by Susan Juby
“Screw this action. Mr. R., man, I gotta go to the can.”
Mr. Richards nodded, distracted by the diagram of cycles of violence he was drawing on the board.
“Go ahead, Kevin.”
Kevin got up and looked down expectantly at Jack. Jack shrugged slightly and stayed seated.
Kevin growled a short, sharp swear word and stomped out.
Mr. Richards was so busy radiating compassion and understanding that he didn’t notice any of it.
I guess all in all it was an okay first day. It sure could have been worse. I’m a pariah at the regular school and an object of pity at the special school, but I’m still in one piece and that’s the main thing.
September 3
It turns out that I am allergic to really old makeup. My whole face is covered with scaly red blotches. Not only that, but apparently you aren’t supposed to put eyeliner over that tiny hole at the inside corner of your eye. I did, and now one of my tear ducts is blocked and swollen to pea size and very sore. It’s amazing, but I actually look more loathsome than I did right after the beating.
Mom has gone and made an appointment for me with some beautician friend of hers so I can learn how to put makeup on properly. I guess she thinks that the early eighties style isn’t working. She said she would buy me new makeup after my “makeover.” For such a granola, my mother is pretty into this whole face-paint thing. I can’t even speculate on what that means—I have a feeling, though, that it’s none too complimentary to me.
Her esthetician friend had better not be as flamingly incompetent as Irma. I’ve been through a lot lately. I’m too fragile to deal with another disaster.
I discovered something about high school today. A person can go from New and Noteworthy to Completely Invisible in just one day. Not one person in the regular school or the Alternative commented on my fashion statement, even though I wore completely different clothes than yesterday. Apparently a person has to dress like a hobbit to stay in the public eye for any length of time. Fine with me.
In Life Skills class today, when Mr. Richards turned his back to draw a diagram of the cycle of failure for young people, Kevin leaned over to me and whispered, “Hey, you little hose. Linda isn’t done with you yet.”
Jack giggled uneasily and pulled on his pot-leaf earring. Nobody else heard.
It could have been worse. One of them could have asked me out.
At the end of class Mr. Richards and Ms. Swinke took me into their office. I guess Mr. Richards had noticed Kevin threatening me yesterday. Either that or he realized that anyone who looks as alternative as me is probably going to experience some kind of violent opposition from mediocre minds. Or Bob’s been breaking his confidentiality agreement.
The Alternative school teachers’ staff room-counseling office is enough to make even the toughest POW crack, never mind someone like me who’s actually quite cowardly. I don’t know what the offices for regular teachers are like, but they put the Alternative teachers in what looks like a boiler room. It’s littered with private-life-of-teachers stuff everywhere—coffee cups with their first names and teacher jokes on them, reading materials—embarrassing stuff like that. I don’t see how it is possible to be effectively counseled in a room filled with personal possessions from teachers’ real lives. I’ve been in school for only two days, and even I know that most kids wish the teachers weren’t allowed out of the school at all. Sort of like I wish my parents couldn’t leave the house. It’s too bad adults can’t be kept in a closet somewhere until they are needed. Adult private lives are embarrassing for us and should be for them.
Mr. Richards and Ms. Swinke told me they’d been “looking into my situation” and wanted to know how they could help. They asked how my mother and I were “holding up.” They wanted to know if I’d heard from “Mrs. Freison since she went away.” On and on it went. They’d heard that I had “a tough time this summer.” I don’t know whether I was supposed to have some kind of emotional meltdown and confess all, just because I was so grateful they had taken the time to gossip about me. Besides, I don’t know what they figured they were going to do about my problems. Maybe send me over to the neighboring town with all new ID, and a false nose and glasses so I could make a new start. Mr. Richards hit eleven on the sincerity scale when he expressed his concern and desire to help. I was all demure and whispered selflessly about not wanting to cause any trouble.
