Pretty Is Page 8

  I hadn’t yet told my parents that I was giving up spelling. Not so much giving it up as cutting it loose. It was no longer going to be a part of who I was. I couldn’t have explained my decision without at least alluding to Zed, who had taught me to see the spelling bees as an empty display of a meaningless skill. I knew they wouldn’t want to hear that, and I felt no real need to make them understand.

  My mother gave me a brittle Miranda-hug: our boniest protrusions glanced off each other. A strand of my hair caught on one of her rings and snapped. She was wearing a sharp navy-and-white linen dress and looked perfectly at home in this environment. These impeccably green sloping lawns, the tasteful flowerbeds, the subdued tones of the other parents—this was her world, the preppy New England world to which she had been born. She bent down and brushed cool, dry lips across my forehead, rested a steadying hand momentarily on my shoulder. For the first time I noticed the delicate lines etched at the corners of her eyes. I did not think they had been there in the spring.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said, almost brusquely, and I knew she was right.

  * * *

  I had finished unpacking by the time my roommate arrived. This pleased me: I had already established my presence in the room, claimed my space. I was sitting on my bed reading when she entered. She was very tall, very blond. She dropped her suitcase as soon as she saw me and held out her hand, a gesture that struck me as very adult but somehow not forced or ridiculous. “I’m Jessica,” she said, smiling. “I’m so glad to meet you.” I put my book down and returned her greeting, relieved that she seemed pleasant without being effusive. “You look familiar,” she said a while later, as she arranged her clothes neatly in dresser drawers. “It’s funny. Like I’ve seen you just recently. Were you at the Vineyard this summer?” Even as she said it, though, she furrowed her smooth brow doubtfully; she knew that wasn’t the answer.

  I was prepared for this moment and glad that it had wasted no time before presenting itself. “No,” I said slowly, as if hesitating to speak too frankly. “I guess you might recognize me from…” I allowed a shadow of pain to cross my face. “Well, it doesn’t matter, really,” I said brightly, jumping up from the bed. “Let’s not talk about that. Are you hungry? Do you want to go get something to eat?” I saw her curiosity intensify, but her manners prevented her from pressing me. Every now and then I caught her inspecting me, though, trying to place me.

  It mustn’t have taken her long to figure it out. By the next day it was widely known that I was Lois, the abducted girl. But as I had neither broadcast this fact nor flat-out denied it, it was not held against me; some unfamiliar instinct had told me that this would be the case. I acquired a certain easy celebrity without putting myself forward. Had I stayed at home, it would have been different: I couldn’t have controlled how people saw the story; history would have dragged me down. But here, among strangers, was a sort of frame within which I was free to construct a Lois I could enjoy being: a Lois who was clever, bookish, quick with words; a Lois who was not shy or awkward, just a little mysterious. A Lois who knew something of life: something dark, something that demanded respect.

  A Lois who had something you didn’t. A Lois you did not mess with.

  Chloe

  God knows what would have happened if I’d stayed in Nebraska. I could be divorced by now, with a couple of kids who spent weekends with their useless father while I sat at home on my widening ass watching crappy TV and drinking cheap wine from a box. I could be the hottest mom in Arrow, putting on lipstick and heels to pick my brats up from school. Those are the happy endings. I could also be in prison. I could be dead. You think that’s melodramatic? Here are some ways I could have died: I could have been killed in a car crash with some drunken asshole at the wheel. Killed in a snowmobile accident, ditto. Dead of a drug overdose in somebody’s skanky trailer. Dead of anorexia, trying too hard to disappear. I knew kids who died in all of these ways. It could just as easily have been me; I was as stupid and reckless as anybody. Anybody who thinks small-town America is a safe, sheltered place to grow up hasn’t spent much time there.

  By the time I was a sophomore in high school—the same year I was crowned Miss Nebraska Teen—nobody mentioned the abduction anymore. Kidnapping. Whatever. Which doesn’t mean they didn’t think about it; there just didn’t seem to be anything else to say. I hardly ever brought it up unless I needed Gail to feel bad. (The fact that she’d been having her eyebrows waxed when I rode off with a stranger hadn’t played very well in the press, as you can imagine, though it was actually one of the few things I didn’t blame her for.) But even if it was buried as far as everyone else was concerned, it was never very far from my mind.

