“She’s that homeschooled girl,” one of her friends explains.
“What homeschooled girl?” Candace asks, wrinkling her nose.
Another girl nervously looks over both shoulders to make sure no one else in the hallway is listening, and then whispers, “Horse Hair.”
Candace’s eyes get big. “Lauren Finn is Horse Hair?”
She’d thought up the nickname last week, when everyone was forced to run a mile in gym class and Horse Hair’s horsey blond ponytail kept swishing back and forth as she trotted along. Candace had made a point of neighing as she passed Lauren because it was gross to let your hair grow that long. Unless, of course, you had layers. Which Lauren didn’t. Her hair was cut straight across the bottom at her waist. Probably by her mother with a dull pair of scissors.
“Well … I think Lauren’s pretty,” another girl says, shrugging her shoulders apologetically.
Someone else nods. “She could use a haircut for sure, but yeah. Lauren’s definitely pretty.”
Candace lets out a pained sigh. “I’m not saying Horse Hair isn’t pretty,” she moans, though she’d never actually considered Lauren’s looks. And why would she? This conversation isn’t supposed to be about Lauren. It’s supposed to be about her. “It doesn’t make any sense that I’d be picked as the ugliest sophomore.” Her eyes roll off her friends and on to other sophomores walking down the hallway. Candace sees, in the span of a few seconds, at least ten other girls who it should be. Ugly girls who deserve this.
“I mean, come on, you guys. This is total crap!” Candace gives her friends another chance to defend her, though she feels a little pathetic at having to bait them. “Pretty girls are not supposed to end up on the ugly side of the list! It, like, undermines the whole tradition.”
“Well, the list doesn’t actually say that you’re ugly,” someone gently offers.
“That’s true,” adds another girl. “The ugliest girls are seriously ugly. The list just says you’re ugly on the inside.”
It isn’t the rousing defense Candace is hoping for. But as the words sink in, Candace nods slowly and lets a new feeling bloom inside her. So what if people think she is ugly on the inside? Clearly her friends don’t believe that, or they wouldn’t be friends with her! And pretty on the outside is what really counts. Pretty on the outside is what everyone sees.
One of the girls says timidly, “So … should we go discuss what we’re doing for Spirit Caravan?”
Candace had announced this as the plan for the morning. Spirit Caravan happens on Saturday, before the homecoming football game. It’s an impromptu parade where the students at Mount Washington drive around town with their cars decorated, beeping their horns and getting people excited for the game. This is the first year Candace and her friends can drive themselves, since a few, herself included, had gotten their driving permits over the summer. Candace has everything planned in her notebook, like whose car they should ride in (her mother’s convertible, obviously), how it should be decorated (streamers, tin cans, soap on the windshield), and what the girls should wear (short shorts, kneesocks, and Mount Washington sweatshirts). Still, Candace stares at her friends slack jawed. “I can’t say I’m in a very school spirit-y mood at the moment.” The fact that they didn’t pick up on this annoys her. “Let’s table that until tomorrow, okay?”
One girl shrugs her shoulders. “But we only have until Saturday to figure things out.”
Another adds, “We can’t leave it until the last minute. We need to come up with a concept. We’re sophomores now. We can’t just, like, throw something together.”
A concept? Seriously? Candace rolls her eyes. But it occurs to her, as her friends nod along with each other, that they are going to talk about the Spirit Caravan with or without her. It is the strangest feeling to have, even stranger than being called ugliest.
She quickly changes her strategy and rips her page of ideas out of her notebook. “Fine,” she says, handing it off. “Here’s what I’m doing. Figure out who’s riding with me, because my mom’s convertible can only fit five of us.” She quickly does a head count. There are ten girls standing at her locker. “Maybe six, if you squeeze.”
Candace opens her locker door and stares through the metal slats as her friends walk toward homeroom without her. Her eyes move to the magnetic mirror hanging inside the door. Something about her face seems off, imbalanced. It takes her a few seconds of close inspection to realize that she’s forgotten to put eyeliner on her left eye.
Why didn’t any of her friends tell her?
