A shiny pink and black vanity stood against one wall. Its round mirror bordered with layer upon layer of snapshots: Gretchen in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin that time she had mono, Gretchen and Glee at the beach looking hot in their neon green and black bikinis, Margaret catching air on the hydroslide, the four of them posed for a photo at the ninth-grade semiformal, Gretchen and Abby with their cornrows in Jamaica.
Abby’s bed was a high, soft nest, held together on three sides by curly white metal railings that rattled whenever she got in. It was piled deep with comforters and blankets, six huge pink pillows, and a mound of her old stuffed animals: Geoffrey the Giraffe, Cabbage Head, Wrinkles the Pound Puppy, Hugga Bear, Sparks, and Fluffy the Fluppy Puppy. She knew it was childish, but what was she going to do? She couldn’t stand to see the hurt in their beady plastic eyes if she put them in the trash.
Everything in this room had been paid for by Abby, or bought by Abby, or hung by Abby, or painted by Abby, and it was the one place where she felt as comfortable as she did at Gretchen’s. She dropped Duran Duran’s Arena into her stereo and cranked up the volume. Gretchen had given it to her for her birthday three years ago, and it always made her feel like summer in the car with the windows down. She crept down the hall, blasted away the crud with a boiling hot shower, wrapped a towel around herself, and then retreated back to her room. It was getting close to 1 p.m, which meant it was time to put on her face and go to work.
Back in seventh grade, Abby had woken up one day with a huge blast of zits across her cheeks, forehead, and chin. They were moving out of Creekside at the time and she was so upset and nervous about every single thing in her life that she’d started picking at them. Within a week her face was a mass of oozing scabs and angry, infected craters. She’d begged her parents to let her go to the dermatologist, like Gretchen did, but only got a chorus of her mother’s favorite number-one hit single, “We Can’t Afford It.”
Can we have a dog? “We Can’t Afford It.”
Can I get biology tutoring? “We Can’t Afford It.”
What about summer school, so I can graduate early? “We Can’t Afford It.”
Can I go on the Greece trip with Mrs. Trumbo’s art class? “We Can’t Afford It.”
Can I go to a doctor so my face doesn’t look like scab pizza? “We Can’t Afford It.”
Abby had tried Seabreeze, Noxzema, and St. Ives mud masks. Everything advertised in Seventeen, everything she saw in YM. There was even one misguided moment when she’d rubbed mayonnaise into her chin and forehead in a fight-fire-with-fire approach she’d read about in Teen. The results weren’t pretty. No matter what she did, the zits got bigger. It had taken just five days for them to appear, but nothing she did made them go away.
Then she stopped touching her face, and cut out Coke and chocolate, and maybe changing hormones helped, too, because after three months of humiliation her face started to clear up. Not entirely, but at least it was a cease-fire. But the war left her skin ravaged with scars. There were deep ones on her cheeks, shallow wide ones in the middle of her forehead, enormous black holes jabbed into her nose, and deep red marks outlining her chin.
“You can only see them when the light hits at a certain angle,”
Gretchen reassured her, but it was too late. Abby was heartbroken because she had ruined her face and never even gone out with a boy.
She stayed in her room for an entire weekend that summer; then on
Monday, Gretchen took her to the Book Bag on Coleman Boule-vard and they went through all the beauty magazines, and finally Gretchen shoplifted a makeup book. Back home, they studied it more closely than they’d ever studied anything at school, made a list, and drove to Kerrisons, where Gretchen bought her eighty-five dollars’ worth of makeup. It took Abby a couple weeks of experimenting, but by Labor Day she had a face she could live with.
Sometimes a clueless dork would ask why she looked like a clown, and in bright sunlight she could be confused for a Miss America contestant in full stage makeup, but Abby diverted the attention by being cheerful all the time. When there was a joke to be made, she made it. When there was something nice to do, she did it. And by eighth grade, when people started reinventing their looks in preparation for high school, everyone just accepted that this was the way Abby looked.
The downside was that it took her a solid half hour in the morning to sponge, powder, and poke her face into submission. She had to put down a base layer of foundation, then blend, and smooth, and powder, and draw on her eyebrows and do her lips and do her blush for color, and get everything perfectly in balance so that she didn’t look like Tammy Faye Bakker. But as long as she woke up early enough, it was actually kind of relaxing to watch her acne scars disappear underneath her real face as she got prettier and prettier, section by section.
Her shift started in twenty minutes, so she finished her makeup, sprayed her bangs up high, put on her green and white uniform, pulled her ponytail through the back of her baseball cap, resprayed her bangs, and got everything situated.
She drove to the strip mall on Coleman, and for the next six hours Abby stood in the cold glass cube of TCBY, marinating in the sour vanilla stink of frozen yogurt. It didn’t bother her. Every hour she spent chilling in this giant freezer was another four dollars in her bank account.
It was a pretty uneventful shift until around four thirty, when the telephone rang.
“TCBY, how may I help you?” Abby said.
“Blood,” Gretchen said. “Everything’s covered in blood.”
It’s the End of the World as
We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
Abby turned her back to the line of customers and dropped her voice. She heard sloshing in the background. “Where are you?” she asked.
“I took a bath,” Gretchen said. “And I decided to shave my legs but the water turned bright red and I don’t know if it’s my blood, or a flashback, or if it’s real, or if I’m freaking out.”
The background sound dropped away and Abby heard a high-pitched buzzing.
“Help me,” Gretchen whispered.
“How much is there?” Abby asked.
“A lot.”
“Okay, stand up. Get out of the tub, and stand in front of the mirror. Stand on a white towel.”
Dee Dee tugged Abby’s sleeve.
“We’ve got a line,” she said.
“One sec,” Abby mouthed, waving Dee Dee away, because frozen yogurt was really not a priority right now. She heard splashing over the receiver, then dripping, then silence.
“Are you looking?” Abby asked. “Is there blood on the towel?”
A long pause.
“No,” Gretchen said, relief in her voice.
“You’re sure? The towel’s fine?”
“Yes. God, I’m losing my mind.”
“Watch TV and I’ll talk to you tonight,” Abby said. “Don’t forget to call me.”
“I’m sorry I bugged you,” Gretchen said. “Go work.”
Abby hung up and, having solved a major crisis, she happily pulled vanilla cones and spooned Heath bar crunch over them until nine o’clock, when she and Dee Dee locked up. When Abby got home she turned on the tail end of The Jerry Lewis Telethon, got into bed, and held one finger on the cradle of her Mickey Mouse phone until exactly 11:06. This was her nightly phone date with Gretchen. She could never call Gretchen’s house this late, and technically Gretchen wasn’t supposed to call either, but as long as Abby kept her finger on the cradle and let go the moment the ringer vibrated, her parents never had a clue.
But that night, the phone never rang.