The Missing Girl (4 page)

She replayed them and took them in like a secret invitation to a strange land. The land of poetry, a place not many people wanted to go, certainly not at first. Friday after Friday, Mr. Giametti stubbornly trolled for the class’s attention with funny poems and easy poems and more poems with naked lady kind of words. Some parents objected, and by the end of that school year, Mr. Giametti was gone. Beauty mourned his leaving, because all that year, that awful, hideous, painful year, Fridays were what she lived for, waited for, longed for. She was in love with Mr. Giametti, of course, but it was also the shock and surprise and delight of the poems he stubbornly continued to recite to her class. To
her
, she thought, and let herself get lost in the words he brought to them.

Four years later Beauty still remembers some of those poems, especially one called “postcard from cape cod,”

made up by a woman named Linda Pastan, someone who wrote a lot of poems. Beauty had Googled her on the computer in the library, and she dreamed that someday she’d meet Linda Pastan—not in Mallory, that was for sure—maybe in Chicago, or New York City, which she planned to visit. She imagined her as very kind with long, beautiful gray hair. They would be at some sort of party,
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and they’d be holding glasses of, yes, wine, and they’d talk.

Beauty:
I love your postcard poem, and I know it by
heart
.

Linda Pastan:
Really?

Beauty:
Yes. I think it’s beautiful. It always makes me
happy to think about it.

Linda Pastan:
Would you like to say it for me?

Beauty:
“just now I saw

one yellow

butterfly

migrating

across buzzard’s bay

how brave I thought

or foolish

like sending

a poem

across months

of silence

and on such

delicate

wings.”

That’s the good fantasy and the good memory. The bad memory, unfortunately not a fantasy, is the note she found
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in her locker later that Friday, after Mr. Giametti read them the naked lady poem.

beauty h

is an old cabbage

boiling mad

on the pure stove

No capital letters. No periods. And funny. Wasn’t it funny?

She had wanted to be amused by this, wanted to believe that the heat in her face was only suppressed laughter.

Wanted to believe the boiling mad part really pleased her.

After all, her reputation—as she knew only too well—was not just homely and wrong named, but
prissy
. Wussy. But, look, here was someone who saw her as feisty enough to be
boiling mad
.

“Great!” she heard herself say, and turned over the paper to see a drawing of a girl with a huge head that closely resembled a cabbage. The letters B. H. were encased in a balloon floating nearby and, in the unlikely event that she didn’t get it, an arrow from the letters pointed to the drawing.

Kids tramped by. Someone said, “Hi, Beauty.” She
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answered automatically, fixed a smile on her face.

Cabbage head, that’s me.

The misery of that year had simmered down, but Beauty believed the sting of the memories, the humilia-tion, would never truly leave her until she left Mallory and changed her life, changed every bit of it, starting with her name. No more Beauty. She would become a Karen or possibly Heather or Kristy.

If she had a regular name like that now, she would be the kind of girl who wore baggy jeans and plain white shirts, who was an average student and sat anonymously in the middle of every classroom, and no one would notice her or her face or her name, ever, for any reason.

In fact, though, she was a better-than-average student and, like most of the girls in Mallory Central School, she wore her shirts colorful and her jeans tight. Her family and other people looked at her as a regular Mallory girl, maybe homelier than most, but ordinary and careful and depend-able, not one to make waves or take chances or do anything the least bit unusual.
Oh, really? Well, someday,
they’ll be surprised. I’ll show them!
That was what she’d been thinking for a long time. Was that why last year, secretly and alone, she had taken herself to the tattoo
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parlor on Locust Street, in a crummy part of town, and why now, on her right thigh, a giant green butterfly (really a moth named Luna) fluttered over a brilliant blue daisy-like flower?

“Not very biologically sound,” the tattoo artist had said, holding his needle suspended over her bare thigh. “Sure you want the flower blue?”

“I’m sure,” she had said, and closed her eyes, so she wouldn’t have to see the needle.

