She hates you.
She thinks you’re a terrible sister.
Bridget slinks the rest of the way to her bedroom. If Lisa did think she was in trouble, did she have to be so horribly mean? Why wasn’t she trying to make Bridget feel good about herself, instead of worse?
Anyway, it’s over. For better or worse, the dance is here. She’s going to put on that dress and face the music.
The red dress is hanging in the closet. She sheds her robe, sets it on her bed. She exhales all the air inside her, hoping to collapse herself. She pulls the dress up over her chest, slides the zipper up.
No problem.
Yay, Bridget!
Her lip quivers and the tears fall. She pitches forward so they won’t drop on the fabric. She did it. She is even smaller than she’d been this summer. Smaller than that enormous bikini. The smallest she’s ever been. She doesn’t have to lose any more weight.
It’s over.
Bridget lifts her arms up in victory. And when she does, the red dress sags low. Dangerously low. So low, her strapless bra peeks out.
This thrills her.
She sneaks into her mother’s room and finds a box of safety pins in her sewing kit. Then she peels the dress off, lays it on her bed, and starts pinning it tighter, along the back, like she’d seen done to the mannequin at the department store.
Bridget catches sight of herself in the mirror. In her bra and underwear. Hunched over the bed, over the dress, making small even smaller. She looks like the bugs they’d been studying in Bio II. Like an exoskeleton, ribs and bones protruding little nubs and ridges underneath her skin. She smiles.
And then her stomach growls.
You’re disgusting.
Can’t you enjoy this for one minute without thinking of food?
You’re not even that thin.
With trembling hands, she quickly finishes pinning the dress and puts it on. Then Bridget twists her hair up, adds a bit of lipstick. She gets ready without looking in the mirror.
Bridget doesn’t need to see herself. She already knows.
She will never be pretty.
andace is in the bathroom, sitting on the closed toilet seat, her eyes shut. Her mom puts the finishing touches on her makeup for the dance. She can hear the girls in her bedroom, and all the talking and laughing makes her giddy. Though they’d shown up later than she’d hoped, and no one seems to be eating any of the appetizers she and her mom had made, her plan is still working.
Her only concern is that they don’t drink all the rum before Candace gets a chance to have some.
“Are you finished?” she asks her mom. “I feel like we’ve been in here forever.”
“Almost. You are so beautiful!” A brush dabs gently at her lip. “Okay. You can look!”
Candace opens her eyes and stares at the girl in the mirror.
She almost doesn’t recognize herself.
Her eyes are deep and smoky, traced with liner and shadowing that only makes them an icier blue. Her lashes are extra thick and long, courtesy of the fake ones glued along her lids. Her face has been spackled and powdered, and it would be lighter than her normal skin if not for the bronzer and the blush. Her lips are lined and stained a deep winey red. And her face and chest have been dusted in a light glitter.
It is, in essence, a mask.
“Remember, it will look different in the gym with the lights down. I took that into account.” Ms. Kincaid turns the bathroom lights off and opens the bathroom door to let in light from the hallway. “Do you like it?”
Candace isn’t sure if she does. But her mom knows what she’s doing. She makes people beautiful for a living. Hides their flaws. And that is exactly what Candace wants tonight.
She walks into her bedroom.
“Whoa, Candace. I almost didn’t recognize you.”
“It’s a little much,” Candace says quietly. “Isn’t it?”
“No! Not at all. You look gorgeous!”
“Like a model!”
They all compliment her. The only one who doesn’t is Lauren. She just sits on Candace’s bed in that weird witchy dress, her legs swinging. She’s drinking from her cup, tipping it all the way back. After the last sip, she swallows and lets out a big ahhh like a soda commercial.
“You’ve seriously never had rum and Coke before, Lauren?”
“No!” Lauren cries. “But they are so good!” She holds out her cup for a refill.
Candace steps in front of Lauren and tries to intercept the bottle. “Maybe you should slow down.”
