by Schow, Ryan
It seems like the more I try to hide, the more out in the open me and all my flaws become. In a world where every day feels like opposite day, my life has become an all hours nightmare. Girls like me, they try hiding in plain sight. Like they’re magicians or something. Unfortunately, yours truly is a horrible freaking magician because I can’t hide from anyone to save my life.
2
I am a sixteen year old human platypus. A sad, sad child fashioned from the scraps of swine and other ugly girls that, put together, equals a child most parents pretend is not an embarrassment. But they are. I am. You would think me having a Spanish goddess for a mother would give me better genes. You would be wrong. My mother and I share no physical similarities. The way we look like we’re not related at all, one might assume I was plucked from some impoverished adoption agency that houses the sort of mongrel children no one in their right mind would want. Yet my parents swear I’m not adopted. With my own eyes I’ve seen my birth certificate. I still think it’s a fake. It has to be.
My name is Savannah Van Duyn, but sometimes people call me Vannie, even though I think it’s a stupid name. The nickname comes from Margaret, my gorgeous, wretched mother. She says calling me Vannie requires less effort than using my full name. She doesn’t like me putting her out. This is a gosh damn riot considering I have become superhuman in my ability to hide in plain sight. They say you’re supposed to love your mother. That’s what they say.
Aside from the obvious discomfort of looking like a grotesque Vanessa Hudgins (and that’s me being generous), I possess no redeeming qualities and honest to God, I’m certain Margaret secretly dreams of putting me up for adoption. Maybe an adoption agency wasn’t part of my past, but no one’s saying it can’t be part of my future. Some days, when Margaret is practically manic, there’s that part of me that aches for her to give me up. All things being equal, the way I look has become an impossible burden heaped upon her narrow shoulders, her self-proclaimed cross to bear. Maybe my cross, too. Once I tried defending my appearance by saying looks aren’t everything and her eyes started to water. She went in the other room and cried for like twenty minutes straight.
Who knew my looks would elicit such pain?
At fifteen, my therapist tried telling me looks are only skin deep. He said this like he really believed it, and right then I said we’d need a refund. Or maybe I said, “Check, please.” Either way, these aren’t the kind of clichés you hear told to beautiful people. My therapist, what he should have said was, “Margaret wanted a beautiful child and you’re not it, so let’s go from there.” I could have dealt with that. Really, I could.
My parents are Silicon Valley power couple Atticus and Margaret Van Duyn. Margaret is shallow enough to define herself by her looks, and since she is a much prettier version of Eva Longoria from that once-upon-a-time show Desperate Housewives—if you can imagine—she is always using her face and my father’s money to get into magazines and on television. My father, however, is brilliant. A certified genius when it comes to all things computer and internet related. Last year, Wired magazine called him the next Andrew Zuckerberg and said his social networking site, SocioSphere.com, will eventually do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace. The stock value doubled. Even though my father has that goofy Bill Gates look working against him, I’m not embarrassed by him, and that certainly doesn’t mean I don’t love him. I do. Just the way he is. Most of the time, though, I’m sure he is embarrassed about me and this makes me sad.
You might be wondering what makes me different than any other regular high school girl my age and let me say, for starters, a lot. My parents being famous billionaires, I believe it’s fair to say there’s no such thing as privacy. I could endure the paparazzi and the press if I looked like Taylor Swift or Carrie Underwood, or even the younger, more wholesome version of Miley Cyrus, but this isn’t the case. Think of me as the direct opposite of those girls. If they had my looks, they would never want to be photographed. Of course, when you’re the daughter of the multi-billionaire founder of the social networking site predicted to rule world, you lose all anonymity and every part of your life becomes subject to ridicule. The grocery store tabloids take no shame in using my unfortunate looks to rattle my parents for things they never did. Margaret says making people look bad is how the middle-class flips the affluent the bird and it would be comical if only it weren’t so paltry.
