The Princesses of Iowa

by M. Molly Backes

  “Oh Paige, you look so pretty!” She leaned down next to me and looked at us in the mirror. Our faces were the same shape, pale ovals repeating themselves. Her eyes were a bright false blue, while mine were the scorched yellow-green of grass in August. During our shopping weekend in Chicago, her college friends kept telling me how much I looked like my mother when she was my age. One of them even called me Jacque, accidentally, and when she did my mother looked at me like I was someone she should know but couldn’t quite pinpoint.

  I caught her eyes in the mirror and smiled, wondering if she saw herself when she looked at me. She smiled back. “Why can’t your sister be more like you, Paige? She could easily be as pretty as you are, if she put forth any effort whatsoever. She has better cheekbones.”

  My smile faded. “I’ll let her know.”

  Her reflection stared at me. “Just a moment.” She turned and clicked down the hallway toward her room. When I was certain she was gone, I leaned toward the mirror until my nose was nearly pressed up against it, staring at the minor imperfections and unevenness of my skin up close. I pulled back again, slowly, until the moment my skin looked perfect again. I squinted, trying to memorize the distance, and made a mental note not to let anyone get closer to me than that. At least, not in the light.

  My mother reappeared behind me and draped a necklace over my collarbone, a glittery, elegant piece she’d had as long as I could remember. “Oh yes,” she said to herself, “isn’t that perfect.”

  I reached up to touch it with nervous fingers. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course, dear,” my mother said, fumbling with the clasp at the nape of my neck. “After all, you’re a going to be a princess; we can’t have you looking like a grungy teenager in public.” The clasp caught and my mother pulled back, scrutinizing me in the mirror with the eye of an artist. I watched her watch me, careful not to make eye contact but noticing the tiny wrinkles around her eyes, the long vertical line running down her forehead and ending just between her eyebrows, the puffiness beneath her lower lashes. She worked out with a personal trainer five days a week, spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on face creams and products that promised dewy youth in a bottle, watched what she ate, religiously stayed under an umbrella in the sun, and yet she couldn’t run forever. For a second I saw the strain of trying to stay young etched in her face.

  She reached up to smooth an invisible stray hair on my head. “Maybe tonight will be the night.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, digging in a drawer for some lip gloss.

  “Oh, you know,” she said. “Perhaps tonight will be the night that Jake pops the question.”

  I looked up in horror. “What? The question?”

  “You look so pretty tonight,” she said dreamily.

  “Mother, are you insane? I’m not even eighteen yet! We’re in high school!” Did she think I was some character in a Salinger novel, a pretty girl in a camel coat to be admired and then wed?

  Her gaze was distant. “I had just turned seventeen when Bobby Monroe proposed to me. It was the most romantic night of my life.”

  “That was a different time, Mom. Like, a whole different world. People don’t get married after high school anymore.”

  Her hand patted along the counter until it found a tube of lipstick. She watched her reflection remove the cap and twist the bottom, followed the waxy crimson finger as it traced the lines of her lips in a perfect bud.

  “Anyway,” I said, too loudly, “you didn’t marry Bobby Monroe. Even back then, it was weird. Right? You wanted to go to college, just like I do.”

  “He’s the vice president of a bank now. In Chicago.” She dabbed the corner of her mouth with the tip of her finger, blotting away the tiny rivers of color that had followed the creases in her skin. “Emily Hamilton said he takes his family to Mexico for two weeks every year.” She sounded wistful. “You know, sometimes I wonder if I should have . . .”

  “Should have what?” I asked. “Thrown your life away before it even started?”

  Her eyes in the glass looked surprised, as if she’d forgotten I was even there. “True love is rare, Paige. The kind of connection you have with Jake — you get it once in a lifetime. Don’t take it for granted.”

  “You love Dad,” I said.

  She paused for a fraction of a second. “Of course I do, sweetheart.”

