by Ariel Kaplan
I ate a mint. Then I ate another.
“Aphra,” she said.
“Maybe I don’t need to be here anymore,” I said. “Maybe we’re done now, right?”
She sat back. “Tell me,” she said, “why you think you started coming in the first place.”
“I’m here because of Delia!”
She shook her head. “You aren’t here because of Delia. You really think that’s why we’re here?”
“Uh, yes?”
“No. The issue with your sister is a symptom. It was the catalyst that blew your cover. You’re so good at hiding your real feelings that nobody knew what was going on with you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Really. And what is going on with me?”
“Aphra, your self-esteem stinks.”
“Uh, no, actually, my self-esteem is great. I’m just very honest and realistic about my shortcomings.”
“Aphra, you fell in love with a boy and handed him to your best friend because you think you don’t deserve to be loved back.”
I recoiled into the couch. Outside, a couple of crows were making a bunch of noise like they’d just gotten a dumpster open.
“It’s not that I don’t deserve it!” I said. “It’s just that it’s not realistic.”
“It is not realistic to think that nobody could ever love you.”
“It’s not that I think that! It’s…it’s…”
“It’s what?”
“Here’s the thing. Do I think I could get a guy to like me through sheer force of personality? Of course I could. I’m smart. I’m funny. Pretty much everyone likes me.”
“So you don’t want a guy to like you because of your personality?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying I don’t want to have to convince him to overlook”—I gestured at my face—“this.”
“In other words, you want someone who thinks you’re pretty.”
Yes. No. I wanted that. I wanted more than that.
“Is that what you want?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“I think you do know. I think you know exactly what you want, and I think you are so scared of what you want that it’s making you lash out at everybody in your life right now.”
I rubbed my forehead until it hurt. Everything hurt. Why did everything hurt? I hated this. Hated it.
“Aphra,” said Dr. Pascal. “What do you want?”
I wanted to go home. I wanted to play checkers with Kit. I wanted to eat a cupcake with Bethany and not feel guilty because I was talking to her boyfriend behind her back. I wanted to talk to Greg and have him know who I was and decide to be my boyfriend instead of hers. I wanted him to look at me the way he looked at her.
I said, “I want someone who loves me because of the way I am. Not in spite of it.”
I felt something inside of me crumple at the horror of my own admission.
I felt sick.
Dr. Pascal made a few notes before looking up at me again. She pushed her glasses up on top of her head, revealing a matching set of dark circles. I wondered how many patients she’d had before me that day, and how many she’d have after. Probably lots of them had real problems, like abuse or their mom died or they had an eating disorder. What was I even doing there? It occurred to me that I should probably feel guilty for taking up this woman’s time, when she had people who really needed her, not just somebody like me with no actual problems.
Finally, she said, “And you think that’s impossible.”
“Yes. It is.”
“I’m telling you it isn’t.”
“Oh, come on!”
She tossed her notebook on the table. “Here’s the truth, Aphra Brown. You’ve bought into the notion of conventional beauty more than almost anyone I’ve ever met.” When I balked, she put up a hand. “You think you haven’t, because you don’t read the magazines or buy the clothes, but you have. Not only that, but you’re overemphasizing how important it is. You sit here every week and tell me your face is the least important thing about you, but you act like it’s the most important.”
“It’s not that it’s the most important thing. It just happens to be…the thing that gets in the way. But that’s fine! It’s fine. It’s not a big deal. It just is what it is.”
She shook her head. “When was the last time you really let yourself be vulnerable?”
“Vulnerable,” I repeated. The word felt weird in my mouth. Another Latin-derived word, from vulnerare, meaning “to wound,” or, if conjugated correctly, “to be wounded.” It made me think of some Roman centurion skewering me so that my insides were no longer inside, which was generally where I liked to keep them. “That sounds like a terrible thing to be.”
“It sounds scary, doesn’t it?”
I made no reply.
“Aphra Brown, I believe you are worthy of being loved. So here’s my question: Why don’t you?”
I blinked a bunch of times. Then I said, “It’s not that I don’t think I’m worthy, it’s that it’s not—”
“Don’t give me that ‘not realistic’ line again. Why don’t you think it’s realistic?”
“Because,” I said. “Because I am ugly.”
I was surprised that word had come out of my mouth. I hate that word. Homely, plain, below average I can deal with. But I hate the word ugly. It sounds so unredeemable, like ogre.
“I don’t think that’s true,” she said. “But even barring that, okay. Ugly people are loved every day.”
“I don’t want to be loved like an ugly girl,” I said. “I want to be loved like a beautiful one.” Stupid id. Stupid, stupid id.
I started to cry, a little and then more and then kind of a lot.
Dr. Pascal got up and handed me a box of tissues. “That,” she said, “is the truest thing you’ve ever said in here.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Since what’s wrong with me isn’t fixable, except maybe if I do like Delia.”
“Nothing’s unfixable,” she said. “You’ve just found your cri de coeur. Now let’s get to work on getting you to believe what the rest of the world already knows.”
