Page 47 of Famous for a Living

It’s about a picture of me standing in front of a waterfall yesterday—the highlight of a two-mile trail Mina took me (read: dragged me) on yesterday after all but dancing with glee at the “amazing weather.”

It was forty degrees.

It rained on us twice.

She called it a sprinkle and sang about lemon drops falling on our heads.

But I went with her, and sure enough the waterfall she declared was “so epic” was indeed so epic. And with much prodding Mina did get me to stand in front of the roaring hundred-foot waterfall, grinning despite soggy bangs clinging to my forehead and mascara running down my cheeks.

And then late last night, I looked at that picture as I lay in my bed. I scrutinized it, then decided to post it.

Yes, my signature lipstick was missing.

My false lashes were beside my nightstand.

And the rain jacket I borrowed off Uncle Terry was so big it swallowed my body.

But the spray and power of the waterfall looked just so amazing.

It was hard to capture on film, but it was truly iridescent.

Like a fairy world Mina and I had stumbled upon that no one in the world knew existed.

And I looked happy. Felt genuinely . . . happy.

It was me. It didn’t represent all of me, sure, but a part.

And it was a real smile. A real, twinkly-eyed smile that somehow, despite my years of practice rearranging my eyes to look just so perfectly bright, my lips to show just the right amount of pearly brightness that effused joy, couldn’t be perfectly fabricated on command.

It just couldn’t.

My eyes may have looked a little smaller from the squinting, but they danced.

They gathered some laugh lines around my temples, because the laugh was real.

It was something I hadn’t seen in myself in a long, long time. Something I hadn’t seen in . . . well . . . years.

But instead of comments about my joy, or the waterfall, or the poem in the caption I’d shared from the cabin Zaiah took me to on top of Cades Peak, what did I get?

A well-meant worry that I looked sick. A hundred various comments along the lines of, Wow, so that’s what you really look like and tirades by both boys and men about the deceit of makeup. Multiple accusations of catfishing.

I remember a time when I never got those accusations.

At fifteen. At twenty. At twenty-five.

I remember a time when, if I showed my bare face, I received praise.

Praise for going without makeup.

The comments, over and over, of natural beauty. Flawless skin. A thousand wanting to know what my secret was. Which makeup line I used. What my nighttime cleansing routine was.

The reality? Back in those days I lived off junk food, alcohol, and coffee.

Now? Now it’s a mad race to put on as much face serum as possible. To try to slow down the inevitable. Push the tide back.

I open the top drawer. Pull out my lipstick.

Oh, the glory of being young.