“Yes. Thank you . . . for giving me your number.”
“Oh my god . . . the witch found it.” He took a deep breath. “Are you okay? What can I do? Do you want me to message the others? What’s she going to do to you? How do you have a phone right now?”
His concern overwhelmed her. In an instant, she was weeping again. She had never done anything to deserve these people, and yet they were there. She’d loved, and these angels had come out of the woodwork to watch her do it. Here they were, on her side, even though she couldn’t touch them.
“Shh . . . it’s okay. Just let it out.”
“I don’t have time. Oscar . . . she’s known for almost a year, I think.”
“What?”
“She’s known all this time. She’s one of my readers. She has to be.”
“Oh fuck. Oh my god.” There was the sound of something clattering as he no doubt dropped whatever piece of artistic glory he was assembling. “This is so fucked. What do we do?”
“She’s going to send me . . . to one of those places . . . those places where they—”
“Pray the gay away?” She sniffled to the sound of his multilingual string of swear words. “Why? Why do they hate us so much? What have we ever done besides make their lives better? I don’t understand this at all!”
His anxiety triggered hers. Her breathing turned to gasps. Tachycardia set in, causing spasms of existential terror. She pressed her face to the cold stone wall and tried with every remaining vestige of will to hold on to the problem, and solve it as Riley would. “Oscar, I can’t let her take me there. I can’t keep pretending. I’m so tired.”
His feelings were cast aside at once for a soothing mantra of whispered support. “Leave. Just leave. Come here. We will figure it out together.”
Hearing him say it made it seem so much realer to her, then. Was it that simple? Just run away? She wasn’t sure it was something she could do. The world was dangerous, and she wasn’t strong enough. But the alternative . . .
“But you don’t have any money. I can’t stay at your house. You have roommates!”
“We’ll figure it out. El, I want you safe!”
“Is there another way?” she breathed.
“Can you refuse to go?”
Just walk in and refuse her mother, just like that. Only if she wanted to lose the phone, the computer, and every ounce of freedom she had for the next six months.
Six months. She’d be eighteen in six months. Her mother couldn’t keep her hostage then. She’d be an adult. An adult . . .
An adult her mother could manipulate with adult consequences just as she did Rose.
How many times had Mama brought up the courts, the judges she knew? There were veiled threats assuring her that if the phone bill looked wrong, she’d be arrested for theft, that if El rode home with someone else, she’d be reported as missing, that if she behaved in any way that differed from her mother’s opinions on what was a good life, Mama would do whatever it took to see to it she ate her mistakes.
If she ran . . . she’d be a criminal in Mama’s eyes, and Mama would treat it just like that. But if she stayed, she was a criminal anyway, already condemned to rehabilitation, with her mother as the sole deputy.
“No . . . I can’t. That won’t work with her. Then I really won’t have any options.”
Oscar huffed. To him, people who couldn’t be bothered to undo their prejudices didn’t deserve to have opinions considered. To him, Nazis were self-proclaimed idiots, anti-LGBTQ were self-identified monsters. To Oscar, the injustice was that society gave such people rights and rules in their favor. The first time she had messaged back and forth with him, he’d told her his coming-out story and it ended with a fist fight. Just like Riley, he was strong, brave, self-aware.
Maybe that was why she loved him so dearly.
“What about R? Can you go to her? I mean you don’t have to tell her you are wicked insane in love with her, just that you need help.”
El let out a whimper. That thought had occurred to her nearly a hundred times in the past two days, but if Mama ever discovered she’d spoken to Riley outside of school . . . it was a sure bet some police officer would find something they shouldn’t in her father’s repair shop, and his parole would be revoked, probably on the advice of an anonymous tip from a reliable source. That was just how Mama worked.
“I want to . . . God, I want to . . . but if my mother found out, she’d destroy her family.”
He let out a sigh. “Then there really is only one way. I swear to you, I’m good for it. Please let me help.”
Her tears spattered the thirsty concrete and evaporated almost at once. “But Oscar, I don’t know how to . . . to do anything! My mother never lets me do anything! I don’t know how to live.”
“And you think that’s going to change if you spend one more year in high school? It’s gonna magically be better after six months of aging? El, princess, I am twenty-two. I still have no fucking idea how to balance a checkbook. It’s why I eat my neighbor’s avocados that fall in my yard. Free food is free food, bitches.”
Her sob was stopped up by his practicality. Of course, the world was dangerous. Of course, age wouldn’t suddenly make her more capable, but it would put the law on her side. How could she possibly get across the country without the legal right to leave her parents? She didn’t have any identification—no driver’s license, not even a library card.
But Rose did.
Her sister was taller than her, with blonde hair. But that could all be fudged. What couldn’t was the face. Rose was a beauty queen, El was a house mouse.
Or was that just more magic?
It was her mother who had always told her that she wasn’t like her sister, but Liz always told her how beautiful she was. Even Riley . . . that goddess of all things gorgeous, had called her pretty. Though he was vile, Jay found her attractive enough to dry hump her leg whenever the mood struck him. And really, a person could do amazing things with makeup. She knew that much from watching her sister transform into her crown-catching alter ego.
