What I Want Page 3

  “You’re welcome,” Grace said, turning to look at her and still smiling. “It was my idea.”

  Bizzy and her violin were a big hit at the orphanage. Most days when I arrived there after school that winter and spring, Bizzy would already have five or six little kids hanging around her, begging her to play something for them. She usually obliged and even started going on the Internet to listen to various songs that they requested. It always amazed me how she could listen to a song and then turn right around and play it by ear, seemingly without a mistake. But Bizzy insisted that she made plenty of mistakes.

  “Not that I can tell,” I said.

  “I need lessons,” she complained.

  “Don’t you take lessons at school?” I asked. (Bizzy went to a public school – I went to a private one.)

  “Real lessons,” she said. “I need real lessons.” And for the millionth time, I wished that I could give her everything that she wanted.

  I may have wished I could give Bizzy everything that she wanted, but that’s not the same as wishing that Bizzy had everything she wanted.

  I wanted to be the one to make her happy so that I would get credit. I wanted her to love me and need me the way that I loved her and needed her. If all I’d wanted was for Bizzy to be truly happy, I would have wanted for her what happened next.

  ~ ~ ~

  SUMMER VACATION WAS just around the corner. I was going to a couple of soccer camps, one math camp, and one quick trip to the States, but other than that my summer was pretty much free. Grace only had one gymnastics camp, but she and Meredith were going to stay in the States for three whole weeks, and I couldn’t wait to have Bizzy all to myself.

  Two weeks before the end of the semester, however, Bizzy told me that she had some wonderful news. She even had a smile on her face, but I knew instantly that something was wrong.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’m being adopted.”

  “What?”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “I finally get to have a family.”

  I stared at her, unable to say anything.

  “This is a good thing, Marco,” she said when I still didn’t speak.

  “Where do they live?” I finally managed to ask. It could be somewhere close by . . . right here in Mexico City. That didn’t happen very often, but it did happen . . .

  “Canada.”

  “Canada?”

  She nodded.

  “You can’t move to Canada!” I exclaimed.

  “This is a good thing,” she repeated.

  “How is this a good thing?” I asked. “How can this possibly be a good thing?”

  “I’m going to have a family, Marco,” she said quietly. “I’m going to have a room of my own and a house with a yard and I’m going to get a Seeing Eye dog and go to college . . .”

  I stared at her, dumbfounded.

  “And I get to take real music lessons,” she finished softly.

  “We’ll figure out a way for you to take music lessons here,” I protested.

  “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  “But I’ll never get to see you . . .”

  “I know it’s hard Marco, but–”

  “What do you even know about these people?” I interrupted. I was distraught by the thought that she was going to move away, but I was also suspicious . . .

  Who wants to adopt a fourteen-year-old kid?

  “They’re an older couple,” she said. Then, as if reading my mind, she went on. “They’ve never been able to have kids of their own and they really want one, but they realize that it might not be very fair to adopt a baby since they’re so much older . . .”

  I shook my head in disgust and looked away, but then I started thinking.

  What if Bizzy told them she didn’t want to go with them? If Bizzy resisted the adoption hard enough, it probably wouldn’t happen . . .

  But how was I going to get her to do that?

  Bizzy had the opportunity to have parents and a house and a yard and a dog and college and music lessons. A boyfriend with scars and nubs couldn’t really compete with all that – especially since Bizzy wasn’t going to have any problem getting another boyfriend if she wanted one.

  No. There was no way I was going to be able to keep her here. Unless . . .

  That evening I went into my dad’s office. He glanced up at me from his computer.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  I didn’t say anything but sat down on the couch that was along one wall. That couch had always been the go-to spot for us kids whenever we needed to talk with him, and he immediately got up from his computer and came to sit down next to me.

  “What’s up?” he asked again.

  “Can we adopt Bizzy?”

  “What?”

  “Can we adopt Bizzy?” I repeated.

  “Why?”

  “So she can have a family,” I explained. “She wants to have a mom and a dad and a house and pets and music lessons, and we can give her all that!”

  I looked at him and realized he was actually considering it.

  “Bizzy’s already being adopted,” Mom said, sticking her head in the door just long enough to ruin everything.

  “But we could adopt her instead!” I exclaimed.

  “Her new parents are very excited–” Mom began.

  “They can get someone else,” I said quickly.

  “Why don’t you want them to adopt her?” Dad asked.

  “They live in Canada,” Mom explained, casting a knowing glance at him over my head.

  “Oh,” Dad said dryly, and I knew I’d lost him.

  “Please,” I begged, looking back and forth between them. “Please?!”

  “Marco,” Mom began, looking at me patiently. “We can’t–”

  “Please?!” I interrupted, turning desperately to Dad.

  He gave me a long look before he finally answered.

  “Marco, you’re not dating your sister.”

