Mission (Un)Popular (7 page)

Grandma Betty took a step back so she could look at me properly. “I know.” She clapped her hands together once. “Your mother's next client—the one with the lips—will be here in a few minutes.” She was talking about Sheila Wheeler, this woman who wears black lipstick and needs an emergency reading every time she gets a new match on Lavalife. “The girls are watching
The Little Mermaid
.” I could hear Sebastian the crab singing in the next room. “I'll make you all a snack. You go call Erika to see how her first day went.”

“Thanks, Grandma,” I said. “I'll only be ten minutes. I know you're supposed to leave at 3:45.”

“Take your time,” she said, opening the fridge door and giving me a conspiring look over her shoulder. “I think I'd better just stay until Bryan gets home so you can keep an eye on me. Maybe you'll get some of your homework done while you're at it.”

The phone rang twice before Erika's mom picked up. “Hi, Mrs. Davies,” I said, trying to sound extra polite so I'd seem like a good influence. “It's Margot. Is Erika there?” I already knew exactly how I was going to start the conversation…by saying how I almost died at school without her, but that at least I had a bit of good news…and that it just might be about Gorgeous George.…

“Oh, Margot.” Mrs. Davies sounded distracted. “She's not home yet. She's out with a friend from school. I'll let her know you called.”

“Oh,” I said, at a loss for any other words. “Thanks.” I set the phone back in the charger, feeling numb. All day long I'd been taking mental notes about everything I was going to tell Erika. All day I'd been wondering how her day was going. After so many years of telling each other about every crush, consulting with each other before every haircut, venting about every disappointment or parent-related frustration…one day at a new school and she had a new friend? I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach.

I dragged myself into the living room, where the triplets were watching the cartoon fish convincing the prince to “kiss the girl,” and sank down onto the couch.

“Magoo?” Alice said softly, putting her little hand on my arm.

“What, Alice?”

“You smells like butter hearts,” she whispered. I was pretty sure she meant the butter tarts Grandma made. The gooey ones with raisins. And it was the nicest thing anyone had said to me all day.

“You smell like butter tarts too, Alice,” I said, wrapping my arms around her and rubbing my cheek against her soft hair.

In the end, Grandma Betty stayed until 5:30. I sat at the kitchen table wrapping my textbooks in brown paper bags while she fed the triplets ravioli. It took me an hour and a half to do four books. (It's no coincidence that every year, at least one teacher writes on my report card: “Margot has trouble focusing on the task at hand.”) I was just finishing the last one when we heard the van pull into the driveway. Grandma kissed us each quickly, then grabbed her coat off a chair. “We won't tell your mother or Bryan I stayed so late, will we?” She grinned like a mischievous little kid before hurrying out the back door.

Bryan came in the front about thirty seconds later, lugging a ratty square briefcase with him. He was wearing his usual button-up shirt with a tiny poof of chest hair sticking out the top, but you could tell he'd made an effort to dress up to fit in with the real estate crowd, because he'd actually ironed it and he was wearing pants that weren't jeans.

“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” the triplets called. Judging by the joy in their voices, you'd think he'd just returned from a five-month trek across the Sahara.

“Hello, budgies,” he said, putting his briefcase down and going to hug each of them. “Were you good girls?” They all grinned at him with tomato sauce mouths. “Look at this nice dinner Margot made you!” Bryan exclaimed. “What do we say, girls?” he asked. “Thank you, Margot?” None of them said thank you, but none of them said anything about how Grandma Betty actually made the dinner, so I was grateful enough just for that.

“Daddy. Look! I got a hurt,” Alex whined. She held out one finger and showed him the cut she got while “helping” me cover
Destination Math, Level 7
an hour earlier.

“Oh,” he said, looking at it with grave concern like it was a gaping wound instead of a microscopic paper cut. “That must have hurt. Poor budgie. I bet you were really brave.” He kissed it better. I started to pack up my books.

“And how was your day at school, Margot?” he asked, still holding Alex's injured finger.

I knew he was only asking because he thought he had to pretend to treat us all equally. Even though, really, there was nothing equal about the way he felt. The triplets were his budgies…his sweeties…his funny-funny girls. I was just some kid he'd gotten stuck with.