My father doesn’t know why we even care. He doesn’t get it. If you photograph me on my best day, I’m still the punch line of a dozen jokes some jerk has yet to tell. What my father doesn’t say—what he can’t say—is no parent wants to see their beastly child plastered in all her unflattering glory on the front of The Enquirer looking like a freaking bush pig. Margaret, however, obsesses over my appearance nearly as much as her own. Lately she has gone off the deep end and her psychosis is flaring.
The way she obsesses over her appearance, Margaret has gone from shallow to totally OCD. She was always pretty in a reserved kind of way, but lately she has become overly beautiful to the point of looking plastic, like some doll you want to put on a shelf and stare at for hours. Any more overpriced surgeries and me and my father will no longer recognize her. The way she’s changed, her driver’s license could be a photo of her homely older sister if you didn’t know better. Of course, she would never admit this. Those one time surgeries like breast implants and vaginal rejuvenation (because giving birth to me ruined her “lady parts”) were nothing if not an absolute necessity. And the liposuction and Botox addictions? Totally normal. While chewing on Xanax and Vicodin and choking them down with three hundred dollar bottles of champagne, Margaret would claim she’s on a personal journey to heal herself from body dysmorphic disorder. She would say she’s becoming her best self. Correcting Nature’s imperfections.
Just last week I suggested for the millionth time she get her own therapist, like yesterday. All she could say was, “When I finally look the way I want, I won’t act so insane. Besides, no shrink in the world is going to get me into a size zero, or take ten years off my face the way cosmetic surgery can.”
I would drop down and do pushups for Jesus to just once be able to squeeze into a size thirteen. Size zero is impossible! A skinny girl’s dream. But, Margaret, she does this thing where she tries to sound so reassuring. The way she says it’s possible that I won’t always be chunky and unattractive, she says this like she’s gunning for an Oscar. She would say she’s being encouraging, but the way she’s so obviously working to veil her disgust, it’s making me mental. The sad thing is, I’m not even that fat. Just sort of overweight by society’s standards, not that this matters much to Margaret. For heaven’s sake, the woman is sneaking diet pills into my oatmeal.
3
My father made his first billion when I was ten. We moved into a nine million dollar estate on Laurel Glen Drive in the rolling hills next to Palo Alto’s Arastradero Preserve a few years later. Our house was promptly featured in some upscale magazine you have to say using a French accent. Ever since we moved into the neighborhood, we’ve been members of the famed Palo Alto Hills Golf and Country Club. Margaret says she’s a better person because of it. I still think it’s a waste of money considering my father doesn’t even golf. He would say he’s a man of many talents, but hitting a dimpled ball with an overpriced stick from one hole to the next just doesn’t make sense. He once said, “My time is too valuable to waste riding around in a golf cart drinking ten dollar beers.”
The club has a pretty decent pool that kids aren’t always peeing in, and usually there isn’t anyone around, which makes it perfect. Of course, it’s when I’m in my swimsuit that the memories of Margaret’s cruelty start up inside my head. She’s famous for saying things like, “Any girl whose big fat gut sticks out further than her boobies shouldn’t be seen in a one-piece swimsuit. Or even a two-piece for that matter. And she most certainly shouldn’t be out in public unless she wears cute baggy clothes, which really—if you think about it—is an oxymoron.�
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Yeah, that’s exactly how she talks.
Since my father works fifteen hour days, I spend most of my time with Margaret, which is to say my life is insufferable. The way she glares at me—those dark eyes simmering with disapproval—if you saw it, you would understand my body image issues. You would know why my self-confidence is suffering so bad it needs to see Dr. Phil. At least Margaret has the country club, and her friends. But me? I’m a slave to her and her ridiculous schedule.
At the club, she wastes most of her mornings and half the afternoon acting pretentious with the other club hags. They drink Cristal champaign and eat things like chocolate dipped strawberries and sliced kiwis in the Members’ dining room, and at least once a week she swears Chef Orlin Marcus is her new BFF. For a long time my father twisted with insecurity, certain she was having an affair with one of the golf pros, or the chef. He paid to have her watched. A private detective maybe, or perhaps a close friend anxious to catch her doing something slutty. Whatever the case, he was relieved to learn she was just having lunch, and occasionally buying OxyContin from Brenda Pierce, an emaciated-looking clothing designer who lives up the street. The drugs my father could stomach; infidelity…not so much.
