The Last Beautiful Girl

by Nina Laurin

  There’s something deliberate about his casual tone, which instantly puts me on my guard. What do you want from me, Nick Swain?

  “Yes,” I say. “They are. Isn’t it great? And now I guess you want me to invite you over to see them. If that’s what you were going for, well—”

  “The truth is, what I was going for was to offer you a ride home, since class ended twenty minutes ago and no one’s here to pick you up.”

  My head whips around, and I realize he’s unfortunately right on the money. The car is still nowhere to be seen, and the schoolyard is now practically empty. Everyone else has gone home. In their own cars, presumably.

  “I can’t just take off,” I say, scampering to hide my embarrassment. “What if my mom shows up and I’m not here?”

  “You can just call her,” he says with an easy smile. My face grows hot. Of course I can just call her. I’m holding the phone in my hand as we speak. So that’s what I proceed to do, but the phone rings and rings into emptiness. Not switched off, but no one is picking up. I try my dad, but it goes to voicemail immediately.

  Cursing under my breath, I hang up. My only other option is a nice long walk, and I’m not wearing my comfiest shoes today.

  “So I take it that’s a yes?” he asks.

  Shit.

  I follow him across the parking lot to one of the few remaining cars. The shiny, new-model Range Rover takes me by surprise, but then he presses a button on the fob, the car beeps, and I realize that this is, indeed, my ride home. I should have seen it coming. Did I really think Nick would be driving a beat-up Tercel?

  Doing my best not to look the least bit impressed, I climb into the passenger seat.

  Nick starts the engine but lets the car idle. He’s looking at me pointedly until I start to fidget. “What?”

  “Seatbelt.”

  “Oh.” I hurriedly clip the seatbelt. “So much for the rebel bad boy, huh,” I say under my breath.

  “Hey, I don’t really care if you go flying through the windshield face-first. I just don’t want to get a ticket.”

  He drives out of the parking lot onto the street and takes off with surprising speed. Only after five minutes of awkward silence do I notice that, while he’s driving to the house the same way Taylor would, he never asked for directions or even used the map on his phone. It’s like he confidently knows the way…to my house.

  Fantastic.

  “I see you’ve driven this way before,” I say.

  He scoffs. “Everyone in town knows the way to the Granger house.”

  “Sounds ominous.”

  “People used to sneak in there on a dare, during the full moon or on Halloween,” he says with a shrug. “It’s a place of legend, no doubt about it.”

  I feel another stubborn little shiver. “What sort of legend?”

  “Do you really want to know? I mean…if the university folks didn’t see fit to tell you, maybe it’s better if you don’t.”

  I grit my teeth. “Just tell me.”

  “Oh, there’s a bit of a history about dead vagrants turning up on the premises.” He must see how my eyes go round because he chuckles. “The investigation concluded that they died of natural causes, though. They were pretty old, it seems. Just wandered in there, probably to find a place to sleep away from the elements, and died in their sleep. So nothing crazy. Except—”

  The stop sign pops up on the road ahead at an inopportune moment. He hits the brakes, the car stops, and he cuts himself off. When he hits the gas pedal again, he seems to have forgotten what he was talking about.

  Unless he’s doing it on purpose. He probably is.

  “Come on, Nick. Seriously?”

  “It’s not creepy or anything. Well—relatively not creepy. Just gross.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  Like it or not, I’m now invested in the story. He can tell, so he makes me wait. But his eyes have that spark of mischief.

  “You know there’s that patched ceiling on the second floor? And the bit that’s missing the hardwood floorboards?”

  I nod. It occurs to me to wonder how he knows all this.

  “Well, a few years ago, this one vagrant who died, an old woman, she fell through the floor on the fourth. Crashed through one more floor before going splat on the floorboards, where she…well…decomposed quite a bit before they found her. The mosaic floor rotted beneath her corpse. That’s why they took it out.”

  “Great,” I say. “How delightful.”

