Things Jolie Needs to Do Before She Bites It

by Kerry Winfrey

  I’ve tried to get Evelyn to stop using the phrase “breaking my balls” on account of it being extremely inaccurate and also just gross, but she persists. Either way, I can tell it bothers Evelyn that her mom doesn’t get her, but I keep telling her she can use this feeling of alienation in her art. Evelyn ends up spending a lot of time at our house, which is more than fine by me—sometimes I come home and find Evelyn already there, sitting at the kitchen island with my mom as the two of them enjoy a cup of tea, Evelyn saying, “Oh, Rebecca, you’re a card.”

  In my room, I turn on my bedside lamp and reach under my bed, where my fingers close around a notebook. I slide it out, sit on the floor, and lean back against the bed.

  Most people who keep scrapbooks probably fill them with photos of loved ones and cherished mementos. Mine’s more of a vision board, I guess you could say. But it’s not about traveling or my love life or fancy possessions I want to “manifest” or whatever. It’s about one thing: beauty.

  On these pages are picture after picture of girls’ faces. Girls of all skin tones, hair colors, ages. The one thing they have in common is that they’re beautiful. They’re smiling in a way that says, Yes, I know I look good. No, I never worry that no one will love me. Yes, I do feel happy when I look in a mirror. No, I’ve never had a problem chewing my food.

  Because the one thing these girls have in common, besides being beautiful, is that none of them have an underbite. None of them have a facial deformity that’s immediately visible to everyone who meets them.

  When Abbi’s done reading all the cheesy fashion magazines she subscribes to each month, I take them and cut out the pictures of the most beautiful women. It doesn’t matter whether they’re in advertisements, fashion spreads, or celebrity profiles. I know it sounds weird, but there’s nothing in my life that I find as soothing or as hopeful. This will be me someday, I think. Someday I won’t have braces, or frequent trips to an orthodontist’s office, or a jaw that’s going rogue.

  I approach my scrapbooking as carefully and methodically as Evelyn approaches a hair-dyeing job. But tonight, I’m not pasting in any more pictures. I’m just looking, completing my nightly ritual, running my fingers over the faces of all these perfect smiles and symmetrical faces and normal jaws and thinking, Someday.

  In two months.

  Chapter Three

  The next morning, Abbi waddles into my room. “Hey, loser, wake up.”

  I groan and put my pillow over my head. “I’m pretty sure your baby can hear what you’re saying. She’s going to come out of the womb with your bad attitude.”

  Abbi pulls the pillow off my head. “I don’t care. I’m cranky and I have to pee twenty-four/seven.”

  “Charming,” I say, and she hits me with the pillow.

  “Mom’s busy, so you have to drive me to my doctor’s appointment,” she says.

  I groan. I had plans for my Saturday. Like, I don’t know, going to Applebee’s to get some appetizers for brunch, or reading a chapter of Jane Eyre. I’m never going to complete every item on my list if I don’t apply myself.

  I know Abbi doesn’t like going to her appointments by herself, and only a real jerk would refuse to drive her pregnant sister to the doctor’s office, so I begrudgingly drag myself out of bed and pull on dark jeans and a long, beige sweater that’s basically the same color as my skin. I take the time to curl my hair into waves and brush on some mascara, even though Abbi is (slowly) pacing the hallway and grumbling about how we’re going to be late.

  Between Abbi and me, our family basically spends our entire lives at doctors’ offices these days. I have my oral surgeon consults with Dr. Kelley, and Abbi always has to get something checked out by the obstetrician.

  By the time we get there, Abbi’s already moaning about being starving and having to pee, which are, like, her two favorite topics of conversation these days. We hang out in the waiting room, during which I get more than enough time to watch a highly inappropriate round of Family Feud and flip through a women’s magazine that’s ninety-five percent ads for menopause-related products. When the nurse calls Abbi’s name, I’m surprised when she grabs my hand and pulls me along with her.

  “I’ll be okay out here,” I say as I drop the magazine.

  “I hate going in here alone,” she hisses. “Just come with me.”

