It was easy to tell which side of the bedroom was Isabel’s. One had its bed made, pictures straight, the clothes on the shelves folded and sorted by category and color. The other was covered, from the floor to the bed, with stuff. Clothes and CDs and socks and magazines and bras and empty cigarette packs, all burying and supporting each other. But the thing I noticed most was the mirror.
It was over a dressing table, and all around it, stretching out at least a foot from each side, were hundreds of faces cut from magazines. Blonde girls, brunettes, redheads, all staring out hollow-cheeked and seductive. There were girls with drastic makeup, girls with no makeup, all of them skinny, some of them smiling. They were taped up kind of slapdash, overlapping each other, spreading out like a cloud from the mirror’s edges. Here and there, mixed in, you could see pictures of real people: some of Isabel and Morgan, family pictures, a couple of babies and several of smiling, good-looking boys. Next to the models, they seemed smaller, and you noticed every imperfection.
“Sit down,” Isabel said, kicking aside one white sandal and a pair of shorts to pull out the chair. The dressing table itself was a sea of little bottles and containers, so covered with cosmetics that you couldn’t even see the surface. I looked at myself in the mirror, surrounded by all those beautiful girls, and wondered what I was doing there.
Isabel pushed some more stuff aside and leaned against the dressing table, taking another swig of her beer. “Look, Colie. I have something to say to you, and I’m just gonna shoot it straight. Okay?”
I considered this. It couldn’t be any worse than what had already happened. “Okay.”
She tucked her hair behind her ear, took a deep breath and let it out. Then she said, “I really think you should pluck your eyebrows.”
This hadn’t been exactly what I was expecting.
“What?” I said.
“You heard me,” she said, coming to stand behind me and turning my head to face my reflection. “And it wouldn’t hurt to do something about that hair, either.”
“I don’t know,” I said uncertainly as she went to the closet and yanked the door open, pulling out a large box of hair coloring kits. And here I’d thought she was a natural blonde.
“That black is just too uneven,” she said. “You can’t dye over it, but at least we could try to do it again and get it all. It won’t fix it totally, but—” She dropped the box on the floor and abruptly left the room, still talking to herself. I listened to her open and shut cabinets in the kitchen.
I looked back up at the pictures, taking in each of the faces. And then I saw it; one, stuck at the top, that I hadn’t noticed before. It looked like a yearbook picture. The girl in it was fat, with glasses. She had a pudgy face and limp brown hair, and she was wearing a thick turtleneck sweater that looked really uncomfortable and itchy. She had a necklace with a little gold frog on it, something her mother or grandmother must have given her. She was the kind of girl that Caroline Dawes would have made miserable. A girl like me.
I leaned closer, wondering why she was there. Even with the pictures of the babies and Morgan and all those boys, she didn’t fit in.
“Here,” Isabel said, coming back into the room suddenly and dropping a box in my lap. The model on the front had dark brown hair, almost black, with a tinge of red in it, and she smiled up at me. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
I didn’t know what Caroline Dawes had triggered in Isabel but I wasn’t about to question it. After the day I’d had, any change seemed like a good idea.
“Okay,” I said. And behind me, reflected in the mirror among all those other beauties, Isabel’s pretty face almost, just almost, smiled.
“Ouch.”
“Hush.”
“Ouch!”
“Shut up.”
“Ouch!”
“Will you please be quiet?” Isabel snapped, yanking what had to be a fair amount of skin with another pluck.
“It hurts,” I said. She’d searched for some ice cubes, but no luck: she’d forgotten to fill the tray the night before.
“Of course it hurts,” she grumbled, tipping my head further back. “Life sucks. Get over it.”
Obviously, we wouldn’t be best friends immediately.
To distract myself, I looked over at the mirror. “Who’s that girl?”
“What girl.” Another yank.
I had tears in my eyes. “That one,” I said, pointing toward the chubby girl in the turtleneck. “In the yearbook picture.”
She gave another good yank, then looked where I was pointing. “My cousin,” she said distractedly.
“Oh.”
“She’s a real looker, huh.” She switched the tweezers to the other hand, flexing her cramped fingers.
“Well, she’s,” I said, “I mean, she’s very …”
“She’s a dog,” she said, settling in to start on my other brow. “It’s no secret.”
It was always so easy for beautiful girls. They never could understand how lucky they were. But I knew her cousin, knew what she was going through. And I couldn’t take my eyes off her, even as Isabel worked to transform me.
She was finishing my eyebrows, just plucking stray hairs here and there, her face close to mine.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” I asked her.
She sat back, putting down the tweezers. “You know,” she said, “when you say stuff like that I just want to slap you.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” She picked up her beer and took a swallow, still watching me. Then she said, “Colie, you should never be surprised when people treat you with respect. You should expect it.”
I shook my head. “You don’t know—” I began. But, as usual, she didn’t let me finish.
“Yes,” she said simply, “I do know. I’ve watched you, Colie. You walk around like a dog waiting to be kicked. And when someone does, you pout and cry like you didn’t deserve it.”
“No one deserves to be kicked,” I said.
“I disagree,” she said flatly. “You do if you don’t think you’re worth any better. As soon as you saw that girl today you crumpled. You just opened the door up and let her stomp right in.”
I thought of Mira, how much it bothered me that she hadn’t fought back. “She’s—”
“I don’t care who she is,” she said, waving her hand as she interrupted me, again. ”Self-respect, Colie. If you don’t have it, the world will walk all over you.”
I looked down, running my tongue over my piercing.
“See,” she said, “you’re doing it again.”