Darkroom: A Moo U Hockey Romance, Kate Willoughby [best books to read for young adults .TXT] 📗

happening at the time. I remember thinking, he’ll realize the crossed the line any second now. Any…second…now…

But he didn’t.

And when I realized he wasn’t going to take it back, I couldn’t even breathe.

In shock, I’d managed to hold the tears back until I was a couple of blocks away, but once the floodgates opened, I had to pull over because I couldn’t see through the tears. I cried, alone in my car, for a good long while. I sobbed until my throat was sore and my eyes felt like I’d gone a couple of rounds with a heavyweight boxer.

When I got home, Ruby knew immediately something catastrophic had happened. Somehow my body managed to produce more tears even though I would have sworn that was impossible. I told Ruby what had happened and when I was finished, she was ready to commit murder. She ranted for a good fifteen minutes about what a horrible person Hudson was and how she didn’t think he could have gotten any lower. It really helped. So did the bottle of schnapps she kept in the cupboard for emergencies.

“I want to call him a name but ‘bully’ just doesn’t cut it,” I said.

“Ha! We can look some up.”

We ended up finding an insult generator and I have to admit, the random creativity of some of the insults, along with the schnapps, made me laugh, despite my broken heart.

Saturday morning, to say I was disappointed to not get a text from Hudson was an understatement. Ruby was outraged.

“You’d think after he had the night to think it over, he’d realize what a…what was it? Insecure cock waffle he’d been.”

“Once an insecure cock waffle, always an insecure cock waffle,” I said.

I tried to sound like I didn’t care one way or the other whether he texted or called or not, but I checked my phone constantly all day. No word that day or the day after. And when he didn’t come to class either, I eventually moved from despair to anger, which pleased Ruby. She didn’t think he deserved my tears.

“He doesn’t deserve to smell your shit. You should block him. Block his number. If he wants to apologize, he should have to do it in person anyway. Don’t give him the easy way out. Make him come to you to do his groveling.”

In the end, I took her advice and blocked his number, but not for the reason she thought. I blocked him because it was the only way to stop myself from checking my phone to see if he’d tried to contact me. It was a pathetic fact of life that I still loved him and every part of my being wished we could erase what happened and go back to when he was the perfect boyfriend.

I had planned to take that MCAT practice test today, but I’d hardly slept a wink the night before and it was pointless to waste an entire day when I knew my scores would not be a reliable predictor of my real ability.

Instead, I decided to bang out one of the last photography assignments of the semester, called “Me and Myself.” We were to scan an old photo of ourselves and use Photoshop to insert our current selves into the picture. Judging from the examples Larkmont showed us, most people used childhood photos, which made sense. That’s where you’d find the greatest contrast between past and present, but all the photos from my childhood probably showed my birthmark.

I was about to troll my mom’s Facebook photo album for pictures in which my back was turned or I was in profile with my good side facing the camera when I remembered Denise Snow, that woman from the park, mentioning a Facebook group for people with port-wine stains. She’d said the group had four thousand members. Four thousand. Not all of them had port-wine stains themselves, but still, that number had astounded me. Leah had been the first person I’d ever met who had a birthmark like mine.

Curious, I typed “port-wine stain” into the Facebook search box and checked out the top result, “port-wine stain birthmark family,” and to my surprise the first post I saw was of Leah. Obviously, I’d found the right group. Their purpose was to provide support for people with PWS or who loved people with PWS. Without really thinking about it, I requested membership.

A notification that I’d been admitted came only a minute later and a welcome post invited me to introduce myself, but I wasn’t sure I was going to stick around. For the time being, I’d just lurk.

Most posts were by mothers like Denise who had children with port-wine birthmarks. They talked about treatments, related complications, worries and triumphs. Unfortunately, the posts by adults with birthmarks were few and far between, but then I saw something that caught my eye, a post that I hadn’t known I was looking for until I saw it.

Hello, everyone. I’m Michaela and I’ve been hiding my PWS almost my whole life. Nobody except my close friends and family even knows I have one. And even THEY don’t see me often without my makeup.

Because of the many hurtful things that happened to me, I won’t leave the house without makeup. I never go swimming. When people told me I was pretty, I’d think to myself, they can’t see the real me. They only see the fake me.

But over the past year, I’ve come to know other people with birthmarks like mine, each one unique. A lot of them try to spread awareness about PWS. Because of them, I now have the courage to accept myself and be proud of my skin, especially that special part of me that is all my own.

So here goes. Here I am, without makeup. Go me.

A picture of the young white woman without makeup followed this heartfelt essay. Her name was Michaela Gibson and she was very pretty. Her birthmark covered a good portion of her chin, jaw and lower lip and her