North of Beautiful

by Justina Chen Headley

“Terra, you just need to have some faith.”

  I let out a small sigh, her hope smothering me like mulch too thickly applied, and stretched my fingers from their death grip on the steering wheel. “Do you have any idea which way we should be going?”

  “If we keep driving, we’re bound to bump into the highway, don’t you think?”

  “Mom, you lived in Seattle for ten years!” I heard the accusation in my tone. So did Mom.

  A tiny furrow of hurt puckered her forehead, and Mom fussed with the seat belt, loosening it for more breathing room before she admitted, “But your dad did most of the driving.”

  And now I did most of the driving for Mom. She’d never been a comfortable driver, but after her sister, my Aunt Susannah, died in a bus crash, Mom practically had panic attacks whenever she got behind the wheel. Still, there it was, another opening, like the ones I’d been seizing since my admissions letter came from Williams. Maybe Massachusetts wasn’t part of my plan, but some college was, even if it was in Bellingham. Straightening in my seat, I said, “You know, you’re going to have to drive again next year.”

  That uncorked her firmly stoppered denial, and Mom’s breath released, sharp and explosive. Getting admitted into college was easy compared to getting her to admit that I’d be leaving next year.

  I eased off the gas and coasted to a stop at the red light. More gently, I added, “We’ll practice in the spring when the snow melts, okay? It’ll be fun.”

  Mom fidgeted nervously with the directions in her lap, not believing me any more than I did her beauty pep talk. “Why do you have to rush through high school?” she demanded. “You’re going to miss your own senior prom.”

  “Technically I am a senior.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Mom, I’ll probably be going with Erik to his senior prom.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. Unbidden, my hot, swollen cheek throbbed uncomfortably, the way I’d imagine guilt would, laid open. I should have taken the doctor’s advice, been knocked out for this treatment, but then who would have driven us home? Not Erik. The way things were going between him and me, even being his date to the senior prom was hardly a given. Yesterday, when I was supposed to get together with Erik for a quote-unquote study session in his pickup truck, I had outright lied: “Sorry, I’m starting to come down with something.”

  “With what?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer right away. I just didn’t want to get into the whole fixing-my-face conversation again, which only made me uncomfortably suspicious that Erik would never be with me if I hadn’t mastered the Art of the Makeup Mask.

  “Look, I gotta run,” he said abruptly, and hung up before I could make amends.

  Two hours after navigating our way out of Seattle, we drove into the pseudo-Bavarian town of Leavenworth, marking the halfway point home. Mom pointed to King Wilhelm, one of those awful touristy joints that served a healthy portion of oompah-pah accordion music with their sauerkraut. “There,” she said, “just what I need.”

  As surreptitious as any look that had been leveled at me, I glanced at Mom’s hands locked together in a permanent state of worry. Her fingers were so bloated she didn’t wear jewelry anymore — not her wedding band, not a bracelet, not even a watch.

  “Maybe we should just go home,” I said. I couldn’t bear hearing one more of Dad’s comments about her weight.

  The traffic light shifted from red to green, and suddenly Mom said, “You’d be able to come home for the weekends if you went to Western Washington.”

  “But I don’t want to come home!” There it was: the truth leaping off the edge of my thoughts where it had been balancing precariously since forever. I didn’t know if Mom recoiled or if I jerked away, but we both scooted to the edges of our seats.

  Mom’s hurt swelled in the car, her feelings banged up by my one unguarded comment. Softly, she sniffled. “It’s just that it feels like yesterday when you were born. You know, I always wanted a girl.”

  The topography of guilt must be made up of hidden crevasses and needle-sharp spires, because I felt sliced up as I bumbled my way to common ground. I knew that she had pushed for another try at a girl when Dad was completely done with having kids. Even as I stared resolutely out the window — I can’t back down now, I have to go, I have to get away from Dad — I knew Mom was blinking back tears. God, why did I say these things to her, of all people?

  It was freezing outside, and the heater was pumping but not warming up this old Nissan. Still, I cracked my window open and breathed. My first whiff of rain-wet air was mixed with exhaust.

