North of Beautiful

by Justina Chen Headley

  So I told Trevor how I had surgery to get rid of my birthmark, which was like a big freckle. That satisfied Trevor. And I noticed that Jacob still didn’t stare. If he wondered about my birthmark, he did it silently. Then he turned for the coffee shop, nothing more important to him than the little kid riding astride his shoulders. A couple of women walking down the sidewalk drew imperceptibly closer to each other, sheep in a wolf’s presence, when Jacob passed. If he noticed or cared, he didn’t let on. He sailed to his own longitudinal line, straight through the gawkers with a pleasant nod. Once clear of the onlookers, Jacob glanced over his shoulder at me, checking to make sure I was with him. I hurried, smiling to myself, to catch up.

  Chapter nine

  Orientation

  “HONESTLY, HOW LONG DOES IT take for the police to come around here?” I asked Jacob where he had parked himself in front of the window. For the last couple of minutes while he was ordering his coffee, I was on the phone and then in the bathroom, washing up. For as much as I bled, I had seen worse with my brother Claudius, who always managed to mangle himself. Now I peered up and down the street for any sign of uniformed help. “I mean, it’s not as if there’s a whole lot of crime being committed.”

  “It’s Bavaria,” he said. “They run on slower time here.”

  “This isn’t Bavaria. It’s Disney.” I pointed across the street to Ye Olde Christmas Shoppe and the Nutcracker Museum above it. “See all those Santa decorations? It’s December twenty-fifth every day of the year here.”

  He laughed, fingered a sugar packet, and started tapping it against the table in time to the accordion music playing over the speakers. “So, made all your calls?”

  “Just about.” There was one call I wasn’t planning on returning (Erik’s — if I hadn’t told him about the laser surgery earlier, I wasn’t planning on telling him now). And another call I wasn’t planning on making (Dad — the less he knew, the better). Roughly three hours and two hundred miles separated us, but I could hear my father all too clearly in my head.

  The thought of Dad cued my concern for Mom. Automatically, I glanced over my shoulder to where she was sitting with Norah on mismatched threadbare chairs, one a soft fern green and the other what used to be orange but was well on its way to becoming coffee-spill brown. At their feet, Trevor was happily motoring around some grungy trucks he had fished out of the coffee shop’s battered toy box. Meanwhile, Mom and Norah were cackling like old chums with no troubles in the world when an impending fight was waiting for us at home.

  “I’ve never seen Mom this relaxed with someone she’s just met,” I said without taking my eyes off them.

  “My mom could make even the most hardened gangbanger spill his guts. All my old girlfriends stay friends with her.”

  Old girlfriends? I sidled a glance at Jacob, wondering if he was dating anyone now and then looked back out the window hastily. As if I had a chance with a guy like him. Geez, what was I doing here with him anyway? He was the kind of guy who’d shun me when he was with a group of his über-cool Goth friends, pretend he didn’t know who I was. I dug out the piece of metal I’d scavenged and placed it on the table, a boundary line separating our two totally different worlds.

  “So,” Jacob drawled, holding the O for three long beats.

  “Yeah?”

  “So I figure, you must be in my debt.”

  That got my full attention. I turned completely to face Jacob, not even bothering to hide my cheek since it was a little late for that. Besides, he didn’t seem to mind it.

  “And how do you figure that?”

  “Another second” — he touched the piece of the bumper on the table — “and I would have been a double amputee. That is, if I didn’t bleed out first.”

  I grimaced. “God, could you not talk about it?”

  He shrugged, silent. And then he smirked. “Who would have known?”

  “What?”

  “I bet you can’t watch horror.”

  “Or read it.” I made a point of looking him up and down. “I take it you do.”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Really? I thought that was one of the prerequisites of being a Goth and all.” I waved in his general direction.

  “You poor, misinformed soul,” he said, shaking his head, checking over his shoulder, and then he tossed down the packet of sugar. “Just a sec.” He strolled to the counter where not one, but two cups were waiting. I started to get up, but he shook his head and brought the drinks over to me.