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HER HAIR

THE MAN ALWAYS looked at people’s hair. You could tell a lot about a person from the hair. Cheyenne, who worked in the next cubicle, had a short, spiky haircut.

He hated it, hated her for having it. Girls should look like girls, not boys! One of his birds had long hair, and never wore a hat, no matter how chilly the weather, almost as if she were showing off her hair for him. If she only knew how much that pleased him, her bare head and the length of her hair, and the sheen, and the color, and how thick it was, thick and glossy.

And here she came now, here they all came! His heart quickened, but he didn’t alter his pace, or the expression
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on his face. As he approached from the opposite direction, he studied the one with long hair. The five of them were all there today, all clumped together now on the corner, the gaggle of them, waiting for the light to change, twittering and giggling. The one with long hair was jumping from one foot to the other. Her hair flew out behind her, healthy hair, pretty hair, but too messy.

Yes, too messy for his taste, all that hair just flailing around her head, without even a tie holding it back. Some days it was even worse, looked as if she’d forgotten to comb it. Didn’t she know that grooming was important for a lady? If he had a chance, he would certainly tell her that.

He would be nice about it, of course, point out how easy it was to stay neat, then offer to give her a trim, even to style her hair. He could do that.

In his mind’s eye he saw her sitting meekly in a chair, and himself standing behind her, brushing her hair for her. Brushing from the top to the bottom, his other hand following the brush, smoothing her hair, playing with it a little, lifting strands to sniff, winding it around his hand, winding it tighter and tighter. She would shriek, and he would reassure her, unwind her hair, slowly unwind it.

He thought about this, and then he didn’t think it. The
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girls crossed the street, and he moved toward his bus stop, banishing the image, pushing it away, although there was nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with thoughts.

Nothing wrong with his thoughts. They were just thoughts, ripples of the mind. They didn’t mean anything.

And there was nothing wrong with looking at the girl, with looking at all of them. If anyone ever asked, he’d say he enjoyed looking at them the way any man would. It was a manly thing to do. He might admit that he was partial to the one with the long hair, because she was more ladylike than the others, and he would be respected for that.

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HISSY FITS

HERE IS WHAT you think in your heart, and here is the first thing you write in the notebook Mrs. Kalman gave you.
My name is Autumn Jane Huddle, and this is my
privite for me only diary journal. Mommy and Poppy are
awful. That’s my true privite feeling. Well, Mommy is not
so bad, but sometimes I hate her, too. Nobody read this!

You are snooping if you read this. Poppy not getting work
is making them both like crazy, fighting people. Poppy is
sitting out in his truck and Mommy is talking to herself
.

You write that after the fight. You were all at the table, eating supper, when Poppy threw down his fork and swore. “Damn it, I’m fed up with macaroni every day.

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Can’t you make any other damn thing, Blossom?”

You wanted to sink right into the stool or get away or something, but Poppy was looking all around the table, not nice like he always used to be but glaring at everybody, and you didn’t dare move. You wouldn’t dare say a thing, either, not even
pass the salt please
, with Poppy all mad and everybody looking down at their plates. Even Fancy shut up for a big minute, but not Stevie.

Stevie isn’t afraid of
anything
. She got right into the act and made a big hissy fit. “Listen to Daddy,” she said, only she didn’t
say
it, she screeched it, the way she does. “Me, I’m sick of the same thing, the same old thing, macaroni, macaroni, all the time!”

You always get that I’m-going-to-throw-up, sick-in-the-belly feeling when Stevie has a fit and yells at people, which she does about twenty-three times a day, but you can’t help thinking she’s kind of brave, too, and you wish you were more like her. Your secret about yourself is that you’re a huge scaredy cat. You’re scared of so many things, like burglars and lightning and driving across a bridge in a car and going to the dentist, which you didn’t do this year, and it’s one thing, anyway, to be glad about when your family doesn’t have money.

