Lindsay Hunter - Ugly Girls

Baby Girl looked like one sick bitch. Looked like she should be the mean one, but Perry could tell she was terrified. Like shaving off the rest of her hair had left her too exposed, all that armor fallen away, and now anyone could get at her. It was disappointing.

The cell was quiet now, the hooker without no panties had her arm back over her face, the standing one braiding her hair again. Baby Girl was cracking and recracking her knuckles. A guard had come by and told them they’d have their bail set in the afternoon.

Sometimes Perry looked around and saw she was somewhere she didn’t want to be. Sometimes it was sudden and sometimes it was because she’d done shit to make it so. She could count on two fingers the number of times she was happy to end up in some backseat, but she couldn’t say that she hadn’t done everything she could to end up there. And like now. She hadn’t meant for it to turn out the way it did. She’d wanted to go to school, even. But here she was. And when Perry found herself somewhere she didn’t want to be, she rode it out until it was done, because it was the only thing to do. She felt the crying from before in her throat. If she started up again they’d eat her alive. Had to remember how if she was a wounded zebra, she wouldn’t limp for shit. She’d carry on like all her legs still worked just fine. Kick another zebra’s leg to shit, leave the animal there as an offering. Her instead of me.

“Hey,” Perry whispered. “I seen who you were texting with the other day.”

Baby Girl cracked her thumb. “So?” she whispered back.

“I’m just saying, he’s been texting me, too. Talking to me online and shit. So it ain’t like you’re the only one.”

Baby Girl cracked her wrist, said nothing.

“I think he’s trying to get with me,” Perry said. “Just based on how he talks to me. Does he say shit like that to you?”

“We talk about all kinds of shit, I don’t know,” Baby Girl said, and Perry knew by the way she said it that he had never texted Oooh baby to Baby Girl.

“Maybe we should both watch our asses,” Perry said.

“Whatever. I got other friends aside from you.”

Perry felt a tingling in her gut. Like she was winning at something. “So you’re just friends?”

“I don’t even know what he looks like,” Baby Girl said. She whipped her head from shoulder to shoulder, working at cracking her neck.

“I might meet up with him one day,” Perry said. “Unless you say you don’t want me to.”

“Y’all definitely ain’t whores,” the woman on the floor said. “Fighting over some boy? Y’all is just joyriders, am I right? Or what, you steal a lip gloss from the store?”

“Do whatever you want,” Baby Girl said. She moved her hands to her head, kept them there like she was holding her scalp in place. Like that might disappear, too. Was she regretting it? The thought was enough to make Perry feel tender toward her.

“What’s that feel like?” Perry asked. She reached up to touch for herself, but Baby Girl moved quick, slapped her hand away. The woman on the floor snickered. Perry’s face felt hot; Baby Girl had embarrassed her in front of these women, made her seem like the one who wasn’t in control.

“You know what?” Perry asked, putting a hand on Baby Girl’s leg, as friendly as an aunt, holding firm so she couldn’t be slapped away this time. “As your friend it’s my duty to let you know that you look like a fucking retard.”

Baby Girl’s head snapped up, and Perry saw how quickly this brought tears to her eyes. She knew retard would do the trick. Good , she thought. Maybe it’ll wake her up . The women laughed, and Perry felt a stitch of pride. She wanted Baby Girl to know she looked like someone to avoid, someone to back away from, and then from the safety of distance to feel sorry for. Like Charles.

Baby Girl yanked her leg free, still staring at Perry like she had three heads. A fat tear slid down her cheek. “You wrong,” Baby Girl said, her voice loud. She was talking to the woman on the floor. “One of us is a whore.”

The women laughed again. Perry joined along. “Yeah,” she said, “and one of us just wishes she was.” She almost felt closer to Baby Girl than ever, seeing her like this. Still, she moved away, crawled to the opposite corner. Left Baby Girl there to get ate up by whatever hungry animal, if that’s how she wanted it.

LATELY IT WAS like evenings could get dark on you before you knew it. Blink and the sky had pulled up its denim blanket. It wouldn’t get fully dark for a long time, that denim deepening slowly into navy, and Jamey hated the wait. Reminded him of the time between dinner and lights out, when there wasn’t nothing to do but choose between boredom and trouble. And some nights you’d be elated to taste your own blood, nights when a bloody nose was better than one more night of writing letters or staring at the walls or rubbing yourself raw, pretending you didn’t know your cellmate was watching.

And lately, what with his momma on the couch and Perry not two trailers over, it was getting harder and harder to choose boredom.

He’d waited for Jim to leave. He knew Myra was home. He’d gone around back so he could see through her kitchen window, and after a bit she appeared. Went to the fridge just like Jamey knew she would. Like a moth to a flame was what his momma always said about drunks, and about his own affliction.

Another shade of blue had appeared over the sky. Soon he’d go knock at the door, walk in before she could say otherwise. Visit a while. Wait for her head to bob. Then get what he came for. If he couldn’t be with Perry tonight, he could be in her room instead, he could be among her things, he could leave something of himself behind. The thought of it was so real that it was almost like he was in her room already, not standing in the shadows outside an old man’s trailer, looking in at Myra. He felt impatient for it, pushed himself into the light and around to the front of the trailer. Knocked two quick times.

“Come in,” she called. Didn’t even come to the door. Jamey smiled, knew the beer he’d watched her fetch hadn’t been her first of the night.

“Why were you lurking out back?” she asked him once he’d stepped inside. The trailer felt warm and sticky, like it was a body that sweated.

“You must have mistook me for someone else, Miss Tipton,” Jamey said. He put his hands in his pockets so she wouldn’t see the shaking.

“No, it was you,” she said. She held her bottle out to him. “Take this or get yourself a fresh one. If you take this one you got to get me a fresh one, so either way you’ll find yourself in the kitchen.” She laughed. The lights in the trailer making her skin as yellow as beer. Jamey felt a surge of hatred for her, giving into her nasty like that. Just like his own momma.

Another thing he had in common with Perry.

He waved her off. “You finish that one,” he said. “I’ll get me a fresh one and when you’re done I’ll get you a fresh one, too.” He could hear himself starting to talk like her, could hear how he was even running his words together, like he was as drunk as she was. It was something he did when he wanted people to feel comfortable around him, to feel like they were just talking at themselves in a friendly mirror.

“You still didn’t say why you were lurking outside, watching me get messed,” she said to him once he sat down. “You scared of me?”

“A little,” he told her. This was a woman who liked to get flirted with. Her hair had flattened since he’d last seen her at the truck stop, her lipstick was dry, caught in the lines of her lips, but she still expected to hear about herself. He could see where Perry got it from, this sloppy vanity. Only Perry deserved to be vain.