He passes her a turquoise paper bag, the kind you get at Watson’s, over the remains of her birthday dessert.
Inside are two bottles of toner. She turns them over to read the label. It’s not the brand she usually uses, but this is probably nicer than what she can afford.
“There was a buy-one-get-one-free deal,” he says just as she notices the word WHITENING. “I thought you’d appreciate something useful.”
Tearing her eyes from the bold, blocky word—WHITENING—she examines her warped reflection on the back of her spoon, the nut-brown expanse of her face. Once, when she was a teen, one of her aunts had patted her cheek and sighed, “You would be so pretty if you weren’t so dark.” Auntie Tseng has always taken pride in her skin, smooth as porcelain and pale as apricot milk.
Two months ago, during their Chinese New Year gathering, Auntie Tseng had said, “A boyfriend! About time. Don’t stop trying to look good, though—it’s the easiest way to lose a man.”
The bottles of toner rest heavily in her hand.
“I’m not saying you look bad,” he says. “But we all have room for improvement, right?”
Something twinges in her chest, but she leans across the table to kiss him.
She uses the toner twice a day, and it helps: her skin looks brighter, fresher, cleaner. He agrees with her between kisses, printing them over her cheeks when before he only went for her lips. But the toner was a two-for-one deal at Watson’s, and that can only go so far; his focus returns to her lips.
She stops flicking past the beauty influencers that crop up on her Instagram and sifts through their posts for treasure. One product becomes three, becomes six, until her morning routine of simple face wash and toner grows into a fifteen-step ritual: toners from Japan, serums from Korea, SPF 50 PA++++, exfoliation, lip masks, under-eye masks, volcanic clay, gold flakes, pearl essence.
She really sees the difference, the glow it brings. He clears a space in his bathroom for her bottles so she can have two sets of products instead of lugging them back and forth when she stays over—which he wants her to do every other day now.
At the next Chinese New Year, Auntie Tseng says, “I always knew you were beautiful,” and suggests IV treatments. “They make a huge difference.”
Her boyfriend’s intrigued and asks more. She thinks it’s too much money, especially once every two weeks, but he says he’ll pay. By the time summer arrives, she doesn’t need to use whitening filters on her pictures anymore. It’s fun and not anxiety-inducing to post her face now that her likes have climbed from the low twenties to a hundred.
As she slips into a dress for her twenty-sixth birthday—off-shoulder, though she’ll only take off her UV jacket after they’ve entered the restaurant—she spots a black speck on her cheekbone, as startling in the mirror as a splash of paint.
She picks at it, peeling off a tiny, hair-thin barb, sharp at the tip. Like an insect’s stinger, or maybe a thorn. Odd. Probably time to change the bedsheets.
After reapplying her makeup where it’d smeared, she smiles.
Now she’s good enough.
###
She spends most of her twenty-seventh birthday moving into their first apartment.
It’s slow going, especially when she has acrylics to protect, and it takes an hour to bring all of her things up to their new apartment.
She claims the bathroom first to arrange her bottles and brushes … and to pull out the thorns budding at her temple and chin and flush them away, so her boyfriend won’t find them in the trash. She’d gone to a dermatologist once and overheard him telling his assistant he’d never seen anything like it before. He asked her if he could write up a case presentation about her disease. She never went back.
It’s not a disease, just a nuisance. The thorns don’t even leave marks. All she has to do is extract them a couple of times a week, which is less frequent than her exfoliation regimen.
Dinner is celebratory, eaten on a newly assembled IKEA PINNTORP, and the bottle of red makes up for the fact that they’re chairless for now. They do have a couch, though, and are making out on it when her boyfriend stops tugging up her shirt and scans her face.
Her hands still on the clasp of her bra. Did she miss one of the thorns?
He touches her brow. “Hmm.”
She stares, breath caught in her throat.
“Have you ever thought about Botox?”
At first, she’s relieved, but it doesn’t last long. She nudges aside her ring light and picks up a mirror from her unpacked box of Instagram equipment, examines the three vertical lines that have snuck onto her brow. They’re faint, but even after she relaxes her expression, traces linger.
“It’s all right.” He pats her hand. “I’m sure it’s reversible.”
It is, thankfully, and it doesn’t take much effort, just a few shots every three months. Between her brows. Forehead. Corners of her eyes. The consultants at the clinic Auntie Tseng recommended that she call it regular maintenance. “It would be such a shame to mar your skin with wrinkles,” they say, cooing at her alabaster skin, oblivious to the slightly widened pores left behind by the thorns; they’ve gotten a little thicker, and it takes a couple of days for the little holes to close completely.
“Have you considered Botox here?” a consultant asks one day, touching her jaw. “Masticator muscle. It’s really slimming, and you’re so close to a perfectly oval face.”
