At Face Value (12 page)

Rox—as in Roxy Music. Do you like that band? They were way popular back in the late 70s and I think they rock even though they’re not a rock band really. There’s a song they sing called Oh Yeah and it’s really pretty. What music do you like? I wish I could be at the beach right now but I’m stuck in study hall
!!!

“So, what do you think?” She nudges me and I nudge her back but don’t make eye contact.

“It’s fine.” I reach for ChapStick and slide it on, wondering what Wendy’s note says. Leyla has it still balled up on her lap. “Open your note.”

“I will. But really, do you think he’ll like it?”

If she’d asked anything else I could have glossed over it. If, for example, she’d said
are there spelling errors?
or,
does this sound reasonable?
I could have said no, or sure, and left it at that.

“Do I think he’ll like it?” Leyla nods. I shake my head. “Um, truthfully? Not really.”

She looks disappointed, but surprisingly okay. “I kind of figured it sucked.”

I turn to face her. “So, what’re you going to do now?”

She thinks a minute. “It’s not entirely bad, you know? It’s just, I’m over-thinking it all. It should flow better. Isn’t that what you’re always telling Linus and everyone?” As if he heard his name across the room, Linus waves to us from by the windows. He’s busy writing something, too. Maybe study hall isn’t so bad if you can actually accomplish things.

“Look,” I tell her. “I can’t write my essay and you don’t see me freaking out, do you?”

Leyla tilts her head. “You’re not freaking out, but you’re not your usual witty self.”

“Point taken.” She’s onto something there, I have to admit. All the strength I’m using to bottle up my Eddieness and my flock of words is tiring. I feel more drained than inspired. I sigh. “Look, sometimes you have to wait for inspiration.”

Leyla reflects and furrows her brow. “I thought you told me once that you can’t wait for inspiration—you have to make it.”

“Did I say that?” I ask, and watch as the man himself strides into study hall. Eddie is in his worn-in blue sweatshirt, so frayed that the zipper’s broken—which I know only because he lent it to me last year when we had a freak snowfall in April and I’d only worn a T-shirt to school. I’d felt cloaked in him when I borrowed it, and even though I didn’t go so far as to sleep in it, I wished I had.

“So maybe you do need to make things happen.” I study her email again. “Like, when you talk about Roxy Music, you could mention the lyrics you like. You tell him the song you like but you don’t say why. Or you don’t mention what’s so great about the beach. If you want him to know you, you have to let him know you.”

Leyla listens to me, hears me, transfixed. “You’re so right.” She bites her top lip. “You do it.”

The words swarm in me. I know what she should write, what she should say. What Eddie wants from her. “No.”

“Just this last time. Then I can see how you do it and go from there.”

Across the room, Eddie laughs at something, and I watch him as he’s reprimanded. His hand felt so good on mine in the Drama box. Just the way hands should feel. “Fine. But this is the last time.”

“Just edit what I wrote here, and maybe add in something funny.”

“You’re funny yourself,” I say, watching Leyla ignore the note from Wendy.

“But not on paper. You have to be smart to be funny with words. I’m funny like this.” Leyla makes a weird face, pulling her mouth apart with her fingers and looking as ghastly as she can.

I crack up. Even if she hasn’t got a way with words, I’m so glad she’s my friend. That I can help her. “Go like that for Halloween, okay?”

“Aren’t we a bit old for trick-or-treating?” she asks.

“Aren’t you a bit old to have me writing things for you?”

Leyla winces. “You’re so cutting sometimes.” She blushes, looking at Eddie then back at me. She flings the note at me and I read it. “Come to Wendy’s party with me,” she says. “Look, in case you can’t deal with another night of costumes, dressing up is optional.”

I fold the note and hand it back. “Von Schmuckler? No thanks.”

