Ugly Girls Read online

  The beer was making her chatty. She could feel her mouth getting away from her, wanted to stop, but it felt too good, saying these things. Remembering.

  “One time I—”

  “Your daughter ain’t no cheerleader, either, am I right?”

  She had been about to tell him about the time she had drag raced from one stoplight to another, one of those spur-of-the-moment events she treasured. She had won, had kissed the boy she’d raced full on the mouth right there in front of his girlfriend, that’s how filled with triumph she’d been. He had tasted like eggs and she had come to know that most mouths tasted like eggs when they were caught off guard like that. She was overcome with the memory of that night, that moment, her heart pounding, her mouth still open like she was going to keep right on talking, but Pete’s question had caught up with her, frozen her.

  “No, she doesn’t cheerlead,” Myra said. “How you know that?”

  “Well, like I said, I seen you before. And I ain’t never seen her in no cheerleader’s uniform.”

  Was he making small talk? Why interrupt her story like that? Was she being a glory days bore?

  “Uh-huh,” Myra said. “Nope, she’s not the peppy type.”

  “Me neither,” he said. “Or I mean, I wasn’t the peppy type, back when I was in school. Do y’all get along? Fight a lot?”

  “We get along fine,” Myra said. “We fight sometimes, but that’s normal.”

  Myra knew what was going on. She’d overplayed her hand, taken this young man for a confidant, this man closer to her daughter’s age than her own. Now he was making polite conversation, was about two questions away from saying, Well, I better get going.

  “She seems like a real spitfire,” he said.

  “You could say that,” Myra said. Took in two gulps of her beer. That’d be a burp, one she’d be hard-pressed to hold in, guaranteed.

  “Where’s she at?” he asked.

  “Oh,” Myra said, “I don’t know. Out for an evening stroll, is what she told me.”

  “You don’t seem too worried about her. What if she ain’t out for a walk? What if she’s out doing wrong? Or tied up in some maniac’s closet?”

  Already Myra was thinking of the bath she’d take, how she’d pour a beer into a glass and take it with her, light a candle, maybe even fall to sleep in the tub for a while. Who was this Pete, asking her about her parenting?

  “That’s on her,” Myra said. “She knows right from wrong.”

  They looked at each other. Myra saw how his cleft lip made it difficult to keep his lips shut all the way, how his eyes moved quick, taking everything in, green but for a big brown spot in the right one. Finally he looked away.

  “Well,” he said. “I better get going.”

  Myra almost shouted Aha!, she was so pleased with herself for calling it.

  “Thanks for the beers.” He got up, smoothed down his jeans, straightened his shirt. Such pride, Myra thought, in his rags. It felt good to think it.

  “Stop by anytime,” she told him, tipped her beer. She felt surprised to realize that she meant it.

  At the door he turned and said, “You think about those twinkle lights.”

  “I will,” Myra said, the screen door snapping to.

  She listened to see if he remembered to take his gun. Only now did she realize she’d been aware of it out there the whole time, keeping her mind tuned to it like she would if it was a feral cat that could speak her name. Like it might grow legs and walk in, right up to her, and spit in her face.

  THEY ROLLED THE RED MAZDA out of the gravel driveway. The owner had left the keys balanced nice and sweet on the back left tire. A gift. Baby Girl listened to the same GBE song again and again, like she was trying to convince herself she was as bold as the hard thumping beats rattling the windows, like her tank was empty and she was filling it right back up. The bass was so loud it made the car feel like a vise, squeezing tighter with each beat. What Perry wouldn’t give for a song featuring an actual instrument.

  They stopped for French fries at Denny’s. Baby Girl went to the bathroom, came back with her lip liner refreshed, looking to Perry like a batty old lady who forgot to fill her lips in. It had started a few months ago, this outlining, and Perry never got the nerve to tell her. Baby Girl had pale red hair, orange really, the same color freckles, no eyelashes to speak of, and blue eyes set against a lightningscape of red. A body best described as solid. Baby Girl showing evidence of any kind of vanity was a miracle and so Perry left it be.

  “Yo, can we get some menus?” Baby Girl called out.

