skin deep ; liam payne au

two

Throughout my life I had realized there is a definite division between People Who Are Pretty and People Who Are Not. On the Pretty side there are parties and fun and hot bodies, while on the Other side there are video games and Netflix and cellulite. The People Who Are Pretty are the ones who get their lives handed to them on a silver frickin' platter and the People Who Are Not are the ones being forced to hand it all over. The People Who Are Not stand back as the People Who Are Pretty live their perfect lives with their perfect hair, completely ignoring the peasants underneath them as if they are just supporting characters to the lead roles. People Who Are Pretty basically rule the world.

Unfortunately, I classify with the People Who Are Not.

One look at me and you'd know why. Let's start from the top, shall we? With my hair, perhaps? My hair has a life of its own. It is curly and frizzy and too voluminous for anyone's liking. It was like the before shot of a Person Who Is Pretty's hair in an Herbal Essences commercial. Next, my face is repulsive. With acne-scarred skin from freshman year of high school, eyes that are too squinty, and a nose that was far too big for my face... I was what you would call ugly. I had arms that were too jiggly, a stomach that was too pudgy, and stretch marks covering my hips and thighs. The list goes on and on.

I don't know how I got this way. Before high school, I was an Okay Looking Person. I hadn't exactly hit puberty (my whole family is filled with late bloomers) and so I hadn't yet developed my pimple-popping habit nor had I gained the Freshman Fifteen. Actually in my case, it was more like Freshman Forty. It just seems so ironic that when I started highschool, which was meant to be "the best four years of my life" as my mom always said, was just about the time I turned Ugly.

I tried everything. I honest to god tried every trick in the book to turn myself back into the happy, Okay Looking Person I was before. I tried home remedies for my acne, which included sleeping with toothpaste on my face, homemade facial masks, and lots of failure. When none of those worked, I went multiple dermatologists and forced my mom to pay for multiple expensive ass bottles of acne treatments and medicine which all either made me break out more or had little to no effect at all.

For my hair, I bought every type of frizz-controlling, hair taming product I could get my hands on. I tried straighteners and curling wands and crimpers, all of which only damaged my hair beyond repair and made matters worse than before. I had no choice than to pull my hair into a ponytail day after day, occasionally achieving a thick braid -- if I was lucky.

I went to doctors about my weight. They told me what I already knew: I should eat healthy and exercise often. This was a load of bullshit, because no matter how many times I went to the gym and got on a treadmill and no matter how many veggies I ate the numbers never budged and I maintained a hefty weight of 175 pounds. I put myself on meal plans, then stopped eating altogether, then tried more than enough crazy diets to last me a lifetime.

After I sprained an ankle in December of freshman year when I fell off a treadmill that wasn't even running, I decided the world, Mother Nature, and God were all against me and I gave up completely.

My mother also put in a lot of effort, and some was for my benefit... but it was mostly just for her own. She claimed that she "just wanted what was best for me" and "for me to be as happy as I could be," but this was coming from the queen of People Who Are Pretty herself. When she was in high school, she was Homecoming and Prom queen, had multiple boyfriends (some her age, some old enough for it to be illegal), and won pageant after pageant in her small hometown. My mom tried hard for me to turn out just like her, and when I didn't she was disgusted and could only look at me for short increments of time without feeling overwhelmed with self-pity and anguish over the fact that she had been burdened with a daughter who was ugly. Oh the horror.

Needless to say, my mother and I do not get along very well. She was always nagging me about my unruly hair and warning me not to wear certain stripes that would make me look fatter (I could never remember whether vertical or horizontal stripes were more slimming, so I stayed away from both to avoid any problems. I attempted to avoid my mother as well.)

While I was in school, I did have a few friends, but they were the kind that I really only talked to at school. I didn't hang out with anyone over the weekends, I had no fun slumber parties, and I wasn't invited to one Sweet Sixteen bash. I'm going to be honest in the fact that I was an unlikeable person; I wore my Ugly like a shield and wouldn't let anyone penetrate it. I let my hideous looks become my hideous insides and soon became The Biggest Bitch On The Planet.

I wasn't like this forever though. I didn't remain The Biggest Bitch On The Planet because when I turned 18 and moved out, I realized that my mother was one of the key components that resulted in my off putting personality. Her constant nagging and condescending scrutiny made me the way that I was. 

On my 18th birthday I redeemed a savings bond that my dead grandmother had given me when I was like a newborn. As it turned out, it had accumulated just enough money for the down payment and first month's rent for a quaint, one-bedroom apartment located approximately 50 miles away from my mother's house and therefore at the perfect distance away so that she wouldn't think I was avoiding her, while still managing to avoid her.

So, I moved out and away from my mother, who still called me once a week to talk about her life and current dating situation which was so inconsistent I gave up on keeping track. I got another new job, this time as the daycare attendant for my apartment building. (This job payed really well to my surprise, and the parents always tipped more than necessary if I lied and said their child was loud, not listening, disrespectful, etc.)

I didn't have any friends, apart from an online penpal who shared my love for Harry Potter and band tees. But, at this point in my life I was not as unhappy as I had been throughout high school. I had my own apartment, a (semi) steady job, and books to read. I was slightly lonely and still removed all reflective, mirror-like surfaces from my home, only leaving one mirror in the bathroom uncovered, but I was getting better. I wasn't filled with the self-loathing disgust I had been when I was living with my mother, who hung mirrors literally everywhere and insisted on having framed portraits from back in the day when she could have been the poster child for Barbie.

It wasn't until I got the job at Starbucks that I met the someone who understood me more than anyone else ever had. Steven Base was the one person who knew what it meant to have a parent who loathed you and be an outcast in his own family, and the world. Steven was gay. Like they say in Mean Girls, he was Too Gay To Function. He and I had never had any type of relationship with any type of guy, another grounds for bonding, and constantly discussed what it would be like if we lived in a world where being gay and/or ugly were celebrated instead of scorned.

I didn't let anyone in like I did Steven. That is... until Sunglasses Guy began making frequent trips to Starbucks and (sorry for the dramatics) changed my life forever.

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a/n: please do not be offended by anything written in this chapter. you have to realize that everything avery says is something she truly believes. these are her opinions, not mine. these thoughts and beliefs are crucial to her character and the course of the story, and the things I write for her have no correlation to my own way of thinking.

okay thank you for reading :)))

xoxo, skylar