  Daddy was always out on the farm; it seemed like he came in later and later all the time. I didn’t blame him. The house had gradually been taken over by Gail and her kids, and by then they practically had full control. It was their world—not mine, not Daddy’s. She’d had two boys pretty much one after the other, bam bam, after Daddy married her. My half brothers, technically. But from the start I didn’t feel any real connection to them. They looked nothing like me, nothing like Daddy. The first one, Braden, was a boy version of Gail, a pale lumpy little thing. Jaden was different—taller, dark-haired, even handsome—but if he didn’t look like a little boy-Gail, he sure as hell didn’t look like my father, either. Which, after the Miss Nebraska Teen pageant, I had a definite theory about, as you might imagine. Still, if my half brothers had just left me alone, it would have been okay. I would have been happy to pretend they didn’t exist. Stupidly, they made this impossible.

  They tormented me, for one thing.

  Which is no fucking excuse for maiming anyone, obviously, though that’s what damn near happened. And although it could have ruined everything, my outburst of violence actually got me one step closer to gone. Maybe I should have suffered more; it’s easy to feel guilty, looking back. If I’m completely honest, I have to admit that I even felt guilty at the time. And scared as hell; it was terrifying, frankly, to realize what I was capable of.

  It happened one weekend morning when the boys and I were alone in the house. I was locked in my tiny bedroom as usual. We lived in an old farmhouse, with small, odd-shaped rooms, slanting ceilings, and narrow hallways. No right angles. It always felt crowded, like the walls were closing in. I was scribbling in the diary I’d kept since my return from the cabin when one of them started pounding on my door. “Carly May, look, Carly May, you have to see!” It was Jaden, yelling.

  I jumped up from my bed and flung my door open, half hoping he would fall through it. Usually I made them wait longer. I had no interest in whatever he wanted to show me. I just wanted to scare him away.

  Jaden, with a dirt-smeared face, had balanced one of my tiaras on his head, a stupid grin stretching his mouth wide. He would have been about seven then, I guess.

  “Take that off, you little shit,” I said. “You look like a retard.”

  “We’re not supposed to say retard, retard.”

  “Take it off, or I’ll kick your skinny little ass. Gail isn’t home to stop me. You know I’ll do it.” This is how I spoke to them. Nice, isn’t it? I’m not defending myself. Anyway, I was half-serious and genuinely pissed off. Like I said, I would have been glad to ignore them completely, if only they had been willing to cooperate. But I really hated it when they messed with my stuff. “One last chance,” I warned Jaden. “Take it off, or I’m gonna smack you into next week.”

  He knew I meant it; it wouldn’t have been the first time. But he was a fearless little bastard. “You’ll have to catch me, snot-breath,” he said, and then he turned and ran, my tiara crooked on his head. He looked totally demented.

  I took off down the brown-carpeted hallway after him, whipped around the corner, and flew down the creaking stairs while he laughed like a little maniac. I caught him at the bottom. I had just gathered his overgrown hair into a pullable rope when I heard Braden call from the top of the stairs.

&nb
sp; “Hey, Carly May,” he said. “Look.” He held my diary up for me to see. “You sneaky little bastard,” I said, giving Jaden’s hair a hard yank. I grabbed the tiara and looked up at Braden. “Give me that book,” I hissed, “or I’m gonna poke your brother’s eye out.” I brought the tiara close to Jaden’s face, aiming one of the pointy ends at his left eye. He stopped laughing, and I saw fear register on his face. I actually saw it; one minute it wasn’t there, and then it was, changing the color of his eyes and the texture of his skin and the rhythm of his little-boy breath. Later I would think back to that expression when I was acting and had to do fear—I used it as sort of an emotional shortcut, a way to access a feeling I didn’t really understand very well. But in the moment what got me most was how easy it had been to reduce my little brother to a shivering puddle of dread. He really thinks I’ll do it, I thought, sort of amazed. For a second I felt like the biggest asshole in the world. I almost let him go—and then Braden started reading from the top of the stairs. “Sometimes I feel like he’s standing in the doorway watching me sleep. Sometimes I pretend he is. I can’t believe I’m even writing this down.” He read haltingly—reading wasn’t exactly his strong point. The clumsy sentences seemed to burn themselves into my mind, and without even knowing it I jerked the tiara closer to Jaden’s eye. I would like to believe that I miscalculated. But there was no thought involved. I saw myself jab the thing in his eye. He screamed. I let go of him and took off after Braden.

