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  “What did Eric mean when he said you’re such a good guy?”

  Chirag shrugs. “Eric’s a jerk. Everyone knows he’s a jerk.”

  I shake my head. Why would Chirag say Eric is a jerk for calling him a good person?

  Then it hits me. It’s so obvious that I can’t quite believe it took me this long to figure it out.

  Chirag pulls into my driveway, and I unclick my seat belt and open my door before he’s even put the car in park. I move quickly, so that we can avoid the whole should we or shouldn’t we hug or kiss good-night moment. When I close the door and wave good-bye, I’m careful to avert my eyes from my reflection in the rearview mirror. Chirag shifts into reverse and drives away. I watch his taillights fade away into the fog.

  Chirag is a good guy, because a lesser man would have broken up with a freak like me.

  If my parents notice that my night out with Chirag was unusually short, they don’t say so. Instead, they leave me alone in my room, where I sit with the door closed until my mother knocks at eight o’clock sharp to remind me it’s time to take my evening pills. I guess it’s a good thing Chirag and I didn’t linger at dinner. I might have missed a dose by a few minutes.

  “Dr. Boden said that I should be in charge of my medicine,” I remind my mother as she enters my room with a glass of water filled to the brim, but she ignores me. She stands silently as I take pill after pill, like she’s watching an unruly patient in a mental hospital. What will she do next year, when I’m living in a dorm?

  I take the big ones first, to get them over with. I hold the water glass in my right hand—I’m scared I would drop it if I used my left. I’ve never had trouble swallowing pills—when I was little, I used to swallow chewable Tylenol, just to show that I could—but then, I never had to take this many before.

  I’m on my third pill when I decide that I know which is worse: The kids I’ve gone to school with for the past three years looking at me was definitely worse than strangers who don’t know what happened to me. Eric and Erica stared like I was a jigsaw puzzle whose parts needed to be rearranged.

  And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

  On my fifth pill, I decide that there is no chance, no way whatsoever, that I can handle seeing dozens, hundreds, of faces just like Eric’s and Erica’s on the first day of school in just a few days. And it’s not a matter of needing more time. I will never be able to handle all those people: their sympathy and their horror, their sadness and their disgust.

  The final pill gone, I take a long swig of water and say, “I think you should homeschool me.”

  “What?” Mom asks, her back to me. She’s too busy counting pills to have heard me.

  “I think you should homeschool me,” I repeat. “Dad!” I shout, because I think he’s more likely to take my side. When he comes to my door, I say, “I’d like to be homeschooled.”

  He doesn’t respond, but at least he doesn’t ask why. Why is painfully obvious to anyone in my eye-line. Finally, Mom says, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

  “Why not?” My voice is high-pitched, like a child’s.

  “You love school,” my mother answers, and I look at her, incredulous. Does she really think that anything is the way that it used to be?

  “It’s going to be awful.” I hate myself for having a lump in my throat, for the tears in my eyes that threaten to overflow. I don’t want to be a crying, whining little girl. I want to make a compelling argument for homeschool that they can’t deny. Chirag would be better at this, with his scientific explanations. I wish he were here to make the argument for me.

  I sink onto my bed. “Everyone is going to stare at me. They’re going to ask questions. They’re going to treat me like I’m made of glass.”

  “Well, what’s the matter with that?” Mom says. “They should be careful around you.”

  I look at her like she’s speaking a foreign language. She may as well be, for all that we understand each other. Dad sinks onto the bed beside me, but Mom stays standing over us. She never used to seem this tall. Dad glances up at her, and for a second, I think he’s going to give in, but Mom shakes her head slightly, her eyes narrow and certain.

  “Honey,” Dad begins slowly, “your mother and I discussed this.”

  Mom adds, “It’s part of why we allowed them to do the transplant in the first place. So you’d have a more normal life.”

  “What do you mean allowed them to do the transplant?” I protest. “That was my decision. And if I’m grown-up enough to decide whether or not to put a stranger’s parts onto my face, I’m grown-up enough to decide that I should be homeschooled.”

