Jackie tells me about JUVE in the back of Ms. Samuel’s fourth period history class, where the kids who probably aren’t headed to the Ivy League go. We scatter ourselves along the back wall, empty rows reaching to hold the classroom together, but to no avail. Windsor Academy’s watchful eyes and steely regiment crumble like dead leaves here. 

“I need to tell my plug how many to ship,” Jackie flashes me her phone, blinding in the dark. Ms. Samuels scrunches her nose at us, but Jackie doesn’t notice. “So make up your mind.”

“I still don’t know,” I whisper, swiping through the infographics of JUVE on her phone. There’s a picture of the packaging, followed by high-definition shots of glassy skin. “Is it safe?” 

The Imperial Japanese Army quickly crossed the 170 miles between Shanghai and Nanjing, drones the documentary Ms. Samuels put on. 

“Yes, it’s safe,” Jackie massages the words, but I sense a lick of impatience and flinch. “Everyone I know uses him to buy whatever rare shit they want.”

“OK, maybe. But I can’t afford it.” 

In a chilling omen of the upcoming massacre, Japanese forces subjected civilians to extreme violence and brutality.

“I know. I was gonna pay for you anyway,” Jackie says. My stomach turns into itself. “Dad said he would give me extra this month if I apply to Yale, so I got us covered.”

“Haha,” I reply, attempting to wash away her earlier comment. It settles into a stain on my chest anyway, and I’m annoyed that her paying makes the decision that much easier. “OK, fine. Get me one.”

Soldiers set fire to several hamlets they passed through. Many of the inhabitants of Nanqiantou hamlet were locked within the burning houses.

“Hell yeah,” Jackie beams approvingly. She had won me over again.

“Jackie, Vivian,” Ms. Samuels snaps. “Watch the movie.”

🩸 

My first pimple broke skin two years ago. A boiling mass poked skyward above my right eyebrow and quickly burned through my entire forehead like a dry, midsummer fire. Over the following months, my skin began to sag with oil and scarring, and I saw how people bent away from me even as their eyes scoured the geography of my face, like pests to rot. 

Online, the advice was futile. Charcoal like acid on my cheeks. Niacinamide that made my chin ooze like a wound. Accutane forbidden by my parents, terrified by pictures they found in their corners of the Internet of newborns birthed from mothers who ignored warning labels they shouldn’t have. What stuck were the ominous testimonies of premature wrinkles inherited from deep blemishes and irreversible folds cleaved along acne fault lines. 

What my skin needs, Jackie claims, is organic restoration. Influencers have been raving about this new product from Japan that I know, like all the other trends, won’t do anything for me. But Jackie has connections from her time in Singapore, and she knows how to get her hands on the product’s secret ingredient, straight from the source. She knows about the rumors from Tokyo, the historic beauty capital, about a generational secret that promises the rebirth of skin—not just cell renewal, but the previously unthinkable possibility of resurrection itself. JUVE has been reported to reverse skin cell cycles back to the pace of pre-pubescent children so that the customer experiences a process through which their skin is born anew. Blemishes and scars evaporate overnight. Wrinkles stretch back into their former elasticity; old and loose becomes young and tight. 

When Jackie tells me about JUVE in the back of Ms. Samuel’s class, I am first hit with a wave of disgust. But as the wave recedes, I see plainly what I couldn’t admit to myself right away—that at last, I had come upon the final solution. 

🩸 

On Saturday, Rich throws one of his parties at his family’s beach house, around a half hour away from the campus dorms. The house is practically gift-wrapped in glass, wiped flawless by the maids earlier that day, and emptied of all belongings besides the bespoke leather couch and custom-made furniture, now demoted to mere surfaces for cups and ashtrays. Unable to find Jackie, I decide to wander the rooms. In one of the guest bedrooms upstairs, I discover the china, paintings, and sculptures hidden from the party—treasures probably worth the entire cost of my four-year scholarship. Tonight, they slump lonely on the floor without anyone but me to behold them. 

