The Princesses of Iowa

by M. Molly Backes

  I wanted to catch Ethan and Shanti after class and tell them again how much I’d liked their stories, but they both seemed a little shell-shocked from the workshopping experience and wandered into the hallway with private, dazed expressions. I’d talk to them later, I decided. Shanti would be at the bonfire, and Ethan — well, if I didn’t run into him this weekend, maybe I’d stop into Starbucks on Sunday. I headed out to my car, smiling at the thought.

  After school, my mother was in a complete panic over the latest Stella Austin event, and she forced Miranda and me to roll a million napkins with pieces of burlap and tie them with long strands of colored raffia. “Stella’s been so edgy lately,” she kept saying. “Everything has to be perfect.”

  At one point she went tearing into the garage to find extra double-sided tape to keep the ribbons around the vases, and Miranda whispered, “She’s psychotic. You better not break up with Jake.”

  “What?”

  “I mean,” she said, looping raffia around her fingers, “you should, because he’s a loser and you can do better, but you shouldn’t, because Mom’s head will explode.”

  “Jake’s not a loser,” I said. “Anyway, why would you even say that?”

  Miranda rolled her eyes. “I’m not an idiot, Paige.”

  “We’re not going to break up,” I said. “And even if we did, Mom would be fine.”

  My sister snorted. “Sure, Paige. And your actions never affect anyone else.” She shook her head. “If you and Jake broke up, I bet Mom would get fired.”

  “What? No she wouldn’t. Stella wouldn’t do that.”

  My sister raised her eyebrows. “Wouldn’t she?” Just then, my mother came tearing back into the room, clutching double-sided tape like grenades in both hands. My sister looked at me meaningfully and went back to tying raffia.

  Around five, my mother looked at the clock and screeched. “Paige! What are you doing?”

  “Rolling napkins?”

  “Look at the time!” she cried. “The bonfire starts at eight!”

  “It’s three hours away,” I said.

  “Aren’t you going to Lacey’s to get ready? You have to do your hair!” She yanked the yard of burlap from my hands. “Did you steam your dress? You still have to take a shower!”

  I raised my hands in defeat. “Okay, okay, I’ll go shower.”

  “Tonight’s the announcement, Paige! When’s the final vote, next Thursday? You have less than a week! And you have not been dressing to impress lately, that’s for certain!”

  I glanced down at my worn jeans and threadbare green hoodie. Under the hoodie I wore a T-shirt that said NOT EVERYTHING IN IOWA IS FLAT, but I supposed that didn’t count as ‘dressing to impress.’ She’d been so wrapped up in Stella Austin drama all week I was kind of surprised that she’d noticed my wardrobe at all.

  “Why don’t you jump in the shower and I’ll call Brenda to let her know you’re on your way over,” my mother said.

  “I wasn’t going to —” I started.

  “Cool, can I be finished too?” Miranda asked.

  “Is that a joke?” my mother asked Miranda. “We need to finish these napkins before tomorrow morning! And I still have to do my hair and put on my face for the bonfire!”

  “You look fine, Mom,” I said.

  My mother gritted her teeth. “Girls, please try to cooperate for once! Paige, get in the shower! Miranda, please finish these napkins!”

  She was still screeching when I got out of the shower, so I finally packed my things and headed for Lacey’s. My mother shouted after me to be patient with Lacey. In case I wasn’t aware, she was having a “really rough time right now.”

  At the Lanes’, Brenda was just as psycho as my mother had been. She grabbed my arm at the door and pulled me up to Lacey’s room, where the girls were both standing in front of Lacey’s mirror, examining their reflections. “It’s good there’s no game this year,” Nikki said. “This way my hair will still be perfect.”

  “You never know,” Lacey said. “There’s always a chance it could get messed up.”

  “How?” Nikki asked reasonably. “If I’m not making out with anyone before the bonfire, my hair will be fine.”

  “Look who’s here, girls!” Brenda announced.

  “Hi, Paige,” Nikki said.

  Lacey continued talking to Nikki as if I weren’t there. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe the wind? Maybe a random spark will just fly out of the fire and ignite the product in your hair, turning your head into a giant fireball?”

