VI

SCAR

“Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.”
— China Miéville, The Scar

NEW YORK CITY

SEPTEMBER 15—I’VE BEEN AWAKE for over twenty four hours. I’m exhausted. I’m broken. My eyes are on fire and I can hardly hear over the tinnitus screaming in my ears.

Headache. Confusion. Vertigo. Nausea. Classic signs of the concussion I suffered last night when Serenity Holmes drilled her boot into the back of my head.

But that isn’t why I’m lying on a hospital bed in the Mount Sinai ER, nor does it explain the blood soaked clothes sticking against my red smeared skin.

My beating head is turned to the side while Dr. Monasebian does the work of closing the ten centimeter laceration running from beneath my left eye down to my jaw.

I waited six hours for him because he’s the top plastic surgeon in New York. I wasn’t about to trust the chop shop ER doc to staple my cheek back together. During the wait I had lots of visitors from the NYPD. Even had two detectives stop in for a chat. That tends to happen when someone gets killed.

Angel is sitting bedside. Her eyes are irritated from crying. She’s still working through the trauma of what happened. Her hands and arms are stained red from holding my face together until the ambulance arrived.

My entire cheek is numb but I do feel the tug and pull against my flesh as the sutures close the wound, one stitch at a time. He makes quick work of it, then it’s a knot and snip-snip to finish the job.

“All done,” he says before rolling away from me on his chair. I hear the tools clinging on the stainless steel instrument table before the rubbery-stretch of his gloves being removed.

I ask Angel how bad it is. Talking feels strange, like two pieces of my face are pulling in opposite directions.

“It’s not bad at all,” she says. “You can hardly notice.”

She’s a terrible liar.

Sitting up nearly makes me vomit but my stomach is empty at this point. “Give me my phone,” I say while holding out my hand.

She hesitates. I look at her, or more accurately through her and she relents.

“Here,” she says after getting it from my bag.

While I’m bringing up the selfie-camera, Monasebian stands next to her. He’s a squat man with dark skin and dressed in scrubs.

“There will be scarring,” he says. “But once it heals we can discuss reconstructive surgery to reduce that.”

I aim the front of the phone at my left side and the screen captures an angry, closed wound, lined on either side with prominent indentations from the clear sutures holding it together. The surrounding tissue is swollen and discolored.

The phone slips from my fingers and hits the floor. My breathing starts to heave and my heart begins to race in sheer helter-skelter panic.

“It’s okay, baby,” Angel says, reaching for my hand. I recoil.

Monasebian, with his arms crossed like he has somewhere else he’d rather be, says matter-of-factly, “I know this is difficult but it’s important you understand how fortunate you are.”

My head cranes to the side and I look up at him.

“Fortunate?”

He says, “A millimeter deeper the knife would have severed your cranial nerve in two places. That’s major surgery and six months of physical therapy to regain movement. If it hit the artery? Dead before the ambulance arrives. You’re lucky to be alive, Yelena. It could have been a lot worse.”

“DON’T MAKE THIS ANY WORSE, BITCH.” That’s what he said to me, the man with the knife. He was tall but gangly. Malnourished. Missing teeth. Dirty skin. And the smell? Awful. In his hand was a knife with a long blade jutting out of his fist.

We’d been waiting on the corner for an Uber when he attacked us. He took Angel’s phone first. She was a mess from the fear and sobbing like a baby. Seeing her in this state filled me with rage.

Now he wanted my duffle bag. Inside was my ring gear, phone, identification and a few thousand in cash. Nothing irreplaceable, only an inconvenience to do so, but I was already angry and it was hard to think over the church bells clanging in my head.

The strap was tight in my hand. I could hardly stand straight but I refused to hand it over.

“Yelena,” Angel said out of the corner of her mouth. “It’s just clothes and money. Give it to him.”

Money. Why did she have to say that?

“Listen to your friend,” he said, further emboldened. He pointed the knife at my chest. “Or I’ll cut your tits off.”

“Fine.” I held it out to him. He was suspicious at my turn but the temptation was too great. I waited for him to grab it. That’s when I yanked him toward me and seized his knife hand with my left.

Everything happened so fast. We struggled for control. The effort made me lightheaded and my balance faltered. He forced me back into the building exterior. When my head hit the wall lightning flashed across my brain and its thunder rattled my consciousness.

I lost his hand. He jumped backward and brought the blade up through the air. I didn’t feel anything at first—maybe because of the pounding headache, maybe from the adrenaline—but I saw the blood spray across Angel’s shrieking face.

He thrusted the knife at my belly. I dropped the bag and both hands found his wrist before he could stab me. I forced his fist inward, angling the blade away from me, and shoved it under his sternum to the hilt.

He gasped and stopped resisting, so I twisted his arm and pushed down, slicing him all the way to his belly button. We both let go. He fell backward with the knife sticking out of him and died quickly.