  “You don’t sound very grown-up now,” Mom counters.

  “Are you kidding me?” I shout. “You think that my not wanting to go to school is some show of immaturity on my part? You can’t imagine what it will be like. You will never understand.”

  “The adult thing to do would be to face it, head-on.”

  “Pun intended?” I mumble angrily.

  “Look,” Dad interjects, resting his hand on my own—on my left hand, my bad one. Painfully, my fingers curl into a fist beneath his touch. “I know this is difficult, and I know we can’t understand. But the reason we chose the transplant—all of us, together—was so that you’d have a chance at a normal life. Finishing high school with the rest of your class is something you have the chance to do because the surgery was a success.”

  He strokes my hand, his skin impossibly ordinary over my scars. Despite all the arguments my parents have—used to have—I always got the idea that Dad hated fighting. He just wanted to keep the peace. Maybe every single one of their fights was my mother’s fault. I think back to the fight they were having the night before my accident: She was the one who left the dishes in the sink, a test for him to pass or fail, like he was an unruly student instead of her husband.

  “I will never have a normal life,” I growl, jerking my hand away. “Don’t you get that by now? I will never look normal, and I will never be normal. I will never go to the beach with my friends. I will never get asked on a date because some guy thinks I’m pretty. I will never not be stared at. I can’t even sleep through the night!”

  Mom nods heavily. “Right now, all of that is true. But we don’t know if it will be true forever. A few years ago, they wouldn’t have been able to do your surgery at all. So who knows what they’ll be able to do a few years from now?”

  “So my best hope is that someday I might have to have another surgery? Someday I might have to go through all of this again?” The lump in my throat is choking me.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know exactly what you meant,” I answer. What she meant is that she agrees: I look awful. Every time she said I looked great, she was lying. The truth is that she’s hoping they’ll come up with some better technology someday. A chance for her daughter to be pretty again.

  Dad puts his arm around me and squeezes. I cry harder. “Please don’t make me go,” I sob. I don’t feel my tears until they hit my neck or slide into my mouth. “It’s not like I’m some little kid playing sick to get out of taking her math test. I want to finish school. I just can’t go there right now.” There’s no way they’ll make me go to school. Not when they can see how much it upsets me.

  But when I look up at my father, his mouth is set in a straight line, and Mom’s is, too.

  “Your father and I made up our minds,” she says firmly.

  “This is what it takes to get you to agree about something!” I shout. It’s almost the same joke I made earlier, about what had to happen for Chirag to take me to Bay Leaf. Again, no one laughs.

  I never thought I would prefer my parents’ fighting, but right now I hate their united front. I wish they would just get divorced so that I could go live with my dad. I’m pretty sure that I’d be able to convince him to homeschool me if only Mom weren’t around.

  “It is not my job to be
your relationship’s Band-Aid!”

  “Maisie, I think you should stop shouting before you say something you regret.”

  “No,” I yell, so loudly that my father stands up. Maybe all this crying and shouting is bad for my face. “You shut up. Both of you! I can’t believe you would make me go to school like this. What kind of parents are you? Isn’t it your job to protect your child? Isn’t that something parents are supposed to want?”

  My mother presses her lips together so hard that they turn white. “That’s enough, young lady,” she says, sounding for all the world like a normal parent trying to deal with a normal teenager who’s acting up like normal teenagers do. Maybe the face transplant wasn’t my chance at a normal life; maybe it was theirs.

  “I think you owe us an apology,” she says evenly.

  I stand up now. “Well, I think you owe me an apology,” I shout. It’s never a fair fight with her. She’s a lawyer. She’s literally had training on how to argue.

  “I think that’s enough,” she says finally. “We can discuss this in the morning when you’ve calmed down.”

  “I don’t want to calm down!” I cry, but she’s already turned her back on me; she takes my father’s hand and pulls him along with her, until they’re both on the other side of my door. Then, quietly, calmly, she closes it behind her. I don’t even get to slam it shut.