  “I’m going to college, Mother,” I insisted, a little surprised at the anger in my voice. A year ago, the idea of marrying Jake would have thrilled me. I’d spent hours doodling our names together in my notebook. Paige Austin. Paige Renee Sheridan Austin. Mrs. Jacob Austin. Jake had his entire future — University of Iowa, then UI Law, then a place in his father’s practice — planned out since childhood. His life stretched out before him, always easy. He’d have a beautiful wife, a giant house, and a couple of perfect children, unquestioningly following his father’s footsteps the whole way. For years, I’d imagined myself as that beautiful wife, standing proudly by his side, but now the idea clutched at my throat and chest, making it hard to breathe. I loved him, I did, but I wasn’t ready to go down that road. Not yet. . . . “I’m going to college,” I said again. “I’m going to have a life.”

  “Still,” she said, draping a hand on my shoulder, admiring our reflections. “You never know.”

  The game was a long, dull stalemate, and I was alone on the bleachers, freezing. I had a coat on over my little dress, and a blanket wrapped around my legs, but I was still kicking myself for letting my mother talk me into this outfit in the first place. Lacey was with the dance team, preparing for the halftime tribute in which she would hobble out onto the field and everyone would cheer for her, as if she’d been injured rescuing a houseful of orphaned kittens. Nikki had been sitting with me earlier, but somewhere in the second quarter she wandered off. I thought I saw her down by the fence around the field, leaning against someone much taller and broader than she, but they were half in shadow, and I couldn’t be certain.

  Out on the field, Jake seemed to be calling every play, and Randy was his go-to man. At least, that’s what I thought was going on. I really didn’t know that much about football, despite both Lacey’s and my mother’s encouragement to learn something about each sport in order to better hold a man’s interest.

  The field was in a little valley, lower than the surrounding land. From where I sat, near the top of the bleachers, the high school was to my left, the student parking lot directly behind me, and the tennis courts, baseball diamonds, and practice fields were off to my right. In front of me, past the unnaturally bright field, past the red track circling the field, past the dark visitor bleachers on the far side, past the farthest fence, the land rose sharply, its horizon defined by a highway. From the highway, you could look down and see the kelly-green field, the tiny players like bright dolls, the stands full of yellow. Drive a little farther and you’d see the back of the high school, the back lot near the auto shop, the windows of the English classrooms, the sad little garden that the biology teacher’s homeroom planted and forgot every year.

  Looking back from the bleachers, all you could see was the steady stream of white headlights and red taillights, whispering up and rumbling away into the cold September night. Every now and then a semitruck rumbled past, and the chunk-tunk of its axles echoed across the valley of the football field, hinting at a world beyond its blazing borders.

  I sighed, my breath coming out in a little cloud. If I had driven myself, I would at least be able to sit in my car for a while and warm up, but my mother had driven me so I could leave with Jake. Which meant that I was stuck up here on the frozen bleachers, waiting for the godforsaken game to end.

  “You look cold.”

  I jumped, nearly losing my balance on the cold metal. Shanti Kale climbed down from the bleachers behind me and sat down next to me. “Do you mind?” she asked, looking around.

  I followed her gaze. The only people sitting this high up were mothers in turtlenecks and old people who attended e
very single game. “No,” I said.

  “Aren’t you freezing?” I shook my head. She wore white gloves like the ones the cheerleaders wore. Her similarities to the cheerleaders ended there, though. Instead of a snug black-and-yellow uniform, she wore a black wool peacoat and long, well-fitted jeans that draped elegantly over her shoes. Her feet were tiny, I noticed, and once I noticed, I couldn’t stop peeking at them. She was probably five four, five five; how did she manage to stand on such little feet?

  “I used to go to school here, back when we were kids. I just assume no one remembers me.”

  “I remember,” I said. Maybe she’d moved away in sixth grade, but it was a small school and I wasn’t an idiot.

