Scarred Faces
Shannon/The Narrator, shot herself in the face leaving her horribly scarred and unable to speak. Her brother, Shane, likewise bears similar scars on his face due to a mishap with a can of hairspray that blew up when he was incinerating garbage. The scarred faces go beyond cosmetics, however. Their scarred faces are physical parallels of the emotional scars that each of the character bears on their being as a result of having gone through traumatic experiences brought about by abusive parents and relationships.
Veils
Shannon/The Narrator wears veils to hide her face, a trick Brandy Alexander taught her. The veil is more than just an article of clothing, however, as it is now a part of her new identity--her new "face". Whereas she was formerly known for just her beauty now she gets to exercise her wickedly barbed wit and clever, if dark, sense of humor, without really caring too much if it will damage her reputation and chances to be selected as a model on choice projects.
Houses for Sale
Brandy, Manus, and Shannon spend several months touring the Western states and parts of Canada, pretending to be prospective home buyers or the employees of prospective home buyers in order to steal medication from people's medicine cabinets. The lovely but empty houses full of prescription medication are like the characters in that they all have spent a considerable looking good, at least externally, but are all truly empty inside. The dose up on prescription medication to fill up the emptiness and dull the emotional ache they feel; and in so doing become precisely the like houses for sale that they haunt: gorgeous looking facades with nothing inside but prescription medication.
Artificial Female Hormones
Brandy and Shannon both have secretly been feeding Manus artificial female hormones, in part hoping to kill him and in part to punish him for past abuses. The hormones have come to be an agent of change and retribution for the characters. For Brandy it was a means to become what he always wanted to be: a beautiful woman. For Manus, it was punishment; as a police officer and as a man he took great pride in his strength and physique, but this began to gradually disappear as the hormones began to kick in, giving the siblings a good karmic and cathartic laugh at his expense.
“Surgery”
Brandy Alexander, aka Shane McFarland, is waiting to receive sexual reassignment surgery to permanently turn him into a woman. Shane guns for this as his greatest achievement, akin to a knight finally finding the Holy Grail. To Shane it was the penultimate objective--it was escape and a chance at a new life, one without all the complications of his past--and it could only come at the price of genital mutilation. Shannon on the other hand felt shackled by her beauty and decides to free herself by shooting her face, effectively doing crude reconstructive facial surgery on herself.
