Free The Color of Silence by Liane Shaw Page A

still look like you, but maybe a bit older. There’ll be lots of upper-year guys at the party.”
    â€œIt’ll take more than foundation to make upper-year guys interested in me!”
    â€œFirst of all, I’m using a lot more than just foundation. And second of all, stop putting yourself down. It’s stupid.” I open my eyes to look at her, and she grins at me. I shake my head and smile back as she picks up a brush and starts putting pink streaks across my cheeks. The touch is gentle, feathery, and it feels kind of nice. I shut my eyes again and just give up and give in. I listen to the music instead of worrying about my face. It’s an unusually mellow CD for this house, probably one her mom’s. Cali is singing while she works, and I almost drift off to sleep by the time she finishes.
    â€œTa daa!” She yells it in my ear, and I jump. “Open your eyes and feast upon yourself!”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThat didn’t come out quite right. Just look at yourself and tell me how wonderful you look and how wonderful I am!”
    I open one eye at a time and sit looking at the new old me. My skin looks a different shade than usual and is all smooth and even looking. I used to have a few freckles that my dad says
I inherited from my mother, but they seem to have been erased with the new skin painted on. This skin feels kind of tight, and I’m afraid it might crack if I move it too much.
    My cheeks are slightly pink, making me look like I’ve been out in the sun for a while. My lips are shiny and soft looking. They taste like the strawberry-flavored medicine that my dad used to force down my throat when I was little. My eyelids are blue and shimmer gently in the bathroom light. My eyelashes look long and black.
    Everything is different.
    But I still look like me.
    I like it.
    I open my mouth to tell Cali that, but she’s busy doing her own paint job and babbling away about how great I look and how much fun we’re going to have, so I just shut my mouth and try not to touch my face.
    â€œOK, I’m ready. Let’s go.” She grabs her giant purse, and we head down to her mom’s car. She looks exactly the same to me as she did before she started.
    â€œYou look lovely, Alex,” Cali’s mother says as we climb in.
I try to smile, but I’m afraid that my cheeks will fall off.
    â€œThanks, Mom! I do good work, don’t I?” Cali grins at me. I’m still afraid to smile back.
    But I do it anyway.
    And that’s as far as I let myself remember. I don’t want to go further into that day. I want it to stop right there with the two of us grinning at each other in the backseat of the car. I want reality to stop right there so that we don’t have to live the next few hours. I want it to be a normal Friday night, a boring Friday night that leads into a boring weekend that leads us back to another boring week at school. I want there to be endless boring weeks of school that Cali and I have to suffer through together.
    They told me at the hospital that Joanie doesn’t go to school anymore. I wonder if she thinks that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
    What would school have been like for her? What can you do at school if you can’t talk at all?
    We had a class in my elementary school for kids kind of like Joanie, but I never really thought about them all that much. I never wondered what they did all day in class, what they learned, or how. Maybe if I had been a bit more curious back then, I’d be able to figure out what I could be doing for Joanie right now. But I was too busy thinking about me to pay attention to anyone else, worrying about keeping up my grades so
I could keep on singing.
    I thought I was going to keep on singing for the rest of my life. I didn’t know I was only going to sing for the rest of Cali’s life.

Chapter 12
    â€œEveryone listen up now.” Ms. Blaine claps her hands to get our