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“Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”

—Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“I look at myself as an art project, and I’ll create whatever I want until I want to stop.”

—Erika Jayne

Part One

1.

I am on my phone, of course I am. But the screams start, sudden as the sound of my own name. I look up. It’s only a group of girls, huddled by the hot tub. They lift arms, devices, as if in prayer; they still themselves before the lens, a ritual. Three flashes and again, they shriek, each omg another post, another like, another love. They are alive in their bodies, together in their bodies; I feel their oneness inside me, like hunger.

The plate before me is empty, though. Just the rind of a bacon cheeseburger to remind me what I ate. On this white daybed. In my bikini, which is also white. Ketchup dripped down my chin, landed on my breasts, smatterings of B-movie blood I wipe with my whole hand, lick clean. I lie back, body bare and distended. I’m satiated, but the feeling always passes and the meal was freighted, like everything today, with the possibility that it might be my last.

I fish a bottle from my black and white striped bag, snap the cap, swallow a pill with spit. I suck a vape to erase the chemical taste, blow cones of watermelon smoke toward the girls. They’re cute, but each one needs a tweak to achieve true beauty. Rhinoplasty, I diagnose when I look at one. Brow lift, I silently suggest for another. Buccal fat pad removal.

In the big pool, a woman my age props her elbows on an inflatable raft. Nearby, a child, chubby with preadolescence, slumps sidesaddle on a foam noodle. Clearly they are together, clearly they are one, both redheaded and freckled, pear-shaped bodies waved as blown glass beneath the water. The mother says something and the child doesn’t answer, just stares at the hot tub, the girls. When I was young like her, I wanted nothing more than to emerge. Out into the seen world, the world of teenagers I saw on TV, girls I followed on Instagram. Girls who siphoned attention, desire, love, with reckless ease. Girls tweaked into fantasies I thought were real.

“Isabelle,” the mother says. The number eleven between her eyebrows is so deep it threatens permanence. I touch my skin like I’m checking it’s still there. My forehead remains, pulled tight as a starched sheet and I want, for a moment, to wrinkle it. I want to become the other woman. A mother, a daughter, a purer version of myself; I want to become them all.