"FaceTrue" by Amy DeBellis
- Roi Fainéant
- 6 days ago
- 13 min read
Even a hangover couldn’t spoil the beauty of the photos from last night. Katie lay on the couch, legs dangling over the end, scrolling through them. She and Alex had gone to a rooftop bar that not only boasted glittering, magnificent drinks with names like “Hibiscus Heaven” and “Lavender Lemonade,” but bloomed with walls upon walls of vertical gardens that were bursting with flowers of every shape, size, and color. The hanging gardens, she thought when she first saw them. One of the wonders of the ancient world. She was already tipsy enough at this point that the sight really did fill her with awe, even though these were highly artificial gardens—captive flowers, prisoner blooms—instead of the lush verdant splendor of Babylon.
She’d asked multiple strangers to take pictures of her and Alex. The two of them had posed between the flower walls, and as it was her birthday night, he hadn’t rolled his eyes, not even a little. Instead, he’d posed affably for the camera, his teeth ice-bright in his smile, his muscular arm a comforting weight as he slung it around Katie’s waist.
Yes, the pictures were beautiful, if you ignored the fact that Katie was in them. She swiped past photo after photo, and her hangover jabbed more fiercely at her brain with each passing moment. In every single picture, something was wrong with her: she was in the midst of a blink, or her pupils had gone red from the flash, or her hair had swung in front of her face, or her hand was a blur of movement as she reached up to adjust the offending hunk of hair.
Alex, though. He was flawless in all the pictures, but this wasn’t a surprise. Alex always looked amazing. Maybe it was the way the light hit his face, reflecting off his features and turning him into a kind of living prism. He had glossy chestnut hair and Mediterranean-blue eyes, full lips, and a nose that could have been cut from marble. His face was so symmetrical that, when the two of them had gone to the Museum of Illusions a few months ago, he hadn’t recognized the reverse mirror for what it was. You know, the mirror that shows you your own face flipped horizontally, the way other people see you? When Katie saw her face in that mirror, she cringed visibly and wanted to back out of the room, out of the museum, out of her entire life. And Alex, her innocent Alex, shielded by his facial symmetry from the cruelty of such inventions—he thought it was just a regular mirror.
Katie was about five more swipes from sending a few of the pictures to her best friend and texting her Can you FaceTune me to look like a human being. But just then, she found the picture she’d been waiting for. The picture where she looked not just decent, not just okay, but beautiful.
She and Alex were standing close together. The flower walls were like vivid living waterfalls on either side of them. She’d rotated her body slightly to the side, the way she knew she needed to in order to get a decent shot—why had she kept forgetting to do this during the twenty previous photos? Had she been that drunk already?—and she was angled in towards Alex. Her face, too, was turned at just the right angle. Next to her, Alex stood half a head taller. His body was turned more towards the camera than to her, which allowed the viewer to clock the breadth of his shoulders, the vein running down the thick slab of his bicep, the narrowness of his waist. His smile, in this picture, was one of those that could light up even the darkest corners of her heart. His eyes were heavy-lidded, almost sleepy-looking, but she knew they were relaxed with happiness.
“Hey Alex,” Katie called. He was in the kitchen, preparing one of his post-workout shakes. “Can I post this picture of us on Insta?”
“Lemme see.” He came over and glanced at the phone for a few seconds, not bothering to examine it closely. “Yeah, sure. You look beautiful, Katie.” He kissed her on the forehead.
Katie didn’t mess around with filters and only added a few flower emojis as a caption. She was too excited to put much thought into it anyway. As she posted it, she felt a delicious swoop in her stomach. She imagined that scattering of old high school classmates who still followed her on Instagram—girls who’d mocked her, who’d smirked whenever she spoke in class—scrolling down their newsfeeds and pausing on this picture. They’d frown in confusion. Is this really Cringey Katie? They’d scan Alex—his sharp and beautiful face, his hard athlete’s body—and want him. But they couldn’t have him, because he was Katie’s. And at this thought, Katie allowed herself a quick sunflash of a grin, brilliant as a shimmer of light across water.