  “You didn’t have to do this. I should be buying you a drink. I’m the one who almost killed you, remember?” I protested.

  “Or amputated —”

  “Ack,” I said, holding up my hands, “forget I said anything.”

  “It’s hot,” he warned me as he set the white coffee mugs on the table, and then continued relentlessly as he dropped onto his barstool, “But I kind of like having you in my debt.”

  “You wish.” I grinned at him, my first official smile of the day. “So you guys here to celebrate with Father Christmas?”

  “Nah, we’re on our way to Colville.”

  “Really? That’s where I live.”

  “No kidding. That’ll be the best part of spending Christmas break there then.” He smiled at me easily, picked up his coffee cup, breathed in, and set it down without sipping. “Technically, we’re there for an easy holiday. No cooking or decorating.”

  “But . . .”

  “But officially?” He glanced at his mom and then faced the window, his shoulders hunching. “News that Dad left her for the barista in his office cafeteria broke before Mom could contain it. Heaven forbid anyone know.”

  Trevor’s truck impressions roared impressively over the coffee shop hubbub. “He left you guys for a barista?”

  “She’s five years older than me. God, what a pathetic cliché.”

  The door to the coffee shop opened, a cold wind blowing in. An even colder blast of open revulsion from the curly-haired woman who followed reminded me of my cheek. Suddenly, I was aware of it throbbing, no longer frozen from the cold. I swear, the way she continued to stare at me, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she shrieked out loud the way people did back in the medieval times when port-wine stains were thought to be the mark of the devil. Without thinking, I angled my body away from the door, the woman, and Jacob. How could I have forgotten to position myself so that my bad cheek faced the wall? Dumb, dumb, dumb.

  “Hey,” Jacob said softly.

  I shook my head. He placed a gentle hand on mine. Through my haired veil, I glanced at him, unprepared for his look that held so much concern.

  “Don’t let her bother you,” he said.

  “It’s hard not to,” I answered him quietly, my hands tight in my lap, “when your face is the first thing people notice.”

  He didn’t disagree the way Mom would have with her constant denial of anything remotely disagreeable. Say, the second-grade girls who pointed at me when I had to go back to school after a laser treatment, calling me “Grape face.” Mom had said then, “Oh, they’re just jealous of your gorgeous blue eyes.” Yeah, right.

  Instead, what Jacob said was this: “Let her stare.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, most of the starers are just curious. Smile back. That’s what I used to do.”

  If he wasn’t going to play dumb, I wouldn’t either. I knew he was talking about the whitish scar stitching his lip together. “So people stared at you?”

  “Cleft lip, tough to ignore.” Absently, he rubbed his scar with his finger. “Stares pass, though.”

  It made no sense that I was actually considering his advice when I’d dismissed the very same thing from so many well-meaning people before. The difference, I suppose, was that he actually knew what it was like to be so obviously marked. “So smile, huh?”

  “Doesn’t hurt.” And then he pushed my drink closer to me. “Tell me if I guessed right.”

  “What is it?” I asked, lifting the cup to my lips,
edging my body back toward him in degrees like a flower tracking the sun.

  “Wait!”

  “What?” I lowered my cup hastily, wondering if maybe there was a stray hair, or worse, a newly boiled bug inside the cup.

  “You got to smell it first. It’s the proper way to cup coffee.”

  “Cup coffee?”

  “Taste it.”

  “What? Are you the coffee police or something?”

  “Come on, don’t you ever stop and smell the coffee?”

  I followed his gaze to the list I had jotted down of everything I had done to contain the situation: call the police. Find a tow truck. Check in on insurance. Everything crossed off . . . and written down after the fact. Compulsive, I know.

  So what could I do? I inhaled: rich and sweet and . . . “Caramel macchiato?” I guessed, and took another more appreciative sniff of the hot drink, a decadence I’d always coveted but never splurged on.

  “Upside-down caramel macchiato,” he corrected me.

  “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “You put the caramel in first, then add the shot of espresso. The flavor is better this way since the caramel swirls all around.”

