Little Pretty Things

by Lori Rader-Day

  What had I told Courtney the night before? Long distance turned you into a god? My file was probably getting pretty thick over at the Midway Police Department. I needed to stop saying idiotic things, and also stop doing them. I needed to put all the shiny trash under my bathroom sink out in the bin and get my life together. I needed … a run.

  “Running quiets the voice in your head,” I said, more to myself than to her. “People who do the short distances don’t know it. It’s a secret, so don’t tell them.”

  She snorted.

  “That voice that tells you you’re not good enough, pretty enough, smart enough. That you don’t know anything. That you’ll never amount to anything,” I said. “That you’ll never have the things you want, will never stop wanting what you don’t have. The voice that points out how you compare to everyone else.”

  The girls thundered all around us. Jessica took a step in to hear the terrible things the voice would say.

  “It says all the other girls don’t think about the things you do,” I said. I felt my cheeks burn. My mind raced to Vincent, his skin against mine as he cried on my shoulder. Had he smelled Maddy’s perfume on me that day? And then, for some reason, Beck came to mind. Beck, kicking at the gravel on the side of the road, saying—what was it?—that I had always treated him badly. “That voice that says other girls are the enemy.”

  Jessica looked away. “I know what the enemy looks like, OK? Anyway, they already have a long-distance runner.”

  “You can have more than one, believe me. One of you will win more often,” I said. “But you don’t have to be in real competition. There’s enough air for everyone. You’ll push each other to be better than you would have been.”

  She didn’t believe me. Who could blame her? It had taken me ten years to learn that lesson.

  “Look,” she said, and she seemed much older than she could possibly be. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But I don’t need saving. Not quite yet, anyway.” She stepped into the path of the lap runners. Within a few minutes, she had passed them all, and led them the rest of the way.

  At lunch, the memory of where yesterday’s tater tots ended up was strong. I eyed the snack cake rack. Was it bad form for the gym teacher to have doughnuts for lunch? I finally decided on a leafy salad. In line, the bowl slid around on the tray as I dug for my money. A hand shot out and caught the bowl just before disaster struck. At the end of a freckled arm: Delia.

  “Is that really the only thing skinny girls eat?” she said. “I’m doomed.”

  The salad had turned less appealing since I’d picked it up. “I’ve only recently given up fried foods. Yesterday, actually.”

  She brightened, then blinked at me expectantly. “Did you mean what you said? To Jessica? About the voice?”

  “Which part?”

  “I didn’t hear it all—but the thing about, you know.” She looked around and leaned in. “About ‘not good enough, not smart enough.’ I mean, I hoped I wasn’t the only one.” She put the salad back on my tray and stuck her finger into her pudding cup, pulled it out, and licked it. “But most of them—poking themselves in the mirror, moaning they’re so fat, when they’re anything but. They just want you to tell them they’re wrong, that they’re really perfect. Same with grades. ‘Oh, I can’t believe I got an A-minus, wow I hardly studied at all.’”

  “It doesn’t seem fair. It will never seem fair, by the way.”

  Delia’s finger stopped on the way to her mouth. “Thank you. Thank you for not pretending it’s all fine.”

  My turn at the register came, then I waited for Delia to pay. “That’s not your lunch, is it? I mean, that’s not really going to last you the rest of the day.”

  “I had something already,” she said. Her face had gone pink. “I just really like pudding.”

  Everything I could think to say sounded condescending. “I almost got a honeybun for lunch, so don’t take advice from me. Of any kind. Seriously, career, life. No advice coming from me.”

  She smiled and rolled her eyes out toward the sea of tables, loud with students and silverware and chairs scooting across the floor. “Want to sit with me?”

  I’d meant to escape back to the gym, or maybe even brave the faculty lounge, but I couldn’t think of a way to refuse her. What if she sat by herself every day? Of course, sitting with me wouldn’t up her credibility with the other students.

  She led me down a long aisle between tables until we came upon a group of girls from the first-period PE class. My team.

  “Hey, Coach,” some of them said, and they slid over to make room. Delia took a spot across the table.

