Maybe that’s not one hundred percent true, but what’s a little white lie to see her smile? I try not to look at her scar as she places the bag on the bed and zips it open to reveal the tools of her trade. If I look too closely at it, I’ll think about what Carlo told me, about the complex web I’ve fallen into it. I might scream. I might run. So I do what I got good at during childhood: lock it all away in a box in my head.
Alda spins on me. “Ready?”
She sounds like a referee before a fight, but I manage a nod. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
Over the course of the next hour and a half, I find out what it would be like to trade places with my canvases. I am painted, prodded, pruned, touched-up, perfected, erased, re-perfected. “No, that’s not quite right.” She does my makeup twice. She piles
