by Ariel Kaplan
“You can still have lunch with the rest of the crew team,” I said.
Bethany did not reply.
“I mean, you know I actually don’t have to be there for you to sit with them.”
“I know that,” she snapped. At the front of the room, Mr. Positano had finished passing back the assignments and was trying to start class.
“Ladies,” he said. “Am I interrupting something? What’s the deal?”
“Nothing,” Bethany muttered, more for me than for him. “The deal is nothing.”
“Bethany,” I said.
“No, you’re right. It’s not a big deal. I’m being stupid.” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”
* * *
—
I was still thinking about Bethany’s over-the-top reaction when I got to Latin that afternoon and was surprised to discover Greg sitting in John’s chair while John stood in the doorway scowling at him. I breezed by John as if he didn’t exist and dropped my books at my regular desk.
“Mitzi’s out today,” Greg said. “Can I sit with you instead?”
John stalked over and crossed his arms. “Did you seriously tell him to take my seat? Really?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“I love how you’re all Miss Sense of Humor until the shoe’s on the other foot,” he said. Which actually made me start laughing, because of how ridiculous it was, because I have literally never made fun of somebody because of how they look. Well, except Delia, maybe, but that’s a special case.
“Dude,” Greg said. “What did you do?”
“I made a joke,” he said. “And she’s making a big-ass deal about it.”
“Literally, you are the only one talking about it,” I said.
“Not my fault you don’t have a sense of humor.”
“When have you ever been funny?” Greg said. “Sit down, John.”
John made a nasty face and then went to sit at Greg’s desk.
“Seriously,” Greg said. “What’d he say?”
“I already forgot,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Good. So I actually wanted to talk to you. See, I just found out something kind of significant.”
I dropped my pencil on the floor. “Oh,” I said. “Really?”
“Yeah. It kind of involves, you know. Me and Bethany.”
At the front of the room, Ms. Wright told us to move to the next section of Ovid. We opened our books to the story of Adonis. I tried not to cry from the irony. I did my best to ignore the Adonis next to me and started working on the first few words.
My translation didn’t look right. “Is this tree pregnant?” I asked.
“It’s just, I kind of found out something by accident.”
I froze in my seat a little. He couldn’t know. Could he know? No, if he knew he’d be mad, and he didn’t seem mad. He seemed nervous, or maybe a little excited. “Okay?” I said.
“Sophie Bell told me Bethany’s birthday is Friday,” he said.
“Oh. Yeah, I knew that.”
Of course I knew. I’d had her present in my sock drawer for weeks: a charm bracelet with elemental symbols, to add to her collection. I found it on this website last summer and had to save up for the little enameled charms for three months.
“Right. So I was thinking…” He did spirit fingers at me. “Surprise party.”
“Oh. No,” I said. “No, no.”
“What?”
“No surprise party. Not for Bethany. That won’t go over, like, at all.”
“Everybody loves surprise parties!”
“If by loving it, you mean Bethany will spend the whole party in the bathroom breathing into a paper bag, then sure. She’ll love it.”
“I wouldn’t invite anyone she didn’t know,” he protested. “Just, like, the crew team and stuff. I thought you could help me make a list. I checked and Sophie said we could use her basement if we want.”
“You ran this by Sophie? And she didn’t tell you this was a bad idea?”
“Come on,” he said. “She’s turning seventeen! She should have a party.”
“I feel like you are not hearing me. She doesn’t want a party. Bethany hasn’t had a birthday party since she was nine. Her mom hired some chick dressed as Princess Belle and she hid in her closet the entire time.”
“Princess Belle hid in Bethany’s closet?”
I smacked his arm. “Quit being obtuse.”
“Come on,” he said. “That was eight years ago.”
“She hasn’t had a personality transplant since then. Listen. Lis-ten to meeeee. She doesn’t want a surprise party.”
He let out a long-suffering sigh.
“Does that mean you get it?”
“But she was at prom,” he said. “That was a party. She looked like she was having fun then.”
“Well, yeah. But that’s because it wasn’t for her. She wasn’t the center of attention.”
“But you agree that she did have fun at that.”
