Now You See Her (3 page)

the boys all covered with zits and sitting with their shoulders humped over in their DeathZone T-shirts and their ear buds in, bobbing up and down.

But the thing is,
they’re
home. They’ll probably all turn out normal.
Normal
. Like lawyers and teachers.

But who wants to be normal? I used to think, Hello! No one? But now I don’t know. I guess it would be bet- ter, considering this mess. I used to feel sorry for the Neeland kids and Abby, my so-called friend from the theater group, but they don’t have to write stupid jour- nals and do twice the homework of an ordinary high school like I do because this is an
exclusive
prep school. I’m the one who was so special. Their parents wouldn’t just sweep them under the rug when something hap- pened to them. My parents did. They basically swept me under the rug. I wonder if rape victims feel this way.

Even now, my parents have only come to visit two times. For two hours. They say it’s the rules. But I think it’s that my mother’s convinced I’m nuts or something. Stuff does happen around here that doesn’t sound nor- mal. But hello! Stuff happened back in Bellamy that would have freaked them out, and in Starwood, too! I can remember sitting in the back of the bus in, like, eighth grade in Bellamy—which is supposed to be as rich as Palm Springs or someplace—and hearing girls say, “I get high and I get drunk and then I do it! I don’t care

who with! As long as he’s cute!” What would my parents have thought of perfect Starwood if they knew about the deserted cabin? And don’t think my brother, Carter, doesn’t know about that stuff, just like I did! Now when my dad talks, I bet it’s all about Carter, Carter, Carter, who they just sort of let grow up and play soccer before. They can’t talk about me anymore. They had to go to the reserve kid.

I know because when my dad does bother to come, he’s like, “Carter’s turning out really good. Carter’s on the honor roll. Carter’s getting really tall.” It’s like Carter grew out of the ground like a magic mushroom after the kidnapping.

Before, they didn’t even notice they had two kids. Well, they’re going to notice me again.

First of all, I’m practically starving away to nothing because I won’t eat the garbage Miss Taylor calls food.

I heard my father say they were hitting him up for twenty big ones a year for tuition. You’d think for that much, they could afford better than baked beans and iceberg lettuce!
Canned
beans? Iceberg lettuce? I never had those things in my entire life. And sauerkraut? Who eats sauerkraut? Oh God, I ran into the hall bathroom and yakked the first time I even smelled it. And they make it, like, twice a month because it’s cheap. Even the teachers are cheap because they can only get jobs at

places like Miss Taylor’s. Everyone knows private school teachers suck.

My parents aren’t going to get away with it, and Logan isn’t going to get away with it.

It’s too much.

Oh shit. I should be done with this by now.

I wrote and wrote and wrote, and I still have to write five more pages. In my
own
handwriting. It’s more “authentic” than the computer. You have to write
more
the first few months to “get your feelings down on paper.” Okay.

Retards. Assholes.

Second verse, same as the first!

Think of it this way: say that one day you were this girl who was, well, it.

It.

I’m not bragging.

I was. I was the person that other people wanted to be like. Like a trendsetter, a person who had this style of her own, where there were only preps and Goths, basically. Not just at home, but at Starwood, too. It was natural for people to copy whatever I wore. I was so much more adult. I knew how to wear clothes. Real clothes, not kid clothes. I wore tight capri pants under dresses with straps and other people did too. I could wear a scarf and not

look like someone’s mother. (You don’t just throw it on; you have to know how to tie it.) I wore ballet shoes for real shoes. Other girls started doing it too. When I did my hair up in these tiny little rows of colored pins, other girls did too. When I got gigantic shades, other girls got their parents to send them the same kind, and layered their short skirts over long skirts, even when it just made them look like fat asses. They even pronounced words how I pronounced words. It was almost annoying.

That’s what it’s like to be it.

And then there was this big total misunderstanding that I was just led into! You’d think, with it being some- one like me, they would believe in me a little.
No!
They blame me. Not Logan. He’s fine and dandy. He’s a real
actor
, even in real life! He lies and they believe him. I’m the one thrown out of Starwood. My school doesn’t stick up for me. My parents don’t stick up for me. My so- called boyfriend acts like we never even met.

And I end up here.

