Pretty Is (10 page)

What I dreaded was returning to school: facing rooms and hallways and auditoriums and locker rooms full of people who
knew
, or thought they did, what had happened to me, and wouldn’t be able to talk to me—or even
not
talk to me—without somehow alluding to it. People I had known for years who had never shown the slightest interest in me would suddenly be overcome by transparent, prurient curiosity. I might as well stick a headline on my forehead, I foresaw, and despaired.

And then one afternoon my mother made a rare visit to my porch, where she found me reading
Jane Eyre
and indulging in lazy fantasies of escape, of power.

“Here you are,” she said needlessly, as if I might have been anywhere else. She lowered herself into a chair and wiped the sweat from her brow with a gesture both graceful and weary. We were short a maid, and she had been cleaning all day. I sniffed inconspicuously, trying to detect the faint sharp scent of gin, but there was nothing yet. I raised my eyebrows in half-greeting and waited for her to speak. Her visit had to have a purpose; she had lost the ability to be casual with me.

“Your father and I have been talking,” she began at last. This meant that she had been talking, and my father had been listening and agreeing. Her eyes seemed fixed on some distant point across the lawn where the trees began—where deer sometimes emerged from the woods and cautiously surveyed the grounds.

“We’ve been talking about private school,” she continued. “Boarding school. Academically, of course, it would be an excellent opportunity for you. But mostly, you would have … a fresh start. People who don’t know you. Does that appeal to you?” As an afterthought, she added, “We would miss you,” though it was too late to convince me that missing me was part of the equation. It didn’t matter. Private school
did
appeal to me. It appealed to me more than I could politely admit. From the parking lot came the sound of tinkling laughter, the gentle slam of an expensive car door. We had a wedding party that weekend. “I have to go.” My mother heaved herself out of the chair and smoothed her skirt. Once or twice her eyes had skittered across mine. She had not once looked at me directly. She seldom did anymore. “Think about it, Lois.”

But there was no need to think.

*   *   *

Three weeks later my parents deposited me, my bike, and a few suitcases at a white-pillared, redbrick dormitory that looked like part of a movie set. It was only two hours from home, but it felt like another world. “Rich kids,” remarked my father, eyeing my fellow students. “Don’t let them intimidate you, honey.” My mother glanced at him sharply; she hated it when he suggested that he was not really at home in this world, her world. “You just be yourself. And remember’’—he ducked and spoke into my ear—“you can spell their pants off, every one of them.” His voice shook with what I took to be emotion. Curious, I searched his face for clues—how
did
he feel about me, anyway? But as usual, his body seemed like an awkward placeholder for a mind that had wandered elsewhere. My father had always been something of a mystery to me; since my abduction, he seemed almost a stranger, kind but befuddled.

I hadn’t yet told my parents that I was giving up spelling. Not so much giving it up as cutting it loose. It was no longer going to be a part of who I was. I couldn’t have explained my decision without at least alluding to Zed, who had taught me to see the spelling bees as an empty display of a meaningless skill. I knew they wouldn’t want to hear that, and I felt no real need to make them understand.

My mother gave me a brittle Miranda-hug: our boniest protrusions glanced off each other. A strand of my hair caught on one of her rings and snapped. She was wearing a sharp navy-and-white linen dress and looked perfectly at home in this environment. These impeccably green sloping lawns, the tasteful flowerbeds, the subdued tones of the other parents—this was her world, the preppy New England world to which she had been born. She bent down and brushed cool, dry lips across my forehead, rested a steadying hand momentarily on my shoulder. For the first time I noticed the delicate lines etched at the corners of her eyes. I did not think they had been there in the spring.

“You’ll be fine,” she said, almost brusquely, and I knew she was right.

*   *   *

I had finished unpacking by the time my roommate arrived. This pleased me: I had already established my presence in the room, claimed my space. I was sitting on my bed reading when she entered. She was very tall, very blond. She dropped her suitcase as soon as she saw me and held out her hand, a gesture that struck me as very adult but somehow not forced or ridiculous. “I’m Jessica,” she said, smiling. “I’m so glad to meet you.” I put my book down and returned her greeting, relieved that she seemed pleasant without being effusive. “You look familiar,” she said a while later, as she arranged her clothes neatly in dresser drawers. “It’s funny. Like I’ve seen you just recently. Were you at the Vineyard this summer?” Even as she said it, though, she furrowed her smooth brow doubtfully; she knew that wasn’t the answer.

