There it was, just as it had been for the past 25 years; of course it was different, new lines had formed and parts that had once been sprite now lacked luster, but that was only because Harriet had allowed it to be so. The same problems that had haunted Harriet Livingston her entire life persisted: dark bags under her eyes that even the most coveted of creams couldn’t manage to tighten, and a quiet hatred for the face that stared back at her, more scared than sad, but strong in its determination.

     She had spent countless hours like this: static and stoic, staring at herself in the mirror, callous in her criticism of herself. Her forehead seemed too broad and her eyes too close together. Her chin came to a point imperceptible to everyone but herself, and her jaw was too wide, making her “too handsome”. She could tame her black eyebrows, which she inherited from her Russian father, and waxed her upper lip intermittently, but these actions were purely superficial for Harriet. She wanted to look nothing like herself. She wanted to come out of surgery a masterpiece, having lost the facade of a woman who could only claim to be her.

     Harriet’s self image had been tarnished by no one but herself. Sure, the pressure of being the daughter of one of the most beautiful women in the world had been tenacious in its attrition, but Harriet again had allowed that. Seeing the beautiful face of her mother, Lara Livingston, one of America’s most beloved movie stars, plastered on magazine covers emblazoned with lavish praise of her natural good looks gave Harriet the ammunition. She simply fired the gun. As a child, Harriet’s mother kept her hair in a boyish bob, coated in shiny wax, that framed her lightly olive skin like a bell jar and gave her blue eyes an even more ghostly allure than her own cold stare. Harriet, of course, hated it and cried voraciously when the hairdresser came to the mansion she shared with her mother and brother in Beverly Hills. Her father, a famous photographer, left her mother and moved to Paris a mere five days after Harriet’s birth. She rarely saw him.

     The boys at school, despite the more popular aesthetics of the time, adored Harriet. One boy in particular named Kevin Mason fell in love with her immediately. He moved to California from Idaho right before second grade. Filled with the nerves typical of being thrust into a new situation over which you have no control, Kevin went to Ms. Riley’s classroom at the designated time on the designated day. He was dreading it and tears welled easily as he walked down the long, foreign hallway. It wasn’t until he saw Harriet: her bob shining under the fluorescent light, that Kevin started to relax. For years he would long for Harriet, who never allowed the boys’ flirtations to faze her, and for years she turned him down flatly each time he asked for a date. Kevin moved away after the eighth grade and, like many of the boys charmed by Harriet, he thought of her wide, powerful face and vague eyes even after he had many other women and settled down to start a family.

     Self-deprecation aside, Harriet had had a series of awkward boyfriends in high school and college: all of whom her friends and family would privately insist were far too unattractive for a girl as striking as she. Sex, however, was joyless for Harriet, at least in the emotional sense, and she fretted constantly that the men were thinking of more attractive women, or her mother. The men, of course, were always thinking of themselves and their good sexual fortune in catching such a fetching woman.

     None of that mattered now because by this time tomorrow Harriet Livingston’s face would be no more. Her eyes would be fit and tight. Her chin would come to a curve, and her cheeks would be lifted. She decided to pin her ears, which were her fathers, back because she thought they stuck out too far, and her jaw would be filed into a more delicate, far narrower shape. She would inject her thin lips with collagen, giving them the illustrious appeal of a woman much more adept at the ways of the night.

     Harriet stood there, looking at herself looking at herself, and wondered what it will be like to look at her self and see something else. Or, someone else: someone she always felt was inside of her but that she had been cursed to look nothing like. Someone who had cried to exist since Harriet could remember, and who only now would come into being. It crushed Harriet that her inner self had missed out on coming of age and college, and picnics in the park when her father visited from Paris. The woman inside of Harriet had, of course, been there the entire time, but was forced to sit mute, crying out only to Harriet for release, while Harriet begged to be destroyed.