I snuffled and wiped my eyes. “What is that?”
“That you deserve to be loved because of who you are, not in spite of it. And if you put yourself out there, you’re going to see it happen. Probably over and over again.”
“But that’s not—”
“Mmm!” she said. “Mmm-mm.” She held up the Muppet closest at hand. “Elmo says bullshit.”
On Tuesday, the varsity eight girls had our annual spring sleepover.
This was actually only our second annual spring sleepover. The last one had been the night before day one of the final regatta of the season, and we had decided that was a Really Bad Idea, because we were all exhausted the next morning. So this year, we decided to go midweek. We’d eat spaghetti, we’d watch the 1934 classic Eight Girls in a Boat, and then we’d get up for a breakfast buffet before we left for school.
All this was to go down at Sophie’s house, since her basement’s huge, with a giant flat-screen. So after practice on Tuesday, we piled into two cars (Sophie’s and Claire’s) and stopped by the grocery store to get the stuff for the spaghetti, snacks for the movie, and things for breakfast, splitting the list nine ways and meeting up at the cars afterward.
My list consisted of Pop-Tarts (chocolate and one other) and Hershey’s Kisses, one large bag. I paid for my part and made my way back to the car, where Sophie was impatiently tapping on the steering wheel while Claire and Talia sat in the backseat. “Where’s Bethany?” I asked, since everyone else was already there. I hadn’t meant to take so long, but the bathroom was near the candy aisle and I’d had to pee.
“Not back yet.”
“What did you ask her to get?”
Sophie, who’d made the list, said, “Cereal.”
I said, “I’ll be right back,” and went back into the store. Bethany, as I’d expected, was standing in the cereal aisle. Her face was glued to her phone, and she was frowning rather hard. “Hey,” I said.
When she didn’t answer right away, I said, “Having trouble picking something?”
“What? Oh. Yeah, there’s like a hundred different kinds. Hey, Aphra—”
“Don’t worry about it. Let’s get one healthy, one sugary, and one in the middle. I grabbed Shredded Wheat, Froot Loops, and some kind of granola. “There, let’s check out.”
“Hey, Aphra…,” she said again as we walked to the front of the store.
“I’m not sure why we’re getting these, anyway. Everybody just ends up eating Pop-Tarts or toaster waffles. What?”
She took a deep breath, let it out, and then said, “I was supposed to get Twizzlers, too.”
We grabbed two big packages and I dumped everything at the checkout counter. Bethany was unusually quiet for someone with multiple bags of candy.
“You okay? You loved the sleepover last year. Is it Cake Baby?”
“Oh, no, that’s good. I got a raise this week.”
“What? You’ve only been there like a week and a half.”
The man in front of us was arguing about the sale price on four bags of coleslaw mix and asking for a manager. I’m not sure why I always pick the wrong checkout line, but I do it every time. Bethany said, “Yeah, I figured out that the supplier was shorting us on our flour.” Her face brightened a little. “I brought my bathroom scale to work because I was wondering if a bag was really exactly twenty pounds, and when it came up a pound short I took one to the FedEx down the street and asked them to weigh it for me.”
I stepped out of the way of coleslaw man, who seemed to have decided to return his salad to the produce section rather than pay thirty extra cents. I said, “You dragged a twenty-pound bag of flour all the way to the FedEx?”
“Yeah, so then I checked the cubic volume of the bag and realized there was no way to fit twenty pounds of flour in it at all. They’d been cheating us since, like, always, I guess.”
“Wow,” I said. “Well, that’s pretty cool. So work’s good.”
“Yeah. Doug put me in charge of checking all the deliveries now. Anyway, that’s fine. I guess I’m just kind of thinking about Greg.”
I paused while she handed her cash to the checker and grabbed her bag. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s…I don’t know. Like, he’s great. He’s amazing. It just seems like half the time I don’t know what he’s talking about. Like, yesterday he asked me about how much maple syrup they make in Canada. I was like, I have no idea how much maple syrup they make in Canada! Why would you expect me to know this?”
“Is that, uh. Is that what you said?” I asked, pausing in front of the gumball machine.
“No, of course not. I told him I couldn’t remember and then I made out with him.”
“Right. Okay.”
“And then when I try to talk to him about science stuff, he kind of glazes over. All he wants to talk about is, like, Russian literature. All the time. And he does this thing where he says something in Russian and…waits for me to ask him what it means. And then just now he asked me—”
We waited while some lady coming through the door wrangled her toddler into the front of her cart. “Are you breaking up with him?” I asked.
“What? No! I’m…I don’t know. Venting. I guess. I just, I’ve never gone out with anybody. I don’t really get how it’s supposed to work.”
“I mean, you guys are still getting to know each other, right?”
“Yeah. I guess that’s probably it. I’m just used to…”
Ten feet away, Sophie lay on her horn. Leaning out the window, she shouted, “Let’s GO! We are BURNING DAYLIGHT, ladies.” So Bethany and I got in and rode to Sophie’s house. I wanted to ask her what she was used to, but I never did get around to it.
