Outside Beauty

Outside Beauty

OTHER BOOKS BY

Cynthia Kadohata

Kira-Kira

Weedflower

Cracker! The Best Dog in Vietnam

Cynthia Kadohata

With thanks to Gale School Elementary pals

Amy and Chris.

From age nine to ninety, some friends are forever!

Atheneum Books for Young Readers • An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division • 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
• This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. • Copyright © 2008 by Cynthia Kadohata • All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. • Book design by Mike Rosamilia • The text for this book is set in MrsEaves. • Manufactured in the United States of America • First Edition • 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 • Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data • Kadohata, Cynthia. • Outside beauty/Cynthia Kadohata.—1st ed. • p. cm. • Summary: Thirteen-year-old Shelby and her three sisters must go to live with their respective fathers while their mother, who has trained them to rely on their looks, recovers from a car accident that scarred her face. • ISBN-13: 978-0-689-86575-6 • ISBN-10: 0-689-86575-9 • eISBN-13: 978-1-416-99819-8 • [1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Custody of children—Fiction. 5. Beauty, Personal—Fiction.] I. Title. • PZ7.K1166Out 2008 • [Fic]—dc22 • 2007039711

For the guys:

Sammy

George

Stan

Zach

and

Dad

“PLEASE?” MY LITTLE SISTER SAID. “Pleeeeease? Let me push you in the shopping cart. I promise you won't fall.”

“
No
,” I said. Maddie was one of those kids with big, persuasive eyes, like a doll's. But a couple of boys from school happened to be across the alley, and I didn't want them seeing me in a shopping cart. I wasn't wearing my glasses because I wanted to look cute.

“Pleeeease?” Maddie said.

“Oh, all right.” Those boys didn't like me anyway. I climbed into the cart and watched Maddie's face brighten, then scrunch up with the concentrated effort of pushing me. She started running, her face
alight, but suddenly the cart came to a halt and the next thing I knew, my head thumped on the sidewalk and the shopping cart crashed against my nose.

“Ow! You said I wouldn't fall!”

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry! There was a huge crack in the ground.” Maddie helped me get the cart off. “Your nose is bleeding.”

“Yours would be too.” But I wasn't too hurt to glance at the boys. They hadn't made a move to help. Instead, they were watching and laughing. As my mother liked to say, “Some men just have no manners.” I rose unsteadily to my feet and swiped the back of my hand under my nose to wipe away the blood.

Maddie was near to crying. “I'm sorry.”

“You almost gave me a concussion!” I said. I stomped away. I tasted blood. I knew Maddie was following because I could hear her behind me, repeating that she was sorry.

We went home the back way and stepped into the usual commotion—we didn't have much downtime at home. At the front door someone was pounding. My sisters Marilyn and Lakey pressed against the door. “It's Pierre!” said Marilyn urgently. “Why is your nose bleeding?”

“Hi,” said Lakey. “Your nose is bleeding.”

“Where's Mom?” I said.

“Getting dressed,” Marilyn said. “You should do something with that nose, Shelby.”

“My eye hurts too,” I said.

“It's all red,” Marilyn said. “I think you're on your way to a shiner. It's swelling.”

The pounding grew louder. From the other side of the door Pierre shouted, “I'm pounding my head! It's my head you hear! I'm killing myself!”

Marilyn and Lakey kept pressing against the door as if they and not the dead bolt were holding it closed. My heart beat hard inside of me, and I could feel my face grow hot with fear and excitement. The door shivered every time Pierre pounded his head.

“Let's open it and see what happens!” Maddie cried out. Her short hair was mussed as usual, shooting out every which way.

We all turned to Marilyn. She shook her head no. “That's just looking for trouble.” She thought some more. “Not that trouble isn't fun sometimes. But Mom said not to open it. Are you
okay
, Shelby?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I can hear you in there!” Pierre shouted. He said “th” like “z.” He continued to pound. “I am killing myself!”

If we were anyone else, the neighbors probably would have called the police by now. But we were who we were. My mother walked calmly out of her bedroom, and we girls split apart like the sea as she said imperiously to the door, “Believe you me, no man ever committed suicide by pounding his head against a door!” She turned to me. “Bathroom. Come. Now.”

She swept away, all of us following. She was overdressed as usual. Who else would wear a red silk dress and full makeup for a man on the other side of a door? The four of us formed a semicircle around her in the bathroom. She leaned toward me, examining my face. “Hmmm . . . good. There's no injury to the eye itself, just the tissue around it. And you should be thankful that your nose isn't broken.” She stood up without inquiring what had happened to me. “Shelby, you clean up your face. The rest of you start packing. We're taking a little road trip.” In the background Pierre's pounding had taken on a deliberate rhythm.
Bomp!
One, two.
Bomp!
One, two.
Bomp!

