Hope in a Jar

by Beth Harbison

  Now suddenly Olivia was this big Lip Smacker expert.

  Please.

  Allie looked at the things she’d poured out of her own purse. Four Lip Smackers (Watermelon, Sour Grapes, Dr Pepper, and Piece a Cake, which she was never going to trade), a roller bottle of Love’s Rain Scent perfume, a broken Snoopy pencil, a Hello Kitty sticker she’d put on the outside of her purse but that was now a gummy mess, a “teen-sized” Tampax tampon (hope sprang eternal), and two dollar bills.

  Fifty cents more, plus tax, and she could just go to the mall and buy her own 7UP Lip Smacker, if they had them.

  Unused.

  “Fine,” Allie sniped, tossing her light blond hair, which she knew Olivia envied. She walked over to the mirror and looked at her image in between pictures of Scott Baio, Shaun Cassidy, and Robby Benson, which she’d taped around the perimeter.

  She didn’t really like Shaun Cassidy as much as everyone else did but it would have been embarrassing to admit she still liked David Cassidy, now that he was ancient.

  “I don’t want the stupid thing anyway,” Allie said. “I was just trying to help you.” It was mean. She knew it was mean and she didn’t want to be mean, but Olivia was being such a stubborn jerk. “It makes your lips silver.”

  “It does?” Olivia’s image appeared in the mirror next to her. Right under Shaun Cassidy’s crotch. Her red hair was parted in the middle and lying lank down both sides of her head, framing her pale white face. Allie had tried over and over to get her to use a blow-dryer and some Body on Tap shampoo to give her hair some bounce, and maybe a little bit of blush, but Olivia was determined to stay mousy, apparently.

  She smeared some of the lip gloss onto her lips, then frowned. Her brown eyes met Allie’s blue eyes in the mirror. “No it doesn’t.”

  “Yes it does.” Allie brushed her hair and put it into barrettes on each side of her head, like that picture of the model Cindy Harrell in the latest issue of Seventeen. “Totally silver. They’re not even lip color anymore. I don’t want it.” She turned and flounced back to her bed, bouncing down onto the softness.

  Olivia wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, looked at it for a minute, obviously seeing the very sheer frosty tint, then joined Allie on the bed.

  For a moment they lay in silence, staring at the ceiling. It still had thumbtack holes from when Allie had experimented briefly with putting a picture of John Travolta from Grease over her bed. It had gotten really creepy, really fast.

  “I’m still not trading,” Olivia said after a few minutes. “I like it.”

  “Fine.” Allie leaned back against her pillows, half admiring Olivia for finally standing up for something, yet half seething that she was standing up for keeping something that she hadn’t even cared about before Allie wanted it. “By the way, I want those two pictures of Leif Garrett back.”

  “Why?”

  The wind rose outside, bringing the springtime scent of the viburnum blossoms under her window into the room. “Because I like him again.”

  “You said he looked like he smelled funny and he had lizard eyes.”

  “Well, now I don’t think so.” But he did. He totally looked like he smoked pot and smelled like pee. “You can have your Parker Stevenson back.” She gestured idly at the picture of Parker Stevenson that was taped to her closet door. Top right, over in the corner, because she didn’t really like blond guys that much, including Leif Garrett. She’d only done the trade because everyone else thought he was cute and wanted the picture and since Allie was Olivia’s best friend she got first dibs.

  “You’re just saying this because I won’t give you the 7UP,” Olivia said, exactly right.

  But Allie wasn’t about to admit it. Olivia always had her figured out. Allie was sort of sick of it. “That’s not true. I’m just saying it because I want the pictures back. You said we could trade back if I wanted to.”

  Olivia thought about it for a moment. “Well, you can’t have them.”

  Allie was surprised. When they’d made the trade, Olivia had said she was only doing it as a favor and she didn’t like Leif Garrett. “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t have them anymore.”

  Allie couldn’t believe it. Those things were like gold in the trading arena of Cabin John Junior High. No one with any brains at all would trade them without thinking very carefully about it. Unless, of course, they were trading them to their best friend, who said they could have them back if they wanted. “What did you do with them?”

