Beautiful Beast

by Dayle A Dermatis

  For our pageant queen-to-be.

  I slid to the floor, the fabric and cardboard pressed to my chest, my legs unable to hold me up anymore. I realized, with a clarity I didn’t want to have, that all day I’d been suppressing my grief that my parents hadn’t been there to see me today, up on that stage, in those beautiful gowns. Their beautiful girl.

  They would have called me that no matter what I looked like. Their beautiful girl.

  They would have celebrated how well I’d done. They would have rushed into the dressing room, arms open, laughing, hugging me so hard and so long I would’ve gotten embarrassed and tried to squirm away, which would have made them squeeze even harder. My mother would have cried. My father might have, too.

  They would have been proud of me, and they would have told me that, more than once.

  Sure, they would also, afterwards, have encouraged me to do better, cheered me on as I worked harder. But right now, at this moment, they would have simply been so happy, so delighted at my achievements.

  I pulled the cardboard insert out of the T-shirt and tugged the shirt over my head. I unfolded the bottoms and tugged them on, lifting my butt off the plush carpeting to pull them over my hips. I gripped the card so hard in my hands that it crumpled.

  I still couldn’t quite breathe. A rock had lodged in my chest, at my sternum, and my throat had closed up. I started huffing little shuddery breaths in and out.

  I climbed to my feet, clinging to the dresser to pull myself up. I knocked over the can of soda sitting on top. I grabbed it, set it upright, didn’t bother to clean away the spill.

  My body knew where to go steps ahead of my brain. Next thing I knew, I was outside Taryn’s door, hand poised to knock.

  I needed to be with somebody, to be anything but alone, and Taryn was my only option. I hoped she wouldn’t turn me away.

  Hoped with every fiber of my being.

  Fifteen

  Taryn yanked the door open, eyebrows drawn so low into a scowl that I could almost see them under her ragged bangs. I was so afraid she’d shut the door in my face that my nose immediately clogged with tears.

  She must’ve seen the look on my face, because a moment later her own expression changed, something coming into her dark eyes that I had never seen before. She softened.

  She stepped back and let me in, closed the door behind me. I stopped. I’d gotten this far, and now I didn’t seem to know what to do, where to go.

  Taryn put an arm around me and drew me into her room. Her room was kind of a mess. Most of the clothes were in the closet—I could see the piles through the open door—but there were socks on the floor by the bed, as if she’d toed them off before climbing into bed, and the sweater I’d loaned her hung over the chair in front of her drafting table.

  Music was playing, a little loud. Some classical piece. She shut it off. “I can’t listen to lyrics when I’m working,” she said. She was wearing grey sweatpants and the oversized button-down shirt she’d worn to the pageant, red and white vertical stripes, and she was barefoot.

  I opened my mouth to ask what she was working on. I could barely get sounds out; my voice sounded foreign and light years away, an alien’s. “Whu—what—”

  And something in me shattered. The lump in my chest shifted, and the tears clogged in my throat broke free. My legs started to give out, but she caught me, got an arm around me again, and steered me to the bed. She flipped back the covers, and I crawled in. Her sheets smelled like her, warm and untainted by fake scents. I wasn’t sure how I was able to smell anything, and I wasn’t sure why I was having such strange, disjointed thoughts.

  She got in after me, pulled the covers over both of us, and slid an arm under me, so my head was on her shoulder. She put her other arm around me, and she held me while I shook and sobbed.

  She didn’t say anything until I’d mostly stopped, and then she murmured, “My mother is a piece of shit.”

  “No,” I protested immediately. “It’s not that. My…parents—”

  And then I was off again.

  Finally I sat up a little. With her free hand, she grabbed a square box of tissues from her nightstand and held it out. It took me three tissues to force my sinuses clear, and they were still swollen. My face throbbed. Makeup smeared the tissues. I hesitated, the sodden mess in my hand, and she said, “For crying out loud, just toss them on the floor.”

