Chapter 6

• Chapter 5
• The Fear
• Suzy's POV***
• I am certain that every person has something she fears.
• Or if not fear, something that turns her feelings up and down.
• To me, my own fear is my FACE.
• Or anything about how I look. So much that my greatest anguish is for people to notice that I have that kind of face, a face that people will call a “beautiful face”, “an angelic face”, extra-ordinary pretty face, a sexy face”. Or whatever.
• Just hearing people describing me as so beautiful will cringe my skin, I swear. It will bring a shock to my nerves.
• You can not blame me. The disasters in my family keep on happening because people noticed that I have this kind of look.
• You see, I have round eyes fanned by long thick lashes. My mother often says “Cherry Suzy” because my lips are like plump cherries.
• My father also once said I have thinly perked up nose like Elizabeth Taylor's nose but with the mole of Marilyn Monroe. I know that Marilyn Monroe has a mole exactly like mine. At home, they like to tease me always, saying I am gifted with a uniquely beautiful face.
• My grandmother once said that the combination of our genes gives that unique angelic look that is majestically breathtaking for women. That is because our ancestors were from a noble family and in a cycle, there is always a child born with the gift of rare beauty. They say I am that child.
• If my parents thought that I was born with such luck, I felt otherwise. I never consider my face pretty or admirable. To me, this face is ugly. I do not know what they see in me.
• Also, I think this is a cursed face. In whatever angle, I am never happy with the “good” looks attributed to me. I feel it is horrible to have these facial features.
• That is because the many sufferings I have encountered in my life can not be counted by my fingers.
• When I was eight years old, I remember that I was with my mother inside a market when a fat old man appeared from nowhere and said to me “what a beautiful child, your face is so pretty!” And the fat man suddenly snatched me and tried to kidnap me!.
• I remember the next frightening event. I saw my mother chasing after us while I was forcibly dragged by the man towards his car. In a split of a second, my mother was hit by a speeding car, leaving her legs paralyzed. The said incident forever embedded in my memory. I have a much sleepless night because of that horrible day.
• Up to now, my mother is in a wheel-chair. And the once lively woman of our house lost her waves of laughter with the loss of her legs. Her depression led her to have a seizure when she fell. Now she needs surgery to remove a tumor clot on her brain. And it happened because someone took a fancy on my damn face. If I were not a “beautiful child” perhaps my mother can still walk now and she would not be comatose.
• That kind of horrifying event is something I hope will never ever happen again in my life. I blame my face.
• So, I decided to hide my face when I was growing up. This plan is made possible by my wearing silly eyeglasses to hide my eyes and big bangs to keep my face away. Even when I went to school, I wore my fake ugly eyeglasses to make my face look weird.
• Even my hair, I have to continuously trim long bangs on the sides and front to keep my cheeks away.
• But in spite of my masks to hide my face, another tragic event happened.
• When I was in high school, I attended a welcome party for new students and since I was a new student, my teacher forced me to come. I ponytailed my hair and exposed my face. That was my mistake.
• Because even when I hid in the dark, someone noticed me. After the party ended around midnight, and I was on my way home with my friend Jenny, two young men suddenly and without warning pulled me to the black alley.
• They whispered, “Come here, pretty lady”. I panicked and called for help “Help, help'! But The drunk man only leered and his fat ugly face said: “look at this beauty, let me taste that sweet red lips”.
• What happened next was a struggle and fight of will to escape the assailants. Try as I might to fight off with all my strength, the sharp knife keep painfully poking at my back, the drunk man was really strong.
• I thought I will say goodbye to the world when the knife pinched my skin, leaving me bloody and on the brink of death.
• Suddenly, my friend Jenny threw stones at them yelling, “leave my friend alone!”.
• Luckily I survived, but my close friend Jenny who answered my call of help died that hellish night. What can I do, she came to help save me and the drunkard turn his knife towards Jenny stabbing her fatally in her belly.
• I again could not forgive myself. I should have not let myself be seen by the drunken man. I had become depressed for a long time. This “pretty face” was a curse.
• Because I was blamed by Jenny's family as the cause of her death, I together with my invalid mother and my working father, we were forced to transfer to another city. We can not find any peace in the neighborhood after Jenny died.
• After we transferred to the new city, I vowed that I would never expose my face to anyone.
• I did my best to have my face hidden by my mass of curly hair and thick bangs and big thick eyeglasses above my bushy eyebrows.
• My eyebrows were never trimmed, so they do look like a thick the permanent black marker above my eyes.
• My lips and the mole above my lips are my only identity left, thus I often bent my head to avoid any exposure to that side too. If only I can cover myself like batman or spiderman, then I would have done too. But I guess, no one will allow me entry in the school with my mask.
• My attire always consists of oversized blouses and shirts and pants to have my body always hidden since my boobs are crazily rounding and getting bigger.
• To be a plain Ugly Suzy is my dream to a contented life.
• My invalid mother thought I was overacting silly with hiding my beauty.
• Nevertheless, in all those years, my life seemed to become normal with nobody bothering me. In fact, except for problems in our finances to pay for my college while I struggled to finish my university degree in accounting, everything was alright.
• We are lucky that my father is a hard-working man. He divides his income on my mother's medical bills and my college, As to myself, I did a lot of part-time job.
• And I remained the Ugly Suzy.