  Olivia’s face went pink, which totally made her lips look even more frosty by contrast. “My mother used them to line Flicker’s cage.”

  Allie’s jaw dropped. Flicker was Olivia’s cockatiel, and there was never a messier, or meaner, bird in the history of the world. If Leif Garrett had been at the bottom of that cage for even two minutes, he would be unrecognizable now. “Are you serious?”

  Olivia nodded, pressing her lips tight together.

  “Did you tell her what she’d done?”

  Olivia nodded again, her face growing redder until finally she burst out laughing. “If he didn’t smell funny before, he does now.”

  Allie gave a shriek of laughter. “Oh. My. Gosh. Do you know what Vickie Freedman would have given you for those pictures? Like, anything you wanted! She is in love with Leif Garrett.” In truth, that was probably the reason both Allie and Olivia had tried to like him and had stopped at nothing in their fights to get the pictures everyone else wanted, even if they didn’t.

  “Vickie Freedman wouldn’t talk to me even if I had Leif Garrett himself with me.”

  It was probably true. “You’re lucky she won’t talk to you. Today she asked me if I was wearing Toughskins jeans in front of, like, everyone. And I’m not, they’re Zena. But now everyone thinks I still wear Toughskins and Underoos.”

  “Underoos?”

  Allie nodded miserably. “I heard her say that while they walked away.”

  “She’s such a jerk. Just because she has Sassoon jeans she thinks she’s so cool.”

  Inspiration hit Allie and she sucked in her breath. “You should give those Leif Garrett pictures to her now.”

  “But they’re a mess!”

  “Exactly. Stick them in her locker anonymously.” She had the entire picture in her head, folding the pictures, wedging them through the vent holes in the locker, hearing them drop to the floor on the other side . . .

  They dissolved into fits of laughter again.

  Allie was relieved. She didn’t like fighting with Olivia. School sucked bad enough without having her best friend mad at her.

  “Do you really think the 7UP Lip Smacker makes my lips look silver?” Olivia asked, when they had calmed down.

  “Well . . . only if you use too much of it.” Allie got up and took Olivia by the arm. “Come here. Let me show you.” Unlike Olivia, Allie was an aficionado of Teen and Seventeen and, when she could get away with it, occasional issues of Glamour and Mademoiselle. She knew all about makeup and what worked and what didn’t.

  She sat Olivia down at her dressing table, dipped a Kleenex in Pond’s cold cream, and handed it to Olivia. “Wipe your face clean and we’ll do a makeover.”

  Olivia did. “But not too much makeup. My mom and Donald will kill me if I come home looking like a hooker.” Donald was Olivia’s newish stepfather, and the reason she and her mom had moved to Potomac last year. He owned a gas station by Montgomery Mall and had a girl working behind the cash register who looked exactly like a hooker, so Allie doubted he would care if Olivia wore makeup.

  “I’m not going to make you look like a hooker. God.” Allie put her hand on her hip. “Why would you even say that? Do you think I look like a hooker?”

  Olivia frowned and looked at her. “Are you even wearing makeup?”

  “No”—her mother wouldn’t let her wear it out of the house—“but I mean when I do put it on. Do I look like a hooker then?”

  Olivia screwed up her face. “Well.” She let out a short br
eath. “There was that one time—”

  “Apart from then.”

  “Oh.” Pause. “No.”

  “See? I know exactly what I’m doing.” She took a sip from the Orange Shasta can that had been sitting there since they came upstairs an hour ago. She held it out. “Want some?”

  Olivia took it, while Allie opened the drawer and riffled through the old cosmetics her mother had given her to “play dress up” with plus the Butterfly Collection she’d seen advertised in Seventeen and had begged for until her mother finally relented under the condition that Allie didn’t tell her father. Some of the stuff wasn’t too bad. She started with a Merle Norman cream base in Bisque.

  “That’s too dark!” Olivia objected, looking for her image behind Allie’s arm.

  “Right, so I’m using it to make you look tan. Trust me.” Now she had to put her money where her mouth was, as the Close-Up commercials said, and somehow make this dark, streaky mess work.