I was prepared for this moment and glad that it had wasted no time before presenting itself. “No,” I said slowly, as if hesitating to speak too frankly. “I guess you might recognize me from…” I allowed a shadow of pain to cross my face. “Well, it doesn’t matter, really,” I said brightly, jumping up from the bed. “Let’s not talk about that. Are you hungry? Do you want to go get something to eat?” I saw her curiosity intensify, but her manners prevented her from pressing me. Every now and then I caught her inspecting me, though, trying to place me.

It mustn’t have taken her long to figure it out. By the next day it was widely known that I was Lois, the abducted girl. But as I had neither broadcast this fact nor flat-out denied it, it was not held against me; some unfamiliar instinct had told me that this would be the case. I acquired a certain easy celebrity without putting myself forward. Had I stayed at home, it would have been different: I couldn’t have controlled how people saw the story; history would have dragged me down. But here, among strangers, was a sort of frame within which I was free to construct a Lois I could enjoy being: a Lois who was clever, bookish, quick with words; a Lois who was not shy or awkward, just a little mysterious. A Lois who knew something of life: something dark, something that demanded respect.

A Lois who had something you didn’t. A Lois you did not mess with.

Chloe

God knows what would have happened if I’d stayed in Nebraska. I could be divorced by now, with a couple of kids who spent weekends with their useless father while I sat at home on my widening ass watching crappy TV and drinking cheap wine from a box. I could be the hottest mom in Arrow, putting on lipstick and heels to pick my brats up from school. Those are the happy endings. I could also be in prison. I could be dead. You think that’s melodramatic? Here are some ways I could have died: I could have been killed in a car crash with some drunken asshole at the wheel. Killed in a snowmobile accident, ditto. Dead of a drug overdose in somebody’s skanky trailer. Dead of anorexia, trying too hard to disappear. I knew kids who died in all of these ways. It could just as easily have been me; I was as stupid and reckless as anybody. Anybody who thinks small-town America is a safe, sheltered place to grow up hasn’t spent much time there.

By the time I was a sophomore in high school—the same year I was crowned Miss Nebraska Teen—nobody mentioned the abduction anymore. Kidnapping. Whatever. Which doesn’t mean they didn’t think about it; there just didn’t seem to be anything else to say. I hardly ever brought it up unless I needed Gail to feel bad. (The fact that she’d been having her eyebrows waxed when I rode off with a stranger hadn’t played very well in the press, as you can imagine, though it was actually one of the few things I didn’t blame her for.) But even if it was buried as far as everyone else was concerned, it was never very far from my mind.

Daddy was always out on the farm; it seemed like he came in later and later all the time. I didn’t blame him. The house had gradually been taken over by Gail and her kids, and by then they practically had full control. It was their world—not mine, not Daddy’s. She’d had two boys pretty much one after the other, bam bam, after Daddy married her. My half brothers, technically. But from the start I didn’t feel any real connection to them. They looked nothing like me, nothing like Daddy. The first one, Braden, was a boy version of Gail, a pale lumpy little thing. Jaden was different—taller, dark-haired, even handsome—but if he didn’t look like a little boy-Gail, he sure as hell didn’t look like my father, either. Which, after the Miss Nebraska Teen pageant, I had a definite theory about, as you might imagine. Still, if my half brothers had just left me alone, it would have been okay. I would have been happy to pretend they didn’t exist. Stupidly, they made this impossible.

They tormented me, for one thing.

Which is no fucking excuse for maiming anyone, obviously, though that’s what damn near happened. And although it could have ruined everything, my outburst of violence actually got me one step closer to gone. Maybe I should have suffered more; it’s easy to feel guilty, looking back. If I’m completely honest, I have to admit that I even felt guilty at the time. And scared as hell; it was terrifying, frankly, to realize what I was capable of.

It happened one weekend morning when the boys and I were alone in the house. I was locked in my tiny bedroom as usual. We lived in an old farmhouse, with small, odd-shaped rooms, slanting ceilings, and narrow hallways. No right angles. It always felt crowded, like the walls were closing in. I was scribbling in the diary I’d kept since my return from the cabin when one of them started pounding on my door. “Carly May, look, Carly May, you have to see!” It was Jaden, yelling.

