Robin sat in the library after school, trying to do geometry homework. She sometimes imagined herself marching over to Janet’s house and ending their friendship. She knew Janet would stare deeply into her eyes. Janet would say insulting things—or worse, she might say nothing at all. She might just say “okay” and go back to her little turquoise room at the top of the stairs and apply another coat of Intrigue #39 to her fingernails. It was possible.
Robin soon gave up on the idea and went online to a site she had heard some girls talking about called prettygirl.com. On a message board called “Being Pretty Is Enough,” she read:
“I’m kind of a snotty bitch. I like to diddle my boyfriend around and because I’m pretty I CAN. Ha!”
“Don’t get me wrong I love being pretty. In fact I’m super pretty but if I had been a little less pretty I might have developed more of a wit. I’m not good at one-liners like my mediocre-looking roommates and sometimes I get jealous, like yesterday when one of them came in with a little flower from the lawn and stuck it in a jelly jar and placed it on the table and said ‘weed du jour.’ I wish I could come up with stuff like that. I’m twenty so I’m probably older and wiser than most of you. All I’m saying is maybe I should have felt the need to be clever.”
And the responses: “I bet she isn’t really pretty.” “You are so right. I know an ugly girl who reads this website.”
Robin thought of the last party and all of the other terrifying parties Janet had dragged her to. She wrote: “I love that being pretty means I don’t have to do anything. People seem to like me just because I’m pretty to look at. Doors open for me wherever I go.”
As Robin left the library she saw Nolan Fry, gazing into his locker as if it were a refrigerator. Surprisingly, he was the only one in the hall.
Robin walked toward him. Doors open for me wherever I go. “Hi Nolan,” she found herself saying.
“Hey,” he said, turning his cool eyes on her.
“I thought I’d say ‘hi,’” she blurted.
“You’re Cheryl.”
“Robin.”
“Robin,” he said, brushing a finger over his lips.
“I’m a sophomore.”
He laughed.
“I mean you probably don’t know many sophomores, is all.”
“Have you read this Bartleby the Scrivener?” he asked, pulling it from his locker.
Robin shook her head.
“Bartleby. I like that name,” he said, tossing the book into his backpack. He slammed shut his locker. “See ya.”
“Bye.” He walked the short distance to the side exit. Doors open for me wherever I go. Robin stared after him as he left the building. Being pretty hadn’t done a damn thing for her. It was almost nothing, really. She had the urge to check her face in the bathroom mirror.
But Nolan was opening up the door. “Want a ride?” he called.
She rode in the front seat of Nolan Fry’s pickup truck, which was blue with a slightly crunched passenger door. She was wondering if she should tell him where she lived or if she should wait for him to ask. It was easier to look at Nolan’s profile than to look at his dreamy, beautiful face. Nolan apparently didn’t feel the need for chit-chat, and they rode quietly listening to the radio. Every now and then he coughed and gave his chest a small pound with a fist.
“You’re Janet’s friend,” he said, after a time.
“She’s not really my friend,” Robin said.
Nolan pulled into the lot at the park and found a spot under some leafy trees. The sky was growing dark, and the air had became cool. He took a swig of the purple cough syrup that lay on the dashboard. “Want some?” he said.
“Okay,” she said. Her mouth had gone dry, and she took a sip. He laughed and took a joint from his pocket and rolled it between his fingers. “You smoke?” he asked.
“Won’t that make you cough more?”
“Probably. I’m an idiot sometimes.” He took a hit and handed the joint to her. Robin didn’t especially like getting high, because most times nothing much happened, though once she had the repeated sensation of falling off a curb.
They passed it back and forth until she got a chill and the top of Robin’s head went momentarily frosty. Nolan took another swig of cough syrup and slunk down into his seat. Robin felt smooth and polished as a stone and slunk down next to him, and they stared into the park. After a while Nolan said, “Come.”