  I couldn’t figure out why it felt so wrong to do that, so when I did fling them, it made me giggle, and I did that annoying laughing/crying thing. Then I blew my nose some more. Tissues drifted to the floor like snow.

  “Hang on a sec,” she said, slipping out of bed. She went over to the white shelves next to her drafting table and pulled out a wooden art supplies box. She flipped it open. I could see pens and pencils and brushes lined up in tidy rows. Then she removed that tray and rummaged beneath it. Leaving the box on her chair, she came back to bed.

  She hauled on the covers, then scootched way down. “C’mon,” she said. “This calls for a blanket fort.”

  I followed suit, and she tucked the end of the covers behind the mass of throw pillows, creating a tent over our heads. It was dark except for where light crept through a few cracks, just barely enough for us to see each other.

  She revealed what she had retrieved from the art supply box.

  A small bag of M&Ms.

  It was like a stash of cocaine and a file baked into a cake, all in one.

  “I have a stash for emergencies,” she said, tearing off the top.

  “I don’t want to wipe you out,” I said, even though my mouth was watering.

  “Oh honey, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “These rooms are loaded. Just wait ’til I break out the Doritos.”

  I did laugh then, a real laugh. Doritos sounded heavenly, but right now, chocolate was by far the most important food group. It was more like an extra air tank for a drowning diver.

  I wanted to lean my head back and tip the whole bag into my mouth, but instead I took one, left it on my tongue to melt, and held out the bag to her.

  We nibbled on M&Ms in companionable silence. I felt drained, numb, the way you do after a good cry. But I felt a lot of other things, too.

  My emotions were still pretty messed up, jumbled up, all over the place. Grief, letdown from the pageant, fear about the next pageant (yes, already. God help me), exhaustion, and a whole mess of confusion about Mrs. Wentworth’s reaction tonight.

  “First of all, I want to apologize for getting mad at you the other night,” Taryn said finally. “This is your thing, and I don’t get it—I don’t even like it—but I respect it’s important to you. Now, you need to talk. So talk.”

  So I did. I rambled, I babbled, occasionally I paused and pointed out that I was making no sense. She didn’t say much, just kept her arm around me and nodded and hmm’d. I felt myself relaxing in a way I hadn’t for as long as I could remember. Oh, my body still hurt from the way adrenaline had tensed my muscles all day, my feet from the heels, but something deep inside me had let go, broken free like a piece of ice floe.

  At one point, I got up to use the bathroom, and she said to use hers. It was, as expected, a mirror image of mine, but without the makeup mirror and piles of makeup and skin-care products. Not even an exfoliating scrub.

  I sighed, catching a glance of myself in the mirror. As if I were one to talk.

  “I’m sorry,” I said when I crawled back into the blanket fort. “I’m such a mess.”

  “No,” she said, “you’re not. You’ve been though a lot, and it sucks. But you did spectacularly today. You deserved first place, I thought, but what the hell do I know? That question from the judges…that was just so unfair. You handled yourself so well, though. I would’ve expected you to just lose it.”

  “If I’d had time to stop and think, I would’ve,” I said. “I just knew I had to talk, and I’d practiced enough that I could mostly bullshit my way through. Mostly. With anything else, I could’ve pulled out t
he statistics, sounded more knowledgeable.”

  “Stop it,” she said. “Stop picking everything apart. You did fantastic. You came in third, with all those other girls behind you. You get to bask in that glory without recrimination.” She poked at the covers over our heads. “This is a no-recriminations-zone blanket fort.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem,” she said, and it was almost like “whatever,” but it was also not like “whatever” at all.

  Eventually we must have drifted off, because I woke up sometime later, disoriented, my mouth tasting like stale, bad chocolate and my eyes gummy and swollen. We were still sort of tangled together. My shirt had ridden up a little, and the empty M&Ms bag was stuck to my side.

  I turned my head. In the gloom, Taryn slept, turned towards me, one hand still under my shoulders, the other resting on her own arm. Her lips were parted and she breathed deeply and evenly. Her hair was swept back, and I could see all of her face.