  A waitress in a short brown wig wheeled around from where she was taking a man’s order. Two penciled brows looking like wobbly cartoon frowns above her eyes. “In a minute,” she snapped. The man had a mesh hat balanced atop his head, dark tinted glasses. Thin frowning mouth like his was penciled in too.

  Baby Girl had her mouth open like she was about to say something back, but Perry didn’t feel like starting. “Shoot, try me?” Baby Girl muttered. She had decided it wasn’t worth it, was letting it go, and Perry felt her body sag a little in relief. Her eyes felt dry as rocks. She was starting to long for her bed earlier and earlier lately.

  A boy with a mop and bucket appeared, pushing through the doors from the kitchen. Perry recognized him from her math class. Short blond hair, strong arms, brown eyes. A boy her momma would call real clean-cut the same way someone else would say This steak is nice and juicy. Perry had once dreamed about him. She was chasing him through a forest, holding a spear. Myra would have liked that. She put a lot of faith in what dreams could tell a person about her life, but Perry had always felt that dreams were just random collections of stuff that bored you plus stuff that quaked your soul with desire or shame.

  “Travis,” she called to him, before she even realized she knew his name.

  Baby Girl turned around to see who she was talking to. “Oh shit,” she said under her breath. “You think he saw the Mazda?”

  Perry ignored her. She had to peel her thighs off the vinyl booth seat, and as she walked over to talk to him she wondered if they were red, if they looked like she had sat on the toilet for too long. She wished she hadn’t had the thought, knew she must look bright red as well as sweaty to him. Did she care? That was the question.

  “Oh, hey,” Travis said. He looked at her like it took all he had to allow his eyes a glance.

  “I didn’t know you worked here,” she said.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, looking around, like he’d just remembered where he was. “Trying to make some money.” He stared at his shoes, black plastic clogs.

  “Nice shoes,” Perry told him.

  “I have to wear these,” he said quietly, like she had accused him of something. But Perry had just wanted to make him laugh. “No,” she said, “they really are nice.” It came out sounding even meaner. She had that thing where the sweeter she tried to sound, the more it came off like bullshit.

  “Nice seeing you,” he said, and pushed his mop into a roped-off part of the dining room. He had a bleach stain on the back of his shirt the shape of a splattered kidney.

  Perry walked back to the table. Baby Girl had been watching the whole thing, her face split in two, dead eyes, wide grin.

  “Damn,” Baby Girl said, “that guy thinks you’re a bitch.”

  Perry watched Travis push the mop, back and forth, truly cleaning. He was a hard worker, it was clear. She knew if it was her with the mop she’d push it back and forth a couple times and call it a day. But if he was watching her she’d try harder, if only to make him think she could work hard like him. She cared what he’d think of her, suddenly there it was, put in front of her like a plate of pancakes. She could feel the spear in her hand, the warmth heading south. She wondered did her lips look dry, did she have sleep crusted in her eyes, did she look ugly to him?

  He never once turned to look at her, just pushed the mop right through the swinging doors to the kitchen.

  The waitress came over, starin
g at her pad instead of at them. They ordered without menus because all they wanted was French fries, and because the waitress wasn’t offering menus anyway. Baby Girl made a point to use her name. “And some ranch for dipping, Pam.” She always went the extra mile to give someone shit. Which, Perry realized, made her the Travis of assholes, only instead of a mop she had her mouth.

  Denny’s was always where it all caught up with her. She could feel exhaustion closing over her like a heavy drape. It was the sitting still, the eating, the bright lights. Travis still hadn’t come back out from the kitchen. Perry wondered if he was the one doing the cooking. Did he spit in the fryer, like she would have done? She found herself hoping he had.

  They left the waitress two quarters for a tip. Baby Girl fixed them to the table with a wad of gum that had been chewed colorless. In the parking lot she was chewing again, always obsessed with the smell of her breath. Perry didn’t know how she could be so concerned with her breath and so unconcerned with the goblin she kept drawing on her face.

