Chapter 10 Chanel
Chanel
On Monday, I show up to school completely naked.
That’s how it feels anyway. I haven’t made such a drastic change to my makeup style in years, and my eyes feel bare without
my usual heavy eyeliner, my face exposed without my pigmented blush and highlighter combo. My own appearance startles me when
I catch sight of it in the dark glass panels outside the classrooms. Image is everything, I learned early on, but it still
amazes me how manipulable image is. I could be someone else, a girl who runs through orchards and goes strawberry picking
on weekends and actually wants to fall in love.
I’d set my alarm two hours early this morning just to experiment with the look, using the Instagram photos I’d saved of Ares’s
former fling as reference, all while feeling strangely sheepish, ashamed even, to be doing so much for a boy.
It’s not as if I want to, I argued with myself the entire car ride. It’s only because of the vision. Once I secure Ares as my prom date and stop the fire, I won’t have to care whether he’s attracted
to me or not.
But at least my efforts don’t go unnoticed, because when I catch sight of Ares in the hallway, he actually slows down. Stares at me, his dark eyes roving over my face.
“You look . . . different today,” he remarks.
Not quite the compliment I was hoping for. “Good different?” I prompt.
“Just different,” he says, neutral, and I feel a dull heat rise to my cheeks, the same choking, futile frustration that overwhelms
me whenever I’m around him, as if we’re actors going over a script together, and he keeps messing up his lines.
“Well, I felt like switching things up,” I say with a shrug.
“But you weren’t like this on Sunday.”
“On Saturday, you mean,” I say.
“What?” He frowns, like I’m the one who’s mixed the dates up, then seems to remember something. “Right, Saturday. Two days
ago.”
Which is how long you’ve left me on read, I think bitterly inside my head. Nobody leaves me on read this long. No one. Even Erik Park, who I met only once at a Bulgari
gala dinner and has been touring the world with his K-pop group, never takes any longer than three hours to reply to my messages.
The sheer nerve of this boy—
As if he can sense the direction of my thoughts, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out my bracelet. “I found this,” he
tells me. “It was in my bag.”
I don’t take it right away. Instead, I glance around, making sure enough people are passing by to witness this moment, before
saying loudly, “Oh, thank god—I wasn’t sure if it’d fallen into your bag or on the floor when I was trying on the prom dresses.
” Ares might not be following the script the way I want him to, but this is a show, whether he likes it or not.
A performance for the girls crowding around the lockers, who nudge each other and exchange raised-brow glances and giggles.
Good. If the rumors about me and Ares going to prom together hadn’t been spreading fast enough after my Instagram story, this should
do the trick. When I’d planted the bracelet in his bag, it wasn’t just so I’d have an excuse to message him on WeChat later—it
was also to serve as physical proof that I was with him outside of school.
“Don’t lose it,” Ares tells me, pressing the bracelet into my open palm. I try not to react when his fingers brush mine. It’s
a light touch, barely anything, yet it’s as if all my nerves are made of electricity, dialed up to the highest voltage. His
skin is smoother than I imagined, softer, despite his calluses. And there’s a new ring on his thumb—silver, engraved with
a dragon symbol, the metal a few degrees cooler than his hand.
He turns to go, and it’s only then that I notice how stiffly he’s moving. How he’s carrying his books at an awkward angle
with just one arm, as if afraid to put any strain on his other side. How he’s almost limping, his gait slow and uneven.
“Wait,” I call. “Are you okay? Are you . . . injured?” My voice rings out with genuine worry.
He glances back over his shoulder at me, like he’s as surprised by my concern as I am. “I’m fine,” he says.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.” He pauses, then adds, “Remember that peer mentoring starts tomorrow. Make sure you prepare.”
I’m aware that Ares had meant math preparation, and not mental preparation.
But I can’t shake my nerves the entire afternoon, as if I’m getting ready for a first date with a celebrity—except I’ve done
that before, and even then, I hadn’t been anywhere near as restless as I am now. I plan out my hairstyle, my outfit, practice
microexpressions and lines designed to charm. Revert back to my classic makeup style, because I need the confidence, and I
feel more like myself with heavy eyeliner than without it. I pick out a café for us to study at, somewhere with a more casual
atmosphere.
Nothing can calm me down.
As a last resort, I turn to my main form of therapy, which any qualified therapist would likely advise is very unhealthy:
I search for my name online.
The first page loads right away, over a hundred different results, information pieced together from interviews about my early
life, my mother and my father and my zodiac sign. Slowly I scroll through the photos, assessing each of them with utmost concentration,
like a quality control analyst. The ones in the top row are all nicely photoshopped, my hair glossy and my makeup perfect,
taken from magazine spreads or my own social media, but that’s only because I made sure of it.
