by Cyn Balog
He acts like he didn’t hear me, then props his elbows up on the counter, as if he’s deciding what he wants to order. Which is totally stupid, since he’s been coming here with his boys for years and always orders the same thing.
Evie clears her throat. “Can I get you guys something?”
He eyes my sister. “Yeah, baby. You can get me to understand how the same parents produced this tub of lard”—he points to me, then points to her—“and such a beautiful creature as you.”
I guess if Evie had not just come into that incredible rack and transformed from Awkward Gangly Evie into Show-stopping Gorgeous Evie over the summer, she might have realized that Rick, for all his good looks, is the biggest player on the Eastern Seaboard. She might have seen through his act. Poor Nai-Evie. She melts into a puddle right before our eyes. I can’t blame her; Rick is easily the hottest guy in the school. And the biggest jerk, too, but when he aims those giant blue eyes in your direction, it’s hard to see that. Not that it’s ever happened to me, but I’ve heard enough talk in the girls’ locker room to know that he has taken dozens of victims.
“Excuse me while I vomit,” I mutter.
He ignores me. “You coming to Cellarton High this year?”
She nods and squeaks out, “I’ll be a freshman.”
“Fantastic. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”
I head into the back room and get a bag, consider puking in it, then fill it up with two white creams, one Boston cream, and a sugar ring. When I come back into the front, Rick is leaning so far over the counter toward Evie that he could quite possibly stick his tongue in her ear if he so chose. She’s blushing, which on me looks like I have hives, but on her looks irresistible.
“Your order,” I say, holding the bag up to him to break up the lovefest. “With the chocolate milk it comes to five, even.”
He turns to look at me, a question on his face.
“You guys get the same thing every time you come in here,” I explain.
He reaches into the pocket of his wet suit and pulls out the money. “Thanks, Dough.”
He doesn’t seem quite so mean now. It almost makes me feel bad for smearing his donuts on the floor in the back room before placing them in the bag.
Almost.
3
I HEAD UPSTAIRS, stuffing another donut in my mouth, which does wonders in stopping the flow of tears. Girls are supposed to look up to their big sisters, but I think Evie is embarrassed by me now. It started when she entered sixth grade and I was in eighth, and she saw how everyone treated me. Before then, she used to follow me around and try to borrow my clothes and lip gloss and sleep in my bed. But then, that very first day, the second we stepped off the bus at Cellarton Junior High and someone called me lardass, the big-sister worship was over.
If Wish had been here, I tell myself, things would have been different. Even though he and Rick travel in the same wealthy-beyond-my-wildest-imagination circles, Rick always rubbed him the wrong way. He could have told Rick where to go or beaten him up, defended my honor, just like in the movies. And then we would have laughed together and poked fun at how nobody else could fit in a room with Rick and his ego.
Oh, who am I kidding? Rick isn’t the only one who makes jokes about me. No one wants a girlfriend who’s the butt of 99 percent of the school’s jokes. (The rest are about the purple chicken the cafeteria passes off on Thursdays.)
My family lives in a three-bedroom apartment above the bakery. It’s old, probably the oldest building around. It’s the only establishment on the island, besides the 7-E, the elementary school, and a gas station down the road, that isn’t a multimillion-dollar mansion. The owners call them cottages, because that sounds quaint, but they’re bigger than shopping malls. I’ve heard that it’s bad luck not to name a ship, and I guess that also applies to houses that touch the ocean, because they all have goofy names like the Whitecap or Sea Spray. Wish’s dad, a retired naval officer turned author of bestselling thrillers, has one of the biggest; there’s a sign outside, rimmed in rope, with an anchor on it, that reads Red Sky at Night. Rick Rothman’s parents, who are both scum-sucking (well, I just assume they’re scum-suckers, since he’s already one) lawyers, have one that’s pink and horrendous, like Miami Beach came here for the day and threw up on it. It’s called Seashell Cove. Supposedly, their winter house, ten miles inland, has turrets and a moat and would make King Arthur drool. I think they also have houses in other places, for other seasons, too. The Rothmans are fortunate enough to be able to change houses like they change the batteries in their smoke alarms.
