Ugly Girls: A Novel (7 page)

Hey—I saw on fbook that u know Jamey. What’s his deal? He’s clingy right??

After a minute, Shanna passed it back.

I mean, I know him from fbook. He friended me a while back but I haven’t talked to him really all that much. He seemed nice tho. I like your top today!

Little hearts over every
i
. Smiley face at the end. Shanna was a real kiss-ass type, that one eye always wide and begging. Best not to stoke the flames by writing back and thanking her, especially since she didn’t know anything anyway.

Later, in math class, the window a/c unit rattled on and off in five-minute intervals. Off just long enough so everyone started smelling, on long enough to dry the sweat. Perry liked the way her sweat smelled. Her own specific scent. Like sugar, and like butter left out for too long. Kind of sweet and kind of nasty. Baby Girl smelled like a sliced onion if she got too sweaty, but Perry had seen her caking her pits with Secret, had seen her spritzing that perfume you could get for $1.29 at the drugstore under her shirt, so it wasn’t like Baby Girl wasn’t trying. They had to sit alphabetically according to last names, so Baby Girl was behind Perry and at a diagonal, seated in the row all the way against the wall. She was still in the same clothes from the night before, but her hair fell in wet lines down her forehead, and Perry couldn’t smell the onion yet, so it was clear she’d showered. Her lips outlined in brown and gleaming, like always. Perry looked at her, mouthed,
Why didn’t you text me back?

Why the fuck would I?
she mouthed back, real slow and deliberate, like she was tough, like she had no idea how dumb she looked with a mouth drawn around her mouth. Still, if Baby Girl was really disturbed by something she’d have ignored Perry outright. So they were cool.

Bitch
, Perry mouthed, turned around before Baby Girl could say anything back.

Travis usually sat in the row on the other side of Perry, but today his desk was empty.

It was nearly one o’clock. Perry felt cored, and the shell that was left ached. The classroom was as warm as a kitchen, Mr. Clark talking about tangents and cotangents in a nasally drone. Perry felt her lids pulling down, her eyes nearly closed when he’d say
tangent
or
cotangent
again, getting too rough with his
t
’s. Bringing her right back to the ache.

Travis walked in ten minutes before class was over. Perry checked his shoes. Silvery sneakers, like they were spun from webs. Mr. Clark watched Travis take his seat, holding his chalk in front of him, like it was important, leaving a ghost of dust across his middle. “All right,” he said.

“Yeah,” Travis said. “I apologize, Mr. Clark.”

“All right,” Mr. Clark said again.

Travis didn’t have anything to write with, didn’t even have his book or his green book bag. She had noticed this happening to him before, and now that Perry knew he worked all night long it made sense. It was hard for her to remember to bring everything after a night out with Baby Girl. She’d had to borrow pens and paper countless times from the boy in front of her, Matt, who she usually tried to copy off during quizzes. She nudged him now, pushing her fingertips into the flesh at his back. His T-shirt was hot and moist, stuck to him. He turned, smiling, ready to help, and Perry tried not to gawk at the gap between his front teeth. “Give Travis your other pen,” she whispered. “And a piece of paper.”

Matt looked from her to Travis. “Sure,” he whispered, and quickly handed them over like Travis was mugging him. “But I need that pen back.” He had never said that to Perry before. She probably had a dozen of his pens in her locker, on the floor of Baby Girl’s car.

“Thanks,” Travis whispered. “I’ll make sure to give it back.” He bowed his head, started writing down the scraps of equations Mr. Clark had written on the board throughout the class. Going through the motions was what he seemed to be doing.

He must have felt Perry watching him. Looked up at her with his big cow’s eyes.

“You’re welcome,” she whispered. He nodded, and Perry was disappointed that he didn’t smile at her. In her mind he had smiled, and she had smiled, and after class they’d walked together in the hall, out the front doors, into the woods … but there she stopped herself. She wouldn’t be like that with him. And besides, he hadn’t even smiled at her.

But he was probably as tired as Perry was, more even, since he’d been working all night. Mopping and cooking and whatever else. Helping that old witch waitress adjust her wig just so.
Pam.
Again Perry found herself thinking how nice it’d be to go back to the trailer and have Myra and Jim be gone, lay down on her bed with Travis. Take a nap, nothing else.

