Pretty Girl

Illustration by Gillian Lenth

It had been seven hundred and eighty-seven days since someone called me beautiful. Leaning over the edge of a bar with a smirk on the wrong side of cocky, his hand had trailed down my arm. Plumbs of purple smoke drifted from his lips and I tasted the crackle of something electric in the air. 

“Hey pretty girl,” he slurred, his fingers cupping the crook of my elbow. “Let me buy you a drink.” His hands climbed to the top of my shoulder, and I leaned into his touch, inviting more. 

I flicked my eyes up, sultry and certain. “How about we just get out of here?”

He laughed. “I thought this would be harder.”

“Keep calling me beautiful, and this can be as easy as you like.” 

I brushed my hair back as he grabbed the door. By the time we reached his car, I made him call me beautiful a dozen more times in three different languages. 

It had been seven hundred and eighty-seven days since that night. That was the problem. 

*

“And this is your… twelfth procedure?” The nurse said. I turned toward her, a winning smile brightening my face.

“They were big procedures,” I said as if admitting a secret. “All needed, of course.” 

“Of course,” the nurse agreed. She scribbled down another note, her hand tight around the pen. “And how long since your first?”

“Ten years, six months, and seven days.”

The nurse made another note, her brow furrowing. “That is a lot of large procedures in a relatively short amount of time. Arms and legs, cheekbones, teeth, fingers, a full rib cage reconstruction-”

“As I said.” My voice sharpened. “They were all needed.” 

I waited for her to ask another question, but she didn’t. She couldn’t bring herself to look higher than the back of my smooth, unblemished hands as she finished taking her notes. She wasn’t used to someone like me, I reasoned. Most people weren’t. I was so, so close to perfection and yet I fell brutally short. This reaction was a natural response to my failings. 

After this procedure, she would look at me. No one would be able to look away again. 

She left me alone with the sketches and X-rays of my skull while she went to fetch the surgeon, her throat bobbing as she swallowed hard. Still, even if she noticed something was wrong with my chart, she wouldn’t say anything. This was my ninety-second “twelfth procedure in ten years” across multiple underground clinics across the country. If someone were to catch on, they already would have 

I picked up the drawing, scanning the images of my new eyes and cerebral cortex. There was a reason I had left this procedure for the end. It would take the best mechanic and surgeon imaginable to fully reconstruct the nerve endings, linking them to the wires while maintaining the intricacies of both my original brain and the new memory circuit. An upload of this magnitude  would completely puncture the remainder of my brown eyes, but I didn’t care. I wanted blue. I needed blue.  Blue would make me perfect. Blue would mean I was finished. 

I stared blankly ahead as I flipped through my chart, noticing the areas they had mistaken as my “original” parts. A full-furbished leg a shade paler than my skin. A beautifully crafted arm stolen from a pleasure-android from the Bronx. A set of teeth lifted from an aging model. She hadn’t needed her pretty smile. I did. 

The nurses bustled around me, taking my blood pressure, my temperature, and my height and weight. There was a heaviness to the way they whispered as they skimmed my chart, with particular scrutiny surrounding my age. But considering how much I paid the staff, I doubted they really cared about where I got my new parts.

I was beautiful once. The gorgeous gold girl of Seattle, the Rose Queen, a supermodel. Everyone wanted me and those who didn’t wanted to be me. But there was always a flaw. A wrinkle here, a zit there, a mole near the base of my legs. I was an imperfect machine, but I didn’t have to be. 

My mother showed me it was possible to achieve perfection. From a young age I was taught to iron out my flaws with an iron fist. From my nose job at thirteen to my first round of botox, she proved I was a collection of upgradable parts. 

Human and mechanical configuration? Done. A few engagement rings and a bat of my eyes bought me larger breasts, long hair, and a smooth, child-like face. I thought I was perfect. 

Then my third husband left for another woman. My daughter abandoned me for a man with a beer gut and a wispy mustache. And my mother, bless her, died at the age of sixty-six with the face of a twenty-year-old. 

Love was beauty. I understood that better than anyone. But with every side comment and tabloid story comparing my age or my weight, I found another piece to cut off. Who wanted to see the cover of Women’s Weekly with baby stretch marks? Who wouldn’t notice the slightly-crooked slant of my teeth on a Times Square Billboard for Donna Pericolosa fragrance?  

But, after my rib replacement surgery, the chorus of the crowd became how much I changed. How the slope of my new hips was too sharp to be “natural” so I kept replacing, piece by bloody piece. Too perfect was still imperfect. I needed real parts, not plastic, to finish me. Then I would be beautiful again. I had to be. 

New cheeks, new chin, new fingers, new eyebrows, new waist, and new hips until the raw, blended feeling inside me was soothed with another, “Hey, beautiful.” 

I knew I wasn’t human anymore. Not really. Wires had long since replaced my veins, but copper undertones were better for my complexion than blue. And blood was a silly, messy thing. I would rather spend years as an “android” than garner a scar that could ruin me. 

Replace, replace, replace. That was how you mattered in the world. No one liked someone afraid of reinvention. My fingers stilled over the last page, a full-frontal x-ray image of the inside of my body. I tilted my head, considering. 

In the fifty-three years since my first procedure, I replaced most things. Every few months, something needed to be changed, tucked, or cut. My leg replacements took months to heal, but they straightened my crooked knees and gave me an extra few inches. My fingers had always been too stubby until I seized new ones from a young concert pianist. I was a collection of stolen flesh and bartered metal, but I was still flawed. The brown of my eyes couldn’t be changed without disconnecting the nerves that allowed me to see, and if I couldn’t see myself, how would I know what to fix next? 

But I had to take the risk. I had to have blue eyes. Because on the last night I was called beautiful, the man murmured something against my mouth. 

“You look like my ex,” he said, sweaty and harsh against my lips. “She… She was so, so beautiful. But you don’t have her eyes.” The wetness on his face grew and he hiccupped. “I… I miss her blue eyes.”

And, since that night, no one had called me beautiful. Not once.  

My eyes had to be wrong. Blue was perfect, blue was beautiful, and I ruined perfection each day I blinked with a brown-tinged glow. And as I sawed and replaced, clinging to love, I realized that the only thing I had left of myself was my brown eyes. 

Those big, baby browns that donned the cover of a thousand magazines. Those huge eyes, as soft and warm as hazelnut spread. The eyes that a hundred thousand men had fallen in love with when I was still Seattle’s gem. The eyes that scanned every inch of my body for flaws and imperfections. The eyes that found the pieces that would make me whole again. 

And, at lost last, they failed me. The man that night didn’t want me. He wanted something else. Something I didn’t have. And with that realization came clarity. The reason no one called me beautiful anymore was because there was still one piece left that was rotten. 

That woman had something I lacked. That was why I carved her blue eyes from her pretty skull. Because once every piece of me was sawed away, once I couldn’t recognize myself, I would finally be beautiful. 

The surgeon stepped in, patting the gurney. 

“Are you ready, pretty girl?”

I delicately took his hand and sat down. It had been seven hundred and eighty-seven days since the last time someone called me beautiful. But now, I would finally be perfect.