If Mr. Richards (Doug) is painfully sincere, Ms. Swinke is a thousand times worse. She supposedly teaches history and science, but she’s always trying to work the fact that she’s a Wiccan into the conversation. Witch or not, she seems exactly like my mom’s power-to-the-goddess, hand-me-that-sage-I-want-to-appropriate-some-rituals friends. Today in class Ms. Swinke gave us a talk about keeping “our overwhelming negativity contained.” She thinks that the release of negative energy makes it hard for the “sensitive energies” in the class to open up. Ms. Swinke radiates a few negative vibes herself. Like the other New Agers I’ve met, she seems really angry about something, even though she puts on a big show about how peaceful and serene she is. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about a few New Agers going postal—gunning down everyone in their yoga center or whatever. Ms. Swinke could be the first. She certainly seems tightly wound enough.
She tried to Oprah me with some personal advice. “You know, Alice, I respect individuality and personal fashion statements as much as the next person, but yours, well …”
Mr. Richards gave her a look. “She looks cool. Urban. The clothes are not the problem.” Then he addressed me. “Don’t go changing.”
Ms. Swinke was offended. “Fine then, Doug. So what is the problem?”
“It’s not clothes, Carolyn. Alice just started. It’s going fine.”
“Maybe it’s clothes and certain behaviors in class. Like making faces when others speak.”
“Come on, Carolyn. Don’t you mean making faces when you speak? They all do that.”
She turned to face Mr. Richards, who is perhaps not as sensitive as I thought. “Excuse me?”
I had to step in before they could show me more of the cracks running through their professional relationship.
“Thanks. I, um, know what you’re getting at. And I appreciate it. Everything is fine.”
Then Mr. Richards floundered around trying to raise my self-esteem, and Ms. Swinke tried to unstick her sour face before excusing herself, saying she was sure Mr. Richards could handle the rest of the meeting.
What followed was definitely a three-points-for-effort performance from Mr. Richards, but even he dwindled off toward the end of the big violence-intervention talk.
“So you’ll let me know if you have any problems. Or you need any help?”
“Sure.”
“Or the police. You’ll contact them, if you get into trouble.”
“It’s fine. I’ll be fine,” I lied.
He might be athletic, but Linda could take him.
Later
I think Ms. Swinke or Mr. Richards must have called a few minutes ago. After the phone rang, my parents went into a big huddle. Usually they are embarrassingly open, but now they’ve gotten all furtive about issues to do with me. I actually appreciate it. I hate discussing my problems. It’s a bit too much like an afternoon talk show with all the bad grammar, cheap clothes, and name calling. It’s a mark of civilization to keep things bottled up inside.
They each made a point of stopping by my room and asking how my day was. And word for word, they both told me that they wanted me to “feel comfortable talking” to them about things. Then they went for a walk together. Dealing with me is bringing them closer together.
And I don’t want to disappoint them by telling them that I am pretty much old news at school. Nobody even notices me enough to bully me. Which is a relief. I guess.
September 5
Mom and I went to get my makeover done after school today. I don’t want to look like every other eighties retread at Smithers Senior Secondary, and extrem
ely professional model-style makeup is probably the route to go.
The makeup lady’s name is Zoë, and it turns out that she is another friend of the poorly shod, sexually alternative Finn. Zoë’s fashion statement is pretty much car-wreck-involving-flower-trucks. It’s one of those things where you can’t decide whether you’re delighted or nauseated. Zoë’s basement, which is where her Beautifying Studio/Salon is located, was stuffed with fake and dead flowers. There were flowers dried in bunches and hanging from the ceiling. Silk and plastic flowers thrust out of pots in every corner. Zoë herself was, mysteriously, since there was no prom in the area that I knew of, wearing a huge corsage. Even stranger was that, for a place without any fresh flowers, the salon smelled overpoweringly of roses. There was a bit of a chemical undertone to the scent, which may have been offgassing from the plastic flowers. After being in Zoë’s Beautifying Salon, I know what a corpse at a low-rent funeral must feel like.