~
When Alex came back from his workout, Katie was still on the couch, reading a book. It was nonfiction, written over two hundred years ago, and she had to concentrate to understand it. Reading it gave her the feeling that she was undergoing some type of purification of the intellect, or the soul. She was so deep in concentration that she didn’t register Alex kicking off his shoes by the door, nor the heavy slap of his wallet on the table.
She did, however, register the tenor of his voice when he demanded, still in the other room: “What the fuck were you thinking, posting that picture of me?”
That tone: it was coiling darkness. It was fear thudding in Katie’s head, kicking the hangover back into being, calling up nausea from the pit of her stomach. It was neural lightning that branched red through her brain, making her sit up convulsively, speeding up her heart and her breathing, sharpening her vision so that she could see, when Alex stormed into the living room, how his pupils had blown. The black swallowing up nearly all the blue seas of the iris. Something she’d read once flashed back to her, nonsensical in this instant: People’s pupils enlarge when they are looking at someone they love.
“What picture?” she asked, trying to modulate her tone, as though Alex would follow her example.
But her calmness only seemed to anger him further. “What picture?” he repeated in a horrible, sarcastic voice. “The one you posted on Instagram a couple hours ago. I just saw it when I was at the gym.”
“What—what’s wrong with it?”
He sat on the couch, the cheap fake-leather cushions squeaking beneath his weight. She could feel the heat radiating off his body. He smelled corrosive, like sweat and rusted metal. He shoved his phone under her nose, almost too close for her to focus on it—yes, there was that beautiful picture of the two of them. Forty-two likes already. More than most of her pictures got.
“You don’t see anything wrong with it?” he asked. That sarcasm was back in his voice again, pinched and tight, like something ready to strike. “Look closely. Reallllly closely.” He moved the picture even closer to her face.
“No!”
“My eyes,” he pronounced. “They’re half shut, that’s what’s fucking wrong with it. I look dopey.”
“You—you don’t look dopey. You look sweet. That’s what I thought when I posted it.” She swallowed against the tightness in her throat. “And anyway, I asked you if I could post it, and you said yes.”
“For fuck’s sake, Katie. I was getting ready for my workout. I didn’t look at it closely enough. You should’ve asked again. To make sure I’d actually looked at it!”
From dating Alex for two years, Katie had had this logic embedded in her marrow: My boyfriend is a man of his word. What he says, he means. So there’s no sense in questioning it, in asking “Are you sure” about anything. That will only make him mad. And beyond that, Alex was a grown man. Since when was it Katie’s responsibility to make sure he had looked at a picture closely enough?
“You tricked me. You showed me the picture when I was distracted, then you posted it. Great trick. Really nice, Katie.”
This was so unfair that for a few moments, Katie couldn’t even speak. She could only splutter, and this brought back to her altercations in the hallways of her high school, times girls had regarded her like she was prey and lobbed words at her, things like: We think you’re really beautiful, you’ve got a kind of unique gorgeousness (giggling behind their hands) or Why do you talk like that? or Did you really fuck Josh for fifty dollars and a hit off his blunt?
The whole time she stammered, trying to find her words, Alex regarded her with his black-hole eyes. The rest of what she’d read about pupils finally made its way back to her: Pupil dilation can be a sign of stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system, aka the “fight or flight” response.
Oh yes, Alex wanted a fight. An hour of pushing hundreds of pounds of steel around in the air-conditioned gym, and he still hadn’t exhausted whatever rage he still had simmering inside of him.
“I—I didn’t trick you,” she finally managed. “I didn’t. I really liked that picture. I thought you did too.”
“Give me your phone.”
After only a moment’s hesitation, she handed it over. So he was going to delete the photo from Instagram. Fine. She sighed to herself as she watched him click the requisite buttons. It was a bit dramatic, but at least she could keep the memory, and maybe put another, better picture up instead—
But he wasn’t done. He’d exited Instagram, but instead of handing her phone back to her, he was now scrolling through her camera roll. What was he doing? Katie’s stomach began a slow, gradual drop. Not a plummet, but a heavy and disbelieving descent.