After digging in her makeup bag, Candace inches close until the tip of her nose nearly grazes the mirror. She gently pulls the corner of her left eye toward her ear and traces a creamy band of chocolate pencil, one of the samples her mother gave her, across the lid. Then she lets go, her skin snapping pertly back into place, and blinks a few times.
Candace’s eyes are her best feature, as far as she is concerned. They are the lightest blue, like three drops of food coloring in a gallon of ice-cold water. People always commented on them, and even though Candace finds that predictability annoying, she of course still relishes the attention. How a salesgirl would suddenly look up from the register and say, “Wow, your eyes are amazing!” Or, better yet, a boy. Her eyes get more attention than her boobs, and that is seriously saying something. She is, after all, a true C cup without any of that ridiculous padding, which is false advertising, in her opinion.
A small sense of relief washes over her. List or no list, Candace Kincaid is pretty. She knows it. Everyone knows it.
And that is all that matters.
auren Finn and her mother agree the sedan still smells like Lauren’s dead grandfather — a musty blend of pipe smoke, old newspapers, and drugstore aftershave — so they drive to Mount Washington High School with the windows open. Lauren splays her arms across the window frame, resting her chin where her hands overlap, and lets the fresh air rouse her.
Mondays are always the most tired mornings, because Sundays are always the worst nights. The anxiety of the coming week speeds Lauren up when she wants to be slowed down. She feels every lump in the old mattress, hears every creak and sigh of her new old house.
She is three weeks into this new life and nothing is comfortable. Which is exactly what she’d expected.
The wind whips Lauren’s long pale hair like a stormy blond ocean, all but the section pinned with a tarnished silver barrette.
She found it last night, after the first hour of tossing and turning in the same bedroom, the same bed, where her mother had slept when she was a fifteen-year-old girl. The slender bar stuck out like a loose nail where the wood floor met the wall, its cloudy rhinestones blinking in the moonlight.
Lauren crept across the hall in her pajamas. Her mother’s reading light cast a warm white glow out the seam of the open door. Neither of them had been sleeping very well since moving to Mount Washington.
Lauren cracked it wider with her foot. Pairs of caramel drugstore panty hose hung on the coils of the wrought-iron bed frame to dry after having been washed in the sink. They reminded Lauren of the snake skins shed in the warm dunes behind their old apartment out west. Their old life.
Mrs. Finn looked up from the thick manual of tax laws. Lauren weaved through unpacked boxes and hopped onto the bed. She opened her hands like a clamshell.
Mrs. Finn grinned and shook her head, looking a bit embarrassed. “I had begged your grandmother to buy me this when I started high school.” She pinched the barrette between her fingers, examining the fossil of her youth. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had this feeling, Lauren, but sometimes, when you get something new, you trick yourself into believing it has the power to change absolutely everything about yourself.” The corners of Mrs. Finn’s mouth pulled until her smile stretched tight and thin, turning it into something entirely different. With a sigh, she said, “That was quite a lot to ask of a barrette, don’t you think?” Then Mrs. Finn threaded it into Lauren’s hair, securing a swee
p over her daughter’s ear, and pulled the quilt back so Lauren could lie beside her.
Lauren hadn’t experienced the feeling her mother had described, but one much more unnerving. Like with Randy Culpepper, who sat one desk away in her English class.
On her very first day at Mount Washington High, Lauren had noticed that Randy smelled strange. Woodsy and sort of stale was how she’d first categorized it, until she overheard in the hall that Randy was a small-time pot dealer who smoked a joint in his car each morning before school.
That Lauren now knew what an illegal substance smelled like encapsulated how much her life had changed, whether she’d wanted it to or not. She swallowed this secret, along with so many others, because knowing them would break her mother’s heart. She could never confirm that things in her new school were as bad as she’d been told.
If not worse.
A while later, after Mrs. Finn had finished studying and turned off the light, Lauren stared into the dark and held on to her mother’s words. Despite all these changes, she would stay the same girl. Before falling asleep, she touched the barrette, her anchor.
Lauren reaches for the barrette again as the sedan slips into a free space along the curb.