“Come on, Candace. Let her have more,” one of the girls says with a devilish smile.
Another adds, “She needs a drink! She’s had a rough day.”
“Look at her dress. She’s in mourning.”
There are more snickers.
“It’s true. I am.” Lauren pouts, and lets someone refill her cup. “My mom is pulling me out of Mount Washington.”
Candace perks up. “What? Why?”
“She found the list. And then she told me that I couldn’t go to the dance. So I snuck out.”
Oh, god. This is bad. Lauren’s mom is going to freak. “Lauren —”
Lauren leans around Candace and beams at the girls. “I am so glad to be here with you,” she says, her voice quivering with emotion. A few of them laugh. Her eyes fill with tears. “No, seriously. This is all I’ve ever wanted. Really.”
The girls giggle at each other.
Lauren tries to stand up, but her feet catch the hem of her dress. She falls forward into one of the girls and seizes the opportunity to hug her.
“Whoa! Lauren!” the girl snips and guides her off. “Take it easy.”
Lauren hits the carpet and then pops up onto her knees, like some kind of planned tumble. She kisses another girl, one sitting on the floor, on the cheek, and in the process sloshes the girl’s rum and Coke onto her dress.
“Lauren! What the hell?”
Lauren eases onto her back and lies in the middle of Candace’s room, like she is making a carpet angel, and grins up at the ceiling fan. The rest of the girls stare down at her, lips curled.
“Don’t give her any more,” Candace says, pulling the empty glass out of Lauren’s hand.
By the time pictures are taken and the girls have done their last-minute primping, Lauren is completely drunk. The two girls with their permits pack their cars up with bodies and drive over to the school. It is decided that Lauren should walk to help her sober up.
The other girls who can’t fit in the cars walk briskly. Candace ends up falling back with Lauren, keeping her from drifting into the street.
“Your mom is so pretty, Candace,” Lauren slurs.
“I guess.”
Lauren stops walking. “My mom hates me.”
“She doesn’t,” Candace says, grabbing Lauren’s hand and pulling her gently along. “She thinks she’s protecting you.”
“I’m not going back to school.”
“You can talk to her, Lauren. You —”
Lauren shakes her head. “I know it. She’s not going to change her mind.”
Candace, unfortunately, believes her. “I’m sorry.” But she also realizes that Lauren leaving Mount Washington changes things. Her friends are warming back up to her. With Lauren gone, they’ll most certainly let her back in the group.
When she looks at Lauren, Candace sees that she’s started to cry. “I don’t think the girls like me anymore. I don’t know what I did wrong.”
“They still like you. Don’t worry.” Lauren cries a little more, then stops walking again. “Are you going to throw up?” Candace asks her. “If you think you have to, do it. You’ll feel better.”
Lauren looks at her with watery eyes. She blinks a few times and says, “I don’t like you with all that makeup on. I think it looks bad. You don’t need any of it. You’re so pretty, Candace.”
“Whatever.” Candace tries to keep it light.
When they finally arrive at the school, the girls are sta
nding around impatiently. Candace can hear the music inside the gym leaking out of the windows.
“Candace! Come inside! Hurry up!”
Candace looks at Lauren. She is puking down into the storm grate. “We can’t bring her in. She’s wasted.”
“So leave her in the car.”
One of the girls opens the door to her backseat. Candace helps Lauren get inside.
“Don’t puke in my car,” the girl cautions. “If you need to puke, you go outside, okay?”
Lauren rolls on her back and whispers, “Okay.”
Candace watches the girls run into the gym. When she looks back at Lauren, her face is pale and she can tell another wave of puke is coming. Candace drags her back out of the car, gets her over to the curb, and holds her blond hair back.
When Lauren stops retching, Candace says, “We’ll hang here until you’re puked out, and then I’ll walk you home.”
“No. You should go dance, Candace. Go be with your friends.”
