The jar was an iridescent plastic, illuminated by the spotlight overhead, as if carved from an abalone shell. Its font was feather light and swooping, its words promising and seductive. Smooth. Soft. Radiant. Hydrated. The jar was inches out of reach, both in its price point of $190 and its physical space within the local mall’s Sephora. Frankie closed her eyes and imagined what was inside this sloping vessel. Water-cool and life-changing, a face cream she needed so badly, so fiercely, that her small press-on nails carved half-moons into her palms as she clenched her fists.
“Don’t you dare bring back those tantrums you had as a child, Frankie, I swear to God, there will be no frozen yogurt for you.” Her mom towered above her, squinting downward to ensure Frankie didn’t employ the Teen Girl Eye Roll. She just didn’t get it, Frankie thought as she reached a friendship braceleted arm upward, to gently caress the moisturizer’s surface. It was smooth, as smooth as the skin it promised. Her finger then found her own face, with its dry patch and studded pimple. Like, her skin was fine, but who wanted fine when you could be radiant? Her mom was still talking.
“You’re twelve, sweetie pie. You don’t need this yet.”
Willow in Art Class had told her about this specific cream. It was why she didn’t even need foundation anymore. Just mascara, she said. But Frankie’s Mom didn’t get it. She was a soap-and-water woman, and Frankie thought it was really starting to show. But she wasn’t about to tell her mom THAT.
Instead, she sulked through the promised froyo and a trip to Macy’s for bath towels, the weight of her bad mood only shifted to curiosity when her mom swung the Kia Sedona into the CVS parking lot. Her mom held the flush of pleasure that comes from holding in a surprise.
“What if I gave you $25 to pick out whatever you wanted?” Her proud hands were already in her purse, a delight and self-satisfaction for finding a compromise. “No microneedling-acid-whatever. An age-appropriate moisturizer.”
Her mom just didn’t get it, but Frankie didn’t want her mom to feel bad. She swallowed swollen embarrassment and faked a smile. One fingernail popped up from the nail bed, the cheap glue loosened from pressure against her jeans. She accepted the folded bills from her mother’s palm, trying to hide the searing disappointment – the bratty sulk of not having a parent who could buy her the thing that would actually fix her.
Frankie went inside. She grabbed bottles and jars without looking at the label, threw her mom a pity hug when she returned, every tendon tensed in an impossible shame. Her skin would never be good enough with this slop.
Back in her bedroom, Frankie sobbed. Her space was a testament to the transitory nature of girlhood. Ratty Barbie dolls next to origami tampon wrappers. Glitter stickers affixed to the bottoms of old Converse sneakers. Bubble gum K-Pop posters. A thumbed-through copy of The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. An empty bowl, fuzzed over what was once cinnamon oatmeal. A thong she’d borrowed from Willow, but hadn’t had the guts to even try it on. Tissues stamped with too-pink lipstick. Her very own bathroom, small but stacked with bottles of apple shampoo and waterlogged magazines.
Frankie shoved each drugstore product beneath her mattress, violently swiping at angry tears. She’d rather die than use that trash.
The Sephora dupe came in a plain cardboard box, duct-taped so judiciously that Frankie had to use a knife from the kitchen. The link came buried within a subreddit thread about all things beauty, after Frankie had been scrolling for hours.
“That price is wayyyy more doable, and the results are bio-identical LOL,” the commenter had stated, punctuated with about nineteen exclamation points. Frankie looked at the commenters’ profile, but it was unused except for this suggestion. Its image was of a cartoon worm wearing a hat. “These skincare brands be ripping us off for real. Trust LOL.” Knock-offs were totally a thing, Frankie knew. Anyone with a social media account knew that. You just had to know where to look.
Frankie used her parents’ emergency credit card to cover the $40 price tag, hidden beneath the folds of winter bedding in the hall closet. She nearly sliced an artery getting to the box’s peanut-packed center.
The jar itself was unmarked, but was painted with the same phosphorescent mother-of-pearl perfection. The directions came on a Sharpie-penned index card, the kind Frankie used to study Spanish.
Apply to a clean face in upward circular motions each evening.