“How do I look? Like an accountant you’d want to hire?” Mrs. Finn turns the rearview mirror toward her and regards her reflection with a frown. “It’s been so long since I’ve had an interview. Not since before you were born. No one’s going to want to hire me. They’re going to want some beautiful young thing.”
Lauren ignores the sweat stains in the armpits of her mother’s blouse, the small run in the panty hose that betrays the paleness of her mother’s skin. Paler still is Mrs. Finn’s hair, blond like Lauren’s, but dulled by gray.
“Remember the things we talked about, Mommy. Focus on your experience, not the fact that you haven’t worked in a while.”
They’d done a mock interview last night, after Lauren’s homework had been finished and checked. She’d never seen her mother so unsure of herself, so unhappy. Mrs. Finn doesn’t want this job. She wants to still be Lauren’s teacher.
It makes Lauren sad, their situation. Things hadn’t been good the last year out west. The money left by Lauren’s father was running out, and her mother cut back on the cool field trips they used to take to get a change of scenery from The Kitchen Academy — what they called their breakfast nook between the hours of eight and four. Lauren hadn’t even known her mother had stopped paying rent on their apartment. Her grandfather dying and leaving them the house was a blessing in disguise.
“Lauren, promise me you’ll talk to your English teacher about the reading list. I hate the idea of you sitting in her class for the whole year, bored to tears with books we’ve already read and discussed. If you’re afraid to do it —”
Lauren shakes her head. “I’ll do it. Today. I promise.”
Mrs. Finn pats Lauren’s leg. “We’re doing okay, right?”
Lauren doesn’t think about her answer. She just says, “Yeah. We are.”
“See you at three o’clock. I hope it goes fast.”
Lauren leans across the seat and hugs her mother tight. She hopes for that, too. “I love you, Mommy. Good luck.”
Lauren walks into school, barely a force against the tide of students flowing from the opposite direction. Her homeroom is empty. The fluorescent lights are still off from the weekend, and the legs of the upturned classroom chairs spike four-pointed stars, encircling her like oversize barbed wire. She turns one over and takes a seat.
It is terribly lonely at school.
Sure, a couple of people have talked to her. Boys, mostly, after daring each other to ask her stupid questions about homeschooling, like if she belonged to a religious cult. She expected as much — her male cousins were just as goofy and awkward and annoying.
The girls were only slightly better. A few smiled at Lauren, or offered tiny bits of politeness, like pointing out where to put her dirty cafeteria tray after lunch. But no one extended herself in a way that felt like the start of something. No one seemed interested in getting to know her beyond confirming that she was that weird homeschooled girl.
It shouldn’t have surprised her. It is what she was told to expect.
Lauren lets her chin rest against her chest. She pretends to read the notebook lying open on the small patch of desk attached to her seat. Really, though, she discreetly watches the girls filter into the room and take chairs beside her. She picked up the trick from Randy Culpepper, who used the same posture to sleep, undetected, in second period.
She doesn’t see the girls’ leader with them, the pretty one with the icy eyes. It’s a rare sighting.
The girls are frantic, whispering like crazy. Stifling giggles and laughs. Completely consumed with whatever they’re gossiping about. Until one notices Lauren watching them.
Lauren lowers her eyes. But she’s not fast enough.
“Oh my god, Lauren! You are so lucky! Do you even know how lucky you are?” The girl puts on a big smile. Huge, even. And she runs on tiptoes over to Lauren’s desk.
Lauren lifts her head. “Excuse me?”
The girl ceremoniously places a piece of paper on top of Lauren’s open notebook. “It’s a Mount Washington tradition. They picked you as the prettiest girl in our grade.” The girl talks slowly, as if Lauren spoke another language, or had a learning disability.
Lauren reads the paper. She sees her name. But she is still completely confused. A different girl pats her on the back. “Try to look a little happier, Lauren,” she whispers sweetly, in the same way one might discreetly indicate an open zipper or food stuck in her teeth. “Otherwise people will think something’s wrong with you.”
