The word “ugly” is a complicated word. There are no gross anomalies or dissymmetries on my face. It’s plain and simple except for the nose, and yet, instead of calling it plain and simple, they call it ugly. By “they” I mean this entire town.

They call me Picassoface. A little understanding of modern art won’t hurt here: Picasso abandoned mimesis in favor of distortions that supposedly mirrored a subconscious countenance that was closer to truth than mere anatomic renderings. He put both eyes on one side, made the nose part of the forehead, and violently punctured new orifices wherever he wanted.

They call that genius. I call that cruel.

The word “gross” is another complicated word. I said there are no gross dissymmetries on my face, but there are indeed dissymmetries. My nose is about half an inch off the center of my face, to the left. It’s also somewhat large.

Guys pretty much don’t want anything to do with me. Brandon was nice, for a while. We walked home from school; sometimes we even stopped by Stop n’ Go for a snack. His father always came home red-faced and pissed, so Brandon would come over to watch TV. I loved the commercials because he would stop looking at the screen and look at me, and I would smile.

He never held my hand or even touched me. I settled for the air around him.

Brandon said he wished he could get rid of the last letter in his name. He loved Brando in Apocalypse Now, kept on quoting him and ad-libbing alternate versions of Kurtz’s speech in the end. I watched that movie five times, hoping to have something interesting to say. I guess I’m that cow that gets decapitated.

One time, coming back from school, we saw some kids burning a huge pile of dried leaves by the Methodist church. Black bits curled and floated in the air. One landed on his cheek, and I brought my hand up and touched his face. He stepped back and looked at me. His eyes were watery, and then he looked away.

That moment was a razor blade, and it seemed to remove the skin from my body. Our walks home from school became farther and farther apart. He said he found a shorter way home, had to hop only one fence. So I let him hop.

One day, he stopped looking me in the eye. It was that easy. I came up to his locker, and I was invisible.

The word “beautiful” is not a complicated word. It’s a feeling that drops inside you and stays there, and you hold onto it with trembling hands.

Dusk is beautiful because the foreground—the ugly parts filled with faces, cars, and things—becomes a blurry silhouette that crops out the sky as it changes from color to color. Finally, it decides on black. I guess each day has a little funeral.

Soon, Brandon started calling me Picassoface, too.

Love is like gathering all the emptiness in your chest the way one gathers laundry from the dryer without a basket, hoping not to lose any socks. When I find all the socks I’ve lost, I will make a pillow.

My father says I’m beautiful, which hurts the most. I can see the love mixed with lies in his eyes. I can see my mother look away every time he says it; sometimes, she even runs the garbage disposal.

I go upstairs to my room and look in the mirror. I touch my nose and bring it to the middle. My eyes give birth to soft, salty diamonds.

Picasso was only twenty years old when he moved to Paris and painted on cardboard and pieces of scrap wood, anything he could find. He was less cynical, I guess—the faces then were only sad, having leaked out the entire rainbow except blue.

I’ve started studying Picasso in the library during lunch. I share the long tables with the brown kids. They know better than to go out there in the quad. Hashim is addicted to his Nintendo DS. Neeraj does his calculus early, in time to take care of his grandmother. We’ve been talking every day. He’s sweet.

I show him Picasso’s painting of this old lady with a glass eye looking off into blank space. “She’d be a good friend,” I say.

“Why?” he asks.

“She’d only see half of me, like this.”

I bisect my face with an imaginary line traced with my finger, stopping at the chin.

He smiles, and I smile back.