The Heart-Shaped Girls

In third grade, I envied the girls with the heart-shaped faces. Their sharp little chins always made me think of freshly sharpened colored pencils—and their skulls, so delicate and pointed, reminded me of candy hearts—the ones I’d get every Valentine’s Day up until the age of nine or ten or whenever you had to start being more than just a girl enrolled in the public school system to receive heart-shaped objects from people you wanted to kiss. 

My only consolation at the time was that the candy hearts tasted like chalk. No one actually craved them. No one ever said, ‘God, I could really go for a box of candy hearts right now.’ After Valentine’s Day, everyone forgot about them. You couldn’t even find them if you wanted to. It wasn’t like chocolate, which found its way into every holiday, creeping into plastic Easter eggs and pumpkin-shaped Halloween buckets. Sometimes I wondered if the candy hearts were made of the same toxic material our teacher Mrs. Q used to write mixed fractions on the board with. 

They probably were.  

But that didn’t make the heart-shaped girls any less enviable. I noticed that, compared to the block-headed girls like me, the heart-shaped girls got away with more. One time, when Mrs. Q was out, the block-headed girls persuaded the liver-spotted substitute teacher to feed the disc player the Powerpuff Girls instead of Mysteries of the Atlantic Ocean. When Mrs. Q found out who had done it, she called it sociopathic manipulation. But when the heart-shaped girls did the same, she called it ethos, pathos, logos.

It only got worse in high school. Every Valentine’s Day, while the block-headed girls carried nothing, the heart-shaped girls carried hairy hands and roses wrapped in cellophane. 

I liked roses. I wanted one very badly. It got to the point that I would have taken anything heart-shaped or red on Valentine’s Day. A jar of blood or extra chunky salsa. It really didn’t matter. I started to think of ways I could improve my face—to shape-shift into one of the heart-shaped girls. As of now, I had a square head. A Kraft-singles head. A paper napkin head you used to dab away insecure tears blackened by drug store mascara. 

When it came down to it, I could never really pinpoint what it was that made people like the heart-shaped girls so much. What made people want to touch them—to do nice things for them and terrible things to them all at the same time. In the end, I concluded it was a mathematical equation that involved more than just their head shape. It involved their lips and nose too. For me, heart-shaped girls became a catch-all term for all pretty girls in general.

Their lips, to start, were different from mine. Mine were thin like a piece of hair in your food. Theirs were pillowy, like a Tempur-Pedic mattress I could fall asleep on, get a full nine hours of beauty rest on, but still wake up the same block-headed bitch on. 

And their noses. Their tiny little noses that were simultaneously there and not there. I often wondered what I would trade for one. Maybe a toe or an earlobe or some other nonvital organ or vestigial structure that evolution had made so-last-year. 

One night, when I lied in bed alone, I tried pinching my nose to make it smaller. It hurt, but not as much as the difficult-to-forget comments—as the clashing messages to accept myself and edit myself.

The pinching never worked. And every time I tried after that, my nose did the same thing, eventually expanding back to its original form.

Back when I was little, and distant uncles would play gotch-your-nose with me, I wished they had keep it—put my big, lumpy nose in their shirt pocket with their pens and business cards no one actually wanted and walked away, never to be seen again.

It must have been different for a heart-shaped girl. To her uncle, gotch-your-nose was a joke, but to herself and the rest of the world, it was not. He had just stolen from her the most beautiful object to have ever existed. She would demand he give it back, and with a strange, guttural wrench sound, he’d pretend to screw it back on. 

If someone were to actually pull my nose off, I would probably say thank you. I wouldn’t care if I lost my olfactory system either. In my mind, it was much more special to look like a rose than to have the ability to smell one. 

***

It didn’t take much to think of a solution. 

The difficult part was telling people about my solution. Any time I brought up the words nose and job, they instantly wrote it off as bad and wrong. My church friends reacted the worst, warning me that changing my nose would make God very sad. He worked hard on my nose, they explained, and by getting a nose job, I was telling God that I did not approve of his creation. 

I did not. 

At least I did not lie to God like my block-headed friends did, who thanked and praised Him for their giant heads and oddly shaped noses, the same way you’d tell a child that their scribbled crayon art was very good. 

God didn’t like liars. 

***

I decided to donate my eggs to come up with the money. I had no shame in what I was doing. After all, there were Disney princesses who sold their vocal cords in exchange for bipedal legs—not for the purpose of tap dancing or performing kung fu with but solely for the purpose of spreading open for a guy they saw on a ship one time.

The surgeon assured me it’d be over fast. I wore a crinkly shower cap, and the nurses led me into a room where I was put to sleep. Before I knocked out, I imagined waking up to a rose on my chest, having transformed into the Sleeping Beauty.

***

When I woke up, I did not find a rose under my chest. I immediately put my hand on my nose instead, and a nurse yelled at me not to touch it.

That in itself was a good sign. You’re not supposed to touch things that are considered fragile and beautiful. I had, for the first time, become something to be handled with care.

***

It took about a week for the bloody bandages to come off and another for the yellow-blue bruises to fade. By the time I had healed completely, people treated me like a heart-shaped girl, and, for the first time since fifth grade, I received a heart-shaped candy that said KISS ME.

I never did eat it—just held it in my palm like a tiny red gem and stared at it for a very long time.