by Sarah Dessen
“He does not!” Morgan yelled from the bathroom. “He doesn’t even lead the team in errors anymore!”
Isabel grabbed her cigarettes and kicked open the screen door. I watched her strike a match, its orange glow lighting up her face, before she moved down the porch, out of sight.
The disco was still blasting. My face felt like it had been dipped and set in concrete. From the kitchen window I could see Mira’s house, quiet and peaceful. I wondered if she knew that she didn’t really need wrestling at all. Morgan and Isabel were like Triple Threat and Saturday Cage Fights rolled into one.
I turned down the music, then walked down the hallway and knocked on the bathroom door.
“What?” Morgan said.
“I really need to wash my face,” I said.
“Oh.” I heard her get up. “Okay.”
She unlocked the door and I pushed it open, sliding inside. She was sitting on the edge of the tub, her mask streaked and muddy from crying. I pretended not to notice.
I went to the sink and ran the water until it was warm, then carefully washed off the mask, watching the green run down the drain. Morgan handed me a towel.
“Colie,” she said as I patted myself dry, noticing that my skin did actually feel very nice, “do you have a best friend?”
I looked down at the towel, folding it carefully. It was, after all, Morgan’s. “I don’t have any friends,” I said.
“Oh, that’s not true,” she said in the quick, knee-jerk way of guidance counselors and teachers.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.” I handed her the towel.
There was an awkward silence, made even more noticeable because the bathroom was so small. I had nothing to look at but my hands, Morgan, or my own face in the mirror.
“Well,” she said, and I could tell she was uncomfortable now, sorry she’d even brought it up, “sometimes they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Trouble or not, at least she wasn’t alone.
“I love Mark so much,” she blurted out. “And Isabel is just wrong about him. I would know if he wasn’t the one. I mean, I’d have to know, right?”
“She’s just worried about you,” I said. “She doesn’t want you to get hurt.” I could understand this, because it was not unlike the way my mother had always taken care of me.
“She needs to butt out,” Morgan sniffled. “This is my life. She’s my best friend but this is my life.”
There was a silence. Morgan was still sniffling, dabbing at her face with the towel, which was now splotched with green. This was my first true confessions session in a bathroom, a Girl Moment, plain and simple. I had to say something.
“When I first met you, you said Isabel wasn’t so bad,” I told her. She looked up, her clear skin showing through in patches. “You just said she could be a real bitch sometimes. And that she was friendship-impaired.”
“Oh,” she said. “I did?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, she is impaired,” she admitted. “She didn’t know how to be friends because she’d never had one. Until me.”
I could feel my own earlier admission hanging in the air like smoke between us. And now I might have told Morgan about my fat Harvest Dance, and all the schools I’d suffered through and left behind. But, again, there was something that stopped me, that prevented me from opening myself like a book to the spine, leaving the pages exposed.
“I’m just saying,” I told her, “that maybe you should remember that about her when you guys fight like this.”
She nodded. “I do,” she said softly. “I can’t ever forget it. It’s, like, part of who she is, you know?”
“I know.” And I did.
Outside in the living room, the music suddenly cut off. There were a few minutes of silence, broken only by the sound of Isabel going through the stacks of CDs. Then a click as she shut the top of the player and another as she hit the button.
The music started.
“At first I was afraid, I was petrified . . .”
Morgan went to the sink. She splashed at her face, again and again, until the water didn’t run green anymore. Then she lifted her head and smiled at her reflection, at the bits of green speckled here and there along her hairline. “She’s so crazy,” she said to me softly. But she was smiling.
“Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side. . . .”
And outside the door, suddenly, I heard Isabel singing along. “But then I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong!”
“And I grew strong!” Morgan yelled back. “And I learned how to get along!”
The door flew open and there was Isabel, arms over her head, hips shaking, eyes closed as she channeled some long-ago disco queen. Her face was green, her curlers bobbing madly.
“And so you’re back from outer space,” she sang, off-key.
“I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face. . . .” Morgan moved forward, past me, snapping her fingers over her head while Isabel turned and started shimmying down the hallway. Morgan followed, skipping from side to side, doing some sort of strange booty-slap.
It was like the first night I’d seen them, and I wished I was back on Mira’s roof, watching from a safe distance.
I walked behind them, keeping my eyes on the door. It was like being caught in some weird tribal ritual, firewalking or glass swallowing, and not knowing the correct way to carefully extract yourself. I dodged when they started doing the bump, Isabel’s energetic hip swings knocking Morgan halfway across the room, and put my hand on the screen door. They had completely forgotten me.
“Colie!”
Or maybe not.
I turned back, pushing the door open as I did so. “Yeah?”
“Come on!” Morgan was waving me over as she shook her hips. The music was still cranking and the song, the stupid song, seemed to be endless.
“I have to—”
But now she was coming over, still dancing, and reached out to grab my hand. “Come on,” she said, and gave me a good yank, pulling me back toward them.
“I told you,” I yelled back at her, over the music, “I don’t dance.”
“We’ll show you,” she said, misunderstanding me. The song was ending now, fading out note by note.
