North of Beautiful

by Justina Chen Headley

  But inside, the spa was an oasis, from its soothing earth tones to the tinkling of a tiny water fountain. Two friendly receptionists manned the front desk, which held an odd assortment of plastic barrettes and random Hello Kitty paraphernalia. The professional decorator must have finished the job, never checking back in to see how the misguided spa owners accessorized the place.

  Having never been to a spa, I had no idea what I was supposed to do and looked blankly at the menu of services. I almost turned around right then, almost sprinted to the door; everything was so expensive. But then again, I had just sold my first piece of art, and I wanted to celebrate.

  “Have a body scrub,” one of the young women recommended.

  Which sounded promising until they handed me a thin cotton robe, two towels, and a little pink cap. Norah did not mention any little pink cap. The benefit of the little pink cap, however, became instantly clear. I was too busy feeling stupid in my little pink cap to worry about being nude. Plus, Norah had overstated the whole naked business — the only section where nudity was mandatory was in the Jacuzzi room where I was supposed to marinate myself for an hour in four hot tubs, each hotter than the last.

  While the spa wasn’t thronging with women, the ones here were a chocolate box’s assortment of shapes and sizes: grossly obese women who made Mom look svelte, emaciated ones who could have packed on fifteen pounds and still look gaunt. Women the age of the Twisted Sisters; a wedding party of women in their twenties.

  That’s when it struck me: how gorgeous we all were, even with cellulite (saw a lot of that) and stretch marks, scars and tattoos. Let me just say this, not a single body was perfect, not even the fittest of women there. (She was a triathlete; she told me so after we dared to use the glacial plunge pool.)

  The long treatment room had a full five stations, with nothing separating the vinyl tables from each other. I will admit: I panicked as I lay there on my stomach, naked before everyone in this tiny microcosm of the world. But the moment the middle-aged woman, bulging out of her black camisole and shorts, began scrubbing me with her hands enveloped in yellow mittens, I forgot to be embarrassed or scared. Norah was right. My heels, elbows, chest, stomach, upper thighs — every part of me was scrubbed clean, even my face. Twice. And then three times. And in between each round, the woman doused me with hot water infused with mugwort.

  Little eraser dander of skin clung to the white table when I sat up for my final, cleansing rinse. I seriously had no idea how much dead skin one body — one live body — could produce. I swear, my entire epidermis had been sloughed off. She probably even skimmed a little from my underlying dermis. What was left of my skin felt smooth and baby soft.

  After the service, I had to use the bathroom, and as I was washing my hands, I caught a glimpse of myself.

  I glowed.

  It was almost a shame to put on my clothes.

  “So did you enjoy yourself?” the receptionist asked when I was ready to check out, but not ready to leave. I could linger in the serene quiet here for hours. But there was someone I had to find.

  “Definitely.” And then I paid the spa the highest compliment I could: “I’m going to bring my mother here.”

  Even with my unplanned pit stop at the spa, I still had almost two hours before I could intercept Jacob at school. Because he was, I had to admit, the real reason for my trip.

  So I drove now to the University of Washington, asking myself, How hard could it possibly be to find a campus that was some twenty-two million square feet? Hard, as it turned out. Unintentionally, I found the University Village shopping mall. Which was definitely worth a drive-by look. But I turned around on 45th Avenue, and finally arrived on the campus.

  The cherry trees in the main quad were at the end of their bloom, a few blossoms, pink and white, were left, interspersed with bright green leaves. Students milled around, some of the girls so dressed up they looked ready to go clubbing. The funny thing was, standing there in this university that I had written off as too monolithic, too overwhelming, I felt completely at home. After China, how could any place feel too large or too hard to navigate? I had walked through squalid alleys, negotiated the Forbidden City, and didn’t just figure out a way to get to the Great Wall — I geocached and tobogganed there. I did all of that with just a handful of Chinese words and one big smile.

  There was no reason why I had to go to Western Washington.

  I could handle UW. Take classes in its fine arts program. And major in business school, if I wanted.

  This university wasn’t on Dad’s sanctioned list, but its tuition? That, I could afford on my own. And I had gotten in, after all.