And so it is. There’s a visible difference after a few injections; the roundness of her cheeks is trimmed to a smooth slope. Her Instagram followers climb to 10k, 15k, 20k now that she has a “goose-egg face,” as Auntie Tseng calls it.
“Like a classic East Asian beauty.”
She’s admiring the result in the clinic bathroom one day as she reapplies sunscreen before heading home, when she notices a black mole on her wrist.
Not a mole. A thorn. Pushing up her sleeve, she discovers a dozen of them marching up her forearm.
Thank God it’s winter, or as winter as Taipei gets, otherwise the technician would’ve noticed. Barricading herself in a stall, she pulls out each barb, hand shaking as she hyperventilates. They’re thicker, deeper than the ones that sprout on her face, and come out trailing tufted roots and skeins of wet, translucent gel. Blood trickles down her arms and spatters onto the floor, though the wounds clot and purse closed before she even presses on them. Barely visible, even to her.
It’s a scramble to clean up, thorns and bloodied tissue swirling down the toilet, and though the bleeding has stopped, pain flares across her skin in starbursts. But when she steps out, her expression is serene. Not a single crease to expose what just happened, though—
She dabs away a bit of blood on her chin.
Now she’s good enough.
###
On her twenty-eighth birthday, he gives her a ring.
When she posts about it, the dozens of congratulations that include some variation of omg you’re soooo pretty or you’re a goddess feel better than post-engagement sex. She makes sure to show off the ring in her pictures, flashes it in the reels she’s begun filming.
One morning, after she’s slipped out of bed early to extract her thorns from her face and arms and shins—just another part of her daily routine, a necessity since he wants her most mornings—and gone back to pretend to slumber, he “wakes” her with a hand between her legs. She arches into him, hungry; he calls her perfect so much when he’s getting close.
He stops, though, his other hand skimming the skin beneath her eye. “Are you not sleeping enough? There are bags under your eyes.”
She denies it, of course. No one can ever know about the spikes that keep cropping up under her skin. Reputations are difficult to uphold once they’ve been shattered, and her 34.9k Instagram followers are there for beauty content, not weird skin conditions.
Later, as she’s slipping an iron supplement into her mouth—a couple dozen trickles of blood a day add up—she examines herself in the living-and-dining room mirror. He stops next to her, coffee in hand. “You should probably get it fixed before the wedding.”
He means hyaluronate injections. She’s noticed her eye bags before, but it isn’t until he points them out that she notices them, and suddenly they look like crevasses.
“Maybe these, too.” He touches the laugh lines running from the edge of her nose to her mouth, and they become ravines. When her gaze flicks to his face, his creases, he shrugs. “No one will care what I look like. Weddings belong to the bride.”
The injections work like a charm, filling in the gaps where age has shrunken her collagen. He touches the spots, marveling at how natural they look. One day before her regular Botox and Picosure Laser, he taps the bridge of her nose—too flat—and the tip of her chin—too blunt—and says, “You’re beautiful, but …”
She thinks about the white girls on the brochures of her beauty clinic and how sculpted, three-dimensional their profiles are. Hers is nowhere near as angelic.
It’s good to have someone push her to be better, to fulfill her potential. Nothing drastic. Just some nudges here and there, pushing clay into a pleasing shape. A little more on the nose. Lower lip. Upper lip. Sharpen the cheekbones. Sculpt the chin. Implants, not big, the smallest size, just enough to squeeze out some cleavage.
Some new followers ask if she’s half-white; she screenshots the questions to look at whenever she gets nervy before an injection. At her family’s Mid-Autumn Festival barbecue, Auntie Tseng doesn’t have any more suggestions, just claps her ringed hands and says, “I never thought you’d grow up so lovely.”
She’s perfect, finally, and the comments flooding in from the wedding ceremony Instagram stories are proof of it. Except one. It takes her a moment to remember who it’s from: a high school classmate.
Haha, your future child is going to wonder why they didn’t get your nose.
When she shows her fiancé—wait, husband now—he rolls his eyes. “Who cares? You look beautiful now. That’s what matters.”
Now.
She knows she wasn’t beautiful before, but heat burns in her chest at this casual reminder. Her knuckles pop when she squeezes her phone, and, looking down, she finds a crop of thorns protruding from the base of each finger. She drops the phone to cover them, the tips cutting into her skin, and escapes to the bathroom, saying she has to get ready for bed.
The thorns are as thick as chopsticks, and it takes the strength of her whole arm to yank them out in a spurt of scarlet and stringy yellow fibers. Four black spikes adorn the sink’s rim when she’s done, each as long as a finger, too long to flush.
Once the burning sensation in her knuckles has fizzled out and her breath has evened, she wraps the thorns in tissue and hides them deep in her cosmetic case, then shrugs out of her shimmery afterparty dress to step into the shower, so she’ll be pristine for her wedding night. Underneath steaming water, she notices more thorns budding at her hips. Yank. Tissue. Cosmetic case.
