Beautiful

by Amy Reed

  I hand Sarah the sweatshirt and she says, “What’s this?” and I say, “A sweatshirt, dummy. Wear it.” She puts it on and it makes her look even smaller because the sleeves are about a foot too long.

  “Your boyfriend smells bad,” says Sarah as she sniffs the armpit of the giant sweatshirt.

  “All boys smell bad,” I say, and she nods her head like we have just figured out something very important.

  We are sitting still. We are watching the boys skate back and forth. They occasionally jump or slide on a curb or a rail, something concrete or metal. It is only interesting when someone falls down. Ethan sees us watching, turns and heads toward us fast. We scream like we’re supposed to and he stops just before he runs into us. He puts his arm around me and starts kissing. I can taste the stale cigarette smoke on his tongue. I can smell his sweat. I can feel his wet armpits resting on the shoulders of my brand-new coat.

  “How do I look, baby?” he says. He’s breathing hard and steam is rising off his body. He’s posing for us, puffing his chest out.

  “Good,” I say. “You look really good.”

  “Cool,” he says, and he skates off to join the other boys going back and forth.

  This is the routine, except Alex is usually sitting with us and not kissing the fat guy with scabies. Usually, we are faking how impressed we are. But today, I turn to Sarah and roll my eyes. I make her giggle. I can do it because Alex is busy getting her face sucked off. I can do it because she’s not watching.

  “This is so stupid,” says Sarah. “Why are we sitting here freezing to death?”

  The guys are taking a break from skating now. They are tagging their names on the concrete pillars with spray paint.

  “They’re like dogs pissing on poles to mark their territory,” I say. Ethan has already claimed most of the poles. Red and blue and green and black, Aleph all over.

  “I have the alpha dog,” I say.

  “What does that make you?” Sarah says. She’s swinging her feet like a little girl, drowning in the giant sweatshirt.

  I look at her very seriously. “His bitch,” I say. She laughs timidly and I laugh back. She laughs again and so do I, and then we are both laughing as hard as we can. We are laughing so hard we forget it’s cold, we forget the rain, we forget Alex and Ethan and everyone else. There are just our faces and everything out of focus behind them. There are just our voices drowning everything out.

  Sarah is trying to catch her breath. “That’s a double entendre,” I tell her. She screws up her face, which makes me laugh again.

  “Why are you friends with us?” she asks, finally breathing.

  “What?” I am starting to feel normal again. I smoke some more.

  “You’re too smart to be friends with us. You should be hanging out with those kids in your class.”

  “I hate those kids in my class. They’re all boring assholes,” I tell her, blowing smoke in her face.

  “Why do you hang out with us?” she says.

  “Because I like you.”

  I hand her the pipe and she inhales, holds her breath, exhales slowly. “You like me?” she says.

  “Of course I like you.”

  “You like him?” she says, nodding toward Ethan, who is attempting a handstand. I shrug my shoulders.

  “You like her?” she says, motioning toward Alex, who is under the sleeping-bag coat, kneeling in front of Wes with her face in his lap.

  I look at Sarah and she meets my eyes and all of a sudden I feel like crying. I feel like telling her everything I have ever thought, every secret I’ve ever had, like that could somehow make all of this go away and we would not be freezing, we would not be watching the boys pee on things like dogs, we would not be breathing spray paint and exhaust fumes, we would not be sitting here pretending we are like these people, not like Alex with her face in someone’s lap, not like the boys going back and forth, not like all these people going nowhere.

  “You miss where you used to live,” Sarah says as she reloads the pipe.

  I shrug my shoulders again. I feel like I miss something, but it couldn’t be that. I couldn’t miss living in the middle of nowhere and having no friends. I couldn’t miss being alone all the time.

  “What were you like there?” she says.

  “Different,” I say. “Boring.”

  “How?” she asks, passing me the pipe. I inhale, feel the smoke softening the tightness in my throat and my chest.