  Nikki clapped her hands over her head, stricken. “Oh my God! I never thought of that!”

  “I’m sure it will be fine, Nik,” I said, dropping my bag on the bed and hanging my dress over the door.

  “Right,” Lacey agreed acidly. “As long as you don’t have a chance to whore around under the bleachers, I’m sure it will look fine.”

  “Jesus,” I said, and Lacey flipped her gaze to me.

  “Speaking of whoring, what did you do yesterday, Paige?” She sat on a small bench in front of her faux-French vanity, her bad leg sticking out awkwardly straight in front of her. She watched herself in the mirror, pulling a comb through her fine hair, following it with a curling iron.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I kept my voice steady as I pulled my dress from its bag and stepped behind the closet door to change.

  Lacey’s voice was innocent. “I’m just asking what you did yesterday.”

  “Nothing.” I slipped the dress over my head. The fabric was soft against my skin, and I stepped back into the room, enjoying the swish of material against my bare legs.

  “Nothing?” Lacey asked. “Really? That’s weird, because I could have sworn I saw you in Iowa City.”

  “Why were you in Iowa City?” I asked.

  Nikki looked up from her bottle of nail polish and blinked at Lacey. “I thought you had physical therapy, and that’s why you couldn’t hang out.”

  “But let me ask you this,” Lacey said to me, ignoring Nikki. “Where was your boyfriend yesterday, when you were running around with those queers? Are you too good for him now? Huh? Just like you’ve been too good for the rest of us ever since you got back from Paris?”

  Nikki tried to interrupt. “Lacey —”

  “Doesn’t it bother you, Nikki? Doesn’t it bother you that ever since Paige got back from Paris she hasn’t wanted to hang out with us?”

  “More like every time I tried to hang out with you, you were ‘comparing physical therapy notes’ with my boyfriend —”

  She raised her voice over mine, speaking to Nikki. “How about spending your summer in the hospital while Perfect Paige went to Paris? While you were stuck here watching your family fall apart?”

  “I was exiled!” I said. “My parents were so embarrassed of me that they sent me out of the country!”

  Lacey put down her curling iron and spun around to look at me. “Right. Exiled. We’re all supposed to feel so sorry for you because your life is so difficult. Well, guess what: without us, your life would be a hell of a lot worse. So think long and hard before you throw it all away.”

  Her eyes were cracked with summer lightning. She turned to Nikki. “Doesn’t it bother you even a little bit to see her treating Jake like shit, taking him for granted, when he does nothing but fawn all over her and she doesn’t fucking deserve him? Hmm?”

  “And you do?” I asked.

  Lacey hit me with the full force of her glare. “Maybe I do. Because you haven’t fucking been there for him one minute, and I have.”

  “You’ve been there for him?” I shouted. “I thought it was the other way around! Because it seems to me that all I’ve heard from the second I got back this summer was all about how you need help, you’re going through a rough time, you have it so hard, you you you! I haven’t heard one thing about Jake having a hard time, even though he’s obviously so sick of your drama he could scream!” I was screaming now, my arms pulled tight across my chest like safety straps.
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br />   Lacey yelled, “Maybe that’s because you haven’t taken one second to think about anyone but yourself!”

  Nikki stood, reaching between us. “Girls —”

  “Since when are you Miss Do-gooder anyway, Lacey?” I yelled. “I thought you left that act to Nikki!”

  Nikki’s face dropped, and her outstretched arms fell to her sides. “Act?”

  “Oh, Nik,” I said. “I didn’t mean —”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t really want to hear your apologies anymore, Paige.”

  She turned and walked out of the room.

  “Nikki!” I called.

  “Let her go,” Lacey said. “And get used to it. Because after tonight, nobody’s going to want to listen to your shit anymore. You’re done.”

  I stared at her until she became unfamiliar, like when you repeat the same word over and over until it seems like the most unlikely combination of consonants and vowels and you wonder how it ever could have had meaning for you. Her eyes were small in her face, her cheeks flushed and hot. The longer I looked, the more monstrous she appeared, until I was overcome by it. How could Jake have chosen her over me, even for one minute?

