Blush Pink is the colour she’s allowed. Nothing flaming, nothing flagrant, nothing fuchsia. Aurora bought the Blush Pink for her and presented it in that smug way she has. “Here you are, this shade is very popular among the twelve-year-olds, I’m told, so I’m sure it will convey the right message.” Aurora gives a lot of thought to those details, which is helpful, but she can feel herself reaching the moment when she’s going to yell.
“Campari and soda?” says Aurora.
What’s that, thinks Charmaine, some snobby drink unknown to us hicks? “Whatever,” she says, “as long as it’s got a kick to it.”
The drink is reddish and a little bitter, but now she feels better.
Aurora waits until Charmaine’s drunk half. Then she announces, “I’m staying here this weekend. Jocelyn thought it would be best. I can keep an eye on you, just in case anything unexpected happens.”
Oh heck, Charmaine thinks. She’s been looking forward to having some Me Time. She’d enjoy a long soak in the tub, in behind the shower curtain where the camera can’t see her, and without having to worry about another person who might want to get in there to floss their teeth. “Oh, I don’t want to put you out,” she says. “I don’t think anything unexpected … I’m fine, really. I don’t need –”
“I’m sure that’s true,” says Aurora in her tone that means the opposite. “But think of it this way. What if he decides to pay you a visit?”
A big What If, thinks Charmaine. She doesn’t need to ask who
It’s better than she thought it would be, the weekend with Aurora. You should never pass up the chance to learn something new, and Charmaine learns several things. First of all, she learns that Aurora can make good scrambled eggs. Second, she learns that Ed is planning some sort of a trip, and that Charmaine will be invited on it, but Aurora doesn’t know where or when, so right now it’s only a heads-up.
And third, she learns that Aurora’s face is not her original face. It’s always been obvious that she’s had work done, Charmaine has known that from the get-go, but what Aurora tells her goes way beyond mere work.
“You may have wondered about my face” is how Aurora opens the face round. This is on the Sunday, after they’ve watched
Now they’re feeling like old best girfriends from school, or at least Charmaine is feeling like that. Not that she had any best girlfriends from school, not really close ones. When she was little she wasn’t allowed to have them, and then later she didn’t want to have them, because they would ask too much about her life. So maybe she’s having a best girlfriend now. Though it might just be the effect of her fourth Campari and soda, or is it a gin and tonic, or maybe something with vodka.
“Your face? What do you mean?” says Charmaine, trying to be kind and helpful while at the same time paying attention.
“You don’t have to pretend,” says Aurora. “I know what I look like. I know it’s too … tight. But I used to look very different. And then, for a while, I looked … I didn’t have any face at all.”
“No face?” says Charmaine. “Everyone has a face!”
“Mine got scraped off,” says Aurora.
“You’re kidding!” says Charmaine, and then she can’t help laughing because it’s too ridiculous, a scraped-off face, like scraping icing off a cake, and then Aurora laughs too, as much as she can, considering.
“I was in a roller-derby accident,” she says when they’re finished laughing. “It was a charity thing, for the image consultant agency I was working for then. We were raising money for lung cancer. I guess I shouldn’t have volunteered, but I really wanted to help out. You know.”
“Oh, yes. I know. But roller skates, that’s dangerous,” says Charmaine. She wouldn’t have spotted Aurora as being that athletic. Face scraped off! It hurts her to think about it. Aurora is looking blurry, and Charmaine can almost see underneath her skin. Hurt is what’s under there. So much hurt.
“Yes. I was young then, I thought I was tough. I shouldn’t even say accident, it was a deliberate trip for Maris in Accounts. She had it in for me because of this man called Chet, not that there was anything. And I landed right on my face, at top speed. I came out looking like hamburger.”
“Oh,” says Charmaine, sobering up a little. “Oh, terrible.”
“I couldn’t even sue,” says Aurora. “There wasn’t even a category.”
“Of course not,” says Charmaine sympathetically. “Darned insurance companies.”
“So they offered me a full-face transplant,” says Aurora. “For signing up at Positron.”
“They did?” says Charmaine. “You can do that with faces?” Pop your face off and pop another one on – you could be a whole different person, on the outside, not just on the inside.
“Yes. They were at the experimental stage and there I was. I was custom-made for them. They wanted to see if they could transplant a whole face. Why suffer is how they put it.”