Stuck on Me (4 page)

f I think about it, I can pinpoint the exact moment when I started obsessing about my nose. I’d noticed
it had changed before, of course, but it didn’t start to keep me awake at night until the day my aunties came round for tea, just before I went to Goa . . .

‘Goodness, Sky, haven’t you grown!’ declared Auntie Karen, kissing me loudly on both cheeks. I cringed, like I always do. She’s being saying this to me and to my sisters,
Grass and Ocean, at every family get-together since I can remember. I think someone must pay her to embarrass us; she certainly acts like it’s her job.

She took a step back. ‘You do look ever so grown up.’

‘Thanks, Auntie Karen.’ I forced a smile and, when I was sure she wasn’t looking, wiped her wet, peach lipstick imprint from my cheek. Dealing with embarrassing aunties was
so
not the way I wanted to be spending the last Sunday afternoon before I went away for a month.

‘No, I really mean it, dear. Let me look at you.’ She took my face in her hands and squeezed my cheeks, as if they were made out of playdough. ‘You’re different,’
she continued. ‘Still lovely, of course, but your face . . . it’s more defined. No more puppy fat, eh? Those boys will be queuing up.’ She prodded the side of my nose. Her hands
smelled of onions. ‘And you certainly don’t have a little baby nose any more, eh?’

I did a double take. Did she really just say that aloud? Did Auntie Karen really just tell me – and everyone else – that I have a big nose? Grass giggled; I must have heard right.
Aware that I was glowing bright red, I stepped away from Auntie Karen and went to sit down on the sofa, covering my nose with my palm, protectively.

So it isn’t just me, then, I thought, mortified. My nose is huge and people can tell!

‘You’re right, Karen,’ said Auntie Julie. ‘Sky looks terribly grown up.’ She stared at me too – although, thankfully, she didn’t feel the need to touch
my face. Then she appeared to have a lightbulb moment. ‘I know! I’ve got it! Doesn’t she look like Connor all of a sudden?’

It took me a second to twig exactly who Connor was. I’ve never called him that. I felt a twinge of nausea rise from my belly.

‘I didn’t . . . you know, you might be right,’ said Mum, in a weird voice, peering at me, as if she had never seen me before. I was starting to feel like an exhibit in a
science lab. ‘I hadn’t really noticed the change,’ she continued. ‘I guess you don’t see someone growing when you’re with them every day. But Julie’s spot
on. You’ve gone and got your dad’s nose, Sky. Well, well, well.’

I looked around the table from my mother to my older sister, Ocean, and then to my younger sister, Grass. It struck me that all three of them have exactly the same slender nose, with slightly
triangular nostrils and a cute little tip. Perfectly proportioned identikit noses, which looked like they’d been made to a pattern in the same factory. Grass could be my mum’s Mini-me,
they’re so similar. Mum often likes to pretend we’re all sisters. She gets a buzz when people say, ‘Oh but you don’t look old enough to be a mother yet, let alone have three
such grown-up teenage daughters!’

I hadn’t acknowledged it before, but that day it became clear to me that I don’t really look like her, or the others. I’ve got her eyes, maybe, but I’m taller, darker,
flatter chested. And if my nose was made in the same factory, it was in the misshape pile, rejected for being too big and slightly wonky.

Until that second I had never wanted to look like Mum. In fact, I’ve tried my hardest not to, refusing to wear the hippy-dippy clothes she likes me to dress in, and cutting my hair to
shoulder length, when she’d prefer me to wear it down to my waist. But now I felt like the odd one out. And I didn’t like it.

‘You’ve got no reason to feel self-conscious, Sky. It’s a handsome nose,’ said Mum.

‘Gee, thanks, just what I’ve always wanted – a handsome nose,’ I said, hoping sarcasm would mask my hurt.

Mum smiled, wistfully. ‘Oh, but Connor had a lovely nose. A real Roman nose. It was one of the things I first noticed about him. That, and his eyes.’

‘Yes, he was a nice-looking fellow,’ said Auntie Julie. ‘That’s one thing we can all say.’

I flinched. They were talking about him like he was dead. But he isn’t dead. He’s just . . . somewhere else. He left when I was eight and then there were a couple of years of odd
weekend visits and random cards. After that, nothing. I haven’t heard from him for almost five years. We used to get bits of news through Grandma, but since she died: nada.

‘Oh, sure, he was a handsome devil,’ said Auntie Karen, winking at Mum. ‘Devil being the operative word.’

Mum nodded. Then she shook her head, as if she was trying to shake off her memories. ‘Well, it’s all in the past now. No point dwelling on it.’

She tried to change the subject then, as usual; she doesn’t like talking about Dad. Since he left, Mum has filled the gap – and our flat – with all her weird and wonderful
interests, and the new friends that come with them: animal rights, spirituality, medieval music, saving the planet . . . She claims she’s a free spirit. Who needs a man, when you can do a
thousand and one things with tofu?

But I didn’t want to drop the subject. ‘He wasn’t a devil, he was my dad,’ I said, quietly. ‘He’s
still
my dad.
Our
dad.’ Even if, I
wanted to add, he doesn’t care about me, Ocean or Grass enough to remember our birthdays, or send us Christmas presents. I glanced at my sisters, but they were staring down at their plates,
pretending they weren’t there.