* * *
—
Bethany and I were texting during Eight Girls in a Boat, because if you talk during a movie Sophie will sit on you.
Bethany said, Don’t tell anyone, but I really hate this movie. We’d already eaten our spaghetti, and the inside of my mouth tasted like garlic and Twizzlers. Which sounds gross and is.
Yeah, I said, it’s not my favorite, either. But there are girls and a boat, so.
Maybe next year we can vote instead of watching this again?
Maybe, I typed. I’m just happy to be out of the house. I’m so sick of Delia I could scream.
Her eyes cut to mine above the glow of our phones. Wait, what?
She’s just awful.
You guys are STILL fighting?
I hadn’t actually mentioned our last fight to Bethany because of the fact that it was kind of about Bethany. Well, about Bethany and Greg. I said, Yeah, we’ve moved on to round 12.
Bethany’s mouth popped open and she stared at me for a good thirty seconds. Then she started poking me in the shoulder. Repeatedly, and hard.
“Ow,” I said. WHAT??? I typed.
I need to talk to you. NOW.
What is it?
She poked me a few more times. I typed, I am listening to you what is it?
Come upstairs. Bring your phone.
We were just getting to the part of the movie where Christa’s crew coach—not knowing she’s pregnant—works her until she falls over, but I followed Bethany up the stairs to Sophie’s darkened living room.
“What do you need my phone for?”
“Have you been texting Greg?” she asked.
I felt my muscles freeze up. I said, “What?”
“You heard me. Have you been texting him and telling him that you’re me?”
I stared at her in the dark. She waved her phone around and said, “He’s always saying this random crap, like about the maple syrup and his classes at NOVA and Russian poetry, and I thought he was just trying to be funny or…or ironic or something, but we were texting when I was in the grocery store before and he asked if my sister and I had moved on to round 13 or called a truce.”
Oh, God.
I felt the blood drain out of my brain and pool somewhere around my ankles. I whispered, “What did you say?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I didn’t know what to say. Seeing as I don’t have a sister. So I want to know, Aphra, why Greg thinks I have a sister, and why he keeps calling out all these inside jokes I don’t get, and what the hell is going on.”
I wanted to die.
“Whatever you say next,” she said, “it better be the truth.”
“Bethany,” I said. I was going to cry now, big-time. It was stupid. I was in the wrong, I was so in the wrong, but I was going to cry, and not in the pretty, delicate way, either.
“Aphra, what did you do?”
I took a couple of deep breaths. “You remember the Deanna app?” I asked.
“Yeah. It didn’t work, but you fixed it, right? You got an A on that.”
“No. I couldn’t fix it. But I didn’t want to tell Mr. Positano that, so I kind of…fudged my data.”
“What does this have to do with me and Greg?”
“Greg was using the app,” I said. “I was typing the answers myself to hide the fact that the app didn’t work, and he figured it out.” I swallowed. “And then he saw you with the code, that day at school.”
“The code?”
“The Deanna code. The day he kissed you, didn’t you ever wonder why?”
“Because he likes me!”
“Yeah, he does, but he also thought he’d been talking to you. He thought it was your app.”
Bethany sat back, her hand coming up to cover her mouth. The worst thing was, she hadn’t even gott
en to the bad part yet.
“Why didn’t you say something?” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me literally any of this?”
“You were so happy,” I said. “And it would have been a big mess for nothing. I knew how much you liked him. I thought I was being a good friend.”
“God, Aphra.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”
I waited for the moment she’d realize. There it came. “Wait. That was like three weeks ago.”
I lowered my head onto my knees.
“Delia wasn’t even here then.”
I said nothing.
“You’re still talking to him?” she asked incredulously.
“I’m sorry,” I told the carpet. “I didn’t mean to.”
“You didn’t mean to?”
“He…he logged in to the app. And I wasn’t going to talk to him, but he was going through all this stuff with his parents, and I felt like maybe I should just help him get through it, you know? And then it kind of. Snowballed.”
“It snowballed.”
I opened the Deanna app and handed her the phone so she could look through my messages, which she scrolled through without actually reading, her eyes huge. Finally, she stopped and looked up at me. “You’ve been talking to him this whole time?”
I glanced away. “Yeah.”
“And he thinks this is me?”
“That’s pretty accurate.”
“And you didn’t think you should tell me he thought I was you?”
“What would the point have been? You’re the one he wants. Look, I know I shouldn’t have kept talking to him after you guys got together. I know that. But I just…did.”
“You just did. You just kept pretending to be me while talking to my boyfriend late at night.” She threw the phone down and stood up. “Exactly how do you expect me to feel about this? This is all kinds of messed up.”
“I know. I know it is, that’s why I told you.”
“You told me because I found out!”
“Well, technically—”
“Ah! Shut up! Don’t Aphra me right now. I don’t need to hear the technical reason why you’re right and I’m wrong. This is seriously screwed up. I can’t believe you did this.”