Zoë was every inch the esthetician. No part of her looked natural. Her nails were cripplingly long and pink and false, her hair was short and a startling red found nowhere in nature. Most interestingly, her face didn’t appear to have any pores. I can’t imagine a woman who looked less like my mother, but they seemed to be friends. Maybe that’s what Mom means when she goes on about folk music having no barriers—everyone from hippies to cosmetic criminals can enjoy the tuneless sounds of folk music and consider themselves daringly artsy.
So after Zoë and Mom cooed at each other for a while, they turned to me—the project for the day. I probably did look a bit bland in that overblown basement, but who wouldn’t? Zoë had me sit in a pink vinyl hairdressing chair, and pumped it up until my face was almost on a level with hers. Mom stood at the counter staring intently as Zoë began draping pieces of colored fabric around my head and shoulders, to find my “tones,” she said. The colors she was using were all extremely ugly, which was a bit of a concern, as were her frequent comments on the inadequacies of my skin.
“Oh honey, you see all the green this brings out in you? See how you look sick? Well, you are definitely a sallow.”
A sallow, no less! Well, lucky me. Heaven forbid I should be, like, an ivory or something. No, I have to be sallow.
“Now this one shows all your blemishes. See that there? How blotchy you look? You are definitely not someone who can get away with this color.”
And on and on it went.
I have to admit, I was surprised to find out I was a spring. I thought I would be a dead of winter, for sure. I mean, I am temperamentally.
Having decided what season I was, she started unloading makeup from these little cases on the counter. I gag even to write it, but being made up made me feel like a princess. Not just a regular princess, but a fairy princess, you know, the type who can feel a pea under a whole stack of mattresses.
Maybe my parents stole me from a royal family somewhere and now my noble roots are starting to show. That could be why I’m so sensitive. And different. It could be the reason I don’t fit in. If only there were princess positions available. I would be perfect for the job.
The princess feeling must have been coming from deep inside me, because it sure wasn’t coming from the way Zoë was treating me. For a woman who looked like she didn’t have any bones under her skin, she was surprisingly businesslike about applying makeup. Brisk and efficient, she smoothed on the foundation, adding a darker shade on the sides of my “no need to call attention to our defects” nose. She took aim with the eyeliner like a surgeon. She contoured my lids with shades from the row of little containers filled with complementary shadows.
Her professionalism was so reassuring, I nearly fell asleep. If I ever have an operation, I hope the doctor is as good as Zoë the esthetician.
My lips were outlined just a bit outside where they actually ended and filled in with two types of lipstick. The blusher and powder went on last.
When I woke up enough to look in the mirror, I was startled. I looked like one of those freak child models. It wasn’t that I looked bad—I actually looked pretty attractive, in a put-together, matched-sweater-set kind of way, but I looked really old. I looked like a thirty-six-year-old first grader.
Well, I guess I didn’t look quite that bad. Just sort of like I should be wearing a pair of pumps four sizes too big and a rope of pearls hanging to my knees. My old eighties unprofessional makeup kind of matched the rest of me. This new makeup didn’t fit. I’ve noticed that makeup makes people who don’t usually wear it look much older until they are about sixty; then it does the opposite and makes them look like children. The backward effect only works if someone doesn’t usually wear the stuff. Grandma hardly ever puts makeup on, but when she does, she gets this look like she’s been in Mr. Dressup’s Tickle Trunk. It seems like the older people get, the harder it is to put on lipstick between the lines—probably because the lines start going all over the place.
I don’t think the whole properly applied makeup thing is going to work for me—I’ll either apply it badly or not at all. That was confirmed for me when fashion felon Finn came over and told me I looked pretty good with proper makeup rather than “painted up like a dog’s breakfast.” If he has anything positive to say about the new makeup, it must be pretty bad. I let Mom buy all the stuff, though. I mean, she was so into it and everything. I wouldn’t have wanted to disappoint her. It was kind of like when I took piano lessons from the nuns at the Catholic school for about two weeks. Mom got all excited because she was convinced I had finally found something I liked and that I was going to become this genius child prodigy with piano-playing, superachiever type friends and everything. I knew after a couple of lessons that I didn’t like the piano much, but I kept going because the nun who taught me had this unusual smell that I wanted to identify (I do that sometimes; it’s sort of a hobby). So when Mom went out and spent all her dough on a piano, I didn’t try to stop her. I figured that would have been cruel. So we got the piano, and of course I didn’t play it, and now we just use it for sorting coupons. Dad keeps them filed between the keys. MacGregor uses the piano instructional books for pressing leaves and stuff. Mom was pretty annoyed at me for not following through, but I don’t see why. It’s our nicest piece of furniture, and she had her moment of thinking I had a constructive hobby.
