Confessions of a Teenage Leper Read online

  PENGUIN TEEN

  an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers, a Penguin Random House Company

  First published 2018

  Text copyright © 2018 by Ashley Little

  Cover image © Studio 504 / Getty Images

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Little, Ashley, 1983–, author

  Confessions of a teenage leper / Ashley Little.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780735262614 (hardcover). —ISBN 9780735262621 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8623.I898C66 2018 C813′.6 C2017-905752-9

  C2017-905753-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017960301

  Text and Cover design by Five Seventeen

  Edited by Samantha Swenson

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.3.2

  a

  For Ben Parker, with thanks

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  They think I got it

  Author’s Note

  Thank You

  They think I got it from an armadillo. Isn’t that the most fucked-up thing you’ve ever heard? I mean, seriously. It’s the twenty-first century. Who gets leprosy anymore? No one. That’s who. Unless you, like, live in a gutter covered in filth or were in the Bible, or unless you’re me. My name is Abby Furlowe*. I’m seventeen years old. I live in     , Texas. I’m blanking out the name of my town because I don’t need some jerk-off coming to find me, getting all up in my face and spray-painting the words DIRTY LEPER across the front of my house. Privacy is important to me now. It didn’t used to be. I used to want to model for Seventeen magazine. I used to want to be an A-list actress and have a beach house in Malibu. I used to fantasize about the paparazzi following me around and me blowing kisses into their cameras, or giving them the finger, depending on my mood that day. When I was a little kid, people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I’d say, “I want to be beautiful.” And then they’d laugh and say something cheesy like, “Oh, sweetie. You already are beautiful.” And it was true. I was. I really, really was. And I wasn’t one of those bleach-blonde chicks who thinks she’s so pretty she could maybe be a model one day; I actually was that pretty. And I’m a natural blonde. I was crowned princess of my junior high, I was on the high school cheerleading squad, and I was crowned Miss      two years ago. I got to wear a rhinestone tiara and a dress Miss Universe herself would’ve killed for. I stood in the back of a red convertible cruising down Main Street, waving to onlookers at the Fourth of July Parade. You would never think that now, if you saw me today, but it’s true.

  I guess the very first thing I noticed was a little reddish spot on my thigh, like a little sunburn patch or something. It was the summer I turned seventeen, and I was a lifeguard at the local pool. No big deal, right? It’ll go away. Just leave it alone, I thought. But it didn’t go away. That’s the thing. That’s the worst thing. It never really went away.

  So, anyway. I waited and waited for it to go away and it didn’t, so finally I showed my mom. She ran her fingers over it and poked at it, but it didn’t hurt, and she squinched up her face at me like she does when she’s worried about something but doesn’t want to say what it is.

  “What?” I said.

  “Don’t pick at it,” she said.

  “I haven’t been picking it, Mom!”

  “Okay.” She nodded. “That’s good.”

  She put some ointment on it and took me to the doctor the next day.

  Dr. Jamieson was the doctor who had delivered me. He knew my complete medical history from minute one, even before that, actually, if you want to get technical. He knew about every rash, flu and infection I’d ever had. He didn’t know anything about this red spot though. He thought it was eczema so he gave me a prescription for some cream. So off I went, bought the cream, put it on, blah blah blah. It didn’t work. In fact, I got another little scaly patch on the side of my foot and then one on my face. On my face! Right between my eyebrows. Like, the worst possible spot, obviously. So…yeah. I went back to see Dr. Jamieson.

  “Are they itchy?” he asked.

  “Kind of.” I scratched the one on my foot.

  “Ringworm,” he said.

  “Gross!”

  “It’s not actually a worm,” he said. “It’s a fungus that lives on the skin.”

  “Still gross.”

  He whipped out his prescription pad and scribbled something illegible on it. “Should go away in two to three weeks,” he said. He tore the sheet off and held it out to me, his mouth a thin, tight line.

  I grabbed it and left the room, disgusted that I had a fungus. Now, I wish I had a fungus. I’d welcome a fungus.

  I put the antifungal cream on all the spots every night for three weeks. The spots didn’t go away. Then, when I woke up in the morning, my face would be puffy and red and my eyes all swollen up. The swelling would go down in a few hours so at least I looked okay by the time I got to the pool. It would happen the next morning, and then not for a day or two. Then it would happen again. I went back to see Dr. Jamieson.

  “Could it be from something I’m eating?” I asked.

  “Possibly,” he said. “Let’s try you on an elimination diet.”

  “Is that when you have to stop eating everything that tastes good?”

  “Pretty much, yeah,” he said.

  So I cut out eggs, dairy, soy, wheat, gluten, oats, corn, citrus fruits, nightshade vegetables (tomatoes, eggplant, potatoes), nuts, seeds, caffeine, all processed foods and, hardest of all, sugar and chocolate. Basically, I ate celery, cucumbers, fish, turkey and rice for four weeks. It sucked. Nothing changed. I still got the morning puffies. I still had the spots. And they looked angry. I went back to Dr. Jamieson. He didn’t know anything. He sent me to see a dermatologist.