Frankie did as she was told, as she mostly always did. The cream itself was a jellyfish slurry, viscous and thick. Tiny silver flecks shaped like commas were flecked throughout, and she reveled in the cooling sensation, almost as if it were moving across her skin. She tucked herself into bed earlier than usual, eager to experience her new, ultra-hydrated skin when she awoke.
The change happened three days later, but it did happen, as if she’d emerged from a chrysalis. Her toothpaste-specked mirror radiated her own reflection back to her. Cheeks, collagen-filled. Surface, a dolphin-like sheen. Any semblance of a blemish had vanished, blurred and evaporated. She pushed a fingertip into her plump face and marveled at the smoothness, the clarity, the luminosity. Fuck Sephora, she thought, the curse word like a caramel. Even her mother noticed over breakfast.
“Told you those cheaper products worked just as well,” she’d preened, stabbing a milky spoon through the air. “Listen to your mother.”
Frankie nodded, pleased to keep her mother happy while having a secret. Maybe she’d share eventually, she thought. Her mother was beautiful, sure, but the skin around her eyes creped. There was a papery quality to the lines around her mouth, like someone had sewn them shut once and they’d never healed. Frankie would never get like that, she told herself. This was preventative. Even tweens needed to develop quality self-care habits.
In Art Class, Frankie waited for Willow to notice. She angled her face to catch the sunlight. Coughed and held a pencil against the curves of her lips. Willow leaned in, smiling in that sleepy, blasé way only cool girls have access to.
“You totally hooked up with someone, didn’t you?” Her gold glitter nails tapped against the art table. Her neon pink spaghetti strap top. She was always talking that way, and Frankie’s cheeks flushed. “You got that glowwww glow. Who was it? Tell me now.”
‘Ohmygod, I did not.” Frankie rolled her eyes and went back to her oil painting, her whole body tingling from the compliment. Willow loved to shock with her outfits and her words. Frankie knew she’d only made out, but the fuzzy feeling lasted until the bell rang and Willow stood, her full body now on display. Frankie noticed how her whole body looked as soft and firm, and plump as her face. The lengths of her legs that grew from her cut-off shorts. The flanks of her shoulders. The dip in her faked cleavage, created by a Victoria’s Secret Bombshell bra. Frankie glanced downward at her arms. They looked so dull now. It was actually weird when she thought about it. To have her face look like this, and her body look like that. She couldn’t believe she went out in public like this. The sweetness of Willow’s compliment melted like cotton candy under a faucet. She grabbed the girl’s arm with urgency.
“What do you use on your body?” she almost yelled. “It looks so…moisturized.”
Willow laughed. She was used to girls pulling at her. Asking for her skincare routine, her fragrance, and where she got her sneakers. “Ohmygod girl, this totally addicting body butter. I’ll show you.”
This one was $290 and Frankie’s stomach sank, but only for a second. She raced home and returned to her trusted Reddit thread. She dropped an image of the pricy body butter into a comment, tagging the cartoon worm commenter who’d helped her out the last time. She waited, surveying her bedroom. OJ stains on her satin comforter, a fake nail clinging to a gauzy curtain. Oreo crumbs like lice speckling the carpet. An earring glinted on her dresser. They responded.
“Oh, I got good news for you LOL. The same company that makes the dupe I showed you also makes a full-body cream that does the exact same thing LOL. It’s def a little more intense, but you got this girlfriend LOL. Just follow the directions LOL.”
The cadence in which the commenter wrote struck Frankie as odd, but her heart pounded as she clicked through to a site that sold another identical tub to what Willow had shown her. This container was much larger than the one for her face, but that made sense. There was more surface area to her body. The emergency credit card was pulled out again, this time for the very reasonable price of $60. When the jar arrived, again in an unmarked box, again in slick packaging like the scales of a mermaid’s fin, but this time, the instructions were longer.
Run a bath as scalding as you can stand. Dump 1 scoop into water and wait until it’s dissolved. Submerge yourself entirely and move the water in upward circular motions over skin.