  Abbi situates herself on the examination table, and I grab a seat in a chair shoved in the corner. The nurse takes Abbi’s blood pressure, then promises that the doctor will be in shortly. Abbi doesn’t seem interested in conversation, so I keep myself occupied by reading a pamphlet about breastfeeding until the doctor walks in.

  “So,” the doctor says, checking her clipboard, “thirty-two weeks along?”

  Abbi nods quickly, looking more nervous than I usually see her.

  “And are you feeling okay?” the doctor asks.

  Abbi just nods again. I’m trying, as usual, to stay quiet and out of the way, but the oppressively strong scent of hand sanitizer makes me cough.

  The doctor turns to look at me, startled, as if this is the first time she’s noticed I’m in the room. “And you are…?”

  “My sister,” Abbi says, finally getting her voice back.

  There’s a moment when a flash of shock rolls across the doctor’s face. She recovers quickly, but I know I saw it. It’s like in one of those old-fashioned horror movies, when a skull flashes over a person’s face. It’s barely there, but you can see it.

  And I’m used to it—to people being surprised I’m Abbi’s sister. I mean, why should this objectively beautiful woman have a sister with an underbite? It seems like a joke. Like, we can’t possibly be from the same family tree.

  “It was nice of you to come along since Dad can’t make it,” the doctor says, and I’m too shocked to say anything back. And even if I could, the warning look Abbi shoots me would convince me otherwise. This must be a new doctor if she doesn’t know that the father of Abbi’s baby has never even been inside our house, let alone the examination room.

  The doctor lubes everything up and rubs some device over Abbi’s belly. And then, there she is—Abbi’s baby. We already know it’s a girl, so there aren’t any surprises at this point, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen her on the screen.

  “That’s her hand!” I say, and the doctor gives me a smile.

  “That’s right. She’s growing perfectly. It looks like she’s going to be a big baby.”

  Abbi beams like she just got an A on an exam. Growing a Big, Healthy Baby: A+, excellent work.

  After Abbi gets all that goo off her stomach, goes through the rest of the exam, and we’re back in the car, there’s only one thing I want to ask her. And it’s not “Is it really cold when they put that goo on you?”

  She pulls on her seat belt and sighs. Before I can even say a word, she turns to me and says, “Listen, I have my reasons for not talking about things, okay?”

  I just nod because I don’t know what else to do.

  Abbi looks straight ahead and nods once, resolutely. “Okay. Good.”

  * * *

  I’m so distracted by baby hands and ultrasounds that I forget to check my phone until I get home. The text that’s waiting for me is, in true Evelyn fashion, mysterious and exciting.

  I may have found a way for you to be in v. close contact with Noah Reed. Details later.

  I almost squeal in frustration. “Details later?” Who does Evelyn think she is, a news anchor going to a commercial break?

  I text back,??????

  When that leads to no response, I decide to try!!!!!!!

  Then I pick out a few choice emojis, mostly that angry red face.

  Still nothing. I call Derek, because he’s an eighty-year-old man trapped in the body of a sixteen-year-old and actually prefers phone calls.

  “Derek,” I start before he can even say hello, “do you have any idea what Evelyn’s plan is?”

  He sighs heavily, sounding even more like an old man. “Which plan are we
talking about?”

  “Something about a way to get me into close contact with Noah Reed.”

  “Oh no,” Derek says with a sardonic chuckle. “I know exactly what she’s doing.”

  I perk up. My previous plan to get near Noah Reed involved waiting for a tornado or other natural disaster and then getting trapped in the school together, forced to subsist on cafeteria food, after which, eventually, we would end up making out. But a lot of factors have to fall into place for that one to work.

  “It’s the musical,” Derek says. “He’s in it every year, and tryouts are on Monday and Tuesday.”

  “What?!” I screech. “First off, how do you even know this—”

  “Because I’m in charge of set design.”

  Of course Derek, king of extracurriculars, would be in charge of set design.

  “And second off, how does Evelyn expect me to be in the musical? She knows I can’t stand being in front of people!”