“You know you want to.” Leyla eggs me on. “We’ll see who dresses the sluttiest, okay? Test your … hypothe …”

“My hypothesis? You mean, that the girls with the lowest self-esteem need to bare the most cleavage?” I look at Eddie and his cronies. He’ll be at the party. And being with Leyla is fun. Plus, I’m supposed to be doing all the senior year stuff. “Fine—but no costume for me.”

Leyla nods. “Sure thing.” She gathers her stuff together and eyes the computer again. “So you’ll do it?” I nod hesitantly. “And I like the beach because … it’s just … so fun!”

She squeezes my arm as a goodbye and goes to join Wendy and her clan of cave dwellers for a pilgrimage to the mall a few towns over. The rest of the students filter out, the jumble of bodies and colors and bits of conversations like confetti around me. Wordlessly, Linus signals to me and signs
look down.
I half expect to find my shirt stained or badly buttoned, but instead there’s an airplane by my desk. Had a paper plane really flown over my head and I hadn’t noticed? I really am distracted. I nod at Linus and slip the note into my pocket for later. With the big study room finally quiet and nearly empty, I use the few remaining minutes I have before my run to the doctor’s office.

Rox—

Did you know you have a band that’s semi-named after you? Roxy Music. Bryan Ferry is the front man, or was—who knows what he does now. He wore a suit and looked very dapper on the cover of some album I found in a second-hand store. Anyway, my favorite song is “Oh, Yeah.” It’s kind of depressing—I believe a breakup is happening in it—but it’s so pretty and so well written. The music echoes the meaning of the words; the mark of great songwriting talent, I think.

This is all a long-winded way of saying—do you want to be Rox? Or Eddie? Do you feel as though they’re the same person or that somehow since your moniker stuck so early that you’ve somehow become a split person?

I sometimes I feel split—like there’s one side of me that’s …

I stop. One side of Leyla. Not me. I think of how to sum her up and still sound real.

There’s one side of me that everyone thinks they know, and another part that maybe only a couple people really see. Sometimes I wish I could just be both at the same time, but then I also like keeping a section of my mind that’s only for me. Does that make sense? I listened to you in the Word meeting and sat there wondering if anyone else noticed the way you use the word “however” a lot. It’s a funny word to slip into places, and maybe you’ll think it’s lame that I noticed this peculiar literary trait of yours, but there you go. Often I think that these little noticings (for lack of a better word) are what makes a person unique. HOWEVER (poking fun at me, not you), maybe this is just a lot of study hall-induced babble.

Leyla

M
Y FEET POUND THE
pavement, revoltingly awful music from the mix I made for Leyla
(Songs You Didn’t Know Could Be So Bad)
playing in my ears. The soles of my well-worn sneakers hit the leaf-strewn sidewalk and Eddie’s reply resounds in me:

Leyla—

You surprise me with your candor. You seem guarded at our Word meetings—HOWEVER—on the page the lines just read really naturally. It’s what we in the newspaper industry call “good flow.” However, I could be making that up. However, it sounds okay. However, I am kind of loving the fact that you noticed my affinity for this word.

And yes, I do feel the Two Halves of Eddie situation. Rox is the school one, who is me but who is also a lot of things people want me to be or think that I am, and Eddie is my parents and my sister and my little brother and regular sitting at home me. And maybe one friend or two. And maybe you?

I’d love to write more; HOWEVER, I cannot. I have soccer practice, loads of homework, yet another round of edits from Cyrie on the article I started last week, and now a dumb costume to throw together for Von Schmedler’s shindig (and no I don’t usually use the word shindig, HOWEVER, I like it here—kinda retro and aware of itself at the same time).

Googled that song “Oh Yeah” and will download it tonight. I’m always game for new music (or old new music) so fire some more my way, even if they are not named after me. Write soon—

Rox (AKA Eddie)

I jog past the bank with its sturdy brick walls, past the town hall all stout and set back from the road by its semicircular driveway, past Any Time Now with its windows shut and covered as Hanna prepares a new time period, and all along the roads I’ve jogged on so many times—by myself, with teammates, with Sarah Jensen and her perfectly pristine white shoes and double-knotted laces. But today, it’s different. I’m lighter somehow. Happier? Not really, but it’s as though the words that leaked onto the page (or screen) to Eddie today calmed me. All that built-up tension and muddle churned out one little email and made me feel better. And he wrote back. Fast.