  “They never did identify her,” Nick says, like the story needed adding to it. “You can see it for yourself if you don’t believe me—it’s on the town police force’s website, under unsolved cases. They just know that it’s a woman, very old, probably into her eighties.”

  “What was a woman probably into her eighties doing out on the street, not to mention all the way out here?”

  He shakes his head. “Isa, Isa, you disappoint me. Did you know that elderly women are more likely to live in poverty than any other demographic?”

  I did know that because it’s one of Taylor’s favorite causes. She did a photo story on the subject that caused an uproar back in the day. I remember one shot from it—a gloomy, sepia-colored wide-angle picture of a hoarder’s trailer. “I knew that,” I say. “It’s just odd. If she’s from around town, then shouldn’t somebody know her?”

  “You’d think.”

  The house floats out of seemingly nowhere, taking me by surprise. Before I know it, he’s pulling up to the back entrance. Again, I didn’t have to tell him—he just somehow knew the front door was condemned.

  “Here you are, Your Majesty. Back at the castle. I’ll see you tomorrow at school?”

  “Sure,” I say. That’s it? I’ll see you tomorrow?

  Then again, what did I expect, a porch kiss?

  Did I want a porch kiss?

  “Are you getting out, or going home with me?”

  I jolt a little. But, one look at his face, and I know he’s teasing again. “No way,” I say. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I get out of the car, make my way up the winding path, and slip into the house. At once, I realize my parents are home: Dad’s favorite jazz is playing on the newly installed stereo, and smells of cooking waft from the kitchen.

  Wait. They’re both home, and no one bothered to pick me up from school? “Mom!” I yell out. “Dad?”

  Taylor emerges from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. I hadn’t seen her wear that apron in ages. The domestic-goddess thing isn’t really her…thing.

  “Why do you still have your shoes on?” she harps. “I asked you, no heels on the hardwood floor. And we’re going to eat in ten minutes. Tacos. So you might want to change out of your white shirt too.”

  I feel dizzy and disoriented. “Heels? On the floor? You forgot to pick me up from school today.”

  Taylor gives me a short look of confusion, then collects herself and rolls her eyes. “Ah. A joke. I see. Well, I’m happy that you’re in a joking mood, but you still have to ditch your shoes. Them’s the rules.”

  “Mom,” I say. “I’m absolutely serious. You didn’t come pick me up! I waited for like twenty minutes…”

  “Okay, Isa, ha, ha, ha. Hilarious.”

  “I had to ask someone in my class for a ride home,” I say, “which was embarrassing enough, thank you very much. And I know you feel bad about it, but pretending like it didn’t happen doesn’t make it better.”

  “What’s gotten into you?” By the look on her face, I can tell that she’s not pranking me; she genuinely has no idea what I’m on about. “I got there early today. And you were there, and I drove you home, and that was twenty minutes ago. You went up to your room. Are you okay, Isa? Are you drunk?”

  “Drunk? I’m not drunk. You’re the one who—”

  I cut myself off midsentence.
There’s no point.

  “You know what, never mind. I’m going to go change.” I kick off my shoes right there, pick them up, and walk past her, barefoot.

  All the way up the stairs, I feel her suspicious gaze on the back of my neck.

  Fourteen

  On Saturday morning, Alexa shows up at the house, and, this time, she came prepared. It takes us close to a half hour to lug her trunk of equipment up the stairs to the fourth floor.

  It helps that my parents are at the university. Dad is preparing for some sort of fancy event, and my mom is working on her course materials. We have the house to ourselves.

  The week went by without any more weirdness, and I’ve had time to calm down and start turning the lights out in my room again. I still have no idea if Taylor genuinely thought she did pick me up or was just playing a really good, but really tasteless, prank.

  It seems like Alexa also brought the world’s longest extension cord, and now Isabella’s portrait room has functioning professional lights. The first thing Alexa does is haul all the old trunks out of the storage room and onto the center of the floor.

