Keeping the Moon (9 page)

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"We need takeout," one of the girls said. "Um, two cheeseburgers and an order of onion rings. And two Diet Pepsis."

"Two cheeseburgers," Isabel called out to Norman, stabbing the ticket on the spindle. "Be a few minutes," she told the girls. Then she walked towards the back door, glanced at me, and went in to the bathroom. From the kitchen I could still hear Ste-vie Wonder, jaunty and cheerful.

I closed my eyes, letting the sun warm my face. I could smell those cheeseburgers, and my stomach grumbled. I'd stuck to my Kiki Food Plan for the most part, with just a few french fries and onion rings here and there. Still, I was always tempted. "One day down, one victory won," my mother would say. It was the name of her best-selling inspirational tape.

I heard someone coming down the hallway and I turned, thinking it was Isabel. But it wasn't. It was one of the girls from the counter, and even squinting through the screen between us I could recognize Caroline Dawes.

She saw me, too, and looked just as surprised. For some crazy reason I thought that maybe, just maybe, things would be all right. We weren't at school. We weren't even at home. We were miles away. So I smiled at her.

"Oh, my God," she said, her nose wrinkling as if she'd seen something disgusting. "What are
you
doing here?"

Sucker.

There it was, that dry spot at the back of my throat, and instantly I was fat again, my face broken out, pulling my black trench coat tighter to hide myself. Except I didn't have my coat, or those forty-five-and-a-half pounds. I was a wide-open target.

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Then she laughed. Laughed and shook her head, stepping back from the door with one hand covering her mouth. And she ran back to the counter, her sandals making light, cheerful slap-slap-slap noises.

I turned back to the Dumpsters and closed my eyes. I could hear myself breathing.

"Who was that?" her friend asked as she got closer.

"Colie Sparks," Caroline said. She was still laughing.

"Who?"

"She's this girl, from my school. She is like, the biggest
loser."
Caroline was talking loudly, loud enough for me to hear all the way across the restaurant. I knew Norman could hear her, too, could imagine what he was thinking, but I wouldn't let myself turn around. "She will sleep with
anyone,
I swear to God. They call her Hole in One." She laughed again.

"That's awful," her friend said, but I could tell she was smiling by her voice.

"She totally deserves it," Caroline said. "She's the biggest slut in our school. Plus she thinks she's so cool because her mom is Kiki Sparks. Like that impresses anyone."

I pulled my legs up against my chest, balancing my chin on my knees. I could have been back at school, in the locker room, the day Caroline and her friends opened up my gym bag and took out my big panties for everyone to see.

Every time I'd thought it couldn't get worse, I was wrong.

If I'd been Mira, I would have pretended to ignore it altogether. If I'd been Morgan, I would have stood up and walked in there to give Caroline a piece of my mind. If I'd been Isabel,

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I probably would have thrown a punch. But I was just me. So I pulled myself tighter and tighter, closed my eyes, and waited for it to be over.

"I just can't believe she's here," Caroline said. "If I have to see her ugly face again it'll, like,
ruin
my vacation."

Then I heard something behind me, in the hallway. Something close.

I turned around, my eyes blurring as they adjusted to the shade. It was Isabel. She was standing on the other side of the door, arms crossed over her chest. And she was watching and listening to Caroline Dawes.

Oh, great,
I thought.
Now she can hate me for a reason.

I waited for her to say something, one of those snarky, half-grumbled Isabel remarks. But she didn't. After a few seconds, Norman yelled that the order was up, and she walked back down the hallway.

I heard her ringing up their food, the drawer popping out with its cheerful
bing.
She made change and the front door creaked as Caroline or her friend pushed it open.

"There you go," I heard Isabel say. "Y'all have a good day."

"You too," Caroline's friend said, and the bell rang again as they left. Isabel came out from behind the counter and flipped the sign to closed.

Whatever fresh start I'd wanted, whatever I'd wished she and Norman would think of me, was gone. Isabel would take this information and run with it.

