On Your Skin (ENG)

My hands are burning.

That’s the first thing I feel every morning, before I’m even truly awake. This burning beneath my gloves, reminding me with my very first breath just how much I hate myself. Last night, in front of the mirror in the new bathroom, I tried to make them disappear again. The spots. As if you could erase your own skin just by wishing hard enough. The cheese grater Uncle Gérard gave my mom the day after her divorce, that’s its real purpose now. Reducing to pieces what my parents keep telling me is their greatest gift.

But the grater can’t. Not really. It only manages to hurt me. So I put the gloves back on, the blue woolen ones. They hide the spots, and now, they hide the rest of it too.

"Are you sure you’re going to be okay?"

"I’ll be fine, mom... It’s just the first day of school."

She doesn’t believe it, but she needs to hear me say it. For a year now, she’s been looking at me like a cracked glass that’s been dropped ten times already. But one that somehow refuses to shatter.

The car pulls up along the curb across from my new high school with its dark stone walls.

Trévannec.

Three thousand residents, and not a single soul who doesn’t already know my name. Which is exactly what I need.

"I can come pick you up at..."

" I’ll walk home. Love you."

I step out before she can finish her sentence, and the wind instantly steals my breath. I pull my scarf up higher. In Brittany in October, nobody finds that weird, right? That’s what I keep telling myself. The cold is just an excuse.

As my sneakers echo against the granite pavement, my eyes lock onto the bus shelter across the street.

A woman.

A silk dress draping over golden, flawless skin, smiling down from a billboard ad. And underneath it, there's a single phrase:

Francesca, because you’re worth it.

Everybody knows Francesca. The kind of beauty that’s beyond debate. A year ago, an image like that would have made me want to claw my own skin off.

" One day, I’ll be like you, Francesca..."

In this new town, nobody knows they used to call me the dalmatian, or Yin and Yang. Nobody saw the photos of my body secretly took in the locker room back when I still thought I was just like everyone else. Here, I can finally be what I’ve always wanted.

To be somebody.