Beauty's on the Inside, not on the Outside

Prologue The fire took fourteen seconds to change Jules Marron's life. She knew because she'd counted. Not during nobody counts during a fire. You run, you scream, you feel your lungs fight for air that tastes like smoke and burning plastic and something chemical that you will never be able to name and never forget. You feel your skin do things it was never designed to do. But after. After, when the doctors stood at the foot of her hospital bed with their clipboards and their careful eyes and their rehearsed words, after her mother had cried herself dry in the corner chair, after the morphine made the ceiling pulse like a second heartbeat she counted. Fourteen seconds. From the moment the kitchen curtain caught until her father yanked her out the back door. Fourteen seconds that redesigned the left half of her face, crawled down her neck, and left their permanent signature across her collarbone. She was eleven then. She is seventeen now. And tomorrow, she starts at a new School. Chapter One: First day The thing about scars, Jules had learned, was that people thought they were the whole story. They weren't. They were just the part people could see. She stood in front of the bathroom mirror a routine she'd developed since Dr. Henry told her that avoidance wasn't healing and she looked. Really looked. The scarring ran from just below her left temple, sweeping across her cheekbone in a geography that was uneven and pale and permanent. It pulled slightly at the corner of her eye when she smiled. It thickened along her jaw and continued down the left side of her neck, disappearing beneath the collar of her shirt to reappear at her collarbone if the neckline was low enough. Her right side was untouched. Warm brown skin, a nose she'd inherited from her dad, full lips. On that side, she looked like what she was: a seventeen-year-old girl who liked reading on rainy afternoons and made really good playlists and could eat an entire sleeve of Oreos without guilt. She pulled her hair forward on the left side not to hide, she told herself, just to feel less like a live exhibit and grabbed her bag. Her mom was in the kitchen when she came downstairs, making the scrambled eggs Jules had eaten for luck since fifth grade. The eggs weren't lucky. Jules knew that now. But her mom kept making them, and Jules kept eating them, and maybe that was its own kind of luck. "You look great," her mom said. "Mom." "You do." "I look exactly how I look every day." "And you look great every day." Her mom set the plate down and squeezed her shoulder. Sandra Marron had the kind of love that was sometimes too big for the room, that leaked out around the edges and made Jules feel both steadied and suffocated. "Westbridge is different. It's a fresh start." Jules ate her eggs. Westbridge Academy was different, in the same way that all the schools that came after Pine Valley Middle had been different. New hallways, new faces, same moment the moment somebody looked at her and then looked away, or worse, didn't look away, and she would have to watch them do the math on her face. She'd gotten good at not caring. Or good at pretending. The school was twenty minutes from their new apartment, which her mom had chosen because it was zoned for Westbridge, which had a strong academic program and her mom had said this with the practiced casualness of someone who'd done a lot of research "a really good counseling team." Jules appreciated the research. She didn't say so. She got there early, which was another strategy she'd developed. Arrive before the crowd, get oriented, find the exits. Not literal exits she wasn't afraid of buildings but social exits. The places you could stand that weren't the center of the room, where you could breathe. She found her locker on the second floor, 247, and was working the combination when she heard them coming. Not a crowd exactly. More like a pressure system. The kind of social energy that had its own gravity and pulled other people's attention without even trying. There were three of them. Two guys and a girl. The girl tall, blond, a ponytail that swung like a pendulum was laughing at something on her phone. The shorter guy with the basketball shoes was talking loudly about something that had happened at practice. And the third one, walking slightly apart from the other two in the way that people do when they're with a group but not entirely of it, was someone Jules would remember later with the specific quality of having noticed something before she understood why she was noticing it. He was tall. Dark hair that was slightly overlong in a way that read as deliberate. A jaw that looked like it had been engineered for looking unbothered, which he clearly was about the phone, the practice story, the general early-morning chaos of the hallway. He walked like someone who had decided that nothing in his immediate environment was worth his full attention. His eyes moved across the hallway in that idle, surveying way. And then they moved across Jules. She felt it the specific quality of being seen and waited for what always came next. The recalibration. The microscopic flinch. What she got instead was nothing. He looked at her the same way he'd looked at the lockers and the trophy case and the water fountain at the end of the hall. Then he looked away, back at something his friend was saying. Jules turned back to her locker. She didn't know why nothing felt like something. But it did. She learned his name by third period. It wasn't hard. In a school like Westbridge medium-sized, suburban, the kind of place where people had been in the same social clusters since middle school someone like him had a name that floated through the hallways on its own. Alexander Sinclair. She heard it from the girl who sat next to her in AP English, a small girl with box braids and paint-stained fingers who introduced herself as Priya and then, when Jules mentioned she was new, launched into an unsolicited orientation. "Okay so the cafeteria is actually decent, the east stairwell smells weird, Mrs. Holloway in calc is a demon but in a way that you'll appreciate in April, the drama kids own the west courtyard at lunch and they're actually fun if you can handle organized chaos, and Alexander Sinclair is both the most talented person in this school and the biggest waste of said talent, but he's also kind of impossible to hate even though he makes it very easy, if that makes sense." "It doesn't," Jules said. "It will." Priya smiled. "He's in this class, by the way. Sits in the back. Doesn't speak unless Mr. Kessler specifically calls on him, which Kessler does constantly because Alex always has the right answer and Kessler finds that annoying in a way that he thinks is inspiring. It's a whole thing." Jules filed this away. She had a talent for filing things away. She didn't look for him when she came in. She chose a seat in the middle not the front, which announced effort, and not the back, which invited scrutiny and opened her copy of the book they were apparently discussing today, which she'd already read. She'd read most of the books on the AP English list over the summer. Reading was the thing that didn't require her face. She heard the class settle around her, chairs scraping, bags dropping, the particular shuffling sounds of seventeen-year-olds who weren't fully awake yet. She was reading the first page of chapter seven for what was probably the fourth time when she felt, again, that specific quality of being looked at. She didn't look up immediately. She turned a page, and then she looked up. He was looking at her from the back corner seat, his elbow on the desk, his chin on his hand. He had the book open in front of him but he wasn't looking at it. He was looking at her with an expression that she couldn't classify not rude, not curious, not the thing she expected. More like he was solving something. Working something out. When she met his eyes, he didn't look away immediately. That was also unusual. He held it for about two seconds, which was long enough to feel intentional, and then he dropped his gaze to his book. Jules did the same. Mr. Kessler called on her twenty minutes into the discussion new student, test the waters and she answered his question about symbolism in the text with probably more detail than he was expecting. She saw Priya give a small nod of approval. She didn't look at the back corner. When class ended, she was packing her bag and heard Priya say, "Told you." "About what?" "He was looking at you for like three minutes while Kessler was talking." "Two seconds," Jules said, and then she heard herself and felt warmth rise up the right side of her face. Priya looked at her with an expression of profound satisfaction. "Two seconds you counted. Sure." End of Chapter One. Just say the word when you're ready for Chapter Two! 🤭