“No,” I said, loudly, pulling my arm back. She looked surprised, then hurt, and it was suddenly very quiet, with just the last bits of my loud objection settling around us.
“What is your problem?” Isabel said.
“I don’t dance.” I folded my arms across my chest, taking all of myself back. “I told you that.” And I didn’t care if they laughed at me, or hated me. I didn’t care what they would say when I was gone.
They exchanged looks. Isabel shrugged. “Whatever,” she said. Then she reached up and undid one of her curlers, a perfect blonde corkscrew falling down over her eyes. “We need to get ready, anyway.”
“Yeah,” Morgan agreed, but she looked more hesitant, still watching my face. “We do.”
“Ready?” I said.
“To go out,” Isabel said over her shoulder. “You really haven’t done a Chick Night, have you?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, hurry up,” Morgan scolded me. “And shut that door. We have work to do.”
chapter eleven
“You can’t have a good Chick Night,” Morgan said, leaning in to the mirror to curl her eyelashes, “without at least one cat-fight.”
“And somebody has to cry, at least once,” Isabel said. “With us, it’s usually Morgan.”
“Is not,” Morgan said, fluffing her bangs, now somewhat fixed.
Isabel caught my eye in the mirror and nodded.
I was sitting on the bed as they stood in front of Isabel’s tiny vanity, adding on and tweezing away, emphasizing and concealing with the spread of makeup before them. The entire room smelled of perfume and smoke, the latter from the curling iron that Isabel had accidentally set on a stack of m
agazines. The fire had been small but dramatic, burning Cindy Crawford’s lovely face to a crisp.
The closest I’d come to this was watching my mother get ready for dates, something I’d been doing for as long as I could remember. Even in the Fat Years, my mother made time for a social life. It was my job to sit on the bed and hold the box of Kleenex, handing them over as needed to rub in blush or blot lipstick. It was also my job to answer the door, lead her date to the one good chair that always traveled with us—a recliner we’d bought off the side of the road in Memphis for fifty bucks—and make small talk until my mother made her entrance, smelling of whatever perfume insert had been in Cosmo that month.
This was different. This time, I was the one who was going.
“Sit up straight,” Isabel scolded after I’d been sat, on orders, in the chair facing the mirror. “Slouching is the first dead give-away of low self-esteem.”
I sat up.
She pulled back my hair with a headband, then scrutinized my face. “Morgan.”
“Yes?”
“Hand me that Revlon Sand Beige makeup. And a sponge. And the tweezers.” She held her hand out flat, like a surgeon waiting for a scalpel.
“The tweezers?” I said as Morgan slapped them efficiently into her palm.
“Good eyebrows take maintenance,” she said, leaning forward with her eyes narrowed. “Deal with it.”
She plucked. I sat there, staring again at all the beautiful girls while she worked her magic. She spread makeup over my face, blending and dabbing until all of its normal bumps and ridges were smoothed away. She curled my eyelashes as I squirmed, her hand fixed hard on my shoulder. She lined my eyes with black kohl, smudging it with her thumb, then brushed blush on my cheeks and added mascara, drawing my lashes out farther and farther. Then she pulled my hair back, letting a few strands wind down, just like hers. And all the while I studied those perfect faces, one after another, until I came back to my own.
And I saw a girl. Not a fat girl, or a loser, or even a golf course slut.
A pretty girl. Something I had never been before.
“Sit up straight,” Isabel said again, poking me in the spine with the hairbrush. “And put your shoulders back.”
I did.
“Now smile.”
I smiled. In the mirror, over my head, Isabel frowned.
“Do me a favor,” she said, leaning in so her face was right beside mine. “Can you take that thing out?”
She was pointing at my lip ring, and I instantly ran my tongue across it. It was my touchstone, after all. I needed it. “Um,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“Just for one night,” she said. “Humor me.”
And I looked back at myself in the mirror, at all those faces, and then glanced at Isabel’s cousin. She stared back through her thick glasses, her face plump and wide.
“Okay,” I said. “But just for one night.”
“One night,” she agreed, as I reached up to take it out, the last remaining part of what I once was. “One night.”
Chase Mercer had been new to the neighborhood, just like me. His dad did something in software and drove two Porsches, a blue and a red. He didn’t fit in much at first either, since he had a sister in a wheelchair; she had something wrong with her legs, and a nurse wheeled her up and down the street every day. Whenever she saw me, she waved. She waved at everyone.
I met Chase at a neighborhood pool party at the country club. We were both with our parents. The adults were clumped around the bar, my mother working the crowd, and all the kids had disappeared to do whatever kids did in Conroy Plantations, so Chase and I started walking across the golf course. It was late summer and all the stars were out. We were just talking. Nothing else.
He was from Columbus, with thick blond hair that stuck up in the back. He liked sports and Super Nintendo, and when he was six he’d had pneumonia so bad he’d almost died. His mother sold real estate and was never home, and his sister had been sick since she was born and her name was Andrea. He missed his old friends and his old school, and all the kids he’d met in Conroy Plantations were rich and obnoxious and cared too much about clothes.