The waiting room at Dr. Schnoz’s office is lined with uncomfortable, high-backed chairs and a green couch set with plump needlepoint pillows. Upon closer inspection, the needlework isn’t just designs and roses, but words, phrases:
A nose by any other name, A nose knows,
and so on. Is this supposed to be funny? I look around to see if anyone else cares. A woman with a bandage on her face reads a magazine that displays last summer’s offerings, instead of anything timely. A kid and his grandfather take turns with tic-tac-toe.

How come I never noticed the pillows before? Are they new? Did I not care before, or overlook them because my parents were with me? They’d sat and worried as I went in for my initial consultation, then looked relieved when the appointment ended with the doctor assuring them I had “all the time in the world to think about this big decision.” It’s big all right. I wipe my forehead and blow my nose with one of the tissues from the multitude of boxes thoughtfully placed around the room.

I sit down, removing the unfunny pillows from behind my back, and script a response to Eddie’s email in my mind. There are so many songs to tell him about. He would love Leon Russell and LL Cool J and Radiohead’s first album (maybe he knows it, but maybe he only knows their latest album …). I take out my notebook to write down things to tell him—things to ask him—and then, right when I’m about to stop myself because, really, that was my last email to him anyway, I feel something poking my thigh.

I rummage in my pocket and pull out the now-folded paper-airplane note from Linus. In his familiar block printing, neat and square and solid, he’s written:

I gotta love Linus for his trim sentences, his forthrightness, his out-there-ness. Reading his message gives me nervous energy—a need to either rip up the note and forget I ever saw it, or call him right now and hear what he has to say immediately.

Neither of those things happens, though, because—

“Cyrie Bergerac? You can go to room four.”

“Rhinoplasty can alter the shape or size of the nose. Increase the tip or decrease. Narrow the nostrils’ span …”

“The span of the nostrils,” I say back to Dr. Schnoz who is sitting behind his oversized wooden desk and sifting through cards as he recites the nose-worthy verbiage to me. “Sounds like an unpublished poem.”

He looks at me and smiles. “See? Right there—a reason not to do it.” He shakes his head.

“I thought you would want people to get this done.” I grin and wave my hand across my face. “This is your primary income, is it not?”

“Cyrie,” he says, “I’ve known your dad since college. You since you were a kid. A baby.”

I lean back in my chair, the way you’re not supposed to for fear of tipping over. “Ah, the good old days. Back when it”—I touch the offending body part—“was just a little thing.”

He rolls his eyes and places his hands on his desk. “All I’m saying—and no, your parents didn’t put me up to this—is that with wit like yours, with brains—”

“Who needs a good face?” I’ve heard it before. I’ve thought it before. But it’s not true. “The thing is, I don’t
need
it. I
want
it. I know the difference.” I exhale deeply and study the trim on his desk. “But thanks for the confidence boost.”

Dr. Schnoz claps his hands to switch gears. “Okay.” He riddles with the mouse on his desk and presses a button so a screen rises from the floor. Instantly a photo of me appears, enlarged. “We can change whatever you want, of course. You can trim here …” He clicks and instantly reduces the length of my nose.

“It’s jarring.” I stare at the image ahead, amazed at my face.

“It is,” he confirms. “We could change the angle between your nose and lip. Where you’ve been used to this …” He clicks again and suddenly I have a different nose. “You can play with the shape.”

I’m glued to the screen, all the different versions of me appearing next to one another each time he clicks. A group of Cyries. Each one able to be just like me, but different. Short and perky nose. Elegant and long. Solid but not awkward. All of them are … “They’re so normal.”