Beth Bauman - Beautiful Girls

“A Russian?” the old man asked.

“Possibly.”

J.D. sat up as if plugged in. His entire head warmed. He glanced at the dinner guests until he realized no one was paying attention to him, and then he closed his book and stared.

“She talks about him constantly. She says he’s nuts about her.”

“Oh, to be a teenager again!” Mrs. Allard said.

“Teenagers can be a pain in the ass though,” Birdy said. The room quieted except for the sound of spoons clinking against bowls.

“Everyone’s a pain in the ass on occasion,” the old man said.

There were murmurs of agreement.

“I’m glad about this Vladimir,” Mrs. Martinelli said. “Dawn just started high school and I worry about her. She’s never had many friends and she’s moody and she’s getting fat, like I should talk.” She eyed the potato on her spoon. “You know how those years can be. It can feel like being on the outside looking in, waiting for something to happen.” She slid the potato into her mouth and held it there.

“It can feel like you’re always waiting for something,” Mr. Allard said.

Mrs. Allard looked at her husband for a quick second and attempted a laugh. J.D. studied the dinner guests so closely he might have been watching a movie. He watched the way the old man nodded his saggy-cheeked head in agreement, the way the bathroom man gazed from one person’s face to the next with his magnified eyes, the way Birdy nibbled on her bread, thinking. They were polite in the way strangers were, yet they seemed to understand each other, too. J.D. felt exhilarated, thinking that Dawn Martinelli had made a boyfriend out of Vladimir, a fiery character from a play on the dusty shelves in their classroom. She told her mother about this pretend boyfriend. She invented stories. He could see there were things Dawn wanted, too—things she didn’t yet have. It was also possible that she liked J.D. He let these thoughts, which weren’t unpleasant but strange and mysterious, scramble around inside his head. Slowly, he began to feel a friendly pity for Dawn Martinelli and the Allards, too, and as he sat there he began to feel a friendly pity for himself.

“Luckily,” Mrs. Allard said, brightly, “we have some time before Annabel and Sophia are ready for boyfriends.”

“ Annabel and Sophia ,” Birdy said. “How grand! Maybe they’re destined for great things.”

Mr. and Mrs. Allard smiled uneasily, and J.D. could tell that they thought Birdy might be making fun of them. He saw it in their eyes. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew the Allards had great hopes for their girls. J.D. also knew Birdy wasn’t making fun of anyone, and he had an urge, like an itch, to straighten it out. He searched the Allards’ faces to see if he’d misread them, but they sat stiffly on their folding chairs, spooning beef stew up to their mouths. The Allards were grown people with sleeping children down the hall. It was disturbing to think he understood something they didn’t.

Then Annabel poked her head into the living room, with her finger to her lips. She gestured for J.D. to come to her. He slipped off the couch and rounded the table of dinner guests, who ignored him, and made his way down the hall to the bathroom, where Annabel sat glumly on the rim of the tub. She had a crust of sleep in her eye.

“I was thinking,” she said. “Maybe next time I could pop out of the closet. I could say ‘I have traveled so far!’ I could wear the goggles and helmet. Wouldn’t that be good?”

J.D. smiled at her. “You could say, ‘Let me tell you about the places I’ve been and the things I’ve seen.’”

“Oh!” she said, thinking of possibilities.

It was clear there was nothing Annabel needed. She just wanted to talk with someone and be up past her bedtime, this little girl in her flannel nightgown.

“Why aren’t you sitting at the table with them?” she asked.

“I’m the babysitter.”

“So you just sit on the couch?”

“Yup.”

She stood on the rim of the tub and raised the window. Cold air blew in. It had started to snow, and the wind swirled the flakes against the darkness. “Tomorrow a cold pocket of air is coming down from Canada and we could get…” She shrugged. “Four feet of snow!”

He stood next to her and looked out the window. She was fibbing. Tomorrow a warm front would move into the area, and it was expected that the temperature would rise for the next few days at least.

IT WAS HARD HAVING A LOUSY PERSONALITY. Robin would rather have been cursed with a weight problem or a bald spot or thick glasses, or better yet a missing finger. Instead she was stuck with her personality, which was a non-personality, a blank sheet of paper she kept trying to write on. Case in point: here it was Friday night, and she was hiding out in some little kid’s bedroom pretending to care for Lila, who was a slut and was passed out on the gingham bedspread with chunks of puke dotted down the front of her shirt, while downstairs a party went on without them.

It was becoming boring, sitting on the bed and staring at Lila, who breathed rhythmically through her slack mouth, putting Robin into a stupor. Robin moved to the corner of the bedroom, where a naked Barbie doll was spread-eagled over the breakfast nook of the beach bungalow. Robin dressed the doll in a fringy cowgirl outfit and was deciding between boots or Jesus sandals when her friend Janet popped into the room, guzzling from a bottle of wine.

“What are you doing ?” Janet said.

“Lila’s sick here.”

“Lila’s a slut,” Janet said. “Why are you hiding? Have you talked to three new people?”

Robin set the Barbie doll on the roof of the beach house, placing the sleek, smiling head up against the Barbie telescope, which was aimed at the lavender wallpaper beyond which were the hedges where Robin had parked her bike an hour earlier. In her mind’s eye, she could see the bike there, awaiting her.

“The thing is—” Robin said.

“What? Speak up!”

“It’s just that parties—”

“Oh, I know what you’re going to say: ‘I don’t like parties.’ But if you don’t like parties then you can’t really like people and if you don’t like people then you’re an antisocial.”

“I like people.”

Janet sighed. She was a junior and a year older than Robin. She had an underbite and would have her jaw broken, realigned, and wired shut one day in the distant future. She was the first and only friend Robin had made when Robin’s family moved here last year. Janet, who worked on the yearbook and school spirit committees, had knocked on her door last summer just days after Robin’s family had moved in and had taken Robin on a walking tour of downtown. “Here’s Friendly’s, where you can get a chocolate Fribble,” she’d said. “Lots of kids hang out here. I mean it’s fine when you’re in eighth grade but when you’re our age it just sucks, bites, and blows. Here’s the movie theater where the floor’s as flat as a pancake. They’ve been showing a lot of love stories, which are my favorites, but if you get a large head in front of you it just sucks, bites, and blows. Here’s Trimmings Salon where, trust me, all you’ll want to do is get a trim. If you’re looking for a new hairdo you’ll have to get your butt on New Jersey Transit and head into the city. God, you have gorgeous hair,” she said, grabbing a handful of Robin’s long, dark hair and holding it up to her own head. “My hair’s decent but some days…” She rolled her eyes up to the True Value Hardware sign, which glared green above them. “Isn’t this place the worst?”

Janet now plunked down on the bed next to Lila and stared hard at Robin for several seconds. “It makes me so unhappy, Robin, that you won’t try to be a more popular person.”