The Ugly Girls' Club: A Murder Mystery Thriller

by C. A. Wittman

  Nisha spooned more coffee into her mouth, the cream having melted into a slick white foam. A sharp silence had fallen over them and Cat’s face looked pained.

  “Mhmm,” Nisha said. “Knocked her up. This lil girl is now pregnant at eleven. Not long after that, Gumption said, she caught the eye of this rich white English woman named Lady Catherine, who liked her artwork and liked Gumption. Lady Catherine told Gumption’s mama she was a prodigy and wanted to take Gumption back to England. Her mama said no. But then the po-po came sniffing around about the murdered klansmen and Gumption’s belly was getting big. That’s when her mama let Lady Catherine take her. She went to live on this great big country estate in England, which she didn’t mind, having lived in the country all her life. Lady Catherine brought in private tutors and Gumption was given speech lessons. Taught something called RP.”

  “What’s RP?” Cat asked, her face pinched with concern, horror, and fascination.

  “Girl, I don’t have a clue,” Nisha said.

  “It stands for Received Pronunciation,” Hunter said. “It’s the queen’s English. Like, when someone sounds posh, that’s how they sound.”

  “Are you a walking Google, or what? You’re next level, HH,” Nisha said, looking impressed.

  “I read widely,” Hunter said.

  “Well, it’s paying off.” Nisha grinned and took a big swallow of her drink. “Anyway, Lady Catherine—she completely makes Gumption over and adopts her baby. Meanwhile, girlfriend is a fugitive from the American government, but the British won’t turn her over, and she just grows up there in England and becomes a famous artist. Then in the nineties, the governor of Louisiana pardons her after a movie was made about her life.”

  “A documentary or adaptation?” Hunter asked.

  “Actually, both. The movie’s called Shame, and it goes into how these klansmen had been terrorizing the town Gumption grew up in, literally getting away with murder. The documentary came out after the movie, and the family members of the victims who’d been murdered by the klansmen were interviewed in the documentary. Just listening to the kinds of gruesome things those mother fuckers did to innocent people got the public riled up. I mean, damn! They decapitated Gumption’s dad and tossed his head on her porch. People from all over the world started demanding that Gumption be pardoned. There were demonstrations. People were demanding Gumption’s pardon in places like Germany and Sweden. So finally the governor did, and that’s how it went down.”

  “What did she have?” Emma asked.

  “What?” Nisha said.

  “Her baby?”

  “Oh. A boy.”

  “It’s still not right, her drawing Wren like that,” Cassandra muttered.

  Nisha clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes. “You know what? You’re gettin’ on my last nerve, C.”

  A shadow fell over the table and Emma looked up to see two girls standing behind Nisha.

  “Kanisha?” One of them said. She wore similar braids to Nisha and large silver hoops that glinted in the sun, her eyes decked in thick false lashes.

  Nisha turned around, then grinned. “Hey, what are y’all doin’ out here?”

  “Shoppin’.”

  The girls eyed the rest of them, then focused back on Nisha. “Wussup, girl? You busy?” The same one said.

  Nisha glanced at Emma, Cat, and Hunter, and then her eyes lingered on Cassandra. “Nope,” she said and stood. “I’ll catch y’all later.”

  “Thanks for the drinks,” Hunter said.

  “You’re welcome, HH.” She linked her arm through the arm of the girl with the silver earrings and the three of them walked away, laughing and chatting about a life that Emma, Cat and Cassandra were clearly not a part of.

  Cassandra glared at her back and said, “She’s so basic.”

  Emma’s phone pinged and she looked at the screen. It was her mom.

  Myla is watching the twins for me after dinner and putting them to bed. It will give us time to talk. Please text me back to confirm our meeting at seven.

  Confirmed, Emma texted back. She sighed, took another sip of her tea, and grimaced, deciding to abandon it.

  “We should make a plan to do something for graduation,” Cassandra said.

  Hunter’s phone pinged and, as they read the message, a small frown played at their mouth.

  “What?” Emma asked.

