Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (10 page)

“Wow,” I said to no one in particular. “So what grade are you guys all in?”

The answers came back: eighth, eleventh, tenth, ninth, ninth.

“Cool. Me too!” I said. But my heart was sinking. Did I look too young to be considered a secure export? These kids were all my age, but they had boobs and walked in heels. It was diabolical.

I looked up at my reflection in the wall mirror looming in front of us. I was THAT KID. I was the one in the movie whom everyone wanted to make over, the dumpy kid in the nerd glasses and Chuck Taylors.

This was amazing.

I was going to win the makeover round. Hands down. This potential Canadian model export was ready to wow the group. Lionel Richie would be proud.

Jeneta sashayed down the runway in front of us and up to the makeup station. She was gorgeous. She looked like Kelly LeBrock.

“Today we're learning about makeup techniques and proper grooming,” she said, flicking her hair as she glanced over at my husband, Andrew. “When you show up for go-sees and shoots, you have to have the perfect palette. Your skin has to be moist but not greasy, and then totally matte with foundation. Brows plucked. Lips unchapped.”

“
Unchapped
isn't a word,” I accidentally blurted out. Everyone looked at me, confused as to why I would care. “Sorry, I thought I was just thinking that. It's probably a word.” I shrugged. Some people aren't interested in an education.

I smiled at Jessica and she rolled her eyes at me. I swear I could actually hear them turning in her head. What the heck was her problem?

That was it. I was totally planning on being nice to her, but now it was clear: she had become my enemy.

I'm REALLY good at picking out my enemy in a room—whether it's a grocery store, airport, or public bathroom. I generally work off a vibe (or just pick the farter). Choosing an enemy after it's clear she dislikes you was kinda cheap and lame, but in this case I hadn't been looking for an enemy. Maybe she was looking for me.

“Okay,” Jeneta said, clapping her French-manicured hands together. “Who's first?”

I'm always aware of when I have to act. I feel like I must be a terrible actor, because I'm aware of when I'm doing it, but that really makes no sense. Maybe I'm a fantastic actor? I tried to muster a great “
Hmmm . . . I wonder who Jeneta will pick?
” face as I looked around, noticing one girl's posture and straightening out my own rounded shoulders. Someone once said, “If you have good posture everyone thinks you're a bitch,” or something like that, but I'm pretty sure 100 percent of women with perfect posture
are
bitches.

We all knew that Jeneta was about to pick me. I was the dead tilapia in the fish tank in your grocer's seafood section, the moldy strawberry in the clamshell. I was that time in high school when you sang U2's “Pride (In the Name of Love)” into a cassette recorder and accidentally put it on a mix tape that someone played at a house party.

“KELLY! You're first!” No. Shit.

“We'll start with brows, then skin. Then I'll teach you how to do a basic natural face. With makeup. The whole thing should take each of you less than five minutes once you've perfected your grooming.” Jeneta spun me around, and I stared into her eyes as she assessed the work ahead of her. I could see it there: doubt. Doubt that she'd be able to climb this mountain in under five minutes.

Then she grabbed her tweezers and went to work.

As I sat up in that chair, the most miraculous thing happened. I heard everything Jeneta said about exfoliation, moisturizer, and tweezing, but in my mind I was envisioning my future as a famous person. Being waited on hand and foot. Getting to wake up a total pig and go through a machine of people who would make me look awesome without having to do a single thing myself. I'd call them “my team,” like other famous people do. As I sat there having hairs pulled out of my forehead, carving two distinct eyebrows out of my single large one, I thought,
This is what home feels like.

Jeneta had taken my glasses off in public. This was huge. I'd been wearing glasses since I was three. Until that moment, having them off my face meant one of two things: either I was washing my face or I was going to sleep. I even swam with my glasses on, although that did cause my family to spend a day at a Hawaii LensCrafters after I forgot I couldn't bodysurf, ran into the ocean headfirst, and was pummeled by a wave and face-planted into the beach so hard I was blowing sand out my nose for days.

“Look at you!” Jeneta stood back, covered in my eyebrow hairs. Her arms looked like they belonged to Robin Williams. She turned me around in the stool to meet my maker: the great mirror wall behind me.

