And then he says: Are you turned on?
He asks her questions like this, and she has to answer yes even if she feels stupid saying it, because if she doesn’t he will stop with the experimenting.
BECAUSE HOLLY is the smart girl who works after school (Shelly is the cute girl who works after school), her bosses have trained her well and given her important responsibilities. She is asked to count pills, balance the register at the end of the night, and look up prescription histories on the computer. She can search by name or address or type of medication, so one day she did a search for the pill and now she knows everyone who is on the pill in her high school. There were surprises. She told her girlfriends some of their names, and now they all giggle and feel superior when they see them at lunch. But also she thinks: Why are they having sex and not me? None of her girlfriends are on the pill. Neither is Holly. Shelly is on the pill, but she says she takes it just to help her cramps and Holly believes her, because Shelly is always sad because she doesn’t have a boyfriend.
Shelly runs the lottery machine and video rentals. If someone returns a video late, she pockets the fee and buys scratch-off lottery tickets with it. She splits them with Holly, and the two of them play them at the end of the night when the store is mostly empty. Once Holly won fifty dollars and they both went to Taco Bell after work and got nine million steak tacos and ate them till they wanted to puke.
Holly loves her pharmacy life. She even thought about going to pharmacy school. She’s awesome at math and science and it seems like such a relaxed job. But when she told her father about it he said, “Really?” in such a dry, bored tone that she dropped it. Her father is a famous writer and doesn’t understand anymore what it’s like to be not famous. And even though in her mother’s house he is Enemy Number One, Holly would hate for him to find her boring, so she drops the pharmacy dream and thinks pre-med instead.
Sometimes she sees her father on the news or on a talk show, discussing a new book or being an expert on something, and he looks so handsome and confident that she can almost forget he is probably covered in makeup at that moment.
CHRISTIAN HAS NEVER even heard of her father.
SHELLY IS DONE. “Perfecto!” she says. She backs out of the bathroom to give Holly more mirror space. Holly leans in, knocks a box of Kleenex into the sink. They’re on special this week. She leaves it there. Instead she focuses deeply on the glowing lavender triangles that lie nestled in a base of delicate pink eyelids. I look like I should be going to a party where a band is playing, she thinks. I look dreamy, yet glamorous. I look so fucking hot.
And then Shelly leans in next to her, and Holly sees how they match in the mirror. And how the pink and purple complement Shelly’s naturally honeycomb-tan skin, and how the gray in her eyes makes it all look a little risky even, but it totally works. Those eyes take her into the future.
Holly will see girls like her years later when she has finally moved to New York, when she and her friends from college will dress themselves up in revealing shirts and travel downtown on Friday nights to edgy bars in edgy neighborhoods in search of edgy men to take them home. The girl will be behind the bar. Her eye makeup will be perfect, and she will be wearing a halter top that Holly could only imagine owning, and when she asks the bartender where she got it, she will say, “My friend’s a designer. He made it for me. Isn’t it great?”
And Holly will want to be her, just as she wants to be Shelly now, because as soon as she has seen Shelly in the mirror, she realizes that she does not look hot. The colors are all wrong for Holly; on her eyes they’re garish, and they make her skin look sallow. On Holly’s eyes, the triangles don’t look mystical or Middle Eastern; they look like children’s blocks. She’s not spiritual or ethereal; she’s a girl who is wearing too much makeup.
Some girls are made for makeup, some aren’t.
She can’t take it off, of course. She can’t insult sweet, scarred Shelly. Plus Holly was thinking of having her come over to her house sometime and make her up some more. Shelly would lean over her, breath close, in her upstairs bathroom or maybe her bedroom. They could have a sleepover or something when her mom is out of town.
Holly is stuck with this clown makeup for the rest of the night.