Ugly Girls: A Novel (2 page)

She always tried to feel a glimmer of regret. It was so easy to take advantage. Why did she have to be the type to take advantage? Well, she
wanted
those boots. That was the main thing when you got right down to it.

Plus lip liner and gloss. That completed her look.

Baby Girl’s prettiest feature was her lips: plump and pink. She had watched tons of YouTubes featuring women who knew about makeup demonstrating what to do with lips like hers and had settled on the liner-and-gloss method. It called them into focus while maintaining their natural color. And it made her look like a tough bitch.

Perry looked like some kind of garden fairy, only tall. Bright green eyes, black eyelashes, blond hair. Tanned legs. Smallish boobs. Baby Girl was grateful that Perry wasn’t entirely perfect: she had a widish nose, a fang on one side of her mouth, and way back, a gray molar. Fixable problems but only if you had the money for it. And Perry didn’t. But neither did Baby Girl. Which was an important level to share.

Tonight Perry wore her usual ponytail, the same shorts from yesterday, a yellow T-shirt. Sandals. Each toe with a chipped remnant of polish. Perry came off like she didn’t give a fuck about stuff like that. Baby Girl had learned that that was usually the way with pretty girls.

They drove, windows down. Somehow this Suburban didn’t have a CD player, or if it did, Baby Girl didn’t know where.

“Let’s get something to
drink
,” Perry said, which meant she wasn’t so pissed about ditching anymore. Baby Girl knew she meant something they could get shitty on. That meant going to the
other
Circle K, the one with the guy who sold to anyone.

“Okay,” Baby Girl said, “but after that we got to dump this thing.”

“Oh hell yeah,” Perry said, attempting one of Baby Girl’s signs.

“You can be a real fuckin’ hillbilly sometimes,” Baby Girl told her.

“Oh well,” Perry said. Her other favorite comeback lately.

Baby Girl made a U-turn. Up ahead, she could see flashing lights. She gripped the steering wheel. Her heart thudded like bass turned way up.

But it was just a tow truck. In her headlights she saw a man with his hands to his head, a jagged spill down his shirt. The tow truck driver seemed to be ignoring him. “Yo, that guy is
wasted
,” Baby Girl said as they passed.

Perry leaned up, pulled her phone out of her back pocket, studied it. She made a quiet noise, something like a snort, then put her phone back in her pocket. “Who keeps blowing your shit up?” Baby Girl asked.

“Just this guy,” Perry said. “I don’t even know him.”

Perry’s stepdad, Jim, was a prison guard. A quiet guy who seemed as big as a standing bear. Perry loved him, Baby Girl knew, but she also seemed dead set on making sure he had a heart attack. Once he saw Perry’s phone bill he’d want to know who this guy was. Happened every time. It seemed like a luxury to Baby Girl, toying with that kind of love and concern. But she knew better than to say shit about it to Perry.

She waited until Perry was looking out her window again, then pressed the button on her phone to check for texts. Nothing. She had gotten used to something waiting there for her nearly every time she checked, but in the past couple of days, nothing. She had gone too far, of course she had. Quickly, she texted,
Hey, sorry if I acted like a stupid bitch. Miss talking to u.
The
u
was her way of speaking his language, reaching out. Corny-ass text speak that no one she knew used, except for him. Jamey. Thinking his name made her feel like she had to pee. That always happened when she felt excited. Or scared. She pressed
SEND
, pushed the phone way down into her pocket, so she couldn’t easily get it out to check again in the next thirty seconds.

There was a small woman behind the counter at Circle K, not the usual stoner who’d sell to them, so Perry and Baby Girl wiped down the Suburban and left it there and walked into the neighborhood next to it. This time, Baby Girl wanted a car with a CD player. These nights weren’t hardly worth it without a way to listen to her music. The few times Charles had taken her out at night, he’d turned up the music so loud she could feel it in her teeth. Windows rolled all the way down, which meant lots of nasty looks from old ladies, but they had it wrong. Charles wasn’t trying to annoy no one. He was trying to share it with them. Share that feeling. Windows down, the hot night breezing in and out of the car carrying the scent of gasoline, orange blossoms, garlic, exhaust. Music saying exactly what was in his heart, and what was in Baby Girl’s heart, too, which went beyond anything you could say with words, but if she had to try it’d be
Yes
. And that’s why you could have it loud. No one needed to say a thing. So she’d be damn sure the next car she and Perry got had that CD player. Perry would probably pout since Baby Girl’s music wasn’t her kind of music. But she wouldn’t say nothing, because she knew it wasn’t up for discussion, and because Baby Girl wouldn’t be able to hear her anyway.

