{Morgan pictured above.}
NICOLE
Mom came into the kitchen a few seconds later, dragging Nicholas by the hand so that his sock-clad feet slid against the slick marble. His blue eyes widened when he saw me and Dad in the kitchen, and the second Mom let go of his hand he scampered off to sit in the living room.
"Hi Nicole, honey," said Mom, turning on the sink to wash her hands--she and Dad didn't agree on much, but she did oblige his request to wash her hands whenever she entered the house. "How was Carmen?"
I could feel Dad frowning behind me even though I couldn't even see him, and I fidgeted with the hem of my purple athletic shorts as I said, "Good. I went and saw a movie."
Mom turned off the sink and towel-dried her hands while Dad continued to cut up vegetables. The tension in the room was palpable.
"I'm going to go get some homework done," I said, and just like that, I'd escaped and scampered up the staircase to reach the second floor.
When I got to my bedroom, I shut the door behind me with my foot and then collapsed onto my bed, pulling out my phone and flicking absentmindedly through old texts. Despite the fact that Noah acted pretty obsessed with me during school hours, he'd still failed to text me outside of the 8:00-3:00 time frame, and I wondered it that proved even more that this was all just a game to him.
Before I knew it, I'd flopped down so that I was facing the ceiling, and in another few minutes I'd closed my eyes and fallen fast asleep, my thoughts still chasing each other around and around in circles even in my subconscious.
Blaring pop music woke me up the next morning. The deep bass of the drum rattled my bed frame as I sat up and tried to figure out where the sound was coming from. Eventually, I figured that it was coming from the laundry room beneath me for whatever reason, but at least it had worked as a decent alarm--it was just the time to get ready for school.
My hair had air-dried the previous night and now hung in unflattering waves against my face, frizzing in the most unnecessary places, but at least I'd washed off all my makeup in the shower after getting home from the movie. I rolled out of bed and my hip connected with something hard--I realized that my cell phone had gotten tangled up in my sheets overnight.
Out of habit, I pressed the home button, even though I didn't expect to see any texts, but to my surprise Noah Murdock <3, 10:32 PM showed up on the glowing lock screen.
Even though it shouldn't have affected me, my heart started pounding and my stomach felt weirdly fluttery as I struggled to remember my password and unlock my phone.
Hey Nicole, don't know if ur asleep, just wanted to tell u that u looked beautiful today & looking forward to seeing you tomorrow :) :)
For a split second, my stomach dropped to my feet and I thought he was talking about Carmen and the movie theatre, that he'd somehow actually seen though my disguise--then I reassured myself that he must have been talking about school. I was usually never asleep by 10:30 at night, but waking up to the text message was somehow better than receiving it as I was staring at my ceiling and trying to fall asleep.
Then I remembered the details of what had really happened at the movie theatre, and my stomach really did fall to my feet. Noah didn't care about me. I didn't know what his motives were, but they weren't what I'd initially thought.
I deleted the text without responding, then went to his name in my contacts and deleted the heart next to his name. "Noah Murdock" looked sort of lonely by itself without anything next to it, so I added the face that seemed to best mimic my present emotions: an open-mouthed O with two dots with eyes that seemed to remind me that I had more eyes around him than he thought I did.
I pulled on some jeans shorts and a halter neck loose white shirt, then added some flip-flops before heading into my bathroom to complete my daily makeup routine. The daughter of a beautician, I had way more varieties of foundations, blushes, and mascaras than I needed, especially when I used the same things practically every day. Halfway through applying my eyeliner, my phone buzzed from its position on my dresser, and even though I normally wouldn't have batted an eye, something made me go over and see who it was.
Incoming call: Noah Murdock
Biting my lip, I capped my eyeliner and then halfheartedly answered the phone.
"Hello?" I asked, trying to sound groggy--my morning logic told me that if I acted tired, the conversation would be shorter.
Noah sounded sleepy too, something that would have been endearing only a few days ago but right now was something that only made it harder for me to hate him. "Hey Nicole," he said. "Get my text last night?"
"Oh," I said, faking a yawn that could have passed for nothing less than an awful imitation, "I just woke up. Um, let me check."