‘Of course he is,’ said Mum, ‘but we’re OK without him, aren’t we? Us girls together!’

I nodded. ‘Sure. I guess.’ As always, I felt strange thinking about Dad. I hate him and I love him and I miss him and I don’t miss him, all at the same time. It’s so
confusing.

Mum peered at me again, and I couldn’t tell if she was calculating how much I resembled Dad or whether she was just concerned about me. ‘I know you miss him sometimes, Sky. But
you’re better off without him. We all are.’

‘Yeah. Probably.’ I grinned broadly, a fake grin. ‘But I shouldn’t moan – at least he gave me something,’ I joked, ‘even if it was his great, big, beaky
nose. Cheers, Dad.’

Nobody laughed.

‘Another slice of cake, girls?’ said Auntie Julie, to break the tension. ‘This spelt cake really is good.’

I managed to get through the rest of the tea somehow, making small talk with my aunties about how I was doing at school and what GCSEs I’d chosen, but I couldn’t stop thinking about
my dad, and how unfair it was that I was the one to look like him, when he made all of us so unhappy. The minute my aunties left the flat, I went into my bedroom, shut the door tight and fished
around under my bed until I found my old photo albums. Then I leafed through them, hunting for pictures of my dad. I don’t have many, I realised with sadness: just a few old snaps of him
holding me as a baby, and some from one Christmas when I was six or seven. And there were also a couple of photographs of him with Mum when they first met, pictures she was planning to throw out
when she was really upset once, and that I rescued. She doesn’t know I have them.

I studied the photos, taking each one out and holding it up to my face in the mirror, so that I could compare my features with Dad’s. There was no getting away from it: Mum was right
– I do have Dad’s nose. His is almost exactly the same shape as mine – slightly more crooked, perhaps (I think I remember him telling me that he broke it in an accident, when he
was a kid) and on a larger scale, like the rest of him. But I’ve got the Carter Conk, all right. Funny, I used to want to take Dad’s name, to be Sky Carter, rather than Sky Smith, but
Mum wouldn’t have it.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Grass, pushing open my bedroom door and making me jump. She never remembers to knock, probably because she got so used to sharing a room with me when we
were younger. She came in, uninvited, and sat herself down beside me on the bed.

‘Nothing,’ I said, clumsily trying to hide the photos under my duvet.

Too late. She’d seen them. ‘Are you looking at old pictures?’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘Of what?’

‘Nothing much. Just stuff from when I was a kid.’

‘Are you looking at photos of Dad?’ She squashed up closer to me.

‘Maybe . . .’

‘Can I have a look?’ She sounded very curious. ‘I don’t really remember him at all. I can’t see him in my head.’ She’s only eleven now; she was tiny
when he left.

‘I guess,’ I said, handing over a photo of me sitting on Dad’s lap. ‘Don’t you remember how he used to sing to us?’

She shrugged. ‘Not really.’ She picked up one of the photos and pulled a face. ‘Was he good?’

‘Yes, really good. He played in bands. He could play loads of instruments – the guitar, the harmonica, the piano . . .’

‘Ocean says he wasn’t a nice guy. She hates him.’

‘Ocean just thinks whatever Mum says she should think,’ I told her. ‘He wasn’t
all
bad. He was funny and he used to love playing silly games with us. I remember
that he’d let us ride around the living room on his back, like he was a horse. And he’d make up stupid songs that rhymed for us.’

She smiled at me. ‘Do you think we’ll ever see him again?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

I didn’t tell Grass this, but I also clearly remember the last conversation I had with Dad. It was the day before he left for good.

‘I’m going away for a while,’ he told me. ‘On the road.’

‘Will you be back soon?’

‘Probably,’ he lied. ‘I’ll keep in touch.’

‘Will you bring me a present when you come home?’

‘Of course I will, Sky-blue. It’s a promise.’

Six years later, I’m still waiting.

oday is back to school day. Already. The summer holidays are never long enough. At the start, six weeks seems
like forever – days and days of doing whatever you like (if you don’t get carted off to Goa against your will, that is), waking up late, seeing your friends – and then, all of a
sudden, it’s time to go back to school again. Worse, just two days in, it feels like you’ve never been away.

What’s weird is that, even though the holidays go in a flash, people do seem to change over those six weeks. Maybe it’s the fresh air or the sunshine, but everyone seems to come back
taller. People – boys especially – who came up to your shoulders in the summer term are suddenly the same height as you.

I measured myself when I got up this morning. Over the summer I’ve grown a total of four centimetres: two in height and two in nose length. To be fair, the amount my nose has grown is just
a guess; I’ve never measured it before today. But it must be
at least
twice as long as it was in July. My beak is now a whopping five and a half centimetres from the middle of my
eyebrows, where it starts, to the tip, where it – finally – ends. Then I Googled
nose length
and discovered that for an average European woman, like me, it should be just five
point one centimetres. If that’s not bad enough, I’m an overachiever in the protrusion stakes too. The average nose sticks out by two point two centimetres; mine is two point three. And
we’re not even mentioning the bent bit. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve ever wanted to be average at anything. Less is definitely more, when it comes to your nose.