  “Hey, Dill,” one of the girls said. It took me a minute to locate the source of the nickname. I’d been worried she might have to sit by herself, but it was really her pity for me that had brought me here.

  “Ladies,” I said. Our little thing. I refused to call them girls now, no matter how old they were, at least not aloud. “What’s good today?”

  “Not a thing,” Jessica said.

  “The French fries,” another girl said, and gave Jessica a look. “What’s your problem?”

  Jessica glanced my way. “Not a thing.”

  “We’re used to it with Mickie, but shit.”

  The girls tried to hide their smiles and sidelong looks at me. Mickie sat at the head of the table, stirring a serving of corn with her fork. “Shut it,” she said.

  They seemed willing to take orders. A few of them picked up their trays and left, and everyone scooted down to fill the void. The shift left me sitting alone, so I slid down, too.

  “You guys hear that motel by the highway was a front for a prostitution ring?” Mickie said.

  The chatter grew loud and obnoxious. The girls simultaneously couldn’t stand to hear a word and wanted to know every detail. One of them had stayed there, which elicited a great deal of discussion. Delia looked uncomfortable and pinker than when I made her run.

  “I know someone who’s spent a great deal of time there,” Mickie continued, looking at me.

  “I cleaned the toilets, Mickie,” I said. “It wasn’t a front.” The girls all leaned in to hear me. “Not exactly. It was a real motel, but the—look, I don’t know anything about what was happening there.”

  Mickie was smirking at Jessica now. “You must have cleaned up a lot of—”

  “So this voice,” Delia said around a mouthful of pudding. “You hear it for real?”

  “Not in a schizophrenic way,” I said, grateful for the change of topic. “Less a voice and more like my own voice, my own thoughts. If you don’t know what I mean, count yourself lucky.”

  “No, I have the voice,” Delia said. “‘You shouldn’t eat that, Delia. You shouldn’t wear that, Delia. Nobody likes you, Delia.’”

  “We love you, Delia,” said one of the girls.

  “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Delia,” I said.

  “It never says that,” she said. “But is it true? What you said about running making it go away? You’re not just trying to get me to lose weight, are you?”

  “You’re fine the way you are,” I said, poking at my salad. “Even if the voice never says so. Even if no one ever says so. You’re great.”

  “You don’t even know me.”

  “That’s the point, Dill,” Jessica said. “Coach Feelgood over here wants to make sure you understand what a special snowflake you are.”

  I pushed my tray away. “Enough. If you don’t want me to sit here, that’s fine. I’m nearly thirty years old, so I don’t go in for teenage bullsh—attitude anymore. I’ll see you on the track later.” I threw a leg back over the bench.

  “Not me,” Jessica said. “I won’t be there.”

  Words sprang to mind that I couldn’t say. Sometimes the sprinters flamed out, but distance runners were usually tough. We were in it for the long haul, for the guts, for the miles. What a little daisy this girl was. I’d lasted four years. One race shy of four years.

  Mickie looked
up from her corn. “You’re quitting already?” she said. “What a loser.” She started to laugh, a low, sneaky sound that gathered speed and force and hysteria until she looked insane. “You lasted one day? One day?”

  The other girls, thrown off by the terrible laughter, waffled between smiling and looking concerned for first Mickie and then Jessica. Then Mickie again.

  “One day was enough,” Jessica said. “I’m not going to be a horse in someone’s stable.”

  Mickie bent over her tray, coughing and crying with laughter. A few of the other girls grabbed their trays and got up. Around us, the other students had started looking our way. I didn’t slide down to fill the empty spots this time, and neither did Delia, who quietly finished her pudding, then said, “I found an extra copy of your yearbook. You had pretty goofy hair.”

  “We all had goofy hair. Your hair is going to look goofy a lot sooner than you think.”

  Mickie hiccoughed. “I’m not a horse,” she said. Tears ran in beautiful rivulets down her face. “I’m a thoroughbred.”