I took my ear away from the phone for a second to pretend to check my messages, then pressed my cheek back up against the device. "Just got it. That's sweet, thank you. Sorry, I fell asleep early last night."
My voice was sort of beginning to shake, and I realized how much I wanted this to be real--for Noah to really, truly like me, and for me to feel nothing but pure happiness that he'd thought about me enough to text me the previous night. But I knew he'd texted only after he'd gotten back from a date with another girl, and that made me begin to hate Carmen. If I'd never become her, I never would have known, and I could have just kept on living cluelessly.
But would that have made it any better, and would it have made the heartbreak less when I really did find out?
"It's cool." Noah yawned now, too, except I could tell he wasn't faking it. "I just wanted to make sure it, you know, went through."
For once, he was actually sounding nervous, like a clumsy deer that was just learning how to walk, and I had to tell myself over and over again that it was all a lie so that I kept my cool.
"Oh, it did." There was an awkward silence. "Listen, I've got to go get ready, but I'll see you at school, okay?"
"Okay. By, Nicole."
I hung up without saying anything back and then threw my phone on my bed--it landed on my duvet a little harder than I'd thought it would. Then I uncapped my eyeliner and went right back to penciling in those lines under and above my eyes that just added even more fakeness to my face--even more disguise and hiding. I hated that I wasn't even confident being Nicole Thorn without makeup anymore.
Heck, I didn't even know who I was or who I was supposed to like anymore.
I finished drawing in the line on my right eye, but it was messy and didn't match the carefulness I'd taken on my left eyes. I tried to fix it with my finger and it smudged; frustrated, I put my hands in my chin and just stared at my face in the mirror.
My eyelashes looked like they were going down, so I twisted open my mascara for the third time that morning and set to work on them--except now, they were starting to look clumpy and spidery. And when I ran my fingers along them to try and straighten them out, they began to fall out, one after the other--dark, delicate lines against my index finger.
I held one up to my mouth, thought about it for a while, and shook it away, then went back to de-clumping my makeup. Halfway through trying to redo my eyeliner on my right eye, I poked myself almost straight in the pupil, and the resulting irritation in my eye turned into tears almost right away.
Once I'd started crying, I couldn't stop, and soon I was sobbing into my hands and messing up my makeup once and for all, but not even caring. Phone calls from crushes weren't supposed to make me feel this way--so why did I feel even more hurt after than before?
Slowly, the sobs faded to sniffles, and then I was pulling out my makeup remover and trying to fix the damage I'd done. I was running late for school and I still had to eat breakfast and finish the homework I hadn't even started the previous day. It was just one of those mornings.
I walked into English class late, taking my seat next to Morgan. She'd decided to show up despite her mental breakdown the previous day, and she was flipping through A Tree Grows in Brooklyn almost resentfully.
"Hi," I tried, pulling out my own book. I realized I hadn't done the reading and knew I could only hope Mrs. Coale was in a charitable mood. "You didn't happen to do the homework last night, did you?"
"I was feeling like an overachiever, so I looked it up online," she said back, and proceeded to give me a synopsis that I was relatively certain would earn me a passing grade if our teacher decided to give us another pop quiz. "But hey, aside from that--did you hear Lauren's throwing a party this weekend?"
I hadn't heard, and I didn't really care either. "No," I said. "But cool, I guess."
Noah slid into the seat beside me, which was usually John's, but John immediately submitted and sat down one seat down instead. "Hey, Nicole," Noah said, inclining his head towards me. A strong wave of cologne that should have made me choke but instead smelled heavenly wafted towards me.
Morgan plucked up both eyebrows at me--evidently, her one-eyebrowed stare wasn't sufficient for such an event. Then she pursed her lips as if assessing me as a lost cause and went back to flipping through her book.
"Hey Murdock," I said, nudging his shoulder. I hadn't forgotten about what had happened, but I wasn't going to let it affect the rest of my day, either; and anyway, I also couldn't let on to Noah that I knew. Not until my time was up, at least. "Thanks for waking me up. I probably would have overslept if you hadn't called."