“Fine.” I zipped up my backpack.

“It's strange, isn't it?” He laughed. “Us both starting school on the same day.”

“Yeah,” I answered, already edging out of the room.

“You know,” he said brightly, “I'd forgotten how tough it can be, trying to take notes while the teacher's talking. How do you do it?”

I was trying to be nicer to him, like I'd promised my mom, but, honestly, I'd had such a long day. I was too tired to play along with the, “Gee, let's be buddies” routine. “Try point form,” I said.

“Right, good idea,” he answered cheerfully. Bryan really
was
a pretty good actor, but when I turned my back I could hear him inhaling deeply to a count of four. “Can I get you something for dinner?” he tried again.

“I already ate, thanks,” I said, then felt the tiniest bit bad, so I turned around and added, “Oh, and Bryan?”

“Yes?” he answered eagerly.

“I
love
your briefcase. It's really…retro.”

“Thank you, Margot,” he said, smiling. Then I figured we'd both made enough effort for the night. I went into my bedroom and closed the door behind me.

O
NE TIME, IN THIRD
grade, Erika and I got an idea for improving her front yard. The whole thing was basically green grass and rose gardens. It was okay, in a boring kind of way, but what it really needed was a koi pond. We sat on her front steps imagining it for the longest time. It would go from the front path to the maple tree and would be surrounded by white stone. (We even knew where we could get some—from the neighbor's driveway across the street.) And it would have a waterfall, plus a small bridge with trailing vines where Erika could sit and feed the fish. Seriously, I wish you could have seen this thing in our minds. It was breathtaking.

But then Erika's mother—who came home from the grocery store to find a two-inch-deep mud hole in her new sod—would probably disagree. As it turns out, the vision you have and the reality you end up with can be entirely different. Another thing I learned, yet again, the hard way.…

After leaving Bryan in the kitchen I flopped down on my bed, feeling rejected. Erika still hadn't called. She hadn't e-mailed either. I knew because I'd run back to my room about ten times to check. Clearly, she was much too busy swapping Bible stories with her new Catholic friend to think about me. I stared at the ceiling for a while, checked my e-mail a few more times, then got up and went into the bathroom.

I spent a long time looking in the mirror, trying to come up with something new to do with my hair. I kept thinking of what Em had said: “You obviously haven't seen her portfolio. She has real potential.” Even though I knew she was lying, I wanted to believe her. Maybe I
did
have potential. Maybe with some lipstick and some mascara…? I pulled my hair back and made a pouty model face.

I didn't look awful—not really. It was just that, with my hair back like that, my bushy eyebrows took over my entire face. They were disgusting, like flattened caterpillars. I felt so relieved. Becoming the new, improved, more normal Margot Button was going to be easy. All I needed was twenty minutes, a pair of tweezers, and the “Beautiful Brows” article from the September issue of
CosmoGirl
.

The first step, according to the magazine, was to visualize a straight line from the base of my nose to the inner edge of my eye. That was where my eyebrow was supposed to begin. I wrinkled my nose at my reflection. The situation was obviously serious. Next, I was supposed to look straight ahead and notice the spot above my pupil. This was where the arch should go. It sounded easy.

And it honestly would have been, except for the fact that it hurt
so
much. I had tears rolling down my cheeks before I'd even yanked out five little hairs. It took twenty minutes just to finish one eyebrow. It looked good, though. Thank God. Otherwise I never would have been able to get through the pain of the second one. I turned on Mix 85.4 and sang along while I worked. Personally, I blame the really good Eternal Crush song for what happened next.

I started plucking to the beat, taking pain breaks to dance around the bathroom. I was so energized that I finished in about ten minutes this time. But when I took a step back and looked in the mirror, it was pretty obvious that the second arch didn't match the first.

I didn't panic. I just had to make the arch in the first eyebrow archier. It was going all right, too, until, through the blur of pain-induced tears, I accidentally got a bunch of extra hairs stuck in the tweezers and pulled them out all at once. I wiped at my eyes and stared at my reflection in horror. There was a huge gap in my left eyebrow right where the eye-enhancing arch was supposed to be. I tried to brush the other hairs over to see if that would hide it, but it only looked like some kind of pathetic eyebrow comb-over.

