Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (8 page)

Mr. Lee stood us at the front of the classroom, then sat down at his desk, arms crossed, happy as a clam. My math teacher lived for misery, pure unadulterated misery. He loved it when a student failed a test, just so he could berate them with a rousing game of “What kind of job can a person who fails seventh grade math get?” (“Chicken plucker” was one of his suggestions; that made him reel with laughter. As if anyone plucked chickens outside the Sichuan Basin.)

“So, we have a couple of scrappers here,” he told the class now. “I just had to pull Kyla Warren and Kelly Oxford apart out there. So, girls, what was the problem?”

Kyla and I looked at each other.

“Nothing,” she volunteered. Amateur move, Kyla, amateur move.

“NOTHING?” Mr. Lee said. “Did you hear that, class? They were fighting over nothing!” Mr. Lee stood up and started pacing in front of us like a prosecutor.

“Kelly. You certainly didn't appear to be upset over ‘nothing' in the hallway. Were you? Were you upset over ‘nothing'?”

I felt like I could throw up. I'd never wanted so badly to sit down at my desk and do some fractals. I looked across the room at my empty desk, where my bag sat, the Peer Support pamphlet sticking out. And suddenly it hit me: the pamphlet. “Encourage honesty. Honesty can free people of their problems.”

I looked Mr. Lee straight in the eye and took my shot. “I said something I shouldn't have said.”

He stopped dramatically, eyes wide, mouth gaping, and then started running around the class waving his hands in the air like Phil Donahue. “Oh, so it was
your
fault, then, Kelly??”

“Yes, it was,” I replied calmly. “I said something about Kyla that I shouldn't have said, but I did it out of care and concern.” I looked at Kyla hoping she'd recognize me as the next Mother Teresa. “I was really worried about her.”

“Oh, she was
worried
about her!” said Mr. Lee, mocking me in a baby voice. “What did Kyla do that made you worried?”

Kyla's face fell. I looked at Mr. Lee. “I can't tell you,” I said.

Mr. Lee immediately cut the dramatics, stood up straight, and looked at me hard. “You can't tell me?”

“Nope,” I said as casually as possible. Then I dropped the bomb. “Quite frankly, it's none of your business.”

“Kyla!” His red face turned four shades darker than usual; he was approaching a true eggplant. “Kyla, go to your desk.” She did. Mr. Lee came up to me, bent down until we were face-to-face. He leaned in so close that I could see the thick hairs coming out of his cheek pores. “Get your things and go directly to the office.” Then, in a fit of rage, he walked over to the intercom and pulled the lever down. “HELLO?”

The secretary's voice returned a hello.

“I'M SENDING MISS KELLY OXFORD DOWN TO THE OFFICE FOR FIGHTING IN THE HALLWAY,” he said, then released the lever.

I swallowed the lump in my throat, stuffed my binder and the pamphlet into my bag, and looked over at Kyla.

Did she even remember how close we once were? How the monkey masturbated to both of us? In my imagination, something beautiful and perfect could have happened in this moment. Kyla could have mouthed a simple “Thank you.”

Instead, she mouthed, “Fuck you.”

As I waited for my dear principal to call me in, I thought about that “Fuck you.” I didn't deserve that. Everything that had happened happened because I cared. I cared enough to worry about Kyla and her AIDS. I cared enough to talk back to Mr. Lee and get yelled at by him so closely that I could smell his mouth hole.

After waiting for half an hour in the office foyer, I sat down in Mr. Wynychuk's office. “So,” he said in a perky sort of way, “what happened?”

I was humiliated. I shrugged my shoulders, fighting back tears. Outside, through the window, I could see the smoking girls with the G N' R boobs. How did
I
end up in the office, when all the bad girls were clearly out there?

“Did you really start a fight?” Mr. Wynychuk said. “Honestly, I don't believe that.” He sat back in his chair and put his hands behind his head, pen in hand, smiling a warm smile.

“Yeah,” I said. “Because I didn't. Kyla Warren was mad at me because someone lied and told her I said something about her.”

“And you didn't say something about her?” Oh God, this again.

“Okay, yes, I did. But promise me you won't tell anyone.”

“I can't promise that, Kelly.”