  “I should go,” they said. “Poppy needs me.”

  Hunter stood and gave a distracted wave before loping off toward Lincoln Boulevard.

  “What did you have in mind?” Cat asked Cassandra.

  “I don’t know. Actually, I was wondering, Emma—do you think we could kick it at your dad’s?”

  “My dad’s?”

  Cat and Nisha had been over to his house a few times, but normally it wasn’t a place she liked to spend her time. “And do what?”

  “I don’t know. It’s Malibu. It’s nice out there. We could swim, hang out on the beach, or… just hang. Maybe your dad could get us more liquor,” she said, a hopeful expression on her face.

  “Um, I don’t think so.”

  “Emma doesn’t like hanging out there,” Cat spoke up, casting Emma a concerned look.

  Cassandra blushed. “I just really don’t want to get stuck at my place, dealing with my mom. My birthday is the day before and I don’t want to have to spend my birthday and graduation night with her.”

  “Let’s think about it,” Cat said. “We have a month. What about Magic Mountain?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Emma said, the thought of the amusement park uninspiring. She opened Instagram and began scrolling through her feed until a boomerang of a girl swiveling her hips made Emma’s heart lurch.

  @bluemars

  So having a birthday party June 7th. Malibu Malibu Malibu.

  There were three hundred likes.

  “Oh my god,” Emma said under her breath.

  “What?” Cat and Cassandra said.

  “Blue Mars is having a party in Malibu on graduation night. It’s her birthday.”

  “June seventh is her birthday?” Cassandra asked.

  Emma nodded.

  “Is she one of the Pretty Little Devils?” Cassandra asked, leaning forward.

  “Yes,” Emma whispered.

  Chapter 15

  By the time Emma made it home, Myla, Jill’s assistant, was running a bath for the twins. Dim lighting and Chopin’s Nocturnes created a sedate environment, the first step in the twins’ bedtime routine. Wooden blocks, two plush books, and bits of colorful fabric, as well as several nesting cups, were set out on the living room floor for the babies to play with. Jill rotated their toys daily, and when the twin’s engagement with a particular toy drastically went down, she got rid of it altogether and replaced it with something else. As well as the meticulous monitoring of toys, she kept a record of every toy they ever had and notes on their use of the toy.

  Jill documented their emerging organic interests in things and the shared interests within their twin-sibling relationship. She was even documenting their speech patterns, noting the beginnings of a private twin language between them—a common occurrence, she’d once remarked to Emma.

  Jill had kept copious notes on Emma, too. A few times, Emma had read her mother’s notes on her life as a baby and young child. She’d been amazed at how accurate a picture it formed of who she was now. There were parts of herself that stayed true throughout her thirteen years. For instance, it seemed she’d always been easy going, a go-with-the-flow type of person. She loved girly stuff and sweets, and was a people person, preferring the company of others to being alone. In fact, it seemed she’d always hated being alone and grew depressed when she was forced to spend too much time by herself. Jill had made notes in the margins, jotting down things like, “I have finally figured out what Emma’s whiny cry means. She gets upset when I don’t smile at her often. I must remember to smile more.”

  Her mother’s astute insights had given Emma a warm, fuzzy feeling, an assurance that
beneath the clinical sciency parts of her mom was a woman who deeply cared. Emma had to remind herself of that whenever she got annoyed with her mom’s charting, graphing, and note taking.

  Jill sat relaxing with a glass of wine, watching the twins play, their harnessed and leashed bodies connected to one of the multiple hooks set throughout the house. The leashes allowed Jill to keep them in the controlled spaces she created for their exploration.

  “Hi, Emma,” Jill said. Her glasses were on her head, and there were two little indentation marks on either side of the bridge of her nose and faint ring marks etched into the skin under her eyes from the weight of the frames. Whenever Jill was wearing her glasses on her head and had a glass of wine in her hand, she was feeling relaxed.

  “Hi,” Emma said and went to put her bag away, then wash her hands, before sitting next to her mom on the sofa. “The twins are getting big,” Emma said conversationally.