There was my face. Behind the glasses and the hair, there was a face.

I had two eyebrows, eyes, cheekbones that weren't being used to prop up my fake eyes.

I squinted at the mirror.

“You have contact lenses,” Jeneta stated. Like, if I didn't, I would have to.

“Toooootally,” I lied. I was so enchanted with myself. I felt like the Prince from
Beauty and the Beast
after he was stabbed and then came back to life as a hot, hot prince after Belle cried, “I love you.”

Sitting there at the makeup station, I was stunned. As I sat there staring at myself, Jeneta straightened my hair with an archaic contraption that was basically two clothing irons taped together. She gave me blush, eyeliner, lipstick. By the time I stepped down, I was transformed. Brace yourself, Andy. Kelly, as I knew her, was gone. I was like one of those pretty Barbie paper dolls wearing a shitty farmer doll's outfit. My head no longer fit the overalls I came in with.

I kept my glasses off.

That meant I couldn't see a thing that was happening at the makeup station, but judging from what I heard, the girls weren't getting nearly as much attention as I did.

Jessica sat down beside me after she got out of the makeup chair.

“She didn't need to pluck my eyebrows,” she said, smirking. “Guess they were perfect.”
Fuck you.

“God,” I said, slumping forward exaggeratedly, preparing for the setup. “You were up there for, like, a second.”

“I know!” she said, all smirky smirk smirkerson.

Fly, meet web. “Whoa,” I said, sitting back as I prepared to detonate my personal TNT. “Must be kinda sad to know that no one can make you look any prettier,” I said, giving her the side eye. “You've peaked at fourteen.”

Her face dropped. Boom. YOU DON'T WANT TO BE MY CHOSEN ENEMY!

I was riding so high off my Jessica blaster that I forgot all about my makeover. When I climbed into the Aerostar and saw the looks on my mom's and sister's faces, I was confused.

“
What?!
”

For a moment, they just stared at me. Expressionless. Not a word.

Silently, my sister passed me a McDonald's bag containing my mainstay, McChicken and fries. I
always
got the McChicken. Never gave a shit about the McChicken Tumor Rumor.

Then I looked back at my shocked mom and my shocked sister, and I was suddenly kinda shamed. Here I was, the only girl in the car who was a top model. I'd been saved and they hadn't. I wondered if this was how Jewish girls in the Hamptons felt when they got nose jobs and then hung out with their original-nosed Bubbies on Yom Kippur.

I reached into my backpack for my glasses and put them back on. Now all three of us were wearing glasses, and sitting in our Aerostar, and all was right with the world.

“What are you waiting for, Mom?” I said. “Let's go!”

“Whoa, Kel. You look . . .
old.
” My little sister's mouth hung open. She was generally a mouth breather (tiny nostrils), but this time her open mouth was a sign that her brain was trying to make sense of my face.

“Let me look at you,” my mom said, looking at me over the top of her glasses. “Come on, come on, take them off so I can see you!” She was smiling and giddy.

I tried to fight off my smile, but I couldn't. I took the glasses off.

“HOLY DYNA! Why do you look so different?”

I took a bite of my McChicken.

“I got my eyebrows shaped,” I said, my mouth full of breaded bird and bun. “Tweezed.”

As my sister and mom leaned in to get a better look, I looked back at
their
eyebrows—big, bushy replicas of what mine had been a few hours ago—and started feeling guilty again, as if I'd betrayed my family somehow.

Then my mom turned around and sat back in her seat. “Guess we're buying tweezers,” she said contentedly. She started up the Aerostar and we drove over the tracks, back to the wholesome side of town, where dads didn't wear glitter and kept their Hanes-clad asses indoors.

I PEED MY
PANTS
AND THREW UP
ON A CHINESE MAN

Once, I peed my pants in a gas station while standing in line to buy cigarettes.

At the age of fourteen, I guess this was a sign that I wasn't cut out for the smoker's lifestyle. But I didn't listen.

