I was twelve. My whole life I’d been unintentionally giving her looks she didn’t like.
“You’d be impressive in one of those gowns, like a pope.” She widened her eyes at me. “I’m kidding! Listen, I’m not saying there’s no system at all. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that there’s an order on a higher level than school, and it’s worth paying attention to the relative elevation of things. God, man, bureaucracy, worksheets.” She sighed. “When they say at school, do this worksheet, and the next one and on and on, you need to see, it’s really important that you see, those aren’t steps that go on up higher. It’s just a fake kind of higher. Does that make sense?”
“What’s this!” she asked me once, when she found a People magazine on the table, left open to an article about Princess Diana. I was fascinated by her sadness for a while, by how, pretty as she was, she could not keep it to herself. I read about her little boys, her husband’s affairs, her eating disorder, her lipstick pairings, her stockings, her high heels. I found an article after her divorce in which she’d made a list of her morning routine, which included: Think Positively Even If You Have Bad Dreams. That seemed both pitiful and brave to me, poignant. My mother, however, turned the slick People pages in complete puzzlement, saying, “Did you read this whole article? I don’t understand you. What is there in that thing to read?”
Once, near the beginning of seventh grade, I went to the bathroom and Sarah the Ice Skater was there with another girl, combing sparkly gel into her hair. It was Lily Holburn, who looked stricken. Her slick black hair came to a point like a stake behind her back. “Oh, the Freak,” Sarah said when she saw me, but she seemed interested rather than disgusted, searching my face for a sign of the popped bubble. There wasn’t any, except—maybe—the spot on my cheek that was less deeply tanned.
Lily squeezed one eye shut, a line of gel leaking down her forehead.
“Hey,” I said, warily.
I knew Sarah was to be respected. I’d heard she had already landed a double axel, one footed, fully rotated, and I believed it. Her body was like a pulled wet branch, her taut muscles holding some weird snap that seemed mechanical and a little dangerous. Everyone assumed that triples hung in her future, that they followed her magically wherever she went, dangled just out of her reach. Triple Salchow, triple loop, triple flip, triple lutz. That meant Upper Great Lakes, Midwesterns, Nationals, Worlds.
Lily, on the other hand, was not what people considered athletic. Still, Sarah had befriended her in the months after her mother died and convinced her and two other mediumpretty girls, both blondes, to join synchronized skating. It wasn’t charity, Sarah’s interest. Though Lily wasn’t called Indian anymore, no one was calling her retarded the way they once did either.
The Loonettes needed people with poise Sarah told her, all smiles.
Boobs, she meant.
Which was why Lily was standing in the seventh grade bathroom with Sarah’s greasy hands in her hair, glitter everywhere, a gob of it now on her cheek. The Loonettes had a competition that afternoon in Duluth.
“Lil, don’t look at the Freak,” Sarah said, as I squeezed past them to get to the stall. “Her dad, you know, tortures her for fun. That’s what they do in that cult where she grew up. They burn her face with wax. They force her to pee outside so she doesn’t know how to use a toilet.”
Lily’s brown eyes met mine in the mirror. For an instant, I had the sensation I was looking at myself, and when I saw my own gaunt face beside hers I was startled.
“Her face looks okay to me,” Lily hedged. She leaned forward, so Sarah pulled back on her hair like reins.
“I’ve seen what they do! Have you seen it? Have you?”
“No,” Lily acknowledged.
I said nothing. On the floor of the stall lay the detritus of a quick change. Jeans, padded bras, a pair of off-white underwear in a wad. I nudged the pile out of the way with a toe, sat down but could squeeze nothing out.
Hiss-hiss went the hair spray—on and on, with no change. They were listening.
“Sorry,” Lily mumbled when I came out, bladder full, humiliated. “About the clothes.”
“Don’t talk to Freaks.” Sarah started spraying Lily’s face. “Close your eyes!”
Lily did, but Sarah’s eyes met mine as I rinsed the tips of my fingers under the faucet. It was the kind of look the dogs gave me when they had a meaty bone in the corner of the shed.
“Let’s sing,” Sarah said to Lily, who was cracking open her eyes. “Let’s sing ‘One Tin Soldier.’”
When Lily didn’t join in, Sarah gave her a prodding kick in the shins.
“You need to believe in the song,” she said.
“I wish I believed in this shit,” my mother said the morning she baptized me. I was six, maybe seven years old. A slant of light from the doorway caught her face. Cold well water from the measuring cup trickled down my back.