The Concealer

A wise man once said: “Be not deceived with the first appearance of things, for show is not substance”. That would’ve been a great advice to give myself back in eighth grade. I remember walking into class on my first day at my new school, feeling worried and insecure. I had just reached the peak of my awkward years of puberty so walking into a class full of girls with flawless skin didn’t help aggrandize my self-esteem. I wanted to abscond into the bathroom and hide from the nonverbal abasement. Instead, I chose to abide with the situation, so I wouldn’t have trouble understanding the lesson later. It felt like a century had passed before the bell finally rang. I raced home and found my mother in her room. She was dressed elegantly because she was getting ready to go to a wedding. I noticed something different about her face; the scar marked on her face since childhood had suddenly disappeared. It was a small scar, but she always complained how ugly it made her feel which I thought was untrue. The scar was a part of what made my mother herself. When she left, I stayed in her room to examine her makeup products, trying to figure out which to use. I never knew how to apply makeup. After applying a lot of different substances to my face, it looked worse than it did before.

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I washed it off and gave up on trying to look better. The next day, I was assigned a project with Sara, the prettiest girl in class. She invited me over to finish it up. We got to know each other more on the bus ride to her house. She turned out to be a sweet girl, not the mean “it girl” I stigmatized her as. We sat in her room and began to adorn our board when she suddenly got up. “I’m going to wash my face. I’ll be right back”, she said. When she came back, I tried my best to hide my shock. Her face was covered with pimples similar to the ones on my face. She must have read my facial expression because she started talking to me about how great her new concealer was. I would mention the details about it, but I wasn’t concentrating on her words. I thought about how stupid and naïve I was for not realizing sooner. It is biologically impossible for a person in our age group to look perfect. In fact, nobody can truly look “perfect” without concealing their flaws first. I was snapped out of my thoughts when Sara suddenly groaned. “I cut the decoration out of line. Now it looks weird. There’s no time to reprint it so we’ll just have to remove it completely”, she said. I looked at the decoration in her hands. The problem was almost nonexistent from where I was sitting. “Why should we fix it? It looks fine to me. When we paste it, no one is going to notice it because they will be captivated by the beauty of the rest of the board”, I said, as I took it from her. After we pasted everything, we examined the board one last time. “See! I told you it doesn’t show”, I said. She nodded in agreement. “It does look good, but I just wanted it to be absolutely perfect”, she replied. “Why should we hide something if we both know we’re only humans and we’re susceptible to flaws? After all, we are all fallible”, I said.

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I wasn’t only referring to the board at this point. I had come to terms with how I looked and I was trying to help her learn what I had. I wasn’t sure if she was going to understand my advice, but when I got to school the next day, I found her face clear. Not clear of pimples, but clear of the mask she had previously worn. The insecurity I had felt was now absent as Sara and I chatted like normal classmates, neither of us faking who we really were.