I dug around in the cabinet for makeup, but all I could find was a black eyeliner pencil. It was my mom's, left over from the pre-triplet days when I still slept over at my grandma and grandpa's sometimes, while she went out with friends for nice dinners. It was a little on the crusty side, but I grabbed it anyway and tried to draw fake hairs. But besides being crusty, it was the completely wrong color and just made the gap look worse.

More than anything in the world, I wanted to call Erika. She would know what to do. And, if she didn't know, her mom would. Mrs. Davies is the kind of person who gets her nails done professionally. She owns three different kinds of eyelash curlers. She
knows
girl stuff. But what would I say?

“Hi, Erika, I know you're busy socializing right now, but I'm having this problem with my eyebrows…Could I talk to your mom…?”

So instead I did the only thing I could think of. I brushed my hair down in front of my face, folded it up a few times to test how it would look, measured just below my “ideal” eyebrows, grabbed the scissors from under the sink, and cut bangs.

I can't quite explain the few seconds that followed. It was like things were happening in slow motion, to somebody else. The radio must have still been playing, but everything seemed silent. The huge clump of frizzy hair I'd just cut landed softly in the sink. I stared at it for what felt like minutes before I set the scissors down and looked up.

I was a poodle with a human face. I wanted to die. The bangs didn't lie flat and hide my eyebrows. Not at all. Instead, they stuck straight out, making it look like I'd made a pom-pom out of my own hair and glued it to my forehead. I took some deep breaths and tried to think it through rationally.

Obviously, there had to be options. I could wear a hat at all times. Or I could get hair extensions. Only where do you get hair extensions at 7:00 on a Tuesday night, and how would I pay for them? I turned on the tap and stuck my head under it to see if I could wet the bangs and, somehow, force them to dry straight.

With the water running, I didn't hear the knock on the bathroom door, I guess, because suddenly it opened a crack and I heard my mom's voice. “Margot, is everything all right in there?”

“Fine,” I shouted.

“In the middle of my shift this morning, I realized we forgot to take the back-to-school picture,” she said. “We could take it now, if you're still dressed. It won't be quite the same, but I think we could—What are you doing?” She opened the door wider.

There was no point hiding it. “Trying to make my bangs go straight,” I said miserably, rubbing at my forehead with a towel.

“Oh, Margot.” She stepped toward me to survey the damage. This made me feel ten times worse. I'd kind of been hoping she'd say something like, “Hey, bangs look great on you. Who'd have guessed?” But if my mom, of all people, was at a loss for something positive to say, then it definitely looked horrible. “Did you tweeze your eyebrows too?” She was obviously trying not to wince.

And here I'd just been starting to feel a bit better about the eyebrows. “Yes,” I said, close to tears. My mom held up her hands.

“Wait here.” In a few minutes she was back with a baggie of bobby pins and a bottle of green hairspray I recognized from when I used to do ballet recitals. “Close your eyes.” She combed my hair down and sprayed. It reeked like chemical-coated apples. I almost gagged twice. “Okay.” She stepped back. I looked in the mirror. The bangs were parted in the middle, hippie-style, and glued flat against my head. I looked a little like a greasy used-car salesman, but there was my mom, peering over my shoulder hopefully. “Thanks,” I managed. “They're…flatter.” She smiled, the little wrinkles around her eyes lifting.

“How about that picture, then?”

I ended up going out onto the front steps and letting her take it. “Actually,” she said as she turned on the porch light and handed me my schoolbag to pose with, “I like your hair pinned back like that, Margot. Now people can see more of your pretty face.” But it was way too little, and way too late, and way too untrue. I was hideous, and I knew it, and she knew that I knew it.

“Don't worry, honey,” she went on, putting an arm around me. “It'll grow back. Someday you'll look at this photo and smile.”

She showed it to me in the display. My head was tilted weirdly to one side, and I had red-eye. Right.
So
photogenic.
Real
potential. But I didn't ask her to take it again. Seriously, what difference would it have made?

