Beautiful Girls (11 page)

“What do I do?” Robin wrote, feeling herself go clammy.

“I don’t have all the answers,” Janet whispered. “I definitely don’t.” She gave Robin a small, weary smile, revealing her bottom row of even white teeth.

Every week during the seminars they got a new pamphlet and this week’s said, “Everybody Wants to Be Cool and That’s Okay.” Robin read a list of ways to be cool. Help a disadvantaged child; be a good neighbor. Doing something for a kid or neighbor was certainly nice but it wasn’t cool, she thought. Who were these people to talk about cool when they didn’t know what it was either? The room was filled with the whish of pamphlets hitting the auditorium floor. Janet flicked hers, and it ricocheted off the seat in front of her before landing next to their feet.

Robin was saving the pamphlets. They were a mystery, not really helpful but occasionally very interesting. Last week’s—“Reach Out for Friends Not Drugs”—said only a small percentage of the people you meet will actually become friends and that it’s important to have realistic expectations. This was a revelation. There were hundreds of kids in the auditorium; there were so many bodies and voices, so similar to each other in their boredom—each of them wiggly and uncomfortable in the stiff seats. Most of us will never really know each other, Robin thought as she looked at the rows and rows of heads in front of her. When Janet wasn’t looking Robin slid the pamphlet into her notebook.

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 swallowed 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.