Wealth, status, and beauty define the elite of Kensington Prep. Every one of them possesses the ability to get away with anything and everything they want, unscathed and remain as privileged and superior as ever.
But Amory Scout decides that tim...
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"Are you sure you want to do this?" Hadley chewed her bottom lip. Over the years of friendship, it had grown to be a habit of hers and she tended to do it out of boredom or nervousness and I'm not sure what it was this time. Though nervous was a good bet.
We were at the doctor's office, waiting for my appointment and waiting for the chance to finally transform.
"I'm positive," I told her, even though I could hear my heartbeat deep under my chest. The mirror next to the clock on the wall plastered with body-length posters of women's bodies and faces with slogans like sculpt your way to a new you or beauty is confidence. The last one struck me as rather odd to say in an aesthetic surgery clinic as confidence must be a department somebody was lacking if they came to seek beauty in plastic surgery. "It's what needs to be done."
I was never butt-ugly. Sure, I had some childhood hiccups but it wasn't as if I was Frankenstein's girl cousin. I always had bad skin but that could be amended with the right skincare routines and dermatologist appointments, my braces were already taken off and my eyesight had been recently restored the minute the osteopathic doctor recommended the LASIK surgery. Everything that was ever a flaw could've been fixed except for my nose.
Usually, I really didn't care about it. I thought it was cool to have a little bump on the bridge of my nose. People often said it gave character to my face. But popular girls don't do characters, they are usually caricatures of perfection.
The desire to change it had never struck me until recently when in order to assimilate into the ranks of the Elite and take them down, I needed to fix my nose. Since then, I became hyper-aware of the imperfect feature of the face- my nose. I was comparing it to perfect girls in magazines and social media, even though I knew they were retouched and photoshopped; those other tall, blonde, straight-nosed, full-chested girls who were perfect, no doubt of it, with their worries on anything but their nose.
It was now all I stressed about- my nose. The thing was that I was constantly worried about it, wondering if it was the first thing people noticed about my whole appearance- my nose; the bad and the ugly, the thorn that needs to be plucked off and replaced with a rose.
I stared back at the clock hanging on the wall above the receptionist's counter. The clock was like the rest of the clinic's interior- standard, white, clinical, boring, its glinting metal hands resting on two in the afternoon. I stared at the brochures, all written in Korean. They are all tacky and bright with beautiful, photoshopped Korean girls advertising some beauty product that doesn't really work. I stared at the other patients sitting beside me. They were reading magazines or scrolling down their feed, enslaved into the cage of their own networks, too busy for the real world, too engaged by the digital reality before them.
"Amory Scout?" The nurse in the white uniform pronounced my name in heavily accented English as she peered around the reception for anybody of the name. Hadley and I stood up, rising slowly, with caution as we drew some attention to ourselves.