  I almost laughed out loud when I drove up to Jacob’s private school, Viewridge Prep with all its ivy-covered brick buildings (buildings!) and lush green soccer fields (soccer fields!). My school was a squat, two-story building, shared between the middle schoolers and high schoolers. We had Astroturf, because nothing save sagebrush and weeds grew in happy neglect in the Valley.

  But it wasn’t our differences that I wanted to focus on. So I parked in one of the visitors’ spots and pulled out the GPS I had taken to carrying in my backpack when I went running. I switched it on so I could pinpoint my coordinates, the longitude and latitude that placed me here and nowhere else in the world. The problem was, inside the car, the device couldn’t locate the satellites, so I unrolled the window, stuck my hand out and held the device to the sun. As soon as it calibrated, I grabbed my notebook from my backpack, ripped out a random page, and wrote my position on the paper. As I folded the sheet in half, I caught sight of my meager notes from the lecture about Fate Maps all those months ago.

  Genetics might be our first map, imprinted within us from the moment the right sperm meets the right egg. But who knew that all those DNA particles are merely reference points in our own adventures, not dictating our fate but guiding our future? Take Jacob’s cleft lip. If his upper lip had been fused together the way it was supposed to be inside his mother’s belly, he’d probably be living in a village in China right now. Then there was me with my port-wine stain. I lifted my eyes to the rearview mirror, wondering what I would have been like had I never been born with it. My fingers traced the birthmark landlocked on my face, its boundary lines sharing the same shape as Bhutan, the country neighboring Tibetans call the Land of the Dragon. I liked that; the dragons Dad had always cautioned me about had lived on my face all this time. Here be dragons, indeed.

  I leaned back in my seat now, closing my eyes, relishing the feel of the sun warming my face. No, I wouldn’t trade a single experience — not my dad or my birthmark — to be anyone but me, right here, right now.

  At last, at 3:10, I open my door. I don’t know how I’ll find Jacob, only that I will. A familiar loping stride ambles out of the library. Not a Goth guy, not a prepster, just Jacob decked in a shirt as unabashedly orange as anything in Elisa’s Beijing boutique. This he wore buttoned to the neck and untucked over jeans, sleeves rolled up to reveal tanned arms. For the first time, I see his aggressively modern glasses, deathly black and rectangular. His hair is the one constant: it’s spiked as usual.

  What swells inside me is a love so boundless, I am the sunrise and sunset. I am Liberty Bell in the Cascades. I am Beihai Lake. I am every beautiful, truly beautiful, thing I’ve ever seen, captured in my personal Geographia, the atlas of myself.

  “Jacob!” I call, not minding when my voice echoes off the library building, so loud he and his friends turn to me.

  For once, Jacob doesn’t look sure what he wants to do, whether he wants to stop or keep going. But I do. I know. I shut the car door behind me and venture into the Unknown. His walls are up, fortified by days and days of silence. To my relief, while his face is carefully blank, he doesn’t turn away when I near.

  I feel his friends, both guys and girls, watching me. And I realize this might be a colossal mistake, a public humiliation. Maybe Jacob is seeing someone else now. Maybe he’ll never forgive me. His friends draw behi
nd him like bodyguards.

  I have no words, just myself and this piece of used paper, which I hold out to him.

  Jacob takes my note silently and reads the two coordinates. “What’s this?” he asks gruffly.

  This is what I want, I tell myself. He, of all people, is worth this risk of being transparent, of letting him know how I feel, what I want. So despite his friends who are watching, I straighten, throw my hair over my shoulder, and stand before him, utterly vulnerable.

  “A geocache,” I say.

  “A geocache.”

  “If you’ve got the guts to find it.”

  For the first time, his eyes glint with something like amusement, something like curiosity. “Well,” he drawls, “that depends on the cache.”

  I shrug and shake my head. “It’s a new one. No one has ever found it.”

  “So tell me more.”

  “It’d take . . . oh, gosh, an entire day at least to tell you all about it.”

  “I’ve got time,” he says easily. “Give me a clue.”

  “You?” I ask in mock horror. “You, an expert geocacher, are asking for a clue?”

