Pretty (16 page)

For twenty minutes the rest of the class confers with each other about the assignment or about what to make for dinner or maybe about Carrie and Big, until finally Ray is overcome with annoyance. “This is not rocket science, people. Let's move on.”

For the next part of the game, Ray instructs us to stick the yellow Post-its to the pockets of our smocks. Then we are supposed to walk around and look at what mantras or theme songs our classmates have chosen and remember our favorite to share with the class afterward. Not much of a game, but there it is.

These are some of the cryptic choices I read stuck to the smock pockets of my classmates:

A puzzling, even disturbing, drawing of an elephant from behind.

About ten
Just Do It
s from the people who didn't understand or couldn't come up with one of their own.

And Javier's choice:
Don't Rain on My Parade
.

It's unclear to me what the connection is between mantras and Charm Gels, but Ray makes the transition seamlessly and without explanation.

Javier interrupts, “Oh, Ray? May I make a suggestion that we each do a performance of our personal theme song?”

I think it's an entertaining idea, but, of course, Ray ignores Javier. Instead, he does a semipermanent maroon gloss on Lila's hair, making her olive skin look startlingly chartreuse under the fluorescents.

A wave of exhaustion overwhelms me and I lay my head down on the table along my outstretched arm. Violet has forgotten to remove her Post-it, and I read sideways that it says
Here Comes the Sun
.

“Here Comes the Sun?”

“So what?”

“Nothing. Just unexpected.”

My meds must be messed up; I must have wicked PMS; I must be sleep deprived, because, thinking about that song, my eyes well up with tears, and one or two even drop onto the plastic red-and-white-checked tablecloth before I can reel them back in.

And that's when the thought hits me. It would knock me down if I wasn't down already. Then the thought starts a chain reaction, like a hundred dominoes followed by a hundred others and on into eternity, so that I have to shake my head to stop it but it doesn't stop. It isn't possible. But it is. It is possible.

I
t's a short walk
to the Rite Aid from school and I head in that direction as soon as I clock out for lunch, with no explanation to Violet or Javier as to why I'm not going with them for SanSai sucky sushi. They're used to my fluctuating moods. It's not unusual for me to wander off once in a while.

I enter the drugstore and circle around and around the labyrinth of aisles, which contain only a handful of customers and the possibility of a troll popping out and posing a riddle that you have to answer or live with him forever next to the scented candles. Didn't there used to be employees in stores who wore little vests with name tags, carried price guns, rolled carts stacked with canned peas, and pointed you toward the aisle with the Scotch tape or the nasal spray? No one.

I pass the candy aisle without even a thought, which never happens, but right now I'm on a mission. I have tunnel vision, literal, not metaphorical, which may or may not be caused by my medication. At the end of the tunnel are stacks of tampon boxes and I follow their blue beacon. Next to the tampons loom the pregnancy tests—cheery-colored, shiny boxes ranging from $9.99 to $21.99. I settle for one that costs $16.99. I glance at the ovulation kit nearby, with the fleshy baby crawling right at me on the front of it, caught in a moment of impossible cuteness. It is natural selection's way of giving babies a chance, this cuteness. So we don't leave them out in the middle of the woods somewhere when things get tough. But I'm not fooled.

I buy the test, my tunnel vision shifting in and out, making me seasick. On the walk back to the school, I'm completely devoid of past or future, totally unable to contemplate either. My breasts bulge in swollen crescents over the top of my bra. I thought I was just getting fat. I put shoe to pavement, right shoe, left shoe, head down as if I am leaning into the wind but I'm not because it's an L.A. sunny seventy-two-degree day with clouds like spun sugar and I fucking hate weather like this sometimes. Like God designed L.A. weather for the very beautiful and very successful and very rich. If you're not all of those things or at least two out of three this weather is like God laughing in your face.

I reach school and walk down the aisle with empty stations on either side of me, then upstairs to the back bathroom. I pass the lunchroom, where the Armenian women laugh and talk loudly with each other. They always seem to be having fun even though I know their lives must suck, too. They are in this same decrepit school as me, on top of immigrating from some former communist country or whatever the hell is going on in Armenia that they all came over here to wind up forty years old and trying to be hairdressers. But they don't seem to walk around all day long needing a bucket of pills or a boatload of heroin or the lit end of a cigarette held to their forearm flesh. They do things like cook lunch and share it with their friends. Vera calls after me to come and eat, but I motion to my belly and make a face like I'm not feeling well. I motor past the door.

The bathroom smells of sulfur from the old pipes and of shit covered up with freesia air freshener from the hundred people in here before me and of perfume from the same. And if I was feeling like retching before, now I actually start to gag.

The bathroom is wood paneled and strictly seventies, like this whole building. Even the toilet seat is that wood kind. They warn you against cutting boards made of wood so who thought it was a real good and sanitary idea to make toilet seats out of wood, I wonder. The room is so small that when you sit on the microbe farm toilet seat your legs hit the sink. Mrs. Montano would never consider a renovation without a direct order from the Department of Public Health, which I am amazed she doesn't have already. Tacked to the door is a poster of a cat wearing a nightie, with a silver dryer bonnet on her head as if she is setting her curlers. The caption:
“I'm too pretty for mousework!”

