Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth

by K. Dawn Goodwin

  “Can we… help you?”

  I backed away, and this attracted the pity of some homely-looking nice girls, like stray dogs to fresh carrion.

  “Hi, what’s your name?” one asked me. Oh no, I thought. Her clothes look as dumb as mine. But I knew what she was thinking: We can’t leave the new girl all alone. That would be mean, and mean would be unthinkable for nice girls. Which was why I couldn’t tell them out loud that I wanted to hold out for better friends. My edict was to be supernice, to wallow in shared niceness with man and God, who was also supernice, and to continue smiling nicely while sinners made haste upon my morning execution.

  We lined up to go inside to get our locker assignments. I’d always dreamed about this moment. Having my very own locker. I would pad it with carpeting and drill in shelving, fill it with cozy nooks and safe crannies where my stuffed animals could dwell in peace and safety. But that dream had never included living adjacent to Niles, a boy terrorist in a pink alligator shirt.

  “Nice jacket,” he choked, slamming his locker closed. “What are you, Bozo the Clown?”

  Apparently my charms, much like my fashion sense, had been cultivated by Jesus Christ and were appropriate for small, private school audiences only. I was no longer the Lord’s sexiest spokeswoman. I was more like John the Baptist, staggering out of the wilderness and into a soirée already in progress. Bits of locust guts dangled from my beard. The patrons fanned away my stink.

  I felt it was best to ignore all of these shocking slap downs, because Jesus hath said: turn thee thy other cheek. Soon, mine were flipping like a roll of toilet paper. Jesus forgot to point out that, when you turn that much cheek, sinners tend to wipe their asses with your face. Niles thought he’d died and gone to the all-you-can-eat power-trip buffet. I found him waiting for me every morning by the classroom door, as if an insult delivered early ensured him good luck all day.

  “Oh, those shoes are cool,” he’d coo. “Where’d you get them, Dorks R Us?”

  His sidekick leaned in to examine the nondesigner tag sewed to the butt of my jeans.

  “FabGirl?” he read and sputtered. “What’s up, fag girl?”

  Moments before I was assigned a “helper” from the Newcomer Club to show me the ropes, I prayed—harder than I’d yet prayed in my young life—for God to please let it be someone Niles respected. Please, dear God, set the tone for my life. Please. I beg of thee.

  But God had a nice girl in mind, someone He approved of, someone with creased slacks and no friends. As she escorted me around that first week, I tried to pull away from our shared space so that maybe my head would be mistaken for another body. Every time she smiled at me I smiled back, and my Christian love recoiled and shriveled.

  Then Drew, a really cute jerk, discovered my Michael Jackson notebook with the King of Pop posing on the front in his gorgeous yellow shirt and bow tie.

  “Oh my God,” he moaned, holding it up. “She likes Michael Jackson?”

  A hush of disbelief went over the sea of white faces in my classroom.

  He tossed it to another boy as if it had bit him.

  “Gross!” he yelled.

  I watched the stripping happen in slow motion, shaking in my boots. I stooped to gather my fallen papers, wondering if they were planning on killing me next. Instead, the boys dragged my notebook to the corner, where they devoured it whole. Drew stretched out on the floor, trying to get more comfortable as his friends huddled over his shoulders. Occasionally, they found a really juicy page where I’d written God knows what, and their muffled laughter crackled like gunfire. I looked up to see their squinty faces leering back at me, like having a front-row seat to my own disembowelment. But I didn’t want to stare at them—that would be so rude—so I quickly looked away.

  How had I been programmed to like things Avon people hated? I was eager to accept punishment and make changes to my clearly unkempt personality. Panicked, I dumped my Heritage Christian sandals, ripped the labels off my myriad of Michael Jackson accessories, and frantically prayed for something, anything with Benetton on it. In Avon, Benetton was like sacrificial blood. If you had it over your doorway—or on your back—you pretty much got a free pass from anyone, even the Angel of Death. I looked at my pants and felt an icy chill. They were the polar opposite of Benetton. They were a direct threat to my life.

