Napoleon’s lips press together, and he wants to form a word. His lips start to open, but then close and press against each other even tighter. He does this twice more. I don’t know if he’s trying to choose the right word or if he’s frightened. Might be a combination of the two.
“What, Nap? Baby don’t know how to talk?”
By this time the crowd is speechless, and it’s evident by the way Nap’s eyes are darting around the room that he wishes they would start screaming or laugh about some dumb joke, anything to silence the silence. He catches my gaze and I don’t know why, but I seem to give him strength. At least the courage to speak.
“Better than having a bitch for a sister!”
Thrilled that her boyfriend finally showed some spunk, Jess squeezes my hand. I squeeze it back, but I don’t turn to face her. I have to see how Nadine responds. I never expect to hear her laugh. Deep and hearty.
“I’m a bitch because I want my grandmother to be in a facility where she can get the help she needs?” she asks rhetorically. “You would say something that idiotic.”
“No, you’re a bitch because you want our grandmother dead!”
And just like that, Nadine’s laughter stops. She tosses the dirty cups she was holding back on the table, causing them to fall over so a little soda river spreads out until it reaches the edge of the table and drips onto the floor. Moving even closer to her brother, Nadine forces Nap to take a few steps back until the backs of his legs crash into the wooden end table. Nap stumbles to the side in an attempt to get out of his sister’s path.
“When did I say I wanted her dead?” she asks. “When did I say that?”
I can tell from the way Nap’s looking at her that he’s wounded, not physically, but emotionally. The way they go at each other reminds me of how Barnaby and I can sometimes argue. Instantly, I’m grateful that Nadine has come into my life; I’ve witnessed firsthand that I’m not the only girl in town who’s filled with anger. Jess will never be replaced as my best friend, but Nadine is becoming something of a soul mate. Which is why I feel like I have to help her out.
“Nadine,” I say, “I don’t think that’s what Nap meant.”
She’s so upset with her brother that when she turns to face me the anger remains on her face. It takes a few seconds for the harshness to recede, but then her face softens, and I can tell that she’s grateful for my comment; it’s helped her return to reality. Her lips start to move; they press against each other, a spot-on imitation of her brother, but she doesn’t speak; she can’t find the right words. The twins might be different in some respects, but they’re still twins, and they have similar characteristics.
“Thank you, Dominy,” she says finally.
While I’ve been noticing that I have no reason to feel isolated and alone, others have noticed that the party is no longer a celebration about youth and its victories, but a debate about the elderly and their inevitabilities.
“Um, I thought this was a party for the football team?”
Leave it to Caleb to be able to sidestep the furious argument taking place right in front of him and make everybody laugh again. Almost everybody. Nadine looks like she’s going to scratch my boyfriend’s eyes out. I don’t blame her or get upset, because I know the feeling quite well. I also know that it’ll pass.
“Sorry, Caleb,” Napoleon mumbles, trying to control his anger. “You have a sister?”
“Two of them,” Caleb replies.
“Then you understand,” Nap says. “And you have my sympathies.”
It looks like Napoleon is about to engage Caleb in some intricate male-bonding handshake ’n hug ritual that I know my boyfriend would rather skip, when Jess once again comes to the rescue. By screaming at the top of her lungs.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
Lie of the century. Clearly she’s lying because she’s staring at me, bug-eyed, and I’m afraid her eyelids are going to expand and her eyeballs are going to pop out and dangle from their sockets.
“Jess, seriously, what’s wrong?” I repeat.
By now everyone is facing Jess, and her expression is getting more fearful by the second. Part of me wants to shield my face because I really think her eyes are going to launch themselves into the air. The other part of me is growing very concerned.
“I, uh, I thought I saw a mouse,” Jess explains.
And this is the announcement that officially ends the party.
“Vermin?!” Arla shrieks.
There’s a noise, sounds like cardboard pizza boxes being crushed and shoved into the garbage can. I know the harsh sound is connected to Nadine even before she speaks. “We do not have mice.”
“I . . . I just saw one,” Jess stutters, as if one mouse is so much better than two. “And it was little, but still it kinda freaked me out.”
