Pretty Is: A Novel

by Maggie Mitchell

  I slipped into the backseat, settling my dripping backpack beside me, perching in the middle and leaning forward between the two front seats.

  “Okay. Go up there and turn right,” I said. For a few turns he followed my directions perfectly, arousing no suspicion. Then, quite suddenly, he didn’t: he took a left instead of a right, and without warning we were on a back road, heading out of town. I was so surprised, and he was so calm, that I said nothing at all. This is the part I could never explain to anyone’s satisfaction. I didn’t want to let the strangers down. I wanted to ride in that musty backseat forever; I wanted to belong to them. I could feel the girl watching me. I wondered if the man was her father, but I didn’t think so. Age aside, that wasn’t quite how they spoke to each other. I couldn’t have described how they did speak to each other. Words rose to my throat countless times, but somehow it had already become too late to say anything that would matter. Weirdly, I was reluctant to seem rude. They were so sure of themselves, and so pleasant.

  No one spoke for the first hour or so, and then it was Carly May who filled me in on what little she thought I needed to know. We stopped once for gas, and Carly and I stayed in the car. “You don’t have to go to the bathroom, do you?” she asked me, and since “no” was clearly the right answer, that’s what I said. “You should stay down,” she explained, tucking herself lower into the front seat. “It’s best if no one sees us.” She sounded more like an accomplice than a victim of a kidnapping—if that’s what she was, if that’s what I was; kidnapped was a word that had drifted around my head a bit, but it carried little conviction. I did as she said. “There’s no point in running away or anything like that,” she added. She twisted around in her seat, fixed her blue eyes on me—darker than before, with only the lights from the gas station picking out specks of iris. “Are you scared?”

  The car smelled of fast food and people who hadn’t showered for a couple of days. I was hungry; I did have to go to the bathroom. Of course I was scared, though that wasn’t all I was. How often had I imagined ways of leaving my world behind, woven elaborate fantasies of escape, of transformation? And now, in one confused, rain-soaked moment, my world had been snatched away. My feelings were—mixed.

  “He picked us, you know,” she said. “It wasn’t just random that we found you. He knows all about us.” I could tell that she thought this would please me, and sure enough, it did. A sense of importance touched up against my fear; I felt the fear take a step back.

  “Why?” I asked. It was the obvious question, but I could tell she didn’t like it. She turned back around in her seat and checked the rearview mirror. “Here he comes,” she said, and fell silent.

  “Not much farther now,” he said when he returned to the car. Carly turned her full smile on him. The beauty pageant smile, as I learned later, but more real. And he smiled back.

  That’s how it was from the start: them smiling at each other in the front seat, me in the back, watchful, secondary.

  Chloe

  “It’s perfect for you,” Martin says. “It’s an action role, in the sense that you play a cop, handle a gun, that kind of thing, but it has serious dramatic potential. You’re an emotional cop. Maternal, conflicted, sympathetic. It’s the best of both worlds! It could open new doors for you.”

  “Who wrote it?” I ask for the second time. The name on the screenplay is Adam Gitner, but this doesn’t fool me. I repeat: “Where did the fucking story come from? Give me an answer, and we’ll talk.”

  We’re in Martin’s office, which I have never liked; it reminds me that I am C-list and clinging to the third tier like a cat that’s lost its balance. The neutral-toned office is not exactly seedy, just a little too five-years-ago. It feels almost seedy, like you would only need to scrape away the earth-toned veneer to get to the sordid underbelly of this godawful world. We’re here because he wouldn’t meet me for a drink. Do you think that would be wise? he had asked, almost gently, but right now I’m too single-minded to risk getting pissed off by his paternal bullshit.

  “Who,” I say. “Wrote. This. Fucking. Story. Not the screenplay. Who wrote the book?”

  I realize that I’m freaking him out, that he can’t possibly understand my urgency. I’ll worry about it later.

