Skin Read Online Free Page A

it,” I say.
    “Do you want mascara, too?”
    “No.”
    “Yeah, you don’t really need it, with those black lashes. How about some tweezers?” She’s eyeing my brows.
    Does she want to totally remake me? But this is her job—right. “Tweezing hurts.” I remember well from middle school.
    “What’s a little pain for beauty?”
    “It just grows back anyway.”
    Slinky laughs, but in the nicest way.
    I pay and half-run all the way home. Purple lipstick. What did I just do? Do I even like purple? I feel a strong need for the privacy of my bedroom. I sneak in the front door.
    “Slut’s home.”
    “Don’t call her that.” Mamma comes running out to me. “Why are you so late? How are you feeling?”
    “No vomiting. No fever. What else did you ask this morning? Oh yeah, no bleeding.”
    “Unless you count her period,” yells Dante from the living room.
    I don’t have my period. But it’s coming. I can feel it in the heavy blumpiness of my belly. How did Dante know?
    I stand in the hall and look at Dante. He’s on the floor in front of Nonno’s chair. Nonno was Mamma’s father. He’sbeen dead over a year. Still, no one sits in the soft fake leather that used to hold his indentation.
    Except Rattle. Who isn’t there now.
    When Mamma’s cooking, Rattle’s in the kitchen—and Mamma’s clearly been cooking. Her hands are garlic. Rattle is undoubtedly under the table, nose lifted hopefully toward the stove, since his sense of smell is great, even if he’s too blind to see anything.
    Rattle came from the SPCA when he was only a year old. An overgrown mutt puppy with a broken tail. He thumps it on the floor, and immediately you know it’s separate pieces inside. Without all that hair, it would rattle. But there is all that hair. So how did Dante know enough to name him that, and when he was only five?
    Does my brother have unknown powers?
    Mamma’s been looking me over this whole while. “You seem healthy. Go wash off that lipstick and let’s take a peek.” She clasps her hands in front of her waist.
    I should tell her about the lipstick coming off at lunch and the little wispy white spots that showed. But I can’t bring myself to, her face is so hopeful. And now I’m suddenly mad at her. I managed to keep a good perspective all day long and now she’s ruined it. “You’re making this into some big thing!”
    “Me? No, I’m not.” Her face falls.
    She’s hurt? This is so unfair. I’m the one with the white lips. “Forget it. Soap and water?”
    “Cold cream. I have some.”
    We go to the bathroom off her and Dad’s bedroom. She opens a cold cream jar. I dip in a finger and smear it over my lips. White everywhere. Then I wipe with a tissue.
    The pink is gone.
    My lips are white.
    “It must be a character flaw,” I say. “Probably fatal.”
    “Dr. Ratner said—”
    “I was kidding, Mamma.” Permanently disfiguring. Not fatal.

THE GRAPH OF Y=X 2 is a nice deep bowl of a curve with the lowest point at the origin. The sides are mirror images of each other—symmetrical. All these graphs on our calculus homework are familiar to me from ninth-grade geometry, but they’re fun to do again. Symmetries galore.
    I touch my lips. They are symmetrical across a vertical axis. Symmetry is part of beauty. Experiments prove that; when presented with pictures of faces, people invariably find the symmetrical ones most attractive. I read about that in sixth grade, for a school project on birds.
    Animals turn out to care about symmetry, too. Female zebra finches choose mates with symmetrically coloredleg bands. And beauty has a halo effect: attractive people are also judged to be more intelligent and better-adjusted. They’re more popular.
    So beauty matters. At least in most people’s eyes. Undoubtedly in Joshua Winer’s eyes.
    I’m getting blue again.
    None of that—back to graphs.
    I like asymptotes. I don’t remember if we learned that word in ninth grade. If we did, we didn’t make a big deal