Beth Bauman - Beautiful Girls

Robin reached for Janet’s bottle and sipped long and hard. The wine tasted like rotten fruit—overly sweet and funky—and thinking this made her start to gag and she handed back the bottle.

“Listen, I hate to be boring,” Janet said in a low voice, “but there are some things you obviously don’t know.” She looked up to the ceiling, as if thinking, and from where Robin was sitting on the floor Janet’s underbite looked really, really bad. “We live in a highly structurized society,” Janet began. “Friends don’t grow on trees. You can’t go pluck one. You have to make friends. If you just set a little goal to talk to three new people tonight that could be three more friends for you. Don’t you see? It’s not enough to be pretty and just stare into space. You have to act the right way. I’ve had to work at developing my excellent personality.” Janet slid onto the floor next to Robin, her boobs jiggling into place. “Take Lila here,” she whispered, pointing up to the bed. “If she fooled around like a normal person she’d be fine. But no, she’s so obvious that everyone knows her business and so she’s just a slut. Bor -ing. I mean, who wants to be her friend? Well, I’m her friend, but you know what I mean. I’m going to be honest because I care about you, Robin; the thing is that sometimes you can be embarrassing…I haven’t hurt your feelings, have I?” She looked at Robin deeply. Janet had enormous eyes fringed with sparse, stubby lashes; they were the eyes of a strange, graceful sea creature gliding peaceably over coral reefs.

Robin quickly shook her head. In Janet’s presence, she often felt slow and clumsy as the sparky shower of Janet’s words rained down on her. Now she found herself jittery with gratitude and rage. “I can talk to three people.”

“See,” Janet said. “Really, I’m just trying to help.”

“Thank you, Janet.”

Janet nodded. Then she stood and frowned at Lila and wandered toward the door. “Coming?” she asked.

“Yep,” Robin said, unable to move.

“Good,” Janet said, disappearing into the hallway.

Go, Robin told herself. Go now , she commanded, otherwise she might be afflicted with her lousy personality for the rest of her life. She stared at Lila, who was snoring into the kid’s pillow. Yes, Lila was a little sloppy and slutty but she also had a zesty life. Be a normal girl , she commanded herself. Growing angrier, she loped down the hall and down the stairs until she found herself in the middle of the party surrounded by a roomful of lively kids, holding beer cans and waving cigarettes and talking, talking, talking. Robin’s anger instantly fled her body, and she felt deserted, standing there with a dried-out mouth and a twitchy eye. Directly in front of her was a loveseat. She made a beeline for it but two senior girls beat her to it, and she teetered for a second. A wall, a wall; she needed a wall. She quickly moved to the corner of the room, where she sat on the arm of a couch and let her hair fall over her face like a dark curtain. Then she waited for what might happen.

“Are you sleeping?” a guy sitting on the couch asked, giving her a poke.

“Nope,” Robin said, opening her eyes.

“Just checking.”

Robin smiled, feeling herself blush and grow warm. The guy turned back to the girl beside him, cocking his head and grinning as she twirled a strand of hair around her finger. They were having a conversation in which they said things like, “I did not,” “Yes, you did,” “When?” “Come on, you know.” They kept at it for the longest time and Robin wondered how these bits of nothing, like dust, kept the two of them tied up with each other for so long. Soon they wandered away, and Robin realized that if she just sat here, in the corner, on the arm of the couch, she’d be all right.

A girl across the room who had been furiously whispering with two other girls veered toward Robin’s couch and plunked down. She looked like a fly. She had short black hair that hugged her head like a helmet and heavy eyelids, and Robin had often seen her zipping down the halls at school. She now turned to Robin and said in a low voice, “Would you be friends with someone who called you an asshole for no reason?”

“I definitely wouldn’t,” Robin said, elated. She slid off the arm of the couch to sit beside the girl.

“Well, I wouldn’t either…but I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Who called you an asshole for no reason?” Robin whispered into the girl’s ear, which wasn’t very clean.

“It’s very discouraging,” the fly went on, “when you’re the type of person who goes out of your way to do nice things for your friends and you learn that one of them doesn’t even give two little shits about your feelings. I call that very discouraging.”

It sounded very discouraging. Maybe she and this fly could be friends, Robin thought. “I bet it was the redhead,” Robin whispered. “She looks like a creep.”

The fly turned to her head-on. “Not her . The other one.”

“Oh,” Robin said.

“It’s very discouraging to hear you call my very best friend creepy.” The girl gave her a fishy look, popped off the couch and returned to her little circle.

Robin sat there, trying not to stare at anyone and hoping no one was staring at her. Then George from her geometry class joined her on the couch, tapping his foot to Nirvana. He had the bluest eyes, so blue you couldn’t help but think he was a nice person, even if he was stoned most of the time. “Robin!” he said and smiled. She smiled back. He held out his hand, fingers splayed, and for a panicky second she didn’t know what he wanted her to do. He didn’t seem to be looking for a high five. Did he want to shake, or what? He was stoned, she could see that. He had a rubber band around his wrist. She had the urge to flick it. A little flick. She would’ve liked to do that, but somehow couldn’t. He took back his hand and looked at her funny, and then he was tapping his foot again, and the moment was gone. George bounded off the couch and disappeared into the room.

Well, Robin thought, that was three, sort of: the guy who asked her if she was sleeping, the fly, and George from geometry. She headed downstairs where it was darker, louder, and more crowded and stood next to Janet, who was talking to Nolan Fry. Nolan Fry was the prettiest person in the entire school. He had smooth pink skin, a flop of dirty blond hair hanging over his forehead, and he was very tall. Every feature—his thin nose, full lips, heavy eyelashes—was perfect in and of itself, but, as Janet had often said, all together on the same face was almost a crime. It was hard, Robin decided, to look at him head on. Worse yet, he knew how to be pretty. He wore his prettiness like a smart jacket. Janet was staring up at him as if in a trance; her eyes had gone soft and she wore the faintest smile while Nolan talked to the air above her head. Neither one of them looked at Robin, but when she reached for the wine bottle Janet released her grip. Robin gulped and when she handed it back, Janet’s fingers expertly closed around the bottle. Robin wished she knew how to be pretty the way Nolan did. She’d only recently become pretty and often needed to look in the bathroom mirror to be reminded. She slipped through the sliding doors into the cold air, where she got on her bike and raced home.

They had a drug problem at school. Lots of kids smoked pot, but it seemed they also had some sniffers who inhaled stuff like Drano and paint thinner. The school now held weekly seminars in the auditorium ever since one jerky sophomore had suffered some brain damage. Everyone plodded into the auditorium, weary and dead-eyed. Janet waved to Robin and pointed to the seat she’d saved her.