‘You can live with whoever you want,’ Dad says, voice bright, as though he’s handing me a present.
That’s not the plan though. The plan was for me to keep living at home, in this house, with both of them, when I go to university next year, and after that. I would remain here for the foreseeable future. There was no end date on our situation. That’s our plan. That’s been our plan from the beginning.
‘I don’t want to move.’ My voice shakes a little, and I sound whiny and pathetic instead of firm.
‘Honey, no matter what happens, you’ll always have a home,’ Mum says, which is the kind of vague wording designed to comfort but only raises more questions. No matter what happens? What else is going to happen?
‘You’ll have two homes,’ Dad says, in his most upbeat voice.
I don’t want two homes. Who wants two homes? Home only makes sense in singular form.
I look at them both, with their identical please-adjust-quickly-to-our-terrible-news fake smiles, and I feel a sense of dread.
This is the end of life as I know it.
2
My Face and Other Problems
I was a cute child. I don’t say this as a boast, but as a matter of truth. A woman once came up to my mother and asked if she had thought about getting me into child modelling.
‘Your daughter would be perfect for our catalogue. She’s got the right look.’
The woman was talking about a catalogue for a chain of discount chemists, and the ‘right look’ probably meant ordinary, gap-toothed and relatable, so we’re not talking high glamour, but the point is that my face was once considered photogenic. I had shiny dark hair. Chubby, unmarked cheeks. Twinkling brown eyes. (Okay, I don’t know if they were ever actually twinkling but it’s certainly possible that they were in the right light.) My favourite clothes were my purple glitter sneakers and a T-shirt with a unicorn on it. I even have a name perfectly suited for a pretty child: Natalie.
Then, puberty.
Puberty is treated by adults like it’s a big joke. Any mention of it seems to be accompanied by humour and knowing smiles. There’s talk of voices breaking and hair growing. If I thought much about it at all beforehand, I assumed I would start wearing a bra and have to figure out how a tampon works. But puberty, as it turns out, was an assault. My body changed fiercely and terribly, and I didn’t know how to handle it.
I went from being a straight-up-and-down stick figure to a scribble of hips, stomach, breasts, thighs and stretch marks. I didn’t even know stretch marks were a thing. I truly did not know they existed until they appeared on my body. When I googled them, all the information was geared towards pregnant women. I felt like a freak, with angry red lines slashing across my hips, lower back and down my inner thighs, like a graffitied wall.
Once, a girl from my class saw them when I was changing for PE, and she said, ‘What happened?’ and pointed at my hip, and I said, ‘My cat scratched me,’ and she widened her eyes with horror but she believed me because that’s what my stretch marks looked like—savage claw marks from a monster cat.
But the stretch marks were nothing compared with the pimples. A regular scattering of pimples at first, and then more, and more. Then pimples that turned, almost overnight, into deep, cystic acne. Thick, hard, welt-like lumps formed under my skin on my back, shoulders, neck and face. That’s not a cool story, or a tragedy that people want to hear about. It’s gross. I was gross. I woke up thinking that every day for a long time.
My period was heavy and really painful, and managing it felt like a full-time job. I obsessively checked my school dress, my bedsheets, my underwear, my jeans, the couch, the car seat, the train seat—anywhere there could be a hint of what was happening to me. I looked at the back of myself in any reflective surface I could find. I was paranoid about leaving a trace of evidence. The pimples on my shoulders would sometimes burst and leave stains on my top. I was messy, leaking, uncontained.
My body was a shameful disaster. I was too embarrassed to go outside unless I absolutely had to. No, it was worse than that. I was too embarrassed to exist. I hunched down and inwards, trying to hide every part of me. I hated how much space I took up, because I got taller too. I was huge and hulking. I felt like everywhere I went, I was being seen and noticed in a way I didn’t want to be seen and noticed. Even now, on my very best skin days, I’m uncomfortable with people looking at my face. Eye contact makes me feel exposed.
At thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, going to school was hard. Friday night would arrive and I would be filled with such relief. I would unclench and lie on my bed and breathe deeply and reassure myself: I don’t have to go outside or see anyone other than my parents for the next two whole days. The outside world was a place where I was constantly on edge, waiting for someone to look at or comment on my bad skin. I always carried a book with me so I had an excuse to be looking down, and I rarely spoke up in class so that no one would have a reason to look at me directly. I grew my hair very long and let it fall over my face whenever I could. I would part it on different sides depending on which half of my face needed more covering. I avoided sitting in the brightest part of a room. I watched hundreds of hours of YouTube makeup tutorial videos.
I would never look in a mirror in the school bathrooms, because I didn’t want to meet anyone’s eyes, but I carried a little compact mirror in my pocket all the time so when I was alone in the toilet cubicle I could check my face slowly, carefully and without shame and see how bad it was. I would smuggle concealer and foundation in too, and reapply it constantly throughout the day.
Acne hurts. No one talks about how painful it is. Well, no one talks about it, at all. My face, my back, my shoulders, they all ached. If someone bumped me, I would flinch away. If I accidentally knocked a pimple on my face, involuntary tears would pop into my eyes. I had to slink and manoeuvre my way through the world, trying not to be seen, touched or noticed at all.
Somewhere around the age of thirteen, a new personality appeared along with my pimples. Reluctant Natalie. Anxious Natalie. Bitter Natalie. Neurotic Natalie. I was never these things before, and I wasn’t them, not really, but that’s how people saw me, and so that’s who I became.
I’m eighteen now, and sometimes I still want to stand up and scream, This isn’t really me.
This is all a roundabout way of saying I became something of a shut-in during high school. I mean, I’m still something of a shut-in now, but I was a pathological shut-in for a long time.
And until my face was fixed, until I met Zach and Lucy, until I got a bit tougher, my parents were all I had.
3
Something Obscene on a Park Bench
The day after the Christmas bombshell, I go to Zach’s house and walk in through the back door without knocking. I’ve been friends with Zach for a few years now, and I still get a secret thrill out of being allowed to walk into his house unannounced. It feels like I’ve unlocked the highest friendship level.
‘Hello,’ I call out.
‘Natalie.’ Lucy appears at the end of the hall. Lucy and Zach have been officially together for nine months, which is a very long time at our age, practically a marriage, but it’s a situation I am still adjusting to. We were once a friendship group of three individuals—three equals, three devoted but platonic points of a triangle—and now we’re a breathlessly in love couple (them) and a person who spends her Saturday night taking photos of the back of her head in a mirror so she can understand what it’s like to see herself from behind (me).