  The clothes, the clothes, the clothes—this was my non-stop high-pitched mental frequency. Around my head, cuffs and buttons and hems all danced like visions of a sugarplum massacre. Cute was the Antichrist. It had to be cool, it had to be expensive, it had to resemble MTV or Young Miss magazine, it had to pass muster with the popular girls at the caramel center of the playground huddle. What normal nine-year-old girls did before bed, I did not know. But I was obsessing before a full-length mirror, cat-walking every possible shirt-pant combination, each accessory like a colored wire on a bomb only Jesus or MacGyver could decode.

  There wasn’t exactly a whole lot to choose from in my closet. With the new and improved house came a hefty-hefty mortgage, leaving me to create the latest fashion out of whatever was handy. I mined every closet in the house for ideas and accessories. Maybe my brother’s plaid button-down with my sister’s red leg warmers? If only I could take in Dad’s cardigan on the sides and make it a little more, y’know, Christian Lacroix. If only I could sew like Molly Ringwald, making complete ensembles out of scraps of fabric that I’d pulled out of my ass. The only thing I could do was safety-pin my pants into slightly different shapes. This required zero know-how and zero time, and usually stayed together great. As long as I stood still all day. At recess, I wasn’t sure which was worse—the fact that I was the last kid picked for the kick ball team or the fear that a safety pin would come loose and reveal my pants as bell-bottoms.

  “What are you doing to your clothes?” Mom asked while I pinned myself up for school. I was desperate to make my loose, stretched-out turtleneck appear tight to my neck. I had to make my jeans peg-legged. I had to pin extra pins inside the cuff in case a pin gave way. I looked back at Mom, who was wearing a shirt she’d had since 1972. There was no way to explain.

  I stared at myself in the mirror. Niles had now worked out a time-share in my heart with Jesus, so it was becoming harder and harder to figure out where the imparted Truth was coming from. You are ugly, he sneered when I put on my new red Reebok moon boots.

  No I am not! I could be a trendsetter.

  Yeah. A trend for ugly.

  I wore them to school anyway, to see if I could. I chewed my nails to nubs. I stuck a magnetic mirror inside my locker, so when Niles started in, I could have something to turn to, and blame.

  “Oh, my God,” said Niles, dry heaving. He grabbed as many of his buddies as he could, bringing them over and pointing under my desk. “Look.”

  Ignore them, ignore them, ignore them, I chanted.

  Later, in the lunch line, I stood behind Benjamin, a freckle-faced kid with bed head and ketchup crusted on his upper lip. He turned around to stare at me.

  “Hey,” he said, “you’re kinda ugly.”

  It was like prophecy. It was like a snap of lightning, draining the life and color out of everything I was, everything I’d ever been, everything I would never be again after that moment, amen.

  “Thanks,” I whispered, shocked, thinking no.

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  I couldn’t fathom the bluntness. Any Christian knows that when you meet someone who’s ugly, you don’t tell her. You just change the subject or something.

  I wasn’t ugly. I was still me. I still had potential to be fabulous, right?

  I needed to look in a mirror immediately, but there was none handy. I was blocked in by a stream of faces holding their lunch trays. What about her? What about the white girl with the Afro, or that one, with two rows of front teeth? Why hadn’t Benjamin called them ugly? Why only me? What had happened? My future glared back at me like a Dead End sign, erasing my purpose, blotting me off the map.

  I
picked up the first of many plastic lunch trays as Ugly Girl. Behind the counter, a lunch lady was taking a box cutter to a parcel marked Grade-B Food. Second rate, like me, like the cafeteria food I so enjoyed. I put my Jell-O next to the gray beefburger, kept my eyes on the floor tiles, and disappeared into the din.

  Popular Avon girls were mean, but popular Avon boys made them look like fluffy kittens. These boys were a living turd sandwich of unadulterated misery. They’d even formed their own elitist club, the Johnnies, whose charter was to police and reinforce the female pecking order, each and every business day.

  Ginormica, our teacher, was like their very own wet nurse. Tired and slow moving, she spent most of that school year sitting behind her desk resting her chin on her hand, digressing from spelling so she could fawn over the social hierarchy. Ashley, the most popular girl in our grade, was her absolute fave.

  “Isn’t she just cute as a button?” Ginormica gushed, as the rest of us homely forgettables turned obediently toward Ashley to admire her.

  Since Ginormica had trouble moving around, she always had an errand that someone needed to run for her. But before choosing Ashley to do it, she wasted a lot of time asking for volunteers.