  “Okay. You’re right.” Olivia sat back after some time. “I do look tan.”

  “Yup.” Allie spread the base over Olivia’s sharp little face, blending and blending, just like they said to in Teen, until finally the dark color approximated a tan. At least until just under Olivia’s jawline. She had to stop somewhere. Olivia was so pale that in order for this color to look completely natural on her, Allie would have to paste it over her entire body.

  But she was making a point, not a prom queen.

  Next she took out a tube of Bonne Bell red gel cheek color and swiped it across Olivia’s cheeks.

  It shouldn’t have surprised her, but she marveled at how pretty Olivia’s face looked with the strategic coloring instead of the early-spring, still-in-school pallor they both had.

  “If I had enough money,” Allie said, “I could get the good stuff. You know, the things they sell at those glass counters at Hecht’s? If you’re rich enough, you can just buy yourself pretty.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I’m telling you, they make stuff that performs miracles. Seriously.”

  “I wish I were rich.”

  “Me, too.” Allie stepped back so Olivia could see in the mirror properly. “All right, now, see how you look like you’ve been at Ocean City for a week?”

  Olivia’s eyes widened and she put a thin hand to her cheek. “You’re pretty good at this.”

  “You could be, too.” Allie was confident she would still be better at it, though. “It’s just like art. Only instead of drawing on paper, you’re doing it on your face.”

  Olivia laughed. “Too bad I suck at drawing people.”

  “Yeah, but the face is already there. You’re just coloring it in.” In a final gesture of truce, Allie took out Olivia’s 7UP Lip Smacker. “Now when you put this on”—she spread it on Olivia’s lips—“the shimmery color makes you look even more tan. See?” She had to admit, she’d impressed even herself with this experiment.

  It had taken her a while, but she’d figured out the tan skin/pale lip trick while studying a picture of Farrah Fawcett in a Fabergé Organics shampoo ad when she was trying to make her hair look like Farrah’s.

  “Cool.” Olivia turned her face side to side, watching herself, then raised her chin. “But there’s a line.”

  “I know.” Allie squeezed onto the chair next to Olivia. Outside the window behind the mirror, the cherry tree waved its green spring leaves in the breeze. “I didn’t have enough to do your whole body so I had to stop there.”

  Olivia giggled, looked at their images together, then handed Allie the 7UP Lip Smacker. “You should have this. I never get tan, no matter what I do, but you’re like Malibu Barbie all summer. It will look great on you.”

  Allie wanted to snatch it before Olivia changed her mind, but her conscience stopped her. “You don’t have to do that. I just showed you how good it looks on you.”

  “But I’m never tan.”

  “You can get tan.” Allie took the Shasta again. “We should lie out.”

  “No, I just burn.”

  “Then fake it. Use QT or Sudden Tan.”

  “No, they make you orange.” She thrust the Lip Smacker at Allie. “Take it.”

  So she did. “You can have my Piece a Cake one,” she offered, halfheartedly.

  “Really?” Olivia squealed.

  Uh-oh. There was no getting out of this now. If Allie admitted she was just being polite, then she’d look like a total jerk.

  “Sure.”

  Olivia ran to the bed and picked it up. She had the lid off and the tube halfway to her lips when she paused, hand in midair. “I can’t.”

  “Huh?”

  “You got this when you went to Florida. You can’t even find this flavor here. You should keep it.”

  Allie was so moved by Olivia’s thoughtfulness that she almost cried. She could never be that nice. No matter how she tried, or how much she wanted to be, she would never be the kind of person who could give up something she really really wanted, right when it was in the palm of her hand, just because someone else wanted it, too.

  But she could be the kind of person who could share.

  “I have an idea,” she said, rummaging through the drawer of makeup. There she found two old Lip Smackers that were used right down to the bottom of the plastic casing. She hadn’t thrown them out because she could still use a pen cap or a Q-Tip to get the last of it out.