  I don’t tell her that I spent long minutes inspecting the floorboards with a flashlight, trying to find where they’d been patched. Assuming Nick’s story wasn’t just something he made up to scare me, because he is, of course, a world-class jerk. But nothing at all seems to be wrong with the floor up here. No matter how hard I stomped over every inch of the surface, everything seemed reliable, every footfall resulted in a heavy thud that only solid flooring makes. No one has fallen through it—this much I can guarantee.

  Then how to explain that I did find the old woman on the police website, just like he said? The explanatory text was brief.

  The Amory Police Service seeks the public’s help in identifying this woman. The subject is a female in her 80s, Caucasian, possibly with some scarring on her face.

  And there’s the date she was found and one of those robot reconstructions of what she might have looked like. But, like most such portraits, it’s a weird composite of traits that barely looks like an actual person.

  He probably saw it and made up the rest of the story. Just to mess with me.

  “Hey, Isa, check this out,” Alexa calls out. I turn around just in time to see something like a giant bird’s wing flying at my face. I freeze up instead of reaching out to catch it like she meant me to do, and so it hits me in the face with its feathers and its dust. It’s probably another theater costume, a big black velvet cloak trimmed with black feathers that look like they came from a raven.

  “Probably a chicken.” Alexa chuckles. “Dyed.”

  I inspect the cloak with apprehension. Sure enough, Isabella is wearing it in a painting. She’s decked out like a Disney villain thirty years before Disney was even a thing, glaring from the canvas with that penetrating green stare, her hair up with a diadem studded with black pearls woven in. You gotta give her credit for creativity.

  “Isa, look! How cool is this?” Alexa is taking the diadem out of the trunk. The dust and cobwebs dull its shine. Alexa brushes them away.

  “This must be worth a fortune,” I say.

  “It’s costume,” Alexa says, weighing the diadem in her hand. “Paste. And fake pearls. And, by the way, you know what we’re doing today, right?”

  I let her do my makeup, which takes forever. She spends a half hour on each eye, I swear, and finally swipes on what seems like way too much lipstick that’s way too dark.

  “Are you going to let me see myself before we take pictures?”

  “Nope,” she answers blithely. “Now we just have to find a nice backdrop. There’s that beautiful arched entryway downstairs, leading to the living room. Since your parents aren’t home anyway…”

  We head downstairs. Today, Alexa came equipped with a real camera, the kind of clunky beast that Taylor would appreciate and that probably costs several thousand dollars. Looking at that giant lens that gleams like an oil spill, I feel intimidated.

  “Don’t think about the camera,” Alexa is saying. All the while she’s snapping away, the clicks of the shutter like insect wings.

  “How should I pose?”

  “Just do the same thing Isabella does.”

  So I position myself in the archway and try to do exactly that.

  “No,” Alexa says, cringing. “Come on. Stop doing that weird America’s Next Top Model thing and try to be real.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Your face looks like a mannequin. Goth Barbie. And I want you to look like Isabella Granger, great artist’s muse, owner of the coolest damn mansion in the state.”

  It’s easy for her to say. Isabella in that painting looked alluring, seductive, powerful. What the hell do I know about being powerful? Or alluring and seductive, for that matter. I never even had a real boyfriend, for god’s sake.

  “Pretend Nick Swain is here,” Alexa says.

  I puff with laughter. “Nick?”

  “Well, you like him, don’t you?”

  Faced with the directness of the question, I’m a little lost. Do I like him, actually? Do I want to seduce Nick Swain?

  “Okay, so no. Forget about seducing anyone. Imagine your old theater troupe standing here. They’re gazing at you admiringly, and you’re thinking, I’m so much better off without you bitches.”

  “Uh. That’s not—”

  “Just do it, Isa!”

  I try. She clicks the shutter.

  “Good. Not great, but good.”

  “What do you mean, not great? Are you going to let me see or not?”

