If you’d asked Remy about it during her teen years, at the height of when “pimpledom” is supposed to reign supreme, she would have had no idea what you were talking about. What a “blind pimple” meant, that is. She might have nodded along and pretended to comprehend what you were going through, but she never could have fully understood until it happened to her. Because no one can ever really understand until it happens to them.

Thus, as the end of her twenties approached (at the dawn of her twenty-eighth birthday, to be more precise), and she thought she was free of the burden of agonizing breakouts forever, she would quickly learn the meaning of that terrifying expression and even more terrifying experience. Perhaps even more terrifying than seeing a monster come to life. For what was this ever-growing, ever-reddening nodule—yes, nodule—if not a monster?

Indeed, the nodule in question was starting to look like one of the bolts located at either side of Frankenstein’s sallow neck. Or electrodes, if one wanted to be more accurate about their word choice. After all, the reason those “bolts” were there in the first place was to act as a conduit for electricity to assist in the unholy process of bringing the dead creature—nothing more than an amalgamation of dug-up body parts—to life. Remy wondered if her own theoretically dead creature, the pimple on her neck, might come to life soon as well. It was certainly growing big enough to.

And yet, no matter how large or inflamed it became, it simply would not form a goddamn head. That gross phrase that applies to pimples…which does, to be sure, make them sound somehow human, as though they have a life of their own. And of course they do. Churning and festering beneath the surface of your skin like a fetus just waiting to grow and be born. If only your skin would accommodate that birth. Furnish it with a hole from whence to pop out of in a white burst of pus (sans umbilical cord). 

Remy’s skin, apparently, would not furnish that epidermal birth canal. Remy’s skin, apparently, was not only very stubborn about such “furnishments,” but also wanted to dupe both her and the rest of the world into believing she was still a teen girl. For this was the age group most prone to such a cruel and unforgiving type of acne (besides, didn’t youths deserve that level of pain in exchange for the benefit and arrogance of their youth?). And oh, how merciless it was as it went from being a “mild discomfort” on the right side of her neck (again, in the exact same spot Frankenstein would have a bolt) to a massive lump that looked positively tumor-like in nature. 

She knew that the reason for its formation, like every source of evil, was the result of the hormonal upswing caused by her period. Unfortunately for Remy, this “fluctuation” in hormones leading to her blind pimple monstrosity happened during the height of summer (around the week of Bastille Day, for some non sequitur French context), when wearing a scarf or turtleneck certainly wasn’t an option for covering the infernal entity. The inflamed pustule. God, how she wished she could just lance it with a hot, sizzling needle. But she knew, based on everything she’d pored over (skin pun intended), that such an attempt would be the worst possible “solution” to her problem.

It was already bad enough she had tried to get her longtime friend and roommate, whose name, incidentally, was Lance, to try and pop it before later reading about how this would only cause the bacteria and sebum (that Humbert Humbert word) to burrow deeper into the skin, increasing the chances, once more, for external scarring. In fact, everything she read about blind pimples seemed to have the same ending: a scar no matter what. Because, ultimately, it was a kind of cyst, wasn’t it? What choice did a cyst have but to leave behind some permanent skin damage in the form of aesthetic ruination? 

As Remy sat at her vanity mirror staring at her neck like she was trying to bore a hole into the goddamn “bolt” and blow it right off using telekineses, she suddenly felt possibly more empathy for Frankenstein than anyone ever did. No wonder he felt like such a monster. The bolts were really what did it (even though that was Jack Pierce’s visual innovation, not Mary Shelley’s). In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she realized that Frankenstein probably would have been much more palatable in the public space without those bolts, which somehow made him seem more inhuman than his unusually large size or square-shaped head. Even his green skin (also a Jack Pierce innovation, despite Hollywood’s first Frankenstein movie being in back and white) was somehow less immediately noticeable than the bolts. 

Trying to fashion her hair in such a way so that it might “fall” over the pimple, she rued the day she had ever decided to cut her locks so short. Who the fuck did she think she was, huh? Some sort of gamine? Well she wasn’t. She should have kept it long expressly for an occasion like this. But then, how could she have possibly predicted the springing up (or rather, springing down) of a mutant pimple such as this? She had never encountered anything like it before until now, spared such a tragedy during her teen years perhaps solely so she would pay the price for the erstwhile evasion now. Maybe the rule was: the hotter you look in your youth, the uglier you’ll become as you age. 

While Remy made another faux pas by trying to vigorously apply as much foundation (despite knowing that such a “tactic” would only clog the already repressed pores even more) to the swollen, red lump, another thought occurred to her. Why the hell was the Bride of Frankenstein spared from having bolts in her goddamn neck? Pondering this question as she then powdered the shit out of the nodule (still brightly shining red even through her array of makeup products), Remy drew the conclusion that perhaps Frankenstein was on his period too, when he was “made,” whereas the Bride was not.