Frankie was a little confused. She’d never heard of a cream you put into the bath, but her own reflection in the steamed-up mirror reminded her not to stray from the commenter’s expertise. They’d never led her astray before. She prepared the bath while her parents watched game shows and folded laundry. The cream itself looked mostly the same as the other one, but this time the silvery specks were larger, and the shape and size of small noodles. She scooped a handful from its shell exterior and lowered it into the hot water. Immediately, the cream came alive – each rubbery piece of pasta began to wiggle and squirm, shooting off from each other into the depths of the bathwater. Frankie crouched low, so the slope of porcelain was at eye level. What were those things? They seemed activated by the heat, flashes of shimmer, and their sequinned heads led the way. A trick of the light, Frankie decided. They couldn’t actually be alive.
A gasp escaped her as she sank beneath the water, the noodles shooting around her legs and belly like detritus through a windstorm. They tickled, and Frankie held back a mixture of revulsion, suspicion, and wonder. The water felt silky, and whatever Jell-O-like exterior each noodle had felt nice against her body. She envisioned the magic potion infiltrating her pores, moisturizing her from within. She wanted her skin to be the most hydrated it had ever been. More hydrated, more moisturized, the glowiest ever, even more than Willow, even when she wore her tiny tank tops. Frankie stayed in the tub until the pads of her toes pruned, until the water grew cold, until her mother pounded on the door asking if she was alive in there. When she popped the drain, the noodles swirled down it, and then were gone. Frankie toweled off and had the best sleep of her life. She dreamt of dolphins and whales and eels and silver fish. She woke up, cleared the crust from her eyes and ran to the mirror.
This time, the change was immediate.
Head to toe, Frankie was glorious. Like a seal fresh from the ocean, a donut glazed with icing. She was a selkie, a mermaid, perfection in a pre-teen. Not a blemish, a flake of dry skin, a cluster of angry zits. Tears sprang to her eyes. Frankie felt beautiful. She barely wanted to dress, preferring instead to stare at herself naked in her stickered full-length mirror. The clumps of tissues and molded English muffins blurred behind her, and all she could do was stare at her velvet-glowing skin. She practically sprinted out the door, Pop-Tart in hand, to get to school on time. She didn’t even question why, at the bus stop, she burped up what appeared to be a squashed noodle. She simply swallowed it back down and finished her toaster pastry, relishing in what she’d heard her father whisper as the door slammed.
“She’s really coming out of her shell, isn’t she?”
Frankie could feel Willow’s eyes roaming over her as they sat listening to a lecture about the impressionist era. She soon learned the truth about aesthetics – the pretty and chosen gain access to it all. Over the next few weeks, she was invited to every birthday party, every bathroom hangout, and was privy to every nugget of gossip. When asked for her skincare routine, she referred to Willow’s pricey Sephora essentials. She didn’t want to gatekeep, but worried they’d judge her for going for off-brand dupes. The noodle burps became more frequent – one afternoon, she’d raced home from school to projectile into the toilet. She looked down at what she’d expelled and felt her eyes widen. The iridescent commas from the cream, but they were wiggling—seemingly alive, cold gelatin. Frankie slammed the lid shut.
“Pain is the price of beauty,” Willow liked to say as she popped her gum. Frankie decided she didn’t care what she saw – her tank tops got smaller, her skin never stopped glowing, and soon she was happier and more confident than she’d ever been. She’d never stop using her dupes.
It was sheer coincidence that both jars ran out of product the day her parents got the emergency credit card bill.
“I am so disappointed in you,” her mother said, hands clasped on the kitchen table as if in prayer. “That money I gave you at the drugstore…and you go behind my back. You know I’ve read about this. Young girls and products that are too mature for them. You’re beautiful, Frankie. You don’t need all this. You’re twelve. Just be a kid.”
Frankie stared downward, beneath the table. Her legs looked moisturized but less so – a dulling effect had been cast over her skin like a forgotten room. She’d have to do this forever? Was there a way where beauty didn’t involve the arduous labor of maintenance? She felt a burp broaching the back of her throat. She swallowed the noodle down.
“I didn’t think you were a sneaky girl,” her dad said. “No cell phone, no tablet for a week.”