I heard her walking back toward me, taking her time, and I swallowed hard, preparing myself. She stood on the other side of the screen. I could feel her.

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"Just don't say it," I said. "Okay?" Even to my own ears, my voice sounded weak and sad.

She didn't say anything for a long time. I just concentrated on the sky, memorizing the blue. And I was startled when she said, quietly, suddenly, "Come on."

"What?" I turned around. She was looking at me.

"You heard me," she said, and she took off her apron, tossed it on the counter, and started toward the front door. She didn't look back to see if I was following her. She just went. "Come on."

We walked out to the Rabbit, leaving Norman to lock up behind us. Isabel got in and fished for the key, which was on the floor.

She cranked the engine, the CD player immediately blasting. She turned it down, but not much.

I felt like I should say something.

"Look," I said, "about that girl--"

She shook her head and reached for the volume, turning it back up and drowning me out.

We must have driven back at about seventy miles an hour. Not that I could be sure; the speedometer was broken, along with the rearview mirror, which was lopsided, and the gearshift, whose missing knob had been replaced with one of those squeezy balls painted to look like the Earth. The floor and back seat were littered with lipsticks, more CD cases,
Vogue
and
Mira-bella,
and about twenty pairs of sunglasses, all of which rattled from one side to the other every time we took a turn. Isabel didn't say a word as she drove; her mouth was set in a thin, hard line.

We barely slowed down when we hit the dirt road. Since my

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seat belt was also broken, I just hung on to the door handle the entire way. By the time we screeched to a halt in front of the little white house, I felt like I'd knocked a couple of fillings loose.

Isabel got out, grabbing some CDs from the backseat. "Take these," she said, and I did. I watched her kick off her shoes on the porch and get the key from under a dead plant on the steps. She unlocked the door and went inside, stepping over a few magazines and discarded articles of clothing, heading for the kitchen. I stood in the doorway.

She went to the fridge, got a beer, and knocked off the cap on the side of the counter. Then she sucked some down, burped, and put a hand on her hip.

"The world," she said, "is chock full of bitchy girls."

I came inside.

It was easy to tell which side of the bedroom was Isabel's. One had its bed made, pictures straight, the clothes on the shelves folded and sorted by category and color. The other was covered, from the floor to the bed, with
stuff.
Clothes and CDs and socks and magazines and bras and empty cigarette packs, all burying and supporting each other. But the thing I noticed most was the mirror.

It was over a dressing table, and all around it, stretching out at least a foot from each side, were hundreds of faces cut from magazines. Blonde girls, brunettes, redheads, all staring out hollow-cheeked and seductive. There were girls with drastic makeup, girls with no makeup, all of them skinny, some of them smiling. They were taped up kind of slapdash, overlapping each other, spreading out like a cloud from the mirror's edges. Here and

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there, mixed in, you could see pictures of real people: some of Isabel and Morgan, family pictures, a couple of babies and several of smiling, good-looking boys. Next to the models, they seemed smaller, and you noticed every imperfection.

"Sit down," Isabel said, kicking aside one white sandal and a pair of shorts to pull out the chair. The dressing table itself was a sea of little bottles and containers, so covered with cosmetics that you couldn't even see the surface. I looked at myself in the mirror, surrounded by all those beautiful girls, and wondered what I was doing there.

Isabel pushed some more stuff aside and leaned against the dressing table, taking another swig of her beer. "Look, Colie. I have something to say to you, and I'm just gonna shoot it straight. Okay?"

I considered this. It couldn't be any worse than what had already happened. "Okay."

She tucked her hair behind her ear, took a deep breath and let it out. Then she said, "I really think you should pluck your eyebrows."

This hadn't been exactly what I was expecting.

"What?" I said.

"You heard me," she said, coming to stand behind me and turning my head to face my reflection. "And it wouldn't hurt to do something about that hair, either."

"I don't know," I said uncertainly as she went to the closet and yanked the door open, pulling out a large box of hair coloring kits. And here I'd thought she was a natural blonde.