He got to a row of pictures of just Katie, ones he had taken. He scanned them with his fight-or-flight eyes until he found one, nodded slightly. “Okay, this one.” He handed the phone back to her, and despite herself, she sucked in a breath at what was on the screen. She looked ridiculous. Her eyes were closed in a blink, and her mouth was open in a laugh. The movement gave her a double chin, a semi-sneer. Her thighs looked enormous in her jeans. Her arms were hanging awkwardly: one reaching out for the wall of flowers but not quite touching it, the other on her waist, but her wrist turned backwards, so it looked like she had no hand.
She couldn’t have taken a worse photo if she had tried.
“Post that one.” His voice was like granite.
“Why?” She hated how the word wobbled as it came out of her mouth.
“So that you’ll know what it’s like to have everybody laughing at you. See how you like it.” He stood up.
“No one was laughing at you.” She looked up at this athlete, this six-foot-two man with golden skin and hair like a figure on a Grecian urn, in disbelief. “But they’re sure as hell going to laugh at me.”
“Post it or no sex for a month.”
Tears made her throat thick. She had nothing more to say anyway. So she posted it.
~
A few hours later, nearly midnight:
“All right, you can delete it,” said Alex. “I think you’ve learned your lesson.”
She had. Enough people had seen it, that was for sure. She could see that it had gotten hundreds of views. And how many pity likes? Five. One from her mother, the other four from her best friends.
She deleted the picture but she could still see it. It was branded on the inside of her eyelids, a grotesque afterimage. Her gaping mouth, her squeezed-shut eyes, her distorted body. The image gained vibrance and clarity, like a photo developing in a darkroom. Standing out livid as a scar.
It remained even throughout the night, when she was trying her hardest to sleep, Alex’s body a gently snoring mountain next to her. She drifted off into unconsciousness several times but always woke up, shivering from humiliation, sleep nothing more than a shallow puddle.
And at some point in these black, silent hours, the humiliation began to harden. To turn into rage.
~
The next day, after work, Katie didn’t come home. She sat on the subway as it took her uptown, then downtown again, then uptown. She went to a bar and drank three whiskeys, one after the next, and avoided eye contact with anyone but the bartender.
By the time the room had become blurry at its edges, she had gathered the strength to take her phone out. She opened the App Store and searched for FaceTune, but after reading the reviews, she realized she’d need to pay way too much money. An expensive subscription, just for one photo? No; there had to be an easier way.
She scrolled until she found a similar app, FaceTrue, that seemed to satisfy her two requirements: free and simple. It was an obvious knockoff of FaceTune, but even if it wasn’t as good, it would do for the moment.
She downloaded the app, quickly scrolled through the Terms and Conditions (which were rendered in what appeared to be size 6 font), and uploaded one of the pictures she’d taken of Alex by himself in front of the flower walls.
And she got to work.
It was so easy. She put the resize tool over Alex’s mouth and thinned his lips out. She gave him a pencil neck. Next came his arms, the ones that hung so muscular at his side. Methodically, she thinned out his muscles, turned his biceps and forearms into those of a malnourished prisoner. Now the popping veins looked like evidence of starvation rather than of musculature. When she got to his hands, she shrank them down to a ridiculous size: baby doll hands. She dragged his shirt out so that a heavy gut now hung over his jeans.
She zoomed in on his face and took stock of the details. Could she thicken his brows? Ah! It seemed that she could. With a few flicks of a brown pen, she gave him a unibrow. She wished she could decorate his face with a healthy spattering of acne, but of course an app that was meant to beautify didn’t have that feature. She settled for dotting big moles all over his face with the brown pen. She even drew a few hairs sprouting from them, courtesy of a cobweb-thin black pencil.