“Okay, well, I'm sure you won't tell anyone, but it'll be Craig's fault if you do, anyhow. Craig told me that Kyla had, you know . . .
S-E-X
. Sex. Like full-on penis-in-one-hundred-percent-vagina sex. And I obviously flipped out because I didn't think people were doing that. But . . . also because of AIDS.”

“Ahhhhh.” Mr. Wynychuk sat forward, taking it all in.

“I was just worried, you know. Since she was
doing
it
, she could get sick from AIDS. So I accidentally voiced my concern, rather than just thinking it. Then Craig, who is so not the leading man I'd suspected, told her I was spreading rumors that she had AIDS.”

“Well, you didn't
tell
people she had AIDS, did you?”

“Of course not!” I made my eyes really wide to express how honest I was being. “I never meant to hurt her either. I was just worried.”

“Well,” he said, slapping his knees, “it seems like you've learned your lesson here.”

“Yeah!” I rolled my eyes. “I'm just going to keep my thoughts to myself!”

“No, no. Please, don't do that. Just think before you speak. If you want to say something to someone, tell them, face-to-face. In junior high, socializing is difficult. More difficult, even, than Mr. Lee's class.”

I shot him a look. “Can you imagine learning math from Mr. Lee?”

“Seriously,” he said. Man, I knew this guy was cool.

Mr. Wynychuk stood up and put his hand on my shoulder. “You'll be fine. I have faith in you, Kelly. You're a good kid. I've got to go do the lunch announcements now. If you have any other problems or any issues with Kyla, come talk to me.”

“Oh, I should be fine,” I said. “I'm part of the Peer Support Team now.”

I walked out of his office and turned down the empty hallway just as Mr. Wynychuk got on the intercom, listing all the lunch-hour club meetings and the after-school sports schedule. Then he continued:

“Our afternoon song is courtesy of Kelly Oxford, who was kind enough to provide me with a Vivaldi mix tape.”

So much for being cool. So much for going incognito. I may have been small, but I just couldn't be invisible. I always wanted to, but it just wasn't me. If I was going to have friends, they were just going to have to accept me for the stupid kid I was.

The violins erupted just as the bell rang. Students were pouring into the hall as I walked back to my locker, Vivaldi's “Summer,”
Allegro non molto
, filling my head, the hallways, the school. In my daze, I bumped into a kid. Unfortunately it was Terry, the redheaded nightmare.

“Hey, look who's here! IT'S THE ANOREXIC BITCH!” He stopped and laughed. I stopped and turned to face Terry and his friends.

“FUCK YOU, TERRY. FUCK YOU FOREVER.” And I gave him the finger.

Face-to-face, just like Mr. Wynychuk suggested.

TWEEZERS

When I was in my early teens, lightning struck near my house.

A local modeling agency discovered Tricia Helfer in a nearby farm town; she quickly went on to become “Supermodel of the World,” which is a real thing. Soon after that, two other girls were discovered and whisked away from my hometown of Edmonton, widely regarded by other Canadian cities as the armpit of the country, to Paris Fashion Week. And then all the big international modeling agencies started sending in reinforcements, who descended on the area in droves to discover the next big thing.

I was positive it was me.

At the age of fourteen, I did
not
look like a model. I did not want to be a model. Up to this point, my biggest claims to fame were my impressions of Steve Urkel and the Chicken Lady from
The Kids in the Hall
. My intentions were pure: I wanted to be famous, but I couldn't play an instrument, so I couldn't be in a band, and I couldn't memorize lines, so I couldn't be an actress. I wanted to be in Paris. I wanted to be anywhere else. I was obviously
Something
of the World.

I was five foot six and weighed eighty pounds. I had giant pink glasses that hid most of my underdeveloped face. And—again—I had a mean Urkel impression.

To me, it seemed obvious: the next logical move was modeling.

A “cattle call” is what they call a big open audition, a model search. It's great that they call it a cattle call, because much like cows at an auction, all the lithe, ready-to-be-sexualized underage girls wear a number and strut their asses in front of potential investors (that is, agencies), who then pick the girls they want to see and write their numbers down in a book to be called on later. The only difference between the cows and the girls is weight—and the fact that people kill cows before devouring them.