When I woke up the next morning, I hadn't exactly forgotten that I'd uglified myself, but still, it was a shock to see how bad I looked. Overnight, the hairspray had dried my new bangs into two gross chunks on either side of my face, and the eyebrow gap seemed to have grown even huger, somehow.

After showering, I tried to fix my bangs with the blow-dryer and round brush, but it was useless. Then I soaked them in leave-in conditioner and gel and used my flat iron. My hair made a sizzling sound as I pulled it through the straightening plates, but as soon as I released it, it sproinged back, only now my bangs were frizzy
and
crunchy—like cotton candy gone partly stale.

“Margot, sweetie,” my mom said, knocking on the door, “it's half past. You'd better get going.” I sighed, shoved the horrible bobby pins back in, to at least hold down the frizz/poof, and went to get dressed. Maybe, I thought, if I just tried to be perfectly quiet all day:

1. I won't embarrass myself like I did the day before.
   
2. Nobody will even notice I'm there, let alone that I have a “new look.”
   
3. If they
   do
   notice me, they won't even recognize me. “Who is that mysterious, perfectly quiet girl with the interesting bangs?” they will wonder. (Okay, so even
   I
   knew that wasn't going to happen.)
   

Even though I was already running late, I checked my e-mail one last time. There was still no message from Little Miss Holy-Saint-of-Ditching-her-Best-Friend. So much for all of her IM promises.
I'll call you every day. We'll hang out all the time.
Lies, lies, and more big fat lies. In a fit of anger and frustration, fueled by bad hair and loneliness, I opened my e-mail and typed as fast as I could.

I hit
SEND
, then glanced at my clock. I had exactly fourteen minutes to get to school. I rummaged frantically through my clothes piles for something to wear, finally deciding on a slightly too baggy blue T-shirt from the Gap and the Parasuco jeans again. (Just because Erika and I weren't friends anymore didn't mean the jeans had to get caught in the middle, did it?)

I ran most of the way to school and made it through the doors just as the second bell was ringing.

“Good morning, everyone,” Mrs. Collins said as I slid into my seat a moment later. “Margot.” She paused. “I'm glad you could join us.” Everyone turned to look at me. So much for not drawing attention to my “new look.”

Thankfully, Mrs. Collins was feeling all eager-beaver and didn't waste any more time embarrassing me. “Today is a special day,” she said. “It marks the beginning of our poetry unit.” Groans of joy emanated from all over the room. Poetry is like the square dance unit of English class. Only a few geeky people actually get into it. Secretly, I happen to be one of them, but I'd never admit it out loud.

“In the words of the great American poet Robert Frost”—Mrs. Collins pointed to the board, where she'd written a quote in perfectly rounded letters—“‘Poetry makes you remember what you didn't know you knew.' If you're not sure what that means, that's okay. Just keep it mind as we move through the unit.” She started handing photocopies down the rows. “I've divided you into groups of five. I want you to read the poem on the handout and look up the circled vocabulary word within it that corresponds to your group's number. Define the word, then take turns using it in a sentence. When we're done, you'll do a short presentation about its meaning in the poem.” She read off her list. “Group one: Emily, Sarah, George, Simon, and Margot.”

It figured. Of course, on the day when I looked like a human poodle
and
I was wearing the same pants for the second day in a row, I'd end up having to do group work
and
a presentation with Gorgeous George
and
Sarah J. Why didn't Mrs. Collins just rent a JumboTron TV, put it in the gym, project my picture onto it, and call a schoolwide assembly so everybody could see a giant close-up of my ugliness?

I took a deep breath and gathered my courage as we pushed our desks together.

“Hi, Em,” I said.

She smiled at me. A good start.

“Hi, George. I like your shirt,” I tried.

“Oh. Thanks,” he said, then stared out the window, probably looking for interesting shoes.

“So, Simon,” I said, “how was your summer?”

Simon, a skinny, mostly quiet kid, looked up from his binder in surprise.

“Oh my God, Margot,” Sarah said pointedly as she pulled her chair out and sat down.

“What?”

“Everyone knows he has a lisp,” she whispered loudly, “but that doesn't mean you have to throw it in his face.” She shook her head sadly, like I was too hopeless for words. “There's a thing called manners. You might want to learn some.”