MYRA WAS ALONE AGAIN.
Jim off to work and Perry out her window hours before. Perry might think Myra didn’t know she snuck out, but Myra always knew. The whole trailer rocked if you stepped through the threshold, so she could always feel it rock and bounce as her daughter pushed herself out the window. It was what girls her age did. She did it too, and her momma tried many times to stop her. Well, she had decided long ago she wouldn’t be two-faced with her own daughter like her momma had been.

Tonight she had the itch. Nothing but reruns on the television, and a news program about a war in a country Myra had never heard of. She had allowed herself one slowly sipped beer. Tried to watch for a while, get some culture, but twice they showed a dead child limp in his momma’s arms. Myra was just not up for that shit, not tonight.

With the TV turned off she could hear her neighbor two trailers down cooking dinner, the sizzle in the pan, him humming some kind of nonsense, the farting squirt of the ketchup. She supposed she could make some dinner, too, but what? The fridge held eggs, juice, relish, beer.

Beer. She had a shift at 5:00 the next morning, and more than that she wanted to show Jim that she could get through a night without that kind of help. So no. No more beer.

The thing of it was, much as she tried to deny it, ignore it, she hated Jim working nights. She’d always had trouble getting through a night alone; even as a child one stray thought could keep her up for hours, staring at the ceiling, her heart like a mallet and her limbs so stiff, like they were cast in stone. The whole rest of the house at peace. The loneliness of that kind of exclusion. The only thing that helped was climbing into bed with her sister, or lying on the hard floor next to her momma’s bed, which she could only do if her momma wasn’t entertaining.

So sleeping in a bed without Jim, that rarely happened. Unless beer.

Myra tried to fill these nights with little tasks. Clean the kitchen, dust the furniture, look up recipes on the Internet. In the mornings she’d list what she’d done for Jim, like,
See? I can do this.
But reaching the end of her list always made her feel worse. What did it matter that the tablecloth got ironed, that the washers on the faucet got tightened? Jim would be gone the following night, and the night after, and the night after.

So, beer.

Before she could think twice Myra was outside, the door clicking behind her. When she sat on the steps she felt the trailer sag. The air greasy with the smell of onions and meat, the neighbor making burgers, or maybe meat loaf. Humming his ABCs. Did Myra recall that he had a grandchild staying with him?

A man in a sleeveless shirt walked out from between two trailers across the way, stopped when he saw Myra. “Evening,” he called. In the light from her neighbors’ windows Myra could see that his shirt had a graphic of a swordfish bursting out of the water.
Ain’t skeered
, the shirt said.

“Evening,” Myra called back.

“Thought I heard raccoons,” the man said. “I hate ’em.”

Only now could Myra see that he had a BB gun by his side. If she had a dime for every time she ran into someone carrying a gun in this clump of trailers, she’d be one rich woman.

“No luck, huh?” Myra called.

“No luck,” he answered.

“Well, they’re harmless, really. Sometimes I appreciate how they eat trash, what with how many litterbugs we got around here.”

“Harmless till you get bit,” the man said, walking closer. He had a baby face, if babies could get stubble. And something wrong with his lip. When he was right in front of her Myra saw he had one of them cleft palates, the scar a white trail through the stubble, made him look even more like a baby. He leaned the gun up against Myra’s trailer.

“I’m Pete,” he said.

“Myra Tipton,” she said, held out her hand for him to take. His was warm and a little moist, but not unpleasant. It was clear he wasn’t no hard laborer.

“I only been living here the past couple months,” he said. “I live with my momma, been helping her out while she’s sick.”

“Ain’t that nice,” Myra said. He put his thumbs through his belt loops, cocked a hip. It occurred to her that he might be wanting to sit, but the steps were only wide enough to seat one. Besides, what would she look like, scooting over to let this baby-faced man sit next to her, for all the world to see?

