Such a Pretty Face

by Ann Angel

  “It’s like something out of The Exorcist!” My voice trembled. I was only barely holding on.

  “OK, Zelly, this is a problem,” Kristin said.

  I didn’t bother to reply.

  “And you think . . . you think it’s payback because you’re beautiful?”

  “No, I think it’s payback because I like being beautiful. Because . . . maybe I’m not so nice to people who aren’t.”

  “Oh, bull pootie. Who are you mean to just because they’re ugly? I’ve never seen you be mean to ugly people.”

  “Maybe not to their faces. But behind their backs I sometimes say things.”

  “Well, so do I. So does everybody.”

  I gripped the phone.

  She sighed. “Zel, get real. Name one person—one person—who doesn’t laugh at people behind their backs.”

  “Jesus,” I said promptly.

  “Zelly,” Kristin said.

  “OK . . . then Scout Hopkins.” She was as close to Jesus as they came.

  “Scout doesn’t count,” Kristin said.

  “Yeah-huh,” I said. “And by the way, I told her I’d lend her my turquoise earrings. If I give them to my stepmom to give to you, will you pass them on when you see her tonight?”

  “When I see her? Why not when you see her?”

  I gulped. The chin hair looped itself around my forearm, like a puppy dog wanting to be petted, and I swiped at it ferociously.

  “Zelly, you’re a good person,” Kristin said. “In fact . . . sometimes it pisses me off that you’re so beautiful and nice, too.”

  I wanted desperately to believe her. “When am I nice?”

  “When you help Erica with trig, even though she smacks her gum. That time you made everybody let Lucy sit with us at lunch. Yesterday, when you stood in the hall talking to Barton Weaversley about Star Trek, even though you’ve never watched an episode in your life.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

  “See?”

  Hmm. Star Trek really was extremely geeky, but Kristin was right. I’d mentioned neither the bad costumes nor the ridiculous makeup.

  “You can have opinions about things and still be basically decent, Zelly. I mean, come on. Why else would Blake love you so much?”

  Blake, I thought, his name sending me back into panic. Outside, a car pulled into our drive. I dashed to the window to see who it was. Blake!

  “Holy crap,” I said to Kristin. “I’ve got to go!”

  “Huh?” she said. “Why?”

  “Thanks for the pep talk. Bye!” I tossed my phone on the bed and paced back and forth. How was I going to get rid of him? The chin hair reached the floor now, and it was as thick as twine. I almost tripped.

  I heard the front door open, and I peered out of my window to see my stepmom cross over to Blake and give him a hug. Crouching down, I cracked the window so I could hear.

  “—love your sweater,” she was saying, stepping back to admire him from arm’s length. “Is that what you’re wearing to the game?”

  “Is Zelly here?” Blake asked. “Someone said she’d gone home sick. Is she all right?”

  “Oh dear,” my stepmom said. “She’s . . . well . . . I think she’s a little concerned about her appearance. You know us ladies!”

  “Can I go see her?” Blake said.

  My stepmom hesitated. “I’m not sure she’s—”

  “Just for a sec,” Blake said. He headed for the door.

  “No!” I yelled.

  He jumped, and so did my stepmom. They craned their necks upward.

  Keeping the lower half of my face hidden, I said, “Don’t you dare step through that door. If you step through that door, I will never speak to you again. I mean it!”

  “Zelly, what’s your problem?” Blake said.

  My stepmom clasped her hands. “Okeydoke, I’ll just leave you kids to it,” she said. She retreated into the house.

  “Zel?” Blake repeated.

  The chin hair nudged at the windowsill, trying to poke free.

  “I’m having . . . a bad hair day,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “What are you talking about?” Blake said. “Your hair looks great.”

  He meant my shiny, honey-blond mane, which I kept radiant with flaxseed oil. But the chin hair took the compliment for itself, and in a spasm of joy it flipped up and over the wooden sill, unfurling to the ground below.

  Blake gaped. “What the . . . ?”

  Mortified, I tried to reel the hair back in.

  “Just go!” I said to Blake. “There’s something wrong with me. Please, just go!”

  Blake straightened his spine. He strode toward my second-story window and grasped the chin hair, now thick as a rope. “Stay there,” he said. “I’m coming up.”

