Like how she was wiggling backward onto the stool, adjusting her bottom by lifting up one cheek and then the other. When it was my turn, I’d do a quick, confident hop, like Cinnamon had. I wouldn’t adjust my bottom.
“Let’s see,” Aimee said, tilting her head to study Dinah’s features. Dinah held her smile in a way that showed she knew she was being scrutinized. Round face, white skin, blue eyes—that was Dinah. My little kitty-cat girl, so not a tigress. Which was as it should be. In a threesome of friends, there isn’t room for more than one tigress.
Aimee got to work with something called “Moon Glow,” which she said would “add radiance” to Dinah’s skin. “It has reflective particles that catch the light and bounce it back,” she explained. “Angelina Jolie uses it.”
Dinah giggled. She jutted her chin forward to meet Aimee’s touch.
Aimee stroked on a smoky eye shadow and lightly lined Dinah’s blue eyes with gray eyeliner. I noted how she did it, with lots of small dashes rather than one continuous line. She used a tiny brush to paint Dinah’s lips with a deep cherry stain.
“There,” she said. “What do you think?”
Dinah looked in the mirror. Cinnamon and I leaned over her shoulders.
“Whoa,” Cinnamon said when she got her words back. As for me, I remained speechless. Dinah looked…beautiful. How had Aimee done that? Was it the cherry-red lips? Or maybe it was the Moon Glow. Dinah’s skin was luminescent.
“Oh my gosh,” Dinah said. She put down the mirror and grabbed a Kleenex, rubbing at her lips.
“What are you doing? Leave it!” Cinnamon said.
“It’s too red!” Dinah said. “I look like a…like a streetwalker!”
Aimee laughed. “Sweetie, you do not look like a streetwalker.”
She kept scrubbing. “I do!”
“Dinah, stop,” Cinnamon said. She grabbed Dinah’s hand. “You’re not used to it, that’s all.”
I wasn’t used to it, either. I was confused by what I was feeling, which I recognized by its prickly claws in my stomach.
“Honest, you look fabulous,” I said, trying to push the jealousy away. Jealousy was stupid and wrong, especially when it came to Dinah. I should be happy she looked so great! I was happy. I was.
“Anyway, it’s just for fun,” I said. “Nobody says you have to make yourself up every day.”
“You’ve got to get that lip stain,” Cinnamon said. “That has to be your one thing.”
“Well, don’t force her.” I laughed. “Dinah, it’s totally up to you.”
She got off the stool, easing herself down until her feet touched the floor. It was downright weird seeing this beautiful Dinah. I couldn’t get over it.
Aimee patted the stool to say it was my turn, while Dinah gravitated to one of the mirrors on the counter.
I tore my eyes away. I hopped up on the stool and straightened my spine. Then I felt stupid and let myself slump. Then I felt slumpy and straightened up again. Ack! Why was I was so awkward in my body?!
“Hold still,” Aimee said. She did her thing with the moisturizer, her fingers light and birdlike, and I focused on soaking into the moment. This is your birthday treat, and you’re supposed to enjoy it, I reminded myself. It was part of my normal existence to give myself instructions like this. Maybe other people acted and lived in total naturalness. I often wondered if they did. But me? I needed an operating manual.
“For you, we’ll go with dark brown eyeliner,” Aimee said. “You have such pretty eyes. We want to emphasize that.”
That made me feel better. Pretty eyes, I have pretty eyes. Were Dinah and Cinnamon catching this? No, Dinah was still peering at her at reflection and Cinnamon was uncapping lipsticks and testing them on her forearm. I felt a stab of irritation. I’d watched them get made over. Shouldn’t they be watching me?
Cinnamon felt my gaze and glanced up. “Looking good!” she encouraged.
Aimee applied a pink glitter dust called “Rock Star” to my eyelids, and she used a miniature comb to smooth my eyebrows. “You’ll probably want to pluck eventually,” she said, “but let’s not worry about that now.”
What was that supposed to mean? Am I a hairy, over-eyebrowed beast? Or—oh god. Maybe I had a monobrow?
“Do I have a monobrow?” I asked.