Any guilt Frankie felt paled in comparison to the seeping horror she felt without her dupes. The glow was going away. The backs of her hands felt dry and tough, calloused and gross. And the panic she felt, all she could lose, what Willow would think…she couldn’t just give this up. She would die.
She waited until her parents had gone to bed before she stole her banned phone from beneath the same bath towels. The emergency credit card was now hidden behind the sugar in the kitchen cabinet, not even a little difficult to find. Her fingers typed fast.
“I need something that works all over – face and body. I need it to last. I need it to be permanent. HELP.”
The worm wearing a hat responded within minutes.
“I know just the thing LOL. But when I say it’s permanent, it’s permanent. Follow the rules exactly and girlfriend, your skin will glow FOREVER LOL. It’s a little pricey but you’ll never have to buy it again LOL. Here ya go, girlie LOL.”
The order was placed and Frankie waited by the door so neither one of her parents could intercept the package. This time the box was huge, the size of a microwave. Frankie was suspicious – did “permanent” just mean larger? She’d still need to repurchase eventually, but maybe by then she’d have a part-time job or she could babysit or something. She hauled it as quietly as she could up to her bedroom.
The jar this time wasn’t so much a jar but an urn sized for a pretty large dog. Frankie struggled to unbox it, and shuddered when the iridescent glass hit the porcelain tile. Feeling like she needed a friend, she quickly typed out a message to the commenter.
“This is comically large haha,” she said. She waited. The response came.
“OMG girlfriend, I know. But it’s SO worth it LOL.”
Frankie shrugged and used the strength of her shoulders to unscrew the top. Sweat dampened the crown of her ponytail. Her bare feet slid on the floor. Finally the shimmering top gave way and opened like a top, clattering to the floor with a muted echo.
A sour surge of bile rose in Frankie’s throat this time when she saw what was inside.
These were udon noodles this time, and they coiled around the entire inside of the jar. Equally gorgeous in wetness and in tone, the jelly-like forms were the circumference of Frankie’s wrist and indiscernible in length. She couldn’t tell if one noodle was inside or many, snuggling against each other in phosphorescent liquid. Swallowing nausea, she reached a finger out and poked one. It shuddered like the top of a flan and seemed to shrink away from her touch.
“The fuck is this?” she uncharacteristically swore in the Reddit thread. She waited. Nothing. A card fluttered from the box onto the floor. The directions were similar to the last dupe, with small adjustments.
Run a bath as scalding as you can stand. Dump entire sarcophagus into water and wait until the water begins to move. Submerge yourself entirely, head and all. Do not move, no matter what, until the moving stops.
“Sarcophagus?” Frankie stared at the word. “Like the Egyptians?” It seemed odd and dramatic but then again, she was aware she’d ordered this dupe offline and had asked for something unconventional. Probably Willow didn’t even know about this. Maybe this would finally be a skincare product the coolest girls in school weren’t aware of, and maybe this wasn’t even a dupe. Perhaps this was a real beauty secret, known only to a few. And Frankie was one of them. Nausea turned to a buzzing excitement.
A laugh track to some sitcom played up through the floor. Frankie filled the tub, disrobing as the water steamed and rose up to the top. She stared hatefully down at her knees, how knobby and dull they were. Her arms looked dusty from the day. Her cheeks, she poked fingers into them. They were soft, spongey, but could be better. She imagined what she would look like after this – dewy, glowy, radiant, luminous. This would fix it for once and for all.
Dumping the contents of the container into the tub proved to be a difficult feat. The noodles inside were heavier, like a firehose made of gelatin. Frankie slipped and slid on the now-slick tile. The noodle seemed stuck, unable to meet the cold bathroom air. Frankie reread the instructions. Sarcophagus. She tried again, and this time, the entirety of the massive jar expelled from her arms and crashed down to the bottom with an audible, muted thump. She waited, breath bated, waiting for her parents to call up to her. Nothing. Just canned laughter.
Her eyes peeked over the edge. The noodle, the firehose, had slipped from its jar and was now coiled in one corner by the drain. Frankie shrugged. Okay, great.