Downstairs, people were dealing in treasures of a different kind. Treasures in small bags scattered across the marble countertop, the red oak table atop a once-living trunk; of foreign whiskeys and pungent flower exchanged between lusting fingers; of the bodily experience, enjoyed in dark rooms and along the shore outside. Resigned to a corner away from prying eyes, I nurse my beer as I steal glances at Rich and Maeve teasing each other on the couch. 

Brilliant Maeve, so smart she’s definitely joining Harvard’s next class, and not just because her parents are both Harvard alumni. Beautiful Maeve, so lovely with the slim waist and bones angling in all my desired directions. Recently, her parents bought her a rhinoplasty that became an open secret among us girls, but her features bloomed so delicately around her nose’s gentle stem that we all secretly turned to our mirrors and recoiled—some of us at stubborn hair above our lips; a few at monolids splayed across our skulls; others at the forests of pinprick wounds from hormones untamed; and me, at all of that and more.

Beside her, Rich inhales a line of white on the coffee table and emerges in rapture. Last year, when he was caught with a dusty nose in the bathroom, his parents threatened to sue the headmaster if he faced any consequences. Now he’s rubbing off on perfect, perfect Maeve, who is giggling and leaning down to the table, a dainty hand still resting on his knee. 

Swallowing my disdain for Rich, I scan the room for Jackie and finally spot her on the back patio, laughing with Lori. I swerve wide around the couch, training my focus on the hardwood floor instead of on Rich and Maeve making out in my periphery, and step outside. 

“Oh, hey Vivian,” Lori says. We had only met a few months ago, when she drifted away from Maeve and started growing closer to Jackie. Out of what I suspect to be sheer politeness, she hands me her joint. I accept it anyway, pulling deep on the earthy smoke, and nod my greeting. 

“Where’d you go?” Jackie asks, waving away the joint I was handing her. “Remember? I don’t do that anymore. Wrinkles.” 

I pass the joint back to Lori. “Went to the bathroom.” 

“I’m gonna go get another drink,” Lori declares, wiping where my mouth had touched the joint. Jackie’s eyes follow her into the house before they, at last, acknowledge mine. 

“What were you guys talking about?” I ask, to fill the vacuum. 

“Oh,” Jackie scoffs. “We were watching Rich turn Maeve into a cokehead.” 

 “Me too,” I admit. 

“She’s totally the type to get really into it. And crash out at like 22.” 

I cringe at the thought. “You think?” 

“Oh yeah. And end up shriveled like all the other addicts.”

I return a short laugh and turn away from Jackie, digesting her words. If this is the path she sees so clearly for Maeve, what about Riya by the marble countertop and Lucia by the red oak table? Ivana, Susan, and Maria sway nearby, their eyes foggy and their cheeks burning. This is the point of the party: to escape Windsor, hijack the rules of time, and force tonight to delay tomorrow, only for everyone to wake up the next day and realize they had the cash, they had the drugs, but they can never, ever have time. As for me, besides the borrowed head-high here and there, I have nothing but my internal clock that ticks too loud, reminding me that everything, even flowers, shrivel in the end. In ten years, half of us will be balding and the other half will be pumped turgid with Botox. We will come together in gilded downtown lounges, sip on more sophisticated whiskeys, and reminisce about the party tonight, when we basked in our youth even as we chipped away at it, each chunk more solid than the last. 

The following week, word gets out that Rich’s parents discovered slashes in the bespoke leather couch, spider cracks in the glass, and foul stains on the hardwood, already dried to the color of rot. It took the destruction of property for him to finally face the worst consequence of all: no more parties. The entire grade spends the rest of the day lamenting the end of an era, which like most things in life, fell from our grasp before we knew we could even lose it. 

🩸

Ms. Samuels has just turned on the documentary again when Jackie rushes into the room and slips into her seat. She squares her shoulders to face me, back to an annoyed Ms. Samuels, and grins. I have not seen her this excited in months. 