  “I wasn’t very popular,” I say, which is the closest thing to the truth I’ve ever told anyone. “And I was good. I never did anything. I didn’t know anything about anything.”

  Sarah has a blank look on her face, and I’m afraid for a moment that I said too much. But after a while, she smiles and says, “That sounds nice.”

  “Yeah.” I am thinking about the photos, the ones that are ashes, the people I’m not allowed to miss.

  “It’d be nice to not know anything,” Sarah says.

  “Like if you could just go backward,” I say.

  “Forget everything.”

  “I bet you can make yourself forget,” I say. “If you try really hard, you can make the memories disappear. You know how humans only use one-tenth of their brain? I bet if you just thought really hard you could control everything in your brain, even the subconscious stuff like in dreams.” I realize I am talking like a stoned person. “Does that sound stupid?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. “I can do that.”

  “What?”

  “Make the memories go away. Make it like it never happened.”

  Sarah’s shivering again and I can’t stand it. I can’t stand her so small and sad and freezing. I pull her hand out of the sweatshirt sleeve, squeeze it in mine, feel it tiny and bony and fragile and cold, feel it squeeze back.

  “You’re going to freeze to death,” I tell her.

  “I know,” she says.

  “Let’s go home.”

  Her body tenses. “I don’t want to,” she says.

  “Not to your house, to my house.”

  She almost whispers when she says, “Really?” like she’s afraid I’m playing a joke on her, like she’s afraid to get her hopes up.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I think my mom might actually cook tonight.”

  I stand up and Sarah stands with me. “Is she a good cook?” she asks.

  “Not really,” I say. We are walking now. “But it’s better than microwave dinners.”

  “I’d be happy with microwave dinners,” she says. We are almost gone. We are at the part where the overpass turns. We are almost out of sight.

  “Hey, where you going?” Ethan yells just loud enough that we can’t pretend we didn’t hear him.

  “Home!” I yell back. He starts skating over. We should have walked faster.

  “I thought we were gonna go driving later,” he says, which really means parking behind an abandoned building or at the end of a rural road so he can fuck me.

  “We’re not feeling too good,” I say. “Probably the flu.”

  “Yeah,” Sarah says. “Like we’re going to throw up.”

  “Gross,” Ethan says, his face twisted in disgust like the thought of me puking has forced him to reevaluate my attractiveness. I think about kissing him good-bye, but decide against it.

  “Bye,” I say, backing away.

  “Bye,” says Sarah. We are almost gone.

  “Wait a minute,” Ethan says. “Where are you going with my sweater?” He has this annoying way of calling sweatshirts sweaters, like he’s too stupid to know the difference.

  “Sarah forgot her coat,” I tell him. “Let her borrow your sweatshirt and she’ll bring it back tomorrow.”

  “No,” he says. “Then I’ll freeze.”

  “It’s okay,” Sarah says. “I don’t need it.” She lifts her hand to the zipper and I grab it, pull it back down.

  “See, she doesn’t need it,” says Ethan.

  “Yes she does.”

  “Tell her to give me my sweatshirt,
” he says, raising his voice.

  “No,” I say, and it is the loudest thing that has ever come out of my mouth. There is something thick and hot and boiling up out of my stomach, into my chest, into my throat and filling my head, throbbing, red, heavy. Something is filling me up and the noise of it is so loud I cannot think. I am bursting. I would explode right now if something touched me.

  Sarah and Ethan look at me funny, like they don’t recognize me, and I realize I have done something very wrong, that whatever entered my body and moved my mouth must leave or something terrible will happen. I must make it go away. Just like Sarah, I can make things inside go away.

  Leave, I tell the thing inside me. Die, I tell it, and just like that, everything is back to normal, like nothing happened. Then it is just skinny, quiet me again, numb and exhausted, with nothing inside but air.

  “Okay,” Ethan says. “Whatever.” He has the same look on his face as when he imagined me puking.

  “Thanks,” says Sarah, not looking at him or me.

