The other kids at the table were the nerds who hurried through their lunch so they could play card games until the bell rang. Sarah knew the Beautifuls called it the loser table.
Sarah stabbed at her lettuce with her dull plastic fork. “What would you do,” she asked Abby, “if you had a million dollars?”
Abby grinned. “Oh, that’s easy. First I’d—”
“Wait,” Sarah said because she knew the kind of thing Abby was going to say. “You’re not allowed to say you’d give it to the Humane Society or the homeless or whatever. The money’s just to spend on yourself.”
Abby smiled. “And since it’s imaginary money, I don’t have to feel guilty.”
“That’s right,” Sarah said, crunching on a baby carrot.
“Okay.” Abby took a bite of pizza and chewed thoughtfully. “Well, in that case, I’d use it to travel. Paris first, I think, with my mom and dad and brother. We’d stay in a fancy hotel and go to the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre and eat at the best restaurants and stuff ourselves with pastries and drink coffee at fancy cafés and people-watch. What would you do?”
Sarah pushed her salad around on her plate. “Well, I’d definitely get my teeth professionally whitened, and I’d go to one of those high-end salons and get my hair cut and colored. Blonde, but a realistic-looking blonde. I’d get skin treatments and a makeover with really good makeup, not the cheap drugstore kind. And I’d get a nose job. There are other cosmetic procedures I’d like to have, but I don’t think they’ll do them on a kid.”
“And they shouldn’t!” Abby said. She looked shocked, like Sarah had said something really bad. “Seriously, you’d put yourself through all that pain and suffering just to change the way you look? I had my tonsils taken out, and it was horrible. I’ll never have another operation if I can help it.” She looked at Sarah intensely. “What’s wrong with your nose anyway?”
Sarah put her hand to her nose. “Isn’t it obvious? It’s huge.”
Abby laughed. “No, it’s not. It’s just a regular nose. A nice nose. And when you think about it, does anybody really have a beautiful nose? Noses are kind of weird. I actually like animal noses better than people noses. My dog has a really cute nose.”
Sarah shot a glance over to the Beautifuls’ table. All of them had perfect tiny noses, adorable little buttons. Not a potato nose in the bunch.
Abby looked over to the table where Sarah was looking. “Oh, the Penguins again? Okay, so the thing about penguins is they may be cute, but they all look alike. You’re a person, and you should look like an individual.”
“Yeah, an ugly individual,” Sarah said, pushing away her salad plate.
“No, a nice-looking individual who worries too much about her appearance.” Abby reached out and touched Sarah’s forearm. “You’ve changed a lot in the past couple years, Sarah. We used to talk about books and movies and music. Now all you want to talk about is how you don’t like the way you look and about all the clothes and hairstyles and makeup you wish you could afford. And instead of having pictures on your wall of cute baby animals like you used to, you’ve got pictures of all those skinny models. I liked the baby animals a lot better.”
Sarah felt anger rising like bile in her throat. How dare Abby judge her? Friends were supposed to be the people who didn’t judge you. She stood up. “You’re right, Abby,” she said, loud enough that the other people at the table turned to look at her. “I have changed. I’ve grown up, and you haven’t. I think about adult things, and you still buy stickers and watch cartoons and draw horses!”
Sarah was so angry that she marched off and left her tray on the table for somebody else to clean up.
By the time school was over, Sarah had a plan. She wasn’t going to sit at the loser table anymore because she wasn’t going to be a loser. She was going to be as popular and as pretty as she possibly could be.
It was amazing how quickly her plan fell into place. As soon as she was home, she dug in her dresser drawer where she kept her money. She had twenty dollars of birthday money from her grandma and ten left from her allowance. It was enough.
The beauty supply store was just about a fifteen-minute walk from her house. She could get there and back and do what she needed to do before her mom got home at six.