“I just heard from my plug,” Jackie whispers. “It’s coming tomorrow.” 

“The JUVE? Already?”

Japanese military police gathered prisoners of war and civilians as test subjects.

“Yeah, girl,” Jackie leans back into her seat, holds her hands in front of her, palms up. “It has to be fresh. Obviously.” 

“Right,” is all I can say. Nausea spirals up from my core. Fresh. 

A group of physicians was responsible for maintaining healthy test subjects and dispatching them for experiments.

Jackie searches my eyes, secures them in her gaze. “Vivian,” she starts gently, stops. “This could fix all your problems.” 

One of the worst things about acne is that you wear your problems on your face, for everyone to see. I stop myself from cringing at Jackie’s comment and swallow sand. 

“I know.” 

The momentary tenderness in Jackie now dissipates. She bares her teeth into a wide smile because she knows, too—this is my final answer, my only solution to preventing these problems from graduating into wrinkles that will too eagerly build a home on my face for life. 

Scientists kept meticulous logs of the experiments, which became valuable resources in the development of biological warfare, public health policies, and medical breakthroughs. 

“We’re gonna look fucking snatched,” Jackie says, more to herself than me. 

🩸

When I first met Jackie, I was seven and she was eight. Our parents, college friends who diverged on drastically different paths, reunited for a polite dinner. We had just moved into our first house in a suburb hugging the city they lived in, so Jackie’s parents saw it as an obligation to invite us to dinner at their downtown penthouse. More than three of my new houses could fit inside their cavernous apartment, so I was thrilled when Jackie asked me to join her in a game of hide-and-seek. It was the first step in our friendship, an opportunity I accepted with open arms. 

As the adults caught up over rich flavors and pungent drinks, Jackie and I counted in corners and stuffed ourselves into crevices. It only took a few rounds of the game for both of us to realize that I was unfamiliar with luxury—how to move around it, how to take it into my hands like it belonged. While Jackie burrowed behind heavy, velvet curtains, pulling them tightly around her core, I resigned myself to open spaces behind couches and tables, terrified of touching them, and as a result was too easy to find. And this was when young Jackie got bored. 

You can hide in closets, too, she told me. 

With her permission, I hunkered down in a closet on the second floor, several walls away from our parents chatting in the dining room and Jackie counting in the kitchen downstairs. As soon as I closed the door behind me and squatted low to the floor, I looked up at the vacuum, broom, and shelves above, looming over my head in the barren dark like giant, disfigured creatures, and regretted my decision. Just as I was about to slip out of my hideout, I heard Jackie’s warning cry, followed by footsteps thundering up the stairs. 

Ready or not, here I come. 

I hugged my knees into my chest and shut my eyes, willing her to find me quickly. My ears followed her footfalls into each of the bedrooms upstairs, the opening and slamming of other closet doors, until I heard her approach mine and swing it wide open. I opened my eyes then to catch her attention, only to see that hers were wild and searching, brimming with youthful adrenaline. For a second, our eyes met, or I believed they did. She towered over me, confident and tall and rich, while I huddled in the corner, every breath I took panicked and halting. Then, she slammed the door shut, and through the wall and my paralyzing shock, I heard the sound of heavy furniture sliding in front of the closet door.

By the time she alerted the adults that she couldn’t find me, I was already sniffling into my knees, soaking my jeans in tears and snot. The situation was precarious. If I cried for help, she would surely abandon our friendship, so young and easy to discard. The creatures lurched above me, twisting and turning to the beat of my anxious heart. I strained to follow the series of footsteps below, roaming the rooms downstairs, searching for me in closets where I wouldn’t be. 

As the adults continued to look for me downstairs, I heard the sound of shifting furniture by my ear. I didn’t look up until a voice coaxed me to my feet. Found you, Jackie whispered to my cheek, still smothered in the salt of my anguish. Then, she half-carried me down to our parents, who were already irritated to have been roped into childish games. 