  “Cool.” I inhaled again. “When can I drink it?”

  “Now. But technically, you’re supposed to slurp and spit.”

  I arched an eyebrow at him. “I don’t think so.”

  He laughed but watched me as I took my first slow sip so I wouldn’t burn my tongue. I closed my eyes. It was nectar for the caffeine-addicted.

  “So you like it?”

  “Love it.” I allowed myself another slow sip before asking, “So why’d you pick this?”

  “You seem like the kind of girl who only takes her coffee black. Am I right?”

  “I heard a ‘but’ in there,” I said. “But what?”

  “But you’re too much of a control freak to risk tasting the fattest thing on the menu in case you like it too much to say no the next time.”

  “I’m not a control freak.”

  He just lifted his eyebrows and drank his coffee. Controlling how much I exercised and what I ate and drank had everything to do with maintaining an ideal body to distract people from my less-than-ideal face. It had nothing to do with my being a control freak. But that didn’t explain why I refused to be put under for my laser treatment, opting to slap on Emla, the anesthetic cream, so I could stay awake during all two hundred and fifty zaps from the laser.

  “My studio’s messy,” I said, more defensively than I cared to admit.

  “You’re an artist?”

  “Not really,” I said, wishing I hadn’t said anything. “I dabble.”

  “Well, for a dabbler, you get things done. You called the tow truck. The police.”

  “So?” I squashed the flare of guilt at Erik’s unanswered text messages, his voicemails I was ignoring. As much as I didn’t want to talk to him, I wanted to keep talking to Jacob.

  “So you didn’t freak out after the accident,” Jacob said like he was impressed, like composure was something to be proud of.

  What came out of my mouth was more truth than I’d ever revealed to anyone: “I’m always freaking out inside.”

  His expression didn’t change, betraying no surprise or denial or even curiosity. “Aren’t we all?” he answered. He looked like he was going to say more, but this conversation itself was caramel macchiato for me, a dangerous indulgence in intimacy that I couldn’t afford — especially since Jacob was headed to Colville for two weeks. Much more than my face felt exposed, and it scared me.

  So when he set his cup down, I made a big deal of the straight black coffee inside: “Oh, and what’s that you’re drinking? Is that black? Not a single grain of sugar? And who’s calling who a control freak? I mean, there’s got to be at least one study that links black coffee to control freakedness.”

  His lips twitched into that crooked smile, which meant I was back on safer, more superficial ground. “My mom’s a coffee bean buyer.”

  “She is? That’s so cool,” I said, casting another glance over at Norah, who had her cell phone out, checking her messages with an experienced glance. My mom still got confused by any function more complex than answering and making a call. Norah was exactly who I wanted to be — put-together, successful, and financially independent.

  “Hmmm . . . ,” said Jacob noncommittally. “That ” — he pointed to my syrup-laden, milk-drowned coffee cup on its way back up to my lips — “is the enemy to purists.”

  “Yum.” But then, of course, I had to know, “Is this really the fattest thing on the menu?”

  “I called it,” he crowed triumphantly. “Just enjoy it, Control Freak. It’s not like you’re going to order it every day.”

  Without much more than an unhelpful “you’re better off hauling the car to the junkyard,” the police took down the accident report and left, all within seven minutes. I timed. The tow truck driver wasn’t much more encouraging. After a couple of deep, face-creasing frowns and heavy sighs, he told Mom, “You’re lucky just the car was damaged.”

  Right. I almost lost it then. Just the car.

  In no way would Dad ever consider the mangled piece of metal the tow truck hauled away just a car. This was a two-fer opportunity: browbeat Mom and strip something from me. He already took Williams College. What more could he take? Anxiety nibbled at my composure, especially now that there were no more excuses to linger in the safety of Leavenworth’s Perpetual Christmas.