“Not at all,” Aimee said. “Everyone can benefit from a little shaping, that’s all.”
“Oh,” I said. But what I thought was: Then why didn’t you mention it to Cinnamon and Dinah? Couldn’t they benefit from a little shaping, too?
I really, really hated how needy I was feeling. It was as if it came out of nowhere.
“Um…should we use the Moon Glow?” I asked.
“Not with your skin tone,” Aimee said.
I wanted to argue, but didn’t.
She reached into a drawer and pulled out a steel something-or-other that looked like it came from the Middle Ages. It was curved at the end, with a black cushiony pad between two parts that opened and shut. Aimee put her hand under my chin and said, “Okay, look down for me.”
I did. She clamped my eyelashes and squeezed. Ah, I thought. An eyelash curler. It didn’t hurt. She did the other eye, then stroked brown mascara on both with a fat brush. She finished up with a pale pink lip gloss.
“There,” she said.
Dinah and Cinnamon stopped doing their own stuff and gathered around.
“Oh, Winnie,” Dinah said.
“Sheesh, girl,” Cinnamon said. “You’re a babe!”
I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyelashes, which I’d never spent much time thinking about, curled in a dark fringe around my eyes. The pink glitter dust didn’t look awful, as I’d feared. It made my eyes sparkly. And the gloss—again, pink—made my lips shiny and soft.
I’d never thought of myself as a pink kind of girl…. but maybe I was.
“You like?” Aimee asked.
I nodded. I did like, very much.
Cinnamon and Dinah put their faces down by mine so that all of us were visible in the mirror. We were ourselves, only fancier. The heaviness in my chest lifted and floated away, all but the teeniest tendril.
“Three beauties,” Aimee pronounced.
“Aren’t we, though?” Cinnamon said. “We are foxy.”
Dinah and I giggled. I was filled with love for both of them, and I felt guilty for not always being only filled with love. When it came time to pick out which product we each wanted to buy, I told Dinah she really should get the lip stain.
“It makes you look fifteen at least,” I say.
“Oh,” she said. Then, “Do I want to look fifteen?”
I hesitated. Didn’t she? Didn’t we all?
“Of course,” Cinnamon said. She turned to me and tut-tutted. “Kids. What can you do?”
“Oh, please,” Dinah said. “Like you’re so much older.”
“Eons and eons, sweetie,” Cinnamon threw back.
I smiled, but I wondered who was right: Cinnamon for wanting to move forward, or Dinah for wanting to stay put? And where did I fit in?
“Get the lip stain,” I said decisively. “And I’ll buy the Rock Star glitter dust.”
“But—” Dinah started.
“Nope, no arguing. And Cinnamon, you should get the color brick, because you can get green eye shadow anywhere.”
“Not this exact shade,” she protested.
“Fine, get the eye shadow,” I said.
“Okay,” she said happily.
Dinah said the Bobbi Brown products were the best birthday favors ever, and I teased her for calling them “favors,” as if I was five again and handing out cellophane bags filled with candy and those cheapo soundmakers that unfurl when you blow them.
At the photo booth by the food court, we posed for three different strips of pictures, some goofy and some for real. Later that night, when we were back at my house, we cut the strips apart and divvied up the pics. I picked one, then Cinnamon, then Dinah. Then all over again until every photo was clai
med.
“You have got to give that one to Lars,” Cinnamon said of one in particular. In it, I was laughing, and my hair was swished back in a particularly flattering way. My eyes were bright and happy.
“I don’t think so,” I said. We were in my bedroom, all three of us sprawled on our stomachs on the carpet. The pictures were spread in front of us.
“Why not?” she said.
“Because it would be too obvious, that’s why. What, I’m just going to whip it out and say, ‘Here, this is for you’?”
“Uh…yes.”
“Uh…no.” I glanced at Dinah for support. She tittered.
“Don’t you want him to see how hot you are?” Cinnamon said.
“Not if I have to be the one who shows him!”
“Then I’ll do it,” she said, deftly exchanging my swished-hair picture for one from her own collection.
“Hey!” I protested.