Some of the girls, they really need to be here. It’s the best they can do. But if you were . . . something, not just something—if you were it, then it’s hard to come down to this. I had more to lose, you know? I’m not being con- ceited. It’s just the truth.

Wouldn’t you be pissed off? Or more? Like, desperate? Wouldn’t you just cry and cry and cry? I do! Me! I cry

like one of the idiot girls I used to go to school with in Bellamy. They cried over their retarded boyfriends or that their best friends didn’t invite them to a sleepover or that they got
grounded
and couldn’t go to the
big game
! Stuff that never even affected me.

I never cried. Well, not never.

I used to cry from anger when I got to the last round of callbacks only to lose out to some Barbie doll. Callbacks are when they invite you back on another night to audition again for a show, after they weed out all the zero-talent blobs and fatsos. I cried over stuff like that, even when my mother said, “They were just look- ing for a particular type, honey. . . .” I cried just recently when my dog, Hero, died without ever getting to see me again.

I cried over Logan.

And now I walk around like a zero among negative numbers. Wearing my Miss Taylor’s uniform, my black- watch plaid skirt and red blazer. Ohmigod. I look like the American Girl doll I had when I was little, the one they would never let me play with. Like this outfit was designed by a blind nun! I swear.
Loafers
with a little hole for a penny! No jewelry, not even little diamond studs. My ear holes are going to grow together. I take
Latin
! I have to sing in a choir in chapel! And when I start to

really sing, they say, “Now remember, this is unison singing. No stars here—we’re all stars!” We all have to walk together to meals and sit next to a different girl every time. I have to spend one hour every night mini- mum writing in this stupid-ass journal. I’m learning to play lacrosse and
soccer
! Please! Is it any wonder that cry- ing is, like, all I do? I am crying my head off, and no one cares.

Except this one girl who lives on my hall, Em. That’s what I should write about.

Em. She is so sweet. Like, a really good person. Though she probably does belong in a very strict school like this. She has big issues. I mean . . . big!

I saw her the first day. She was shy. Just sort of slip- ping around the corners in the hall. But she reminded me of someone. She had this long curly black hair, and she would have been pretty if she hadn’t been so fat. She was graceful. I found out later that was because she’d been a ballerina. We got to be friends, like, right away. She still hardly ever says anything. But I can tell that she understands. This one day, she smiled when she walked past. She has this beautiful, sad smile. So I wrote a note to her. I slipped it under her door. Now, I write things to her all the time, and when she sees me, she smiles. When I talk to her, instead of looking straight at me, she’s smart enough to act like she’s looking out in the distance. I

know she’s listening, though. Sometimes, when she’s heard me through the wall at night, crying, she has tears in her own eyes the next morning at breakfast, and makes the okay sign at me.

Like it could ever be okay.

I’m crying and crying all the time, except I never get to float or drown like Alice in Wonderland almost did, in a river of her own tears. A river of her own tears.

I told Em about that. She thought it was beautiful. It was her favorite book when she was little too. She wanted to go to another world too, away from this bor- ing, ugly one, with people with blackheads on their nose and Cheetos on their breath. When I was little, my mother would tie my hair back with these sparkly velvet bands, and my father would say I was his Alice in Wonderland.

I told Em about Logan. About Logan and his big Plan. For ruining my life. And how he won’t answer his phone: “Logan here. Speak.” How he’s at Starwood, hav- ing a ball. Probably literally. Probably with Alyssa Lyn Davore. Getting a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon. Never thinking of me. Glad he’s out of it.

And I’m here.

Em. She’s a great listener, and she’s funny and smart the two days a month when she’s only mildly chemically imbalanced. I can tell by the notes she sends back to me.

Sometimes they’re just little cartoon drawings. Sometimes they say, like, “Just be sure not to be yourself!” When she’s out on one of her whippy trips, you could be talk- ing to your basic floor lamp. She doesn’t even react. But she’s not like that all the time.

If it wasn’t for Em, I’d be gone now. Gone. As in dead. Like the real Juliet, not the girl I was playing at Starwood.

