Page 49 of Counting the Days

She feared that having her nose reduced was the exact same thing. It seemed like the only real difference between the two practices was general anesthesia. Which was notthatsmall of a difference, considering the monumental amount of pain generations of Chinese women had endured.

Rhea imagined a woman in the far-off future, reading about cosmetic rhinoplasty on whatever the future version of Wikipedia would be: “Can you imagine breaking yourown nose,just to make it smaller?”

Rhea envisioned this future woman with an absolutely enormous nose, a nose that drove people wild with desire. Considering humankind’s track record, a new practice would commence during the inevitable large-nose trend: People born with tiny noses would suck the fat out of their thighs and inject it into their nostrils, longing for a thick schnoz.

The constantly shifting beauty standards were among Rhea’s top ten causes of anxiety. In her twenties, she had every single hair from her upper lip down to her toes lasered off. It cost more than her first car and hurt tremendously, but the payoff was getting to feel like a ten-year-old girl with almost no maintenance.

She did wish she lived in a utopian society in which adult women were considered more attractive than ten-year-old girls, but societal norms were what they were, and she figured one hirsute woman was not going to be able to change them. After several rounds of painful lasering, her body hair stopped growing back. She began to nurse a fear society would someday grant pubic hair clemency, or worse, what if everyone suddenly decided full-grown women with pubic hair werevery attractive? Then where would she be? Buying pubic hair from strangers off the internet and gluing it all over her body?

In the nineties and aughts, thick eyebrows were consideredfoul, and everyone lined up to have theirs waxed off. Fifteen years later, thin eyebrows were considered disgusting, and all the women who had spent years paying to have their eyebrows whittled down to matchsticks felt like ridiculous punch lines.

The worst part was, the damage to the hair follicle was done, and some of those women could not grow those matchsticks back to normal human eyebrows. Rhea knew victims of the matchstick trend who had hair from their heads transplanted onto their eyebrows so they could again feel welcome in society. Rhea was thankful she’d had the foresight to ignore the initial trend. Throughout the aughts and tens, she’d left her eyebrows thick and natural, despite being toddler-smooth everywhere else.

Back then, she heard, “Girl, you havegotto do something about those caterpillars.”

Now she heard, “Oh my God, I love your eyebrowsso much,you’re so lucky.”

Which trends to ignore and which to follow? A question that kept her up at night.

Rhea picked up her phone but still could not make herself write him back. She knew Danny was going through something, and she did not want to ignore it. But so many times in the past, asking if someone was going through something had not gone well. She was too observant and usually knew her boyfriends were upset before they did.

It took them several days to figure out they were going through something, and by the time they finally realized theyhadbeen upset, they were usually too annoyed about being asked if they were okay over and over again to remember what they had initially been upset about.

Growing up with an unpredictable mother gave Rhea a superpower. She could read every little sigh or downward gaze likeit was a crystal ball, accurately predicting any sudden change of mood and the yelling that might accompany it. When exchanging text messages, her superpower allowed her to read a lack of punctuation or a delayed response time as tiny clues that something was amiss.

Her fingers hovered above the keys. She typed:I’m sensing something is going on with you. Am I way off?

She hesitated before hitting send. What was the worst thing that could happen? He’d get annoyed, never talk to her again, and she’d get to be a mother someday? She sent the message off into the ether and waited to accept her fate.

Less than a minute later, he called.

“Wow, I thought I was pulling it off, but you’re not buying it, huh?”

She tried to sound as casual as he did. “Nope. Not buying it.”

“I’m really sorry. I just, uh, woke up feeling kinda…freaked out. And I wasn’t trying to play mind games or anything, I think I was just trying to buy myself a little time to figure out what to do next.”

Rhea was speechless. Every single time she had ever inquired how a guy was feeling in the past, she was met with some version of a lie, like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.I’m totally fine.”

But Danny was immediately admitting something was offandapologizing. How was it possible for him to be even more perfect than he already was? Well, notsoperfect that he didn’t make her wonder what the hell was going on for several hours, but still way more perfect than anyone else she’d ever dated.

“Full disclosure, I tried texting you a few times earlier, and none of them felt right. I just, uh, felt like we needed to finish our conversation—the one we started in the hot springs—and I’vebeen trying to figure out the right way to bring it back up without being a bummer…. But seriously, you must be a mind reader, ’cause I thought my texts were all soundingvery cool,very normal,” he said with what sounded like a smile.

“Not to me,” she said with what sounded like a performative smile.

“And I’m sincerely sorry about that,” he said earnestly.

Danny had mentioned spending years in therapy working on his internal issues, but this was ridiculous. This was the kind of honest, straightforward communication one could only dream about in a partner.

Rhea had often been accused of being “crazy” in past relationships, but this conversation was making her wonder whether she was crazy for being intuitive or just needed a partner who was emotionally mature enough to be able to admit her intuition was accurate.

“No, it’s completely okay, you didn’t do anything wrong. I’m just…very sensitive,” she said, trying to match his refreshing candor.

“One of the many things I like about you.” He took a deep breath and continued. “Okay, so this morning I woke up thinking about our, uh, discussion, and I just need you to know I amone hundred percenton everything I said and…if you’re in a gray area about any of it, I really can’t continue this ’cause…I like you and I don’t want to, ya know, head toward a dead end, like you said—and I feel guilty for going back to your room when I wasn’t sure where you were at with all of it—”

“Oh, please don’t feel guilty; I basically dragged you—”

“Rhea, I picked you up and put you on your bed….”