  My friend Liz went to a dermatologist in tenth grade for her acne and he put her on birth control. It was a win-win for Liz because it got rid of her acne, made her periods way better AND she didn’t have to explain to her parents why she was on birth control. She actually started having sex since she was already on birth control anyway. I bet if my mom and dad had known that about Liz, they wouldn’t have sent me to see a dermatologist.

  I had a major crush on my dermatologist, Dr. Baker. He was super young and pretty hot. He looked too young to even be a doctor.

  Dr. Baker suggested I do some special medicinal facial mask, like, every night. So I did that and the spot on my forehead kind of calmed down for a while. It faded to a pale rose color. But the spots on my thigh and foot didn’t really change, so I just tried to forget about them. I tried to think of them as birthmarks, and I hoped that by the end of summer my tan would be dark enough that they would fade and eventually disappear. The sun usually makes my skin look better. When I wasn’t at work, I made sure to always keep the spots on my foot and thigh covered up, which wasn’t too hard, except no more booty-shorts or super short skirts, wh
ich was a drag. I covered the spot on my forehead with makeup and then wore my bangs over it and sometimes headbands and hats. If you look at any pictures of me from that time, I’ll always have something pulled down over my forehead, so no one really knew. No one saw it. My parents knew. And my brother, Dean, who started calling me Scabby Abby. You wouldn’t think that anyone could be such a colossal douche to their own sibling. Well, you’ve never met Dean.

  So that went on for a while, but then the spot on my head started to get brighter and redder, so I stopped using the mask that Dr. Baker had prescribed because I was afraid that it was making it worse. I tried different masks and pastes and all sorts of crap. I tried oatmeal masks, avocado masks, egg whites and mud. I used toner, concealer, cover-up and finishing powder. I bought something called ScarFade from the drugstore. I “borrowed” Dad’s credit card and bought a super-expensive skin-lightener off the Internet that claimed to completely obliterate redness. Nothing worked. Plus, I was starting to look like the Marshmallow Man in the mornings, and sometimes my eyes would be so swollen that I could barely see. Also, I was grounded for a week for using Dad’s credit card without permission and had to pay him back in monthly installments. I went back to see Dr. Jamieson. He thought maybe I was having an allergic reaction to something in my environment and sent me for an allergy test.

  Allergy tests are really fun! Said no one ever. Except maybe some super-freak who wished he were a pincushion instead of a human. They poke up the insides of your arms with about a thousand different needles and then leave them in you for an hour while your skin swells up in some places but not in others. I found out I’m allergic to hay and rabbits. This meant pretty much buck-all to me since we don’t live on a farm, I’m never around hay and I’ve always thought that rabbits were kind of stupid. I avoided anything remotely hay-ish or rabbity from that day forward, not that it was hard. The spots didn’t go away.

  That summer, my feet were cold all the time. They got so cold, they were numb. Every night, I wore my dad’s big wool socks that he got in Alaska to bed. My feet went glacial at night. One night, I was dancing at a house party. I was in my bare feet on the dance floor because my high heels were slowing me down and I’d taken them off. Someone had dropped a beer bottle and it smashed all over the floor but everybody just kept dancing. Everybody else had shoes on. Not me. After about three or four more songs, my friend Marla pointed at my feet and said, “Dude, you’re bleeding.”

  My feet were a mess, spiked with shards of glass and torn and bleeding all over the place. But the freakiest thing was, I didn’t feel anything.

  I went to the bathroom to wash my feet and get the glass out of them. The door to the bathroom was locked. I banged on the door. Nothing. I banged again, harder. I heard a low moan from behind the door. I turned around; a line had formed. Dustin Lorimer was behind me. He pointed to my feet. “You alright?”

  I’ve had a massive crush on Dustin Lorimer since I was, like, five. His mom used to look after me and Dean when we were little. He lives the next street over.

  I told Dustin that I was fine but I needed to get into the bathroom right away. He looked at my bloody feet again then stepped in front of me, threw his body against the bathroom door (HOT!) and the door popped open. Aaron Forsythe was in the empty bathtub looking like a sorry mess. He was drunk as fuck. It looked like he’d been crying and snot was running down his face.

  I used to have a crush on Aaron Forsythe, but after seeing him like that, I didn’t anymore. Obviously.

  Aaron held his arm out with his fingers in the shape of a gun and pointed it at us.

  “Get out of the tub, man. Abby needs to wash her feet,” Dustin said.

  “Why does she need to wash her feet?” Aaron slurred.

  “I stepped in some glass,” I said.

  “Oh, shiiit,” Aaron said, looking at my feet. He looked like he might projectile vomit on us. Dustin helped him stand up and climb out of the tub.

  “What were you doing in the tub, Aaron?” Dustin said. “Or do I want to know?”

  “Just thinking about stuff, you know. Sometimes you gotta think about stuff,” Aaron said. “The bathtub is a really good place to think. Empty or full.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Dustin said.