  “Yes. They’re growing fast,” Jill agreed and smiled. It was more of a genuine smile, rather than the forced facial expression she often displayed when she was trying to fulfil social expectations.

  Emma watched her siblings, amazed at their level of cooperation at only a year of age. They were stacking the nesting cups together. One picked up a cup and handed it to the other, who tried to make it fit into another that was too small. After some moments, they both studied the cups together and then the one selecting the cups chose another. When it fit, a look of pleased satisfaction swept over both drooling, chubby faces.

  Emma could never tell the twins apart. Although they were of opposite sex, they looked identical, bald with faint blond fuzz on their heads, moon faces, and chunky bodies. Jill often dressed them in matching outfits. The twins did not care for the company of anyone that was not Jill or her assistant Myla. They often cried at the sight of Oliver or any of Emma’s friends, and would come close to crying if they thought Emma might touch or pick one of them up. Fortunately, Jill did not require help from Emma with the twins, nor did she seem to think it was important that Emma form a bond with her much younger siblings at this point in their lives.

  Jill leaned over the baby closest to her and signed while speaking. “It’s bath time. Do you need to use the bathroom before you get in the water?”

  The small fist bobbing back and forth meant yes.

  The other twin made the same motion.

  “Myla,” Jill called out.

  Myla came out of the bathroom. She had a towel draped over her forearm.

  “Both need to use the potty before entering the tub,” Jill said.

  “Okay.” Myla gave the twins a big smile. “The bath is ready,” she said while signing. She unharnessed them and squatted down, hefting each one up onto her hips and taking them to the bathroom.

  Jill had begun potty training the twins when they were three months old by holding them over the toilet ten to fifteen times a day, making a ssss sound for pee and grunting for poop. She’d trained Emma the same way.

  “They can barely hold up their heads,” Emma had remarked. “Don’t you think toilet training is a little advanced?”

  “It’s called elimination communication. It speeds up the toilet training process by a year or more. You were out of diapers at fourteen months.” Jill had said of her unorthodox method.

  Now, Jill picked up her iPad from the sofa and lowered her glasses over her face, peering at the screen. “I’ve been doing some research into various diets and meal schedules.” She paused to glance at Emma over the rim of her glasses. “Although the USDA has created a broad nutritional guideline for the American population, macro and micronutrients are going to vary individually. For example, your age, sex, height, ethnicity, daily activity levels, the nutritional fitness of your mother’s womb, and many other variables are going to create a subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle variance in nutritional goals on a person-by-person basis. Over the years, I’ve devised detailed notes and graphs on your eating habits until three years ago, Tuesday, May third, 2016. You told me to leave you alone and to stop keeping a record of your life. You were very upset and—”

  “I remember, Mom,” Emma said.

  Jill blinked. Often, interruptions derailed her train of thought, but sometimes Emma felt she had to cut her off. Her mother had a habit of digressing.

  “I only bring it up,” Jill continued, “because my research on your eating habits is now out of date, and I will need you to provide me with lists of your favorite foods, what you regularly eat, what you don’t like, and times of day that you generally eat your meals, including snacks. So far, I’ve combined the charts of your eating habits from birth to age ten into one metadata summary and analysis.”

  Jill pulled up the Meta-Chart and broke it down for Emma.

  “If we look at your eating habits through the years, we can see that you’re not much of a breakfast person. Breakfast was either very light or skipped altogether. Around ten in the morning during the school year, you often had something sugary, usually donuts or a cinnamon roll and cola. In the summer and shorter school holidays, you ate a high protein meal of eggs, bacon or sausage, and toast, also around ten in the morning. You can see here,” Jill pointed at a meal calendar for the month of February 2015. “I began sending you to school with breakfast sandwiches and burritos as well as a packed lunch. However, much to my consternation, you ate the breakfast I packed for you along with the sugary food I was trying to—”

  “Mom, can we just get to the point?”