     She imagined it would be like traveling to the future as a child to see how things turned out: you’d know yourself but fail to see how you got there. It would be a like a dream, the exact features and details opaque yet perceptible. It would be like when she was ten and got her ears pierced: it took a few days to adjust to two new holes in her head, but now those holes were as much a part of her as her tongue. Harriet’s mother, who had aged as gracefully as anyone Harriet knew, objected vehemently against her daughter’s surgery. She stroked her daughter’s tear stricken face and assured her that she was beautiful, she told her she was radiant; no matter what she said, and even after she cried, “You’re amazing and it crushes me that you’re erasing your parents from yourself,” and her tears ran faster than Harriet’s, Harriet was steadfast in her cosmetic convictions. Her brother, Jonas, who was also attractive and had delicate features that suited his fey demeanor, told her he supported her but thought she was mad. Her father said about the same thing, before adding, quite slyly, that many of the male models he worked with commented on an 8x10 picture of her he kept in his studio. Harriet was deaf to their objections and, in fact, had agreed to the surgery before even bringing it up to her family. Her friends, of which Harriet only had a few, had yet to be informed, except for Harriet’s long-time friend Yvonne, a model whose face was nearly as ubiquitous as Harriet’s mother. Yvonne, too, had tried to dissuade Harriet, but knew in her heart that it didn’t matter so dropped the subject with a defeated sigh.

     The doctor came in to make his “map” as he called it. Harriet sat on the plush king-sized bed provided by the private hospital: which promised full confidentiality. All of the most famous of Hollywood’s citizens had passed through its labyrinthine private entrance. The walls of the room were mahogany and a 48” flat-screen television was hidden behind a panel that raised and lowered with the touch of a button; a satellite channeled in over 400 channels. Heidi, who arrived two days before surgery under the clinics advice to acclimate to her surroundings and her decision, had yet to tune in.

     “How are you feeling, Harriet?” One of the most sought after plastic surgeons in the world, Dr. Barry Eisner spoke softly, betraying his substantial mass. Standing at 6’4” with broad shoulders and a well developed, hulkish body, and hands rivaled only by a baseball mitt, Eisner seemed like a giant compared to Harriet’s small, 5’5” frame. His patients, male and female alike, were just as taken by his refined, Greek features as by his performance as a doctor, which was exemplary. His bedside manner was charming and sweet, and one knew that he really did care about his patients’ well being, which is just as comforting as it is sexy.

     People were equally impressed with his good will: the doctor traveled two months out of the year performing surgeries for the needy and malformed. Given his running rate in Los Angeles, the talented doctor could afford to live without the income. Furthermore, his travels allowed him to feel less sheepish about going into such a lucratively superficial business. It also afforded him time with his female colleague, with whom he would celebrate five years of mutual adultery on an upcoming trip to Eritrea.

     “I’m well.” While confident in the doctor’s abilities, Heidi was not interested in talking with him. She was too far in her own head and lacked the vigor to engage or be engaged.

     “Nervous?”

     “No.”

     “Excited?”

     “Extremely.”

     “I am too, Harriet. I think you’re really going to like how things turn out.”

     “If I look like your computer imagined, then I’m sure it will be money well spent.” Heidi tried to curb her curtness, but didn’t. The doctor, however, was unfazed, humming a little as he criss-crossed Harriet’s face with marker. He dashed a line under both her eyes and down her face. He made a smile line under her chin and inverted it above.

     “I like to make sure all my patients have thought deeply about the procedure and its effects before surgery. Are you absolutely sure you’re making the right decision, Harriet?”

     “Aren’t you?”

     “Well, I don’t really think my opinion matters here.” If he were being honest with her, he would have told her that she was beautiful and was wasting her money. He tried that approach during their first consultation, but Harriet would hear none of it. He pulled her ears back and made small dashes behind them.

     “Dr. Eisner, when you look in the mirror who do you see?”

     “Myself.”

     “I don’t know what that’s like. I’ve always seen someone I couldn’t imagine was the girl I claimed to be. I couldn’t fathom that I looked how people saw me, like a princess with a grotesque curse. I can’t look like this,” Harriet waved her hand in front of her face. “I need this surgery.”