It was 8:30
A.M.
, the line at the Gas Bar was long, and I was at the end of it. I'd walked across the street from my high school alone to pick up a pack of Benson & Hedges. Back then, no one ID'd for cigarettes. Back then, you'd see helmetless babies in buckets on the backs of bicycles holding packs of cigarettes for their parents as their parents rode and smoked. I'd started smoking because I hated the smell of cigarettes. My new friends all smoked. And if I smoked too, I realized, the way they smelled wouldn't annoy me so much. I guess I'm lucky they didn't smoke meth.

At the end of junior high, I'd decided I wanted high school to be a fresh start. I didn't want to go to the same school as my childhood friends; I needed a new cast of characters.

I lived downtown, but when I entered my district high school I discovered it was filled with a bunch of suburban kids who were bused into the city. These suburban kids were
way
worse than the kids from my neighborhood—my neighborhood being the inner city. And by worse, I mean
bad.
Like they'd been having sex, smoking, drinking, doing drugs, and wearing kohl Wet n Wild eyeliner since they were twelve. At twelve, I was going to Disneyland with my sister in matching hot-pink-and-gray fleece jackets. At twelve, I found a lump under my nipple and thought it was cancer until the doctor convinced me it was just my boob developing. That's the kind of kid I was.

But now I was convinced I could be one of these kids. I could drink and smoke and party with them.

Whatever that meant.

“One pack of Benson & Hedges Special King Size, please. One pack of Benson & Hedges Special King Size, please,” I repeated in my head as I stood there in line. I was the only one of my new smoker clique of friends who smoked B&H. I chose it because the little black-and-gold pack matched all my clothes.

It was a one-pump gas station, a refuge for drivers who needed cigarettes or Mountain Dew. Of course, it also catered to kids from the school across the street, who presumably smoked for the same reason I did, because they hated the smell of cigarettes. This mid-September morning I'd finally decided it was time to grow up, to stop bumming cigarettes off my new friends. There was a party that weekend, and I wanted to look prepared. Having your own pack of cigarettes, when your parents don't smoke and you can't steal a pack from them, is a traditional symbol of rebellion. Time to step out. Kelly the Rebel.

Suddenly, I started getting nervous. The line wasn't moving fast enough. What if they didn't have my brand? What if they asked how old I was?
Oh my God, I have to pee.
Maybe I could leave the line and go pee? Then my mind kinda went into a spin—like in old TV shows?—with my head floating in the middle of the screen and a bunch of little items flying around it. Items like cigarettes, your mom's floating head, six-year-old me in a nightgown with bronchitis. When you're buying your first step into the dark side, your subconscious can be a motherfucker.

And then it happened: I was peeing my pants.

As the warm piss soaked into my eighty-dollar Guess jeans and trickled slowly down to my ankle, I just stood there, dumbstruck by my own body. Was I dying? How had this happened? Why did I have to have a FULL bladder before I got in line? And this was no tiny spritz of pee gently wetting the inside of my underwear either. It was a bucket of fresh pee. I looked down, praying there wasn't a puddle, but there in the middle of the tile was a tiny pool of my pee.

I looked around for faces of horror, pointing fingers, gaping mouths, but no one in the line seemed to notice the dark blue, lightning-like stain zigzagging its way down the legs of the jeans I'd begged my parents to buy me. They were all just waiting in line, like a bunch of breathing mannequins at some horrible laborer-clothing outlet. I took tiny footsteps toward the counter as the line got shorter, trying to keep my legs together to prevent the pee marks from showing and the pee smell from spreading.

I looked up at the clock. I was almost late for French class. If my French teacher knew I was here, in a gas station covered in my own bodily fluids, she would laugh and laugh and say, “
Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!
” and spritz more Chanel No. 5 around herself, forming an even larger cloudlike barrier of vanilla and musk to protect her from the mortals.

“Hi,” said the woman behind the counter. She was short and heavy, with a crazy, thick, short, red haircut, and I was about to blow her mind.

I knew I couldn't bullshit my way out of being drenched in urine. I certainly recognized that I couldn't go back to my school with wet pants. But it was 100 percent BEYOND QUESTION that, after all this early-morning bodily function trauma, I wasn't leaving this gas station without the black-and-gold pack I came in for.