To Maddie, Mom said, “Your hair—you look like Sid Vicious.” To Marilyn, she said, “Make sure the girls pack everything they need. We may be gone a couple of weeks.” To Lakey: “We're going to California to see your father.”

I lay on the bathroom floor holding a tissue to my nose. When my nose stopped bleeding, I checked the mirror. My eye was swollen and red. Sometimes I could kill Maddie. I hurried into the bedroom to pack. My sisters had already thrown some clothes into my bag. Pierre was still pounding, but the rhythm had slowed and the sound came from lower down, as if he were sitting now.

As we walked out the back door, mimicking our mother's silken movements, we could still hear the steady thumping. I wondered how long Pierre would continue. Mrs. Gilmore from next door and Mrs. Fedderman from below were standing on the back stairway talking, but they stopped when they saw us. We continued moving as silkily as we could when carrying two weeks' worth of baggage. “What's wrong with that girl's face?” Mrs. Fedderman called out, looking right at me.

And that's how I came to be hanging my head out the car window with a sore eye, the warm air pounding my face as we escaped Pierre and the humid Chicago summer and drove toward California and Lakey's father.

It was the summer of 1983. School was out, Sally Ride had just become the first American woman in
space, and we were the four most amazing girls in the world. Our mother told us so.

I was excited. I hadn't even realized Pierre was important enough for my mother to make a move like this. He was what we thought of as one of our mother's “minor boyfriends.” As opposed to, for instance, our fathers, who were “major boyfriends.”

“My mother had four daughters by four different men.” This is a line I had repeated many times in my life, as explanation. I loved my sisters more than I loved anyone, maybe even more than my mother. They were not just sisters to me, they were extensions of myself. It felt exactly right to be barreling down the expressway with them.

Whenever we needed to change lanes and it was a tight squeeze, Marilyn smiled at the driver in the next lane to make sure the car would let us in. She used her beauty the way my mother used hers. Marilyn was not a pretty girl such as you see every day, at the bank or in the store or in a restaurant. She possessed that rare type of beauty, like our mother's, that you saw only once in a great while and that haunted you. She was half Italian and half Japanese, and she looked vaguely Polynesian. Several times, at a Chicago Cubs game, a boy would spot her with his binoculars and seek her
out from across the park. The boys would just want to meet her, maybe to touch her hand. She was second in command to our mother and was so grown up that she'd even driven us to school with our mother riding shotgun.

In the car Lakey had already started reading. Reading in a car always made me feel ill. But Lakey not only read in the car, she read in the bathtub, at the table while we ate frozen dinners, and on the sidewalk while we walked to school or the ice cream store. She was a genius, according to a test she took last year when she was seven. Lakey was conceived on a boat in Lake Michigan; thus, her name. My mother said that if we were ever out in public and she got distracted—she meant by men—Lakey was Marilyn's special charge, and Maddie was mine. Lakey was half Japanese and half Chinese.

Maddie was lucky she was so cute. At least, that's the way I saw it. She was a six-year-old troublemaker. She was born with a thin patch of hair low on her back, not far from where a tail would be. We thought this was proof that she was part animal. She was half Japanese and half Anglo, pale with heavily slanted eyes.

And me? I'm Shelby. I was almost thirteen and—I don't know—the private one. Like sometimes when I
had a thought, I kept it to myself. When I cried, I did so after my sisters were asleep. Now, maybe my sisters also cried after they went to sleep, but since I was usually the last one up at night, I doubted it. I needed to debrief at the end of the day, so I liked to think before I went to sleep. I had a very clear memory and could see everybody perfectly when I closed my eyes at night. This helped me think about the day.

I wanted to grow up and be something normal with a dash of glamour, like a tour guide or a photographer.

Lakey wanted to be a lawyer, and Marilyn was going to get married when she was nineteen, so she wouldn't have to work. Maddie didn't have the slightest idea what she wanted to do someday. Maddie just wanted to laugh. She wanted to play. To have fun, like my mother always did.

My mother had briefly entertained the idea that we would be like the Partridge Family or the Jacksons: a family band. We took singing and dancing lessons and didn't much like them. Then my mother decided she wanted us all to be not only songbirds, but sex-bombs, each in her own way. She could see potential in my sisters but not me, because I wore glasses, and the contacts she once got me made it feel like dust
was rubbing against my eyes. So I was always clutching at my face and crying out, “There's dust in my eye!” My mother said I was a late bloomer. I hoped that was true. I wanted so badly to be sophisticated, the way my mother wanted me to be. The way my sisters saw me? I guess they thought I talked slow, and I guess they thought I moved at my own pace, and I guess they thought these were traits I inherited from my father. And because I had a habit of seeming to change the subject while we talked, they thought my mind moved around an awful lot.