Illustration by Alivia Cooney
My mom wants me to stop touching my face because my hands are dirty and I’ll break out, but I love touching my face. I love resting my chin in my hand. I love slapping my forehead when I do something dumb. I love covering my mouth when I’m thinking.
My mom tells me to stop popping the pimples that I get from touching my face, but I love popping my pimples. I love squeezing them and seeing the gunk dribble out. I love looking at the tiny circles of blood. I love feeling the craters they leave behind.
Having pimples isn’t so bad if you don’t look in the mirror too often.
My mom takes me to the dermatologist’s office. I sit in the exam room and stare up at the fluorescent lighting while the dermatologist touches my face.
She asks me if I touch my face.
I lie to her, but it takes all of five seconds for my mom to rat me out. “She does,” she says, crossing her arms. “All the time.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” I ask, “that there are people out there who never touch their face at all?”
My mom uncrosses her arms.
The dermatologist uses a tiny needle to remove a blackhead from my nose. Then she uses a metal stick with circles at either end to squish the gunk out of the skin on my forehead, which I would have much preferred to do myself and preferably with my fingers.
“Don’t you stop getting pimples when you’re older?” I wince as the dermatologist continues to poke. “Can’t we hold out until then?”
“I just want you to have beautiful skin and be beautiful.”
The dermatologist writes me a prescription that I will eventually use twice and then forget about, though, at the moment, I accept it graciously.
We leave, but not before my mom makes an appointment for herself to get Fraxel, which is where they use a laser to blast off the top layer of your skin so that the less-wrinkled, less-blemished skin underneath shows through.
I touch the spot on my nose where the blackhead had been.