Fee knocked on the door. ‘Hey. You okay in there? Mark’s here. He’s got an update about Marilyn.’
‘I’ll be right out,’ Ellie called, clutching the towel around her, even though Fee couldn’t see her. She looked at herself in the mirror again, and looked away quickly.I’m ugly, she thought, her heart sinking.Why did this happen? Why did it happen to me? I hate this. I hate my body. I hate myself.
She reached for the soft cotton bralette the doctors had recommended she wear as her scar healed. For now, she had to go lopsided; for when the scar was up to it, the nurse had given her a prosthetic breast she could put in the missing side. She shuddered at the thought of it.
She remembered when she’d got her first bra, and her mum had made her wear it to school. She hadn’t wanted to. It was embarrassing. It made her feel different. She felt like everyone was looking at her. This was exactly the same. The only improvement was that Tom Johnson and his gang weren’t sneaking up to her in the middle of science and snapping her bra strap for laughs.
On the other hand, she’d just had cancer. Compared to cancer, Tom Johnson and the bra-snapping lads in the science lab were a walk in the park.
Being between a size 8 and a 10 and having been a workout addict and constant dieter for seventeen years, she only wore an A cup. Maybe she would have felt more conspicuous now, after the mastectomy, if she’d had Fee’s more voluptuous figure – the loss would have been more noticeable, perhaps. But even if she wore one of the many loose blouses she’d bought online for the road trip, and even with her petite figure, she still felt like people were looking at her. That they knew what had happened to her, and that they knew what her body looked like.
That she looked like a freak.
Ellie reached for her knickers, pulled on her jeans and buttoned up the white blouse, turning up the sleeves. She tied her wavy black hair up in a ponytail and put on some basic make-up. Nothing fancy, but she was suddenly tired of seeing herself in the mirror so washed out.Fake it till you make it, she grinned at herself aggressively in the mirror. She looked like a crazy woman. Still, to someone who didn’t know her, she looked slightly more normal than before.
That was probably as good as she was going to get right now.