  Jessica stared at her for a long moment, then stood and walked down the table to her. I braced myself for another fight, and so did the other girls, including Mickie, who stuck out her chin but didn’t move.

  “Come on,” Jessica said, tugging at Mickie’s sleeve. After a moment’s hesitation, they went off, leaving their trays behind.

  “That’s weird,” Delia said. “I didn’t think they liked each other.”

  I knew they didn’t. But I was starting to remember how easily you could hold two opposing feelings at the same time. You could love someone and still keep secrets from them. You could despise someone and still trust them. But I didn’t remember as much as I wanted to remember. “The yearbook,” I said. “Where is it?”

  Delia let me into the student-activities room and hit the light. The tables were covered in computers, a long line of them, back to back. When Delia bumped a chair getting to a cabinet in the back of the room, one of the screens glowed to life.

  “You guys do the newspaper, too?”

  “Same room, different students.” She stood on her tiptoes to pull the book from the top shelf. “A few kids do both, but you have to be pretty far ahead on, like, your math classes and stuff.”

  She held the book out. It was red faux leather, with a fat panther paw print raised on the cover. A normal yearbook, even a nice one. And yet somehow I’d come to think of the thing as some magical—no, evil object. But it was just a book. Delia held it out, the sleeve of her shirt pulling up to reveal a set of raw-looking scratches on her wrist. She saw me noticing, put the book on the table, and pulled down her sleeve. The class-change bell buzzed overhead.

  “Just leave it here when you’re done, OK?” she said. “I’ll get killed—I mean. I’ll get in trouble.”

  “Delia—”

  “Just put it back on the shelf and close the door when you’re done,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “I’ll be late.”

  She hurried out the door. I sat at one of the computers, stunned. Whatever I’d just seen, I knew the voice in Delia’s head had said some awful things.

  The longer I was at Midway High, the more I wanted to leave and never come back. Everywhere I turned, there was another girl to worry about. How did teachers do this, day in and out? How did parents?

  I had another class starting in a few minutes, too. I shook myself back into focus and flipped through the yearbook quickly to the index. No surprise that my name only had two page entries. In my individual picture, my ten-years-younger self grinned like a jack-o’-lantern. The braces had come off, and I hadn’t stopped smiling that year. I looked happy. I was happy then; the picture had been taken at the beginning of the year, not the end.

  The other index entry led me to the track team pages. The main photo was the one I remembered, Coach bent over in Maddy’s face, giving her a pep talk with a side of shoulder squeeze. The next largest photo was the team portrait with Maddy in the star position between the coaches and Fitz’s back turned ever so slightly toward me. My smile here wasn’t as bright. It was cold that day. There was a small photo of Maddy hitting the tape. I’d been cropped out. My foot kicked into the frame.

  That was all. Because of the timing of the yearbook delivery, the season never got fully reported. No team stats, no personal bests. With only the photos and a couple of quick captions to go by, anyone could see that Maddy was the star. No wonder she hadn’t wanted me to buy the book. My foot was in more of the photos than my face. I would have fretted over that shoe for the rest of the year. Longer.

  Maddy had a few more entries in the index than I did. I flipped between the pages until I found her in the spring homecoming court. I’d forgotten about that. In the photo with the other princesses, she was hunched over, like carrion sitting on a wire.

  The last index entry made up for it, though. Near the back, in a series of pages of photos taken over the course of the year, a sort of highlights reel, there was a nearly full-page photo of Maddy. She was running, mid-stride—stretched into flight, athletic and angelic at once, her ponytail jouncing behind her in the wind. In black and white, she gleamed, just like one of those silver girls on the trophies we both took home.

  The difference a split second makes. We only had room for one goddess, and maybe the shoelaces coming in right behind her.

  I got up and threw the book up into the shelf, never more glad that I’d not wasted the twenty bucks. Maddy had saved me that reality for ten years. Forever, if I hadn’t gotten in my own way and insisted on seeing how little I’d meant to everyone at Midway High. Running hadn’t made me a god. It had made me a ghost. I hit the lights and slammed the door behind me on the way out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The rest of the day, groups of shoes pounded the gym floor. One direction, then the other.