  I have to kiss him now. I have to make him forget the voice that came out. I have to remind him that I am who he wants me to be, not someone who tells him “No.” I pull him close. I bite his ear. I put my mouth on his. I put my hand on his crotch, squeeze gently, feel him hot and sweaty through baggy pants. When his breath gets heavy, it is safe to leave. I back away. I say, “Bye.”

  He looks at me, heavy-lidded, and says, “Are you sure you don’t want to go driving?”

  “Tomorrow,” I say. I blow him a kiss, turn around, and start walking.

  We walk in silence for a while, Sarah slightly behind me. When we get as far as we can go under the overpass, we stop.

  “We didn’t say good-bye,” Sarah says, looking out at the sky.

  “She was busy,” I say.

  “She was watching when we left,” she says. “She didn’t look happy.”

  I consider this and I know I should be nervous. But I am too tired to care. “I’d look unhappy too if I just had Wes’s crusty dick in my mouth for the last half hour,” I say, and Sarah smiles and we put our hoods over our heads. She grabs my hand and we step forward into the gray blanket of rain.

  (TEN)

  We run the last couple of blocks to my house and our shoes match the rhythm of each other’s squishing. By the time we get home, we are drenched and shivering, our faces lined with streams of mascara, our hair matted and plastered to our heads. I can barely get the key in the door because my hands are frozen. I have never been so happy to be home in my life.

  “Oh my,” Mom says as we burst through the door.

  “Hi, Mom,” I say as I start peeling off my layers. “This is Sarah.”

  “Sarah, you’re shaking,” she says, and Sarah just stands there. I can hear her teeth chattering.

  “You need to get those clothes off.” Sarah flinches when Mom puts her hand on the zipper, but she lets her pull the sweatshirt off. She has that look on her face like her brain has gone somewhere else.

  “Let’s go to my room,” I say. She snaps out of it a little when I pull her arm.

  “Nice meeting you,” she says to my mom.

  “You too,” Mom says, like she doesn’t quite know what to think of her. “You girls get into something warm and I’ll put your clothes in the dryer.” Something’s gotten into her and she’s trying to act like Supermom. These phases never last for long.

  “Thank you,” Sarah says, still half zombie.

  I show Sarah to my room and get clean towels from the bathroom. When I get back, she’s just standing there in the middle of my room like she’s afraid of touching anything.

  “It’s warm in here,” she says.

  “Here.” I throw her a towel and she doesn’t catch it.

  Normally I’d be shy, but I’m too cold to care if Sarah sees me naked. I start taking off my clothes without trying to hide anything. Sarah turns her back to me and starts slowly undressing, hunched over like she’s trying to make herself as small as possible. I dry myself off, wrap the towel around me and start looking through my dresser for pajamas that aren’t too embarrassing.

  When I turn around, Sarah is facing the wall. Her shirt is off and I can see her pale, naked back with one long scar running down the middle, a half-inch-thick ridge of discolored skin, not a scar like I’ve ever had, not the kind from cuts and scrapes that disappear after a few months. This is the kind of scar that doesn’t heal, that will last forever.

  “Sarah,” I whisper.

  She wraps the towel around her and turns her head to look at me. She tries to look me in the eyes, but her stare falls into space, into something that won’t look back at her. There is a look in her eyes that is intended for me, a kind of begging for me to say nothing more.

  “Which ones do you want?” I finally say. I hold out the pajamas in my hands. There is red flannel, blue-and-green plaid, and half-hidden beneath them, fuzzy baby blue with pink sheep.

  Sarah smiles, straightens a little, and takes a few small steps toward me.

  “The sheep ones,” she says. I hand them to her and we get dressed in silence.

  Dinner is pot roast, and Mom is wearing an apron. Dad’s seat is empty, as it is most nights, but Mom has set a plate and silverware and napkin there, like she’s still hoping tonight will be different. Sarah is saying please and thank you for everything, like she has no idea how to eat dinner with people, but she’s smiling like this is the best Friday night she’s ever had. I wonder if she’s ever sat down to dinner like this. I wonder if she’s thinking things are always like this with other people, that moms cook pot roast, wear aprons, help you out of wet clothes and put them in the dryer.