But I live in the little apartment over the bakery. If we had to name our home, I could just see the sign, hanging over the cracked sidewalk, with fancy script: The Slum. The kitchen is part of the living room, and the only things that separate the bedrooms from the living area are plastic shower curtains. Plus the floor kind of tilts, pretty badly, toward the left front corner of the building, where my room is. Drop a marble on the linoleum, and eventually, I’ll end up sleeping with it.
Even though we’re within walking distance of those mansions, it feels like a million miles away. Cellar Bay is one of the barrier islands off the coast of New Jersey; it’s just a tiny strip, a half mile wide, tied to Cellarton, on the mainland, by a rickety two-lane drawbridge. It gets pretty busy in the summer, when all the residents over the bridge flood the beach. I guess I should be grateful for that, because it’s what keeps the bakery in business, but having to cater to the Ricks of the world during my summer vacation is more than one poor soul should have to bear.
My mom is working in her office, which is our wobbly three-legged kitchen table. Usually once a week, she pulls out all the bills and her ledger (my mother refuses to keep anything on a computer), and her grunts and groans and cries of frustration can be heard all over the island. She breaks a pencil in her hands and blows out air so that the thick tuft of red hair over her eyes puffs out. “They raised the price of apple-raspberry jelly again. Again!” Her face distorts and she clenches her fists and I think maybe an alien might pop out of her belly.
“Bad news,” I say, even though I can’t muster the same amount of outrage. “We can put less in the donuts.”
She glares at me, and I know what she’s going to say. “Four generations of Reillys have stuck to these recipes. I don’t intend to change them. But …” She looks down at the pile of bills. “I wish I knew why I’m always coming up short. We’re barely scraping by.”
This reminds me of a Far Side cartoon someone taped to my locker once, of a bakery manager saying, “I don’t understand it; we’re just scraping by!” while there’s this guy sweeping up who is the size of a Mack truck. Okay, I do eat a lot, but so does Evie. She may be skinny, but she’s a walking trash can, our vastly different metabolisms being yet another sore spot for me. Still, I’d be the first one blamed for the failure of the bakery.
The thought makes me so upset that I head into my bedroom without another word. There, I pull off my whites, which are all gritty and smell of cinnamon sugar, and stare at myself in the mirror. Yeah, there’s no question I could stand to lose a few dozen pounds. I look like a turkey, with a big fat stomach, a beak nose, and a pouch of skin hanging down from my chin. A turkey with frizzy, mousy brown hair. And my cheeks are full and perpetually red, like two giant pimples on the verge of popping.
Oh, but I’m not all weird. My mother once told me that all people in the world have some God-given gift, something special about them. I have nice toes. Nice feet in general. I could be a foot model.
I know, la-di-da. I guess there are worse gifts that a person could have, but I know for sure there are better ones.
Wish, on the other hand, is the most gifted person I know. Not only can he read the ingredients on the back of a cereal box and make them sound interesting, but he is an amazing artist. He can draw anything; just give him a pencil. Usually, he draws planets and rocket ships; he’s always been fascinated by astronomy. My eyes trail to the bulletin board
over my desk, where there’s a drawing of my profile, with stars and planets in orbit around my head, on a bakery box top. He did it in seconds while I was on the phone, taking down a birthday cake order as we were sitting in the back of the bakery playing Monopoly. I look pretty in that picture. Maybe I was, back then.
I don’t have a closet in my room, so my mother has hung some of my new school clothes from a garment rack in the corner. She’s freshly pressed them, but they’re still terrible, styleless, fat-girl pants and shirts from Wal-Mart. Things that people wear when they don’t care how they look. I didn’t mind them last week, when she brought them home, but now …
“Mom, can we go to the mainland?” I ask after changing into my gym shorts and T-shirt.