  Now if you actually try to picture this, you have to admit that it’s partly comical. If it was in a movie, you would want to laugh, even if you were trying to tell yourself it really wasn’t funny. I was using a tiara as a weapon. But Jaden howled for Daddy, who happened to be coming in from the barn. He showed up just as I caught up with Braden—I was wrestling him to the floor while he kicked me in the knees, the shins, wherever his thick little legs could reach. I’d managed to grab the diary out of his hand, and I punched him in the stomach with it as he went down.

  That’s what Daddy saw, that and then Jaden’s red, swollen eye. He didn’t think it was funny at all.

  I felt awful, of course. I felt awful when I saw the disappointment in Daddy’s face, and I felt awful when I saw little Jaden’s angry, temporarily sightless eye. At the same time I was sort of relieved to notice that I felt awful, since it seemed to prove that I was not an absolutely heartless person, which I did occasionally worry about. I fully agreed that I should be punished, though I felt strangely removed from the endless conversations about what should be done with me. I felt more curious than afraid. What could they do to me, after all?

  Gail was all for sending me away to some kind of home for problem children. This seemed like an awfully risky proposal to make, given my hold over her. God, she must really hate me, I remember thinking. “No more road trips, no more nice hotels and room service?” I said nastily. I saw her face flush as her eyes shot sideways to see if Daddy had picked up on anything. He hadn’t.

  “I’m sure we could work something out,” she said, because of course she had never intended to give up her stake in me. She was fine with the idea of picking me up from some juvie home, my fellow delinquents waving good-bye-for-the-weekend as I got into the car with my gowns slung over my arm.

  Ha.

  “Don’t forget what she’s been through,” Daddy said, though he didn’t say—no one ever did—what that was, exactly.

  “She can’t use that as an excuse forever.” Gail squirted a big blob of ketchup into the meatloaf she was mixing. I could tell from her voice that she would give in—she had no choice, really. I did an obnoxious pirouette and then struck a graceful pose. I studied the long dark hairs on Gail’s stirring arm, wondering why she didn’t bleach them. It seemed like the kind of thing she would do.

  “She isn’t,” Daddy said. “I am.” He used his firmest voice, the one even Gail gave in to. He folded his newspaper, set it aside, and settled his fists on the table, knuckles touching, giving the question of my fate his full attention.

  Daddy suggested, of course, that it was the pageants that should go. There was a logic to this, I had to agree. I would have fought it, but I also would have accepted it. The whole lipstick-and-lace scene had gotten pretty old, and there were other ways to get where I wanted to go. Gail, however, would have none of it. She said pageants were the most positive thing in my life, what kept me grounded, gave me self-esteem. I watched her curiously while she spewed this crap. Then, against his better judgment, Daddy talked himself into believing her. I watched that too, my faith in him fading fast; I was disappointed but hardly surprised. The most interesting question, as far as I was concerned, was this: how the hell were they going to get me away from the boys?

  In the end they decided I would go and live with Grandma Mabel for a while. Daddy’s mother. She had moved into a small house in town when Grandpa Luke died, and she’d been there on her own ever since. We didn’t visit Grandma Mabel much. She came to the farm for dinner every couple of weeks, but her house was too small and tidy, I guess, for all of us to invade. Or, I don’t know, maybe she just wasn’t Gail’s biggest fan. I liked it at Grandma Mabel’s. It was orderly and calm, a place where you could think straight. It smelled a little like old people, true, and Grandma Mabel watched horrible stuff on TV. But: no farm, no little brothers, no Gail. Getting off the farm would be the first step. From there I would find a way to get out of Nebraska.