  The yellow crowd below us suddenly yelled and stood up. “Go go go!” Down on the field, someone in yellow was running with the ball. The crowd’s cheer steadily rose in pitch and volume, swelling collectively, and then turned into a disappointed “Awwww” when the runner was tackled on the twenty-yard line. I had a flash of being at the State Fairgrounds with my father, years earlier, standing near the racetrack. “You hear how the noise of the car sounds higher as it approaches, and lower as it goes away?” he asked. I took his hand, nodding solemnly, awed by the noise and the speed of the cars. “That’s called the Doppler effect. It happens with sound waves and light waves, both.”

  I should ask him for help with my physics paper, I thought idly. If I can ever catch him at home.

  “I have to confess: I’m kind of surprised you remember me,” Shanti said as the crowd sat back down.

  I was taken aback by her boldness, and I studied her in the cold night air. She raised her eyebrows and smiled as if waiting for me to agree. It took me a minute to pinpoint exactly what was so strange about this conversation, but then I realized that very few people outside my circle had randomly approached me in years.

  “We were in the same math class in fourth grade. Mrs. Dawson.” Shanti reached over and tugged at the blanket around my legs. “May I?” At a loss for words, I just shrugged.

  “You’re different than you were back then,” she said. “Am I allowed to say that?”

  “No,” I said, vaguely remembering a little girl playing Mercy with the boys at recess. She stood on the far side of the big oak tree, where the teachers couldn’t see, digging her nails into the backs of the boys’ hands until they conceded their loss. “I mean,” I said, “yes. You can say whatever you want. I don’t care.”

  “Okay.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “I just didn’t know if people knew that you used to be a . . .” She whispered, as if it were a curse word, “A nerd.” And then, in a normal voice continued, “You know, now that you’re a princess.”

  I was flustered. “No, I mean — I wasn’t exactly . . .”

  “It’s okay.” Shanti grinned. “I’ll keep your secret.”

  “Anyway, I’m not even a princess yet.”

  “‘Yet’ being the operative word,” she said. “You will be. Obviously. And Lacey. She was popular even when I lived here before, but now that she’s crippled? She’s like Princess Di.”

  “Um, she’s my friend.”

  “Really? I assumed it was more like a political marriage, you know, like France and England. Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII. That kind of thing.”

  “She was from Spain,” I said.

  “Ha, I knew you were a nerd!”

  I tucked the blanket more tightly around my legs. “I watched The Tudors.”

  She looked down at the field, seemingly captivated by the action. “They look so little down there, don’t they? They look positively adolescent.”

  She was right. The second string, especially, looked like little boys. Most of them had toothpick legs and shifted their weight uncomfortably, swaying back and forth in their bulky shoulder pads, trying to stay warm. I felt a little embarrassed for them.

  “It’s weird, you know, how everyone’s changed since sixth grade,” Shanti said. “Isn’t it weird to think that was six whole years ago? Like, it was a third of our entire lives ago. Back then, everyone was basically split into three groups: the cool kids, the totally hopeless loser kids, and everyone else. Now there are like a hundred groups and subgroups, a whole complex hierarchy of coolness and loserdom, and each strata is relative to each other one, you know? Like, there are the cool theater kids who, relative to you and your friends, are probably considered losers, but compared to, say, the marching band nerds, the cool theater kids are like gods. But then there are the less-cool theater kids, the dumpy kids and the awkward kids who don’t really make it into shows, or stay in the chorus, and they look up to the cool theater kids, but even those kids are cooler than the tech guys, who are totally hopeless cases, but not to themselves, because in their own minds they’re way cooler than the coolest theater kids. You know what I mean?”

  “I never really thought about it before,” I said. “But yeah, I know what you’re saying.”

  “Really?” She looked at me for a minute, her breath coming out in puffs. “Awesome. No offense or anything, but I don’t really like your friends. They were jerks in middle school, and they’re jerks now. I mean, Randy Thomas? What a dick. I guess I assumed you were the same as the rest of them — no offense — but then in creative writing . . . you seem different.”