     The doctor looked at her, a gleam of analytical consideration in his eye, before replying. “Good. I’m just as confident as you are, Harriet. Now, I must go and get some rest, and I advise you do the same. I’ll be in before the surgery in the morning. Goodnight, Harriet.” He gave her cheek a light stroke before leaving quietly. Harriet sat on the bed for a minute before returning to the mirror.

     She kept her hands folded on front of her and breathed slowly. Her head swelled. She could feel it shifting, growing louder and echoing, as if her mind were a cave, devoid of activity, every sound bouncing off the harsh, cold walls. It bubbled with self-hate, one born out of Harriet’s own disbelief, a definite deficit of conviction in her own self worth: an inner beauty perceptible to everyone but herself, exhibited fairly in her beguiling good looks. Her head screamed, “I hate you!” violently, the elongated –ou sound verging on hyperbole, before she said, out loud, “I don’t even know you.”

     Her face was scored, ready to be transformed. Harriet put her hand to her cheek, where the doctor had touched her ever so slightly, and pinched it, holding the skin painfully between her fingers. A welt formed immediately, right where her new cheeks would protrude, she hoped, ferociously and with the striking force of a hammer.

     Harriet would not even allow the shortest of glimpses in the mirror until she was fully healed. She had no use for scars and swelling: she only wanted to see the seamless, finished product, so she spent the weeks after the surgery reading magazines and watching the satellite television. While most patients preferred to recuperate at home, Heidi had shelled out an extra few grand for the extended privacy of her mahogany room. She didn’t anticipate having many visitors, any way. She had told her mother and brother to stay away until she was ready to show them her new face. Dr. Eisner came in periodically to check on Harriet and her new face. He always kept a blank face when he examined her progress. The first time he unwrapped her he had allowed a small gasp, for even he hadn’t predicted the severity of Harriet’s instructions. “What’s wrong? Did it work? Am I beautiful?” Harriet’s voice shook only slightly. She was filled with the eager anticipation of a child looking for praise.

     “Ye-Yes, you look wonderful, Harriet. I just remembered that I forgot to turn off the stove, that’s all. Your face is healing well.” His typically gregarious attitude was abandoned and the doctor scuttled out the door soon after rewrapping her face. Later that night, in bed with his mistress colleague, Dr. Eisner would say he felt as if he had used his hands to destroy something beautiful. He had forsaken his practice and wondered aloud if all the money was worth it. His lover told him not to be over dramatic, but the doctor couldn’t help but feel hollow. Harriet’s only other visitor was Yvonne, who came four days after the surgery.

     “Are you in pain, honey?” Yvonne, tall and lanky, sauntered over to the bed, her dress, tailored by the designer himself to her famously long torso, and sat next to her friend.

     “Yes.” Her face burned with pain, cracking around the edges of her wounds as they healed, closing the incisions and cementing her new face. It was penetrating and as she spoke, Harriet imagined that the doctors had sliced her larynx, for the nerves twitched excruciatingly. Her voice was not her own. “Aren’t you on painkillers? Why aren’t you on medicine?” It was surprising to hear Yvonne say this. She had never had surgery and was one of the few models that stayed away from illicit substances. She rarely drank, having learned the dastardly effects of alcohol at the hands, and often fists, of her abusive, diplomat mother.

     “No. I don’t want them.”

     “But you’re in pain, Har. That slows the healing process.”

     “That’s what my doctor said. I don’t want them, though. I want to feel myself heal, the burning pleasure of a new face, a new self as it firms into being.” Behind the pristine gauze, her face completely hidden, Harriet’s azure eyes burned with resolve. Yvonne had long suspected Harriet of being unstable, but in the months and weeks leading up to the surgery, her suspicions became firm knowledge. The surgery had become a religious experience for Harriet; it was to be a pain filled pilgrimage through which, Harriet testified, would bring her closer to her self. She would be filled with a new knowledge. “My being shall be whole, and when that happens, my heart and soul shall beat in tandem,” Harriet said over dinner when she told Yvonne that she would finally get the surgery.

