A Perfect Circle

01 | three faces

Don't forget to read the author's note before this. This is a paid story!

01

T H R E E  F A C E S

WE ALL HAVE three faces. One we show the world, one we show our loved ones, and one we show only ourselves. The last is the truest reflection of who we are. There's a proverb about that – I didn't make it up.

I wasn't particularly original or artsy in any manner, but I had my three faces, though my first two were virtually the same. I'd always been known as the nice girl. Even my two best friends liked to joke about how I was sweet and innocent – "too good for this world" or "a cinnamon roll". They were kind words, really, but they bothered me. Because I'd never asked for any of that.

Being the nice girl took energy. At school, I dressed how Papa wanted me to – pleated skirts with tights and knitted sweaters, Oxford shoes with matching white socks, little diamond earrings. Some people found it too formal, but it was attached to The Nice Girl, and because of that, it was attached to me, too. Ella Volkov wears skirts; Ella Volkov plays the harp. But even with that persona, I couldn't show up to a party dressed like that.

So there I stood in front of Luisa Acosta's full body mirror, waist-high jeans with rips in them and a pink crop top. Buggy blue eyes, pale blonde hair in tousled straggles over my shoulders – this was me. Would anyone notice those half-moon bags on my skin, or was that my anxiety magnifying them? And since when did I have that weird shadow above my upper lip?

I tugged the jeans up higher, hiding as much of my skin as I could. This look had been Jenny and Luisa's choosing, not mine.

"Oh my God, Ella, stop." My best friend, Jenny Smith, grabbed my jeans and tugged them down past my belly button. It was a slight outie, the ugliest damn thing I'd ever seen, so I pulled them back up.

"It makes me feel naked, Jen," I said, heat flushing to my cheeks.

She propped her hand on her hip and cocked an eyebrow. "If I had a tiny waist like you, I'd actually want to be naked."

I looked away, sick of my own reflection. Luisa had shelves of statues lining her walls, pretty little fairies with butterfly wings and glassy eyes. The blonde one – the one she'd always said looked like me – watched me with a vacant, unsettlingly realistic stare.

Ugh.

Jenny pushed me aside and took up the width of the mirror. She pulled her dark jeans over her stomach and adjusted her navy blouse, before her brown eyes darkened as they scanned up her figure.

"Look at me," she said, "I'm a freaking whale."

I shook my head. "No, you aren't."

She really wasn't. Sure, Jenny wasn't stick thin – she had a bigger frame and curvy hips and breasts – but she wasn't fat. Maybe she wasn't gangly like me or slim like Luisa, but she had her own beauty. I wished she was able to see that.

But I guess we all sometimes want to trade faces with somebody else.

"I'm up five pounds." Jenny's eyes were foggy. "You should be grateful, Ella. I'd kill to have your body. I know I've come far, but I still feel like the fat girl."

I shifted my weight and fidgeted with my fingers. Jenny's words made me uncomfortable. I hated when she compared herself to me, but I also got where she was coming from. Jenny wasn't labelled as "the fat girl" anymore, but in elementary school, she had been. She'd always been bigger and taller than the other girls. I didn't blame her for being unable to release that mantle. Being "the" anything was shitty.