There’s a girl- you can tell by the level of concentration. He’s self-editing to impress. He won’t tell us who she is yet, so we act like he’s fully present, and ignore him. Eventually he sticks the phone in Seven’s face, and she shrieks and huddles over the screen. Day is pleased.

             
“You’re going to want to see this True.” he says.

I guess i
t isn’t his girlfriend texting after all. Day is much harder to read than Seven, his eyes are often down-turned, unavailable. There’s a series of something to view; Seven’s peels of jagged laughter come in bursts, but she isn’t sharing yet. This is too important. At the edge of my field of vision Story extends her index finger, I turn towards her and get poked.

             
“Sorry! I wanted to see what it felt like. It feels normal- like normal skin.”

             
“My hole in the face.”

             
“Don’t you like it anymore?”

             
“I never liked it. It interests me.”

             
“But you’re keeping it?”

             
“Yeah, for now.”

Seven
tosses Day his phone back, a loopy throw as if it’s contaminated.

             
“Take it! Take it! Urghh.”

Day
reacts too slow, grasping the air as his phone hits the floor and snaps shut.

             
“Careful! Monkey-Face is after me, he won’t believe me if this thing gets damaged
again
. He says it like that: ‘
Breakage again, Day? How convenient, start of every lesson...
’”

             
“MonkeyFace, the new wild animal range for men. Get back to your evolutionary roots.” Seven flows in a Merlot-purr.              

She does Merlot
to perfection. We all laugh our appreciation as Seven finishes up in an old Merlot-smile, two smiles back, before Merlot went all vulnerable.

             
“Does he seriously look like a monkey?” Story says.

             
“Put it this way, other monkeys would be attracted.” Day says.

I get s
econd look at Day’s phone, bypassing Story, which confirms what I’ve already guessed. It’s something about Dollar’s shock announcement: Dollar is to go Natural for his next film role, and here lie the rumours of his new face. I sneer at the first image, it’s too easy: they’ve picked his broad roman nose, and twisted it comically off centre.