My clothes felt wet. When I looked, I saw blood pouring down my body. Then I realized half my face wasn’t working.

I looked at Angel. I tried to talk but the words were mangled.

Angel screamed. “Yelena! Hold on!” She started searching his pocket for her phone to call 911.

“I’m okay,” I said to no one and then collapsed.
I woke up in the ambulance. She was praying for me while the EMT squeezed a bag of o negative down the line into my vein. Praying. Like I was a terminal patient in need of sympathy.

SEVEN HOURS LATER Monasebian tells me how much worse it could have been. Look at me. I’m disfigured. Mutilated. And this scar will remind me every day for the rest of my life.

I’m freaking out. Full blown panic attack. Sweating. Labored breathing. Fucking head killing me and the bupivacaine losing its control over the ache radiating from my cheek.

I can’t hear either of them over the ringing. Darkness is circling my sight and creeping inward, swallowing me in darkness. I think…I’m going…to pass out…

…until two familiar hands slide over my shoulders, and a voice not unlike my own whispers into my ear, her words cutting through the noise.

“What’s wrong, sweet one?”

“Look what they did to me.” I frantically rub my trembling hands together. Yes they. The thief, Serenity, and Corey.

The Other Me sighs. “Corey and Serenity manipulated you into the match and look what happened. They’ll surely pay for it but maybe there’s a sunny side here.”

She comes around the bed. In the background, Monasebian and Angel are frozen as my Dark Self kneels in front of me. Her left cheek is mutilated just like mine, only it has healed into a long, curved scar creating a narrow, jagged pit from her cheek to jaw—my future staring at me.

“This will make you stronger—us stronger. Perfection is lazy, Yelena. It’s an easy road. On the outside you’re everything everyone wants to be. Beautiful. Intelligent. Rich. Powerful. And hilarious, of course! You’re god mode, baby, but only on the outside. Inside you’re a monster. You’re the monster. And up here?”

She taps the side of her head.

“You’re Looney Tunes. You see and talk to me! I don’t even exist! Hrmph! We can’t let them see too far under your skin. You’d be locked away for life! But we can give them a glimpse. That’s what this scar will do. It doesn’t make you hideous. You were already hideous where it counts.”

She points at her heart.

“In here.”

I might cry. That might be the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me. She’s right. She’s always right.

I take a long deep breath and let my eyes close. When they open, she’s gone and I say to the rest of the classroom, “Lucky to be alive.”

The doctor looks down over his crossed arms. “Pardon?”

“That’s what you said.”

Angel leans forward and says quietly, “Yelena, don’t. Not here.”

Laughter builds first deep in my chest, then fires up through the copper-taste of my throat and explodes out of my crusty, strained lips.

Rolling forward, I stumble off the bed, nearly falling from the disequilibrium, but after getting my legs under me, I stand full height over the five foot nothing doctor.

“You’re right, doc. I am lucky.” I smile at him with only half my face. “I’m the luckiest girl in the whole wide world. Thank you for the pep talk. Is there some way I can show you my appreciation?”

A little bit of us slips out. We place our hand on his chest.

He gives a nervous laugh, adjusts his glasses, then says, “That won’t be necessary. Just doing my job.”

“Come on, Yelena,” Angel says. She’s waiting at the door with Yelena’s things. Her eyes are begging me to leave with her.

Our hand pulls away from him. “Sorry. The ol’ ball and chain says it’s time to go. We’ll make sure to leave you a review on WebMD. Real nice. A+ bedside manner.”

To Corey.

This is your fault. And Serenity’s. You both schemed to trick Yelena into the Kumite so you could embarrass her. It wasn’t even supposed to be a ladder match. We agreed to a submission match. Funny how that changed.

It’s almost like this was all part of a plan.

As far as what happened after, the knife wasn’t in your hand but it might as well have been. You and that spoiled little bitch are probably going to have a good laugh when you see us. Har-har-har.

But we’re gonna turn this frown upside down. Or at least half of it. The left side is still having an issue in that department. Point is, when our match was announced, we weren’t exactly invested. A non-title match? Let me guess. Certain people didn’t expect us to come through against Tony Two-Time. They expected, like you did at the Kumite, to see us put in our place.

Maybe you even hired that drug addict who attacked Yelena and Angel outside of Terminal 5. We wouldn’t put it past someone like you. A coward and a failure. We’re not talking about in the ring, short stuff. We’re talking about your life.

You couldn’t protect your brother.

You couldn’t protect your sister.

All you could do after was seek some measure of revenge and even then you couldn’t do it with your hands. You didn’t have it in you to get the blood under your nails. You had to use a bat to beat ol’ daddy over the head. That’s you. You needed help getting the job done.

Convenient isn’t it, that our match is no disqualification so when you can’t beat me with your hands, you can grab a bat just like you did thirty-something years ago.
There’s just one problem. Unlike your daddy, we see you coming and we get to use weapons, too.