At the time, my brightest dreams were about getting Margaret out of my life, so I said things like, “I’m sure she’s cheating, dad. I’m positive.” I said, “Is she wearing your cologne today? Because that sure isn’t perfume I smell.” Eventually he stopped confiding in me.
When he would confront her about the drugs, they would have the kinds of fights even the deaf could hear. She fell apart for awhile. Some days, after watching her stumble around the house in a bawling rage with her mascara licking black trails down her cheek implants and fillers, I feared whatever sickness she had I would eventually inherit. I’ve been fighting that fear for years. When I finally broke down and asked about all the sobbing she said she was sad because plastic surgery could make you pretty but it couldn’t make you taller. I laughed so hard tears streamed down my own face and my stomach started to cramp. The expression she made, the resentment boiling inside those watery eyes, talk about priceless!
I said, “That’s what you’re upset about? Your height? You’re five foot six!”
“In my heart I know I should be five ten,” she said. She was wiping the rivers of makeup from her cheeks with such disregard I saw flashes of the original Lady Gaga in her look.
I laughed so hard I had to sit down.
“I’m a five foot four inch disappointment with frizzy hair, pale eyes and gigantic muffin tops and you’re the one losing it?” I said. “Oh my God, you’re so pathetic.” It was the first time I really talked back to her and it was oh so liberating!
She crossed the room and slapped my face with such force I snorted out an even more boisterous laugh. I couldn’t help myself.
“I’m guessing dad took away the cocaine, too?”
Oh yeah, Margaret’s not afraid to huff a little blow when the occasion warrants it. The last time I caught her powdering her nose, she said, “Who needs Jenny Craig when I can ride the white pony?” She was tanked when she said this. Then again, she’s pretty much always tanked.
Standing before me, her face practically in flames, she said, “You just wait.”
“Wait for what?” I asked, touching my face where she struck me. “For you to hit me again? For you to realize I’m yours and dad’s worst characteristics combined, but it’s pretty little Margaret who’s doing all the crying? Honestly, you’re giving me polyps right now.”
She started to say something, but closed her mouth and opted for silence and smoldering looks instead. I stood and pushed past her, heading for my bedroom. Then, because I just had to say it, I turned and said, “You should clean yourself up, your face is a horror show.”
What I said about my parents giving me their worst genes is true. Painfully true. I’ve been cursed with their most unflattering characteristics, and for this reason alone God and I are no longer friends. To this day, He’s done me exactly no favors. Not with my terrible mother, not with this pig-sloth body of mine and certainly not with this disastrous face.
4
So everyone likes being around positive, upbeat people who talk about sunshine and birds and the beauty of God and how much they love life, but lately this just isn’t me. Margaret says I’m unhappy because my spiritual body is in conflict with my physical body. When I asked her to speak English, she said, “Your spiritual body doesn’t need Weight Watchers the way your physical body does. Your soul is thin, but your body is portly. Therefore, conflict.”
“That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said to me, Margaret, and that’s really saying something,” I said. “I’m not conflicted, I’m in pain. It’s your relentless disapproval. It’s just too much to take anymore. And I’m barely even fat.”
“Everyone I know talks about the pain they’re in,” she reasoned while perusing the latest Allure magazine on the new couch. “You should get over it already.” She held up the opened magazine to show me a teenage model with heavy purple and black makeup and said, “Do you think I’m still young enough to pull this off?”
I ignored the magazine. Starring at her, emanating tsunamis of disdain, I said, “Everyone you know is on drugs to dull the pain. Just like you. What do you really know about pain that you haven’t chemicalized into nothing the second it appeared?”
She looked up at me, rolled her eyes, then dropped the magazine on the table. “Pain,” she explained, talking to me the way you would explain physics to a retard, “is an emotion with teeth. It leaves scars. Don’t tell me I don’t know pain.”