     Harriet, whose alienation was worn on her sleeve, had always maintained a cool demeanor, every emotion subtle and innocuous, even as she silently berated herself. The development of her zealous determination to change herself, then, came as a surprise to her friend. Yvonne, of course, thought that something had precipitated the event, some man who had insulted her, or negative press, or perhaps her mother had said something flippant.

     The truth of the matter was that Harriet, who failed to outgrow nightmares with her peers, had been tortured by more graphic, more disturbing dreams in which her face was more grotesque than ever, so much so that she rivaled Medusa and turned the world, even the animals, to stone. Seeing what she had done, Harriet was filled with grief and, as punishment, bashed her face against a moss-covered rock repeatedly. Blood flowed from her forehead, dripping into her eye, and meeting the blood that oozed from her nose and mouth. Her lips were torn and swelled. A river of Harriet’s blood flowed from her face, sweeping past her feet. The people of the world, turned to stone, were bathed in Harriet’s blood, which flooded the land and the ocean, too. Then, something miraculous happened: all the people Harriet had frozen in horror began to revert. Their skin was soft and alive. When they looked at Harriet again they did not turn to stone. Her face was gone, for the blood of her injuries had transformed her, too. Taking a mirror from an adoring child, Harriet saw her new face and it was gorgeous. She woke from her dream placid and filled with purpose. She called Dr. Eisner that morning and made an appointment.

     To Harriet, the dream was a prophecy. By changing her face, Harriet believed, she would not only complete a journey of self-realization, but would somehow make the world a better place. She would introduce a new beauty to the world, one sure to bring as much pleasure as her last one brought pain. It was divine. Now, her voice was filled with a rapt, erudite confidence. She seemed to be speaking to no one, not even herself, as if Harriet had experienced some transcendence, something akin to a trip to Walden. Yvonne felt a chill when her friend spoke, ruminating on the convergence of her inner being with external, material appearance.

     Harriet remained still as Yvonne rocked back and forth, languidly at first but gaining more momentum as her throat clenched in anxiety. Her friend, the girl with whom she had spent so much time in the past decade, didn’t sound like herself, didn’t seem like herself. This was not her friend. Yvonne didn’t even know her. She was in the room with a stranger: a masked stranger, an imposter who had taken over Harriet’s identity, discarding the friend Yvonne knew for some many years, and replacing her with someone who was lifeless, soulless. It was a woman, a girl who had crushed her self only to return, in contradiction with what she said, as a shell of a person. Harriet’s voice was even more void of emotion than before, and emanated ominously as if disembodied from any one thing at all, and it was frightening. “Listen, Harriet, I’m going out of town for a few weeks.” Yvonne stood and straightened her skirt. She brushed her lap and took a small step away from the bed.

     “Why?”

     “Work. It’s fashion week in Europe, and then a vacation with Freddie. I’ll see you when I get back, okay. I’ll call you. Take care, Harriet.” Yvonne gave Harriet a quick, abrupt kiss on her gauze covered head and attempted keep her pace steady as she walked to the door. With the click of the door, Yvonne broke into a run, fleeing down the hall and out of the hospital as fast as she could, and only when she closed her car door did Yvonne begin to breath normally. There, she sat, her heart mourning the loss of a friend who was still very much alive, fearing the loss of her own mind.

     Harriet spent the next few weeks alone; the suffering of the pain dissipated with time and she was filled with nothing but splendor. She itched with anticipation but knew it would be best to wait, allow herself the time to prepare to be the most beautiful woman in the world, a role she knew would bring pressures and attentions that she must embrace responsibly. It would be a powerful position, one that Harriet was more than willing to fill. Harriet’s hair was longer now that her appearance was no longer so explicitly handled by the whims of her mother. A natural wave came with puberty and it tramped down her face with a shine and a bounce, giving her the look of a woman who had just crawled out of bed but whose natural radiance negated any signs of restlessness. She instructed the doctor to leave her hair unwrapped after the first week of healing, so that she could wash and brush it, which she did for hours.

