It Sounded Better in My Head - Nina Kenwood Page 0,22

back, come back.’ I was alone, and I had to cope without them for three days. I had to sleep in a single bed with itchy-looking blankets. I had to share a bathroom. I had to eat meals prepared by people who had no idea that chicken sometimes grossed me out and I didn’t like the texture of cooked mushrooms.

Lucy walked into the cabin then. She was assigned to the other bed in my room.

Lucy was the other student from my school picked for camp. We had been in several classes together, but we’d never spoken more than a few sentences to each other before this moment.

I knew about Lucy though. I spent a lot of time at school watching and observing, and I generally knew a lot more about my classmates than they knew about me. I knew Lucy liked poetry and YA fantasy novels, and that she always enthusiastically volunteered for things, from reading aloud a section of a book in class to creating posters for our school’s campaign for combatting climate change. She was on the debating team, she was in the school musical, she was vice-president of the social-justice club. She was a joiner and she was aggressively nice, two things I have a natural suspicion of, but with Lucy they weren’t fake or annoying. She acted like a good person because she really was a good person.

Lucy had one strike against her, though—she had perfect skin. Ever since the first pimple appeared on my face, skin is always the first thing I notice about someone else, the first judgment I make, even when I try to stop myself. Do they have good skin? Lucy was small (she was fifteen at the time, but she still looked twelve), with unmarked skin and the kind of big blue eyes that could get you off a murder charge with a couple of well-timed blinks.

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