When I pull back the shower curtain, Mom’s staring at me like I have three heads. I never want to go anywhere; all my favorite activities, TV watching and sleeping, can be done in the luxury of my bedroom. “Why?”
“To get some school clothes. And to get my hair cut?” There’s a pretty nice mall a few minutes inland that all my classmates go to, but if I can get there in the next hour or so, while they’re all at the beach, I’ll probably avoid them. I’ve heard some of the girls talk about this cool hair salon, Swank, which is right in the mall. There’s a small chance that nice hair and clothes might so completely mesmerize Wish that he’ll overlook my extra pounds. Well, that and some hallucinogenic drugs, which I’ve heard can also be bought on the mainland.
She gives me a look. “Seriously, Gwen, did I not just finish telling you how we’re barely scraping by?”
I stare blankly. Oh, right. I do seem to recall her saying something about that.
“What’s wrong with the clothes I just bought you?”
“Well,” I say. Where do I start? “They’re fat-girl clothes.”
“No, they’re perfectly useful and comfortable pants and shirts. The styles are a smart choice for people of any size,” she says. This from a woman whose best ensemble includes a free Grand Opening T-shirt from an electronics store that went out of business five years ago.
“But …”
“Aw, hon, I know you want to look good for Wish,” she says, reading my mind. She picks through her purse, and I think for a second that she’s going to go for it. Instead, she pulls out a ten, places it on the kitchen table, and says, “Here. Go to Melinda’s and get a good shaping.”
Oh, no. Melinda is like eighty years old. She’s our neighbor who runs the hotel next door and, wackily, in her spare time, cuts hair. She comes from a time when there were only three people in a village, so the postman was also the veterinarian and the editor of the town paper. Unfortunately, I don’t think she was sent to Paris to study the latest styling techniques, like the girls at Swank were. Last time I let her have her way with my hair, she gave me a Farrah Fawcett feather. And there is nothing worse than a fat girl pretending to be one of the original Charlie’s Angels.
I finally decide that my hair, which is frizzy and out of control, couldn’t look any worse, no matter how badly or reminiscent of a seventies TV star she cuts it. I pocket the money and head out the door, thinking that if this is my only option for improvement before Wish gets here, I might as well make that lipo date with the vacuum cleaner.
4
“DID YOU KNOW that L.A. has the thinnest population in the country?” Melinda says as she sits me in her old-fashioned barbershop chair, which is, oddly, in the lobby of the hotel. There’s crocheted stuff everywhere, products of another one of Melinda’s hobbies; I think the Seascape Hotel is where doilies go on vacation. An old guy in Bermuda shorts and knee-high black dress socks, with zinc oxide slathered all over his nose, comes by for the free hot tea and finger sandwiches that Melinda serves every day at two. He grabs two big handfuls of dainty cucumber sandwiches and then sits in one of the chairs, chewing with his mouth open and staring at me as if I’m the afternoon entertainment.
“No,” I say, wondering if she can just stab me in the throat with her scissors and get it over with.
“Plastic surgery, my dear,” she says, tilting my chin up so that I can see my face in the mirror. “You have a natural beauty.”
I stare at my face. I have nice, big blue eyes. It really isn’t that bad when you look at me head-on and can’t see the beak of my nose. That, and if I didn’t have a body attached, I would be fine. If I could just be a floating head that never turned sideways, people would love me, I am sure, providing that Melinda doesn’t Farrah me up.
“Now, what do we want to do here?” she asks, fluffing my frizzy hair over my shoulders.
Melinda is so senile that two minutes later she won’t remember what I say, so I decide to be short and to the point. And I decide I will repeat the directions every so often, in case she forgets. “Keep it as long as possible. But put in bangs. And long layers.”
She nods and gets to work. I’m a little nervous, with the way she’s clipping so frantically, that I’m in trouble. “You know,” she says, peeking over her bifocals at my reflection, “my daughter is your size, and I keep telling your mother to come and take some of the clothes she left here. Why don’t you try some of them on, at least?”