The store was brightly lit, with row after row of beauty products: brushes and curling irons, hair dryers, nail polish, and makeup. She headed for the aisle labeled HAIR COLOR. She didn’t have to have a million dollars to become a blonde. She could do it for around ten bucks and just look like a million. She selected a box marked PURE PLATINUM, decorated with a picture of a smiling model with long, luminous, white-gold hair. Beautiful.
The woman at the checkout counter had obviously dyed, bright red hair and false eyelashes that made her resemble a giraffe. “Now if you want your hair to look like the picture, you’ll have to bleach it first,” she said.
“Bleach it … how?” Sarah asked. Her mom used bleach and water to clean the floors sometimes. Surely this wasn’t the same thing.
“You’ll wanna get the peroxide that’s back on aisle two,” the cashier said.
When Sarah returned with the plastic bottle, the woman looked at her with narrowed eyes. “Does your mama know you’re about to color your hair, hon?”
“Oh, sure,” Sarah said, not making eye contact. “She doesn’t mind.” She didn’t know if her mom would mind or not. She guessed she would find out.
“Well, that’s good, then,” she said, ringing up Sarah’s purchases. “Maybe she can help you. Make sure you get the color on good and even.”
At home, Sarah locked herself in the bathroom and read the directions from the box of hair color. They seemed simple enough. She put on the plastic gloves that came with the hair dye kit, draped a towel around her shoulders, and worked the peroxide into her hair. She wasn’t sure how long to leave the peroxide on, so she sat on the edge of the bathtub and played a few games on her phone and watched some YouTube makeup tutorials.
First her scalp started to itch. Then it started to burn. It burned as if someone had thrown a handful of lit matches into her hair. She quickly typed into her phone, “how long to leave peroxide in hair.”
The answer that appeared was “no longer than 30 minutes.”
How long had she left it in? She jumped to her feet, grabbed the detachable showerhead, turned the water on cold, leaned her head over the tub, and started spraying. The frigid water soothed her fiery scalp.
When she looked in the bathroom mirror, her hair was stark white, like she had become an old woman way before her time. The bathroom stank of bleach, making her nose run and her eyes water. She cracked the window and opened the bottle of hair color.
It was time to complete her transformation.
She shook up the hair color ingredients in a squeeze bottle and squirted the mixture all over her hair and massaged it in. She set the alarm on her phone to go off in twenty-five minutes and settled in to wait. By the time her mom got home, Sarah was going to look like a whole new person.
She played happily on her phone until the alarm buzzed, then rinsed off again with the detachable showerhead. She didn’t bother with the conditioner that came with the hair color kit because she was too anxious to see the results. She toweled off her hair and stepped over to the mirror to see the new her.
She screamed.
She screamed so loud that the neighbor’s dog started barking. Her hair was not platinum blonde but sewage green. She thought of Abby when they were little, coloring her Barbie’s hair with a green Magic Marker. Now she was that Barbie.
How? How could she do something to make herself pretty and end up even uglier than before? Why was life so unfair? She ran to her room, flung herself onto her bed, and cried. She must have cried herself into a miserable sleep because the next thing she knew, her mom was sitting on the edge of the bed saying, “What happened here?”
Sarah looked up. She could see the shock in her mom’s eyes. “I—I was trying to color m
y hair,” Sarah sobbed. “I wanted to be blonde, but I’m—I’m …”
“You’re green. I can see that,” Mom said. “Well, I would say there would be consequences from you coloring your hair without my permission, but I think you’re already experiencing some of those. You are going to clean up the bathroom, though. But for right now, we need to see what we can do to make you look less like … a Martian.” She touched Sarah’s hair. “Oof! It feels like straw. Listen, put on your shoes. The hair salon at the mall should still be open. Maybe they can fix this.”
Sarah put on her shoes and stuffed her moss-colored tresses under a baseball cap. When they got to the salon and Sarah yanked off the cap, the stylist gasped. “Well, it’s a good thing you called nine one one. This is definitely a hair emergency.”
An hour and a half later, Sarah was back to having brown hair, now a few inches shorter because the stylist had to cut off the damaged ends.