  “You know what?” I finally said, grabbing my bags and makeup and the clothes I’d worn over to her house. “You are a small, judgmental, mean little girl. You think no one else sees that? They remember who you were, and so do I. You were the bully on the playground, the one who had to scare people into playing with her. And now you’re a bitch!”

  “I’m a bitch?” she hissed. “Look in the mirror, Miss Paris!”

  “No wonder your dad left. I would have left you, too!”

  My words rang in the air, clearly marking a line between before and after. A line I couldn’t cross back over, even if I wanted to. But I didn’t — and as though to prove it, I kept going. “Jake doesn’t like you; he just feels sorry for you,” I said. “But I don’t. You deserve everything that’s happened to you.”

  “You deserve ten times that!” she yelled. “You should have been the cripple! The accident was all your fault! If you hadn’t been such a slut . . . You ruined everything!”

  My throat was tight, but I forced the words through. “You know what? I take it back. I am sorry for you, because you’re going to end up all alone. Too bad you didn’t die in the accident; everyone would forget what a bitch you are and make you into some kind of hero.”

  “I wish I had died!” she screamed. “I wish we both had!”

  I stood in the doorway of her room, shaking, as the words echoed through her and she collapsed in on herself, weeping.

  And then I left. Left her sitting all alone in the middle of her room, barefoot, boobs shoved into a strapless Wonderbra to create the illusion of a chest in her satiny dress, the curling iron dangling in her right hand, half her hair still hanging straight and limp across her shoulders.

  My flight brought back memories of the previous weekend: running down the wide front steps, taking them too fast even though my ankle still winced at the memory of its last journey down these stairs. I darted across the open doorway toward the dining room, hoping to avoid Brenda. The house was eerily quiet, and I imagined I could sense the gaping absence Lacey’s father had left behind him. I was burning with pure adrenaline and anger, hearing the ugly echoes of my own voice reverberating in the house’s gaping silence, shaking and shocked by my own capacity for evil. Maybe I was the bitch. Maybe we both were.

  In ninth grade, Lacey and I saw this dumb made-for-TV movie where the girl comes home to find her boyfriend in bed with another woman. The boy sits up in bed, looking vaguely embarrassed, and the girl grabs this framed picture of them off the dresser and hurls it at his head, scattering glass everywhere, while the other woman grabs her things and runs from the house. The movie was terrible, but there was something about that scene that struck us, and we spent weeks afterward discussing it: In the girl’s place, would we do the same thing? Would we scream, break things, make a scene? Lacey said yes, but I worried that I wouldn’t, that I’d just run from the room without a word, silent and crying. Lacey laughingly agreed.

  Well, now we know, I thought wryly. I should tell Lacey.

  And then it hit me.

  I couldn’t tell Lacey. I couldn’t tell anyone. The adrenaline drained from my body. “I just broke up with Lacey,” I whispered to myself. She would never forgive me. Our friendship was done. I couldn’t remember a time I’d felt more out of control — or more alone.

  I had to get out of there.

  Jake’s. I’d go to Jake’s. I nodded, glad to have made the decision, because a person who could still make decisions wasn’t totally lost yet, was she? Armed with a plan, I headed toward the kitchen door. And then I was gone, realizing only much later that it might be for the last time.

  Five minutes later, I pulled up in front of Jake’s house, my heart throbbing in the base of my throat. The radio went off with the ignition, and for a moment I sat in the car’s clicking silence as the engine cooled and tree branches bobbed against the windshield. The night was cloud tossed and windy. “Wild nights!” I whispered, remembering Mr. Tremont smiling to himself. The thought calmed me. I reached for my makeup bag and took a few moments to do my eyes in the rearview mirror. My hair looked surprisingly decent, considering I hadn’t managed to curl it or put it up or do anything but run my fingers through it on the drive to Lacey’s. A dab of my favorite lip gloss and I was good. Good enough, at least.