Whatever reprieve I might have helped create is gone; Nadine is back in angry mode and doesn’t take this contradiction very well. Her voice is calm, but I doubt her insides are. “I don’t care what you think you saw, Jess, we do not have mice or any other kind of vermin in this house.”
Knowing Jess, chances are good that the mouse was a product of her imagination. A quirky shadow, one of those black squiggly lines you see in your eye from time to time, and she made the rest up. The nonverbal consensus is that everyone believes Nadine when she says her house is vermin-free. Everyone except for her brother and my boyfriend. Her brother because I’m guessing he’s still anti-Nadine and doesn’t want to agree with his sister regardless of whether she’s speaking the truth and my boyfriend because I know that he has a fear of all things that fall under the rodent umbrella. Rats, squirrels, hamsters, guinea pigs, and, of course, mice. He’s frightened of them all, kind of his phobia. Whenever he sees a squirrel he unconsciously clutches my hand and scrunches up his face into this grimace. It’s actually a cute look. So I completely expect it when he tells me he has to leave.
“C’mon, we have to go,” he says, his voice shuddering.
“No!” Jess screams, turning me to face her. “I need her to stay with me.”
“I need her to come home with me!” Caleb shouts back. It’s like he’s forgotten he’s a guy and a football player and my boyfriend, and he’s become my little sister or something.
“Sorry, Caleb,” Jess whines. “I really need Dominy to walk me home.” Frantically, Jess’s eyes dart around the room until she lands on a solution. “Archie’ll drive home with you. The party’s over anyway.”
“C’mon, Winter,” Caleb says, his voice still shaky.
“Sure thing, Bells,” Archie replies.
Caleb’s already got his jacket on. “Sorry, Dominy, you know how I get.”
I do. “No big d,” I tell him. I try to give him a kiss good-bye, but he’s racing up the stairs with Archie right behind him. “Call me when you get home!”
Outside, Jess, Arla, and I are walking, but Arla’s the only one doing any talking. Jess is still shell-shocked from whatever it is she thinks she saw, and I’m trying to peel back the complicated layers that make up the Jaffe household. I’ve barely scraped the surface of the matriarch when Jess makes us stop. She clutches Arla’s hand, and they both face me. I feel the moonlight bathe my face, and I feel exposed.
Jess bends her head close to Arla and whispers, “Look at her.”
Baffled, Arla follows orders and looks at me. In less than three seconds she gasps.
“Oh my God!” Arla screams. “How did I not see it? It’s . . . it’s...”
“What?!”
“Guh-ross!!”
Involuntarily, I look behind me, around me, thinking that I misheard Jess’s instruction and something nearby is the object of their disgust. But I’m wrong; the gasps of horror are directed at me. Okay, I admit that I’m vain, but I sort of have a reason to be. If I were taller I could model. Then I realize it has to be karma, cosmic revenge. I made fun of Jess and Nadine’s pimples, so now my face has gotten hit with a new crop of zits. I pro
bably have red, blotchy skin, littered with white spots. My face must look like a slice of the pizza that we just ate. Unfortunately, it’s even worse.
“What do you mean, I’m gross?!”
“Sorry, Dom, it just slipped out,” Arla apologizes. “But . . . and it hurts me to say this, but gross really describes it quite well.”
I feel the moonlight on my face and the rage churning in my stomach; I’ve had enough. “Show me!”
Jess’s and Arla’s heads snap toward each other, and if I wasn’t so pissed off I’d think it was comical.
“Should we?” Arla asks.
“We have to,” Jess replies.
Arla digs into her purse for, presumably, a compact, and Jess launches into a speech that is supposed to calm me down, but it has the opposite effect. “Remember that most things like this are temporary; they never last very long, and no matter what you may look like, Dominy, we still love you. And we will help you get over this, we promise!”
I yank the compact out of Arla’s hand and flip it open. The glow from the moon is blinding, and I can’t see myself; for a moment I don’t exist, but then I come into focus and a second later I scream. “I have a moustache!”
Jess looks like she’s going to cry. “Yes, honey, you do.”
“Nadine was right,” I say, putting the pieces together. “There wasn’t any mouse; you were creating a diversion!”
Now she really does cry. “What else would a best friend do?!”