“Why you out here all alone?” the man asked.

Myra couldn’t put her finger on why—something about the way he asked it—but she decided to lie. “Oh, I’m not all alone,” she said. “My husband’s inside, taking a shower.”

“But you still out here alone,” he said, cocking to the other hip.

Myra stood up. “You’re right,” she said. “I better get inside where I won’t be all alone no more. Nice meeting you.” She turned quick, tried to jog up the steps like everything was no big deal. She was reaching out for the screen door handle when her foot got twisted up in her housedress. Grunted as she fell on her knees.

The man was on her in a flash, pulling her up by her elbows, opening up her screen door and helping her to her own couch. Her knees throbbed, the steps were ribbed metal, she could feel the pain pounding in the palms of her hands, too.

The man stood before her, hands out like he might need to catch her again. She had to peer up at him, the ceiling fan light making a halo around his head, his face darkened by it. It hurt her eyes. “Miss Tipton,” he said. “You all right? I was just joking with you, I ain’t really asking why you were out there on those steps all alone. I sit on my momma’s steps alone every night, for no reason at all.”

There wasn’t no shower running, no husband coming out to see what all the commotion was about. This man, this Pete, surely knew Myra had been lying. He’d left his gun outside, didn’t even seem all that concerned about some trailer kid coming along and taking it away. This boy could be just what the doctor ordered in terms of making the clock go go go.

“Pete,” she said. She lowered her eyes finally, addressing her question to his gut. “You want a beer?”

He sat down next to her with such force that the cushion she sat on jumped. She could see his face clearly now, and felt surprised all over again at the scar on his lip. “Well, heck yes!” he said. “I ain’t skeered!”

Myra used her fists to push herself up from the couch. His momma hadn’t cared for that scar right. It bubbled up like a grub worm. She felt half sorry for him and half disgusted. She grabbed two beers, making sure the bottles bumped against each other, because it was her favorite sound. She pushed the disgust away. She had to. Drinking the night away was no biggie if it was a social occasion. And this surely counted.

JIM GOT TO WORK
feeling like he’d been wrung out. Before he left, Myra had seemed fidgety. Never a good sign. And Perry’s TV was still on, which meant she was still awake, hadn’t turned it off and rolled over to sleep. She’d be out the window quiet as a cat not an hour after he left, he knew.

He wanted to leave the house with his family tucked in and safe, doors and windows locked snug, leaving a warm presence that never cooled. Wanted to return to a home filled with the yellow light of morning, have his coffee, crawl in next to his wife, fall to sleep without a care.

That hadn’t happened in a long while. Instead, he knew he’d come home to Myra’s bottle still in her hand, the foamy bits dried to a film at the bottom, Perry’s door closed, her bed empty. The trailer dank and dark, the sky overcast, no yellow light. The neighbor playing her polka music loud enough for her to hear despite her broken hearing aid.

And before that, a long shift at the prison, which always left him feeling like he hadn’t showered in days, like behind every piece of good news there was a shiv-sharp piece of bad news.

Jim had a walker’s shift that night. Already, seated comfortably in his truck, he could feel his bones ache like he was driving home after a shift, not driving toward one.
Kadoom, kadoom
, he’d have to walk the lengths of the cell block over and over, the hard rubber soles in his shoes never giving, not ever; he’d asked to be allowed to wear black tennis shoes instead but had been denied. And in a way he felt reassured by that. In prison, order was key. Allow one crack—moving to less formal, more giving shoes—and the whole thing would fold in on itself.

He pulled up to the small guard shack. The new guard leaned out, a young black man named Davie. He smiled and Jim saw he was missing the top right incisor. A child’s smile, and a child’s innocence in his eyes, too. Hadn’t seen shit yet. Jim handed over his own ID, attempted a smile in return, though he was sure it looked like he was simply brandishing his teeth.

Or was it Davis? This was new—these blips in his mind where he wasn’t sure what was what. The stresses of a teenaged stepdaughter, of a wife giving in to the urges she’d been able to convince herself didn’t exist for a time. Not much room to store things like the gate man’s name. Did it even matter? Would he fold in on himself because he couldn’t remember Davie or Davis? The brim of the man’s hat was stiff, unworn. Jim waved, drove through.