They crawled into the cab of the truck where it smelled like breath and sleep; he lay down on a pile of clothes and she lay next to him. He picked up a chunk of her hair and ran his fingers through it until she tingled all over. He held the strands to his nose. She was aware of how shiny and thick her hair must seem between Nolan’s fingers and how lovely she must look. She felt as though she were being revealed to herself for the first time, and she saw a flicker of the alluring girl she could become. Nolan scooted closer and scooped up more of her hair and let it fall over his face. They were like this for a while.
“Janet, man,” Nolan said in a sleepy, slow voice. “Do you know she invited me over for lunch last winter?”
“No,” Robin barely said.
“This is bizarre…” he whispered, lifting her hair from his face.
“Tell me.”
Nolan sat up on his elbows and shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m in the bakery one morning. Janet comes in for a sticky bun and asks me to stop by for lunch. So, I’m like, I guess. I go there expecting grilled cheese…
“When I get there she’s the only one home,” he said. “She’s got the table set in the dining room and she’s serving roast tenderloin and mashed potatoes and string beans with almonds. She’s got gravy in a gravy boat!
“She’s got on tight jeans and perfume and high heels. I’m sitting in her freaking dining room with a real napkin, and I’m sweaty and covered in flour. She’s running back and forth from the dining room into the kitchen, and her high heels are going click, click, click on the linoleum. The whole time she’s smiling like a goon. Man…”
A gravy boat! Robin thought. High heels!
“She was seriously hitting on me, man…I mean, the food was totally yum. Totally. But it doesn’t change the fact that I don’t exactly like her. I mean, she’s okay but I don’t ever think about her. Not to mention that she looks like something that crawled out from under a rock.”
Robin blinked. “You know, she’s going to get her jaw fixed one day.”
“It’ll help.”
Robin pictured the little scene Nolan Fry had painted for her. She could hear the click of Janet’s heels. She could see Janet’s dark creature eyes and goony smile. She felt ashamed as if it were she, not Janet, serving Nolan a roast tenderloin lunch. And she was ashamed for feeling ashamed. “That Janet, she’s a dog.”
“Sad but true,” Nolan said.
“You said it!”
“You like talking about your friend like this?”
“She’s not my friend…and it’s not because she looks like something that crawled out from under a rock, which she does, but because she’s…not nice.”
“Nice!” Nolan said. “Are you nice?”
“I think so. I don’t know. I see what you mean.” Nice. It was sort of a dopey, incomprehensible word. A kiss-ass word. What was so good about being nice?
“I’d rather be true than nice,” Nolan said.
“Exactly.”
“I’m true,” Nolan said.
“True is good.”
“Are you true?”
She closed her eyes and wondered. “I’ll let you know,” she whispered.
After a pause Nolan Fry said, “That seems like a true thing to say.”
She turned her eyes toward his chest, where her hair sprawled across him like tentacles.
“Would it be all right if we didn’t do it,” Nolan said. “Some skank in Sandy Hook gave me something nasty and my pecker’s still sore.” He reached lazily for his backpack and took out a prescription bottle, popped a pill, and sw
allowed it with cough syrup.
“I wasn’t thinking we should do it,” Robin said.
“You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”
“I’m not answering that.”
“It’s all right. I like virgins.” They lay down again, this time with her head on his chest, and he roamed his fingers through her hair, and they were quiet for a long time. “I know exactly who you are,” he whispered.
“Who?” she barely whispered back. She looked into his dozing face, so perfect even slack. She brought her cheek to his. “Who?” she whispered again.
A long while passed, or so it seemed, as she drifted in and out of sleep. “Wake me in two minutes,” he murmured. “I gotta go. My mom’s making Hungarian goulash for supper. Totally yum.”
When two minutes seemed to have passed she took his sleeping hand and held it with both her hands. “Tell me how to be pretty, Nolan.” He was in a lush, private sleep and didn’t answer. She felt safe, separated from him like this, but she wanted to know all the things he seemed to know and she wanted to know how he knew them. She brought his hand to her chest and gently held it there, not ready to relinquish it. When he stirred, he raised his sleepy head and gave her a quick kiss with chapped lips.