She doesn’t go out until her wounds close to pinpricks, too small for either her husband’s eyes or lips to notice.
Now she’s good enough.
###
The morning of her thirtieth birthday, she’s brushing her teeth when she notices the ink-dark needles nestled in her gums. One for each tooth.
She sighs, but by now the thorns are nothing more than dead skin to exfoliate or nails to trim. The ones she extracts from her gums are split at the base, two or three-pronged.
After spitting out a mix of toothpaste foam and blood, she begins the methodical work of de-thorning herself. They’ve moved to a new apartment with two bathrooms, so there’s less pressure to finish quickly, especially since they have enough sex in the nights that her husband prefers to sleep in now.
Face. Arms. Legs. Stomach. Back. The last one requires some contortion, but that, too, she has grown used to. Then she’s clean, just a bit hilly where the thorns were, like chicken skin. No matter. A hot shower, red-and-yellow water swirling into the drain, and she’ll be porcelain instead of clay.
He laughs when she takes out the steak she’d defrosted overnight.
“At eight A.M.? Really? I know it’s for your anemia, but …”
He pinches her waist, failing to parse her frown, though that isn’t his fault, just the price of Botox. When he puts his arm around her, she tenses, thinking back on the contours of her body from that morning’s shower. The thorns, the incessant thorns, had distracted her, but now she feels the pressure where skin bunches up against skin.
“Oh, don’t be upset. You’re gorgeous, even with a little extra weight. It’s not like you need liposuction.” He gives her a kiss, hand drifting down to cup her ass just as a shiver runs down her back. “See you at dinner.”
After he leaves, she pushes back her scheduled livestream by an hour, apologizing to the skincare company that had sent her a sample box. Then, cross-legged on the floor, she wrests out the jagged black protrusions on her spine.
The champagne at dinner looks like the gold serum she sold five hundred units of on the livestream. It leaves her body tingling, the warm buzz following them on the way home.
When he says, “I was kidding about liposuction, but you ate so much that maybe I shouldn’t have been,” the warmth turns to a burning sensation, and she scowls, except she can’t really scowl anymore.
Her cheeks can still flush, though. He wraps his arms around her. “Aw, it was just a joke. I thought you wouldn’t mind; it’s not like you haven’t had a dozen procedures by now.”
The burning intensifies, and the familiar prickle of growing cascades down her torso. No. No. No. She twists away, stammering that she needs to be alone, and stumbles to the bathroom.
The thorns are everywhere, crawling up her neck and jaw, so dense that she doesn’t need to be discerning. She just grabs and yanks, grabs and yanks, until the floor is littered with sharp-tipped quills, glistening in her pooling blood.
“Just talk to me,” he calls through the door. “If I knew you’d be so touchy, I wouldn’t have said anything.”
Her reply is stuck in her throat. Her mouth has become too full of teeth, but of course, they’re not teeth, they’re thorns, winding out of her gums and slicing her lips. She tugs at them, but her fingers are clumsy and bristly, and the wounds on her body haven’t stopped weeping because they’ve closed, it’s because more thorns are pushing out—
The doorknob turns.
She forgot to lock the door.
“What the fuck? What the fuck?” His voice is shrill, even shriller when she turns around, naked but also not naked. “You’re—you’re—what is this?”
Her skin is burning and burning. She reaches for him, her tears evaporating into steam on her cheeks, only for him to scramble away, tripping and falling backward onto the bed.
Without him in the way, she sees herself in the floor mirror. Her eyes are pure scarlet, except for the dots of her pupils.
“God, I can’t even look at you,” he says, and there’s that look again, that look when he said we all have room for improvement, but amplified enough that she can finally see it with her new, bloody eyes.
Disdain.
With the heat inside her and her old self sloughing off like a peeled orange skin, she sees more of him, all of him. The pockmarks of old acne scars. The ring of flesh sitting on his waist. The weak, wobbling chin. All things she’d noticed yet never thought needed changing, even as he’d pointed out her every flaw.
The thorns fuse in places, coating her in scaly armor and rising to form the twisted barbs of a crown. Her bones grind audibly, her insides rearranging so noisily he ditches his disdain for terror. He runs for the door, but she catches him by the throat, her grip firm as he paws at her thorns.
“Let me go, let me go,” he shrieks. “What do you want from me?”
Her thorn-to-mouth ratio is still too high for her to speak, but her growl silences him. The globules stuck under her eyes, in her cheeks and lips, are pushed out to dribble down her chest. Her teeth follow. Her breast implants plop to the floor the same moment a dark stain spreads across his crotch.
Injection after injection, and he’s never even bothered to trim his nose hair.
With a crunch, her mandible elongates enough for her to form words.
“Am I good enough now?” she snarls and closes her jaws around his face.