  My hair was ruined the second I stepped out of the car; it whipped across my face in fierce strands like something living. Nikki wouldn’t be happy, I thought, before remembering that I’d messed up with her, too. Could I stay friends with Nikki after breaking up with Lacey? Would she choose Lacey over me? Would we make her choose?

  I went in through the garage, mindlessly punching the numbers into the keypad. I knew this house as well as my own. My mother had been working for Stella Austin Events since the summer before eighth grade, and even before that I had come with Lacey, who’d been friends with Jake since they were little. The summer after seventh grade, my mother finally got her invitation to join the Willow Grove Country Club, and she immediately signed me up for tennis lessons. Afterward, Lacey and I would play doubles against anyone she could tease into joining us. Most days we played Chris Jensen and Jake. I spent the summer feeling strong and loose, savoring the way the sun warmed my suddenly long legs until I was sleek and tan and unstoppable.

  That summer, for the first time in my life, I felt like everything was right. Lacey and I were inseparable. Any leftover loneliness from elementary school had faded away. Grown-ups started treating us differently, looking at us with something like respect, listening when we had something to say. Brenda started asking us for the latest gossip, and Lacey and I would tell her, crowded around the kitchen table with magazines and diet sodas. My mother never missed a chance to introduce me as her daughter.

  At the end of that summer, Lacey and I snuck out of her house in the middle of the night and ran around the golf course’s perimeter, clinging to the wooded edge for cover, to meet Jake and some of his friends on the sixteenth hole. Five of us sat at the base of an old oak tree, in a circle like it was story time. Chris brought his iPod and tiny speakers. Jake brought a bottle of vodka-spiked Sprite. Lacey brought the skinny menthol cigarettes that Brenda pretended not to smoke. I sat between Lacey and Jake, watching the shadows shift on the blue grass in moonlight, shivering in the chill of the evening and the excitement of sneaking out. Jake took off his sweatshirt and draped it over my shoulders. And when, almost two years later, he kissed me under the misty trees in Lacey’s backyard, I remembered that moment, the scent and warmth of his sweatshirt against my summer skin.

  I took a deep breath and pushed open the garage door. I paused in the mudroom between the garage and kitchen, listening. Jake’s house was almost identical in layout to Lacey’s, the same kitchen–dining room–foyer–living room pattern across the first floor. I always knocked, in cas
e someone was in the kitchen; one time I’d startled Mrs. Austin and she’d screamed and dropped a very expensive wineglass on the Mexican tile. All was quiet, and I leaned my forehead against the door’s cool surface for a moment before opening it. The kitchen was dark, but I could hear voices in another room. Jake’s house always smelled light green, clean and sagey. I slipped out of my shoes and left them by the kitchen door, padding across the dark floor toward the front staircase. The voices got louder and my steps slowed, the back of my neck tight and prickling. I rested my fingers on the banister and silently lifted myself up the stairs, one at a time.

  “I don’t care if it’s for a girl,” Jake’s dad was saying. “You are going to be a lawyer, not a damn poet! The only writing you do will be legal briefs and client letters, and most of the time you won’t even write them, your secretary will. You understand what I’m saying, son?”

  I stopped, hardly daring to breathe.

  Jake’s response was too quiet for me to hear, but his father’s rumbled back. “Then buy her something nice! Take her out to dinner; buy her flowers! I won’t have my son writing poetry like a damn faggot!”

  A door slammed, and I sprinted back down the stairs and slid across the polished wood of the dining room. Heavy footsteps followed, tromping down the stairs, and my heart jumped against my rib cage. I quietly opened and loudly shut the kitchen door and turned the light on. “Hello?” I called.

  Mr. Austin’s voice answered. “Hello? Is that Lacey?”

  I bit my lip, but called back cheerfully, “No, it’s Paige!” I bent down like I was taking off my shoes and pressed my hand to my chest, trying to slow my breath.

  I stood up just as Mr. Austin appeared in the kitchen. “Haven’t seen you in a while, Paige. How have you been?” He walked over to the fridge and peered inside. “Do you want something to drink? Diet something? Juice? Beer?” He took one for himself.

  “Water’s fine,” I said. “I can get it myself.”