Beth Bauman - Beautiful Girls

“Slob,” he said, looking into my locker at the mess of books, crumpled papers, candy wrappers and medicated acne pads.

“Want to go to your house?” I brushed the knots out of my hair.

He shook his head. “You toy with me.”

“Ha!” I yelled, but when I turned to him he looked disgusted and far away. You toy with me . The words were strange and flat in the air above us. “That’s a rotten thing to say,” I finally said. “Are you mad at me?”

He shook his head and slid down the locker to the floor, rubbing his temples. I stared at his big feet. “I used to wait, thinking you’d want to be my girlfriend again, but you don’t and now I don’t want you to be—so what are we doing here?” He placed his hands out in front of him, and I looked at the space between them, a space I could slide right into if I wanted to. His hands fell to his lap, and I squatted down next to him and thought about touching him.

“So, okay, we’re not going to be boyfriend and girlfriend,” I said quietly.

“We’re just going to be friends.” We sat in the hallway as other kids filtered by, their voices echoing down the hall. In the silence, Ben was telling me we wouldn’t get naked anymore, we wouldn’t talk on the phone at midnight, we wouldn’t hang out at his house, we wouldn’t hang out together with Connie. He was also telling me about Pamela Zlotkin. He was telling me many things I didn’t want to hear.

It’d been raining for days, and the wintry sky hung low over the town. I rode my bike down Main Street, empty and slick with puddles, and stared at the posters of five smiling girls in the store windows. There we were—me, Inggy, Pamela Zlotkin and two other girls—Miss Merry Christmas nominees—displayed next to shoes, pizza pies, postage stamps and interest rates, waiting for the town to crown a winner. I parked under a street lamp and stared and stared, secretly feeling the thrill of good luck and good genes. It was a decent picture of me, not like I must have looked now—a girl in the rain with her hair plastered to her head.

Even though it embarrassed me to admit it, I really really wanted to win. I wanted to see what winning might do for me. But I knew Inggy would win; she seemed destined. At the moment the school photographer had snapped her picture, the wind swept a long strand of white hair clear over her head and she hollered with glee. I remembered thinking this was what Daisy Miller must have looked like before the malaria. Inggy was the most beautiful girl on the poster, although there was more to it than that. On that windy November day she was there in her photo, fully herself.

I let myself in the side door where Connie stood at the stove making a big pot of chicken soup. “Hey, you,” she said. “Rice or egg noodles?”

“Rice.” Ben and Pamela Zlotkin had gone to the movies. The news spread fast today, reaching my ears in Advanced Biology as I classified algae under the microscope.

Connie threw me a dish towel, and I patted my wet head.

“I think Ben really likes this Pam Zlotkin girl,” I said. I thought I wanted to talk about this, to hear words instead of my own rattling thoughts.

Connie smiled. “You okay, Dani?”

“Sure,” I lied. Something felt lost, something I didn’t think I wanted. Connie put a bowl of soup in front of me and handed me a spoon. I felt flushed and confused, the heat of soup and memories welling up inside of me. “Do you think I broke his heart, Connie?” Lately I’d been counting my favorite people: Inggy, Ben, Connie. I would say their names to myself, carrying them with me like essential items in my pocketbook—lip gloss, money, keys. I hoped I hadn’t broken him, yet part of me hoped I had.

Connie skimmed the fat off the top of the pot, dropping the grease into a measuring cup. She smiled into the soup. “You two will always be friends, don’t you think?”

I nodded weakly, but I wanted to know about the state of his heart. I wanted to know about the state of mine. “If Pam Zlotkin becomes his girlfriend, how will I ever come over here?” I asked.

“You better come over, Dani.” I’d once run mayonnaise through Connie’s hair to give it some shine and she wound up with greasy hair for a week, but she was so cool about it. She wrapped a bandanna around her head and that was that. I couldn’t imagine not having her as my friend, not spending time in this house. Sometimes on a Saturday night Ben and I would pull out the sleeping bags and watch late movies. We’d fool around and fall asleep with popcorn still in our teeth. When we woke up, Connie would make French toast, and wrapped in sweaters we’d eat on the porch with the morning light washing over us.

I wondered how much Connie knew about me and Ben, though her knowing everything might have changed things between us. I wanted to tell her this: As my friend, Ben had a life and there were other things in his line of vision. But as his girlfriend, his life shrunk and I was the only thing playing on his screen. Seeing Ben at the end of the day waiting by my locker became as ordinary and predictable as rolling out of bed in the morning. I just thought I wanted more . I didn’t know what, but was pretty sure I’d know if I found it, or if it found me.

Connie came up behind me and kissed me lightly on top of my wet head.

I snuggled with Daffodil on the couch in the den while Mom and Franz fought in the living room. They’d been having spats all week, and they’d stopped smiling at each other and started rolling their eyes when they thought the other wasn’t looking. “Trouble,” Dorrie said, from the other end of the couch, where she chewed on a strand of hair.

Daffodil wore a sequined purple bodysuit, and her dark, shiny hair was pulled into a ponytail. Violet eye shadow sparkled above her long lashes. “What’s this?” I said, wiping her face clean with the bottom of my T-shirt.

“Get off,” she yelled.

“You want to turn into a slut?”

“No,” she yelled.

“Then clean up your act.”

She already had boys calling the house, but it wasn’t anything really. She’d say, “You’re a faggot.” Then he’d say, “No, you are.” “No, you.” “You.” “You.”—like that until one of them would get tired and say, “See you tomorrow.” Now she rubbed up against me. She wanted to be me; she would tell me this. “You’re going to be Miss Merry Christmas,” she whispered.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“You’re the prettiest,” she said. Her teeth were tiny and white, her eyes all dark pupils. Her head lay in the crook of my arm, and she motioned for me to bring my ear close. I leaned down and she told me how she and some of her older friends, girls in the fourth and fifth grades, had gone to every store on Main Street and voted for me, filling out a white slip and dropping it into the box beneath our pictures. “I disguised my handwriting,” she whispered. “Don’t worry.”

After my sisters and I had pigged out on pot roast and gravy, I started wondering if Ben might call me. I lay on the couch, shaving my legs and dipping the razor into a Dixie cup filled with soapy, hairy water. Dorrie and Daffodil lay on their backs on the carpet, painting their fingernails red. After a bitter fight, Mom and Franz were out to dinner. The phone was silent.

Inggy walked through the front door. “Hey, Dan,” she yelled, coming into the den and spreading college catalogs all around the coffee table. We had to start thinking of these things, she told me. Look at this, check this out—she spoke a mile a minute. “This one has environmental science.” There was a picture of a weenie kid standing in a sludgy bog, holding a beaker. “What kind of science do you like best?” she asked me. I shrugged, dropping the razor into the Dixie cup.