  At one point, I looked up to find Coach bringing his boys through. “Time for the showers, isn’t it, Juliet?”

  The girls didn’t wait for me to agree. They pivoted from whichever position on the floor they held and jogged toward the lockers. The clock over the door revealed that I’d let the last period class go too long, almost too late for them to get ready to catch their buses home. I was no longer their coach.

  Coach walked over. “I heard from Fitz, if that’s been worrying you. He’s fine, or at least he says he is. He says he’s helping with the service.”

  “Service?” I said. “Oh.” Maybe Shelly wouldn’t have to do all the work. Fitz would get it right. “Better him than me,” I said. “I went to see Gretchen, and it was weird. Maddy’s room was weird. Everything was the same, the trophies and ribbons and stuff all still where she left them.”

  Coach looked at me. “All of it? Like a shrine? That would be … upsetting, I think.”

  “But she’s not the same,” I said. “I mean … she wasn’t who I thought she was. And I certainly didn’t know who she was when she died. It’s not fair to bury her as an eighteen-year-old girl, is it?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” he said, giving me a closer look. “Are you OK?”

  “I’ve spent too much time here,” I said, “I’m not even sure this is good for me right now. But I need the—anyway, Fitz is being so generous.”

  “Is that what it is?” he said. “I suppose I’m glad one of us is the beneficiary of his kindness right now. I feel a little let down, myself. Any hope you can stay and help put down the revolution?”

  “Revolution?”

  “That Jessica creature didn’t work out,” he said. “These girls don’t like to be told what to do. I hate to sound a thousand years old, but I miss girls like Maddy, you. You just wanted to run. You didn’t need to be told why.”

  Now that I’d seen the payoff of all the time and effort—the yearbook stung, I couldn’t help that—I wanted to know why, myself. “Her loss,” I said, not sure I believed it.

  “Yes, but she’s taking my star with her.”

  “Mickie?” I remembered Jessica taking Mick
ie’s arm at the lunch table. “You said Mickie was easily swayed. You were just worried about the wrong influence. I’m so sorry. I haven’t gotten anything right here, have I?”

  He gave me a gentle pat high on my back. It wasn’t the same as getting one of his bracing shoulder grips at the finish line like Maddy used to get, but it was something. “You always got it right, Juliet. It wasn’t your fault it didn’t work out the way we all wanted it to.”

  I nodded, and he dropped his hand and walked away.

  The bell rang. Beyond the gym doors I heard the scatter of students rushing for escape. I followed closely behind, and was halfway to my car when I thought to wonder what the outcome that we’d all wanted had been.

  Maddy winning? I had wanted something else. Even if she’d won, nothing about my life would have been any different. Same dead father. Same helpless mother. Same dead-end job. I had to admit: I still wanted something else.

  A group of students gathered at the exit. I nudged through them and outside. Clouds rolled darkly overhead, and a few fat raindrops had begun to fall.

  Out in the lot, a police car was parked in one of the aisles, askance. My broken car sat nearby, ugly and pathetic. Courtney leaned up against it, writing in her notebook. Her partner, the big guy whose name I’d forgotten, sat back in the passenger seat of the patrol car.

  As I got closer, I realized Courtney wasn’t writing in her notebook. She had a ticket book out and was making good on it.

  “What, Courtney?” I said. “What could I have possibly done now?”

  “Your tags are out of date,” she said. “You’ll have the ticket, a fine—oh, and your insurance rate is not going to like this at all. Or is that out of date, too? Open up and let me see your proof of insurance.”

  The group of students at the door had gotten deeper, peering doubtfully out at the weather.

  “My tags can’t be out of date,” I said, but I didn’t know. I unlocked the passenger side door and popped the glove box. On my back, I felt the rain pick up. The wind turned shear, blowing at the hem of my T-shirt. Courtney looked over my shoulder into the car while I dug out the paperwork—a registration that was indeed out of date, and an insurance card that wouldn’t have been any help to me, either. “Dammit.”