“False alarm,” she commented on the thread, feeling a buzz of nerves. She needed a friend to feel less alone in this strange endeavor. “Getting in now, wish me luck!”
Placing her phone on the edge of the tub, she lifted one leg and then the other and slid all the way down inside. The water was almost scalding by design, but Frankie preferred her baths that way. She usually liked a bubble, a bath bomb, some essential oil – her mother believed in that kind of self-care. But this was different. It was medicinal.
Her toe touched the noodle and Frankie shuddered. It was that strange, hard-soft feeling, like the tops of mushrooms that grew in damp grooves of the garage. It was scaly, though, like this book about a rainbow fish she had when she was little. Each illustration had shimmered on every page. The noodle, though beautiful, kind of floated there at the bottom, by the shampoo crud and a speck of old toothpaste.
Her phone buzzed. A notification from the Reddit commenter, the worm in a hat.
“LOL,” it said. Frankie snorted. “Weirdo,” she thought, mildly annoyed.
It buzzed again. “LOL.”
“Whatever,” she thought, and looked down again at the noodle. She pushed it a little with her toe, this time feeling braver. It seemed to shudder back at her, but Frankie was sure that was just the gentle hot waves as she moved.
“Wait until the water begins to move. Submerge yourself entirely, head and all.”
Frankie had left the door open, and she could see her room. Glitter glue and poster board, sunless tanner lotion stains on her satin comforter, a Barbie from years before, her hair ravaged by safety scissors and missing a shoe.
The water then began to move. Frankie, one eye shut, glanced downward at the noodle. It was definitely moving now, a subtle, consistent vibration. Frankie took a wide gulp of air and, imagining her gorgeous forever-moisturized skin, plunged below the surface, her mouth blowfish-wide. The water felt even hotter down there, and she wondered how long she could even hold her breath. There’d been swim lessons, a test on treading water, but what if she couldn’t do it? Would it all be a waste?
Frankie was beginning to lose patience as her lungs struggled. Making a decision, she peeked underwater, imagining her lashes like the legs of a starfish.
It was an eye. A big, sad, goopy eye inches from her own. She could now feel the glimmering noodle lying against her, soft and churning. She struggled for the surface but the weight of the thing held her down. Pushing, pushing her so hard down into the ceramic. It hurt. It turned into Willow’s dumb face, freckled and perfect, its sneer her bottomless judgment that made Frankie feel like she was never enough. Frankie couldn’t breathe. The noodle became a noodle again, this time closer.
Frankie tried to scream as the thing blinked, bubbles coming from somewhere – perhaps wherever its mouth was. She thrashed, she pulled, she tried to stab the thing with her press-on fingernails but they fell off one by one like lost seashells.
Frankie’s mouth opened and the thing lunged. It filled her mouth, its taste of fish and swamp – slick and mucky, endlessly wet. It pushed past her teeth and into the sides and back of her throat, stretching her jaw so wide it made her ears pop. The water’s surface was an inch above her head and she felt the distant sound of her phone vibrating the sides of the tub. Her hands flailed, trying desperately to pull upward, find air.
“Do not move, no matter what, until the moving stops.”
That was what the directions said. She had to do it. Frankie, teeth knocked back, esophagus stretched, stomach distending, and the thing pushing pushing pushing, until Frankie saw stars. Literal stars in the water in front of her. Floating, silver, so fresh and stunning. She wished she were a star. She wished she were Willow. For a fleeting, infinitesimal moment, she wished she had been at peace with her mother’s drugstore face cream. The thing consumed her, and all that was left were her lingering thoughts floating atop the water like mermaid foam.
Was this her rebirth? Would she awake glazed and sticky, hydrated and dew-glossed, perfect in her hydrated body that everyone would envy? How long could she go without breathing? Would the thing live inside of her? Was she finally beautiful?
The moving stopped. The water calmed. The steamed cooled. The laugh track continued.
Above Frankie, as her hair floated like golden candy floss atop the water, her phone buzzed again, this time no one to read it. Just a cartoon of a worm wearing a hat.
“LOL.”