  “For especially gnarly caches, I make exceptions.”

  “Gnarly?” I frown.

  “Complicated,” he amends. The beginning of his crooked smile begins to form, and the murky Unknown solidifies into familiar terrain. “So what’s the cache called?”

  That, I hadn’t prepped for. So I improvise: “I’m a Moron and I’m So Sorry. But then really good geocachers know it by its nickname: I’ve Missed You So Much.” A breeze tangles my hair, and when Jacob reaches out to brush a strand off my cheek, the tension releases in me. “But the truly brilliant geocachers?”

  “Yeah?” he says. “What about us?”

  “They know it by its real name. Terra Firma.”

  “Terra Firma,” he repeats. At last, he slips his backpack off his shoulder. I know what he’s looking for.

  I take a breath. “You don’t need your GPS for this cache.”

  His eyes don’t move off mine; he’s watching me so carefully. “You don’t, huh?”

  “Nope,” I say.

  Some things are meant to be kept — what you learn from experiences good or bad, smiles from an orphaned girl, a boy who is your compass pointing to your True North. So I look Jacob full in the face with nothing obscuring him. Or me. And then I step closer to him. And closer. And closer yet.

  “Here I am,” I tell him. “Here I am.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to all the wind deities who blew this novel in the right direction: Dr. Julie Francis and Janice Hendrickson for answering my every last question about port-wine stains; Lillian Thogerson and Lynn Gibson for their passionate commitment to complete families with children from around the world and for sharing their stories about orphanages in China; Francine Shore, for opening my eyes to the pentimenti of life and art; the artists at the Confluence Gallery for showcasing beauty in all its forms; and Bob Larson for giving me a masterful overview of the mapping industry. (Please note that while the China map written about in the novel is fictitious, I’ve taken care to ensure that the rest of the cartographic information and historical references are factual.)

  A special shout-out to Mary Williams, the former coffee buyer at Starbucks and the reason why people worldwide experience truly exceptional coffee. She not only taught me to cup coffee properly (and to warn me never to rest my purse on the ground in a cupping room where people spit) but is a role model for living fearlessly. Any mistakes in the novel on any of these topics are mine alone.

  I wish all writers had someone like Steve Malk to steer them with such unwavering faith, canny guidance, and a bolstering cup of green tea (no offense, Mary). I’m talking pep talks and well-placed jokes on weekends, holidays, and midnight. Lindsay Davis, you are a true and sparkly star.

  Thanks to my Little, Brown constellation of goodness: Megan Tingley, Andrew Smith, Gail Doobinin, Rachel Wasdyke, Lisa Laginestra, Christine Cuccio, and Saho Fujii. And most especially, my heartfelt gratitude goes to Alvina Ling and Connie Hsu, whose incisive and sensitive editorial direction turned Terra Nullis into Terra Firma. You are the priceless maps I read carefully and follow closely and keep nestled in my heart.

  Like all authors, I owe a litany of thanks to the best matchmakers on the planet — the passionate librarians, booksellers, and bloggers who get my books and so many others into the hands of the readers who need them most. In particular I would like to thank Nancy Pearl, Robin Willard and the entire Chicago Public Library and Teen Volume gang, Chauni Haslet, and Kathleen March. As well, the masterful writers Meg Cabot, Lisa Yee, Julie Anne Peters, Deb Caletti, K. L. Going, and Carolyn Mackler have been exceedingly good to me.

  To my beloved Iron Goddesses of friends Janet Wong, Nicole Ueland, Shelli Cheng — and readergirlz Janet Lee Carey, Dia Calhoun, Lorie Ann Grover, Allie Costa, Jen Robinson, Jackie Parker, Miss Alexia, and Miss Erin — thank you for seeing the beautiful in me and my work, especially when I’ve been the most profoundly blind. Lydia Golston as well as Duaine and Vieno Lindstrom, you keep much more than our keys. Jessica and Fiona Saunders, Reid and Cameron Chen, Matthew and Christopher Headley: embrace the dragons and author your own adventures.

  And finally to the best geocaching buddies on the planet — Robert, Tyler, and Sofia — you are my treasure, my True North, my Bhutan.