He dropped her off at the end of her block, and she lingered for a moment. “That was fun,” she said.
“Yup,” Nolan said. “Thanks for smoking with me.”
She stepped from the truck.
“Later,” he said. Then he sped away toward his mom’s Hungarian goulash.
Janet padded down the hall in Robin’s direction before homeroom, dragging her feet and chewing a gob of gum. “Janet,” Robin said, startled. “I’ve had enough of you.” She left Janet standing there, baffled and peeved. Robin spent the next few days in giddy expectation as if she were gathering energy. She ate by herself in the cafeteria and darted from class to class, not unhappily, her thoughts far from Janet, who’d become remote as a star, casting only a faint light over Robin.
Days later Robin developed Nolan’s cough. The cough was very dear to her and she delighted in every hack. He had given her something, like a souvenir. She decided to never speak of the Nolan episode, since once it touched the air it might disappear.
It wasn’t so much that she wanted to be with Nolan, though she thought she might; rather, she wanted to be like him. The first time she passed him in the hall since their encounter, he lowered his eyes to her and said, “Hey you.” Then most every time after he smiled, but near the end of the week it occurred to Robin that this might be the extent of her relationship with Nolan Fry.
On Friday, Janet had a note delivered to Robin while she ate a ham and cheese sandwich in the cafeteria. “At first I was furious with you, but maybe my behavior has been less than stellar lately. Please come over after school.”
At the beginning of the week Robin hadn’t cared if she ever spoke to Janet again, and she liked discovering what her days could feel like without Janet in them. But now she was lonely and curious and found herself walking toward her ex-friend’s cantaloupe-colored house after school. In the kitchen window, she saw the back of Janet’s hateful head.
“There you are,” Janet said, pulling her inside. Robin felt feverish and Janet pushed her into a chair. “Are you sick? Do you need an aspirin?”
“I have a cough,” Robin said, hacking several times, which made her feel better. She slid into a seat next to the watery hiss of the radiator while Janet opened a cabinet and rooted through a swarm of prescription bottles.
“I don’t know where an aspirin is,” Janet sighed. “There’s never anything I need in this house. What you need is homemade chicken soup, but do you think we have homemade chicken soup in this house? Never. Do you think my mom ever makes homemade chicken soup? Nope. She’s a bitch.” She opened a can of chicken soup and placed it on the stove. Then she sat down without looking at Robin. “Frankly, you dropped me like a hot potato.”
“Yes, I did.”
Janet twitched in her seat. “I can probably sneak a beer. Want to split one?”
“Okay.” While Janet poured the beer into glasses, Robin noticed that Janet had forgotten to light the flame under the soup. They sat together silently, drinking the beer.
“We’re friends again, right?” Janet asked.
“No.”
Janet folded her hands and looked solemn. “Why don’t you tell me everything you can’t stand about me.”
“Okay.”
“Wait!” Janet said, springing up from the table. “Let me get my cigarettes.” She lit one and fumbled with an ashtray. “I’m ready. I feel like Anne Boleyn or something.”
Robin took a sip of beer. “For starters, you’re mean, Janet.” Robin had lined up a few pieces of evidence and she pulled them out piece by piece, illuminating Janet’s various shortcomings.
“It’s just that I think it’s a crying shame not to live up to your potential,” Janet said, blowing a thin stream of smoke from the side of her mouth.
“I’m the kind of person who’s on the quiet side. Why can’t I be quiet?”
“Rightly or wrongly, I’m the kind of person who’s highly opinionated.”
“Well, you’re ugly, Janet.”
Something flashed across Janet’s face, so quickly that Robin wasn’t sure she had seen anything at all. “Just plain ugly,” Robin said as a feeling like silk enveloped her. She took a long sip of beer, letting her eyes wander over to the window. “I’m not saying you’re not a good person underneath it all, but you’re a fault-finder and an extreme know-it-all.”