I look at myself again, and I start to cry. No, I don’t really have a full-grown moustache, but I have hairs all along my upper lip, deep red, which makes sense, but then at the corners of my mouth the hair is darker, almost jet black, and thicker. Suddenly, I feel faint. My heart is racing, and I feel sweat forming on my forehead. How can this be happening? How can I look so disgusting?
“I am guh-ross!” I shout.
“No, you’re not,” Arla protests.
“You said I was!”
“Temporarily! Temporarily guh-ross!” she repeats with even more conviction.
Standing is no longer an option. I grab onto their arms so the girls can lower me onto the curb. The three of us sit there, me in the middle, and try to make sense of my situation.
“My face was fine when I left my house,” I remember. “When did you notice I was little Miss She-ape?”
“Right after Nadine and Napoleon were fighting,” Jess admits. “You calmed Nadine down and turned around. I swear on the eternal soul of Siddhrtha Gautama, the Buddha, that I almost lost my shiz right then and there.”
Arla shakes her head. “It couldn’t have happened that fast,” she says. “It had to have been there all night, and we just didn’t see it.”
No! There’s no way my sudden hair extensions could have gone unnoticed.
“The lighting in their basement isn’t really that good,” Jess adds. “And, Dom, you always get dressed so fast you hardly take a good look at yourself before you leave your house.”
Normally that’s true, but tonight was different. “I did, Jess,” I tell her. “I looked right in my mirror to make sure my outfit looked good for Caleb since I haven’t been the best girlfriend lately.”
“That explains it then,” Arla says. “You did a quick wardrobe check and ran out. You were so focused on your outfit, you didn’t notice your extra hair.”
My head is spinning. I hear Arla, I know she’s probably right, but my instinct tells me she’s completely wrong. “I . . . I don’t know,” I stutter. “How could Caleb not have noticed? He didn’t say a thing.”
Once again Arla has an explanation. “Even if Caleb did notice, how in the world do you expect him to tell you that you have unsightly hair growth on your upper lip?” she asks. “You slapped him around when he broke a date with you. He was probably afraid you’d go postal and pull a gun on him.”
“Not helping, Arla!” Jess cries.
“How are you going to help me?” I shout. “I can’t go to school like this tomorrow. Every classroom has fluorescent lighting!”
Sheer terror envelops the three of us. There is no way that I’m going to be able to hide my face from the harsh glare of the high wattage that exists throughout my entire school. There’s only one thing I can do; I’ll have to quit. My father will have no other choice but to homeschool me, even if that means he has to give up his job; that’s the only solution. That is until Jess saves the day.
“There’s a woman.”
“What woman?” I ask.
“A woman who works at the salon my mother goes to,” Jess conveys. “She’s old, but she’s beauty royalty, a magician when it comes to hairy women treatments.”
“I’m a hairy woman?!”
Jess wraps her hands around mine; this is the stuff she lives for. “You got a hairy upper lip, Dom; this is how it starts,” she enlightens me. “But don’t worry. My mother will make an appointment with Vernita for first thing in the morning for a mega-wax. You’ll be girlie-girl smooth again before the morning bell.”
“And while she’s there, make sure they clean up her arms too,” Arla suggests.
“My arms?!”
“Oh, Dominy, tell me you haven’t noticed?” Arla asks. “You have more hair on your arms than most boys have on their legs.”
I tear off my jacket and pull up my sleeves. I sense a chill swarm around my exposed flesh, but I’m warm from fear. Arla’s right. Have I been ignoring it? Have I been subconsciously pushing the reality out of my mind so I wouldn’t have to deal with it?
I look down at my arms, and I see dark auburn hairs all over my skin. An image pops into my head of a fur coat, and I see my arms encased with disgusting red fur, matted down, wet and dirty. I shake my head and choke down a scream. Refill the jar with honey; reclaim what’s left of my insides. This is some sort of cosmic joke, some physical ailment that can be easily explained and rectified. Tomorrow I’ll go to this Vernita person, and she’ll take care of me; she’ll make me look like I’m supposed to; she’ll make me normal again. Even though I know that’s what will happen, I can’t stop myself from asking out loud, “What’s wrong with me?”