Oh yeah, and on the topic of not following through, I haven’t forgotten about Fellowship. I’m on the last page of the Prologue, but other culture is currently getting in the way of my reading. Bob wanted a Life Goal update. Now that my big one is accomplished and I’m back in school, I had to give him something, so I told him about becoming a cultural critic. Being the helping professional that he is, he wanted to help, so for our last session he brought in this movie called The Unbelievable Truth. It was excellent and funny and about being your own person no matter what anyone thinks, and I hate to admit it, but maybe there’s a reason all the girls at the Teens in Transition think Bob’s great besides the fact that he has a good slouch and he looks a little French. I mean, how many counselors would allow videos during sessions? Bob let other people in to watch and someone made microwave popcorn and a social worker candidate kept the kids in the play area so even the single moms got a break. And all for me. Lucky I have such good taste. If it had been a movie for Violet, we’d probably have been watching a documentary about some head-in-the-oven artist.
NEW FRONTIERS
September 6
I am very busy. I’ve been trying to listen to a tape that Bob lent me so I can be more cultural. But the music, by some band called Bauhaus, is so depressing I can barely breathe. If this is what Bob listens to, no wonder he dresses like the world’s gloomiest undertaker. And there are too many distractions around this house. My dad is having his poker night here. It’s quite a sight to see all the least productive men in town getting together. Mom won’t admit it’s a poker night. She calls it a men’s meeting. Some woman misheard Mom talking about it a while ago and thought she said “Mensa meeting,” and now everyone thinks that
we have this gathering of geniuses at our house once a month.
Fat chance. I guess the rumor just adds to the mystique of all these men without visible means of employment. The only elite thing about Dad’s poker group is their incredibly advanced responsibility-shirking techniques.
I actually prefer Dad’s friends to Mom’s. His are meaner and pretty funny, at least until they get too drunk. Then they’re just sloppy. In fact, I probably learn more about life from sitting around listening to my dad’s friends talk than I do anywhere else. It’s one of the benefits of not having a peer group. I get to hear how they do things in the big leagues.
For instance, one of my main models for how to run a love life is my dad’s friend Finn. He’s here tonight, in his bad shoes. Finn is absolute proof that stereotypes aren’t a good way to categorize people. The whole gay-man-equals-clean-handsome-and-well-dressed thing has nothing to do with Finn. He has the worst fashion sense I’ve ever seen, and coming from this town, that’s really saying something.
It’s not just the vinyl-tasseled loafers all buckled down at the heel. It’s the pilled polyester dress pants, the light-blue dress shirt, and shiny green curling jacket with his name in fuzzy letters on the back that put Finn into the farthest reaches of bad taste. Oh yeah, and his perm. The man perms his own hair. There is no way MacGee does Finn’s hair—it’s a disgrace even Irma would be ashamed of.
Dad swears that Finn just has unfortunate-looking hair and that I’m unnecessarily shallow and judgmental. He is always pointing out how many friends and “friends” (eyebrows meaningfully inclined) Finn has, as though that is some kind of proof that Finn has decent taste and doesn’t perm his hair. I say his popularity has everything to do with the fact that Finn will drink with anyone, anytime. That’s a real bonus in a town where people allow nondrinking only in small children and religious fanatics.
One thing you can say about Finn is that he’s honest. Once he was dating a dying man. I can’t remember just what was wrong with the guy—Reginald, I think his name was—but whatever it was, it was fatal. Anyway, Reginald came to Smithers to visit after meeting Finn in a bar in Prince George. Reginald, although good-looking and terribly ill, was apparently the most annoying man.