“Yeah, whatever,” Cinnamon said. She stacked her pics and slipped them into her back pocket, where I couldn’t grab them without being a perv.
My cheeks got hot, because she knew and I knew and even Dinah knew that I did want Lars to see. Just as long as Cinnamon was subtle about it…. which, given the fact that she was Cinnamon, was totally a crapshoot.
But making a big deal out of it would only egg her on. I picked up the photo she’d given me in exchange for the one of me as a babe. It was one of the goofy ones, with Cinnamon mugging for the camera and Dinah stretching her mouth out with her fingers. I lurched at an angle behind them, making a deranged, hairy-eyeball face.
I imagined Cinnamon giving Lars this one and snort-giggled.
“What?” Cinnamon said.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Seriously. What?” Cinnamon hated being left out of a joke.
I shrugged. No way was I planting the idea in her head. It did make me realize, though, how thankful I should be that we had traded. It was a nugget of unexpected good.
“Just…you know,” I said. “Thinking about oysters.”
“Oysters?” Cinnamon repeated.
Dinah abruptly sat up. “Winnie, please tell me you don’t have an oyster hidden somewhere.”
“What are you talking about?” Cinnamon demanded. “Did anyone bring up oysters? No, I don’t think so. Oysters are not a part of this conversation!”
I laughed.
“Oysters, be gone!” she cried.
“Tell me right now there are no oysters lurking about,” Dinah said. “I mean it.”
“No oysters, I promise. Only symbolic oysters.”
“Symbolic oysters?” Cinnamon said.
“Yep,” I said grandly. I rolled onto my back and gazed at the ceiling. “And in every symbolic oyster is a symbolic pearl.”
Cinnamon groaned, which only added to my pleasure. The carpet was nubbly against my skin, and I realized that the lingering sadness I’d felt at the mall was no longer present. Instead I felt expansive and happy.
Yes, there is both good and bad in the world, and more often than not, they’re mixed together. At least, that’s how it seems to me. But it’s the oyster thing again, because maybe the trick is to find the good part and pull it out and say, “There! See?”
I could do that. I could do anything.
I was thirteen.
April
IWANTED LARS. I did. I wanted him. Not in a hot-and-heavy “let’s make out” sort of way, because that was not within the realm of possibility at this juncture of my life. (“Juncture.” I loved it. I loved finding words like that and tossing them about, even if just in my own mind. “Flotsam and jetsam.” “Indubitably.” “Segue,” with that lovely “way” sound at the end, despite the deceptive spelling.)
No, I didn’t want to make out with Lars—yet. I just wanted to own him, to have him be mine. I wanted him the way I wanted a new bike when I was younger, or the Easy-Bake Oven.
I kept waiting for something to happen between us, for us to at least hold hands again, but somehow the world had yet to throw us into that perfect situation where hand-holding would be the only possible response.
It made me feel desperate, how much I ached for him. I’d have daydreams about him, stupid stuff like him finding me at my locker and putting his hands over my eyes, then leaning close and murmuring “Hey there” into my ear. Or—and this one was kind of embarrassing—I had this one fantasy that I’d fall asleep on one of the benches out on the quad (because I did sometimes curl up on them for a quickie little snooze), and he’d find me and think how cute I looked. Or not cute, but pretty. And maybe I’d be wearing a miniskirt, and I wouldn’t be indecent or anything, but he’d notice that I had nice legs. He’d say, “Wake up, sleepyhead,” and I would. I’d be all flustered and drowsy-eyed, and he’d grin like he found me so incredibly charming.
My daydreams made me feel lame, though, because I was sure he didn’t think about me as much as I thought about him. Well, fairly sure. I hoped he did, but I also knew that boys were different creatures than girls, as evidenced by my dear, sweet, nutty brother, Ty. I loved him with all my heart, but I worried about him sometimes.
Like now, for instance. The sound of duct tape being ripped from the roll jerked me out of my Lars fantasies and dropped me back into cold, hard reality.
“Ty, what are you doing?” I asked. It was Monday morning. We’d leave for school in five minutes. Mom would drop Ty off at Trinity, while I’d ride with Sandra to Westminster.