  “No one whose name would mean anything to you, I’m afraid,” Martin says. I can hear the surprise in his voice. “Several writers have worked on the screenplay, I believe. As I said, it’s based on a novel that came out a couple of years ago. Sort of a domestic thriller. I confess I haven’t read it. Again, no one you would have heard of, I imagine, unless your literary tastes are less discriminating than I would have thought.” He smiles. He’s used to tossing out bits of flattery like dog biscuits. He knows I like to have my intelligence acknowledged.

  Ordinarily I like flattery as much as the next desperate actress, but today I respond by grabbing a heavy paperweight from his desk. Dark, moody colors swirl beneath the smooth surface. I shift it from hand to hand, enjoying its cool heft. I wonder how far I could throw it. I bet I could dent the fucking wall.

  “Lucy something,” Martin says quickly. “Lucy-something-alliterative. Ledger. Lucy Ledger. Happy now? See? No one. Not involved with the screenplay at all.”

  Lucy Ledger, Lois Lonsdale. Please.

  “They want you to read for the part,” Martin says. “If you do that, I might be able to get you in touch with the writer. These things are touchy. Writers are touchy.”

  “Yes, Martin.”

  “And one more thing.” Martin looks out the window, so I do too. Palm trees, a bit of a breeze. Aimless tourists, eyes peeled for celebrities. “This is an extremely big deal for you, I don’t have to tell you.”

  Bastard. Also approximately the only person on the planet who gives a flying shit about me.

  Five minutes later I am headed for the nearest Barnes & Noble.

  I tell myself I won’t have a drink when I get home, just to prove Martin’s not-so-gentle hints unnecessary. But if anything calls for a drink, this is it. I make a martini, very dirty.

  It takes me a few hours, with bartending breaks, to finish the book. I’ve always been a fast reader; teachers used to accuse me of not having finished. And this isn’t exactly Tolstoy, as Martin had pointed out. The publisher had marketed Deep in the Woods as a sort of chick-lit/thriller hybrid of the more literary variety. The cover shows a trail of pinkish blood through the snowy woods leading to a fairy-tale cottage, a scenario that doesn’t appear in the novel. The book, I notice, is more interested in what goes on in the characters’ minds than the screenplay is; it tries to give a sense of their messed-up worldviews. My character—the Carly May girl, I mean—is surprisingly complicated: she’s arrogant, sure, but she’s also vulnerable and lonely and confused. Thanks, Lois. I’m touched. Martinis can make a person sentimental. Lois has not been so kind to herself: the Lois girl is too self-involved to be very likable. Too jealous, too needy. I feel protective of her. I want to defend her young self to her clearly judgmental older self: You weren’t that bad.

  Then again, maybe she was, my martini whispers.

  Lois has also taken some serious liberties with the truth. With certain truths, I mean. I’m partly relieved and partly—something else. I don’t know yet. Betrayed?

  Lois

  Sean sits across the desk from me clutching his five-page paper on Pamela. My neat comments in polite purple ink spill out of the margins. The document has seen better days; it’s rolled into a soiled, ragged scroll, begrimed with God knows what, and smells like cigarettes even from here. I am loath to touch it. I wish for the thousandth time I could have brought myself to scrawl a C on the paper and let it go at that. But that seemed unfair to other students, some of whom worked hard for their Cs.

  “Tell me. What do you see as your thesis here?” I say. “Look at your introductory paragraph, and why don’t you underline your thesis.”

  “I don’t have a pen,” he says. His ability to make things difficult is truly astonish
ing. I hand him a pen—not my own; one of the cheap Bics supplied by the department. He will probably take it with him, intentionally or not. He takes the pen and carves a dark line under a short sentence.

  “Read it, please,” I say.

  “In reality,” he reads, his voice exaggeratedly serious, “Pamela is a slut.”

  His answer is beyond inappropriate; it’s aggressive. I could kick him out, and I am tempted to. I could report him, and he would get a probing follow-up call from a health services counselor. But I don’t; I want to get to the bottom of this on my own. It feels too personal to make public.

