At age 14, and only months after a completing a course of chemotherapy, Lucy Grealy calls a local riding stable and secures a job there working with the horses. After the call, her mother asks, “Are you sure they know you were sick?” (6). Lucy lies and says that she told them everything but admits that really “it hadn’t occurred to me to mention cancer, or my face” because she is still “blissfully unaware” (6) of how her appearance marks her as different.

After being diagnosed with cancer as a child, Lucy has half of her jaw removed to treat the condition, which leaves her face “a strange triangular shape, accentuated by the fact that I was unable to keep my mouth completely closed” (3). When Lucy arrives at the stable, her “pale and misshapen face” (6) shocks the other workers, which in turn surprises Lucy, as she begins to see how people respond to her disfigurement.

Working with children visiting the stable and, especially, taking the horses out to “pony parties,” for children’s birthdays, reinforces Lucy’s awareness of her appearance, teaching her “the language of paranoia” so that she assumes that “every whisper” is “a comment about the way [she looks], every laugh a joke at [her] expense” (6).