“Sorry,” you said, your voice softer than I’d expected.
I looked at my feet, sorry I’d made that red flush creep into your face. The fact was, I felt a kinship with you even though we’d never met. You haunted the streets at night; I did, too, although I drove instead of walking or sat on the motel’s roof, where no one could see me but I could see all. You had found an older man; I knew I needed someone older, too, at least that’s what my mom had told me the night of my senior prom as I stayed home and ate my TV dinner. As I stuffed in a bite of metallic apple cobbler, my mom had said, “Older men don’t get hung up on looks.”
I looked up to speak to you again, but you were walking away with Dani Newell. Smartest girl at school. Everyone knew she’d probably go to some Ivy League college. Dani wasn’t one of the ones who teased me, but she wasn’t exactly warm, either. Thought she was better than everyone. Turned out she wasn’t. She stayed here too.
I ran my finger along my birthmark. Like a map of the world, you said once, later. What I saw in it depended on my mood. Lichen. Inkblot. Palm print. Oak leaf. Phlegm. Some days, when I was feeling especially silly and dreamy, I saw it as France: Paris on my jaw, Marseille on my throat, the outcrop of Brittany jutting toward the Celtic Sea of my right eye. Mostly, though, I tried not to see it at all.
“Next,” the pharmacist said.
That’s when I first got a load of Tom Donahue, Pharmacist. He came out from behind the partition at the Formica counter, stringy black hair brushing the collar of his white smock. His Adam’s apple ran up and down his skinny neck like a mouse in a maze. Ten years older than me, maybe. He had acne pocks on his cheeks, and a scar ran from his right temple to the corner of his mouth. He would know the Question, too, then: What happened to your face? I swore I would never ask him.
I looked down at my torn red sweatpants, at my T-shirt with the coffee dribble. I ran a hand over my unwashed brown hair, my cheek, and I thought about all the ways people knew me, or thought they did. I thought, He knows none of that. I pulled my hair forward over my cheek. Right there among the aisles of Q-tips and hemorrhoid treatment, I thought, I could be anyone.
Tom smiled and rang up my items. “Will this be all for you?”
I handed him my debit card. I stifled a wheezy cough and nearly choked on my gum. “Are you new here?”
He nodded. “Moved to town a couple months ago.” He held up the card and read my name. “Stevie Prentiss,” he said.
I said, “I go by Prentiss. I’m an artist.”
Now where did that come from? I did not go by Prentiss. But I could. An artist? I hadn’t drawn anything since I’d graduated, but what the heck. It sounded better than the manager of a rundown motel. Maybe I could be an artist. I suddenly had the sense things were going to change.
“Prentiss.” Tom Donahue rubbed his jaw, and he smiled a little. His scar reminded me of a seahorse, a jutting V near his temple, a curled tail near his mouth. “That’s nice. Sounds French or something.”
I stopped myself from touching my face, my own imagined country. I swallowed my gum, and the mint trailed down my throat. “Have you been to France?”
“Once. Before,” he said.
“Before what?”
“Oh, who knows. Another life, I guess.” He gave a short laugh and then cleared his throat. “How about you?”
I nodded. At least I planned to go, someday.
He said, “Well, bonjour, Prentiss.”
I smiled at the sound of my new name in his mouth.
The whole time I was talking, Tom looked me straight in the eye, which was more than I could say for most people, who either stared or looked past me like a memory. Not Tom. He didn’t just look. He saw me.
Until I met Tom Donahue, Pharmacist, my days revolved around the motel. Mornings, I set up a continental breakfast, and then my mom came in for an hour so I could run errands and fetch supplies. Afternoons, I answered phones, took reservations, balanced the books, cleaned the rooms, and did laundry when employees called in sick. I usually had one day off, Mondays, when a student from the Syc covered the office.