Mama was a horrible person. Her opinion was the worst possible one to accept. The spell had to break.
“Oscar . . . How hard is it to go blonde?”
He snickered. “What color is your hair?”
“Black.”
“Shit. Well . . . do you care about keeping the hair?”
Reaching up, she ran her fingers through it. It was long, shimmered all sorts of colors, from purple to blue. It was soft. But it was also that thing her mother had raked with a brush as she snarled about how she hated it. It was the thing her mother grabbed to tug her to her room. It was the thing Jay liked to use to hold her fast. It was always in the way, always setting her apart from her sister—the good girl.
“No.”
“Then it’s pretty easy. You buy a bleaching powder and a peroxide developer at a beauty supply store. You mix, you apply, and you wait. And then if you want it to look somewhat natural, you come back in with a blonde dye.”
“How much is all that stuff?”
“Twenty, thirty bucks.”
That, she could manage. “Is it something I could do anywhere?”
“You’d need water to wash the hair, but yeah . . . I guess, if you have a couple of hours.” She heard his chair creek and his cat meow. It sounded as if he was bounding through the house and suddenly his voice wasn’t echoing off of anything. He was outside and pacing over grass. “Are you going to do it? Are you going to run?”
Her stomach, always sore, always churning with suffering, suddenly calmed. Her toes went warm, her heart fell into a normal rhythm.
“Yes, I think I am.”
He let out a whoop of joy. But the delight was short-lived. In a heartbeat, he was back on the ground, and the real plotting began. By the time she was finished, she had a destination and all she had to do was get there.
Easier said than done.
In the house, El replaced Rose’s phone and stood at the table
for long moments as a kind of weird euphoria bubbled up from within. With a remarkably steady hand, she tugged the wallet free, removed the driver’s license, several checks from the back of the book, and the least used credit card. Where once she would have been terrified, looking over her shoulder in a fit of paranoia, El was caught up in a trancelike calm.
If they were going to call her a criminal, call her a freak, then what was the harm in living up to their expectations?
The voices in the living room had fallen silent. Tiptoeing in, El found Mama lying on the sofa; another empty glass of wine was beside her slack hand; she was passed out cold. El thanked the universe for merciful favors. Rose was going through packages they’d somehow acquired, and didn’t notice her until she cleared her throat. “How was cake tasting?”
“Well . . . I think I ate just about ten pounds of cake! Oh my Lord, there was so much—butter cream, raspberry, ganache, lemon curd—I just about died. But then Mama had a great idea! She said, ‘Why don’t we do like a filling that has flowers in it?’ You know, like lavender and roses and orange blossoms!”
El clenched her teeth behind a wan smile.
“So McKayla is going to whip up some new things, and we’re going back next week!”
“Guess it wore her out, huh?” She tilted her chin at the sleeping demon.
Rose spared her but a glance and a nervous laugh. Best not to talk about the woman while she was in the room. They both knew she might be faking. “Well, that’s what happens when you have almost two bottles of wine. I think we should let her nap a bit before we have brunch.”
The conversation collapsed. Not that they ever could manage to build much with so little in common. There was their parentage and what it took to survive it, certainly, but that was a negative. Friendship couldn’t be built on negatives. It seemed laughable and preposterous to think, but El knew her mother, and she was fairly certain that was precisely the intention. Mama didn’t want her two children to overpower her, and so they must be separated.
Rose was more easily pleased, distracted by aesthetics. She was flighty, free-spirited, and forgetful. While El had always been “willful,” as her mother said, and introspective. Mama could control Rose, while El posed a tremendous problem.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said.”
Rose’s confusion was as lovely as her happiness. She shook her head and wrinkled her nose in that adorable way that always got her through the more difficult pageant questions. “What I said? What did I say? I drank too much wine today, sissy. You gotta remind me.”
“About makeup. I’m going to be a senior this year. There’s the wedding, homecoming, prom, all sorts of things . . . senior photos . . . and I don’t know anything about makeup.”
To El’s relief, it seemed she’d said the magic words. Instantly, Rose’s misgivings were gone. This was a subject she could go on about for hours to anyone. Makeup was the lingua franca of her world, the math of her universe.
“Oh sure! There’s all sorts of things coming up for you! You gotta learn!”
“We have time . . .” This was the key to her escape, and she smiled on it invitingly. “Can you teach me now? Maybe just the basics, and how you get your eyes to look like that every day?”
As if God above had given Rose an opportunity to at last fill in all the weak and empty parts of her life, she showed off every one of her pearly white veneers. “I would love to! Oh my god, I’ve been carrying all my makeup with me, because of all this wedding stuff! I have everything here!”
She squealed softly and skittered across the stone floor at full speed, snagging El’s body with the force of a beauty queen possessed. Paying attention as she never had before, El dutifully washed, moisturized, and primed her face, allowed her sister to pluck, pinch and otherwise groom her. Within the hour, she was sure she understood technique, even if the actual execution might need practice.
