There were 175 kids in the junior class. Most of them didn’t like her.
Since middle school, girls had pricked up around her, as cats prick up at danger, and edged away. Once, when she was in seventh grade, three eighth-grade girls had cornered her behind the snack bar, surrounded her and pressed her to the wall, so close she felt their hot, sweet-and-sour breath against her neck, and demanded to know why she thought she was so fucking superior. When she hadn’t answered, the biggest of the three had smiled calmly beneath her dark, center-parted hair, braces glinting, then reared back and slapped her face. A sting that mellowed to an ache. Loose tears. That night, a plum-colored bruise had bloomed high on her cheek, and she’d wished that it would make her ugly by the morning, but it hadn’t.
She didn’t make such wishes anymore. But she knew what boys thought of her. The dime. The bitch. If they did talk to her, it was just to ask about her mom in a way that made her skin crawl.
Everyone liked Elisabeth’s mom, who was pretty and fun and trendy in her skinny jeans and knee-high boots. She worked in a local boutique, and after closing took Elisabeth to dinner at downtown restaurants where divorcés hovered by the bar in designer jeans and dress shirts, or polos embroidered with the scrolling logos of Palm Springs golf courses and Napa Valley wineries. Elisabeth looked just like her, the men said when stopping by the table to be friendly. Those gorgeous, sea-green eyes. That skin. Elisabeth’s mom always grinned and thanked them, radiating warmth as if to assure them that her beauty meant nothing to her. That she was not even aware of it.
The anchorman, Steve, was bolder than the rest. He pulled a third chair to their table without asking, flashed bleached teeth. He wore makeup for his job on TV, and orange foundation crusted in the folds of his eyelids and the grooves of his nostrils.
He leaned over the table and winked. “You know,” he said, “when you grow up, you’re going to be a knockout.”
Elisabeth’s mom beamed and patted the back of her hand, a reminder to be gracious.
Elisabeth clicked her teeth shut. Made a small, closed-mouth smile. “Excuse me,” she said.
As she stood, Steve’s eyes traced her height. Five foot ten in flats. As she walked through the restaurant in her scoop-necked sweater and jeans, three old men in a booth grinned at her with mouths full, jousted at her with their knives. She passed the clanging kitchen—two busboys, leaning by the open door, swiped their palms on their aprons and trailed her with their eyes. She bowed her head. If she looked at them, she’d have to smile, pretend she liked it. If they talked to her, she’d have to say hello, act flattered like her mom would, make small talk, which she was so painfully incapable of doing. So she raised her chin and stared ahead. Her body was a long elastic and she held it taut.
When she got back from the bathroom, her mother was sipping a martini and laughing and Steve was sitting close beside her, stroking the ridge of her thumb, whispering secrets into her hair.
People said Elisabeth was beautiful. Her mom said she was lucky, with a golden complexion and a body built for clothes. But the beauty was foreign to her. She wore it like expensive jewelry she knew was dangerous to own.
It seemed that she had always felt this way. She remembered a Memorial Day weekend when she was six or seven years old, at the Mendocino Valley ranch where Mill Valley parents went to play. The ranch crowned a hill at the end of a long dirt road that corkscrewed up through madrone and manzanita trees. Around the house was a clearing, and beyond that, hills of grass tall enough to hide in.
During the day adults would hike around the hills or sprawl in chaise longues by the swimming pool or pass out on towels on the lawn with paperback novels and bottles of beer. And inevitably, in the blaze of a late afternoon, Elisabeth’s mom would wake red-bellied and howling for aloe. Elisabeth would bring her the bottle. She’d squirt the cold green gel into her palm and rub it over her mom’s belly, chest, shoulders, and neck, skin hot to the touch and goosebumps rising, angry red.
“I didn’t mean to fall asleep!” her mom would moan. “Why didn’t you wake me, Liza-Belle?”
“Stop flinching,” Elisabeth would say. “The gel will help. It always helps.”
Her mom would laugh, tears glistening in her eyes. “My sensible girl. Where did you come from? How did you come out of me?”