“Yeah,” Morgan agreed, but she looked more hesitant, still watching my face. “We do.”
“Ready?” I said.
“To go out,” Isabel said over her shoulder. “You really haven’t done a Chick Night, have you?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, hurry up,” Morgan scolded me. “And shut that door. We have work to do.”
Chapter eleven
“You can’t have a good Chick Night,” Morgan said, leaning in to the mirror to curl her eyelashes, “without at least one cat-fight.”
“And somebody has to cry, at least once,” Isabel said. “With us, it’s usually Morgan.”
“Is not,” Morgan said, fluffing her bangs, now somewhat fixed.
Isabel caught my eye in the mirror and nodded.
I was sitting on the bed as they stood in front of Isabel’s tiny vanity, adding on and tweezing away, emphasizing and concealing with the spread of makeup before them. The entire room smelled of perfume and smoke, the latter from the curling iron that Isabel had accidentally set on a stack of magazines. The fire had been small but dramatic, burning Cindy Crawford’s lovely face to a crisp.
The closest I’d come to this was watching my mother get ready for dates, something I’d been doing for as long as I could remember. Even in the Fat Years, my mother made time for a social life. It was my job to sit on the bed and hold the box of Kleenex, handing them over as needed to rub in blush or blot lipstick. It was also my job to answer the door, lead her date to the one good chair that always traveled with us—a recliner we’d bought off the side of the road in Memphis for fifty bucks—and make small talk until my mother made her entrance, smelling of whatever perfume insert had been in Cosmo that month.
This was different. This time, I was the one who was going.
“Sit up straight,” Isabel scolded after I’d been sat, on orders, in the chair facing the mirror. “Slouching is the first dead give-away of low self-esteem.”
I sat up.
She pulled back my hair with a headband, then scrutinized my face. “Morgan.”
“Yes?”
“Hand me that Revlon Sand Beige makeup. And a sponge. And the tweezers.” She held her hand out flat, like a surgeon waiting for a scalpel.
“The tweezers?” I said as Morgan slapped them efficiently into her palm.
“Good eyebrows take maintenance,” she said, leaning forward with her eyes narrowed. “Deal with it.”
She plucked. I sat there, staring again at all the beautiful girls while she worked her magic. She spread makeup over my face, blending and dabbing until all of its normal bumps and ridges were smoothed away. She curled my eyelashes as I squirmed, her hand fixed hard on my shoulder. She lined my eyes with black kohl, smudging it with her thumb, then brushed blush on my cheeks and added mascara, drawing my lashes out farther and farther. Then she pulled my hair back, letting a few strands wind down, just like hers. And all the while I studied those perfect faces, one after another, until I came back to my own.
And I saw a girl. Not a fat girl, or a loser, or even a golf course slut.
A pretty girl. Something I had never been before.
“Sit up straight,” Isabel said again, poking me in the spine with the hairbrush. “And put your shoulders back.”
I did.
“Now smile.”
I smiled. In the mirror, over my head, Isabel frowned.
“Do me a favor,” she said, leaning in so her face was right beside mine. “Can you take that thing out?”
She was pointing at my lip ring, and I instantly ran my tongue across it. It was my touchstone, after all. I needed it. “Um,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“Just for one night,” she said. “Humor me.”
And I looked back at myself in the mirror, at all those faces, and then glanced at Isabel’s cousin. She stared back through her thick glasses, her face plump and wide.
“Okay,” I said. “But just for one night.”
“One night,” she agreed, as I reached up to take it out, the last remaining part of what I once was. “One night.”
Chase Mercer had been new to the neighborhood, just like me. His dad did something in software and drove two Porsches, a blue and a red. He didn’t fit in much at first either, since he had a sister in a wheelchair; she had something wrong with her legs, and a nurse wheeled her up and down the street every day. Whenever she saw me, she waved. She waved at everyone.
I met Chase at a neighborhood pool party at the country club. We were both with our parents. The adults were clumped around the bar, my mother working the crowd, and all the kids had disappeared to do whatever kids did in Conroy Plantations, so Chase and I started walking across the golf course. It was late summer and all the stars were out. We were just talking. Nothing else.
He was from Columbus, with thick blond hair that stuck up in the back. He liked sports and Super Nintendo, and when he was six he’d had pneumonia so bad he’d almost died. His mother sold real estate and was never home, and his sister had been sick since she was born and her name was Andrea. He missed his old friends and his old school, and all the kids he’d met in Conroy Plantations were rich and obnoxious and cared too much about clothes.
I told Chase Mercer about my mother suddenly becoming famous. About my father, whom I’d never seen aside from a picture of him and my mother standing by the Alamo, in Texas. About how all the girls in Conroy Plantations made fun of me because I’d been fat and were only nice to me when their mothers made them.