  I wondered why she hid beneath her hair. Beneath all that, beneath the sullen scowl, she was really kind of pretty. Her face was heart-shaped, and even though her eyes were closed, I knew they were big and brown, with long lashes. Her nose was a little off, maybe, but it worked on her face, if that made any sense. It made her interesting, striking, not cookie-cutter and in a good way. Her acne wasn’t bad, probably fixable with the right products and not wearing her bangs down all the time. That and a proper haircut that framed her face right, and she’d be…

  Was I being shallow? Not everything was about looks, and even I didn’t believe that a makeover was going to fix someone’s life, no matter what the movies said.

  I just knew that Taryn went to great lengths to hide herself, and I couldn’t figure out why.

  Pondering that, I moved to peel the M&Ms bag off myself, and felt a pinch. Oh, crap, I still had boob tape stuck to me.

  I tugged the covers down as far as my nose, blinking in the lights we’d never turned off. It was after three a.m.

  I had never fallen asleep without removing my makeup. Never. I was faintly horrified with myself.

  As carefully as I could, I eased away from Taryn. “What’re you doing?” she mumbled.

  “I have to shower. Otherwise the boob tape and I will be one forever.”

  “Boob tape? What the heck is boob tape? Are you kidding me?”

  We hadn’t needed it when we competed as kids, so of course she hadn’t experienced it.

  “It’s a vital and fascinating requirement of pageantry that I’ll tell you about when I come back.”

  She pulled the covers down, too. “You’re coming back?”

  “Unless the blanket fort was a one-time offer.”

  “No, it’s good,” she said. “Do what you need to do.”

  I climbed out the other side of the bed, tugged down my shirt. The boob tape tugged on my flesh, and my pajama pants were sticking to my butt a little thanks to a spot of glue I hadn’t managed to catch when I used wet wipes after the swimsuit competition.

  In my bathroom, I screamed when I saw myself in the mirror. One of my fake eyelashes had come off (it was probably lurking in Taryn’s bed like a spider), and my mascara had bled down below my eyes, making me look like a goth raccoon. My lipstick was half rubbed off, and somehow I’d gotten glitter on my nose. Just on the tip of my nose.

  And my hair, oh sweet lord, my hair. Gummy from hairspray, and it had gotten smooshed as I slept, one side matted down and the other pushed up.

  Too bad it wasn’t Halloween, because I had my costume right here: post-apocalyptic cheerleader. How had Buffy stayed so spotless?

  Liberal application of hot water and baby oil finally allowed me to peel the boob tape off. The shower felt heavenly, sluicing away the hairspray and the layers of makeup. I performed my facial ritual in record time (confession: I skipped both exfoliating and toning), blotted most of the water out of my hair, and slipped back into my pjs. Then I ran downstairs and got two fresh, cold sodas.

  When I got back to Taryn’s room, she was at her drafting table again, bare feet hooked around the metal footrest of her art stool. Her hair was back down over her eyes, and curving down over her cheek as she bent her head. The tip of her tongue stuck out as she concentrated. She had a fine-tip marker in her hand; I could see the black strokes on the paper, but not the whole piece, not the picture.

  I wanted to go closer and find out what she was drawing, but she’d been so secretive about her work before, I didn’t want to push it.

  We’d crossed some sort of threshold tonight, and I knew the connection was still fresh and tenuous. We were both tiptoeing forward, and finally in the same direction. Too easy, though, to make a mistake and screw everything up.

  If she wanted to show me her work, she would.

  I hoped she’d come to trust me enough to do that.

  Sixteen

  Taryn looked up from where she bent over the drafting table. She capped the marker and flipped the drawing over so I couldn’t see it.

  We hadn’t gotten to that level of trust yet.

  Okay. I could wait.

  “Do you really have Doritos?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Okay, but don’t rat me out if you have a weigh-in tomorrow.”

  I froze. I’d been weighing myself every day leading up to the pageant, and although I knew I had another pageant to plan for—I didn’t know which one, or when, but I assumed Mrs. Wentworth hadn’t thrown in the towel on me—I thought things would ease up a little.

