CAN I PET YOUR BACK?
Something happened when I got to high school: I found pretty. I found pretty in my slick of teeth, the metal brackets popped off with pliers, the sticky strips of bleach in my mouth. I found pretty in emerald contact lenses, and the squares of tinfoil that sucked the dark right out of my hair. I found pretty in the tanning salon; Playboy bunny stickers arranged on my hips; that blue scream of light baking my naked body. I found pretty in thick foundations that smeared away my freckles, and in inch-long tubes of Styrofoam secured to my eyes for a lash perm. Pretty in the leather seats of high schoolers’ cars and in the back rows of movie theaters and on MTV; I found pretty on the Internet. I found pretty in a stranger named Lennox Price, queen of Fort Lauderdale, in the way she’d document her life on Myspace, her lonely car rides, her breast augmentation, her fishnet tops, the way she drizzled liquor down the mouths of men in the club scene. I found pretty in the plastic clamshell cases of pills—for regulation, not for sex—that bloomed my chest to a size C. I found pretty in acrylic nails and Abercrombie & Fitch and scratch and sniff G-strings on plastic hangers, pretty when I threw my riding clothes away—the breeches, then the boots—because I had been looking too fat to be a jockey too fat for show jumping too fat for the Olympics too fat too curvy too woman too soft (how many more times can a body betray you?). I found pretty in a homecoming Duchess crown, in the wave of my hand from the convertible car creeping around the football field because I was Most Changed—I was that kind of pretty. I found pretty in boys calling me hot. I found pretty in calling girls hot. I found pretty in calling girls fat. I found pretty in calling girls sluts. Girls. I found pretty when the same boy who once asked, Are you a goat? Can I pet your back? didn’t recognize this new version of me, and asked to jerk off into my eyes. I found pretty in the feeling of a razor nicking the hair off my calves, my arms, my back, my pussy, my stomach, my nipples, my sideburns, my armpits, my big toes, my fingers, my neck, my chin, until my skin buzzed with a smooth purity. I found pretty when I dreamed of being raped under bridges and being raped (while drowned) in a Jacuzzi and being raped in Temple and being raped in the gym locker room because I should feel lucky, I guess, being pretty enough for that. I found pretty in Skylar Fingerhut and her summer nose job and chin job and cheek job and all those oozing bandages, like nebulas on gauze, how she invited me over for the first time, let me lift a straw of chicken broth to her mouth as she healed, saying, Symmetry, that’s the key to all this pretty, and I felt as if I were fanning Cleopatra herself. I found pretty in telling my mom to stay in the car at the pickup line, and in the way neighborhood boys beat her hummingbird mailbox with golf clubs, slowly, so that one wing dangled, then both, then the beak; now, only the body is left. I found pretty in the swirl of my lunch from my mouth into toilet bowls, and in the spots of light I’d see when I’d blink away hunger. I found pretty in clavicles, in the nose ring I’d get while I watched a new friend have a needle shoved through the hood of her cunt. I found pretty in the cast of the Real World and in Carmen Electra, pretty on Chinese New Year, my family dressed in red, picking at the cheeks of a snapper, the way I could shift the food around my plate and go somewhere else behind my eyes and say, I’m not like you, I’m prettier than this. I found pretty in my C grades, then Ds, in new classes with no Honors, in the word expulsion. I found pretty in stupid. I found pretty when my father began referring to me as daughter instead of son when he got a call to move to New York, get out of town. The way he said, You’ll be fine staying here, growing up this way. You’re already such a good woman.
LONG LIVE THE TRIBE OF FATHERLESS GIRLS
Your name is Kinky Chinky, they say to me, these girls, as they drag on their Parliament Lights. Harley and Nelle—all ass and stomach and lip gloss and tongue rings—they don’t belong here at this party, though all of us want them.
This is the first time I’ve been invited, and I came here alone. This is the beginning of a story, a new one. This is me without a father or a mother or a best friend, a boat parade bash in a mansion overlooking the Intracoastal, 2003. I’m a sophomore, fifteen years old, my knees cratered and red from sucking off a boy named Brandon in somebody else’s closet.
Kinky Chinky, it suits you.
Another sophomore named Craig hosts this party every year around Christmas, where the richest kids in our class watch America’s finest yachts split black water like a zipper. Nobody misses Craig’s parties because they have the best drugs and shelves full of blue-colored booze. At least a handful of our class always ends up fucking in a closet, or in Craig’s hot tub, or on the floor of a bedroom, but usually I only hear about it.
Harley and Nelle corner me in the billiard room of Craig’s house. The lights are dim, Ginuwine’s “In Those Jeans” playing from somewhere downstairs. This is where they stand, smoking, staring at my knees.
Brandon Friedman? Really? He’s got the body of a fridge.
Harley Pelletier and Nelle Roman don’t go to our school. They’re childhood friends of Craig’s—their parents have done business with his parents. I knew Harley once before; she went to our middle school for one year before moving south to Davie. She was sweet then, with hair like fondue chocolate down to her waist, light oval eyes—just like Adriana Lima—clear braces that somehow never yellowed. She and I spilled chemicals into the mouths of beakers in our sixth-grade science class. I’ve never met a Chink before, she said to me once, lovingly, holding a scalpel in her gloved hand, a formaldehyde-softened frog between us.
Harley and Nelle don’t look like any other girls at our school, and the boys at this party can tell. Harley has a short, bob haircut now, body of a blade, with nose freckles and a silver tongue stud that glints when she speaks to you. Everybody calls her “Lips,” and she seems embarrassed by the nickname—These fish lips? Gross!—but we can all tell that she knows their DSL appeal. It’s the way she puckers them when she’s thinking, the way she wraps them around a bottle between every sip.
Nelle is more understated. She barely wears makeup—she doesn’t need it—and her tan skin glows as if lit up from the inside. She has deep auburn hair, hips and breasts, a tongue ring with prickly neon strings sprouting out of it like a sea creature. She calls this her Kushy-ball. Better blowies with this, she says. Drives men crazy. Tonight, she wears a neon-green Von Dutch trucker hat, which she turns backward and forward depending on which boy is flirting with her and how much she likes it.
You’re so cute, Nelle tells me. Is your hair really that thick or do you have extensions?
No, she’s really Chinese, says Harley. It was the same in middle school.
You don’t even look that Asian, says Nelle.
You’re actually really pretty, says Harley.
The two of them have a way of picking up each other’s sentences in quick succession.
You look, like, really sad though, says Nelle. Why Brandon? You’re hotter than that.