His legs, now. Not as fun as the rest of him, but it was still a treat to shrink them, to thin them out until it seemed incredible that he could stand up at all. After this, she scanned the picture, looking for places she hadn’t yet touched. She dragged his earlobes down until they nearly met his shoulders, the skin dangling like stretched-out gum. She colored his hair gray—not a trendy, platinum shade, but the kind of gray that an old man would have, peppered with streaks of white. Then a mischievous idea occurred to her, and she dragged the Resize tool over to his crotch. She took the size down, and down, and down again, until it appeared that he had a vortex in the seam of his jeans, an absence of mass so great that it sucked in everything around it.
Katie regarded her masterpiece. Alex barely even looked human anymore. She smiled a giddy, drunk smile, and posted it, tagging him and as many of his friends as she could.
~
By the time she got home, it was past midnight, and all the lights were off. Alex was asleep. She crept into the apartment and closed the door as quietly as she could behind her, then darted to the back room: she rarely used it, but there was a couch in there, and it had a door that locked. She’d crash here out of necessity, and tomorrow she’d start looking for a new place to live.
When she woke, it was with a furry mouth, sore eyes, and the beginnings of yet another hangover. A terrible sound echoed in her ears, although it must have been part of a dream. She had never heard anyone scream like that in real life.
Still groggy, she rolled over on the couch and checked her phone: 7:30 A.M.
She sat up, panic suddenly unspooling inside her. Alex must have left for work by now. Which meant he’d seen the post. Along with all of the friends she’d tagged.
Fuck, she thought. What have I done? She scrambled for her phone, intending to delete the image and leave the apartment as soon as she could—
A sudden scream pierced the air. It was coming from Alex’s bedroom—a lurching, wailing cry. Something about it sounded…not quite human. All the hairs on her arms stood straight up and her spine turned icy. What the fuck is that?
The screaming died away, and then there was a sharp banging on her door. “Katie! I know you’re in there! Open up!”
But Alex’s voice didn’t sound angry, the way it had all the other times he’d hammered on the locked door of this room. It sounded pained. It sounded….terrified.
“Calm down, Alex, I’ll delete the picture. I’m sorry. I was drunk.” Her voice was shaking. Something else occurred to her. “Why aren’t you at work?” Surely he wasn’t so traumatized from this picture—clearly Photoshopped to the point of absurdity—that he had stayed home from work?
But he had, after all, been screaming. Maybe that was what had woken her a minute ago.
A sarcastic laugh from the other side of the door. “Oh, like this? You think I can go to work like this, you fucking demon?” He screamed the last few words. His words sounded constricted, like someone had their hands around his neck.
“What the fuck?” She stood up. “It was just a picture.” Anger overtook her fear, and she walked to the door. “It was just like what you did to me, except mine was so clearly Photoshopped, so clearly not you, that nobody could possibly think—”
She flipped the lock and swung the door open. Her next words died in her throat.
Standing before her—leaning before her, rather—was a monstrosity. A stick insect with a human head, a bundle of twigs the color of human flesh. The creature’s hideous head wobbled, held up by an impossibly thin neck that bent and swayed like living rubber. It tottered on sticklike legs that seemed incapable of fully holding up its weight: it had to lean on the doorframe to stay upright. In fact, it struggled to even hold onto the doorframe. Its hands were so tiny that its fingers were tiny, barely visible stubs.
No, something inside her said. Not “it”. Him.
Because it was Alex. Alex, exactly the way she had changed him. His unibrow, the hairy moles swarming his face, the emaciated limbs, the massive belly sagging towards the ground, the dangling earlobes, the gray hair—
His blue eyes were the only things she hadn’t changed. They stared out at her: helpless, panicked, lost. Then his legs wobbled madly, and he collapsed onto the floor with a slap of flesh.
Katie felt like she was about to vomit. Slowly, Alex began to hunch over, his huge gray head sagging toward the ground on a thin pink stalk, like a dandelion gone to seed. The gurgles and gasps from his mouth were growing fainter, as though he couldn’t get enough air through the narrow throat she had created.
“What…have you…done?” he moaned, sounding like it was taking all of his effort to speak. “What…what is this? What did you do to me?”
“I—I just used FaceTune—”
But no, she realized. That wasn’t true.
She’d used FaceTrue.