  We were already an hour late getting home. I could imagine Dad’s irritation building into that latent volcanic pitch of his, eternally steaming but never erupting into a full-blown yell. God forbid he actually had to heat up leftovers for dinner. But I didn’t check my cell phone and knew Mom had forgotten to charge hers. Like me, Trevor dreaded the drive. He was straining to break out of his mother’s grip beside the passenger door.

  Jangling her huge set of keys in her other hand, Norah asked Mom, “Ready?”

  “Are you sure you can drive us?” Mom asked for the fiftieth time on the sidewalk. She clutched the crumpled bag of her second muffin, long since eaten, as if it had magical regenerative properties. “You really don’t need to do this.”

  “It’s on the way to the River Rock Lodge. You said so yourself.” Norah threw open the passenger’s door for Mom. “Besides, we’ve already placed your entire Costco haul into the back. So hop in.”

  Mom flushed, chastened like a little girl, and walked obediently to the passenger door as if she was used to being ordered around. There was a time when Mom was the one who took charge. Like when I was eight and had catapulted over my bike’s handlebars, turning too sharply when I tried to follow Claudius’s lead. He dropped his mountain bike, ran to the house, hollering for help. It was Mom who had sprinted out of the house. Mom who had followed the siren of my shrieks down our long driveway to where I sat on the road, clutching my bleeding, rock-gouged knee. Mom who carried me to the car effortlessly. I remember thinking that she was so strong, my mom. How I would always be safe in her arms. We headed straight to the Country Clinic, where Mom stationed herself next to me, watching over the doctor’s every stitch on my knee until he told her he hadn’t been under such scrutiny since he was an intern. Where was that woman now?

  A flash of anger shot through me, making me hot even though the temperature outside had dipped another five degrees since the accident. I didn’t know if I was madder at Norah for managing us or Mom for not managing a thing since the crash. I tossed back my hair, ready to assert our independence. Which didn’t make sense, because who could I have called to drive us home? Erik? He was the last person I wanted to see right now. And Karin’s family was spending Christmas in Los Angeles since her dad had found a special effects master who was clearing out his studio.

  “No!” Trevor shrieked, twisting out of Norah’s grasp. “I’m not getting in.”

  Suddenly, the accomplished coffee buyer who could negotiate complex deals in Colombia, Indonesia, and Ethiopia
was trumped by this little boy. Norah looked helplessly on at the impending tantrum. “Come on,” she wheedled.

  After another angry NO!, Mom crouched down and asked Trevor, “Were you playing with a backhoe?”

  Every bit of his nascent testosterone was utterly offended. Trevor corrected her, I swear, with a sniff: “A front loader.”

  “Well, you better tell me what the difference is because I always get them so confused,” Mom said. “And what exactly can a front loader do that a backhoe can’t?”

  Before we knew it, a docile Trevor was scrambling into his car seat.

  “Come on,” Jacob said to me while he slid in, sitting in the middle between Trevor and me. “I won’t even make you sit next to the punk.”

  “Hey!” said Trevor, but he didn’t even complain when Mom buckled him in.

  It didn’t take more than five, ten minutes for me to give thanks that someone else was driving, leaving my hands free. So while Mom twisted around from the passenger seat to chat with Trevor and some mindless kids’ tunes played, I scrounged in my backpack for an ibuprofen and the latex glove I had refilled with ice at the coffee shop. Now, I placed the glove gingerly on my face, grateful it numbed my cheek, wishing it could numb my brain. The thought of Dad waiting at home scared me.

  “You okay?” asked Jacob.

  I nodded, suddenly exhausted. I couldn’t swallow my yawn the way I hoped to.

  “You should rest,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  In front of us, the moms started chatting; I wasn’t paying attention to anything except for my cheek as I waited for the ibuprofen to work its magic, until Jacob sighed, “Here we go.”

  “What?” I whispered.

  “Yes, he’s adopted,” muttered Jacob with an ironic smile.

  Then, from up front, Norah echoed, “Yes, of course, he’s adopted.”

  “I don’t mean to sound totally ignorant,” said Mom, “but I didn’t realize that Chinese boys were given up for adoption. I thought it was just girls.”