  I let out one of my own grumpy-old-man sighs. Honestly, I kind of liked my plan to get close to Noah better, and that one involved waiting for a natural disaster and eating canned pudding.

  “It’s not that big a deal,” Derek says. “It’s Brentley. Half the school is in the musical because there’s nothing else to do.”

  Derek may think this is no big deal, but I’m starting to feel sick. Being under a spotlight, with everyone staring at me? That’s almost literally my worst nightmare (except for that one where I have to give a report on The Great Gatsby while wearing the SpongeBob SquarePants nightshirt I’ve had since seventh grade). Evelyn knows I can’t do that—all those people looking at me as I forget all my lines and possibly faint and/or barf and/or spontaneously combust into embarrassed confetti right there onstage.

  “But you said you’re in charge of set design, right?” I ask.

  “Yes. But you can’t help,” Derek says firmly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you have the artistic talent of a five-year-old and the coordination of a three-year-old.”

  “That’s not exactly accurate…”

  “You’re right. It’s insulting to toddlers and their crayon skills.”

  I scowl into my phone. “Thanks for telling me about Evelyn’s plan. No thanks for the insult.”

  “You’re welcome. Hey, real quick: What do you know about lemurs?”

  “Nothing, but I’m sure I’ll find out plenty on Deep Dive.”

  “See you Monday.”

  “See you.”

  I fire off a quick text to Evelyn—I know what you’re doing and I don’t like it—before crashing in my room. I flop onto my bed and flip through the scrapbook as I run my tongue over the bumps of my braces. One of the biggest bummers about this surgery is that I have to wear braces before and after. When everything’s said and done and my chin looks normal, I’ll have had braces for almost five years, including part of my senior year.

  I still remember how excited I was to get braces at first. They made me feel grown up, and I loved to get rubber bands in different color combos—pink and purple, black and yellow, red and green for the holidays.

  But then I started to get older, and fewer and fewer people had braces. And no one had an underbite, or a palate expander that stretched out the roof of their mouth and gave them a speech impediment, or frequent appointments with oral surgeons and orthodontists.

  And now, the only people I see with braces are some freshmen roaming the halls. I know I was the one who set the goal to kiss Noah Reed, but I was drunk on the promise of Chicken Wonton Tacos and under the influence of Worst-Case Scenario Television. I couldn’t be trusted to make serious decisions. There’s just no way Noah would want to kiss someone who could charitably be described as Brace Face.

  * * *

  On Monday, Evelyn is waiting for me at my locker, clad in a bright blue Evelyn-original dress that’s covered in appliquéd flowers.

  “Good morning,” she says, wiggling her eyebrows. “Get my text this weekend?”

  I open my locker, and she moves out of the way of the swinging door. “Um, yeah. And I responded. About a million times.”

  “Huh. Must’ve missed those,” Evelyn says, but I know she just wanted to tell me in person for maximum drama. “So, are you curious about my plan?”

  I stack my trig and Bio II textbooks in my arms and turn to face her. “You think I should try out for the musical.”

  Evelyn widens her eyes. “How did you know that?”

  “I talked to Derek.”

  “Ugh,” she says, sighing. “Well, this isn’t fair. You two always gang up on me and outsmart me.”

  “We don’t do that,” I say, swinging my locker door shut.

  She nods. “You definitely do. It’s always, ‘No way, Evelyn, a hot dog is not a sandwich. We’re right and you’re wrong.’”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with us ganging up on you,” I say as we start to make our way down the hallway, pushing through the throngs of students. “That’s just a factually correct statement.”

  “All I’m saying is that a hot dog is surrounded by bread, like any other sandwich!” Evelyn shouts to be heard over the locker-door slams and sneaker squeaks just as Noah Reed himself walks by.

  I’m struck by how he’s tall and lanky, but not in an awkward way. Every part of him moves gracefully, like his limbs all know they’re working toward one purpose, and that purpose is Making Noah Reed Look Great. He looks like the lead on a CW show—you know, those guys who are supposed to be teenagers but look like they’re twenty-five and are perfectly styled and don’t have zits all over their chin like the rest of us do? That’s what Noah Reed looks like.