  I tried very hard not to cry the day Bizzy left, partly because (even though she couldn’t see my tears) she might have heard them in my voice or felt them on my cheeks, and partly because I didn’t want her new parents to see me cry. I also tried very hard not to hate them.

  I didn’t do a very good job on either count.

  ~ ~ ~

  BIZZY AND I talked to each other almost every day at first after she left, but gradually that changed. Both of us started high school in the fall and our lives began revolving around homework and extracurricular activities. I tried not to take it personally if she didn’t answer when I called or if she didn’t return a message right away . . . both of us were very busy. Sometimes, however, it felt like she was a lot busier than I was.

  There were always a lot of pictures of her online for me to look at. Often they were posted by her parents: pictures of her in their boat on Lake Ontario . . . of her performing in concerts with her new violin . . . of her posing with her new Seeing Eye dog (a black lab named Star).

  But a lot of them were posted by her new friends, too: pictures of her and a group of girls with their faces covered in paint at a professional hockey game . . . pictures of her and some friends playing with little kids at some kind of church picnic . . . pictures of her and her classmates on the observation deck of the CN Tower in Toronto.

  The one that worried me had been taken at lunch in their school cafeteria. It was of a group of kids – about eight total – and Bizzy was on the perimeter. Next to her was some guy with his arm draped over her shoulder . . . some guy with no visible scars . . . some guy with ten good-looking fingers.

  I studied that picture endlessly and obsessed over it, searching for any clues I could find as to who he was and what he meant to her. Maybe he was the friendly sort who put his arm around every girl he knew. Maybe he was just reining her in to make sure she would fit in the frame.

  Or maybe Bizzy had moved on.

  I agonized over this thought and I worried about it constantly . . .

  But I n
ever did manage to work up the nerve to ask.

  ~ ~ ~

  MEANWHILE, HOWEVER, LIFE went on.

  Puberty finally hit hard enough that I appropriated a razor from Grace’s drawer in the bathroom and started shaving every day. The scientific part of my brain told me that there was no possible way that what you did to the dead hair on the outside of your skin could affect the living hair on the inside of your skin, but I had heard enough people say that shaving would make your hair come in thicker and fuller, so I didn’t figure it was going to hurt anything to try.

  “I know you took it,” Grace accused one day when I denied having any idea where her razor was.

  “I did not.”

  “You’re a terrible liar,” she said, “and you’re so stupid too. You don’t even have any stupid hair growing on your ugly, stupid lip.”

  “That’s because I shaved it off!”

  “Yeah – with my razor.”

  She went off to whine about it to Mom and I made a special point not to care. I definitely had hair growing above my lip, no matter what Grace said.

  Every day I ran my hand across my upper lip, noting what was going on and trying to coax the follicles to cooperate. I would stop shaving for a few days to see what the progress was and then start again in hopes of encouraging all that thicker, fuller growth I’d heard so much about.

  After two months, however, I finally looked into the mirror one day and had to admit the truth.

  “Something’s wrong.”

  I had waited to say that until after I’d stepped into my dad’s office and closed the door, keeping my voice low in case Grace was lurking in the hall.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, turning away from his computer.

  I sat down on the couch and he came over and sat down next to me.

  “My moustache isn’t growing right,” I told him.

  “You have a moustache?” he asked. I think he was trying very, very hard not to laugh.

  “Look,” I said, grabbing his hand and bringing it to my face. “It’s growing here,” I rubbed one of his fingers above the corner of my lip on one side, “and here,” I rubbed it on the other side, “but not here.” That time I put his finger on the spot right above my lip, directly under my nose.

  He looked at me for a moment, apparently no longer about to laugh, and then he spoke carefully.

  “Marco,” he said softly. “I don’t think it’s going to grow there.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s scar tissue,” he explained. “Hair doesn’t grow on scar tissue.”

  He lifted the hem of his shorts to show me a scar on his thigh that he’d gotten when he fell out of a tree about fifteen years earlier. It was shiny and smooth, tight and hairless.

  “I’m not going to be able to grow a moustache?” I asked, mortified. I was so upset that I forgot to keep my voice down.

  “I don’t think so,” he said sympathetically, shaking his head.

  “How come you never told me?”

  “I . . . I guess I never thought about it,” he admitted.

  “You never thought about it?” I cried. It was all I’d been thinking about. “I was going to grow a moustache to hide my scar!”

  “You can’t even see your scar–” he began, but I cut him off.

  “Yes, you can!” I yelled. “I can!”

  “Look, Marco,” he said. “I understand–”

  “No, you don’t,” I shouted, interrupting him again. “You don’t understand! You don’t understand anything at all!”

  And I stormed out of his office, slamming the door behind me.

  Two days later, Dad called me into his office. He was sitting on the couch with his laptop and I slouched in and started to sit down, but he stopped me and told me to close the door.