  “Once your birthmark is gone, everything is going to be better,” Mom promised. “Everything. See, we really do need to celebrate.”

  “What?”

  “Progress! Your face!”

  Stick to the agenda; don’t stop until she acknowledges college, I commanded myself. But I couldn’t. Her insistence about my beautification rubbed me raw in a way that my father’s comments about my ugliness did not.

  The traffic light turned green, and I hit the gas, wanting nothing more than to go go go. And we were still only halfway home.

  “Pull over there.” Mom pointed to an empty spot behind a so-shiny-it-looked-new Range Rover. A boy my age dressed head to toe in black was pulling something out of its back. “I need coffee.”

  Coffee meant scone, which meant needless calories.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “I really could use some. But if it’s too much trouble . . .”

  Which was Mom’s way of saying “yes, now.” So I slowed down, turned toward the empty spot just as we hit black ice, hidden under this innocuous, innocent snow. The car wheels spun out of control.

  “Terra!” Mom cried.

  I whipped around to make sure she was okay — knowing full well she was — when the one I should have been concerned about was standing bull’s-eye in our trajectory. Mom was gripping her seat, bracing herself. I pumped the brakes the way Dad had taught me.

  The last thing I should have done was close my eyes. But that was what I did, unable to watch as our car slid into the truck and killed that boy.

  Chapter eight

  Longitude

  NO SOONER DID WE SLAM into the Range Rover than Mom’s dirge of oh-my-God, oh-my-God started. I lifted my head off the steering wheel. It wasn’t Mom whimpering. It was me. I bit my lower lip to stop from making another sound too out-of-control for comfort and then forced out a question: “Are you okay?”

  Mom’s panicked little breaths hung in the cold air inside our car, frozen in fear. That damned broken heater. This damned broken car. I gripped the steering wheel even tighter, hoping it’d stop my trembling. It didn’t. I turned to Mom, asked her so loudly, I could have been yelling across a long divide, “Mom, are you okay?”

  She barely nodded in response, her wide eyes on my forehead, confirming what I knew but was too afraid to check in the rearview mirror. The skin above my eyebrow stung. Only then did I feel a slow trickle making its way down the side of my face. Since Mom wasn’t grabbing a Kleenex to stanch the flow from my forehead, the cut couldn’t be that bad. And then I remembered the boy.

  God, the boy.

  “Oh, no!” I yanked on my door handle and ran to the front of the car, catching a flash of crimson jumping out of the black Range Rover at the same time.

  A woman’s worried voice cried through the still, cold air, “Jacob!”

  I swallowed hard, took a deep breath as though preparing to plunge into a fast-running river. And then I crouched and peered beneath my car.

  No boy, no blood, no guts.

  “Thank God,” I muttered, leaning my head against the truck in relief.

  “You know,” said a deep voice from behind me, “there are easier ways to meet a guy than to run him over.”

  I swiveled around to see a guy near my age, very much wearing black, very much alive. Outside of Halloween and my infrequent
trips to Seattle, I’d rarely seen anyone quite like him: an Asian Goth in a black trench coat, black jeans, black rock concert shirt. Apparently, neither had the good people of Leavenworth who were gathering on the sidewalk on the other side of my mangled car. They watched him vigilantly as if being a Goth guy was vaguely dangerous, like those homeless men shambling about downtown Seattle, muttering to themselves in a whiskey haze.

  “Jacob, are you okay?” came the woman’s voice from behind us now, strident with insistence. Even distraught, she was still the portrait of wealth, hair colored preternaturally blond, a red overcoat cinched tightly around her waist, and perched in high black boots. You could almost smell eau de Republican wafting from her as she threw her arms around Jacob.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “God, I thought you were behind the truck.” She shook her head, reeling at the miracle of his survival. And then her eyes settled on me and I witnessed a second miracle as she transformed from distressed woman to avenging warrior. She threw back her long hair and straightened to her full height, a few inches shorter than me and Jacob, but it was her laser-sharp tone that made her deadly: “Do you know what you almost did? You could have killed him.”

  “Mom, chill,” said Jacob. “You skidded, too, remember?”