Perry’s phone vibrated. A text from Baby Girl.
Pay attention bitch! need 2 copy ur homework l8r!!

She clicked her pen, ready to take notes. It occurred to her that she wanted, very badly, for Travis to think she was smart.

IT WAS A THIRTY-MINUTE DRIVE
to and back from the high school, so when Jim got home Myra had managed to shower and get into a clean dress; the white one with the tiny blue flowers dotted everywhere. Made Myra feel younger. Cleaner. The beery sheets she’d thrown into the small closet washing machine were frothed and rinsed, ready for the dryer, though Myra knew they’d have a better chance hung from a line, old as the dryer was. But that seemed like a lot today. Too much.

“Hey,” Jim said to her, standing at the front of the hallway, hands on his hips. “You eat?”

“Surely did,” she answered. They were out of fabric softener; they were always out of something. “Can I make you a bite?”

“Might make myself some eggs,” Jim said. Myra was no cook. Still, she wanted Jim to see that she’d offered. She followed him into the kitchen, sat at the tiny nook table to watch him. He cracked some eggs into Perry’s old plastic bowl. A chipped cartoon fish with a mouth full of teeth grinned from the bowl’s center.

“Myra,” Jim started to say, whipping the eggs with a fork. She loved the sound of her name when he said it. So serious. Like she was someone worth knowing.

“Mmm?” she asked. She felt lulled by the sound of the fork, tiny pings and the liquid swish of the eggs. “What is it?”

“I am pretty sure Perry was out all night last night,” Jim said, turning his back to her to pour the eggs into the pan. He was testing the waters, seeing how Myra would react. Because she knew she had done wrong last night, she gave him a taste of what he wanted.

“You’re kidding,” she said, working a thread of shock into her voice. “Again? And after all the talks you’ve had with her.”

It wasn’t that Myra didn’t worry for her child. She did. Only not for stuff like staying out all night. Instead, Myra worried Perry wouldn’t appreciate her youth, her beauty, all the chances she was being given to create moments she could hold on to. To make her life a jewelry box full of shiny things rather than a cabinet that rarely got dusted.

But Myra had gone too far. Or maybe she hadn’t gone far enough. Her words, instead of coming out sincere, had landed flat and unfeeling. She sat up straighter. She needed to pay better attention.

“Anyway,” Jim said, his back still turned. “She was in one piece and she went to school. So maybe I’m wrong and she
was
home after all.”

“I’m glad we have you to worry after us,” she said. “Jim,” she said, when he still hadn’t turned. When he did a moment later she shook some pepper into her hand, held it out to him.

“No thanks,” he said. His eyes held her face a beat too long; he was watching her, waiting to see if she knew Perry had been out. She couldn’t let on that she knew, couldn’t let him know a strange boy had been in the trailer drinking with her while her daughter was out in the night with that half-bald girl. Myra hated that she felt like she had to pretend in front of her husband.

Finally he turned back, raked a spatula through his eggs. “You sleep okay?” His way of dropping the subject. Myra felt tired. She knew Jim was tired. Perry was tired. They were on a carousel that wouldn’t stop.

“I might go over there and knock on her door,” Jim was saying. He meant the neighbor, the polka music. “I know she’s old and she enjoys it but we all need our sleep.” He was already halfway out the screen door; he closed it gently behind him.

Myra went to the bathroom, wet her hands, flicked water onto her face with her fingertips. The carpet of regret had returned, her face was as hot as a stone in the sun. She heard Jim knocking on the neighbor’s door, calling
Mrs. Kozlowski? Mrs. Kozlowski?
The music stopped. Jim and the neighbor murmured to each other. Myra looked into her own face in the mirror. Where Perry’s looks had come from, she didn’t know. She herself was blond and blue-eyed, and Perry’s father was Italian. Myra was pretty sure about that, anyway. It hadn’t been a long courtship.

But sometimes she saw Perry catching her own reflection in a window, that quick appraisal, and Myra could see how Perry was pleased with what she saw.
That
was what she had given to Perry.

She heard Jim come back in, remove the pan from the stove. The neighbor’s music started up again, turned down a smidge.