I don’t have the heart to tell Melinda that her daughter, who stayed with her for a year while she and her husband were “working things out,” is a prostitute. It was obvious to all except Melinda, who called her Doll Baby, that wherever she’d come from, she must have spent many hours on a street corner there. Everyone in the neighborhood knew it. Evie said she saw tracks on her arms, but then again, Evie watches too much CSI, so I can’t take her seriously. But anyway, is it possible to wear a snakeskin minidress and not be a streetwalker?
“Um, I just got a bunch of new clothes,” I say. “But thanks.”
“Oh, okay. But I don’t think she’s ever coming back. She’s a bit of a gypsy, that one. And she never calls or writes. I haven’t seen her in almost a year,” Melinda babbles, and I notice she’s looking at the plate of finger sandwiches across the way, maybe trying to determine if there are enough, or maybe she’s just trying to figure out if there is any surface left in the lobby that could use another doily. Meanwhile, she snips off what seems like a pretty long lock of hair.
“Remember, long as possible, long layers,” I repeat. “Bangs.”
“Oh, I know, dear!” she sings. “I know all about glamour. I cut Lena Horne’s hair. She stayed here once.”
I have no idea who that is. I just hope she doesn’t have a mullet.
Twenty minutes later, I walk out of Melinda’s hotel with a plate of finger sandwiches, a bag of prostitute clothes, and a weird wedge on my head that makes me look like you could tip me upside down and fill it with cream of mushroom soup.
I need another donut.
5
THAT NIGHT, I get an email from Wish:
Hey, G,
All the flights out of LA were booked solid for Labor Day weekend, so my mom booked me on a flight for Tuesday. I am so BUMMED I am going to MISS the FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!!! Take good NOTES for me, k?
What is up with you? Still counting down the MINUTES till you see me? HA HA. You sounded a little weird in your LAST email. Is everything ALL RIGHT?
W.
That is the best news ever. Another day. One more day of the possibility that a truck might run me over.
I’m sure Wish must be catching my drift that I’m not exactly bubbling with excitement to see him. My reply to him was less than cordial, as if he’d murdered my family and I’d just found out he’d been let out of prison, something like “WHY? Are you sure?” Then I told him that L.A. had the thinnest and most beautiful population in the country, as if that would make him change his mind. I knew that if I wanted to give him a real deal-breaker, it would be easy; all I would have to do was send him a photocopy of my butt. But I love Wish. I don’t want to break off our relationship; I just want him to never find out that his girlfriend is a whale. What’s so wrong with that?
My mother is making d
inner—fish sticks or fish filets or pieces of fish in fish-shaped patties—and the smell is so thick my mouth starts to water. Yes, Stomach wants me to eat again, even though Brain is shouting, No, no, never ever. I decide that maybe I could be one of those sick souls who control their appetites with exercise. They say it becomes a habit after a week, so after seven days, I’ll be my new health-minded self, and Wish will be so awed by my dedication to fitness that he’ll totally forget about the junk in my trunk.
I tear my eyes away from the mirror and the train wreck that is my haircut, and pull out my Tae Bo video. Then I get to work. Billy’s been screaming at me for a full thirty minutes and I’m about to be washed away in the tide of my own sweat when Evie pokes her head through the shower curtain. She’s nibbling on one of Melinda’s finger sandwiches. Her shift must be over. “Oh, God, I thought you were moving pianos up here.”
I don’t bother to look at her. Huff out, “Piano. My ass. What’s the difference?”
“Don’t let what those guys said to you …” She begins another one of her halfhearted, I’ve-always-been-thin-so-I-have-no-idea-what-it’s-like pep talks, but then stops. Over a particularly tough back-kick that has me nearly dislocating my butt, if that’s even possible, I see her face, frozen in horror. “What the hell happened to your hair?”
“Nothing.”
She comes closer, inspecting it. Then she reaches out and pats the top of it. “It looks like a triangle or something. Like Cleopatra’s pyramid is sitting on your head.”