  My eyes popped as he began climbing. “Ow ow owww,” I said, bracing myself against the wall with my knees.

  Two sharp tugs, and the top of his head appeared. Another tug, and he heaved himself in, grunting as he tumbled over the sill. He righted himself and stared at the wreck of me.

  “That’s a really long chin hair,” he said at last.

  Shame washed over me. It came in a trembling wave and left me hollow.

  “I’ll understand if you don’t want to go to Homecoming with me,” I said. “Anyway, I’m not going. Scout Hopkins can have my crown!”

  “But you’re the queen,” he said.

  “As if!” I gestured at the chin hair, which had slithered back up the side of the house and lay pooled in my lap. I brushed it off me, but it coiled right back.

  Blake tried unsuccessfully to hide his smile. “I think it likes you,” he said.

  “Aren’t you grossed out?” I asked.

  “Well . . . maybe,” he admitted. “But I’m grossed out when you burp, too. Woo-doggie, you could knock a truck driver under the table.”

  “Blake!”

  “Remember the time you had all those onion rings, and you nearly blasted my eyebrows off?”

  “Blake!”

  He grew serious. “Zelly, for real. What’s a little chin hair between friends?”

  “Big chin hair,” I said.

  “Fine. What’s a frickin’ enormous chin hair between friends?” He grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “And babe—we’re going to Homecoming.”

  I snorted. “Oh no we’re not.”

  “Oh yes we are. You wouldn’t let the way you look stop you from having fun, would you?” He touched my nose. “That’s not the Zelly I know.”

  “Please. It is so.”

  He laughed. “Well . . . it doesn’t have to be, does it?”

  I considered. Going to Homecoming with a full-length chin hair . . . it would kind of be like living in a yurt. Wouldn’t it? Only with dancing afterward? And a crown? And no barley water?

  “I could tie a ribbon on it, maybe,” I said slowly. “To match my dress . . .”

  Blake pulled me toward him. “That’s my girl.”

  Tears welled in my eyes, because he did love me. He really did.

  “You’re so beautiful,” I told him.

  “You’re the one who’s beautiful,” he replied.

  I nestled against his chest, and he stroked my back. The chin hair wrapped around us, pulling us close.

  Louise Hawes

  His brother used to trap Payton the same way every time. “What a beauty!” Eddie would stretch out that last word, pulling it like a lure through still water. “You gotta see this!” And Payton would always believe, always follow after, eager to share his brother’s latest miracle.

  Lots of times, it was dead things. Eddie would stop a few feet ahead of Payton on the sidewalk. “Wow!” he’d say, standing above a dark shape in the gutter, then getting down on his haunches and staring fixedly. “C’mere, Pay.”

  Payton, four years younger and forever trying to narrow the margin, would run to catch up with his brother. Eddie’s husky voice promised wonders: “Look at this, will ya?” Payton would stoop, a complia
nt shadow, and study the shape in the street. Often it was a squirrel, or a pigeon; once it had been a raccoon. A car had literally squeezed the life out of it. Payton had wanted to throw up, but he’d felt Eddie behind him, known without turning how his brother stood with his hands on his hips, his mouth tight and scornful. So he’d forced himself to look, to watch the upturned snout, the flies congregating around the jelly of the open eyes.

  He had run home that day, and raced upstairs to his mother’s room. In the dark, he’d opened one of her dresser drawers. Sobbing, he’d patted the filmy clouds of stockings, inhaled the gardenia scent of her sachet, and lifted a cool silk slip to his face.

  The sideshow would be different, though. Payton was sure of it. He was older now, after all, and the whole thing had been his idea. A traveling circus had set up on the Little League field, and the posters were all over town: BRAND NEW FOR 1954! HANDEE’S MUTANTS AND MONSTERS! The sideshow boasted such “Mystifying Mistakes of Nature” as a Fat Woman (her picture showed her balanced in a scale opposite a blue pickup), a five-legged calf, and a Wildman who ate metal and had to be kept behind bars like an animal.