I expected him to smile, but instead he was staring at me as if he'd never heard anyone call him by his last name before, and that was when I remembered Katherine at Aroma Mochoa--how I'd called him by his last name and then had had to grab wildly for the first story that came to mind to explain away my actions. My heartbeat began to increase excessively in my chest, but it was only a few seconds before the moment passed and he smiled easily at me.
"Lunch again today?" he asked, nudging me back.
Crossing my legs at the ankles, I moved my Post-It note in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from where the homework had started to what I supposed to read through. "If you insist," I said playfully.
"Lauren's having a party this weekend--are you planning on going?"
I opened my mouth to say yes, but then I shut it again and swallowed unnecessarily before saying, "No, can't, sorry. Family in town and all."
"Oh, that's right. You did say you were busy this weekend."
Glad that for once my lies had added up, I pretended once and for all to be absorbed in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and didn't say anything again until Mrs. Coale called on me to list themes present in chapter three--which, thanks to Morgan's summary, I was able to guess at well enough.
*
Morgan skipped art class third period, but by lunch she was grabbing me by my sleeve and leading me down to the cafeteria, smacking gum and talking noisily in my ear about the party on Saturday.
"You have to come," she said, pushing me in front of a group of frightened-looking freshmen and yanking open the door to the cafeteria. "Everyone's going to be there. It's going to be legendary."
I was sick of her begging me, and sick of feeling like I wasn't living up to her standards just by telling her I wasn't going. "You know what? Fine," I said. "I'll show up, but don't expect me to stay long."
"Nonsense," she said. "There'll be lots of cute boys there. Which reminds me--what's up with you and Noah?"
My cheeks turned pink against my command. "Nothing," I said quickly.
"English class didn't look like 'nothing' to me," she said, which was true--Noah and I had taken turns staring at each other the whole fifty-five minutes. "I'd watch out if I were you. That boy has "player" written all over his pretty-boy face."
I couldn't help but smile at her blunt analysis. "Touché. But at least someone other than John has a crush on me."
Morgan turned visibly pink, and I knew she was angry that I'd brought up John--he had a relentless crush on her and never seemed to get the hint that she didn't return his feelings. She didn't say anything else as we navigated through the cafeteria line and I split with her to go eat with Noah, though I knew I was forgiven because she poked me in the side at the check-out line and goofily tipped her head towards John, who was walking by us and staring in what seemed to me a very obvious manner.
Sticking my tongue out at her, I caught up with Noah and followed him as he led me out of the cafeteria and towards the bench I was now beginning to think of as our normal spot--which was strange, because we shouldn't have even had a normal spot. Was it wrong for me to keep leading me on when I should have just told him what I knew?
"How was your morning?" he asked, swirling his bread stick inside his soup and then popping it into his mouth. I had a feeling even the garlic in the bread wouldn't stifle his constantly minty-smelling breath.
"It was fine." I made a point of taking the top off my strawberry and then eating it, chewing slowly. "Same old."
That was true, but somehow the mediocrity of everything wasn't bothering me as much anymore now that I knew I had something to come home to--the promise of a new person, a new personality, and a brand-new experience every day.
I'd begun to think about who I would transform into that afternoon when Noah interrupted me. "I saw someone who looked like you at the movie theatre yesterday."
I instantly stopped chewing, the strawberry suddenly turning bitter against my tongue.
"I was seeing that new action movie with some of the guys, and this girl was there. I could have sworn it was you--the same, but different somehow. I don't know."
I forced myself to smile, even though the fact that he'd both outright lied to me and voiced his suspicions in the same sentence was making me feel dizzy. "That's weird," I said, making a mental note to tell Mom to make my transformations more drastic in the future. "Oh well. You know we're all supposed to have someone who looks pretty much identical to us somewhere in the world, right?"
"I guess. Funny to think about that, huh?"
Another strawberry went down my throat, getting stuck halfway. I coughed and then guzzled down some water, my eyes beginning to water.
"Are you okay?"
Noah was watching me concernedly as I avoided choking on my food, but I pasted a practiced fake smile on my face. "I'm fine. Just swallowed wrong."
He shrugged and went back to his food, but all I could think about was how much longer I would be able to keep this up--and exactly what the consequences would be.