  Aaron belched and staggered out of the bathroom clutching his studded belt. Dustin turned to me. I sat down on the edge of the tub and put my feet in. The glass in my feet scraped across the porcelain, the sound making us both wince.

  “Are you sure you’re alright?” Dustin said. “That looks pretty nasty.”

  “I think it’ll be okay,” I said, and turned on the tap. I wasn’t sure if I should use hot or cold, but it turned out not to matter because wherever I turned the dial, it all felt like the same temperature.

  “I’ll get you a towel,” Dustin said. He opened the tall cupboard across from the sink. I picked shards of glass out of my heel and toe. I wondered how the hell I wasn’t feeling it, but I figured I’d had enough to drink that I didn’t. I just didn’t. That can happen with rye-gingers. Vodka-sodas too. Anything, really, if you drink enough of it. You just don’t feel stuff. Not until the next day. But the next day came, and the day after that, and I had less and less feeling in my feet and I was getting another patchy weird spot behind my knee.

  But that night at the party, I danced until dawn, I talked to boys, I flirted like mad—I looked smoking hot and I knew it. My feet bled, but I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. I wrapped them in maxi-pads and went home with my best friends, Marla and Liz. We cabbed back to Marla’s house, and the three of us slept on her bed like a pile of puppies, our hair entwined, our arms and legs draped over each other. And I thought that it would always be that way. I thought my life would stay like that.

  Summer started winding to a close, as it eventually does, and cheerleading tryouts had started at the end of August. This was twelfth grade, and I was pretty sure I would make the team again since I’d been on it the year before, but tryouts were still nerve-wracking. I had made the first cut, but there was still another round to get through, and then my interview.

  One day, I got home from work and flopped down on the couch beside Dean. He was playing some stupid war video game. I looked at my hands. I had bitten all of my nails down to the quick, which I hate doing because they look so gross. I tugged off my socks then looked at Dean. He wasn’t paying attention to me. He was shooting everything that moved. I bent my leg up and started to bite my big toenail. It’s a shameful habit that I’ve had for as long as I can remember.

  “Ugh, sick, Abby! How can you do that?” Dean kicked at my foot so I had to stop.

  “I can’t help it,” I said. “I chewed off all of my fingernails. I have nothing else to bite.”

  “What are you? A vampire? You need to bite things all the time?”

  “I’m anxious, okay?” I gingerly bit off the nail of my pinky toe and spat it at Dean. He shielded himself as if I’d thrown a knife at him.

  “What the hell do you have to be anxious about? What? Was some little kid mean to you at the pool?”

  “No.”

  “Three guys asked you out and you don’t know which one to pick?”

  “No.”

  “You’re pregnant!” He pointed at me. “You got knocked up!” He laughed with glee. “I’m gonna be an uncle! Wait till I tell Mom and Dad! Or, should I say Grandma and Grandpa?”

  “I’m not pregnant, you moron.”

  He shrugged. “What, then?”

  “Cheerleading squad.”

  “Oh, fuck the cheerleading squad.”

  “You would,” I said.

  He thought about it for a moment. “Yeah, I would. Most of them. No, wait. All of them. Not you, though. That would be too weird. Even for me.” He hit my foot away from my mouth again. “Stop that! You’re going to make me puke! I’ll puke on you! Is that what you want, Abby? Because I’ll do it. Blaaaah! Blaah!” He pretended to barf all over me and I shoved him away. He shoved me back.
<
br />   “Stop it.”

  “You stop it.”

  “You stop it first.”

  “I can only stop it if you stop it.”

  “Okay. Fine. I stopped, okay? I’m stopped. Happy?” I put my socks back on.

  “Yep.”

  He went back to playing his video game. I bit the skin around my cuticles and thought about all of the cheerleading stunts and combos I still couldn’t do. And the ones that I could do, but couldn’t land every single time. Standing back handspring, step out, round-off, front handspring, step out, switch leap, front flip, front flip, full twisting layout. I was going over the combo in my head that I wanted to do for the final tryout. I kept switching it around and around, adding and subtracting different stunts. Plus, I had to make up a cheer for this round of tryouts because they wanted us to be able to contribute to the cheer repertoire as well. I closed my eyes and started to mumble cheers I was inventing. After a few minutes, Dean turned to me and said, “Are you sure you’re not pregnant?”

  Like most ill-informed citizens, you might think that cheerleaders are all style and no substance. The lights are on but nobody’s shopping. But you couldn’t be more wrong. They say that the sign of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Well, cheerleaders have to hold about seventy-eight opposing ideas in their minds at the same time and retain the ability to do backflips. You need to know to the exact millisecond when to twist, when to spin, when to stay still, when to arch, when to tuck, when to tumble, when to toss, when to jump, when to leap, when to fall and when to fly. And do all of it while maintaining perfect balance, often while holding other people, sounding off so loud that a whole stadium can hear you, smiling, always anticipating the next move while paying attention to the counts and keeping time with everyone else. Also, you have to be quick, smooth and precise while you do all of this with enthusiasm.