“Taping up my pants,” Ty said. He ripped a foot-long strip of Day-Glo orange from the roll. He wrapped it around the leg of his gray sweats, affixing it to his ankle.
“Okay, yeah. Got that,” I said. “Why?”
“So snakes can’t crawl in,” he said. He frowned. The tape was misbehaving and getting all twisty at the end.
“Ty,” I said, “there are no snakes at Trinity.”
“How do you know? How do you know for sure?” he asked. “You never know. That’s what you told me last night.”
Well, true. But that was because I was in charge of making him take his bath, and he had refused to wash his hair. Should a six-year-old refuse to wash his hair? No. Should a six-year-old need bath-time supervision at all? No again. Ty was such the baby of the family. One of these days he was going to have to grow up, and then what was he going to do?
But yes. I’d played the lice card, telling him that lice loved dirty scalps and you never knew when a louse was on the prowl.
It worked, and now I was paying the price.
“I wasn’t talking about snakes,” I said.
“If a rattlesnake crawls in my pants, it will bite me,” Ty said. He ripped and pasted one last strip. “Now it can’t, because I have foiled it. Ha ha!”
He straightened up. His sweats bagged around his skinny legs, then tapered at his shins, bound messily with orange tape. He was Duct-Tape-Boy, with his hair all stick-y-up-y from falling asleep with it wet.
“Don’t you think people will…”
“What?”
Laugh at you, I’d been about to say. But it seemed cruel. Ty was six. He shouldn’t have to deal with the harshness of fashion.
Then again, maybe it would be crueler to let him march off like that?
I came at it more gently. “Do other kids tape their pants up?”
“No,” he said. He thought for a moment. “But Lexie has sparkly pants.”
“She does?”
His lips twitched in a way that was new for him this year—which I guess showed that he was growing up more than I gave him credit for. It was a twitch that meant I want to tell you this, but I’m also self-conscious. A little. But not so much that I’m not going to tell you anyway. “I like her in her sparkly pants.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s why I’m taping my pants. That and the snakes.” Again the mouth-twitch, along with a glance to make sure I wouldn’t make fun of him. “I want to be brave for Lexie.”
“And taping up your pants makes you brave?”
/> “Yes,” he said, “because if I am brave in my heart, knowing that snakes can’t get in, then I will be brave on the outside, too.”
“Ahhh,” I said. Well, it made a goofy sort of sense, I guess. I just hoped Lexie went for boys with duct-taped sweats.
Mom hurried in. She was running late, as usual. “Come on, Ty, let’s go,” she said. She took in Ty’s pants. A pained look crossed her face, which then de-wrinkled into a resigned oh well expression.
“Last week a little boy named Daniel wore a pirate costume,” she told me.
“And he peed on the playground,” Ty added. “He did a tree-pee, which is not allowed.”
“A first-grader peed on the playground?” I said.
“He did it so the teachers couldn’t see,” Ty said.
Mom narrowed her eyes. “Ty, you are not to pee on the playground.”
“Mom!” he protested. “I would never!”
“Just like you would never pick your nose?”
“I don’t! I quit!”
“I certainly hope so.” She swooped up her purse from the granite counter. “Okay, we’re off. Winnie, tell Sandra she better get a move on.”
“Sandra!” I bellowed, arching my head toward the living room, which led by way of traveling air molecules to Sandra’s upstairs bedroom. “Get a move on!”
Mom’s look said, Gee, Winnie, thanks, but she didn’t bother to scold me. She strode out the back door, and Ty scurried after her.
Several minutes later, Sandra thundered downstairs, her hair flying and her Chuck Taylors unlaced. She didn’t take the time to grab a package of Pop-Tarts. She didn’t even glance at me. “Let’s go,” is all she said.
Uh-oh, I thought. Bad mood.
In the front seat of her rattly old BMW, which she’d saved up for herself last year, I waited for her to spill. She didn’t.
“What’s wrong?” I finally asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
I gazed out the window. Sandra’s cell phone, visible in the pouch of her messenger bag, played a snippet of an old Doors song: “Hello, I love you. Won’t you tell me your name?”
“Want me to answer it?” I asked.