The rest of the night passed through me like a fitful dream. She hid so well, Jackie quipped. Good job finding her, her parents said. Why would you cry in their house? My parents scolded me during the car ride home. Still, I was eager to see Jackie each time our parents came together for their new monthly dinner tradition. Every time we played, she taught me something new— how to pad bras with pillowcases, how to draw double lids out of monolids with eyeliner, how to train my metabolism with teas and vitamins. She breathed authority, and I, the oxygen of feeling wanted. Then, weeks after my tenth birthday, her family moved to glitzy Singapore for her father’s new C-suite job, while I stayed in the dying suburb she left me in. 

Three years later, when my father told me Jackie’s father had joined the board of trustees at Windsor Academy, famed around the world as a feeder school for the Ivy League, I followed his instructions with acute attention: write a scholarship essay that tugs on heartstrings, smile wide at the interview, and act impossibly grateful when I receive my offer of admission. Getting into Windsor was simple, straightforward even; what was difficult were the years that followed.

Over the course of my time at Windsor, I’ve learned about the nature of luxury firsthand. When everyone is wealthy, other characteristics step in to distinguish one trust fund baby from the next—and on campus, there is no greater differentiator than beauty, the wealth you carry on your face and wear on your body. In the unforgiving game of life at Windsor, I cling tightly to Jackie, a lifelong master in the art of luxury. Who, unlike other trust fund babies, will always find a way to play with me. 

🩸 

I am sitting in the back of Ms. Samuels’ room, the first in the class to arrive again. The lights are off and the air tastes stale. Just as I am about to leave, a breeze of floral perfume brushes my brow. I look up and lock eyes with Maeve, who takes the seat next to me. 

“Hey,” Maeve gives me a small wave. 

“Hey.” 

There is a stretching in between us, the atoms swelling to both push us away from each other and glue us to our places. 

“What’s up?” 

Before I can reply, a clicking sound thunders from the front of the room. Ms. Samuels is standing by the screen, turned to the documentary playing scenes of yards strewn with debris, pillaged hamlets smoldering in the distance, masses of bodies piled along roads. 

Maeve shudders. “I can’t believe I’ve never heard about this.” 

I glance at her across the aisle, her silhouette pulsing with color while the rest of the room crouches in the shadows. I suppress a sudden urge to reach over and turn her face away from the documentary, turn her face so I can see it glow, turn her face to gaze upon mine.

“I actually have been hearing these stories since I was a kid, from my parents and family in China,” I say. 

“Oh,” Maeve breathes. “That’s a lot for a kid to handle.” 

“Sure,” I shrug at the screen. “You get used to it.” 

I am inwardly cursing myself for the bland response when I feel a tickle on my cheek. Maeve has crossed the distance between us and is now standing over me, peering down. Up close, she is even more lovely, like a young morning sun, a spring meadow in full bloom. A breath catches in my throat when she reaches a delicate finger to my face, tracing my temple. 

“Problem areas,” she frowns, then inspects my other temple. “Let me help you with that.” 

Before I can react, she is rubbing both of my temples with her fingers. Startled, I search the room for witnesses, but Ms. Samuels is still focused on the documentary, now cycling through photographs of mass graves and dissected children. 

“The chin, too,” Maeve clucks, and begins scrubbing my chin with a sharp knuckle. My face flushes with adrenaline, setting off fireworks in my ears. Actually, she could do anything to me, and I would stay so, so still for her. 

“Oh,” Maeve exhales again. Her breath is warm on my eyelids. “And the forehead.” Her fingers pause, and in this moment I inhale deeply, filling my lungs with her honey breath until my head is light and feathery, then steady my body for what’s coming next. 