I open the box and unfold the directions, but they basically say to pee on the stick, which is what I assumed. I maneuver in the small space, hold the absorbent tip of the white plastic stick in my pee stream for the allotted three seconds, then put the pink cap neatly back on and leave it facedown on the back of the toilet so I won't watch it while I wash my hands. A bar equals a negative result; a cross equals a positive result.

Someone knocks on the door and my surprising reaction is fury. I could open the door and punch her in the face. I could throw her to the ground. I could knock her head into the floor like you see in the movies. Grab her by the hair and bash it again and again. I want a fucking toilet to sit on in my life where no one can knock on the door.

But what I say is, “Sorry, I'm sick in here. Could you please use the downstairs bathroom?”

The footsteps fade away. It's the longest, smelliest three minutes. I crumple the box and cover it with toilet paper so no one will see it in the trash. I don't bother with dread or hope. A profound tiredness saturates my arms and my legs. I could curl myself into a ball and go to sleep on this filthy floor.

I watch the second hand go around the Minnie Mouse watch Jake bought me at Disneyland a couple of months ago. The hands of the watch are Minnie's arms and her big white balloon hands always make me think of bandages.

I hadn't wanted to go to Disneyland. I had always thought it was, like, some corporate plot to take over the world by brainwashing kids. I was surprised when Jake contradicted me, because he's usually eager to jump on any brainwashing conspiracy train that passes his way. I dreaded the eternal lines and the inedible food and the twelve billion kids wiping their boogers on every possible surface. I dreaded interactions with their fat, miserable parents, who probably came in the day before from my hometown. Just kill me.

But Jake had promised Milla that on our next babysitting day he'd take her to see some fairies. So we went to see the fairies. And the ghosts and pirates and princesses, and in every new land he had a new story for her. And when she got tired he carried her piggyback.

One of the fairies we saw was so bogus and bitchy that Milla called her on it.

“You're not Tinkerbell.”

Jake took her aside and said, “You're right. I think that fairy is a fake fairy. But where there are fake fairies, there are usually real fairies, too. You can't always see them but you can tell because if you listen really close, you can hear them sing. And you can be sure that somewhere there's a fairy who's watching you and who thinks you're the greatest little girl anywhere. And she can't wait to meet you. She's just waiting for the right moment.”

If you were Susan Schmidt you'd say that I'm with Jake because I'm so fucked up and I think I deserve someone headed on an obvious crash course. She'd say that my own guilt and self-hatred prompts my self-destructive choice in boyfriend. But Susan Schmidt never looked at that little girl's face when Jake told her about the fairies.

When Minnie's hand hits the twelve for the third time, I turn the stick over and face my fate.

What I see is a cross. A cross equals positive results.

It's a mistake. I can't possibly grow anything. No seed would take root here, in this poison ground.

I hold on to the stick and slide down the wall, where I sit for a minute with my knees tucked under my chin.

Jesus is in the cross
. Jesus is in the cross. Get it? It's funny.

I don't eat lunch,
which is appropriately dramatic but leaves me starving hungry.

I clock back in, sit at my station, and stare into the mirror, but not at myself, through me to somewhere else.

“You are feeling unwell?” asks Vera, towering over my station with a concerned look on her impeccably made-up, glamorous face. She puts her hand over mine, which I hadn't noticed was gripping the edge of the table. There is the line of demarcation at her wrist that you get from a spray-on tan. Vera works evenings at Wet Seal in the Glendale Galleria. She should be a Transylvanian countess who feasts on the blood of virgins, not working at the Galleria with a fake tan.

“I'm okay. Little stomach thing,” I say, starting to set up my station so I don't have to look her in the eye.

“You are needing some cola?” she asks.

“I'm good, thanks,” I say. She mercifully moves on to her own station and begins meticulously prepping her foils to do Lila's highlights. Lila and Vera are inseparable. They married two brothers and live in adjoining condos. Each carries a wedding picture around in her purse. Vera was Lila's maid of honor and vice versa; the pictures are nearly identical with the roles switched around. That's a different kind of family than I know anything about.

Javier and Violet saunter back in. Since we have been upstairs learning about Charm Gels and the Meaning of Life all morning, we first set up our stations now. I put my rollers and clips and combs out in front of me, arranging and rearranging them, forcing a fake smile at Javier and Violet. Javier raises his eyebrow at me, then goes on about the elaborate task of his daily decorating.

With tiny pieces of Scotch tape, Javier attaches pictures of Milla and Paul and their fat, well-dressed Chihuahua, really named Zuzu but nicknamed Butterball, around the perimeter of his mirror. Since it's nearly spring, Butterball features pastel bonnets and matching capes. I guess Javier couldn't find a real flower today, so he puts a silk flower studded with rhinestones on the corner of his station. He sings under his breath:
“Don't tell me not to live
,
just sit and putter . . .”

“I have a surprise for you,” he says as he fusses, setting his doll head on her stand and preparing to sculpt his latest creation. Lorelei Lee must be the luckiest doll head in the world. Whatever impoverished teenage slave in Burma shaved her head so that we could have real human hair to practice on has had justice of some sort done for her lost locks.

“No.” I stop, lean back in my chair, and look at his reflection dead in the eye. “
I
have a surprise for
you
.”