Little Pretty Things (26 page)

“OK,” I said. “Why the circus act then?”

“What’s the big deal? No one’s ever goofed on you before, Super Teacher?”

I would accept sarcasm, if it came dressed up in such a way. “You know I’m not a real teacher, right? I’m just trying to do for you what someone did for me.”

She’d been stretching the other leg, and set her foot down hard. “What’s that?” Her eyes were like shutters. Defiance—
snap
—something else just there—
snap
—and it was gone.

“Introduce you to long-distance running. Look, you don’t have to join the team. Trophies aren’t everything.” I thought of the sad silver running man still hiding in my car. The perfume bottle. The stupid barrette and all the crap stuffed into my secret compartment. What were they, if not trophies? The most ridiculous trophies ever collected. “You could probably get a scholarship to school, but maybe you’re all set.”

“Let’s say I have all the funds I’ll ever need, and I don’t care much for buses and sing-alongs or standing on a podium. What then? Why bother?”

What had I told Courtney the night before? Long distance turned you into a god? My file was probably getting pretty thick over at the Midway Police Department. I needed to stop saying idiotic things, and also stop doing them. I needed to put all the shiny trash under my bathroom sink out in the bin and get my life together. I needed . . . a run.

“Running quiets the voice in your head,” I said, more to myself than to her. “People who do the short distances don’t know it. It’s a secret, so don’t tell them.”

She snorted.

“That voice that tells you you’re not good enough, pretty enough, smart enough. That you don’t know anything. That you’ll never amount to anything,” I said. “That you’ll never have the things you want, will never stop wanting what you don’t have. The voice that points out how you compare to everyone else.”

The girls thundered all around us. Jessica took a step in to hear the terrible things the voice would say.

“It says all the other girls don’t think about the things you do,” I said. I felt my cheeks burn. My mind raced to Vincent, his skin against mine as he cried on my shoulder. Had he smelled Maddy’s perfume on me that day? And then, for some reason, Beck came to mind. Beck, kicking at the gravel on the side of the road, saying—what was it?—that I had always treated him badly. “That voice that says other girls are the enemy.”

Jessica looked away. “I know what the enemy looks like, OK? Anyway, they already have a long-distance runner.”

“You can have more than one, believe me. One of you will win more often,” I said. “But you don’t have to be in
real
competition. There’s enough air for everyone. You’ll push each other to be better than you would have been.”

She didn’t believe me. Who could blame her? It had taken me ten years to learn that lesson.

“Look,” she said, and she seemed much older than she could possibly be. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But I don’t need saving. Not quite yet, anyway.” She stepped into the path of the lap runners. Within a few minutes, she had passed them all, and led them the rest of the way.

At lunch, the memory of where yesterday’s tater tots ended up was strong. I eyed the snack cake rack. Was it bad form for the gym teacher to have doughnuts for lunch? I finally decided on a leafy salad. In line, the bowl slid around on the tray as I dug for my money. A hand shot out and caught the bowl just before disaster struck. At the end of a freckled arm: Delia.

“Is that really the only thing skinny girls eat?” she said. “I’m doomed.”

The salad had turned less appealing since I’d picked it up. “I’ve only recently given up fried foods. Yesterday, actually.”

She brightened, then blinked at me expectantly. “Did you mean what you said? To Jessica? About the voice?”

“Which part?”

“I didn’t hear it all—but the thing about, you know.” She looked around and leaned in. “About ‘not good enough, not smart enough.’ I mean, I hoped I wasn’t the only one.” She put the salad back on my tray and stuck her finger into her pudding cup, pulled it out, and licked it. “But most of them—poking themselves in the mirror, moaning they’re so fat, when they’re anything but. They just want you to tell them they’re wrong, that they’re really perfect. Same with grades. ‘Oh, I can’t believe I got an A-minus, wow I hardly studied at all.’”

“It doesn’t seem fair. It will never seem fair, by the way.”

Delia’s finger stopped on the way to her mouth. “Thank you. Thank you for not pretending it’s all fine.”

My turn at the register came, then I waited for Delia to pay. “That’s not your lunch, is it? I mean, that’s not really going to last you the rest of the day.”

“I had something already,” she said. Her face had gone pink. “I just really like pudding.”

Everything I could think to say sounded condescending. “I almost got a honeybun for lunch, so don’t take advice from me. Of any kind. Seriously, career, life. No advice coming from me.”

She smiled and rolled her eyes out toward the sea of tables, loud with students and silverware and chairs scooting across the floor. “Want to sit with me?”

I’d meant to escape back to the gym, or maybe even brave the faculty lounge, but I couldn’t think of a way to refuse her. What if she sat by herself every day? Of course, sitting with me wouldn’t up her credibility with the other students.

She led me down a long aisle between tables until we came upon a group of girls from the first-period PE class. My team.

“Hey, Coach,” some of them said, and they slid over to make room. Delia took a spot across the table.

“Hey, Dill,” one of the girls said. It took me a minute to locate the source of the nickname. I’d been worried she might have to sit by herself, but it was really her pity for me that had brought me here.

“Ladies,” I said. Our little thing. I refused to call them girls now, no matter how old they were, at least not aloud. “What’s good today?”

“Not a thing,” Jessica said.

“The French fries,” another girl said, and gave Jessica a look. “What’s your problem?”

Jessica glanced my way. “Not a thing.”

“We’re used to it with Mickie, but shit.”

The girls tried to hide their smiles and sidelong looks at me. Mickie sat at the head of the table, stirring a serving of corn with her fork. “Shut it,” she said.