“Well,” Mom said, once they were in the car on the way home, “that was a big chunk of my paycheck. I probably should’ve just let you go to school with green hair. It would’ve served you right.”
* * *
Sarah returned to school not in a blaze of platinum-blonde glory but as her usual mousy-brown self. Still, when lunchtime rolled around, she resolved that, even without blonde hair, she wasn’t going to sit at the loser table. She served herself from the salad bar, then walked right past where Abby was sitting. She didn’t need Abby to criticize her today.
A knot formed in her stomach as she approached the Beautifuls’ table. They must have decided today was Jeans Day because they were all wearing cute skinny jeans with fitted jewel-colored tops and matching slip-on canvas shoes.
Sarah sat down at the opposite end of the table, far enough away that she didn’t seem to be intruding but close enough that they could include her if they wanted.
She waited a few minutes, expecting one of them to tell her to go away, but nobody did. She was relieved and hopeful, but then she realized that none of them even seemed to see her. They just kept right on with their conversation like she was invisible.
“She did not say that!”
“Oh, yes, she did!”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“And then what did he say?”
Sarah pushed her salad around on her plate and tried to follow the conversation, but she had no idea who they were talking about and she certainly wasn’t going to ask them. Probably they wouldn’t even hear her if she said something. If they couldn’t see her, they probably couldn’t hear her, either. She felt like a ghost.
She picked up her tray and headed toward the trash can, desperate to get out of the cafeteria—desperate to get out of the whole school, really. But there was still seventh and eighth periods to suffer through, boring social studies and stupid math. Lost in her suffering, she bumped right into a tall boy, dumping the remains of her salad on his crisp white shirt.
She looked up into the ocean-blue eyes of Mason Blair, the most perfect guy in school, the guy she always hoped might notice her.
“Hey, watch where you’re going,” he said, picking a cucumber slice off his expensive designer shirt. The vinaigrette-covered vegetable had left a perfect oily circle in the middle of his chest.
“Sorry!” she squeaked, then threw the rest of her salad—what Mason wasn’t wearing—into the trash and half ran out of the cafeteria.
What a nightmare. She had wanted Mason to notice her, but not this way. Not as the ugly, clumsy girl with fried, frizzy brown hair who gave a new meaning to the words tossed salad. Why did everything have to go wrong for her? The Beautifuls never did anything stupid or clumsy, never humiliated themselves in front of a cute boy. Their beauty was like a suit of armor that protected them from life’s pain and embarrassment.
When the school day finally dragged to an end, Sarah decided to walk home instead of taking the bus. Given how her day had been, she didn’t feel like she should take the risk of being with a big group of kids again. It would just be inviting disaster.
She walked alone, telling herself she might as well get used to solitude. She was always going to be alone. She passed the Brown Cow, the ice-cream stand where the Beautifuls went with their boyfriends after school, laughing as they sat together at picnic tables, sharing milk shakes or sundaes. And of course the Beautifuls could scarf all the ice cream they wanted and not gain an ounce. Life was so unfair.
To get to her house, Sarah had to walk past the wrecking yard. It was an ugly expanse of dirt filled with the destroyed corpses of cars. There were smashed-in pickup trucks, squashed SUVs, and vehicles that had been reduced to nothing more than rusted heaps of junk. She was sure that none of the Beautifuls had to pass a place so hideous on their way home.
Even though the junkyard was horrible—or maybe because it was so horrible—she couldn’t help looking at it when she passed by. She was like a passing driver gawking at an accident on the side of the road.
The car nearest the fence definitely fit into the “heap of junk” category. It was one of those big, old sedans that only very elderly people still drove, the kind of car Sarah’s mom called a land yacht. This yacht had seen better days. It had once been light blue, but now it was mostly rusty orange-brown. In some places the rust had eaten all the way through the metal, and the car’s body was so battered it looked like it had been attacked by an angry mob wielding baseball bats.
Then she saw the arm.
A thin, delicate arm was sticking out of the trunk of the car, its little white hand with fingers outstretched as if waving hello. Or waving for help, like someone who was drowning.