  But it wasn’t any of these misfits that interested Payton, who often felt like a mistake himself, glabrous and unfinished beside his lean, confident brother. It was the Tattooed Lady he’d set his heart on seeing. Her poster was the largest of all: It showed her standing, hands on hips, smiling with pride at her magnificently decorated skin.

  There were kittens on her arms, a jungle scene on her belly; there were lilies and Chinese dragons and exploding volcanoes—all in commanding, vibrant hues. Most astonishing, loveliest of all, Payton thought, was the green-and-yellow cobra, its hood spread wide, its ruby eyes flashing, that crawled from the lucky lady’s left foot to the top of her thigh.

  But Payton didn’t tell Eddie about the kittens or the jungle; he knew how the game was played. “They’re freaks,” he said, knowing the seduction the word held for his brother. “Freaks of nature.”

  Eddie pretended not to be interested, but Payton saw the way he forgot himself for a second, the way his eyes widened. So Payton persisted, begged for three days straight, until, finally, the deal was struck. He swore he would be his brother’s slave for a month, no backsies, if Eddie would help him sneak into the show.

  Even though he was almost twelve and had begun to think of himself as a teenager, Payton was too young to view legally what waited behind the striped tent flap at the back of the fairgrounds. So, persuaded by the fact that slaves not only had to do your bidding but would also keep quiet about what time you snuck back home from seeing Ella Louise Baines, Eddie paid and went into the tent without his kid brother.

  From there, he had promised to scuttle along the canvas, looking for cover. His search probably took only a few moments, but the wait seemed endless to Payton, who remained faithfully rooted to the spot he’d been assigned outside. Finally, Eddie ducked behind a providential trash barrel, lifted the tent’s hem, and whistled with one finger the way Payton never could.

  Once inside, Payton found he was shorter than everyone else and had to walk on his toes, straining to see over shoulders, around heads. There were more people in the tent than he’d expected, mostly men, all laughing loudly and pointing. Disappointed in the five-legged calf, whose fifth leg was little more than a stringy extra tail, he and Eddie joined the crowd around the Fat Woman’s metal folding chair. The men jostled and nudged one another with their elbows. “Boy, that’s a mountain of love,” shouted one. “I’d sure as hell want topsies with her!”

  The woman sat for their inspection, insulated by her shiny folds. Lost in the flesh of her face, two small eyes stared out impassively at her tormentors. “Where’d you get that dress?” someone beside Payton yelled. “The circus lend you a tent?” Payton turned to see Eddie, felled by his own cleverness, doubled over with laughter.

  Payton, who was used to Eddie’s teasing, suspected that the Fat Woman, too, knew how to take words that were hurled at her and turn them into a sort of music, a loud, bristling symphony that, if you focused, got fainter and fainter until it hardly mattered at all. So he and the woman waited until Eddie had had enough, until he led his brother away from the crowd and they moved at last toward the pale green curtain where Payton’s favorite poster was hung.

  When they saw her, though, the Tattooed Lady was the biggest disappointment of all. She was such a letdown, in fact, that Payton tugged on his brother’s shirt until Eddie turned around. When he had the older boy’s attention, Payton complained, indignantly and much too loudly, as if he’d suddenly mastered Eddie’s cynicism, “She’s not like the picture at all!”

  And she wasn’t. None of the intricate wonders on the poster had been reproduced on this woman’s sallow, lifeless flesh. She sat, rather than stood, as if even she knew she had nothing to show off. She wore a stiff, corseted bathing suit like the one Payton and Eddie’s mother put on once a year when the family went to Kreller’s Amusement Park and Swim Land. Covering the parts of the woman that weren’t hidden by the suit was a jumble of blotches that had, undoubtedly, once been separate tattoos. But they had long ago lost most of their colors and run together in a sort of purple rash.

  Here and there, Payton could pick out the faded suggestion of a howling wolf or letters that still yearned, vaguely, to spell something—a name, maybe? But there were no volcanoes, no rain forests, and, though he checked every surface except the undersides of the woman’s legs, no bright and rippling cobra like the one that had figured so prominently in the poster.

  When the Tattooed Lady finally looked up at them, then turned away to spit, like a man, on the ground beside her camp stool, Eddie pushed Payton back toward the curtain. “C’mon, Pay,” he said. “There’s stuff way better than this.”