  Taryn must’ve seen the panic on my face, because she said, “Don’t worry. Just tell her it’s water weight because you seriously rehydrated when you got home tonight, and that you’ll sweat it off in the sauna.” She disappeared into her closet. I heard rustling and hangers being shoved along the rod. When she reappeared, she was bearing a bag of Doritos. Not the single-serving size (which isn’t a single serving, those bastards), but a real, actual, full-sized bag.

  “How do you get out of here to get all this stuff?” I asked as we climbed back into bed. “When your mom drives us anywhere, she’s pretty much always with us.”

  “I stock up during the school year,” she said, pulling the bag open and releasing the gloriously unnatural scent of orange powdered cheese. My mouth watered. “Smuggle something home in my backpack every few days. Even though I’m not competing, she still monitors my food intake—hence the locks on everything.”

  “That’s pretty out there.”

  She shrugged, dipping her hand into the bag and coming out with a handful of chips. “It’s her house. She needs to feel in control. She worked with a nutritionist to figure out a healthy meal plan for both of us, so it’s not like she’s depriving me.”

  “I suppose I do that to myself most of the time,” I said. “I’m not really depriving myself of Doritos if I’m choosing not to eat them. But it’s nice to have the option once in a while.”

  “Consider me your junk food dealer,” she said, waving the bag.

  I popped a chip into my mouth. The fake taste, loaded with salt and red dye number whatever and possibly crack, exploded on my tongue. I moaned. “So good.”

  “Got you hooked already,” she said, and made a victory fist.

  I wondered how she’d react if I asked her more questions about her mom. She might shut down on me again. It wasn’t to be nosy, not entirely. I did want to understand her relationship with her mom, but I also just wanted to understand her mom for me. Mrs. Wentworth was so very different from my mom that I’d sort of lost perspective. I didn’t want Mrs. Wentworth to regret taking me in, that was for sure.

  “You were going to tell me about boob tape,” she reminded me.

  I spun it as a funny story, with hand motions and everything. “I need three hands to put it on correctly. No, I need a Boob Girl. So I can call, ‘Oh, Boob Girl!’ and she runs up behind me and holds my boobs where I need them so I can tape them.”

  Taryn had been laughing up until that point, but when I finished, she stared
down at the tasty triangle in her hand, her expression unreadable. A moment later she popped the chip in her mouth, chewed, and said, “Now that the pageant’s over, how do you feel about how it went? Not anybody else’s opinion—yours.”

  “I know I screwed up—I knew it at the time—but for my first pageant in ten years, I feel great. And even though it was crazy and nerve-wracking, it was so much fun. It’s like a dream, being up there.”

  “So you’ll keep doing it?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” I said. “It’s such a rush, and I do think—fingers crossed—I can make it to Miss America. Besides, I really, really need the scholarship money. Cornell’s my top choice for college, and they’re not cheap. But they have one of the best STEM programs for women, so…”

  “So, that’s why you want to compete?” she asked. “For the money?”

  “That’s a big part of it,” I said. “I don’t think I’d do it if I hated it. There are other ways to raise money for college, I suppose. But I think I’ve got a good chance, and I really love it.” I leaned back against the pile of pillows, imagining the thrill of being on the Miss America stage. Of being crowned Miss America. It almost made me put down the Dorito in my hand.

  Almost, but not quite. It just crunched so satisfyingly.

  “It’s hard to reconcile pageant you with math geek you,” she said.

  “I’m just a seething bundle of contradictions,” I said. My father used to say, “Brains and beauty, all in one package!” but I guessed Taryn wouldn’t find that as funny as I did.

  I was sorry I hadn’t gotten to know Taryn sooner. I would’ve liked her to have known my parents.

  Fact was, even though we’d shared classes, we just hadn’t interacted. Outside of those, we had completely different interests. I didn’t even know if she had other friends, or who they were. Other kids in the art classes, probably.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Seething, maybe, but not a bundle of contradictions,” she said. “What you see is what you get.”