It was hard for me to imagine a skinny blonde with flawless skin could have any real problems. Skin, hair, teeth: the holy trinity, as I once read in an article by a Hollywood talent agent. If you had those to begin with, you are miles ahead of the competition. Lucy had them. Well, almost. Back then, she had braces on her teeth, but that meant they would be perfect soon.
Lucy’s face didn’t even have a mole or a slight discolouration. Almost three years later and it still doesn’t. The closest thing she has to a flaw is a scattering of freckles that appear in summer. Skin like this fascinates me. I google it sometimes. ‘Girls with perfect skin.’ ‘Flawless skin.’ ‘Beautiful skin.’ ‘Celebrities with amazing skin.’ It gives me that bad–good feeling to look at people who have what I want so much.
I went to an all-girls school, which can be a harrowing experience, but I am happy I didn’t have to face boys in the classroom every day, because when my skin was at its worst, girls might have said nasty stuff behind my back, but boys straight up yelled at me at the train station with the least imaginative insults possible: ‘pizza face’, ‘fugly’, and once, ‘GROSS BITCH’. I couldn’t have dealt with that all day. My classmates wrapped their insults in the packaging of unsolicited advice, such as: ‘If you wash your face properly every morning and every night, it will draw out all the bad toxins causing the pimples’ or ‘Your makeup is the real problem, maybe if you went without concealer for a few days, it would get better’ or ‘Have you tried only using organic products and washing your pillowcase in vinegar and hot water every day?’ or ‘If you want clear skin, it’s simple: don’t eat sugar or carbs or fat or grains or coffee or red meat or anything processed or anything white or anything packaged or nightshade vegetables and especially not citrus fruit. And drink water.’
As if I hadn’t tried everything that every random person on the internet ever happened to recommend. Honey, toothpaste, olive oil, avocado, hot water, cold water, apple-cider vinegar, fish-oil tablets, spearmint tea, the juice from a sweet potato, the official ten-step Korean skincare routine, the keto diet. My skin usually got worse. It always, eventually, got worse.
I needed professionals, prescriptions, medication strong enough to deform an unborn baby. (That’s what the consent form I had to sign to take the medication said: I cannot, under any circumstances, get pregnant while taking it. It gave me hope—my dermatologist thinks I’ll have sex with someone one day!) After my skin got better, I needed steroid injections and laser therapy to help fix the scars on my back. And still—after all the drugs and laser beams and appointments and diets and exercise and creams and gels and injections and money and tears and worry and thousands of hours on the internet—still, my skin doesn’t look half as nice as most people’s. Especially on my back, which is pitted, red and lumpy, like a constellation of the ugliest stars imaginable.
My parents tried their best to be understanding, but whenever Mum said, ‘It’s just a pimple, Natalie, it’s not a disease, there are a lot of more serious things going on in the world right now,’ it made me feel more alone and more awful than anything any boy at the train station did. Because half of me would agree with her—Oh, god, I’m a pathetic, weak, spineless, selfish, vain, privileged loser—and the other half would be furious—You don’t understand a single thing about the pain I am in.
I dreamed of waking up and not having to think about my skin. Imagine the freedom of someone who had never thought about their skin, ever. Whose first thought wasn’t to rush to a mirror and check what had happened overnight—which pimples got worse, and which might be slightly better.
Lucy was that person. Of course, it didn’t occur to me that Lucy might have other things to worry about when she woke up—to me, it truly seemed like if you didn’t have to worry about dragging a problematic face into the world, then you didn’t have to worry about anything.
Later, Lucy would tell me about how she lay awake at night worrying she wasn’t doing enough: enough study, enough preparation, enough exercise, enough reading, enough homework. That she, herself, wasn’t enough. For who, for what, it wasn’t clear to me, but she was tormented by a voice in her head telling her not good enough, never good enough.
Lucy’s life, I would discover, was exhausting in ways I hadn’t imagined.
But on this day, our first day, Lucy was just a perfect-skinned almost-stranger who was sharing my room. We smiled hesitantly at each other. Lucy made some small talk about school, and then we lapsed into silence, and I feared we had reached the end of all possible conversations we might have and the silence would stretch on forever, or at least for the next three days. But then Lucy pulled a bunch of books out of her bag, and it turned out we were reading the same novel, the final in a long-running series, and we spent the next half hour passionately discussing the love lives of various fictional characters.
Later, when we were called down to the main hall, Lucy hooked her arm through mine and she told me she was nervous about meeting everyone. No one had ever hooked their arm through mine before. The way she did it so casually, I still remember vividly, because it was the first time in years I’d felt properly okay around someone my age.
We sat down together in the hall, and everyone was looking around at everyone else. Most people hadn’t even introduced themselves to anyone and I was already three-quarters of the way towards making a friend. It felt miraculous. I wasn’t even worried that Lucy might abandon me for someone cooler. I already trusted her.
We had to play getting-to-know-you games, which is the kind of thing that normally sends me into a panic spiral but, for once, it didn’t.
The first thing everyone had to say was which Hogwarts house they were in. Zach said he was Ravenclaw, Lucy said Hufflepuff, and I said Slytherin, and later we were instructed to pair up with someone who wasn’t in the same house as ourselves, and Zach slid towards me saying he lived in a house full of Gryffindors and needed more Slytherins in his life. We got into a discussion about time travel, which segued into a discussion about board games and then books. Lucy joined us, and that night I went to bed with my heart full. I’d done it. I’d survived. I’d made friends.
The next three days were, without exaggeration, the best of my life. The teachers told me I had potential as a writer, and I should develop ‘Remember Me’ into a full-length novel one day. Lucy, Zach and I were inseparable, and I wasn’t even mad that my mother had predicted it all.
I left the camp on a high. I had truly never been happier.
Lucy and I hung out at school after that, but it wasn’t easy at first, because no one in the group she sat with was particularly warm to me. Lucy had a lot of friends—or, at least, girls who were friend-adjacent—and she was involved in seemingly endless clubs and committees. I was the opposite. My camp confidence disappeared pretty quickly once I was back.
Zach went to a school near ours, and the three of us began to hang out on weekends and message each other daily. We had game nights and movie nights. We lent each other books. We started our own little three-person TV club. We shared the creative stuff we were doing: fan fiction, short stories, poems, plays. We planned a screenplay we wanted to write together. We contemplated starting our own YouTube channel. We had running jokes. It was what I’d always dreamed having friends would be. My parents were overjoyed.