"That black is just too uneven," she said. "You can't dye over it, but at least we could try to do it again and get it all. It won't

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fix it totally, but--" She dropped the box on the floor and abruptly left the room, still talking to herself. I listened to her open and shut cabinets in the kitchen.

I looked back up at the pictures, taking in each of the faces. And then I saw it; one, stuck at the top, that I hadn't noticed before. It looked like a yearbook picture. The girl in it was fat, with glasses. She had a pudgy face and limp brown hair, and she was wearing a thick turtleneck sweater that looked really uncomfortable and itchy. She had a necklace with a little gold frog on it, something her mother or grandmother must have given her. She was the kind of girl that Caroline Dawes would have made miserable. A girl like me.

I leaned closer, wondering why she was there. Even with the pictures of the babies and Morgan and all those boys, she didn't fit in.

"Here," Isabel said, coming back into the room suddenly and dropping a box in my lap. The model on the front had dark brown hair, almost black, with a tinge of red in it, and she smiled up at me. "That's what I'm thinking."

I didn't know what Caroline Dawes had triggered in Isabel but I wasn't about to question it. After the day I'd had, any change seemed like a good idea.

"Okay," I said. And behind me, reflected in the mirror among all those other beauties, Isabel's pretty face almost, just almost, smiled.

"Ouch."

"Hush."

"Ouch!"

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"Shut up."

"Ouch!"

"Will you please be quiet?" Isabel snapped, yanking what had to be a fair amount of skin with another pluck.

"It
hurts,"
I said. She'd searched for some ice cubes, but no luck: she'd forgotten to fill the tray the night before.

"Of course it hurts," she grumbled, tipping my head further back. "Life sucks. Get over it."

Obviously, we wouldn't be best friends immediately.

To distract myself, I looked over at the mirror. "Who's that girl?"

"What girl." Another yank.

I had tears in my eyes. "That one," I said, pointing toward the chubby girl in the turtleneck. "In the yearbook picture."

She gave another good yank, then looked where I was pointing. "My cousin," she said distractedly.

"Oh."

"She's a real looker, huh." She switched the tweezers to the other hand, flexing her cramped fingers.

"Well, she's," I said, "I mean, she's very ..."

"She's a dog," she said, settling in to start on my other brow. "It's no secret."

It was always so easy for beautiful girls. They never could understand how lucky they were. But I knew her cousin, knew what she was going through. And I couldn't take my eyes off her, even as Isabel worked to transform me.

She was finishing my eyebrows, just plucking stray hairs here and there, her face close to mine.

"Why are you being so nice to me?" I asked her.

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She sat back, putting down the tweezers. "You know," she said, "when you say stuff like that I just want to slap you."

"What?"

"You heard me." She picked up her beer and took a swallow, still watching me. Then she said, "Colie, you should never be surprised when people treat you with respect. You should expect it."

I shook my head. "You don't know--" I began. But, as usual, she didn't let me finish.

"Yes," she said simply, "I do know. I've watched you, Colie. You walk around like a dog waiting to be kicked. And when someone does, you pout and cry like you didn't deserve it."

"No one deserves to be kicked," I said.

"I disagree," she said flatly. "You do if you don't think you're worth any better. As soon as you saw that girl today you crumpled. You just opened the door up and let her stomp right in."

I thought of Mira, how much it bothered me that she hadn't fought back. "She's--"

"I don't care
who
she is," she said, waving her hand as she interrupted me,
again.
"Self-respect, Colie. If you don't have it, the world will walk all over you."

I looked down, running my tongue over my piercing.

"See," she said, "you're doing it again."

"I am not."

She lifted my chin so I had to look at her. "It's all about
you,
Colie." She touched one finger to her temple,
tap tap tap.
"Believe in yourself up here and it will make you stronger than you could ever imagine."

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There is something infectious about confidence. And for that one moment, with my eyebrows burning and my eyes watering, I believed.

"And good hair never hurt either," she said, grabbing the dye box off the floor. "Come on. I've got plans later but if we hurry we can get this done now."