Never mind, Belle.
But I knew. These shoes were for sex. Knowing that made me as red as the shoes. Thinking of Mother having sex. Mother and Chip. Mother and the Troll. I heard sounds sometimes through the bedroom wall at night, and I wondered if what I was hearing was sex. I didn’t know what sex was, not exactly. Apart from what Mother had shown me in a children’s book called What’s the Big Secret? It starred two ugly old people, a cartoon man and a cartoon woman, who were always naked and smiling and holding hands. I hated that book. My secret best friend, Stacey, who is two years older than me because I skipped a year and she was held back a year, says sex is nothing like that dumb book at all.
What’s it like, then?
I can’t say, Stacey says like she has secrets. Stacey’s like that with me. I’m only her secret best friend, after all. Stacey wears Black Honey on her lips just like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club, and she walks in a cloud of Love’s Baby Soft because innocence is sexier than you think. If anyone knew that we actually hung out, that would be very bad for Stacey, Stacey says. Socially. In terms of boys, Stacey’s had what she calls experiences. The only experience I’ve ever had was in a dream of Stacey’s. She once told me she dreamed that I slow danced with Gabriel Gardner to the song “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House, and then he Frenched me right on the dance floor full of fog. “Frenched” means he kissed you with tongue, she said. I almost died from happiness when Stacey told me this. I’ve since asked her to tell me this dream again and again—what was I wearing, what was Gabriel Gardner wearing, how did he look just before he Frenched me, in what part of the song did we French?—but Stacey always says she doesn’t feel like it right now. The last time I asked her was when she slept over, and Stacey said she was too tired, then closed her eyes. I looked at her closed eyes through her feathery blond bangs. All I could think was that dream of me was in there somewhere. Floating around inside her skull like one of those jellyfish I once saw at the aquarium. Slippery. Fragile. Mine.
Mother’s heels are very high, so when I try to stand up, I nearly fall down. But I grip the closet doorknob just in time. It makes a groaning noise.
“?a va?” Grand-Maman calls.
“Oui.” Quickly I teeter to Mother’s vanity. Spritz the violets-and-smoke perfume from the bottle shaped like a jagged star. Does Mother have another red lipstick? She took the best red with her, but there’s a lesser red right here in her drawer. In a blue-and-gold scratched-up case shaped like a hexagon. Rouge, it’s called. By someone named Dior. I coat my lips without looking, I don’t want to look until I’m done.
In Mother’s vanity mirror, I can see only the top half of myself, and I can’t see the shoes. She used to have a full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door, but she took it down. The door still has the shape of the mirror though. I can see the holes where Mother nailed it there. I always thought that mirror must be magic because Mother couldn’t stop staring into it. I’d call her name again and again, Mother, Mother, Mom!, and she’d keep looking in the glass like she was in a fairy-tale trance, like it was telling her something.
Where is that mirror now? I look all around her bedroom. Nowhere.
“Belle? Are you sure you’re okay?” Grand-Maman asks from the living room.
“Fine.”
I teeter back into the closet, ready to take off the shoes. And then I see the mirror. Leaning against the closet’s back wall. Turned to the wall like it’s mad at Mother. Or maybe Mother turned it away because she was mad at the mirror, like when she makes me stand in a corner. I turn it around, quiet as I can. Heavy. There’s a crack right down the middle. Mother must have broken it once. It’s dusty and smeared, too. But at least I’ll be able see all of myself in it. As I wipe the mirror with my hand, I suddenly fill with hope. Maybe with her red shoes, and her lipstick, maybe in Mother’s mirror, I’ll see something else. Someone else. Not this face or this body. Not this skin I wish I could slip out of like a suit. Someone who makes me not want to look away. Who? I wonder.
But when I look in the mirror, what I see is what I always see. My bulbous body. My monster face. Beautiful, Mother says, but I know by now she’s lying. I can read Mother, too. Every page. My gold Egyptian bracelet—a gift from your father—glows on my hairy wrist. There’s an eye in it that’s always staring. The Eye of Horus, Mother explained when she gave it to me. An Egyptian god from mythology. You love mythology, Mother insisted.
What’s mythology?
Old stories. Like your fairy tales.
I looked at the strange, painted eye. It looked nothing at all like fairy tales to me.
Think of it as Father’s eye, Mother said. Watching over you. She never lets me take it off. I slide it off my wrist now. Let it clatter to the ground. Right away, I feel lighter. I close my eyes. A land far away. A castle by the sea. That’s the story Mother tells me each night. About the beautiful maiden. I smile because I can see her. When I close my eyes like this, I am her. Wandering the castle with my glowing skin and my hair like an S.
I open my eyes. What I see in Mother’s mirror isn’t me anymore. The crack down the middle is gone. The glass is shining. And there’s a shape. A dark shape shimmering in the mirror. Waving like smoke. Suddenly, I’m excited. Frozen as I watch the smoke gather into something.
Not something.
Someone.
A man.
An actual man in the mirror. He’s blurred around the edges, like a pond rippling after you throw a pebble in. But I see him there. He’s beautiful. Dark, waving hair. Eyes of bright blue-green. He looks like he’s from the movies. He looks like a fairy-tale prince.
“Are you a prince?” I whisper.
He smiles with his red lips. “Am I a prince?” he whispers back. Looking at me from the other side of the rippling glass. Intensely. So intensely, I shiver. His voice is playful, though. You know me, his voice says. Don’t you?
I nod. Yes. His voice, his face. I know them.
“The movies,” I whisper. “You’re from the movies.”
And just like that, he’s not blurry anymore. He comes into vivid focus. His smile shows teeth. Long and white, slightly crooked. Yes. That’s exactly right.
My heart hammers. The movie. Seeing it in the theater with Mother, then again secretly with Stacey. He’s not wearing aviator glasses or a pilot’s uniform, but otherwise it looks just like him. It is him. I know it like I know my own hammering heart; it hammered just like this in the dark theater. My breath catches.
“Oh my god,” I whisper into the glass, “is it really you?”
“It’s really me,” Tom Cruise whispers. Tom Cruise. Standing in Mother’s mirror. Tom Cruise, in the flesh. Right there on the other side of the glass, his smile white and blinding. Looking just like the movie except for his clothes, which are all black. Like the picture I tore from Sky magazine while Mother was getting her hair done into an S. I don’t know why I did that, just looked into his sky-colored eyes and ripped. Quietly, carefully, so Mother wouldn’t hear or see. Folded it three times, then tucked it deep into my dress pocket where it is still. Tom’s smiling at me. His lips are a little redder than I remember. But he sounds just like Tom Cruise sounds. Smiles just like Tom Cruise smiles. Suddenly, I feel very hot in the face.
“What are you doing here? What are you doing in Mother’s mirror?”
Tom keeps smiling with his long white teeth. One is longer than all the others, like a fang on one side. His eyes say some things are secrets, right? Best kept that way. Something inside of me catches fire. My skin goose bumps right down to my feet. I know why he’s here. I know before he even says the words: “I’m here to see you, Belle.”