Side by side in the mirror, she looked more like her sister than she’d ever dreamed she could. This realization lifted her spirits in countless imprecise ways. It wasn’t about being pretty. Pretty didn’t mean anything to her. It was about being confident, taking ownership of her body. People always used the word “self-possession” to describe a bossy person, but at that moment, as she looked on her face in the mirror, she felt the word would have new meaning for her. It was as if every curse her mother had thrown was being undone and she had control over herself again.
She was now a master of disguise.
“You look fabulous! I wish I had your dark hair!”
“Why do you bleach yours?”
Rose distracted herself with her products. “Well, because Mama said blonde was the color of winning. And she was right, you know. All three of the last Miss North Carolinas were blonde.”
All of them blonde by the bottle alone.
Mama always called pageants “scholarship programs” which annoyed El on several levels. In the first place, Mama only condoned college education for girls if they intended to become nurses or school teachers. And secondly, no scholarship El had ever heard of cared about what a person looked like in a bikini. They cared about grades and expertise. Rose had Miss America coming up—the pageant to win all pageants—and after that, she’d retire and probably see not a single day of college past that point. It had to be tedious, always playing the fresh face preparing to start a life . . . without ever actually living one.
El leaned forward, examining herself in the mirror for the slightest discrepancy. “You should go to school for cosmetology, or maybe become a chemist and make your own makeup line. If you win Miss America, I bet that might happen for you.”
Rose blushed prettily. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think I’d want to do that professionally.”
“What would you do?”
She shrugged. “I love singing. I’d probably try to do it, you know, get a singing deal like Vanessa Williams. But you know what Mama would say if I talked about working, especially in music.”
Did she ever. To hear Mama tell it, a woman’s only purpose in life was to support her husband and surrender her body for his pleasure and the replication of his genes. To watch Mama live it, a woman’s only source of amusement was tormenting her children and running the home like a penitentiary. That hardly seemed any way to exist.
“Are you and Tom going to have children?”
Her sister had a very good poker face, but it was meant to be viewed from the stage, not two feet away. “Oh, I don’t know. The doctor wants me to stay on the birth control because of my cramps and headaches, you know.”
“Of course!” Reassured that Rose had at least learned to excuse herself from compromising her individuality by getting a doctor’s note, El dusted her face with the fluffy soft powder brush. “Thank you, Rose, I really appreciate the help. I guess I’ll need to buy all this stuff.”
Rose made another of her photogenically emotive faces. “Please, sissy. You keep this. People just keep giving me stuff because of the position and all. This way I can make sure you get the right kind of makeup instead of that cheap stuff. Some of it’s good, but it always made my skin just break out!”
El heard the footfalls and had just enough time to prepare herself for the immediate shift in the air that preceded their matron. As soon as Mama’s reflection appeared, bleary and a little disheveled, Rose’s smile dimmed, her eye contact severed at once. As if caught stealing, Rose’s hand fell from El’s shoulder, and when she spoke, her voice shook.
“Look Mama! Isn’t Elyrra pretty? I did her up just like me!”
Mama narrowed her eyes and turned away dismissively. “It’s a bit much, isn’t it? Wipe it off so we can go.”
Rose’s reflection paled beneath her expertly applied foundation, and her usually icy eyes began to melt as she stared at the spot where Mama had been. That was an insult to both of them, to El for daring to be anything other than a dull girl, and to Rose for practicing artistry.
After several swallows, her sister collecte
d a few tissues from the box.
“Sorry, sissy,” she whispered, crushing what of El’s heart had thus far survived unbroken.
“It’s okay. I’m used to it.”
Their eyes met in a single breath, so charged with information that it sent a current through her, raising gooseflesh on her arms and legs. A sympathetic kiss crowned her and then Rose had gone, dabbing at her mascara.
All this time, it had seemed Rose had it so much easier than her, that Mama had been far kinder to her, that the pageants and public appearances had all been privileges granted simply for existing, El was now certain none of that was true.
Being a bully was a fact about Mama that would not change, and she’d probably spent hours working her sister over. As much as everyone complimented Rose’s beauty, El could now recall every single instant their mother had denied the girl any agency, any autonomy, any opinions of any kind. Rose could only speak in aesthetics because that was the language she’d been taught. Mama had convinced the world, but more importantly, the girl herself, that pretty Rose Glasse was nothing but a doll whose mind was blank and whose identity was manufactured and endowed by her admirers. She was a statue only brought to life when someone wanted to objectify her.
As El swiped the makeup remover over her face, she became certain that her sister wasn’t marrying the man of her dreams. She was escaping.
They were both running away.
“I don’t understand the issue.”
That didn’t surprise Riley one bit. It also didn’t matter to her. “There isn’t an issue.”
“Then why won’t you register?”
On the desk between them were half a dozen letters. They were the only marks of approval society had ever really shown her, and to Riley they meant almost nothing. She leaned back in the uncomfortable chair and let out a long sigh. It was clear from the oblivious look on the guidance counselor’s face that this was just the first round of impromptu meetings designed to intimidate her into having a life identical to every other infant shit out by this society.
“Riley . . .” Ms. Sweet wore thick glasses, and in them her eyes were magnified, displaying her absolute shock in badly applied mascara. “This is your future we’re talking about.”
Love Under Glasse Page 7