  Besides, however offensive his “thesis” might be, the truth is that eighteenth-century readers shared Sean’s doubts about young Pamela, who eventually gets to marry her lecherous master after all his attempts to seduce her—or ravish her—have been thwarted by her indomitable virtue. In various spoofs and parodies, of which Fielding’s Shamela is the most famous, Pamela becomes, in fact, a slut. A strumpet, a trollop. Or at least a conniving little wench. Which is not the same as saying that Richardson’s Pamela is a slut: simply that she would have been a far more plausible character if she had been.

  “Let’s talk about how you might begin to complicate that argument,” I say blandly, as if Sean were any other student and not a prying, ghoulish invader of my secrets.

  Half an hour later he is stuffing his papers and—yes—the pen into his grungy backpack when he suddenly raises his head and smiles, exposing teeth that would have benefitted from braces. This should be preferable to his sullen sneer, but I find that it is not.

  “I found the other lady, by the way,” he says. “You know, the girl that was kidnapped with you? I tracked her down.”

  A flash of fury sends blood to my face and threatens to derail my determination to appear calm. Carly was capable of impressive rages; sometimes I envied her. For me, this surge of anger feels closer to the surface than usual—like a fish that flits through shallow water, looking out for vulnerable insects. I want to fling insults, drag a pen across Sean’s smug face. A drop of sweat emerges from beneath my bra strap, curves down my lower back. He has sullied Carly May by searching for her, by tapping out her name on his grubby laptop—almost as if he had grabbed her shirt, torn it, left dirty fingerprints, exposed her skin. Imbecile.

  I slide open my top desk drawer, extract a mint from its box, tuck it alongside my back teeth. When I speak, my voice is level: “You understand what I mean by substantial rewrite. I mean unrecognizable. New thesis, new everything. Or your grade will stand. You have one week.” Imbecile: Ichneumous, inimical, inquisiturient. Intermure, insidiate, imprecate. The words aren’t helping. I stand, signaling that the conversation is over. He looms; I wish I were taller. Carly-sized.

  “Did you guys get along?” he asks, slouching toward the door. “Did you, like, keep in touch after?”

  I wondered at first if Sean had some sort of handicap, some physical condition that affected his posture: something that would oblige me to dredge up more sympathy for him than I was inclined to feel. Since then I’ve decided that his awkward, crooked gait is an affectation of sorts. I cannot fathom what it is intended to signify. I find myself thinking of lisping aristocratic gentlemen in the eighteenth century. I am acquainted with this historical phenomenon in a scholarly way, but it has never made sense to me on a human level. Why lisp? Why limp, unless you have to? I wonder if this association is instructive in any way, and remind myself to consider it later.

  Illision. Ignescent. Indign. I force myself to meet his gaze, but I make my eyes go blank.

  What is it that I fear? I feel as if Sean is slinking through my mind, poking into dark and dusty corners.

  * * *

  One of the many unspoken expectations of new faculty members is that they accept all invitations from student organizations. I have already attended a number of excruciating breakfasts, movie nights, faculty mixers, and—most improbably—a 5K walk-run for some charity. This evening I have agreed to attend a sorority fund-raiser for the local rape crisis center.

  Which is why, several hours after meeting with Sean, I arrive at a rather imposing brick house on Main Street, wearing a not-especially-professorial red sweater dress and high-heeled black boots that are treacherous in the snow. I don’t want to please the Kate LeBlancs of the world by looking dowdy and professorial; I don’t want the young women to tower over me. I make my way through a small crowd, carrying a cup of tea, pretty cookies balanced in the saucer. I attend politely to an extremely earnest state senator, a prized special guest, who regales me with details about a controversial planned development on the outside of town that should interest me more than it does. From that conversation I ricochet across the room to the corner inhabited by a tall, dark-haired woman who turns out to be the director of the rape crisis center. I find her entertainingly caustic. “Nice life, right?” she says at one point, surveying the room, with its soft lighting, delicately upholstered chairs, and self-conscious air of civilization.

