Lindsay Hunter - Ugly Girls

“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.

She could have stayed and felt just fine with that, but she didn’t want to miss out on a ride from Baby Girl, didn’t want to miss out on the feeling of driving out of the parking lot while everyone else was still stuck inside the school. She asked to go to the bathroom, threw the hall pass in the garbage on her way out, waited for the parking lot guard to chug around the bend, out of sight. The school was a flat brown building with a parking lot in front and a bunch of trailers parked in what used to be the football field out back. The school had expanded enough to need trailer classrooms, and it didn’t have enough money to keep up with a football team, so problem solved. The parking lot guard patrolled the parking lot and the trailers, so kids always waited for the golf cart to make its way over toward the old football field before they made a run for it. Perry never ran, though. Running made you look guilty.

Baby Girl was hunched low in the driver’s seat, staring at her phone. Perry got in and Baby Girl backed out of the parking spot, drove them through the gates, sped through the yellow light at the corner, still hunched. Perry felt it, she felt that freedom she’d been expecting, the sun suddenly brighter and the air quieter and the grass so green it hurt her eyes, everything seeming to say that what she’d done was right.

They were on the other side, they were out, and the possibilities lay before them like dashes on a highway. Some days they never found a reason to be out, and maybe today was like that. And it wasn’t like they were trying all that hard. Baby Girl drove lazily, full stops at corners even when there wasn’t a stop sign, checking her phone again and again like she was waiting on something to come through.

Perry’s own phone vibrated. A text from Jamey. U with your freind? U gonna get online? I wanna talk 2 u.

Later , she wrote back. She didn’t want to talk to him, maybe ever again. Oooh baby . Thinking of Travis typing those words, now that was something to consider.

They drove around, parked at the McDonald’s. Perry wondered if it was the same shift as when she and Jim had gone through that morning, if the girl with the lazy eye and long green nails would hand them their burgers if they hit the drive-through. Baby Girl looked at her phone again. “Who you waiting on?” Perry asked.

“Charles,” she said. “He’s supposed to text me when he’s ready to get picked up.”

Perry knew that was a lie. Charles didn’t text and Baby Girl picked him up every day at the same time. “Mm-hmm,” Perry said. A fat man walked into the McDonald’s, antlers of sweat on his shirt, spreading out from his spine. Perry liked to ask herself would she go for different kinds of men: fat, ugly, old. But no, not today. Today all she could think of was Travis, how he hadn’t smiled back at her, how when he’d handed the pen back at the end of class, he’d smiled at Matt.

Baby Girl’s phone tittered. Perry snatched it out of her hand, scraping Baby Girl’s wrist with her nails, holding her off with her other hand so she could read.

U with your freind?

Jamey’s number. Baby Girl mashed Perry’s face with her hand until Perry could taste the salt on her fingers. She dropped the phone and it clattered over the gearshift, fell between the seats.

Perry’s face felt hot, branded where Baby Girl’s hand had been. “Don’t,” Baby Girl said. The heat traveled, covered Perry’s whole body. “Fuck you,” Perry said.

Sometimes Perry wondered how they were friends, or even if friends was the word for what they were. They never talked about boys, Perry had never asked Baby Girl if she’d even touched a wiener before. They didn’t talk, really, they just did. Perry’d had a crush on Charles a long time ago, before his accident, before she filled out the training bra Myra had gotten on sale at Walmart. Perry wrote him a note saying how she felt. The next day Baby Girl brought it back to her. “I read this,” she said. “I took it before Charles could see it. You don’t want him seeing it.” Perry thought she was saving her from embarrassment, that Baby Girl knew Charles would laugh and keep ignoring her, but then she said, “You don’t want him liking you.” Perry never asked her why, too embarrassed that she didn’t already know.

And that’s probably why she didn’t tell Baby Girl what she knew. That Jamey was also texting her. The text just before the one Perry saw on Baby Girl’s phone said, I wanna meet up with u and your freind . He was only texting her to get to Perry.

Baby Girl got out of the car, went into the McDonald’s. She knew she wasn’t supposed to follow. Perry could see her inside, typing into her phone. She should have stayed to see what happened to that zebra.