My mom rarely let me buy magazines—“Waste of money! Just look at the mannequins in the Gap and dress like they do”—so I flipped through a much-cherished, seven-month-old
Seventeen
magazine to find a look to mimic. I settled on a girl who looked like Jessie Spano from
Saved by the Bell
, in stirrup pants and a blazer, and headed into my mother's closet, where the options went beyond my one Benetton sweater, overalls, and boxy jeans.

I threaded through her “fancy” section, full of outfits she'd worn to high school reunions, and picked out her Chanel knockoff blazer, which was six sizes too big for me and came down to my knees. I put on the blazer and looked in the mirror. I was
swimming
in that jacket.

Just as I was realizing what I was looking at, my mom came in. “Kelly, it's great. You look like a tiny Jackie O meets Brooke Shields!” I looked like Sally Jesse Raphael in a gold-buttoned herringbone fire blanket.

We piled into our cranberry Aerostar for the short drive downtown to the high-rise mall.

“Should I come in?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “This is going to be an all-day thing. I brought my allowance for lunch. I'll call you when I'm done.”

“Are you sure you don't want me to come to the audition with you?” she asked. I rolled my eyes. I would
die
if I had to walk on a catwalk with her there. Parents aren't even supposed to know what a catwalk is.

“I'm not a child,” I said, putting on my backpack. “Nothing will happen to me. It's not like we live in Detroit!”

The reality was, downtown Edmonton was kind of an iffy place for a young girl to walk around alone. It wasn't a bustling hub of activity. Between the jail, the big halfway “healing” house, and the downtown drop-in psych hospital, any local hustle and bustle was 100 percent weirdos. But as a kid you might not necessarily feel wary of the guy humping the giant chess pieces in the mall, yelling, “ALWAYS! ALWAYS!” You just think it's hilarious.

I slammed the door shut and headed into the mall.

As soon as I got to the mall rotunda where the cattle call was being held, my heart rate jumped and I started to sweat. There were hundreds of girls there—girls there alone, and girls there with friends, and girls there with their moms. I told myself I had an edge on the girls with their moms and friends, who wouldn't be able to focus during their big moment on the catwalk as completely as I would during mine.

I lined up with the other new arrivals. A group of rapper boys were hanging over the level above us, catcalling. I was going to love being famous.

“Nice hair,” I said to a girl with a slicked-back ponytail. Amateur. My hair was teased as big as possible. That was sexy. That was Supermodel of the World kinda stuff. My friend Mara had Cindy Crawford's workout tape. I knew my shit.

An organizer handed me a piece of paper that read “1149.” I pinned it proudly to my mom's jacket, feeling like I'd already won something, like I'd just been accepted into Tisch or Juilliard.

I got into the line of girls and waited for my turn to hit the catwalk. I hadn't even practiced. I didn't need it. Instead I just studied the others as they strode down the runway, the way an actor would study a role. Swing hips, walk in a straight line. That one touches her hair too much:
don't touch hair.
That one's walking too fast:
walk slow.
As I inched my way closer to the runway, I was gaining confidence with every step. Remember how John Candy overshadowed Tom Hanks in the slapstick racquetball scene in
Splash
? That's how I felt.

At last, it was my turn to shine. I ran up the steps, hit the catwalk with a loud *
THUD
* from my Fluevog clogs, and started madly out-swinging everyone else's hips with my own, down the runway to the heavy dance beat. I looked out at the crowd. Everyone was busy talking or reading. Didn't they realize that greatness had just hit the catwalk? I looked over at the judges. They, at least, were looking at me. I flashed them my perfect teeth. I'd never even had braces. I smiled up at the rapper boys and waved. I'm sure some models waved on a catwalk. The boys had stopped catcalling. Now they were just staring.

This is great,
I thought.
I'm already famous.

I locked eyes with the judges as I passed, smiling the whole way. I couldn't have stopped myself if I'd tried; I was too happy. They were looking at me! How did models make that bitchy face when they had SO MUCH ATTENTION? I did a twirl. Right there, in the middle of the catwalk. You weren't ready for
that
, were you, judges? Boom! For real.