I told Chase Mercer about my mother suddenly becoming famous. About my father, whom I’d never seen aside from a picture of him and my mother standing by the Alamo, in Texas. About how all the girls in Conroy Plantations made fun of me because I’d been fat and were only nice to me when their mothers made them.
I told Chase Mercer a lot of things.
We ended up sitting on the grass at the eighteenth hole, both of us staring up at the stars. Chase knew almost all the constellations—he’d had a telescope in Columbus—and he was picking them out, one finger pointing while I followed it with my eyes. He had just spotted Cassiopeia when I heard the voices.
“Yoo-hoo!” Then a light flickered across my face, a flashlight beam darting from me to Chase and back again. “Oh, my God,” someone shrieked. There was an explosion of giggling. “Chase, you dog, you,” someone else yelled out.
“Shut up,” Chase said. He stood up and brushed himself off, raising one hand to shield his eyes from the light.
“I always knew she was a slut,” I heard a girl say, and even without looking I knew it had to be Caroline Dawes, who was skinny and tan, with straight black hair she spent a lot of time swinging around. Her mother had made her invite me over just after I moved in, and we’d spent a long, painful afternoon in her room, where, as I watched, she lay on the bed talking on the phone. We’d already been in gym class together for almost two years, and she’d tortured me with every fat name in the book until I’d lost the weight. Now, with my awful luck, we were neighbors, and she had something new to hold against me.
“Let’s go,” someone said, and the light flicked across us once more, landing square on my face. It hurt my eyes. “Oh, gross,” another voice said. “Chase, you must have been desperate, man.”
I turned to look at Chase but he was walking away, quickly, his head down. “Chase,” I called out.
“Oh, Chase,” someone echoed in a high falsetto. More laughing. But they were leaving now, their voices growing fainter, the light skipping across the trees and grass, brightening their path.
“Wait,” I said, but I could hardly see him now. The voices trailed off and I was left there alone, under all those stars.
By the next morning when I went to the pool, I had a new nickname: Hole in One. And when I saw Chase Mercer at the snack bar, he wouldn’t even look at me. He walked right over to where Caroline Dawes and all her friends were sitting, greasing themselves up with baby oil and drinking Diet Coke, and took his place with them.
Chase Mercer got off easy.
A week later, just before school started, I went downtown to a tattoo place and had my lip pierced. I don’t know why I did it; it just felt right. I figured I had nothing to lose.
It was the same reason I cut my hair with nail scissors and dyed it bright red. The same reason I took up with Ben Lucas, who was nasty and dirty and just wanted to get into my pants, and I almost let him. The same reason I lost myself in music that screamed and thundered and hated as much as I wanted to.
And I sat in my new bedroom in my new house with my new pool and new clothes and felt miserable, angry with every inch of who I was. At school I was like a time bomb, ready to explode; I pulled my long coat around me for protection so that nothing could get through.
It worked, as well as it could.
At school the guidance counselor, Ms. Young, would pat me on the shoulder and tell me all I needed was a little self-esteem. “And a role model,” she’d go on cheerfully. “Someone you admire who is strong and fearless, who you can model yourself after.”
I didn’t have anyone but my mother. And I knew she wasn’t strong all the time. She’d been fat in school, too.
“Oh, honey,” my mother would say, stroking my hair. “These are the worst years. I promise you.” But this time, she couldn’t quit her job and take me someplace else. We were here
to stay.
The worst years, I’d repeat to myself, thinking of Caroline Dawes and Chase Mercer and Hole in One and the music that almost, but never quite, pounded them all away. And then I’d run my tongue across my lip and hope that she was right.
Morgan drove. Isabel rode shotgun, and I sat in the back, with all the CDs and magazines and a hairbrush that bounced across my lap each time we took a turn. The radio was blasting, but Morgan and Isabel talked the whole time. I couldn’t hear a word they said; instead I caught bits and pieces of their laughing faces in the light from oncoming cars, Morgan rolling her eyes, Isabel with her feet balanced on the dashboard, singing along with the radio.
I kept trying to glimpse my own reflection each time a car lit up the rearview mirror; I was sure I’d find the old me staring back, my hair ragged and black, my lip ring glinting. Instead, I saw that same pretty girl Isabel had created. And I was surprised every time, sure she wasn’t real.
It seemed there was some social life in Colby and we found it at the public beach. The Colby fireworks were the event of the summer. We took our place, parking at the end of a long row of cars by some dunes.
Morgan opened her door and the dome light came on. Isabel pulled down the visor and looked in her mirror. “Nose check,” she said.
Morgan peered in the rearview, turning up her head and checking her nostrils. “Okay here.”
“Here too.”
“How’s my lipstick?” Morgan asked.
Isabel glanced at her. “Good. Mine?”
“Good.”
If this was what girls did, I wasn’t quite sure I really wanted to know about it.
Isabel turned around. “Ready?” she asked me.
It’s easier to be ready when you don’t know what for. “Sure,” I said.
“Okay then. Let’s go.”
She grabbed one of her six-packs and got out, kicking the door shut; Morgan held the seat for me. She pulled a blanket from the back, folding it in her arms, and carefully locked the door behind us. By that time, Isabel was already halfway across the dunes.