  Of course I’d be leaving Daddy, too. I would like to say that part of what I felt was sad; it would make me sound like a better person. Maybe I was sad; maybe I’ve just forgotten. What I remember, though, is that I was ecstatic. I sulked for all I was worth so they wouldn’t catch on.

  Lois

  I can’t get out of bed. I clutch my snowy white comforter beneath my chin. Under the covers, I lock one hand around my phone. My curtains are closed, but they don’t altogether block the light; I am well aware that it is daytime. Spring sun, cold and bare, streaks my walls.

  It’s Friday. I don’t teach today, and I have no meetings scheduled. No one will know if I get up or not.

  I have lain here for an hour or more. My agent woke me, calling from New York with news: that the major parts in the movie adaptation of Deep in the Woods had finally been cast. She told me the names. I have been curious, but I have tried to divorce myself from that project as much as possible, to protect myself from disappointment—and self-reproach; I sold my right to care about the movie long ago. (The film, my agent, Erin, calls it loftily.) If Hollywood makes a mess of the story—which happens more often than not, I would venture to guess, at least from the author’s point of view—it would be hypocritical of me to complain. My pretty antique sleigh bed, my expensive silk nightgown, my zillion-thread-count sheets, the lovely espresso maker that awaits me in my cold kitchen—all of these pleasant luxuries serve as reminders that I received a tidy little check in exchange for signing away any say whatsoever in the making of the movie.

  What I had learned is that most books that are optioned never become movies; someone buys the rights and then sits on them forever. Before the novel’s success, I had half convinced myself that the fate of Deep in the Woods would be no different—or that even if it was, I might somehow preserve my comfortable cocoon of anonymity, appearing to the world as Lucy Ledger only when it suited me, and keeping Lois Lonsdale safely out of the public eye. Once I revealed my history to my editor, I realized that this would be far trickier than I had imagined, and when I heard that a movie was actually going forward—and quickly—I suffered my first serious qualm. It finally occurred to me that I might end up seeing some wretchedly botched version of my childhood trauma on the screen, and that this might be—well—a little disturbing, to say the least; and that I had no one to blame but myself.

  If I had reason to fear—if the early reviews were bad, for instance—I simply wouldn’t go to see it, I told myself: if it even got a screen run, if it played anywhere within a hundred miles, if it stayed in theaters for mor
e than a week, if any of this happened before I was old and stooped and gray.

  And if it was a success? If success led to exposure? A secret almost-hope had glimmered into being, unexamined, barely acknowledged: if success led to exposure, maybe it would lead me back to Carly May, wherever she was, whoever she had become.

  In the meantime, my discovery of Chloe Savage had explained why Google searches produced no traces of Carly May Smith’s existence past the year 2000.

  And now this.

  A shaft of sunlight hits my slightly angled full-length mirror and reflects sharply across the room, falling on my face. With it comes a flash of realization: she has to know.

  Chloe Savage has read the script. She will have recognized the story. She knows that no one else could have written it. She has sought out the novel from which the screenplay is adapted. Her expensively manicured hands have turned each page. They would have been shaking. With anger? Or simply with emotion? She would have been on the alert for misrepresentation, dissimulation, all forms of narrative misdirection or injustice. She would have found them. She would have tried to enter my mind, to imagine what I had been thinking—just as I am now trying to enter her mind. We are trapped in a telepathic loop: but without him, we’re doomed, I think. He who could read our minds, who could lay them bare to us and to each other.

  She took the part.

  This is what finally gets me out of bed.

  I stumble down the chilly hall and into the kitchen, wrapped tightly in my heavy robe, stiff from oversleep. I am making cappuccino when my phone rings again. I’m tempted not to answer it; my life is already complicated enough, and I don’t want to dilute Carly May’s influence with other voices.

  But I do answer my phone, after all, because suddenly I wonder if I have become a bit unbalanced, and refusing to answer the phone strikes me as supporting that possibility. I do want to be sane. “Hello?” I say it with a bit of impatience, in my most businesslike voice—as if I am very, very busy; not at all as if I have slept until practically noon.