The question stumps Jess and Arla, just like it stumps me. None of us have an answer, so my friends embrace me under the light of the moon. We cling to each other all the way home, and the only thing Jess says to me when they drop me off is that she’ll call me in the morning.
Just as I’m about to enter my bedroom, my father comes out of the bathroom, and we look at each other. I’m standing right under the ceiling light in the hallway, the one with the super bright bulb, so I know he can see every detail on my face. He sees the hairs that are growing on my face. He sees how ugly and disgusting and unexplainable I am, and he doesn’t say a word.
He clutches the banister and starts to cry.
Chapter 7
My father reminds me of a half-moon. Split in two, part witnessed, the other part invisible. I want to know what he’s feeling, but at the same time I’m frightened to find out the truth.
He didn’t say a word when he looked at me and cried. The only sound that disturbed our silence was the banister creaking in protest under his weight. His crying was quiet, just tears skimming down his face, no sniffles, no muffled whimpering, nothing extra; it was like he was prepared for this moment and it didn’t catch him by surprise.
We stood facing each other without saying a word for far too long, way too long at least for a father and daughter to be alone in each other’s presence without speaking. When I could no longer look at him, when I needed a distraction, I zeroed in on one tear that had spilled out of his left eye and watched it travel down his cheek. I lost it for a few seconds when it entered the dark stubble underneath his lips, but then it reappeared like a bubble, holding on to his chin, clinging to my father like I’m trying to cling to my innocence, to my better self, until the tear lost its grip, succumbed to gravity, and fell. It landed on his T-shirt, right over his heart, and turned the light red cloth a darker shade. He looked li
ke he was bleeding.
When he turned away from me, the banister creaked once again, but this time in relief. He walked back into his bedroom and closed his door by pulling it behind him without turning around. Because he was simply unable to look at me anymore.
What is happening? I mean seriously, what the ef is going on? Why is my father acting like this, like he sees, but he’s blind? I know he knows everything that’s going on with me, and yet there’s this concrete wall encircling him, separating us. It’s rooted deep into the ground, and it rises so high that there’s no way I can scale the cinderblocks, reach the top, and find my way to him. Physically we’re living in the same house; emotionally it’s like we’re on separate continents.
Under the covers I held open my mother’s old compact mirror and stared at my ugliness, for how long I can’t remember, but the entire time I traced the intricate design on the cover of the case with my fingers. It’s a jeweled tapestry, an image of Little Bo Peep alone in a field; only a smidge of her face can be seen in profile, but she looks worried, because everyone knows she’s lost her sheep. Night has just begun to fall, so the sky is a shimmering purple with only a smattering of stars, and a halo of light adorns Bo Peep’s head like a crown, making her look angelic, even though it’s because of her irresponsibility that her flock is in danger. The border of the mirror is silver, the same color as the stars, and smooth in contrast to the raised, embossed cover. It’s a beautiful piece, more jewelry than necessity, and it was a gift my grandmother gave my mother when she was a little girl. My mother once said my grandmother and I looked alike, and if I looked hard enough in the mirror I’d see Grand-mère looking back at me. That’s the comfort I was searching for, and that’s exactly what I couldn’t find.
After I fell asleep it was my father’s face I saw in a dream. I could only see the left side; the other half was gone, lost to me. It was either snatched by someone, or he was deliberately hiding it from me. His one visible eye was no longer crying; it was dry and smiling at me, reassuring me that everything was going to be okay even if everything at the moment felt wrong. I wanted to believe him; I wanted to trust in his confidence and compassion, but like Bo Peep I knew better. Not all her sheep are going to return home safe and sound, and no matter how optimistic my father appeared I knew he was lying. When the moonlight that spilled into my room invaded my dream and revealed my father’s entire face to me, I had proof. On the right side of his face were scratch marks, long and deep and red. Like an animal had taken a swipe at his face because he had gotten too close while trying to capture or tame it. Even with that raw, unhealed scar he was smiling, or trying to. He was trying to hide what he truly believed, but I only had to look into his eyes to see the truth: that my world was about to change irreversibly; that the clock was ticking, the fuse was lit, and the bomb was set to go off. The little sleep that I finally had was restless.
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