  Payton let his brother lead him away, followed him to a new crowd that had formed around another exhibit. Surprisingly, though, these men were all silent. Not one laughed or pointed or dug his elbow into his neighbor’s ribs. The girl they watched was painting with her teeth.

  Even if the men had yelled or stamped, Payton decided, the girl couldn’t have heard them. She and her canvas and paints were sealed away from them in a small glass booth, where, he hoped, the smells of cotton candy and elderly apples glazed with syrup couldn’t reach her.

  She was young, not much older than Eddie. Payton, who stared in wonder at her lovely, flushed face, at first thought the girl was behind glass because she was so beautiful. He had a box at home, a velvet-covered heart that had once held chocolates. He’d rescued it from the trash and used it to save things he liked to look at, things he wanted to keep forever. The girl in the booth wasn’t splashy and loud like the poster of the Tattooed Lady, or sparkly and hard like Eddie’s girl, with her perfectly arched and penciled brows. This girl was softer than that—a tune hummed instead of sung; a dream you couldn’t remember when you woke up; a pale, small-faced violet poking through moss. Payton stood for a full minute, spellbound in front of the glass, before he realized the girl he was staring at had no arms or legs.

  Her torso was strapped to a cushioned chair, and she was dressed in a pink cotton blouse, its empty sleeves hanging limp at her sides. The bottom of the blouse, under the black strap at her waist, was folded and neatly draped over the cushion.

  Payton willed her to look up, but she ignored the faces trained on her. It was as if he and the rest of the crowd didn’t exist, as if they stood behind a one-way mirror, their stares and whispers bouncing off the glass. The girl concentrated on her work instead, never once taking her eyes from the tangle of flowers and leaves on the canvas propped in front of her chair.

  Gently, methodically, her lips closed around the tapered handle of a paintbrush. As if she were sipping from a straw, she sucked it from a forest of palette knives and brushes in a drinking glass on the table beside her. Next, she dipped the brush into a pot of paint, like one of the stolid, round jars Payton had used in kindergarten.

  Her eyes nearly closed
as she stroked glistening red along the canvas. Everywhere her brush touched, a bright rose blossomed like sudden blood. Her lips trembled and puckered, and the quick flowers bloomed in miraculous patches. Payton watched, mesmerized, until Eddie broke the spell. “God,” he said, sounding strangely awed, “that gimp sure can paint, can’t she?”

  It was then Payton started to imagine what the girl looked like under her pink blouse. Warm and guilty, he pictured breasts and pubic hair floating under the sheer fabric. A body that couldn’t do anything, a body you could do anything to.

  He tried to shake off the nauseating sweetness, the sticky residue coating his throat and nostrils. He wondered if the girl had heard Eddie, if she felt where the men’s eyes burnt holes in her cropped body. He wondered what he could ever do to deserve arms, to be worthy of legs. Until the heat in the small tent filled his chest. Until the light glancing off the girl’s glass cage made him dizzy. Until he ran outside, crouched behind the tent, and threw up blue cotton candy all over the ground.

  Afterward, Eddie, who didn’t need to consult his slave on their agenda, and wouldn’t, in all likelihood, have checked with Payton anyway, dragged him off so they could get their pictures taken. They found one of those souvenir photographers, where you stick your head through a cardboard hole so your face appears on top of a cartoon body. “Come on,” Eddie yelled over the music from the flying tea cups. “I want to be a pirate.”

  It was like walking into the dreary, echoing cistern near school, to come into the photographer’s tent from the noise and light outside. The last thing Payton wanted to do was to stand in this half-light while his brother pawed through the painted boards.

  “Here’s a good one for you, Pay,” Eddie called from the back of the musty tent. He held up a board with a monkey’s body on it. The monkey was swinging from a tree and holding a banana up to its mouth. “Yeah, that’s you, all right,” Eddie said, chuckling. His voice was loud, self-conscious. “C’mere.”

  Dizzy with the thick, sad smells, nursing shame, Payton did as he was told. Dutifully, he bent his head through the hole in the cardboard, then sat down on a small stool behind it. The photographer, an old man with veined hands and pants that spilled over the tops of his shoes, held up a mirror to show him what he looked like.