Wednesday 30 September

My name is Son Goten, and I am wearing makeup.

...Great Kami, the things I never thought I'd have occasion to write.

Let's backtrack to earlier in the day. I got out of art class, where my loony "teacher" had us spend half the class meditating to "draw out our creative spirits," and started heading to the courtyard to meet Trunks for lunch. Most kids prefer to eat in the cafeteria, but Trunks and I both feel like we spend enough of the day indoors as it is. Half the time we have the small yard practically to ourselves. I stepped outside, and sitting with Trunks at one of the run-down picnic tables was, unfortunately, his friend Addo. Don't get me wrong; Addo's in Trunks' class, and he's a pretty decent guy, but he's a bit...odd.

See, the best way I can think of to describe Addo is...gay. Very, very gay. And I don't mean the way I'm gay, just having-sex-with-other-guys gay. I mean fishnet-shirt, pink-nail-polish, glitter-and-lisping-and-techno-pop gay. Which is fine, except he thinks I'm the weird one for not being like that. (Of course, Trunks gets a pass because he's bisexual.) Apparently enjoying martial arts and refusing to buy purple vinyl clothing makes me some "hetero-wannabe assimilationist sellout." Yes, that is a direct quote.

Whatever. I'm the one with a boyfriend.

So, Addo, while generally a pleasant guy, tends to irk me sometimes. But Trunks, despite his popularity, doesn't have many friends. People that know the real Trunks. And I'm not even talking about him being half-Saiyan. I'm talking about him being a bird-drugging, eyebrow-destroying mad genius. Most everyone at school just knows him as this bright, good-looking, well-liked rich kid. There are very few people who know how weird he really is.

Addo is, for reasons I will never understand, one of those select few. Maybe it's because he's one of the only people at this school that even approaches Trunks' level of strangeness. So I actually do make an effort to get along with him.

Naturally, the first thing he says when he sees me isn't "hello," or "what's up," or any of a host of other standard greetings. No, my boyfriend's wonderfully tactful buddy decides to open the conversation with, "What the hell happened to your face?"

I rolled my eyes and sat down on the splintered wooden bench next to Trunks, right across from Addo. I jutted one thumb to my right, pointing at Trunks. "He happened."

I didn't have to explain. Addo got it right away. "Lab accident?"

"Yep." Trunks just gave us both that fake-innocent look and took a sip from his water bottle.

"Yanno," Addo said around a bite of his lunch, "I can help with that."

"With my eyebrows?"

"Uh huh!" He got this fantastically excited expression and started digging through this backpack.

This is where I should have gotten up from the table and made my exit. I really, REALLY should have known that the look in Addo's hazel, glitter-smeared eyes and the smile on his (I wish I were joking) purple-painted lips could bring nothing good.

Anyway, at this point Addo whipped out what looked like a small black pencil. I stared at it for a while before I figured out what, precisely, it was.

"Is that eyeliner?"

"Uh huh!" Addo repeated in that squeaky tone he gets whenever he's keyed up about something. "I can fill in your eyebrows! I'm really good with makeup." Yeah, I could see that.

I turned to Trunks, shooting him a pleading glance, but he didn't seem to be in the mood to help. He just nodded in approval.

I really need to be less of a fucking pushover.

Addo grabbed his backpack and moved over to my side of the table. "Now, which color do you want?"

I sighed. "Black?"

"Well, no shit, Goten." He pulled out a ziploc bag filled with eyeliner pencils that, honestly, all looked the same to me. "I have brown black, blackest black, blue black, charcoal mist, onyx night—"

"Addo," I cut him off, peering into his backpack, "where do you have room for your books?"

He looked at me quizzically. "Books?"

"Nevermind. Look, just pick a color, okay?"

He grabbed one of the pencils. "Shiseido Number Seven, 'Midnight Pitch'." As if those words meant anything to me.

Addo reached over and pulled back my bangs, his fingers brushing along the raised patch skin near my hairline. It hadn't occurred to me that he might never have seen the scar on my forehead before. He asked where I got it, and I explained to him that I'd fallen headfirst onto a rock when I was a kid.

Trunks, the smartass, said, "Explains a lot, doesn't it?" I ignored him as Addo started sweeping eyeliner onto my browbone.

I have to admit, when he showed me how I looked in his mirror (what kind of teenage boy carries a powder compact around with him?), it didn't look bad. So yeah, I figured, maybe this wasn't such a big deal.

Lies. All lies. It was a horrible, horrible ploy to earn my trust. He told me to close my eyes because he wanted to touch something up and didn't want to get any makeup in my eyes, and I listened. Next think I knew, something was brushing along my forehead. Then I felt a light pressure against one eyelid, followed by the other.