Two palms, ice cold to the touch, descend on my face. Her fingers burrow into my skull, stretching over my eyes and turning my vision from black to Maeve to black to Maeve to black again, and they are scraping, scratching, stripping, peeling away at me and I think to myself, this feels so good, even though I can’t feel anything at all, just the honey in my core. 

I startle awake, surrounded by a circle of sweat and clutching a pillow to my cheek.

🩸 

Whenever I feel particularly lonely, I imagine how I would look in my 20s, when my hormones have stabilized, the last of my baby fat dissolved, and my features finally fit my face. 

It goes like this: slim but not chicken-boned, stomach grooved like muscle cars, abs like stream-weathered skipping rocks, hips full enough to stretch denim, tits perky like punching bags, arms that a whole fist can fit around, thighs with room in between for a hand or two, collarbones like handlebars that could snap if gripped, hair that melts like ice cream on the tongue. And what draws doting eyes to her the most is the silk that bathes every surface of her body—a silk spun from within, draped over high cheekbones and sharp jawlines and slender angles like golden light awash over prized treasures in a mansion that are never, ever hidden, so that all who see her yearn only to caress her, to kiss her, to behold her. 

The key, then, is to look like this for as many years as possible. 

🩸 

After my last class of the day, I follow Jackie’s instructions down a long trail into the wooded foothills behind Windsor. Large boulders line the sloped path and spread out around the pit of a shallow valley. There, in the clearing ringed by rock and foliage, Jackie is perched on a bed of leaves and flanked by two bulky bags. Cigarette butts litter the clearing, altogether encircling her, so that the boulders, trees, and cigarettes seem to resemble an audience orbiting Jackie and her two bags. 

For a moment, I consider ducking behind a boulder and sneaking back to campus, but I am too slow and Jackie is too quick. 

“What took you so long?” Jackie calls to me. 

Long, long, long, the rocky hills echo. 

I ignore the question, annoyed that she caught me. “What is this place?” I ask.

Jackie gestures to the cigarette butts with great flourish. “A hideout.” 

I step into the clearing and gaze at the hills above, probably witnesses to years of anxiety-ridden smoke breaks. Behind me, Windsor towers over us, leveling itself with the solemn rock surrounding it. The valley air stands cold and still. 

Jackie plops the bags in between us. “Let’s get this over with before someone comes.” 

I stop in front of her, just close enough to watch her fidget with the lock embedded into the first bag and pry it open. The insulation material lining the inside throws a sharp reflection into my eyes, forcing them closed. It isn’t until the image of the bag’s contents flash behind my closed lids that I register what my pupils had captured in that split second: a dark mass floating in a container, maroon to the point of pitch black, devouring all of the valley’s light. 

When I open my eyes, I see that Jackie is frowning at a piece of paper. For a moment, she peers up at me, her eyes swimming with fear. Then, she bows her head and begins to read. 

“Prepared in Japan. Sourced from Indonesia.” 

My stomach shrivels into itself. 

“Source weight before pregnancy: 46 kilograms. Source weight at time of birth: 57 kilograms.” 

The hills spin around us—me, Jackie, and the dark mass from Indonesia. 

“After birth, each placenta is soaked in amniotic fluid and treated with external beam radiation for nine months.” 

Nausea crawls up my throat and explodes out, shoving me back into the woods. 

“Oh my god,” Jackie drops the piece of paper and stumbles away from the bags splattered with vomit. “Fuck, Vivian, don’t get it on the JUVE!” 

I collapse against a boulder and heave, sucking cold air into my lungs.

“You OK?” Jackie tiptoes around my vomit and pauses next to me. I shake my head. 

“Jackie,” I wheeze. “I can’t do this.” 

Her face jolts, then ices over. “Don’t be stupid. These women were paid.” 

“Huh? That doesn’t—you know what, I just can’t do it.” 

“No.” 

“No?” I gasp, pushing myself up onto my feet. “What do you mean, no?” 

No, no, no, the rocky hills echo. 