This throwaway line surprises Lauren most of all, because it completely contradicts what she’s already assumed.
arah Singer’s plan is to break it to him fast, so there’s no scene. Forget dressing it up, explaining things. That’s only going to make it worse. She’ll just say something like, I’m done, Milo. Our friendship, or whatever the hell you want to call it now, is over. So go ahead and do what you want. Live your life! Become best bros with the captain of the football team. Feel up the head cheerleader, even though everyone knows Margo Gable stuffs. I’m not gonna judge you.
That last part will be a lie. She’ll totally judge him for it.
Sarah sits on her bench, nibbling the edges off a strawberry Pop-Tart. The tangy smell of smoke on her fingers sours the sweet. She forces down what’s in her mouth and chucks the pink frosted center — her favorite part — into the grass, because all this sugar clearly isn’t helping. Let the squirrels eat the crack; she needs to calm the hell down. She moves a tangle of tarnished necklaces off her chest and feels for her heart. It flutters like a hummingbird’s, so fast the individual beats blur together and make a steady, uncomfortable hum.
She rips the cellophane off a new pack of cigarettes, lights up. A lift of wind carries away the smoke, but she knows Milo will smell it on her when he gets to school. He’s like a police dog, trained to sniff out her vices. Last night, when she was hanging half out of his bedroom window, she smoked the third-to-last cigarette in her old pack and told him, after his depressing play-by-play of his aunt’s final days of lung cancer, she’d seriously think about maybe quitting.
Remembering that now makes her laugh, puff out smoke signals. Both dissipate into the chilly morning air.
Last night, she talked a lot of shit.
But Milo … apparently he’d been talking shit since the day they met.
Whatever. Let him bitch about her smoking. It would be a relief to replace her anxieties with something simple and clear, like being annoyed with him.
Sarah watches two junior girls scurry along the sidewalk. Sarah knows who they both are, but what she thinks is: All the junior girls at Mount Washington look the damn same. The shoulder-length hair with highlights, the stupid shearling boots, the little wristlet purses to hold their cell phones, lip glosses, and lunch money.
They remind her of zebras, keeping the same stripes so predators can’t tell them apart. Survival of the generic. It’s the Mount Washington way!
The two girls stop in front of her bench and huddle, shoulder to shoulder, each clutching a piece of paper. The smaller one hangs on her friend and chokes out a series of high-pitched laughs. The other simply sucks air in and out, a rapid fire of hiccupping wheezes.
Sarah’s nerves can’t take it.
“Hey!” she barks. “How about you ladies hold your little powwow someplace else?” She uses her lit cigarette as a pointer and jabs off in the distance.
It seems like a fair request. After all, these girls have the entire school to roam undisturbed. And everyone at Mount Washington knows that this is her bench.
She discovered it freshman year. It had always been vacant, because it was positioned directly beneath the principal’s window. That didn’t bother Sarah. She wanted to be alone.
That is, until Milo Ishi came along last spring.
He’d been adrift on the sidewalk one random day, a new boy tossed around between currents of students who looked nothing like him. He folded his arms and tucked them tight underneath his chest, the chosen defensive posture for skinny vegan half-Japanese boys with shaved heads. Milo didn’t look like Sarah, either, but maybe a more-evolved version. His sneakers were only available overseas. His headphones were expensive. His black eyeglass frames were crazy thick and probably vintage. He’d even gotten his first tattoo already — a Buddhist proverb scrawled on his forearm.
After a few minutes of watching, Sarah took pity on him and called out, “Hey, New Boy!”
Milo was terribly shy. Almost cripplingly so. He hated talking in class and broke out in hives whenever his parents argued. It was hard to get him to open up, but when he finally did, Sarah felt like she’d found a kindred outcast. She liked begging Milo to torture her with stories of his former life in West Metro, what going to an arts-focused high school in a city had been like. Milo said West Metro was a third-tier city, but to Sarah it could have been New York for how it stacked up against Mount Washington. At West Metro High, field trips were to fine art museums, there were no sports teams, and the drama club wasn’t just a showcase for girls who aspired to be another Auto-Tuned voice sugaring the radio.