You know
Romeo and Juliet
? I mean, the Shakespeare play, not the movie? God, you have to. Everybody is forced to read it in high school. Well, I was the star. I was Juliet. In the play, Juliet got married on Sunday and she was dead by Thursday. She killed herself. She stabbed herself with a dagger! That’s why it’s so famous, such a famous tragedy. She was only fourteen, younger than me! Imagine being Juliet, and then a few weeks later being told you could never act again, when it was your life, your whole life. All because of a stupid freaking trick by a stupid guy.

I’m so sure. I’m so sure that’s what I’ll do. Never act again.

Maybe become a nice accountant. Or a dentist!

By now, if it wasn’t for the fact that Em sort of needs me as a role model for surviving prep school, I’d probably have taken a hundred Tylenol PM. She needs me, and also, I think taking Tylenol like that damages your liver if

you don’t die. I read that some people in England took some kind of painkiller and they woke up and their liv- ers were destroyed and they were going to die and they had to sit there for a couple of days? Just waiting to die? They probably didn’t even really want to die in the first place, and probably didn’t take enough on purpose. How retarded can you get? If I did it, I would do it right, like Juliet. So they couldn’t save me. I’d do it beautifully. Falling down on my bed in the moonlight. Some nights, on top of my comforter in my crummy bunk, I imagine I’m lying in my casket, in Juliet’s wedding costume, with the little velvet cap on my hair. I’d leave a note to make sure that my parents would buy it from Starwood. That would be the least they could do. And there would be music. Like Pachelbel’s “Canon.” I know, it’s a cliché, but everyone knows it and it makes people get all weepy. Or “Clair de Lune.” Because I’m so young and I’ll never look at the moon again. Or what is it? “Pavane for a Dead Princess”? My parents made me listen to all that classical crap, along with show tunes, when I took piano lessons. I got imprinted on it like a little duck, and now it’s always the soundtrack when I imagine my life as a movie. I don’t

even know the songs kids my age know.

Yes. It would be so sad.

Classical and sad. Classy and sad!

My parents also used to read me poems and make me

memorize them to train my memory. It worked. I can memorize whole pages of lines in a few hours. Like there was this one, “Brightness falls from the air . . . queens have died, young and fair. . . .” I have no idea who wrote that. But my mom read it to me when I was little. I just saw it again in a magazine story about Princess Diana dying all those years ago. And I thought how it would be perfect for someone to read for my eulogy. Just one lit- tle piece of poetry. Maybe one of the kids from when I was in Saint Barnard’s Players in eighth grade. Like Abby would want to do it. Abby totally worshipped me. And she would be falling apart, sobbing while she was read- ing it. I can see it. I can hear her.

How would Logan feel then? Totally like shit. Totally like the turd he is. Standing there looking at the body of the girl he said he loved.

That would be worth it.

But he’s so into himself. I don’t even know anymore if Logan has feelings, or if he just pretends he has them to impress people. He’d probably pretend he was so totally worn down by sadness
. I cared so much. I did everything I could. . . .
I can hear him saying it. What a total liar. I’m so not the one in denial! He’d probably feel like he deserved all this pity and compassion and junk when he wasn’t even dead! Girls would probably be falling all over to comfort him. They’d be dressed up and

have push-up bras on and be smelling of perfume. I’d be lying there like this tiny little queen, but he’d be stand- ing there with his head on somebody else’s shoulder.

It would be a big risk another way, too.

Like, would he even bother to come? Would his par- ents let him? Maybe they’d think it was too traumatic for poor, poor Logan. After all
he’s
been through. What if he couldn’t even say a final good-bye to me in my tomb? I’d be dead forever, and even if the funeral was really good, he might not go. I wouldn’t know if he was there or not. Maybe I wouldn’t even be getting back at him!

You know your life is crap when it’s not even worth killing yourself.

I’m going to get back at him. Maybe just by being better than him.

That’s why I follow the rules.

Like the “jam sessions.” That’s what she calls them. The Miss Taylor we never see. Our wonderful leader. She sends some teacher or teacher-in-training every week to be the “moderator.” You don’t have to attend but it’s “encouraged.” Ohmigod. Wednesday nights in our “paja- mas.” Our dorm group meetings. I wear my nice flannel pants and long T-shirts. Suzette comes practically naked, in a thong with a see-through top. In front of girls, so the reason would be . . . what? Em wears big men’s striped pj’s if she’s okay. If she’s not, she wears whatever she’s