  “Who wants to take this to Mrs. Jones in second-grade?”

  Cue the sea of raised hands and the eager but futile chorus of oo! pick me!

  “Ashley, c’mere, kiddo,” she called out, letting all the air out of the room.

  As Ashley stood to take her rightful place above us, Ginormica beamed.

  “You’re just so pretty.” She smiled.

  “That’s because her mom’s on the board,” someone whispered.

  The board? I had no idea what the board was, but I pictured a wooden ledge on a shelf none of us would ever be able to reach.

  “Why don’t you go with her, Carrie,” Ginormica continued. Carrie was one half of a set of identical twins in our grade and thus had been granted automatic celebrity status. She didn’t even seem to have a pulse, or need one. She and her twin Christy were born and bred for the sole purpose of escorting Ashley on her errands to the lower school. I watched them both leave, caressing their meticulously preppie turtlenecks with my eyes. There were no seams along the backs of their necks where a safety pin held their heads in place.

  I spent a lot of time staring at Ashley from afar, wondering why every man, woman, and child was under her spell. It wasn’t just her or her propensity to be both friendly and cold at the same time—that was easy—or the fact that there was nothing interesting enough about her face to make fun of. The magic ingredient seemed to have more to do with her choice in bodyguards.

  Like Ellie.

  Ellie was by far the most vicious female ever documented in the wild, and on the playground, she never left Ashley’s side. Sure she was lanky bordering on awkward, but her cool was always resurrected by her ability to shoot pure evil from her fingertips.

  Everything you needed to know about her was communicated in the sideways slant of her ’80s bob. It was shaved at the nape of her neck but hung over one eye in the front, so that every time she needed to see, she cocked her head like a shotgun. I’d never seen this haircut before, no one else had it, and its feminine coolness terrified me. I knew to give her a wide, respectful girth. And revere Ashley like a god.

  At recess, I kept to myself, sitting on a lone swing. Sometimes Jimmy, the kid with Down syndrome, came and sat down next to me. Jimmy had no idea who I was, but he still liked me. I liked being liked. Plus, when he looked at me I didn’t have to stress because Jimmy didn’t care about the circles under my eyes or that my pants were gay. He had a rash all over his forehead and couldn’t keep his tongue in his mouth. Such a relief. We talked a little, and the unexpected fellowship filled me with a strange sense of purpose. I had not realized the breadth of my martyrdom! God must be so proud of me! Blessed are the persecuted, the Bible said. But still, I totally got why Jesus stayed safely invisible, having been previously humiliated and tortured by humans and not planning to repeat the experience anytime soon.

  The Bible taught me that when Jesus returned to earth, it would be in a blinding flash of Glory, the sky peeling back, the best pyrotechnics ever seen, and His Chosen—like me—would be lifted up into the air. If only it would happen right now, with all the cool kids standing slack-jawed as they faded into the background fog.

  “You fwend?” Jimmy asked. “I you fwend.”

  It was the most genuine thing anybody had said to me since I arrived in all-white-meat suburbia, but I couldn’t answer. I was roused from my humanitarian work by a passing swarm in my peripheral vision. It was a writhing mob of boys who looked to be fighting, until I heard one of them scream, “Ashley!”

  I realized, with such a searing and acidic jealousy I could barely breathe, that they were all trying to get to Ashley. To kiss her. To kiss Ashley. She was being mauled by the junior paparazzi. Nine-year-old nerds and jocks alike, all united in a common cause to reject me.

  “Get OFF!” Ashley shouted at them, wrenching free and bounding off, her straight, shiny hair going with her. It swung back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, hypnotizing me. I studied the way she ran, wondering what mystical Benetton pheromones emanated from her ultra-Avon pores.

  “WAIT UP!” screamed Ellie, chasing after her.

  “She might be thirsty!” cried the rest of her ladies-in-waiting.

  “Oh my God, we need to check on her!”

  Look at that, I marveled. A posse of devotees. So familiar. I used to have… one of those. That used to be me. Holy moly. My old life. Stolen from me.

  Why hast thou forsaken me? I prayed silently.

  The boys dispersed from their mob and passed through the swing set on their way to the soccer field, laughing and hocking loogies in the dust near my shoes. I leaned to examine the spit splat on my toe.

