Neutral Mask

Part 1

Connie did her best to conceal her emotions as she entered the house. She was a good actress, but it wasn’t easy. Fortunately, her younger brother was already in bed by the time she got home, and he was the one who could read her most easily.

Mom and Dad were still up, of course.

“You guys didn’t have to wait,” she told them.

Her father gestured at the TV. “Someone great is on Letterman.”

Right. Connie found it beyond suspicious that those few times she’d been out late on a date just so happened to match up with her dad suddenly needing to catch someone on some late-night talk show. She bit back the tempting urge to ask who, even though she was curious as to what Z-list celebrity her father would conjure up.

“Well, I’m going to bed,” she said lightly instead, waggling her fingers at her parents. “See you tomorrow.”

In the bathroom, she ran the tap, then positioned herself at the door, listening carefully. It took less than a minute before the TV’s burble of audience laughter snapped into silence. The low murmur of her parents’ conversation maundered past the bathroom. She caught “—home, at least, and—” from her mother, then an indecipherable Charlie Brown again until their bedroom door closed.

Predictable.

At the sink, she gathered water in her cupped hands and nearly had it to her face when she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Pausing, she stared at herself, momentarily baffled by what she saw.

She looked exactly the same.

Somehow, she had expected to see something different in the mirror. An absurd notion, sure—to think that just kissing a boy would change her appearance—but it had lingered on the fringes of her conscious thought until just now regardless. Every time she’d kissed Jasper—no, wait, he wanted to be called “Jazz” now—she thought the act would transform her as much outside as inside.

She dumped the water and leaned in toward her flat doppelganger. With one finger, she traced the outline of her lips.

I would kill for your lips.

Her lips should be different, shouldn’t they? After that first intense kiss out in the driveway (and thank God her dad hadn’t been peeking out the window right then, right?) and all the ones that had followed in the past couple of weeks, shouldn’t her lips be different? In the trashy romance novels she couldn’t stop herself from reading, the heroine always noticed her lips were swollen after such a kiss.

I would kill for your lips. They’re sooooo gorgeous.

Tracy. Or, depending on the time of year and her mood, Trécii. Connie’s best friend from when she’d lived in Charlotte. A walking blond cliché of Southern charm and long-lashed, early onset sex kitten.

 I have to spend, like, a million years with that special lip balm and the cinnamon oil stuff, and I can’t get, like, half as awesome as your lips.

Connie pursed her lips at herself.

Your lips and your booty. I would kill, like, four or five people for them.

Of course. At first, Connie had been flattered by the girls who coveted her lips and her ass. But then it became so frequent a lament that all flattery drained from it and spiraled down some psychological sewage pipe. The white girls yearned for one another’s lashes and boobs and hair—hair, especially—and eyes and legs and nails and any number of anatomical permutations, but all they ever wanted from Connie were those lips, that “boo-tay.”

No one wanted her hair.

No one wanted her eyes.

She shook herself in the mirror. How had she managed to turn kissing Jazz—not her first kisser, but her very best, by a long shot—into this kind of self-recrimination?