She could still see the 13-year-old girl I used to be somewhere under the lace and careful makeup.
“You look beautiful, Merry,” she said, tears sliding down her cheeks.
Beautiful. That word still catches in me sometimes. At 13, I had heard a very different word in a hospital bed while half my face burned and every breath felt borrowed.
An officer told me a neighbor must have mishandled the gas. That was what caused the explosion. He said that I was “lucky” to have survived.
Lucky meant waking up alive in a body I did not recognize. It meant children whispering at school and adults looking at me with soft pity that hurt more.
Our parents were gone by then. Our aunt raised us for a while, then she was gone too, and 18-year-old Lorie stepped into a life she never asked for and became everything for me at once. She was the one who ran beside the ambulance that day and sat with me through every quiet humiliation of healing.
My sister stood in front of me on my wedding day and asked, “Are you ready?”
