NORMAL

Most women pluck their eyebrows. They extract unwanted hairs like tweezing out bee stings. Sometimes you can see the white bulb at the end, the poison sac. Sometimes you can hear the buzz of voices making fun of stray hairs. You clutch the implement firmly and begin the ritual. You ignore the sting. You rinse your stray hairs down the drain.

You stir up a pasty white cream and smear it on like frosting. You wait for the cake to be done. Sometimes there is the obsessive sense that something is just not right. Sometimes you pull out your eyelashes and store them in cupcake papers next to your beauty supplies.

You repeat the procedure and your brows turn angel food blonde. You feel like a pin-up, but not for long. You repeat the procedure and wait longer than the recommended time. The cake burns. You remove the frosting with a washcloth and your eyebrows come off, too.

You feel like your face will never be a perfect cake. You're somewhere in between store-bought and homemade. Somewhere in between chocolate and vanilla, never smooth enough to be a strawberry shake. Instead of a starlet, you think you look like a spider. You think they can see the venom under your frosting.

You add another ritual to your personal grooming routine. You cover your eyebrow stubble with well-blended foundation and carefully patted-on powder. Then, you draw your eyebrows for the day. Sometimes, you use brown eyebrow pencil. Sometimes you draw them black. Sometimes you use cake frosting squeezed from a sticky tube and imagine them licking sugar off your face.

Sometimes you don't draw any eyebrows at all. You let your bones jut out and complement this look with a scowl. You stare into your own hard eyes and feel like an alien. You like feeling this way. Like you're mysterious in some futuristic kind of style. Like you can't be judged by the normal standards of humans or dolls or cake. You don't like the normal standards anyway.

They make you feel ugly. If they want to act like there are brown recluse spiders crawling under your face, then they can go ahead and stare. They can wonder about your secretly sweet poison. What do you care?

But then your own mom stares at you. She calls you a freak. She cries. You have to promise her you'll grow your eyebrows back. You have tell her you'll try to look normal again. She hands you a new pair of tweezers She hands you a cake frosting tube and smiles.