“It’s not the pain that’s leaving me scarred, Margaret. You’re doing that all on your own.”
She was on her third drink and her fourth magazine and it wasn’t even eleven in the morning. “That’s why I pay for your therapy,” she said, sipping her neon-colored Appletini. “It’s me taking responsibility for my actions.”
“You can’t just treat people horribly then dump them in therapy and act like it’s a confession and you’re absolved from all your bullsh—”
“Don’t you dare use that word!” she interrupted. I thought about it, but didn’t.
5
The way people remember their traumas—like the first day of school, or when they couldn’t stop scratching their chicken pox, or that time they got food poisoning and they sat there on the toilet, crying, sweating, dying inside—that’s how I recall with exact clarity my earliest memory. The way this recollection crucified me at a cellular level, it has become embroiled in my DNA. My therapist calls it my defining tragedy. I don’t disagree. He thinks my traumas are the root of my unhappiness. What almost came out of my mouth was, “Dude, I’m fifteen. Unhappy is my state of mind. It’s what I do.” What stopped me was the possibility that he was right. I couldn’t stop thinking about my earliest tragedy. I still can’t.
So I was three years old, or perhaps four, when a friend of Margaret’s slid a local newspaper with our family picture on it across the table and asked if I was adopted. She wasn’t discrete. The word “adopted” stayed in my mind for years. A couple years later, when its meaning became clear, I lay curled on my bed sobbing for two days. Margaret never noticed.
Back then, as part of the media blitz coinciding with the launch of SocioSphere, the local newspaper printed a large picture of our family calling it an “interest piece.” This was the picture. My father and I looked awful. Margaret, on the other hand, never had a problem striking the perfect pose, or flashing that sensuous Hollywood smile for the cameras. The story gained traction and before long—above our family photo—was the very bold, almost accusatory headline: ANOTHER MILLIONAIRE ADOPTION? You would have to be blind not to see the sour taste of Margaret’s future burning in the sockets of her eyes. She argued with my father for hours that night. The photograph was devastating, the implication worse. Margaret still shows it to me sometimes, when she’s upset, or when she’s feeling especially
cruel.
To her friend, Margaret said, “No, she’s not adopted. She’s got her father’s looks is all.” Her voice was crisp with resignation, the sound of glass splintering. The way her body sunk into itself with the revelation that everyone saw how her little brown child had the shrunken features of a miniature, bloated politician, I knew the exact weight of her disappointment and it measured colossal.
“The best we can hope for,” Margaret sighed, picking at her lunch with a fork, “is that she gets his IQ, too. Otherwise, ohmigod, what’s the point?” Both women laughed and it was a hollow, superficial sound I sometimes hear in my nightmares. My brain keeps that memory on tap, maybe to remind me it’s not okay to relax, or feel good about myself, or dream for a better, happier future. Those jerks who say looks aren’t everything, they don’t have Margaret for a mother.
6
At eleven, puberty hijacked my body and left me terrified about the mysteries of womanhood. My emotions unwound and misfired so dramatically I realized the body I didn’t like was now the body I didn’t understand. My moods were so up and down even I agreed medication was necessary. At one point Margaret suggested an exorcism.
The family physician prescribed various medications and eventually we settled on a strict regimen of Paxil for what he asserted was most likely social anxiety disorder. Margaret said it was important to have pills to solve my problems. No one wanted to talk about me getting my period, or how PMS gives you multiple personality disorder, without somehow turning it into the kind of disease only a pill could solve. Just when I thought everyone was done loading me up on harmaceuticals, Margaret said, “We need some pills for her weight, too.”
First it was Meridia to suppress my appetite, then Xenical in the hopes that the fat burning pill would halt my steady weight gain. When the doctor suggested Margaret analyze my diet, she did her polite-laugh and said, “Fat blockers will help with that, won’t they? Besides, if she can’t have her cheese she’ll just sneak it anyway.”