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Mommy is sort of like Stevie, yelling a lot, but nicer, except when she gets mad. Then she gets really, really mad and throws things, and sometimes it’s funny, like she throws a pot holder or a dish towel, and everybody ducks and tries not to let Mommy see them laughing.

But this time, when Poppy said that about the food, she threw a pot right across the room, and it crashed into the wall.

Fancy, who’s your favorite sister, sang out. “Lucky, lucky, lucky it didn’t hit any person body,” and you look at her and sort of smile, because you know nobody will scold her.

Then Beauty said, “Hey, you all, Daddy’s back is going to get better, right, Daddy? Like your foot last year, after you fell into that woodchuck hole when you went hunting? And then you can work again, and everything will be okay.”

You could see Daddy’s face sort of cooling off and getting nice again, and he nodded, and you let out a big breath you didn’t even know you’d been holding. After a bit everybody started talking, Mommy even sat down next to you and petted your hair, so you knew she wasn’t mad anymore. And everybody ate their supper and was happy.

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Except you. Your stomach still hurt, so you asked to be excused, and you went to your room and wrote in your notebook, and then you felt sort of better, but you still didn’t want to eat supper.

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BEAUTY AND ETHAN: THE MOVIE

BEAUTY WAS ON her way out of school, hurry-ing to get to her job at the florist shop, when she almost ran into Ethan Boswell, a junior boy she sort of knew from AP World History, who was taking the steps back into school two at a time. He had long legs, and he was on the track team. “Oops, sorry,” she said, and stepped aside. So did he. “Double oops,” she said, and stepped to the other side. So did he. It was one of those stupid moments that were so stupid they were funny.

Ethan seemed to be holding back a laugh. His nose twitched. Then he dashed around her. That little dance lasted just long enough for Beauty to look closely at
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Ethan—he sat way in the back of Mr. Magruder’s class and never said much—and to see that he wasn’t just another tall and skinny guy who could run, but had a bit of dash. He wore two thin silver rings in one ear and a brilliant rose-colored scarf, like a flag marking him out, tied across his forehead. Not the usual Mallory toughboy or jockboy—or any Malloryboy—getup.

Beauty looked around for her sisters, saw none of them, and kept going, walking fast and wondering why she had never really noticed Ethan Boswell before, when he was so
very
cute. Her heart rose and sank at the same moment. Yes, yes, it was going to be another crush. She’d been holding out against falling again, falling for a boy, falling into the agonizing, thrilling highs and lows of passion. In some corner of her mind, she had held the thought that
not
to have a crush was somehow freeing, but walking west on Midler Avenue, she was talking to Ethan.

Frankly, it was that scarf that captured my heart, that just
slayed me!

But what about her will slay him, knock him over, stop him in his fast run through life? She shifted her backpack, trotted a block, imagined herself running alongside him on the track behind the school. Is that how they’ll get
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started? Maybe. Well, not in real life. Anyway, fast-forward. Fingers linked, she and Ethan are strolling around the duck pond in Lafayette Park. She’s asking him about himself. He tells her this and that, but mostly he wants to know about her, because he’s that unusual kind of person interested in other people, not just himself.

Maybe she’ll ask if he ever wondered about her name.

I bet you did. Bizarre, huh?
Cueing him in that if he had made fun of her name, her face, of
her
, that she understands, really she does. But no, that script is too real. This is a
fantasy
, a movie, and she’s actress, director, and scriptwriter, so she can have it anywhichway she pleases.

All right then, on with it. Take One, the name scene.

When they named me, my parents were out of their
minds, Ethan
. An amused tone—she’s going for laughs here.
Berserk people! Someone shoulda called the little
men in white
. Or maybe a more serious approach?
I have
suffered with this name every day of my life
. Whew!

Waaay too dramatic. He fingers the silver rings in his ear, nods encouragingly. She notices his ears are large and a little floppy. Sweet. Didn’t she read somewhere that big ears are a sign of a sensitive nature? Nonsense, of course, but still. He is
so
sensitive, especially for a boy—but she
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