  Instead, she went to the bathroom and came back with a length of dental floss, which she used to cut the 7UP Lip Smacker and the Piece a Cake Lip Smacker right in half. Then she put the halves in the old tubes and handed one to Olivia. “You’ll just have to remember that the one that says Bubble Gum is actually Piece a Cake.”

  Olivia looked her in the eye. “Thank you.”

  Why was it that Olivia sometimes seemed so much older? She was a good three inches shorter than Allie—though, granted, Allie was tall—and she only weighed ninety-three pounds. It was so weird how she was able to make Allie feel like a guilty little kid sometimes.

  “You know, you really should be a model,” Allie said knowledgeably.

  Olivia’s cheeks turned pink. “I could never be a model!”

  “Yes you could. Did you look at yourself?”

  Olivia screwed up her face. “You’re the one who’s really into that stuff anyway. When I grow up I’m going to travel the world.”

  “I don’t think you can do that for a living,” Allie said. “Travel the world.”

  “I don’t care, I’ll find a way to get paid for it. Maybe I’ll work as a waitress in a whole bunch of different cafés or something and just earn money as I go.”

  “That sounds fun,” Allie said, but she didn’t think it did at all.

  Olivia nodded, though, clearly determined. “Or maybe I’ll be a photographer. But one thing I’m not going to do is get a regular job that goes every day so I’m home only like three hours a week the way my mother is.”

  “I thought your mother liked her job.” Allie would have liked to work at Hecht’s. Then she’d get a discount on everything, including the cosmetics department.

  Olivia shrugged. “She never goes anywhere, never does anything, never sees anything. The other night she said she’s never been out of the United States. Ever.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “Well, me neither, but I want to.”

  “Okay.” Allie thought about it. “Hey, maybe you could be a stewardess and fly all over the place.”

  “I don’t know.” Olivia frowned, thought, then gave a slow nod. “Maybe so.”

  “You should think about it. Seriously.”

  The squabble over, Allie went to her record player, picked out their favorite Blondie record, and put it on. The record skipped, so Allie had taped some quarters onto the needle, which stopped it from skipping but slowed it down a little.

  They sang “Call Me” to their own drummer.

  Allie hated gym class more than any other class, including history and biology. It wasn’t
the activity she disliked—she’d always enjoyed playing games outdoors—it was the fact that they had to go to the locker room and change into completely different clothes in order to go to gym.

  For one thing, the locker rooms were depressing. The school had been built in the fifties and the locker rooms hadn’t been changed since then. They smelled of old pipes and mildew and the misery of every other girl who’d hated gym class.

  It seemed like there were a lot of them.

  Plus, it was embarrassing to have to change clothes in front of everyone else. Like, really embarrassing.

  When Allie had talked to her mom about it, her mom had patiently pointed out that everyone probably felt similarly about it and so everyone had their own worries and weren’t thinking about Allie’s.

  For a while that thought had helped Allie a lot.

  Until the day It happened.

  They were changing back into their day clothes after class. Allie was struggling to pull her jeans on because they were getting a little too small. So it was when she had them wedged around her thighs that she heard Vickie cry, “Oh, my God, Allie has poo on her underpants!”

  For a moment, Allie froze.

  What Vickie had said was that Allie had Pooh, as in Winnie-the-Pooh, on her underpants because it was true. In an uncharacteristic moment of whimsy, Allie had let her mother talk her into the adorable underwear and undershirt set. She’d pictured herself wearing them to sleep on hot summer nights, but in fact they made her so happy every time she saw the little bear’s picture that she actually wore them whenever she felt a little down.

  But that didn’t matter now—and it certainly wasn’t going to cheer her up in the future—because what everyone else heard Vickie say was that Allie had poo on her underpants.

  “What?” someone asked.

  With hands that suddenly felt like they were made of mashed potatoes, Allie fumbled to pull her pants up.

  “She does?” someone else asked.

  It was like the voices were coming from everywhere, and nowhere. Allie was so blinded by tears she didn’t want anyone else to see that she kept her focus forward, yanking the zipper up and grabbing her shoes in hand.

  “Oh, my God!” Giggles erupted. A lot of giggles.