But Candace has already gone back to the front seat of the car, looking for tissues. One for Lauren to wipe her mouth, and one for Candace to take off her makeup.
arah stands naked before her full-length mirror. The edges are masked with stickers and pictures of the bands she loves, but enough glass is exposed for her to see herself from head to toe. Her skin is dull and chalky except for the hundreds of thin red scratches from her nonstop itching. They give the appearance of her having been attacked by a pack of angry stray cats. She lifts her tangle of necklaces and sees a green shadow of oxidized metal staining her skin. Her hair is wild and it hangs in her face in heavy clumps. She pins a little of it back, so the word on her forehead can be seen. It is mostly faded. She could retrace it, but decides not to.
In the top corner of the mirror, she’s wedged the two homecoming dance tickets. Milo’s, a waste of ten dollars. At least it was his cash, not hers.
She sits on her bed. Her uniform for the week, and now her homecoming dance outfit, hangs on the back of her chair.
The dance is about to start. She is late.
Hurry up, she tells herself. Hurry up! Get dressed right fucking now, Sarah!
Though she is in the homestretch of this anarchy, she does not want to put the clothes back on. She’d taken them off the second she came back from the Spirit Caravan.
Sarah had positioned her bicycle between two vehicles decorated to the nines. One behind her had fluttering streamers taped along the body and soap-caked white words scrawled on the windows, proclaiming allegiance to their class, to the team. The girls in the truck in front of her were dressed in mountaineer outfits. She watched them all dance, cheer, and laugh together. One was that homeschooled girl from the list, Lauren, who had become the darling of her sophomore class. Lauren had looked so unabashedly happy to be standing in the bed of the pickup truck. She kept hugging the girls she danced with, hugging them after every song. Like a twelve-year-old. Her hair was so shiny and blond, and she whipped it around to the music. Sarah watched the other girls on the truck give Lauren funny looks. Her school spirit was a touch too much for them.
The people of Mount Washington came out on their lawns with cups of coffee and waved. The people who watched the spectacle didn’t seem to notice how clearly Sarah didn’t belong. Probably because they couldn’t smell her. Sarah didn’t wave, she didn’t smile. She set her eyes on the bumper in front of her and pedaled down to the football field. And when other cars were looking for places to park, she spun around and rode home.
All the celebratory honks and cheers and fight songs gave her a headache, and she spent the rest of the afternoon in bed.
She thinks about how different her routine is from that of the other girls around town. How primped and perfumed and well lotioned they’d be. She puts on screaming noisecore to motivate her. She thinks of all the people she would disgust, fuels herself by imagining their horrified faces.
Finally she puts on the clothes, and it’s awful. Like someone else’s skin. A horribly stinky cloak.
There’s a knock at her bedroom door. She opens it and at first sees no one. But peeking out into the hall, she sees Milo a few steps down, looking at an old picture of Sarah. One from seventh grade. It’s a horrible picture. She’d tried to curl her bangs like the other girls, but of course it looked like ass. And that grody blouse she’d bought at the mall because everyone else was wearing them.
“Hey,” he says, but doesn’t take his eyes off the picture.
“I was just leaving.” She pushes past him, but he grabs her arm. She tries to pull away, but he won’t let her until he’s slid something on her wrist.
A corsage. White daisies.
He is the only boy to ever buy her flowers.
“I said I didn’t want a corsage,” she says. She rips it off and presses it into Milo’s chest. A few petals fall to the floor. God, he is going to make her cry.
“I don’t know how many different ways I can try to prove how beautiful I think you are. It’s killing me to watch you do this to yourself. I talked to Annie —”
“For fuck’s sake, Milo!” She darts into her room and slams her door right in his face. She wants him to go. She needs him to go. She cannot fucking deal with this right now!
But Milo calls to her through the wood. He says, “And Annie said that it doesn’t matter what I do. I can’t make you believe me. It has to be something you feel.”
“God, Annie knows everything, doesn’t she? Someone should give her a talk show.” Sarah lies down on her bed. She stares at the ceiling. Her eyes are watering. She desperately wants to scratch.