  And that’s what I’m thinking about as he turns around in what feels like slow motion and looks straight at me.

  And smiles.

  “Whoa,” Evelyn says. She reaches out to grab my shoulders and move me out of the path of an oncoming football player. “You almost had a head-on collision with Jockpants McBiceps back there.”

  “Oh my God,” I breathe.

  “I know! I would’ve been wiping you off the floor. That dude’s like four hundred pounds of muscle.”

  “No, Noah Reed,” I whisper-hiss. “He smiled at me.”

  Evelyn stops, causing three people to run into each other behind her in a pileup.

  “I’m sorry, what?” she asks.

  “Noah. Reed. Smiled. At. Me.”

  We start walking again, and she’s talking so quickly that I can barely keep up. “I can’t believe this. Noah Reed is already smiling at you! My plan is so brilliant that you haven’t even started it yet and it’s already working!”

  “Okay,” I say as I start to duck into trig, which Evelyn’s not in because she hates math with the fire of a thousand particularly math-averse suns. “I have class. You know, that thing where we learn stuff?”

  Evelyn shakes her head, feigning confusion. “Never heard of it.”

  “Hey!” I grab her arm as someone pushes past me into the classroom. “You’re not going to ditch class again to go research Edith Head in the library, are you?”

  “Only time will tell!” she sings, scooting out of my grasp and disappearing into the crowd.

  I take my seat in trig, right behind Derek, and pull out my textbook.

  “So,” he says, turning around. “Noah Reed smiled at you, huh?”

  I freeze. “How did you know that?”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Uh, you guys were basically shouting in the hallway.”

  “Yeah,” says Sean Morrison, the super-genius who sits beside me and usually only speaks when he’s correcting someone in our class. “And a hot dog is not a sandwich.”

  “Thank you,” I mutter, but I can feel my face turning red.

  “Hey, it looks like you have a little something here.” Derek reaches out to touch my face, then pulls his hand back as if I’ve burned him. “Oh, sorry, that’s just your cheeks.”

  “Shut up,” I grumble.

  I try
to focus on my assignment as our teacher starts talking. And while on most days I would be super into cofunctions, the only thing going through my head right now is Noah Reed smiled at me.

  * * *

  Evelyn and I are both weirdos, don’t get me wrong, but she’s always been the more glamorous weirdo. She’s the one who has hair that’s often streaked with the colors of the rainbow. She’s the one who does themed manicures. She’s the one with the purple-rimmed glasses, the outfits that look like costumes, and the sewing skills to make every outfit she’s ever dreamed of. That’s why she’s head of the costume department for the school musical.

  “What is it this year?” I ask her, stealing a french fry off her lunch tray.

  “To the Moon and Back,” she says, holding her hands in front of her and staring off into space as if she’s looking at a marquee.

  I shake my head. “I’ve never heard of that one.”

  “That’s because it’s never been performed,” Evelyn says. “One of Mrs. Mulaney’s former students wrote it, and she wants to stage the premiere performance.”

  “You mean our school can’t even get a real musical?” I ask.

  Evelyn shrugs. “We don’t have the budget to pay for the rights for something famous. And, honestly, there’s a lot to do costume-wise, so I’m not complaining. I mean, I have to make space suits because part of it takes place on the moon.”

  I narrow my eyes. “The moon?”

  Evelyn nods and starts describing the plot. “So it’s about little Bobby, who grows up on a farm…”

  While she’s talking, I let myself zone out a little bit. Is it ridiculous to think I could maybe try out for a chorus part in the musical? I mean, I’m not naïve enough to think I could be the star even if I wanted to, but a background player, maybe? Just enough to get close to Noah?

  I snap out of my reverie when I hear Evelyn talking about a scene involving grown-up Bobby. “And who’s going to play Bobby?”

  “It hasn’t been cast yet,” Evelyn says. “But probably Noah. He always gets the lead.”

  I nod. Right. So now all I have to do is sidle my way into a background part, and I’ll have a ticket to staring at Noah from a respectable distance at every single practice. I could think of worse ways to spend my evenings and weekends.