     Harriet would sit in the corner of her room, looking out the window as the California sun, so full of promise, climbed up and then down, giving men and women alike another day filled with joy and sadness, beauty and unbelievable horror. Harriet, her black hair churning out the top of her gauzed face, reflecting the days light, would comb her hair and hum oldies as she thought of her reemergence into the world: the stunned faces of strangers as she graced them with her beauty. Children would think she was a princess and men would clamor for her attention, women would scowl with jealousy.

     As the time for her release from the hospital came, Harriet made arrangements to be picked up in a black limo. A designer with whom her mother had a maintained a solid friendship over the years came to the hospital to fit her with a dress that had cost almost as much as the surgery. She stood in the afternoon light, in her mahogany room, the designer pinning the dress around her thighs as she stood on the pedestal, her face wrapped and her eyes shining. Today was the day the world would receive a new gift, a new face for it to adore and obsess over and wish to possess. Harriet believed people would gasp, unable to conceive something more glorious than they had ever seen. They would be filled with enchantment, of which Harriet believed the world was in much need.

     The limo sped through the crowded LA streets. The sun, as predicted, was shining and a soft, summer breeze blew steadily. It was a Sunday and the driver was to take Harriet to the Four Seasons, where she knew all of Hollywood’s most powerful elite would be feasting on a sprawling brunch. Harriet’s hands were steady as she unwrapped her face, peeling off the layers of gauze, each round bringing her closer to revelation. She had done her hair before leaving the hospital and makeup would be no matter: Harriet was confident that her new beauty was too eminent to be augmented by something as banal as pigments.

     The driver opened the door and Harriet’s legs, one by one, swiveled into the day. Her purple dress, regal even by royal standards, shimmered and the wind swept about the silk effortlessly. The people outside the hotel, always intrigued by a limo, but more so when it comes to such a dramatic and obviously orchestrated halt, looked on eagerly. As anticipated, Harriet’s arrival elicited a reaction. While Harriet believed the people to gasping with pleasure, the emotion they felt as they gazed upon her horrific face was more akin to revulsion.

     Harriet’s lips, once thinner than a pencil, swelled with collagen to the size of a man’s thumb, the skin stretched so tight they reflected light. Her cheeks, into which the doctor had inserted the second largest implants, looked as if they held baseballs, creating a triangle with her chin, which jutted out beyond her forehead, within which her fine skin was skeletal and seemed hollow. Her jaw had been shaved down to a V-shape, making her face appear sharp and unwelcoming, not unlike a cat screeching. Her ears were pinned tight against her head and as Harriet walked and her hair blew in the wind, they looked as if they were a gill-like appendage, immovable and secured firmly to her skull. The skin below her eyes had been cut and pulled, and Harriet’s eyes were taught: smiling in a way that seemed arrogant and lewd.

     Harriet’s exaggerated features, which she chose under the assumption that they were beautiful, made her look like a walking caricature. She looked inhuman, and children clung to their mothers. Teenager’s laughed and older women shook their heads with disdain. Men’s thoughts were as far from sex as ever, wondering how a woman like that came into being. Young women scoffed, promising never to do something as drastic and ill-planned to their own sun-kissed faces. Harriet, deluded even beyond her own comprehension, thought them all to admire her, too intimidated to approach a woman of her magnificence. This delusion would be shattered when, in big red letters, a celebrity tabloid would run a picture of Lara Livingston’s daughter, would ask, “What happened to Harriet Livingston’s face?”

     The abuse was brutal: the papers hounded her, talk show hosts based entire monologues on Harriet’s deformed face. She became the punch line of many jokes, and Harriet found herself vilified. Feminists clamored against her, citing her weak resolve. Drag queens dressed like her on the streets of West Hollywood. There was even talk of a Harriet Livingston mask for Halloween. Harriet became a recluse, staying pent up in the mansion her trust fund bought for her. She had all the mirrors removed and, in their place, hung pictures of her former face. On the few occasions she had a visitor, Harriet kept her face wrapped in silk, but when she was alone, Harriet would stand in front of her old picture and rub her expensive cheek bones, wishing she could tear them out with her bare hands.