are way too heavy for swimming. Besides, you promised we’d cut our hair off together. You’re not going to bail on me, are you?”
“Nope. I’m in.” I’d never had short hair before, and besides, what did it matter? I always wore my hair in a bun or a ponytail anyway. It was kind of handy to have long hair now, though, to cover this thing on my face, which was starting to throb.
We went out to tell Isabel we were done for the day. She was lounging on a towel near the lifeguard station, where some cute high school guy was sitting in a tall chair that gave him a perfect view of her cleavage. “Finally!” she yelled. “I thought you guys were going to stay in the water forever. I’m bored. Let’s get frozen yogurt.”
“Can’t today,” I said. It wasn’t true, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the red bump. I just wanted to go home.
“Suit yourself,” Isabel said. “We’ll just go without you.”
Usually that was enough to get me to change my mind; I hated feeling left out. It wasn’t going to work today, though. “Have fun,” I said, and texted Mom to pick me up.
“Come over later,” Becca said. “We’ll be at my house.”
“I’ll see if I can,” I said. Maybe the bump was just a temporary thing. I watched them walk away and then pulled my hair back into a bun as soon as they were gone.
“Oh, sweetheart, it looks like you’ve got a pimple,” Mom said when I got in the car. “I can put some concealer on that when we get home.”
Trust Mom to see a problem and immediately want to fix it. That was her job back then, after all; she had a risk-management consulting business and helped all the local venture capital firms decide what kinds of investments were safe. “Better to identify issues when they’re small,” she’d say, but I’d heard her talking to Dad about work when she thought I wasn’t listening, and I knew a big part of her job was helping cover stuff up.
When we got home, she marched me straight into the bathroom, put the toilet seat down, and made me sit while she dug through her cabinets for makeup. I snuck a look at the bump, which seemed like a whole other thing from the whiteheads and blackheads Isabel and Becca complained about. Their zits were angry little dots, vanquished by a fingernail or an aggressive exfoliating scrub. Mine had begun to throb like a furious insect under my skin, just waiting for its moment to break through and escape. Maybe it wasn’t even a zit. Maybe it was a spider bite. Or a parasite.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mom said when I suggested it. “Now hold still.” She squeezed some concealer onto the space on her hand between her forefinger and her thumb, rubbed it all together with a delicate brush, and dotted it gently on my face. “You have to have a light touch, or else it will cake up.”
I tried not to roll my eyes. Mom was just trying to be helpful, I knew, but all I could think of was what Isabel would say if she could see me now. She’d been begging her mom to let her wear makeup since we started middle school; she’d finally gotten permission this year, and now every time we went to the mall, she dragged Becca and me to the cosmetics counters in the makeup stores. One time she’d pressured one of the salesladies into giving us makeovers, one of those older women whose face looked like a smooth mask and who wore a lab coat, as if wanting to look prettier was some kind of science project. She’d covered Becca’s face with foundation a shade lighter than her dark skin; she’d slathered me with bronze eye shadow and coral lipstick and made my freckles disappear. We were both miserable.
Isabel wasn’t willing to concede defeat, though. “Okay, we’ll have to try another place,” she said. “But just wait until school starts and you see all those cute boys. We’ll need everything we’ve got to compete.”
She made it sound like a swim meet. “Meeting boys is not a sport,” I said.
Isabel laughed. “It is if you do it right.”
She would know better than we would. She was the first of us to get a boyfriend; Becca and I had just nursed crushes all year. “You guys need to ditch the Speedos and get some bikinis,” she’d say. “You’re totally missing out.”
Missing out on what? I wanted to ask her. From what I could see, getting a boyfriend meant letting some kid who was shorter than me lick my face in public. When I imagined kissing a boy, it was more romantic, private. Less messy. I was happy to wait until high school, where I dreamed there would be boys who were at least as tall as I was. I was sure that in their presence my awkwardness would magically disappear.
“Perfect Kara wants a perfect kiss,” Isabel would say.
I hated when she called me that. It was an old nickname, from back when one of my grade school teachers had used my scores on math tests to try and motivate the class. “Look at Kara—one hundred percent perfect, every time.” I’d felt my face turn red under all the freckles and prayed that no one was paying attention. But everyone was, and I’d never lived it down. The only person who’d never called me Perfect Kara was Becca.
Well, I wasn’t so perfect now. “There we go,” Mom said. “No, wait, it’s not blending properly. Let me just put on a little something else.” She went through bag after bag of makeup, which was kind of funny, since it wasn’t like she wore so much herself. The bag she settled on had a bunch of shiny lips on it.
“No lipstick,” I said.
“No lipstick,” Mom agreed. “This is where I keep my foundation.”
I was tempted to ask why she’d keep foundation in a bag covered with lips, but I didn’t want to seem too interested in her makeup collection. Mom pulled tubes and compacts out of the bag, opening and closing them, grabbing my wrist and putting samples of skin-colored creams on them, frowning, digging back in the bag. Finally, she found a shade she liked. She patted some liquid on my forehead and cheeks with her fingertips, then smeared it around with a little triangle-shaped sponge. “Close your eyes,” she said, as she opened a compact filled with beige powder and then reached for an enormous fluffy brush. I obeyed and tried not to sneeze as she swept the powder all over me.
“You can open your eyes now.” I did, and then watched her inspect my face. She smiled, and I worried that meant I’d be dealing with another horrible mask, like the lab-coat lady had given me. I must have looked like I was going to freak out, because Mom laughed. “I promise it’s not as bad as you think. Come on, check it out.”
I stood up and turned to look in the mirror. At first I was confused but relieved: there was no thick mask, no scary unrecognizable me. And no zit. But there were also no freckles; my skin looked smooth and soft. Really, it was kind of nice. If lab-coat lady had done something more like this, maybe I wouldn’t have taken such a hard stance against this stuff.
“So?” Mom asked. “Was I right?”
She knew how much I hated admitting it, but at the same time, she’d made it easier for me to decide what to do. I’d rather Becca and Isabel make fun of this makeup than the horrible monster zit. “Yeah, you were right,” I said. “Thanks.”
She kissed the top of my head. “Excellent. This was fun, wasn’t it?”
“I guess.” It actually had been. It reminded me of when I was little, when Dad’s first start-up had just taken off and he was at work all the time. Mom and I had spent hours at the kitchen table doing logic puzzles together. At first it had been great, having so much of her time and attention, when normally she was almost as focused on work as Dad was.
But then she’d figured out that I was really good at those logic puzzles, really good at math in general, and all of a sudden everything was about school. She started asking more questions about what we were doing in class, whether it was hard for me or whether I was bored, and when I made the mistake of admitting that I didn’t find any of it all that difficult, she started giving me extra homework. “You’re gifted,” she said. “Pushing yourself is the only way to get better.”
Better at what? I wanted to ask her, but I had a feeling I knew the answer.