Milo opens the door. Sarah hides her face with her sheet.
“Come on,” Milo says, and reaches for Sarah’s hand.
“Where are we going?”
“Into the bathroom.”
“No. I’m making a statement, Milo. You need to respect it.”
“I have. I’ve let you take the list and basically turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. So now you need to respect yourself and take a fucking shower. You’ll feel better, Sarah. Please.”
He pushes her down the hall. And though Sarah protests a little bit, after a few steps she goes limp. Milo opens a few doors until he finds the linen closet. He picks a fluffy blue towel, hands it to her, and then shuts her inside the bathroom.
Sarah stares at the closed door. Milo’s right. Mount Washington was never going to see her as anything other than what they wanted to see. As ugly. It didn’t matter what she did. It didn’t matter if she didn’t shower for a week, or if she got into the fanciest homecoming dress money could buy. She couldn’t change other people’s opinions. She couldn’t teach any lessons they didn’t want to learn.
Milo sits outside. Once the water is turned on, he opens the door a crack and talks to her. About nothing, really. What he says doesn’t matter. Sarah is just glad to hear his voice underneath the falling water. And he can’t hear her tears.
It takes three lather-rinse-repeat cycles to cut through the buildup of grease and grime. And as much as Sarah hates to admit it, it feels so good to be clean.
She walks out with a towel around her, steam billowing.
“What now?” she says.
He shrugs. “We go to the dance.”
“I’m never putting those clothes on my body again.”
Milo kicks the pile with the toe of his sneaker. “Me, either. We should burn them.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have a dress you could wear?”
“I am NOT wearing a dress.”
“Fine. Wear whatever you feel beautiful in.”
She ignores that part and settles on another T-shirt, her hoodie, and a fresh pair of jeans.
And the corsage.
When they get to the dance, Sarah lingers outside the gym door. She can hear the music inside. “I feel like a failure. Everyone expects me to show up and do something.”
“Who cares about their expectations?”
“I never did want to go. I
f I hadn’t been on that stupid list, I wouldn’t have come here.”
She walks off, circling around the school until she’s at their bench. Milo sits next to her. Sarah opens a new pack of cigarettes and lights one up. It’s been almost a week since she’s had one, and the smoke is extra strong and thick in her lungs. She coughs, hard, and throws the cigarette to the ground.
When the smoke clears from her lungs, she asks, “Can I tell you something?” Her lip quivers. She bites down on it. “I don’t know if I’ve ever felt beautiful.”
“Sarah …”
“I’m serious.”
Milo wraps his arms around her and holds her tight. And Sarah lets him. She lets herself be vulnerable for a second, lets him see her real, true, ugly self. It is a beautiful moment, and Sarah lets herself be a part of it, and that, at the very least, is a step in the right direction.
he gym is dark, shadowy. The only brightness comes from the white crepe paper strung between basketball hoops, the iridescent balloons tied to the bleachers, the disco lights affixed to the DJ table, and whatever trickles in from the hallway. It smells of pizza, fruit punch, and the flowers on the wrists of the girls Jennifer is dancing beside.
Margo, Dana, and Rachel wear matching corsages — miniature red roses that haven’t yet begun to open up, interspersed with baby’s breath, a few perfectly oblong lemon leaves, and springy curls of willow wood.
Jennifer’s wrist is naked, light, and it lifts unrestrained to the beat of the music. Her other hand, the one holding her clutch, hangs heavily by her side.
The Mount Washington embossing stamp is tucked inside it. It takes up so much room, she couldn’t pack her pocket comb or the Band-Aids for if her new heels gave her blisters.
Jennifer has kept her end of the bargain.
Not that Margo even bothered to check.
Jennifer shimmies behind Dana and positions herself so she’s dancing directly in front of Margo. She’s tried this a few times already. She wants to get Margo’s attention so she can lift up her bulging purse and show that, yes, she’d brought the stamp as promised. But as soon as Jennifer positions herself, Margo does a half spin and turns away.