  Mom turns on the fireplace and the fake logs glow red. “Sarah,” she says. “It’s nice that you could join us for dinner.”

  “Thank you. I mean, yes, I’m glad, too,” Sarah says, trying to cut her meat in pajama sleeves that are too long.

  “I wish you would have your friends over more often,” Mom says to me.

  “I’ll come,” Sarah says, and we look at her. Her eyes grow wide and she nearly drops her fork.

  “Well, you’re welcome anytime,” Mom says, and Sarah looks down at her plate like she’s embarrassed for speaking, embarrassed for wanting anything.

  “How was school today?” Mom says, and we both say, “Fine.”

  “Still getting A’s?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I’m proud of you,” she says, but she doesn’t mean it. Showing your kids you care was probably today’s talk show topic.

  Mom babbles about going to the grocery store, how she had to drive around three times to find a parking spot. She talks about the good deal she got on the roast, how boxes of cereal were two for the price of one. I wonder if these are the kinds of things she talks about with my dad when they are alone in their bedroom. I don’t blame him for staying at work all night.

  Sarah listens like this is the most exciting news she’s ever heard, like she’s trying to take everything in, like she’s trying to store it away so she can save it for later. I kick her leg under the table and she kicks me back.

  “How did you girls meet?” my mom says. “Are you in Cassie’s classes?”

  “Um, no,” Sarah says with her mouth full.

  “She just moved here,” I say. “She’s Alex’s half sister.”

  “Oh,” Mom says. “The mysterious Alex, who Cassie’s always going someplace with but who we’ve barely met.” She looks at me like a caricature of a stern mom, like she’s practicing, probably something else she learned on TV.

  “Where did you move from?” she says, smiling to herself about her performance.

  “Mukilteo,” says Sarah, her smile suddenly gone.

  “What made you move here?” Mom says, and Sarah looks down at her plate and pushes mushy carrots around with her fork.

  “Her dad’s in the military,” I say. “He had to go overseas, so she came to live with her mom until he gets back.”

  “How int
eresting,” Mom says. “Where’s he stationed?”

  Sarah looks at me, pleading.

  “Somewhere in the Middle East,” I say. “Right, Sarah?”

  She nods her head slowly.

  “Oh, honey, you look so sad,” Mom says. “You must miss him.”

  Sarah nods again, like a robot.

  “We’ll stop talking about it then,” Mom says. Sarah is looking out the window like she wants to disappear.

  “Can we be excused?” I say.

  “You’re already finished?” Mom says.

  “Yes.” I look at Sarah. She nods her head.

  “There’s ice cream,” Mom says.

  “Maybe later,” I say.

  I grab Sarah’s arm to take her to my room, leaving Mom alone at the empty dinner table staring at the fake fireplace. “Thank you,” Sarah says as I drag her away, and Mom looks up, her eyes full of weak gratitude.

  “Sorry,” I say when we get to my room.

  “Your mom hates me,” Sarah says.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. She’s quiet for a moment. “She’s nice. You have a nice mom.”

  “She’s not always like that,” I say. “She was on her best behavior tonight.”

  “But it’s nice that you have her. It’s nice she’s like that sometimes.”

  “Yeah,” I say, and I realize that my parents at their worst are probably better than anything Sarah’s ever known.

  Sarah sits on my bed and pats the blankets around her. “I like your room,” she says. “It’s better than my room.” She sleeps in the room where Alex’s father hung himself, in the room covered with graffiti and filled with broken things.

  I open my closet and find the water bottle hidden behind the backpack Alex told me to get ready for Portland. All I’ve managed to pack are some clean underwear and socks and a toothbrush. All I’ve managed to steal is forty-three dollars.

  I hand Sarah the water bottle full of clear liquor I’ve stolen from Mom’s liquor cabinet, the rum, vodka, and gin she doesn’t drink but keeps around in case of company we never have.