  Mom? I looked from Jacob to his mother, two disparate maps connected in a seam I couldn’t see. The only adopted Asian kids I’d ever seen were Chinese girls, all under ten, who visited Colville with their families. I knew this because I used to make a study of them, wishing I was so obviously adopted no one could mistake me for being biologically related to Dad.

  “I wasn’t driving recklessly,” she said, eyes accusing reckless driver me.

  If I was going to be yelled at, I wouldn’t take it crouching down. But Jacob blanched when I stood up shakily, almost at eye level with him.

  “God,” he said, “your face.”

  God, my face, indeed.

  I flinched away as though Jacob had slapped me and quickly averted my raw hamburger cheek. Lovely. I focused on the I VOTED FOR KERRY sticker on Jacob’s back window, which covered the older I VOTED FOR CLINTON and I VOTED FOR MONDALE ones. Let’s face it: his mom didn’t look like the type to litter her vehicle with bumper stickers. So I was guessing this was his Range Rover and chalked him up as a rich Seattleite taking in the kitschy Christmas festivities here in town. What would he have thought of my town’s Western hoedowns, fiddling festivals, and big bug contests?

  “You okay?” He touched my arm gently. Whether he was reassuring me or trying to get my attention, I didn’t know. I just didn’t want anyone to look at me, least of all him, this too-cool-to-be-true Goth guy. “You’re bleeding.”

  Despite myself, I glanced up at him and touched my fingers to my forehead, almost surprised that they came away wet with blood, but more surprised that he wasn’t staring at my birthmark.

  “Of course she’s not okay. She must have hit the steering wheel,” announced his mom, as though her discovery made it a fact.

  “Here,” he said, salvaging a Starbucks napkin from his pocket. That, he folded in half and held out to me. Even his fingernails were painted graveyard black.

  “Don’t use that,” Jacob’s mom ordered, snatching the napkin out of his hand and wadding it up. As if I was actually going to hold that sketchy wad of germs against my open wound. Who knew where that napkin had been? “I’ve got a first-aid kit here somewhere.” And then she strode around the Range Rover to the passenger’s side.

  Jacob patted his pocket and pulled out another napkin. “Take it,” he urged. “It’ll be next century before she finds the first-aid kit.” He smiled at me crookedly. A faint scar stretched from his left nostril to the topside of his upper lip, tugging his mouth higher on one side than the other. It looked like someone had sketched his face fast, the edge of their drawing hand smudging his upper lip. His own eyes dropped to my mouth, completely aware of my stare. I grimaced, forgot I was supposed to be hiding my face, and then embarrassed, I pinched the napkin between my fingers and asked, “Is this clean?”

  “God, you’re one of those.”

  “One of what?”

  “Those germaphobe control freaks.” Then he laughed. “You are, aren’t you?”

  A child’s muffled wail, bewildered and overwhelmed, cut through my own bewildered denial.

  “It’s okay, honey,” I could hear Jacob’s mom soothing loudly to be heard over the caterwauling. “Just a little accident.”

  If anything, the kid’s howling strengthened, a baby Pavarotti: “I want Jaaaa-key!”

  Jacob sighed, “Great,” and ambled to his mom’s side, his ankle-length black coat fluttering behind him like an explorer eager for adventure. This was my chance to check on my mom, call the police, find a tow truck. Instead, after a quick glance at Mom — she was still mounded in her seat — I watched Jacob.

  Another earsplitting screech from the Range Rover and Jacob nudged his mom aside with a “Mom, I got him,” before disappearing into the truck so that only the bottom of his coat showed. “Hey, Trevor, what’s going on, little man?”

  I should have kept an eye on his mom. As soon as Jacob got the wailing to ratchet down decibel by decibel to blessed silence, she frowned over her hurt expression and then spun around to march to Mom. Oh God, now what?

  I hurried around the back of our car just as she introduced herself crisply, “I’m Norah Fremont. We need to trade insurance information.” When Mom didn’t respond or retrieve our insurance card, Mrs. Fremont prompted her, “Your insurance information is probably in your glove compartment.”

  I blurted out, “Do we have to?”

  “Have to what?” Mrs. Fremont turned to me, her thin eyebrows arched.

