Positively Beautiful (2 page)

I try not to smile. Chaz the Spaz. That's what we were calling him yesterday.

“He asked me out. Can you believe it?”

“Of course I can believe it,” I say loyally, because I catch her thin edge of uncertainty. Boys don't ask Trina out. Boys don't ask her out because she has a bumpy mole on her cheek, crooked teeth, and an impossibly large nose. Once you get to know her, all you notice is
Trina
, her big personality and even bigger heart. I've known her since I was six, so I don't even notice how she looks anymore, but other people do. I know they do, because we both hear what they say.

“He says he's got some cool place he wants to show me
Saturday night. I told him you and I were doing a movie night—”

“Oh, Trina, we can do that some other—”

“No. It's all good. So he says, ‘Why don't you bring her?' The more the merrier, right? He's going to bring somebody too.”

“I don't think—”

Trying to get a word in is like holding back waves with a knife. Trina just washes right over you.

“Seriously. You
have
to come. I'm nervous enough as it is. If you come, I won't feel so weird. You'll have a blast, I promise.”

“Uh-huh.” Like the time she thought I would have a blast when she tried to talk me into bungee jumping. Or the time she thought it would be a blast to go toilet paper evil Mr. James's house. I've seen Chaz the Spaz's friends. I'm not at the pinnacle of high school hierarchy, far from it, but those geeky guys make me look like Queen Victoria. It won't be a blast. I'm certain of it.

“Please? Pretty, pretty please?” She stops in the middle of the hall and throws herself down on her knees in front of me, confusing a herd of freshman who go all wide-eyed and nervous. I shrug at them as Trina looks up at me with her trademark this-is-me-beseeching-you look.

“Look, she's proposing,” someone snickers.

“Okay, okay! Get up.
Please
.”

She jumps to her feet like nothing's happened.

“You're going to have a
blast
,” she says.

I smile and keep my mouth shut.

Trina's newest interest, her fashion blog, requires a lot of work. By me. I'm used to Trina's overwhelming short-lived passions, and I know she'll soon move on to something else. As long as it's not skydiving again.

“Okay, how does that look?” Trina poses in the orange dress, cape, and garter belt in front of her old green tank of a Saab (code-named “Retro”). She's got one hand on the hood, and she's staring down at the ground, all pensive. I frame her in my camera and snap a couple of shots, the green-fuzzed March trees in the background.

“Are you going to tell me, or do I have to wait to read it on the blog?” I ask, as she hops up on the hood and does a pinup girl pose. “I got Pippi Longstocking and what? Victoria's Secret model? Wonder Woman?”

Trina's outfits often have a theme. Valentine's Day last year she was Juliet complete with a bloody dagger sticking out of her
chest, and another day she was Violet Baudelaire from
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
.

“What? A girl can't wear a garter belt and a cape if she feels like it?”

Okay, and sometimes she has no theme whatsoever, just a random assortment of clothing.

Trina is super-skinny, though she eats like a horse. It's because she's always in motion, like a hummingbird that can't stop buzzing around or it will fall out of the sky. Her best feature is her buttery-fine hair the color of daffodils, but as often as not, she dyes it magenta or violet or neon blue. Today it's blond, but she has it clipped with clothespins into two short little pigtails at the base of her neck.

Her phone buzzes and she whips it out. Usually she's adamant we turn off our phones while we're “working,” so I'm surprised.

“Chaz is just so
cute
,” she says. “He texted, ‘I'm thinking about you while I cut the grass.' Isn't that adorable?”

Really?
I smile though, because it's nice to see Trina happy like this. I've been asked to a couple of dances—I never went—just guys I knew who didn't have a date either. I've even had a boyfriend, pudgy, sweet Ted Hanson, when I was in ninth grade. After two months, he said he needed his freedom and I was heartbroken for about two seconds, and that was that. Trina, on the other hand, has had no dates, no dances. Zilch.

“So are you going to do the e-zine thing?” she asks after texting Chaz back something (equally adorable I have no doubt) and slipping her phone in her pocket.

“No …”

“Why not? It sounds right up your alley. But I know what you're going to say. No.
No, Trina, I don't want to do Reading Olympics even though I read for like hours every night. No, Trina, I don't think we should try out for football.
No, no, no. One of these days you're going to have to say yes to
something.
”

“I know, I'm
so
unreasonable. I'm sure we would have made great quarterbacks.”

“It was the
principle
. Anyway, don't get me off on a tangent. You. Writing. You're always writing in your journal, so you must like it. What if you're really good at journalism? You like taking pictures. You like writing. It's a no-brainer. Wouldn't it be fun to try it out and see?”

I wince. “Trina, I know you're on a mission to try everything until you find your true passion, but I'm not. I have to be sure.”

“Oh pooh. There's so much out there to
do
, why limit yourself ? Though I'm pretty sure I've found my thing. I'm going to be a fashion reporter for
Vogue
or
Cosmopolitan
. Won't that be killer?”

I say nothing as Trina starts doing jumping jacks and gestures at me to take pictures. No point in telling Trina I doubt this fashion blog will last more than a month. She is always so
happy
when she first starts a project, why pop her bubble? I wish I could find something like that, something I was so excited about I wanted to do it every minute of the day. Even if it was only for a week, or a month.

“You can't go to some hoity-toity fashion school, though,” I say. “We're talking Emory, or GSU, right?”

“I would never leave my bestie behind,” she says, throwing
her arms around me. “We promised we'd go to the same college no matter what, right? Oh, oh! I have an idea! We'll go to the same school as Chaz. Yes!” She pumps her small fist.