The psychotic, fruity fairy not only covered my scar with concealer, but apparently decided I'd look good in eyeliner. And my ever-so-helpful boyfriend didn't do a damn thing to stop it. The twisted pervert actually seemed to like the way it looked. I, being the normal one, did not see the appeal of looking like a cheap teenaged hooker.

When I demanded that Addo take it off, he just insisted he didn't have any eye makeup remover with him. I glowered at him, pushing him away with one hand and digging through his backpack with the other. Addo tried pushing against me, but even keeping my power at its absolute minimum, he was no match for me. I mean, the guy is at least two inches shorter than me and built like a stick. After a couple of minutes, I found that he was telling the truth—he really didn't carry any makeup remover with him.

At least I can take consolation in Addo's look of horror as I dumped the contents of his backpack into the dumpster.

By the time all of this had transpired, chem was about to start. I dashed to class, praying that no one would notice what Addo had done to me. We were finishing up the lab from yesterday—am I the only one that thinks giving sixteen-year-olds access to sulfuric acid is a bad idea?—so I was, once again, paired up with Ava. She was, surprisingly, on her best behavior, focusing entirely on the lab. I actually dared to hope that I might get through a full fifty-five minutes without any Ava-related incidents when she started staring at me.

"Goten?" she asked while studying my face closely. "Are you wearing...makeup?" Yes, the dumb bitch said this at full volume, so everyone in the class could hear it.

"Uh..." I said ever-so-eloquently, turning bright red as my classmates all turned to stare at us. "Just..." I mumbled, "just on my eyebrows..."

"No, you're wearing eyeliner!" She leaned in, squinting at the drawn-in lines on my browbone and eyelids. "Shiseido's Midnight Pitch. I have that shade!"

How the hell did she recognize it!?

Of course, half the class was snickering by this point and our chem teacher had to slam her ruler against her desk to get everyone to calm down. Not that I could blame them—I mean, I was wearing women's eyeliner. Ugh.

I seriously considered taking the vial of acid in Ava's hand and using it to dissolve her face. Or my own. Couldn't decide.

I grumbled my way through lab cleanup, ignoring any comments from my classmates. When the bell rang, I ran for the door and made a beeline for the bathroom. I stood at the sink, scrubbing my face with warm water. And, of course, it wouldn't come off.

Addo, that stupid queer son of a bitch, used waterproof eyeliner. Why the fuck does he even have waterproof makeup? Does he get dolled up before going swimming?

Wait, this is Addo I'm talking about. He probably does.

Flash forward to this evening. I'm crashing at Trunks' tonight, as I do fairly often, because even though I'm still annoyed with him, the commute from his place is way shorter. In any event, I basically have my own bedroom at this point, and god knows I get way more privacy here than I do at home. It's technically a guest room, but over the last couple of years, half my things have migrated over from my house. Most everyone at the compound refers to the guest room next to Trunks' bedroom as my room.

Trunks drove us back to Capsule Corp after school, snickering the whole way through. I just folded my arms and pouted.

"You really do look good," the spoiled pervert insisted.

I glowered at him. "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response."

"You just did." Smartass.

Anyway, I tried washing the stuff off my face again. Didn't work. I went to my room to room to do some homework, grabbed some food, then tried once more. Still didn't work. What the fuck was that eyeliner made out of? Finally, I was getting desperate, so I did something that was both totally sensible and completely irrational.

I creeped into Bulma's bathroom and started digging through her makeup drawer.

The plan was to find a bottle of eye makeup remover, get this shit off my face, and get out before anyone saw me. But of course Bra picked that moment to wander into the same bathroom, probably to play dress-up with her mommy's lipstick again. We both froze in place when we saw each other.

"Bra," I begged, trying to shush the four-year-old as I accidentally knocked bottles of foundation and tubes of mascara onto the floor. "Please just—"

"Mommy!" the girl shrieked, cutting me off and running out of the room. "Goten's being weird!" I wish I could disagree. Within seconds, in came Bulma.

She stared at me, looked down at the large pile of cosmetics that had fallen to my feet, then looked back up at me.

"Goten?"

"Ah," I said, frantically trying to figure out a way to salvage the situation. "Hi, Bulma."

"I'm...going to assume there's a perfectly logical explanation for why you're going through my makeup drawer."

"Oh," I said, actually feeling my face turn bright red, "I'm sure there is."

Upon reflection, I probably should have just asked for the damn makeup remover. It's not like the situation could have gotten much more mortifying. But, no, I was too embarrassed, so I ran out of there with my tail between my legs.

Metaphorically, anyway. I haven't had a tail since I was two.

I ran into Trunks on the way back to my room. He said I should wear makeup more often. I told him I'm enforcing a sex-embargo until my eyebrows grow back.