  We both hear the door open and turn toward it at the same time. It would have been too late to try to do anything, anyhow; we’ve been caught in flagrante. Taylor comes to a stop in the middle of the hallway, right underneath the chandelier.

  “I forgot some equipment,” she says, looking from me to Alexa and back. “And I see you’re keeping busy. Where did all this come from?”

  “The costume department at theater club,” Alexa lies flawlessly.

  At first, I can’t tell if my mom buys it or not. She looks doubtful. “And what’s up with the setup? Looks sort of familiar. Isa, why are you made up like Marilyn Manson?”

  My face flushes. It would be too easy to throw Alexa under the bus and say it was all her idea, because it’s technically true. “It’s a school project,” I say. I just blurt it out. No idea where it came from. School project? But the lies unfurl so easily in my brain that it seems like my mouth suddenly can’t keep up. “Extra credit. For history. When our teacher found out we lived in the Granger house, she just couldn’t resist. We’re doing this whole big photo-essay on Isabella, the person she was and the art she inspired. All the girls in class are participating.”

  I see Alexa’s face on the periphery of my vision. Her eyes pop out of her head—she’s at least as surprised by this sudden rush of imagination as I am.

  “That’s very interesting. Maybe there’s stuff in the house you can use?” Taylor looks relieved. Relieved that she won’t have to play disciplinarian again, no doubt. What could be more noble than a school project? Only a school project for extra credit. “I know there’s that whole room upstairs full of her old things. As long as you’re careful…”

  “Wow, Ms. Brixton. Thank you!” Alexa gushes. “That would be amazing. It’s so hard to find the right props.”

  “Just be careful, please,” Taylor says.

  “We will be!”

  “Good. Now carry on, girls. I don’t want to bother you.”

  She walks away, and we both stand perfectly still, listening to her fading footsteps in awe, waiting until it’s safe to talk out of her earshot.

  “Wait,” Alexa finally whispers. “Did you just—”

  “Got her to give us permission to use the room,” I say, still incredulous.

&
nbsp; “How did you come up with that?”

  I only shake my head. I look in the direction Taylor went, lost in thought. How easy that was. A little lie, and I got what I wanted. Somehow, I forget to doubt and wonder. This is what I wanted, right? I now realize that yes, of course it is.

  There’s nothing I want more.

  Click, click.

  “There,” says Alexa, looking at the screen on the back of the camera with satisfaction. “This. This is the look I wanted. You nailed it. Congrats, Isa.”

  “Show me!”

  “Oh, no. You’ll see it tonight. Once I upload it to Instagram.”

  * * *

  As soon as I shut the door behind Alexa, I feel like just sitting down on the floor by the exit and not moving. All my energy drains at once, and I find myself without purpose, just floating through time. My skin tingles, and my eyes feel dry. I rub them only to see smears of black all over my knuckles when I pull my hands away. The makeup. I really need to wash my face.

  This thought is what gets me back on my feet and in action. I go upstairs, to the bathroom, where I put my phone on the counter next to the sink, turn on the tap, and grab Taylor’s new, overpriced facial cleanser that promises clean pores and a burst of freshness. I feel a touch of skepticism. This is something new, something that’s not like her at all. When it came to skincare, Taylor believed in coconut oil and Cetaphil. She said she refused to fall for the marketing hype that tricked women into paying bank for tiny tubes of toxic chemicals.

  Yet here we are, I guess. I lather up and scrub my face, but, when I look up, I’m in for a shock. My bewildered face stares back at me from the mirror, crisscrossed by streaks of grayish black and red and glitter. Clearly, Alexa used stage makeup on me, heavy and oil-based, and all the cleanser did was smear it around. Makeup-tinted water runs down my neck and onto my shirt collar.

  With a sigh, I start the bath. Without waiting for the tub to fill completely, I climb in, scrubbing my face with plain soap. Iridescent oil rings tinted with pigment float on the water’s surface before dissolving completely. My pores finally feel clean.