  That night, it isn’t my crying that wakes the whole house. Instead, I wake to the sound of sobs coming from my parents’ room. I tiptoe down the hall and stand outside their door.

  “She’s never yelled at us like that before.” Dad’s voice is thick with tears. “I used to listen to my colleagues complaining about their kids, and I’d think how lucky we were.”

  “We are lucky,” Mom counters, and it surprises me to hear that it sounds like she’s crying, too. “Maisie didn’t mean those things. She’s just hurting.”

  “Is this all too much for her?” he says. “Maybe she’s right. Maybe we shouldn’t make her go to school yet.”

  “I know it’ll be hard,” Mom answers. “Nothing about this isn’t going to be hard.”

  Well, if you know how hard it’s going to be, why are you making me go?

  As if she heard my question, she continues, “But we have to do what’s best for Maisie. Believe me, I know how much easier it would be on her if she could stay home, but the doctors said it would be good for her to go to school. She has to get used to the way people will look at her.” She sighs, and I imagine her rubbing her temples with her middle fingers, the way she does when she’s tired.

  “I don’t want to lose our little girl,” Dad says, and I imagine his shoulders shaking as he cries harder. For a second, I’m tempted to open the door and crawl into their bed the way I did when I was very little. I want to feel my dad’s arms around me and I want to tell them that I love them and they aren’t going to lose me.

  But then the feeling is overtaken by anger. He doesn’t want to lose his little girl? He’s not the one who’s lost something here. He’s not the one with this ridiculous face. He’s not the one who’s going to get stared at, who’ll never get to wear a bathing suit, go for a run, have sex, get married, have kids.

  I sink down onto the floor and close my eyes. I was never that girl who fantasized about a long white dress and wedding cake and throwing the bouquet. In fact, I didn’t think I’d ever want to get married. I didn’t want to end up fighting like my parents. Although they’re not fighting now. Now it sounds like they’re kind of lucky to have each other.

  And that just makes me angrier. They’re together in there, and I’m alone out here.

  Six months ago, I would have texted Chirag at a moment like this.

  Sorry if I’m waking you, I would have said.

  No problem, he’d have answered. I was dreaming about you.

  You were? What was I doing?

  Running. Then he’d have asked, What’s wrong?

  I’m lonely.

  Want me to come over?

  I’d have answered yes, and twenty minutes later I’d sneak out of the house—quietly, quietly—so that my parents wouldn’t hear. Chirag would be parked down the block, out of sight. I’d tell him everything: what my parents were saying, how they always made everything about them when it was really about me.

  Maybe we’d have made out, or maybe he’d have driven around through the fog until the sun came up. Or maybe we’d have just sat there quietly, smiling at each other until morning. Just seeing him would have been enough to make me feel better. To make the world seem so much bigger than what went on in my parents’ house.

  I tiptoe back into my room, where I stare at my phone on my desk. Chirag would be here in an instant if I asked. But I can’t ask. For all I know, he’s dreaming of me right now, my old face still taking up space in his subconscious. I can’t risk snapping him out of that.

  I can still hear my father crying in the next room. I can’t believe they’re going to make me go to school on Monday. I’ll be gawked at and pitied and whispered about. After a while, Chirag will have seen this new face just as much as he ever saw my old one. Maybe my new face and my old face will battle it out over which one will get to be in his dreams. If he ever dreams of me again.

  Serena and I always planned to go to Berkeley together. But now I don’t want to go to college with anyone who knows me, even her. I don’t want to go to college less than an hour’s drive from my parents’ house, just a little farther from the hospital where they gave me this new face. As long as I’m around people who know what I used to look like, I’ll never be seen as anything other than a victim, a puzzle, a science experiment gone awry.

  At one of those special assemblies last year, they had representatives from a dozen East Coast colleges come and talk to us. They said it was to broaden our horizons, as though no one in our class had heard of the Ivy League, which was kind of ridiculous. But one of the speakers was from an all-girls college in New York City called Barnard.