  “Hey, look!” Drew said, nodding at us. “Jimmy has a new girlfriend.”

  Mortified, I ignored the laughter and stood up, acting like I needed to stretch my legs, or possibly survey the chain-link fence, the vast borders of my kingdom.

  “Well,” I told Jimmy cheerfully not looking at him, “gotta go.”

  I wasn’t exactly loyal.

  Not even when I made my first girlfriend, a kid named Margaret.

  Margaret had round glasses and a nonexistent clothes budget like mine, and had committed the cardinal sin against all of Avon: not being thin. Her chances of being chosen for the field hockey team in the sky were slim. But Margaret was different from all the other nice girls in that she was also a real live human being. She could make me laugh, and shared my secret fondness for Jesus, naked Barbies, and simmering with vengeful fantasies.

  But it’s not like my devotion meant I had the guts to defend her. Like when Ellie waylaid her on the playground one day, flanked by the Johnnies, I decided it was best to do what any decent disciple would do when faced with an imminent crucifixion: Run away. Act casual. Blend into the crowd.

  The Johnnies romped and howled around her like a pack of well-groomed, rabid dogs. They’d captured some hapless boy and were trying to corral him toward Margaret.

  “We’re going to marry the fat kids!” Ellie sang, cocking her hair. The jaws on their alligator shirts were snapping as they laughed, their eyes sharp as fishhooks.

  What should I do, I prayed.

  When no answer came, I decided to hang back and practice turning my cheeks.

  “You have to kiss,” one of the boys taunted, pushing the captured boy toward her. Ellie’s wicked grin flashed as she presented Margaret with her spelling book, held flat on her upturned palms like a Bible.

  “I’m qualified to marry them,” she announced to the crowd. “My dad’s a minister.”

  It was hard to believe, but true. Ellie was a real live preacher’s daughter. And yet, the Jesus she’d apparently been required to worship was nothing like the fundamentally repressed do-gooder version Margaret and I got stuck with. While ours left explicit warnings a
bout being kind and doing unto others, Ellie’s granted free rein to be a ruthless bitch. Lucky for her, in Avon this was the highest calling possible.

  “Stop it,” the chubby boy growled, trying to elbow his way out of their hands.

  From the sidelines, my heart raced, but thankfully the blood in my limbs had slowed to a tarlike crawl, prohibiting me from taking one step toward the eye of the storm. Margaret’s pain was too dark and sharp in there, the boys’ pleasure too billowy and blinding. They had togetherness, power, and safety. She had only her two arms, folded for protection, her two feet welded to the ground. Surrounded and abandoned, she tucked her head and started to cry.

  And thus began my illustrious career of standing by and waiting for the Lord to actually do something.

  Because I was a total failure at proper confrontation, I spent a lot of time assuming incorrectly that they’d like us if they only got to know us. We could take back our image. It could happen. We still had Cortney’s birthday party.

  Cortney was a girl in my class who was cool enough to attract Ashley and Ellie but nice enough to invite, well, us. I knew that if I played my cards right, if I properly networked and gave it all I had, there was a chance I could defibrillate my life.

  For weeks, I daydreamed about my epic comeback. Unfettered by the distractions of school, I would amp up my charm to shock-and-awe decibels. I would so tightly control the perfection of my clothes and hair that it would stun-gun them into submission. There would be nothing on me they could possibly make fun of. Nothing. Nada. The only thing sticking out would be my awesomeness.

  After school on Friday afternoon, the precarious countdown began.

  My brother Kyle, who was six years older and seemed six feet taller, passed by me as I primped in the mirror, a full two hours before the party.

  “Are you still doing your hair?” He laughed. “Geez, you are vain.”

  I stopped to consider this.

  Puberty had been kind to him. He had arrived in Avon a gorgeous, muscular, wry, aloof specimen of a teenager. Looking at him in the mirror next to me, it was like seeing my physical and intellectual antithesis. He didn’t need Thriller, he had rock and roll. He didn’t need hair gel because he had genetics. Whereas my carefully coordinated cardigan reeked of trying too hard, his shirts didn’t match on purpose and his hair remained permanently tousled. He was a Darwinian CEO.