Janet lowered her eyes and then looked up at Robin, cowed. “I guess I am at times, and I can now see how that could be extremely annoying.”
“And what do you think my potential is exactly?” Robin asked.
“Well, you’re very pretty for starters.” Robin let Janet look deeply into her eyes. “And you have an interesting way of looking at the world. You’re mostly a loyal person and you’re always on time, and these things suggest a dependable person.”
Robin nodded. “That’s true, but that’s not all I am, Janet. You’re always talking so I think you miss some of my other qualities.” She wondered what some of those other qualities might be. “I hope you don’t think I’m being terrible or attacking you—”
Janet vigorously shook her head.
“I’m not. It’s just that I have to be straight with you, Janet, because I swear sometimes you act like something that crawled out from under a rock.”
Janet rose from the table. She pulled a bowl from the dishwasher and poured the soup in it. She reached to turn off the burner, saw it was off and looked confused. “Something’s wrong with this soup!” she cried. She flung the pot into the sink. “My life is just retarded!” she blurted. “I hate calculus and world history. My bangs won’t grow. No boys like me. I go to stupid matinées with you on Saturdays. When I need beer for a party I have to ask that pimply-community-college-moron up the street. There’s nothing to look forward to ever!”
Robin assured her there were things to look forward to, and she rattled off some possibilities. “And some boys do like you—”
“Not the ones I like!”
“But still…and you’re going to have your jaw fixed one day.”
“Of course I am,” Janet said, coolly. She turned away and started emptying the dishwasher, stacking the clean pots and pans on the counter. “What do you think my potential is, Robin?”
Robin stared at the back of Janet’s head and gathered her thoughts. “You’re smart. You speak extremely well. You’re always able to come through with free movie tickets or wine coolers or Carvel coupons. You’re a real go-getter.”
“Uh-huh…I’m also savvy and enigmatic.”
“Uh-huh.”
Janet’s face was still and soft, like a child’s, when she turned to Robin. “My mom and dad left me pizza money.” She picked up a twenty-dollar bill and made it dance for Robin. “Would you like to get a good dinner somewhere?” She
suggested The Pier. Robin often pedaled past the chic restaurant, where the billboard said “fine dining” and featured two lobsters doing the tango. They counted the money in their wallets and decided they could afford some fine dining.
Janet went upstairs to fix her hair. Robin sat in the warm kitchen, fidgeting and feeling exhilarated. She waited a long time, mesmerized by the whir of Janet’s hairdryer. Unable to keep still, she finally bounded out of her seat and wandered into the dining room, where she searched for her face in the glass doors of the breakfront. She studied her dark reflection, the curve of her cheekbone, and her long hair falling past her shoulders.
As she tried to find herself in the glass of the breakfront, she saw it. There among the plates and bowls and serving dishes was the gravy boat. It must have been the roast tenderloin lunch gravy boat. Robin took it out of the case and held it in her palm. It was very pleasing sitting on its own little plate. She turned it from side to side, admiring its ring of periwinkle flowers and its elegant curled lip. Such a fancy thing—a gravy boat. She pictured it sitting on the dining room table among the plates of food and linen napkins. She imagined Nolan Fry holding it in one of his perfect hands, the same hand that had touched her hair, the same hand she’d held to her chest. She saw him pouring a smooth trail of gravy over his meat and potatoes—Nolan Fry, who would never know what it was to be anyone but Nolan Fry.
When Janet came downstairs Robin saw she had been crying. Janet had sprayed her hair several inches off her forehead and teased it. Her eyes were moist, but she stood on the staircase smiling brightly and jangling her keys. “Ready?” she asked.
“Janet!” Robin said, dashing toward her. Robin was struck hard with tangled feelings of tenderness and guilt. She needed to gush something, to gather up herself and Janet in some binding way. Janet, I didn’t mean it. That’s not who I am. I’m sorry, so sorry, Janet. I like you, Janet. Janet, how pretty you look. Janet, you are a good friend. But she just stood there, swelling up with the things she wanted to say, these things that weren’t true.
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