  What better place to be a freak than New York City?

  I pull my laptop onto the bed and visit the school’s website, browse through pictures of smiling students and wrought-iron gates. That is where I’m going to school. My grades are good enough, as long as I keep them up this year. I download the application and begin filling it out, even though it’s not due for months. I won’t tell anyone; let my parents and Chirag and Serena think that I still want to stay in California. This will be my secret, a decision that no one can make for me. I’ll just get through this year as quickly as possible: I’ll keep to the edges of the school’s hallways, my hair across my face like a curtain, no longer the track star walking with her head held high, who threw her arms in the air while her classmates cheered. And when it’s over, I’ll move clear across the country.

  Three thousand miles away from anyone who knows my old face.

  On Monday morning, in that second between sleep and waking, I’m myself again, blinking my eyes awake and looking forward to the Step, breath, step, breath rhythm that used to punctuate my days. But then I roll over in bed and feel the stiffness on my left side, the delicate tight skin screaming in protest when I lift my arm overhead, and I remember who I am now. I am a freak of a girl who will not be going for a run this morning, whose mother is coming into her room to wake her because she slept through her alarm.

  Sometimes I wish they could anesthetize me into a coma all over again.

  “You don’t want to be late for your first day,” Mom trills, pulling my blankets back.

  In the shower, using the medicinal-smelling soap my mother special-ordered from the pharmacy because she read in one of her countless magazines that it would help my scars fade, I can feel that the muscles I built up over years of training have already atrophied from months in the hospital, where the most exercise I got was walking in circles around the nurses’ station in the weeks following my surgery. My clothes don’t fit the way they used to.

  As I get out of the shower, I catch the tiniest glimpse o
f myself in the steamy bathroom mirror: The skin on my left side is pink and angry; the pink scars on my face are as dark as ever. Am I really worried my classmates will notice that I’m not as fit as I used to be?

  “Hurry up, lazybones,” Mom calls cheerfully as I pad down the stairs, like I’m a regular teenager who overslept on her first day of school. I’m wearing jeans and a long-sleeved plain white T-shirt, the same outfit I wore when Chirag and Serena visited. As commonplace an outfit as possible. Anything to help me blend in. Though clothes would need magical powers to make me look like everyone else. “Chirag will be here to pick you up any minute.”

  I freeze halfway down the stairs. “Chirag will be here?”

  “Of course,” Mom answers like it’s obvious. This morning, she’s wearing a suit; she’s going back to work now that I’m going back to school. “He always drives you. Didn’t he text you?” I shrug. He might have, but I’ve been avoiding my phone. Too scared I’d invite Chirag over. Apparently, it wouldn’t have mattered if I did. Mom invited him over for me. I hate the way she talks to Chirag behind my back, like she’s arranging playdates for a five-year-old.

  She practically pushes me out the door and I look at the ground as I walk down the steps and toward Chirag’s car, the fog enveloping me. This time of year, it usually burns off by nine or ten in the morning, but I wish it could stay today, hanging low and heavy, covering me like a quilt.

  “Morning,” Chirag says, and I mumble it back, letting myself into the passenger side. We haven’t talked since our disastrous dinner at Bay Leaf, but Chirag doesn’t point that out, nor does he remind me that we used to talk every day, a zillion times a day. Maybe he’s worried that I will break if he says anything. We drive to school in silence, me sipping the coffee that he had waiting for me in the car, just the way he used to—2 percent milk, no sugar. The way I always liked it. Today, I can barely swallow it.

  I’d always kind of thought my parents might get me a car for my seventeenth birthday, but I haven’t driven since the accident and no one has suggested that I try. I’d imagined driving myself to school in a shiny hybrid like Chirag’s, wearing new car smell like perfume. I’d hoped that everyone would look at me on our first day back as I pulled into the parking lot and expertly maneuvered my way into a spot.