Sarah burned with curiosity. What was the hand attached to?
The gate was unlocked. Nobody seemed to be watching. After looking around to make sure no one was nearby, she stepped inside the wrecking yard.
She approached the old sedan and touched the arm, then the hand. It was metal, from the feel of it. She found the handle on the trunk and pulled it, but the lever wouldn’t budge. The car was so dented and battered that the trunk wouldn’t open and close properly anymore.
Sarah thought of the story a teacher had read to her class once in elementary school about King Arthur pulling a sword from a stone when nobody else could. Could she pull this doll—or whatever it was—from this wrecked vehicle? She looked around until she found a strong, flat piece of metal that could maybe work as a substitute crowbar.
Sarah braced her foot against the car’s crumpled bumper, slid the metal inside the trunk door, and pried upward. The first time she tried, it didn’t give at all, but the second time, it flipped open and threw her off balance. She fell backward and landed on her butt in the dirt. She stood up to inspect the owner of the hand she had seen sticking out of the trunk.
Was it a discarded doll, outgrown by some little girl and tossed in the trash to end up in the dump? The thought made Sarah sad.
Sarah pulled the doll from the trunk and stood it up on its feet, though once she looked at it, she wasn’t sure doll was the right word to describe it. It was a few inches taller than Sarah herself, and it was jointed so that its limbs and waist looked movable. Was it some kind of marionette? A robot?
Whatever it was, it was beautiful. It had wide, green, long-lashed eyes, pink Cupid’s bow lips, and pink circles on its cheeks. Its face was painted like a clown’s, but a pretty clown. Its red hair was pulled up into twin pigtails on top of its head, and its body was sleek and silver, with a long neck, a tiny waist, and a rounded bust and hips. Its legs and arms were long, slender, and elegant. It looked like a robotic version of the gorgeous supermodels whose pictures hung on the walls of Sarah’s room.
Where had it come from? And why would someone want to get rid of such a beautiful, perfect object?
Well, if whoever put this thing in the dump didn’t want it, then Sarah did. She picked up the girl-shaped robot and found it surprisingly light. She carried it sideways, her arm around its delicate waist.
At ho
me, in her room, Sarah set the girl robot down on the floor. It was a little tarnished and dusty, as if it had been in the trash heap for a while. Sarah went to the kitchen and got a rag and a bottle of cleaner that was supposed to be safe for metal surfaces. She sprayed and wiped the front of the robot, inch by inch, from head to toe. The shininess made it even more beautiful. As Sarah got behind the robot to clean the other side, she noticed an on-off switch at the small of its back. After she finished wiping it down, she turned the switch position to On.
Nothing happened. Sarah turned away, slightly disappointed. The robot was still cool to have, though, even if it didn’t do anything.
But then a rattling sound made Sarah turn back around. The robot was shaking all over, like it was either going to rev up or break down entirely. Then it went still.
Sarah resigned herself once more to the idea that the robot wasn’t going to do anything.
Until it did.
The robot’s waist pivoted, making its upper body move. It slowly raised its arms and then put them down. Its head turned to face Sarah, seeming to look at her with its big green eyes.
“Hello, friend,” it said, in a slightly metallic-sounding version of a young girl’s voice. “My name is Eleanor.”
Sarah knew the thing couldn’t be talking to her personally, but it felt like it was. “Hi,” she whispered, feeling a little silly for entering into a conversation with an inanimate object. “I’m Sarah.”
“Nice to meet you, Sarah,” the girl robot said.
Whoa. How had it said her name back to her? It must have some pretty sophisticated built-in computer or something, Sarah thought. It was the kind of thing her brother might know about; he was in college majoring in computer science.
The robot took a few surprisingly smooth steps toward Sarah. “Thank you for rescuing me and cleaning me up, Sarah,” Eleanor the robot said. “I feel as good as new.” She gave a pretty, feminine twirl, her short skirt billowing.
Into the Pit Page 6