“Jim,” Myra called. “Come here for a sec.” She appraised herself in the mirror, straightened her neck and shoulders, allowed that flood of knowing vanity to fill her face. She had held the attention of a young man for quite some time the night before. When Jim appeared in the doorway, she took him by his belt and led him into the bedroom.

IF YOU LET YOUR EYES LOSE FOCUS
everything becomes a smear. That’s how Baby Girl liked to get through class. The teacher a moving smear of brown and gray, his voice like someone was rubbing an eraser over it: the words were there but you had to work hard to find them.

She used to be good at this shit. Math, English. School. Back when it felt like it mattered, paying attention and doing homework and playing the clarinet and never missing class, not even when she was sick, not even when Charles called collect from jail at five in the morning.

She checked her phone. No new texts. That was all right, she told herself. That was fine, they’d talk
l8r
.

“Dayna,” the teacher said. “What’d I say about the next time you bring your phone to class?”

She let her eyes focus. Even still, Mr. Clark looked like a smear. She hadn’t had the time to fully convince herself that no new texts was actually just fine, and maybe that’s why she answered, “That you’ll set it to vibrate and put it up your butt?”

A boy in the back of the room exploded with laughter. Some other kids giggled behind their hands. Baby Girl hated them for it. They should think she was an asshole. What she said wasn’t even all that clever, had come out before she had time to stop it. Perry hadn’t laughed, either. That was happening more and more these days.

She began packing up her things. She knew she’d be sent to the principal’s office, and she wanted to make it as easy on Mr. Clark as possible, the least she could do. She also knew she’d walk right past the office, push out the doors, run to her car to wait for Perry. She could feel the hard slaps her feet would make, could feel the heat of the treeless parking lot. Was already composing a new text to him:
What u doin?
or even just
Hey
.

“Nope,” Mr. Clark said. “You’re staying right here in this classroom. And you’re coming up here to finish the equation we’ve started as a class.”

He held out the chalk. Baby Girl felt excited, she couldn’t help it. Back in the day she loved to write on the board, loved erasing what she’d written and writing it all over again, only neater. Loved to have the class watch her get an answer right, please the teacher, be the best.

But now she felt embarrassed by her excitement. She dropped her bag as hard as she could on the floor, walked up and snatched the chalk from the teacher’s hand. The equation had three different letters in it, or was one of the letters a multiplication sign? She felt ashamed that she didn’t know, angry that Mr. Clark knew she didn’t know and was making an example of her.

Sometimes when it felt like there was no way out Baby Girl could feel her body getting cold, like it was shutting down so she could think. Like the time a man in his boxers had held up a bat and swung it at her and Perry, yelling how he was going to call the cops. At first it was like Baby Girl was hearing and seeing everything all at once, the man yelling, Perry laughing, a car going by two streets over. And then she had gone cold, could see the way out as if it had been blasted with a flashlight: scream, charge at the man, yank down his boxers, run.

And now here she was again, cold as a lizard. The equation ordered itself, she knew the answer was
26x
. Wrote it on the board, wrote
suck
and
dicks
around it, so the answer read, “Suck 26x dicks.”

Mr. Clark looked like his boxers had landed around his ankles. The boy in the back exploded again. Baby Girl threw the chalk at him on her way out. She hated him, she felt sorry for Mr. Clark and that made her hate him, hate herself.

Heat, footslaps, the wham of her car door. She hunched low, breathing the thick hot air in the car. The bell rang; the bell rang again. Perry would be in biology now. She sent two texts:
P, I’m in the car
and
Hey what u doin?
Added a smiley face, because it seemed more girly, less desperate for a response, but at the last second Baby Girl decided it made her seem high or dense. She fucked up the deletion, though, so her text read:

Hey what u doin?:

No smile, just eyes, like Baby Girl wanted him to know she wasn’t playing, she was looking for him, she wasn’t even blinking, she was looking so hard.

He probably wouldn’t even notice the eyes. She hoped he wouldn’t, she hoped he would.

THEY WERE WATCHING A VIDEO
about predatory animals when she got Baby Girl’s text. She could have stayed and watched that video, it was pretty interesting, especially since she was the only girl who didn’t hide her eyes when the animals would catch something, bite deep into flesh, the zebra or whatever thrashing and then woops, there’s its ribs. Perry wasn’t coldhearted. She just wasn’t scared like the other girls.