Last year, someone had uploaded a screenshot of me with my eyes half open, mid-speech at some gala; I’d immediately reported the image for “inaccurate information,” which technically it was, because it was a super inaccurate visual representation of me. They took it down within two days,
but even that had felt too long. The idea of anyone searching me up in that time and seeing those hideous photos made me want
to claw my skin off.
When I’ve triple-checked that no more embarrassing shots have slipped through the cracks of the internet, I click on my most
recent post. The photos were taken just yesterday in the old hutong districts, shots of me smiling in the sunlight, a tiara
perched on my head, posing with a penguin mascot in the last one. The caption, drafted and edited multiple times in my notes
app: Honored to have been nominated for prom queen!!! voting is open now for airington students—link in my bio! love u all xxx
It’s me, but it’s not. Chanel Cao, the brand. The girl you want to be—the girl even I want to be. And the comments float over
the screen . . . she’s so pretty, marry me, kiss me, Chanel, we love you so much, please don’t ever die, you’re perfect, you’re an icon.
I try to view the whole thing with distance, as if I’m someone else, the way I do when I’m evaluating a selfie before posting
it; sometimes I’ll even close my eyes, wait for five seconds, then open them, as if I can trick my brain into thinking that
my face is a stranger’s face, and I can then determine, objectively, if it’s up to standard.
And I’m satisfied, but the satisfaction is surface level, fleeting. Like those sugary drinks my mother hates that keep you
full for maybe half an hour, then leave you even hungrier than you were before.
“Chanel. Are you paying attention?”
I look up at Ares’s face, then back down at my notes on the café table. Slowly the black squiggles sharpen back into incomplete
equations. “Sorry,” I say, brushing my hair out of the way. “Please. Do go back to what you were saying about . . .” I pause,
searching through my memory of the last ten minutes for something smart and math related, but end up only with my usual doom
cocktail about Ares, prom, the vision. Even when he’s right next to me, he’s haunting me.
Ares raises his eyebrows. “Can you at least pretend to care about the topic for a second?”
“Sure,” I tell him, sitting up straighter on the stool. “I believe it was . . . multiplication?”
“Multiplication,” he repeats flatly.
“Or . . . subtraction?”
He shakes his head. If it weren’t for the fact that he’s pretty much been threatened into doing this by the school to avoid
expulsion, I suspect he’d be packing his bag and marching out of this café right now. “I was teaching you about binomial probability.”
“Right. Yeah. That thing.”
“You seem distracted.”
I grimace. By you, I want to add, but of course I can’t.
“I just feel a bit tired,” I say, which is true.
Ever since that first night at the lake, there’s been a persistent throbbing in my temples, like I’m suffering through the world’s worst hangover, without any of the fun of getting drunk.
“Sorry,” I say again, trying to sound like I mean it. “I promise I’ll focus starting now—”
But before I can even look at the math textbook again, whispers float over from the table beside us.
“Is that her?”
“I swear it is.”
“No, really. She looks exactly like she does in her photos.”
I swivel my head toward the voices and identify the trio of girls who’d been loudly snapping photos of their strawberry crepe
cake earlier. They were very committed too, with one of them tapping the whipped cream with her spoon, while the other carefully
poured the chocolate sauce over the plate, and the third stood up on her chair to find the perfect angle. But now they’ve
completely forgotten their cake to gawk at me.
“Do you really just have fans everywhere?” Ares asks, following my gaze.
“I can’t help that I’m famous,” I say as the whispers grow louder. I’m fairly certain one of them is taking a video of me,
from the way her phone is angled.
Ares rolls his eyes. “Well, it’s not helping you concentrate on math. Maybe we should study somewhere less . . . public. Like
the school library—”
“Libraries put me to sleep,” I tell him. “I’m not exaggerating,” I add when he throws me a disbelieving look. “One of the
longest naps I’ve ever taken was at the back of a library.”
“What about your house then?” Ares suggests.
Everything in me seizes, panic striking my stomach.
He can’t find out where my house is, or else he’ll recognize it from the vision.
And he’ll know where to go to burn it down.
“My mom’s filming this new variety show at our house,” I lie on the spot.
“It’s even more chaotic than the café. How about your house?
” My prom plan flashes through my head. Step eight: Get invited to his house; hook up there.
I’d been meaning to work my way up to it, but math tutoring could be the perfect excuse to secure an invite, and once I’m
there . . . The idea of hooking up had seemed pretty straightforward when I first conceived my plan, a purely strategic move,
but now it sends a jolt of something hot and wild and electric up my spine. Like anticipation.
Ares hesitates, then checks the time on his phone. “I’ll . . . let you know,” he says, distracted. “But I need to head off
in a few minutes.”
“Where to?”
Either he hasn’t heard me, or he’s avoiding the question on purpose. “Come on,” he says, tapping the notebook spread open
between us. “Let’s try this equation one last time before I go.”