  I obeyed before reluctantly joining him on the couch.

  He made sure I was looking at him before turning the screen in my direction.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  I gave the monitor a cursory glance, but when I realized what I was looking at, I leaned forward, studying it harder, barely able to believe what I was seeing.

  Leading plastic surgeon . . . facial hair transplants . . . moustache region . . . designed to restore hair . . . conceals scarring . . . donor hairs obtained from the scalp . . . grows like normal facial hair . . . can be shaved . . . permanent . . . precision placement of the grafts at exact angles assure naturalness . . . microscopically dissected grafts minimize scarring . . .

  When I finally dared to look away from the computer, Dad was staring at me intently. I didn’t say one word.

  “Do you want this?” he asked quietly.

  I gaped at him.

  “Are you serious?” I managed in a voice just above a whisper.

  He nodded and I continued to stare at him. I could barely breathe.

  “Do you want to get it done?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He nodded again.

  “Did you talk to Mom about it?” I asked, because this was just too good to be true.

  He nodded for a third time and said, “She’s completely against it.”

  I looked at him questioningly.

  “But she’ll get over it,” he said.

  I narrowed my eyes doubtfully.

  “Don’t worry about your mother,” he assured me quietly. “This is something only a man would understand.” He gave me a small, conspiratorial smile.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Three weeks.”

  “Three weeks?”

  “I went ahead and made an appointment. We have to fly to Boston . . . I’ll buy the tickets this afternoon.”

  “Boston?”

  He pointed to the screen. “This guy’s one of the best in the world. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right.”

  I resisted the urge to hug him, nodding instead and looking at the computer again, trying to wrap my brain around how everything in my life had just changed in the past two minutes.

  “But Marco?” Dad said, interrupting my thoughts.

  I looked back to him.

  “What?”

  “I want to tell you something.”

  I should have known there would be a catch.

  “What?”

  He rested his eyes on me and paused for a long moment before he spoke.

  “The only reason I’m doing this,” he said, reaching out and touching my arm, “is because I know how important it is to you.”

  He paused.

  “I don’t want you to think for one single second,” he went on, “that I’m doing this because I think that there’s anything wrong with you.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  I managed to nod at him.

  “I don’t think you need to have this done,” he explained further. “I’m only doing it because I know that you want to have it done.”

  I couldn’t answer.

  “The very first day I laid eyes on you,” he said, looking away as if he were remembering, “I thought that you were absolutely perfect.”

  He brought his eyes back to me and held my gaze intently.

  “I still think that,” he finished. “I want to make sure you know that.”

  I finally managed to find my voice. “I know,” I said.

  This time I didn’t resist the urge to hug him.

  Three weeks later, I missed a whole week of school – another thing Mom had a fit about. It was a quiet fit, however, because Dad had insisted that nobody else needed to know any details about what kind of surgery I was going to have and Mom didn’t have many chances to voice her opinions when Grace or Meredith weren’t around. When I was little, I’d had several surgeries because of my cleft, and Dad didn’t have any problem telling my sisters that we were simply going to “fix some things that still weren’t quite right.” Grace looked briefly suspicious, but Dad was a much better liar than I was, so thankfully she let it rest.

/>   Three weeks later we flew to Boston on a Monday and had our consultation on Tuesday. Wednesday I had my surgery. It lasted almost four hours and I was awake the whole time, but I didn’t feel a thing and felt so good afterward that we went to Mike’s Pastry and split a lobster tail (which, it turns out, is not really lobster at all). Thursday I had a follow-up appointment that lasted all of about three minutes, and that night we went to see the Red Sox play the Cubs. Friday we flew home.

  For two weeks I kept a dressing over my upper lip and Grace out of my business. The stitches dissolved and the transplanted hairs fell out the way I’d been told they would, and when they started growing back right on schedule two months later the way they were supposed to, Dad bought me an electric razor.

  I threw Grace’s stupid disposable one in the trash.

  Once my moustache finally came in and covered my scar almost completely, I was close to being able to convince myself that I looked normal.

  One day, when I was home alone, I stood in front of the mirror in Mom and Dad’s bathroom and put my hands behind my back. I stared at my reflection.

  After a moment, I went into Dad’s office and took his favorite leather jacket from the hook on the back of his door. I put it on and went back to their bathroom. I stuffed my hands into the pockets of the jacket, and I looked into the mirror again.

  This time, I almost liked what I saw.

  ~ ~ ~

  BIZZY AND I continued to keep in touch throughout high school. She knew everything that had happened in my life since she’d left, just like I knew everything that had happened in hers. She knew that my grandmother had died the summer after my freshman year. She knew that I’d had an assist on the winning goal of our championship soccer game during my sophomore year. She knew that I’d gotten to go to Los Angeles as a senior when I’d won a design challenge hosted by Tec Santa Fe. She knew about my moustache.