  I am flattered by her assumption that I share her attitude toward this studied atmosphere of privilege. But I’m not sure she’s right about the students; you never know what darkness lurks behind clear, bright undergraduate faces. We all know the statistics about rape on college campuses. Throwing me a quick, sharp glance, the rape crisis center director reads my mind. “Of course you never know,” she adds quickly. “Violence against women is hardly limited to certain social spheres. It’s just my own prejudices speaking. I can’t stand this kind of thing.” She sips her tea with manifest irony. “I bet tomorrow night they’ll be at some fraternity mixer wearing lingerie and togas, drumming up clients for the center. They had to beg to get me to this little shindig.” She’s wearing a chunky black sweater over a flowing, flowery skirt and far more practical boots than mine. Delia, her name is. Impulsively, I suggest having a drink sometime, thinking she seems refreshingly different from my female colleagues. The murky aura of a darker world hovers around her, glowers in her critical, sideways glances. She has seen what people can do to each other. I want to claim her as an ally; I feel the need for one.

  “I don’t drink,” Delia says. “Coffee, maybe?” I accept her politely proffered card, say I’ll call. She places her china teacup carefully on a spindly end table and announces that it’s time for her to mingle. She sounds like someone facing a firing squad. Guiltily, I acknowledge that I, too, should leave the safety of my corner.

  I scan the room for students I recognize, or even the senator. Glossy-haired young women in demure dresses—all in muted colors, as if by agreement—stand in loose clusters, chatting with glassy animation. Such clusters are more structurally impenetrable than they look, I have learned; standing on their peripheries does not guarantee acceptance. A shred of chemistry comes back to me: something about noble gases, unable to react with other elements.

  I wonder what is noble about such gases. Noble: nasturtium, nadir, nescience.

  No one comes to my rescue.

  Carly would know what to do. She always did. She was the opposite of noble, in the atomic sense.

  * * *

  My editor is excited about the sequel; this is why I got a two-book deal. “I’d love to see you confront the aftermath,” she’d said at lunch in Manhattan. “Not the immediate aftermath, I mean, but the lives of these girls—after they’ve been returned to their families, their small towns, tried to reassimilate, et cetera. What becomes of them? What kind of connection do they have? Wouldn’t they always have a kind of bond? What could bring them back together?” She had pressed on with questions like these, as apparently a whole novel unfolded itself in her excitable (but also practical) imagination.

  Back at home I exchange my red dress for warm layers, including the knitted fingerless gloves I have taken to wearing in the evening. I pour myself a glass of wine and settle at my computer. My fingers arrange themselves on the keyboard. I will need to enter a more purely fictional realm than I have inhabited as yet. The kidnapper’s
son will serve as the mechanism that brings them back together, and he’ll provide a fresh menace. He will want to destroy them, of course. But first he will need to lure them to him. Outside my window, thick snowflakes have begun to drift down; every now and then a gust of wind sends them whirling madly past.

  Yes, a jealous son. I’ll give the kidnapper a son, and I’ll make him jealous. Our abductor did have a son, according to the papers, so it isn’t much of a stretch. All his life this son has envied the two little girls his father abducted and adored, the girls he preferred to his own child. The girls with whom his father shared his final days—who, afterward, were on TV, in the papers, everywhere, while he was forgotten, living in his grandparents’ trailer, not even sharing his father’s last name. The girls who stole his father. He’s always wanted to make them pay.

  The sorority fund-raiser settles obediently into the background, along with Delia and the faint strains of the landlady’s television in the room below mine.

  I will start with snow. The jealous son. In a trailer. In the snow.

  * * *

  When Brad texts me later that week on a gloomy February afternoon, inviting me to the local pool hall, I agree to tear myself from my computer and go. In addition to the sequel, I have been working on the final revisions of my scholarly book. It’s basically my dissertation. To have had it accepted by a major university press so swiftly on the heels of landing my first job is wildly impressive in this field. It’s good enough for tenure, which is years away. It’s the Oscar of academe, practically; it makes me a rising star. This is not a secret, though I am quiet about it and self-deprecating. The department is officially enthusiastic, but I detect more complicated emotions in some quarters. I have a not-altogether-paranoid suspicion that Kate LeBlanc is rallying her forces against me. That’s to be expected. You’re supposed to pay your dues in this world, and I have not. No doubt there is concern that I will make demands, expect preferential treatment. Or that I will leave for a more prestigious job.