  “Have to tell insurance.”

  “Your car . . .” She waved helplessly at the lump of metal that used to be our car, the front crumpled like a shar-pei’s face.

  “— is pretty much totaled,” finished Jacob. I had been so focused on his mom and mine, I hadn’t seen him come over, carrying a little boy, three or four, with blond hair and dewy green eyes, their mother in miniature. “You’re better off having it hauled to the junkyard.”

  “Are you kidding?” I crumpled his napkin still in my hand, swallowing my instinct to throw it in his face. Crushed or not, that car was my freedom. “I’m not abandoning my car.”

  “You won’t have to. Insurance will take care of it,” Mrs. Fremont said confidently.

  That was it. Sure, we could report the accident and insurance could pay for the repairs, but then our premiums would go up and we’d hear about it endlessly from Dad. That was about as appealing as living with Dad for the rest of my life. A breeze dragged a strand of hair across my cheek. It felt like the lash of a whip. I bunched my hair into one hand, cheek exposed, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  As if the ramification of the accident only now occurred to Mom, she said, “Oh, Terra.” She looked so vulnerable sitting there, pleating and unpleating her sweater, my heart contracted hard.

  I crouched so Mom could look directly at me. With a hand on her soft upper arm, tense but no longer taut with muscle, I assured her, “It’s going to be fine, Mom. I’ll take care of everything. Dad won’t even know.”

  From behind me, I could sense Jacob and Mrs. Fremont eavesdropping. Sure enough, when I stood, they were watching me with a canny understanding I didn’t like. Not one bit. It felt too close to pity. Mrs. Fremont, who I expected to shoot one last zinger at Mom, instead held her hand out, saying, “There’s no sense staying out in the cold. Let’s get a cup of coffee, warm you up.”

  Those were the magic words. Mom levered her way out of the passenger seat, one hand on the doorframe, the other on the seat, huffing. I bit my lips, trying not to be embarrassed. Still, my eyes sidled to Jacob to see if he was watching Mom’s struggle, but he was already leading the way to the coffee shop, holding Trevor on his hip. Soon, Mom was trailing the Fremonts through the shop door.

 
; The police needed to be called. Auto body shops consulted. A tow truck scheduled. I was almost done architecting my plan for this crisis when Jacob backtracked out of the coffee shop to me, Trevor now riding astride his shoulders.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Jacob asked.

  Behind him, a man walked out with a commuter cup, steaming appealingly and making me acutely aware of the arctic temperature out here. My feet were so cold, even my toenails felt frozen. And that didn’t cover my shivering that had nothing to do with the temperature. God, I had almost killed him!

  Jacob’s gray eye shadow created a smoky effect, better than anything I could ever have achieved. The result: his black eyes gleamed darker than obsidian under his tangerine-tipped spiked hair as he waited for my answer.

  I shook my head. “I got to make a couple of calls.”

  “You might as well make them where it’s warm.”

  A sign that said CELL-PHONE FREE ZONE hung in the window. I nodded toward it now. “You’re not supposed to make calls inside.”

  “Do you always follow the rules?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. First, there was the control freak bit. Excuse me, the germaphobe control freak bit. And now this accusation of me being a blind rule follower. I didn’t like the picture he was painting of me. Anyway, I had to admit, “Warm sounds good.”

  “Come on, then.”

  As I stepped away from the mangled mess of my car, I spotted a small, compacted piece of metal lying on top of the curbside snow, a relic of my car. Even though Jacob was watching me curiously, I couldn’t help snagging the remains of my freedom, twisted into an ugly lump.

  “Coming,” I said, flushing as I shoved the metal into my pocket.

  “What are you doing?” asked Trevor now, his high voice piping like an out-of-tune flute.

  I straightened, flushed, blinked at Jacob’s brother.

  “What’s wrong with your face?” he asked before Jacob chastised him, “Hey, rude.”

  I said, “It’s okay.” Frankly, as much as I hated point-blank questions, I didn’t mind them from little kids. Unlike adults who stared, wondered behind my back, or made lame comments, kids simply accepted my answer and moved on.