  The Denny’s was just a short coast off the highway, and they had to talk loud to hear each other over the roaring inhale and exhale of traffic. “One more?” Baby Girl asked. Already her lip was beaded with sweat, and it made her look like a child who’d just taken a sloppy drink of something. Perry shook her head so she wouldn’t have to yell. She wanted to go home but knew Baby Girl wasn’t ready, knew they’d need to drive the Mazda up the highway, back down it, like two dummies trying to get a screeching baby to sleep. A screeching Baby Girl.

  They drove over to the Walmart to do doughnuts in the employee parking lot. Baby Girl had once filled out an application to work there. They’d gone in to check on the status later that week and Baby Girl told the greeter to suck her dick. Now her applying for the job had become a joke, something she laughed at when telling the story, like she never really meant it. But Perry knew she had meant it, had worn nice black pants and a white blouse to apply. With Baby Girl it was two steps forward and a day’s worth of walking backward.

  Baby Girl parked but left the keys in the ignition. Always ready to take off again. She walked slow with her hands in her pockets, shoulders hunched, staring at the ground, drifting in and out of the headlights’ glare. Every now and then she bent to pick up a bit of newspaper, crumpled receipts, a palm frond gone brown. Kindling for the small fire Perry knew she was fixing to make. Dumped it all in one of the carts left outside, held her lighter to the palm frond, which took to the fire like that was all it was waiting for to look alive again. Bright orange rib cage of a thing, quickly turning black. “Shit!” Baby Girl hissed, and ran back to the car.

  Perry watched the tiny curls of flame for as long as she could as they drove off. Myra was always talking about itches, how people were either scratchers or ignorers. The scratchers poke and poke at it, even though it makes it itch more. The scratchers love the itch and they love the poking. It could go on forever but for the blood, and even then, it’s a small price to pay. That’s how nights with Baby Girl had gotten. None of it seemed to matter. The sun always came up.

  They ditched the Mazda on the side of the highway, near the exit headed back to where they’d left Baby Girl’s car on a quiet street. Cars rushed by them as they walked along the shoulder, some honked, people on their way to work or home from work, probably none of them on the way back from an all-night bender like they had been on. Baby Girl made a visor of her hands to protect her face. She was so pale that even ten minutes in the sun could do her in. Even a weak sun like this one, set back behind a screen of gray. Even this sun would turn her red as a fire ant. “See you at school,” she said.

  Perry nodded, turned down the road leading to her house. She was too tired to say anything back. She had to walk while Baby Girl got to drive home because she couldn’t risk Myra hearing the car, or worse, Jim seeing it on his way back from work.

  Baby Girl honked as she rode past. Trying to get a rise. Perry ignored her, concentrating on how hard the asphalt felt under her feet. Every step a pounding. She walked through a few neighborhoods on her way to the trailer park, each dingier than the last, until she got to one of the nicer ones, brick homes with actual grass in the yards, no cars parked on the street, a man in a suit taking a mug of coffee to his car. Next would come the cul de sac of duplexes and apartments, pretty yellow siding and flower boxes, though the parking lot out front had cracks and potholes, and there weren’t any BMWs or Lexuses, just Nissans and Hyundais and maybe a Buick or two. Then there was the neighborhood of short, squat houses, skinny driveways, no sidewalks, shrubs and grass looking like they’d gone months without seeing to. Mostly old trucks parked out front, sometimes rickety-looking motorcycles. And finally her own neighborhood, if it could be called that, short rows of trailers leading up a small hill. Hers was three rows back. Perry knew what people thought when they heard the words trailer park. Dirty kids in dirty diapers, car parts, people drinking or hollering. But that wasn’t so true for where she lived. They had all those things, but never all at once, it seemed. And if you had a double-wide, like Myra and Jim did, it almost felt like a normal-size house. Perry didn’t love it, but it was home.

  It was nearly seven thirty when she got there. Myra was still in bed, either because she had a day off or because she didn’t wake up when her alarm went off. Perry knew it was probably the second option, what with her having a beer last night. No telling how many came after.