They seemed willing to take orders. A few of them picked up their trays and left, and everyone scooted down to fill the void. The shift left me sitting alone, so I slid down, too.

“You guys hear that motel by the highway was a front for a prostitution ring?” Mickie said.

The chatter grew loud and obnoxious. The girls simultaneously couldn’t stand to hear a word and wanted to know every detail. One of them had stayed there, which elicited a great deal of discussion. Delia looked uncomfortable and pinker than when I made her run.

“I know someone who’s spent a great deal of time there,” Mickie continued, looking at me.

“I cleaned the toilets, Mickie,” I said. “It wasn’t a front.” The girls all leaned in to hear me. “Not exactly. It was a real motel, but the—look, I don’t know anything about what was happening there.”

Mickie was smirking at Jessica now. “You must have cleaned up a lot of—”

“So this voice,” Delia said around a mouthful of pudding. “You hear it for real?”

“Not in a schizophrenic way,” I said, grateful for the change of topic. “Less a voice and more like my own voice, my own thoughts. If you don’t know what I mean, count yourself lucky.”

“No, I have the voice,” Delia said. “‘You shouldn’t eat that, Delia. You shouldn’t wear that, Delia. Nobody likes you, Delia.’”

“We love you, Delia,” said one of the girls.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Delia,” I said.

“It never says that,” she said. “But is it true? What you said about running making it go away? You’re not just trying to get me to lose weight, are you?”

“You’re fine the way you are,” I said, poking at my salad. “Even if the voice never says so. Even if no one ever says so. You’re great.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“That’s the point, Dill,” Jessica said. “Coach Feelgood over here wants to make sure you understand what a special snowflake you are.”

I pushed my tray away. “Enough. If you don’t want me to sit here, that’s fine. I’m nearly thirty years old, so I don’t go in for teenage bullsh—attitude anymore. I’ll see you on the track later.” I threw a leg back over the bench.

“Not me,” Jessica said. “I won’t be there.”

Words sprang to mind that I couldn’t say. Sometimes the sprinters flamed out, but distance runners were usually tough. We were in it for the long haul, for the guts, for the miles. What a little daisy this girl was. I’d lasted four years. One race shy of four years.

Mickie looked up from her corn. “You’re quitting already?” she said. “What a loser.” She started to laugh, a low, sneaky sound that gathered speed and force and hysteria until she looked insane. “You lasted one day? One
day
?”

The other girls, thrown off by the terrible laughter, waffled between smiling and looking concerned for first Mickie and then Jessica. Then Mickie again.

“One day was enough,” Jessica said. “I’m not going to be a horse in someone’s stable.”

Mickie bent over her tray, coughing and crying with laughter. A few of the other girls grabbed their trays and got up. Around us, the other students had started looking our way. I didn’t slide down to fill the empty spots this time, and neither did Delia, who quietly finished her pudding, then said, “I found an extra copy of your yearbook. You had pretty goofy hair.”

“We all had goofy hair. Your hair is going to look goofy a lot sooner than you think.”

Mickie hiccoughed. “I’m not a horse,” she said. Tears ran in beautiful rivulets down her face. “I’m a
thoroughbred
.”

Jessica stared at her for a long moment, then stood and walked down the table to her. I braced myself for another fight, and so did the other girls, including Mickie, who stuck out her chin but didn’t move.

“Come on,” Jessica said, tugging at Mickie’s sleeve. After a moment’s hesitation, they went off, leaving their trays behind.

“That’s weird,” Delia said. “I didn’t think they liked each other.”

I knew they didn’t. But I was starting to remember how easily you could hold two opposing feelings at the same time. You could love someone and still keep secrets from them. You could despise someone and still trust them. But I didn’t remember as much as I wanted to remember. “The yearbook,” I said. “Where is it?”

Delia let me into the student-activities room and hit the light. The tables were covered in computers, a long line of them, back to back. When Delia bumped a chair getting to a cabinet in the back of the room, one of the screens glowed to life.

“You guys do the newspaper, too?”

“Same room, different students.” She stood on her tiptoes to pull the book from the top shelf. “A few kids do both, but you have to be pretty far ahead on, like, your math classes and stuff.”

She held the book out. It was red faux leather, with a fat panther paw print raised on the cover. A normal yearbook, even a nice one. And yet somehow I’d come to think of the thing as some magical—no,
evil
object. But it was just a book. Delia held it out, the sleeve of her shirt pulling up to reveal a set of raw-looking scratches on her wrist. She saw me noticing, put the book on the table, and pulled down her sleeve. The class-change bell buzzed overhead.

“Just leave it here when you’re done, OK?” she said. “I’ll get killed—I mean. I’ll get in trouble.”

“Delia—”

“Just put it back on the shelf and close the door when you’re done,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “I’ll be late.”

She hurried out the door. I sat at one of the computers, stunned. Whatever I’d just seen, I knew the voice in Delia’s head had said some awful things.

The longer I was at Midway High, the more I wanted to leave and never come back. Everywhere I turned, there was another girl to worry about. How did teachers do this, day in and out? How did
parents
?

I had another class starting in a few minutes, too. I shook myself back into focus and flipped through the yearbook quickly to the index. No surprise that my name only had two page entries. In my individual picture, my ten-years-younger self grinned like a jack-o’-lantern. The braces had come off, and I hadn’t stopped smiling that year. I looked happy. I
was
happy then; the picture had been taken at the beginning of the year, not the end.