I jumped up from my bed and flung my door open, half hoping he would fall through it. Usually I made them wait longer. I had no interest in whatever he wanted to show me. I just wanted to scare him away.

Jaden, with a dirt-smeared face, had balanced one of my tiaras on his head, a stupid grin stretching his mouth wide. He would have been about seven then, I guess.

“Take that off, you little shit,” I said. “You look like a retard.”

“We’re not supposed to say
retard
, retard.”

“Take it off, or I’ll kick your skinny little ass. Gail isn’t home to stop me. You know I’ll do it.” This is how I spoke to them. Nice, isn’t it? I’m not defending myself. Anyway, I was half-serious and genuinely pissed off. Like I said, I would have been glad to ignore them completely, if only they had been willing to cooperate. But I really hated it when they messed with my stuff. “One last chance,” I warned Jaden. “Take it off, or I’m gonna smack you into next week.”

He knew I meant it; it wouldn’t have been the first time. But he was a fearless little bastard. “You’ll have to catch me, snot-breath,” he said, and then he turned and ran, my tiara crooked on his head. He looked totally demented.

I took off down the brown-carpeted hallway after him, whipped around the corner, and flew down the creaking stairs while he laughed like a little maniac. I caught him at the bottom. I had just gathered his overgrown hair into a pullable rope when I heard Braden call from the top of the stairs.

“Hey, Carly May,” he said. “Look.” He held my diary up for me to see. “You sneaky little bastard,” I said, giving Jaden’s hair a hard yank. I grabbed the tiara and looked up at Braden. “Give me that book,” I hissed, “or I’m gonna poke your brother’s eye out.” I brought the tiara close to Jaden’s face, aiming one of the pointy ends at his left eye. He stopped laughing, and I saw fear register on his face. I actually
saw
it; one minute it wasn’t there, and then it was, changing the color of his eyes and the texture of his skin and the rhythm of his little-boy breath. Later I would think back to that expression when I was acting and had to do fear—I used it as sort of an emotional shortcut, a way to access a feeling I didn’t really understand very well. But in the moment what got me most was how easy it had been to reduce my little brother to a shivering puddle of dread.
He really thinks I’ll do it
, I thought, sort of amazed. For a second I felt like the biggest asshole in the world. I almost let him go—and then Braden started reading from the top of the stairs. “Sometimes I feel like he’s standing in the doorway watching me sleep. Sometimes I pretend he is. I can’t believe I’m even writing this down.” He read haltingly—reading wasn’t exactly his strong point. The clumsy sentences seemed to burn themselves into my mind, and without even knowing it I jerked the tiara closer to Jaden’s eye. I would like to believe that I miscalculated. But there was no thought involved. I saw myself jab the thing in his eye. He screamed. I let go of him and took off after Braden.

Now if you actually try to picture this, you have to admit that it’s partly comical. If it was in a movie, you would want to laugh, even if you were trying to tell yourself it really wasn’t funny. I was using a
tiara
as a weapon. But Jaden howled for Daddy, who happened to be coming in from the barn. He showed up just as I caught up with Braden—I was wrestling him to the floor while he kicked me in the knees, the shins, wherever his thick little legs could reach. I’d managed to grab the diary out of his hand, and I punched him in the stomach with it as he went down.

That’s what Daddy saw, that and then Jaden’s red, swollen eye. He didn’t think it was funny at all.

I felt awful, of course. I felt awful when I saw the disappointment in Daddy’s face, and I felt awful when I saw little Jaden’s angry, temporarily sightless eye. At the same time I was sort of relieved to notice that I felt awful, since it seemed to prove that I was not an absolutely heartless person, which I did occasionally worry about. I fully agreed that I should be punished, though I felt strangely removed from the endless conversations about what should be done with me. I felt more curious than afraid. What could they do to me, after all?

Gail was all for sending me away to some kind of home for problem children. This seemed like an awfully risky proposal to make, given my hold over her.
God, she must really hate me,
I remember thinking. “No more road trips, no more nice hotels and room service?” I said nastily. I saw her face flush as her eyes shot sideways to see if Daddy had picked up on anything. He hadn’t.