  I didn’t know if I should be offended or pleased. I looked away, pretending to study the crowd. Down in front of the brick building where the announcers stayed warm in their booth, I saw a head of frosted curls bobbing above a leather jacket. Stella Austin. Normally I would make my way down to where she was sitting with Mr. Austin to chat for a bit about Jake’s game, but something kept me where I was, hidden high above the crowd.

  “You can tell me to shut up if I’m talking too much,” Shanti said.

  I didn’t say anything. She shifted her weight, bouncing her tiny foot against the bleacher seat in front of us.

  “You know what I remember?” she asked suddenly, turning toward me. The light caught on her little gold earrings.

  I rubbed my bare hands together, blowing little clouds of warmth into them. “What?”

  “In fourth grade, you found this little bat at recess. Remember? This little brown bat. It was sleeping on the outside wall of the school, low enough that anyone could touch it, but you wouldn’t let them. You stood guard over it for all of recess, and when the bell rang you went and got the janitor to watch it so nobody from the other grades could mess with it on their recesses. You kept saying that if anyone touched it, it would have to get its head cut off, and it didn’t deserve that. You said it was just sleeping, and just because it picked a bad place to sleep didn’t mean it should get its head cut off.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I forgot about that.” My mother had taken us to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago the summer before, and I’d completely fallen in love with the bats. Miranda was scared and my mother waited with her outside while I stayed in the bat room by myself. I watched them crawl around with their little hooked thumbs, amazed at the contrast between their grace in flight and their awkwardness on the ground. “It’s true, though,” I said. “If someone had touched it, they would have had to call Animal Control, and it would have gotten its head cut off to see if it had rabies.”

  “But it didn’t,” Shanti said. “You wouldn’t let anyone touch it.”

  I was silent for a minute. “I remember you, too,” I said at last. “You used to play Mercy with the boys.”

  She laughed. “I won, too. I kicked your boyfriend’s ass. I made him cry.” She laughed again, shaking her head. “I had anger issues.”

  Below us, the crowd stood once more, cheering. Down on the field, a yellow-and-black figure ran ahead of the pack, hunched over the ball in his arms. This time, the crowd’s cheer built into a crescendo without falling, as the runner crossed into the end zone.

  Shanti stood and stretched. “Well, I better find Ethan. I left him alone with his notebook. Who knows what kind of trouble he’s gotten himself into, without me.�
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  “Oh, is Ethan here?” I asked.

  She looked at me. “He is. . . . Were you looking for him?”

  “No.” I crossed my arms. “I mean . . . no.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Well, I’d better go, um, look for Nikki. Because she . . . needs . . . to find me.”

  “Sure, yeah.” She nodded, and then put her hand out as if she’d just had a thought. “Hey — Ethan and I are supposed to hang out tomorrow and write. You want to join us? You’re up for workshop next week, right?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Um, yeah. I mean, I am.”

  “You should come,” Shanti said. “We write every week. Seriously, it would be great.”

  Surprised, I looked down at my blanket. “Thanks.” I fiddled with the edge of fabric, rubbing it between my stiff fingers. “But I . . . um, I can’t. I’m supposed to . . . I’m busy.”

  “Okay,” she said easily, “that’s cool. But the offer stands. We write every Saturday. You’re more than welcome to join us, anytime, okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Totally. Thanks.”

  “All right,” she said. “Well, I’m going to go find Ethan. Nice talking to you. Seriously. Have a good night.”

  “Thanks,” I said again, though I doubt she heard me; she was already halfway down the bleachers, disappearing into the crowded night.

  After the game, I stood in the parking lot forever, waiting for Jake. When he finally emerged from the locker room, freshly showered and smelling like cologne, my mother’s voice echoed in my mind. Perhaps tonight will be the night. I shivered.