  The trailer was quiet and still; it felt to Perry like the preserved remains of a family long gone. Myra collected things, little colonies of shit, and displayed them all over the trailer. Along the windowsill behind the couch she had her group of vintage glass jars; dust had coated them long ago, so instead of reflecting light they just distilled it, held it like a glaze. The couch had its own grouping of pillows, embroidered with dog heads or sayings like COFFEE MADE ME DO IT and IT’S 5 O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE. Mostly pillows Myra picked up from the truck stop. They helped hide how worn the couch was, all its rips and tears, same went for the doilies Myra collected. The walls of the trailer were faux wood paneled, so cheap you couldn’t drive a nail through to hang up a school photo without the whole wall splitting and your picture frame falling to the floor in a shatter. Myra had grouped photos on top of the TV, on the floor in front of the TV, and on the bar leading into the kitchen. None of Perry past the age of eight, like time had stopped once Perry went into the fourth grade. Jim and Myra’s wedding photo in a huge scalloped frame, Myra in a pink pantsuit and Jim in a stiff white shirt, perched on the back of the easy chair against the wall. If you sat too hard it’d topple, and they had all learned how to sit just so, all learned to lean their heads back to hold it in place, all learned you sat in that chair as a last resort. It wasn’t like they all sat together much anyway, so there was usually plenty of room on the couch. Between the couch, the chair, the TV on its stand, and all the shit Myra arranged everywhere, there was about a two-foot path from the front door to the hallway off the bedrooms. Just enough to get by.

  When Myra started bringing stuff home, Perry knew she was trying her hardest not to drink. And it worked, but it also held her feet to the fire. A constant reminder of the distraction she craved.

  Jim would be pulling up soon to take Perry to school. She showered, mussed up her bed to make it look like she’d been in it. Maybe he wouldn’t know, though he probably would, but even so, Perry knew it was important to at least pretend for him. She got on the computer while she waited, listening for his truck.

  There was a message from Jamey.

  NO SUBJECT.

  Perry girlie,

  It has been a lonley nite without you. I got to turn in soon becos I have school in the morning. I guess so do you. Maybe your asleep???

  Anyways, hope to talk to you tonite.

  Jamey

  It was a thrill having a friend like this, a friend Perry could pretend with when there came a need, but it was also a lot of work. Jamey had added her on Facebook months back, and she’d finally acc
epted his request on a night when Baby Girl couldn’t go out. His profile said he went to high school a few towns over. He played baseball and was all right looking from what Perry could tell.

  Now he wanted to talk every single night. She had given him her phone number but he never called, just texted, because he had free texting but limited minutes. Part of Perry was waiting for the other shoe to drop, to find out it was Baby Girl or some jerk from school playing a joke.

  In the meantime, it was fun to read what he had to say, especially when it got sexual, and it usually did. Ooooh baby. He loved to write that line. Ooooh. It almost got her to feel sorry for him.

  Perry had been hoping the message was from Travis. Seeing Jamey’s message instead, seeing his need to talk to her, it was a need, bared naked and misspelled in a dumb Facebook message, it turned her stomach. Even worse was the fact that she had her own need, a need for Travis to like her, and she wasn’t no better than Jamey.

  She looked away from the computer, away from Jamey’s message. The lumpy couch, the worn quilt covering the threadbare patch in the arm, the crocheted rug beaten nearly white over the years, the endless, endless army of glass figurines posing across every flat surface. The house felt empty despite the three people living in it. Myra filled it with stuff and more stuff.

  Every time she got to thinking like this it was like time stopped and froze her right where she sat. She’d never leave this shabby, unloved room. The Perry that she was right then, that girl was trapped forever. Before she knew it she had a glass figurine of a rearing horse under her shoe, using her full weight to mash it into the linoleum. Why had she said that thing about Travis’s shoes?

  Then again, why had he acted like such a bitch about it?

  She swept up the shattered horse, buried it under some paper towels in the trash can. At least six bottles in there, probably more around Myra’s bed. That answered that. She went back to the computer.

  Jamey had left a comment on her newest profile picture. Haha your beatifull even with that hat on!! She had read one of Travis’s papers once during a group activity in English. He was a good speller.