“I said no. I’m sick of you,” Jackie snaps. Spit gathers at the corner of her lips. “I’m sick of you following me around since we were kids. Do you know how annoying you are?” 

My jaw tightens around her words. 

“I have done so much for you. I just paid six grand!” Jackie jabs a finger behind her at the bags. “For you! All so you would finally shut up about your face.” 

Face, face, face. 

“And now you want to back out,” Jackie’s voice rises to a scream. “Because you don’t want to fix yourself. You’re addicted to being sad. You’re addicted to being ugly.” 

Ugly, ugly, ugly. 

Before the words even get a chance to blow past the hills, I wind my arm back and slap her across the face. A stinging welt bleeds through her cheek, already swelling. 

“You’re a cunt,” I spit. 

Jackie freezes, then grabs my shoulders and throws me to the ground. A ringing sounds through my skull, boiling over. I hook my foot around her knees and pull her down, sinking my elbow into her stomach as she falls. She hacks from the impact, her face exploding in red. 

Above, the hills bellow our vitriol back onto us.

Her eyes now burning feral, Jackie digs her fingers into my skin, dragging her nails down my face, rabid like a dog, and I let out a pathetic yelp, my face stinging. I try to thrust a fist into her jaw, but she scrambles over me and pins her knees to my thighs and her hands to my throat. A deep ache trembles through my lungs, and the energy that coursed through me just moments before seeps into the ground like rain. 

“You are going to eat the JUVE,” Jackie growls, choking me with each syllable. “And then you’re gonna get the fuck out my life!” she yells, returning my slap from before. 

Life, life, life. 

I feel pain yank at my scalp and roll to my side, moaning. In a daze, I realize Jackie is grabbing fistfuls of my hair and dragging me, through vomit and cigarettes, to the center of the clearing. I kick at the dirt, splashing vomit onto my legs, and flail my arms around, desperately groping for flesh to scratch, but I am too slow and Jackie is too quick. 

The hills around us thunder, the match concluded and the victor crowned. 

Jackie shoves me in front of the bags, slamming my ribs into a rock. She tightens her grip on my hair with one hand, forcing me to my knees, and twists my arms behind me with the other. 

“Eat it.” A demand. 

Eat it, eat it, eat it. 

I gasp and heave for breath. The forest caves into me, burying branches into my flesh. 

“Eat it!” An order. 

Eat it! Eat it! Eat it! 

Jackie snatches the container from the bag, wrestles open the lid, and plops it in front of me. The smell of iron singes my nostrils. I blink furiously, but my vision blurs.

In the container, the placenta is writhing in its sea, viscous and agile. It rolls into itself, at turns diving and bursting through the amniotic surface, its pulpy eyes trained on me the entire time. Daring me to try and seize it, to kill the life pulsing through, to make its membrane my skin, its flesh my own, taunting—do it, do it, do it. 

“Eat it!” Jackie shrieks. 

Eat it! Eat it! Eat it! The hills chant. 

Do it! Do it! Do it! The placenta cackles. 

The valley air swells around me. 

Can you do it? Can you do it? Can you— 

“Girls!” A voice behind me hollers. “Girls, stop right there!” 

Jackie releases my hair. I fall face-first into the container, the flesh giving into the hump of my nose, the plateau of my brows, flattening its length across my cheeks. Its sea gushes into my ears. Past the liquid static of sloshing and gurgling, I catch a stifled tune—a hymn of life, a requiem for mortality. 

I thrust myself out of the sea and flop onto my back, gasping for air. My face, wet with placenta, stings in the brutal chill of the valley. Through the thin film smothering my eyelashes, I see Maeve and two campus security guards frozen at the edge of the clearing, their jaws dropping and closing in disgust. Sputtering mucus and amniotic fluid, I try to explain myself, but I can’t hear anything coming from my mouth or theirs, just the lonely voice in my ears. 

Let me live, let me live, it sings. I wish to bloom, let me live.