I hug her back. “Crazy girl. So tell me about Chaz, already.”

She hops onto the hood of the car and sits with her elbow resting on her knee. “Ooh, Erin, he is so cute, don't you think? We've been talking in Visual Arts, but, you know, just kinda ‘Hi' and, ‘Nice painting of that flower vase.' And then yesterday, out of the blue, he said he had a place he thought I'd like to see. Wait a minute!” She jumps off the car and grabs my arm. “It's a date, right? Maybe he meant as friends? Oh, I'm such an
idiot.
Of course he meant as
friends
.” She starts pulling at her hair and I put my hand out to stop her.

“Trina. Either way, he asked you out, right? See where it goes.”

“Well, as long as you go, it'll be okay,” she says. “Dorkster Twins activate, right?” We bump fists and pack up.

She's bummed though, and we don't say much else.

It's almost six o'clock and Mom's still not home. Laptop and books are spread across my desk as I try to work on physics. It's not my favorite subject. Actually, if Newton were still alive, and I ever met him, my hope would be that it would be on a dark road, with me in a speeding car.
How's that for testing speed and velocity, Mr. Newton?

After a while, I even turn off Netflix so I can concentrate, but I find myself staring at the picture of my dad on the wall above my desk. He's standing beside the red plane, the one I
remember from when I was a kid. The wind must have been blowing pretty hard, because the dark, curly scraps of his hair are standing on end. How long before he died was that picture taken? I have no idea. Mom and I rarely talk about Dad. The only clear memories I have of him are the times he took me up in his plane, which I adored. I was fearless at six.

I hear the front door open and abandon physics to go meet Mom.

She's forgotten to take off her lab coat at work again, and there is a big green patch of spilled who-knows-what down her left boob. She's a marine biologist, and is currently working on algae that eat waste, i.e., poop.

“Hey, Rinnie,” she says tiredly. “Sorry I'm late. How was school?”

“Unreal.”

She takes off her glasses and puts them absentmindedly on the foyer table. “I'm going to change. I was thinking Dino's tonight? I don't feel like cooking.”

This isn't unusual, but something's off.

“What's wrong?” I look at her more closely. “Are you tired again?”

She hesitates, then looks away. “No, everything's fine. Let's go grab a pizza and you can tell me all about your day. Maybe later we can watch
The Princess Bride
? I'm in the mood for a good movie.” She picks up her briefcase and heads for the kitchen. I am still standing in the middle of the foyer.

“What is it?” I do not even recognize my own voice. It sounds hollow and crystal, like something fragile that might break.

She turns to look at me. I read the lines and furrows on her face as easily as words on a page. I know her that well, and I know this is bad, whatever it is.

“What is it?” I whisper.

“Let's go get some pizza, and we can talk about it.” She brushes a strand of hair out of my face.

I begin to shake my head back and forth. “Tell me, just tell me, please?”

She sighs and looks over my shoulder for a moment. Then she looks back at me.

“I have cancer,” she says simply.

And my life cracks into
before
and
after
just like that.

Mom insists we go get pizza after dropping her bombshell. Like I have any desire to eat pizza after she tells me
she has cancer.
But I can tell Mom doesn't want to cook, that she wants to be
doing
something,
anything
, so I agree.

In the car, I babble questions.

“How'd you get it? No wait, that's stupid. I mean, what kind do you have? How'd you find out? Have they told you, you know, like, if you're going to—” I can't go on. I can't say
if you're going to die?
But that's the question, isn't it? And I don't want to know. I really, really don't want to know.

“I have breast cancer.” Mom's hands are gripping the steering wheel like it is the last absolute thing on this planet. “I found a lump, and I went in, and they did a biopsy and some tests and …” She pauses, and swallows hard. “It's cancer. I wanted to tell you sooner, but …” She shakes her head. “Anyway. I have surgery next week, a … a mastectomy.”

“Wait a minute. Wait. A mastectomy? You mean, they're going to cut off your … breast?”

She nods. “Yes. It needs to be removed. Right now, that's all I know.”

I can tell it isn't though. Not when her hands are tight on the steering wheel, her knuckles white, Memaw's sapphire ring she always wears looking like it's about to bite through her skin.

“
What aren't you telling me?
” I whisper. “Don't you know how much worse it is for me to think you're hiding something from me? I'm almost seventeen years old, I can take it. I need to know. I need to know
everything.
”

Mom uses one hand to give me a calm-down pat.

“I had breast cancer about eight years ago. I had a lumpectomy, and radiation, and they got it all. I didn't tell you because you were only nine at the time, and you were already going through such a hard time with your dad's death, and with school and all, so I didn't want to pile anything else on you. Later … I didn't want to think about it.”

“Is that … is that why Memaw came and stayed with us for a little while? I remember that.”

I remember sweet-potato pies, big, soft hugs, and no-nonsense words when I started on my I-don't-wanna-go-to-school-today whine.

Mom's throat is working, like she is trying not to cry. A hot prickle of tears stings my eyes. Mom always gets emotional about my memaw, who died of ovarian cancer when I was twelve. Mom still hasn't gotten over it. The funny thing is, they never seemed to get along all that great when Memaw was alive. They were so different, Memaw with her big country
accent and flowery housedresses and high school education, and then there was Mom with her doctorate and nice house and manicured hands. It was like Mom set out to be as different from her mother as possible, but in the end, when Memaw was dying, Mom realized how much she loved her. I miss Memaw—
a lot
—and I know Mom does too.