  Jill’s eyes widened and she pushed the frames of her glasses up with her index finger. “During the summer and school holidays, you ate a lot of turkey and cheese sandwiches, pizza, burgers, and fries. Dinner was often your healthiest and largest meal of the day. I often made fish and chicken with broccoli or kale, brown rice, and cooked carrots. You usually had two helpings of dinner. At your father’s, dinner was often consumed at a restaurant, most notably, Katsuya. Then there was the snacking at night. Favorite snacks included Lucky Charms cereal with cow milk, Ranch-flavored Doritos, Hostess donuts of the powdered sugar variety, and Reese's Peanut Butter Cup candy. You also averaged two to four cups of water a day, in addition to two Coca Colas. Your daily caloric intake ranged from four thousand to sixty-five hundred calories with a mean of forty-five hundred daily calories.

  Now as I said, this is based on old data, but it does explain the excessive weight gain, so you can see, you are not naturally big, just eating too much calorically dense food and too much overall, Emma.”

  Emma stared at the chart, agog. She never really thought about how much she ate or what she was eating, but there it all was on her mom’s iPad in black and white, and in graph form. All those questions Jill had asked her about meals over the years and filling out daily questionnaires had amassed a goldmine of her own personal gastronomic habits.

  “Now there are a multitude of diets foisted off onto the public every year,” Jill continued. “They range from sensible to questionable, and, finally, dangerous.” Jill pulled up another document. “I’ve made a list of sensible diets here and underlined the ones I think are most compatible with your natural gustatory cravings.”

  Emma’s eyes scanned the list:

  USDA Nutritional Guideline

  Vegetarian Diet

  Vegan Diet

  Weight Watchers

  Intermittent Fasting

  Paleo Diet

  “I notice that you used to eat a lot of meat, so that rules out vegetarian and vegan, and, although the Paleo diet is mainly meat and vegetables, it excessively strips out sugar. That won’t work since you love to eat sweets.”

  “Oh,” Emma said. “What’s intermittent fasting? Is that where I eat one day and then don’t eat the next?”

  “It can be. In this diet, there is something called a non-eating window, which can be as short as eight hours and as long as eighteen hours. I suggest you stay within an eight-to-twelve-hour non-eating window.” Jill lapsed into silence, staring at the list she’d made. “Intermittent fas
ting might work for you, since you naturally like to eat your first meal at ten in the morning.”

  “That also means I can have some snacks,” Emma said. She thought of how she struggled to sleep the previous night on an empty stomach.

  “A snack,” Jill corrected. “Something carbohydrate-heavy. I’d suggest whole wheat toast with jam, or popcorn with Braggs and yeast.”

  Emma’s mouth watered.

  “Now the next part of the plan is to cut your caloric consumption. I don’t think we should do anything too drastic. Since your median range was around forty-five hundred calories, and probably still is, let's start you at thirty-five and work down to twenty-five. You’re not athletic, so there’s no reason for you to consume anymore than twenty-five hundred calories a day.

  Emma’s phone pinged and she pulled it from her pocket. It was Blue Mars posting about her party again. Emma had started following Blue on Instagram a few months ago, and, not wanting to miss a single post, had elected to get notifications whenever she added anything to her grid or story.

  Emma stared at the picture of the mansion perched over a cliff where the party was going to take place. Wasn’t that her dad’s house?

  “WTF,” she muttered, feeling the blood drain from her face.

  “Emma, we’re in the middle of a discussion,” Jill said.

  Emma glanced up at her mom, who looked supremely irritated.

  “Wait,” she said and stood.

  “Emma.” Jill said sharply.

  “Can we talk more tomorrow, Mom? Something just came up.”

  “No. We can’t talk tomorrow. I have other plans: the twins’ bedtime ritual. Myla is here tonight so that we can have our discussion uninterrupted. I went through a lot of trouble to put this together.”

  “Mom, chill!” Emma yelled, a spark of guilt igniting in her when Jill blanched. She felt bad but didn’t have time to deal with making it all good with her mom. She needed answers from her dad now. Storming off to her room, she rang Oliver. He didn’t pick up. She tried a few more times. Voicemail. Finally, she left a text message.