I hate this bathroom mirror. Too small, and the light makes my skin look sallow. My hair is doing that thing again where it can’t decide if it wants to be curly or just frizzy. The DevaCurl mousse Mommy bought smells like vanilla trying to mask chemicals and always makes my hands sticky. I twist a strand of hair around my finger and watch it snap back, stiff.

Whatever.

I press play on my iPod and adjust the headphones over my ears. They were the best Christmas gift last year—I can’t stand those wired earbuds everyone else uses. Drums slam in time with grinding electric guitars in Phoenix’s “Countdown,” drowning out everything else. “It doesn’t matter what you did and if you did it like you been told,” sing the lyrics. Jason showed me this album yesterday after school and it’s already my new favorite. It feels like a blanket, wrapping me in something that makes me yearn in a way I can’t name.

I lift my camera and look through the viewfinder, adjusting the focus. I’m trying to take a self-portrait for the photography contest Mr. Levinson mentioned. Black-and-white film would just enhance my uneven acne scars and hyperpigmentation, but at least it’d make me look artistic instead of awkward. I lower my Nikon and squint at my reflection.

The mirror ripples like a glitch, or something from one of those horror movies Sophia and I watched last weekend when her parents weren’t home. Suddenly, I’m looking at someone else. It’s me, but it’s not. This person is older—way older. At least thirty. Her hair is longer than mine, with sun-bleached strands that catch the bathroom light. And it’s curly. Actually curly. Not the half-frizz disaster I fight every morning. Like she figured out how to make it work. Her eyebrows are different too. Fuller. Shaped. Not the mess I try to pluck with tweezers stolen from Mommy’s room.

She’s wearing yellow. A yellow shirt that should look terrible with her dark olive skin, but doesn’t. I don’t wear yellow. Not after Nicole said it made me look jaundiced in sixth grade. Everyone laughed. Even Brian. But this woman—this newer, better version of me—wears it like she doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Like she forgot all about Nicole and sixth grade and everyone laughing and even Brian. The old Santa María necklace from Mamá Bruna that I keep tucked under my shirts hangs right there in the open, like it’s no big deal.

I stare at her face. “Do you remember when twenty-one was old?” I ask her. I’m smiling now, so she’s smiling too. Lines around her eyes crinkle when she smiles. I don’t have those lines. She looks tired, but not in a bad way. Like she’s done things, seen things, experienced things. Been places. There’s a tiny scar by her eyebrow I don’t have. How did she get that?

Her nails are painted dark rose and not bitten down to nothing like mine. Her hands look like they belong to someone who knows what they’re doing. Mine just hang there, useless, never knowing where to be. I notice the ring on her finger. Silver and simple. Married? To whom? A man? A woman? I blush. Not like anyone at Toms River would look at me twice. Maybe art school will be different if I ever get there. I could never convince Daddy that studying Studio Art at SVA isn’t a waste of money.

Something moves at the bottom of the mirror. A dog. Small and fluffy, circling her legs before resting its chin on her boot. She reaches down to pet it without looking, like they’ve done this a thousand times. I press my hand against the cool glass. She does too. Our fingertips align. Same short fingers and same crooked thumbnail that snags on everything, but her hand tells a different story. There’s a thin and silver scar across her wrist. What happened there?

What happens to me?

Did we make it? Did we become someone important? Do I have a studio in the city? Did I escape this house, this suffocating town, the sound of Mommy crying in the bathroom when she thinks no one can hear, Daddy’s constant questions about where I’m going and who I’m with and why can’t I just be normal like other girls?

We’re sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick for the big sun.

The woman in the mirror studies me too, and I wonder what she sees. Some kid with a cheap camera. Ripped jeans from the thrift store. Hair she hasn’t learned to love yet. Brown skin she’s been told a thousand times is too dark, too foreign. Her eyes—my eyes, our eyes—are soft, though. Like she remembers what I’m thinking right now because she once sat where I’m sitting.

We’re lonesome, we’re lonesome...

The song fades out and tears glaze our eyes. We open our mouth like we might say something, but then Mommy yells my name from down the hall, sharp and impatient, cutting through the muffle of my headphones. I pull them down to rest around my neck and turn for one final look, but she’s gone. Just a normal mirror now.

Just not normal me.

I adjust the camera and run my fingers through my hopeless hair one more time. It doesn’t matter. I have to finish that English paper and Sophia wants to meet at the mall later.

Mommy calls again, louder and more annoyed. I wonder what filter would make yellow look good on brown skin. I wonder who that woman was, with my eyes and scars. I wonder if I’ll ever see her again.

And then I don’t wonder anymore because Mommy calls a third time, and I’m already thinking about what excuse I’ll give for taking so long.