I thought about it. We’d gone together, and we’d had an amazing time….We went out to dinner first with the crew girls, and then we danced for two hours until our feet hurt, and then we all spent the night at Sophie’s house. It was great. “Yeah, she did.”
He gave me a little half smile. I loved and hated that I could tell what he was thinking just by the look on his face. Or maybe our brains were wired for the same network. I don’t know. “So you’re suggesting,” I said, “that we have a party for Bethany that is not actually for Bethany.”
He smiled wider.
“But if we do that, it can’t just be her friends, or she’ll know,” I said. “There needs to be a lot of people, and most of them can’t know why they’re really there.”
“A stealth birthday party,” he said. “We’ll just happen to have a really big cake on hand. That does not say Happy Birthday, Bethany on it.”
“That’s perfect,” I said. “She’ll love that. She’ll love the whole thing.”
“So it’s all settled, then,” he said.
“Apart from any of the logistics, yeah.” He raised his water bottle and I clinked mine against it.
* * *
—
I sat down on Dr. Pascal’s couch and grabbed my usual three mints out of the bowl. Today, Abby Cadabby was on the table with her wand. She’d always been Bethany’s favorite. Personally, I was more of a Grover stan, but you know. Everybody’s different.
“Do these guys help?” I asked as she finished shoving her intra-patient yogurt into her mouth.
“Sure, for some kids,” she said.
“You never use them with me,” I pointed out.
“I don’t think they’d help you.”
“Maybe you’re selling the Muppets short,” I said. “I mean, Jim Henson was a genius. Did you ever see The Dark Crystal?”
Rather than answer that, she said, “So what did you decide about why you handed Greg over to Bethany?”
“I’m amazed you can remember all these names from one week to the next.”
“Copious notes,” she said, holding up her pad. “Answer the question.”
“Well,” I said. “I did try to think about it. In psychological terms, I would say that my superego has overwritten my id.”
“Just so you know, nobody currently practicing psychology still buys into any of that.”
“What?”
“The Freudian stuff. It’s about a hundred years out of date.”
“No kidding.”
“Afraid so. As much as the ‘monsters from the id’ worked in Forbidden Planet, it doesn’t really hold up to modern clinical scrutiny.”
I’d never seen Forbidden Planet, but the phrase monsters from the id struck me. “Huh. Well, that’s disappointing.”
“You t
hink?”
It was, because I’d liked the idea of these little compartmentalized units coexisting in my brain. Plus, when I was being an asshole, I got to blame it on the monsters from my id, which is sort of like saying I didn’t do it and it is therefore not my fault. I felt like my id was not me in the same way my pancreas is not me. I liked the id. It was like having a dog around that you could blame if you farted at the dinner table. Sorry for my stinky behavior, it was just my id passing some gas, ha ha. I’ll make it go in the other room now. I said, “Yeah, I guess.”
“But what you’re saying is that your desire to do the right thing was more important than what you wanted. Which was the boy.”
I shrugged.
“And you felt like the greater good was taking yourself out of the equation, because you don’t deserve to be with him.”
“It’s not that I don’t deserve it, it’s that it wasn’t going to happen,” I said.
“Hmm,” she said. She handed me a giant book off the corner of her desk. “I thought maybe we could try something different today. Take a look at this.”
I took it in my hands. The front cover had embossed eagles on it and read Frontier High School 1992. “This is a high school yearbook,” I said. “This is your high school yearbook?”
“Indeed it is.”
“Oh! So where are you?”
“Page 37. Be kind, please.”
I glanced up from the book. “Does this mean you ran out of the tricks you learned in head-shrinking school?”
“Please. I ran out of head-shrinking tricks three months ago.”
“Wait. Seriously?”
“Just look at the book.”
I flipped to page 37 and scanned down until I got to PASCAL, LAILA in that stupid off-the-shoulder drape they’ve been making girls wear in their senior pictures for the last fifty years. She looked surprisingly the same, with different glasses and pudgier cheeks. “You were cute,” I said. “And you weren’t even wearing that nasty plum lipstick, so bullet dodged there.”
“Thank you. So here’s what I want you to do with that book. I want you to go through it and tell me which girl in the senior class you think was the prettiest.”
I looked up from the book to see if she was serious. She seemed to be. “If I say you, do I get a prize or something?”
“No. Go ahead.”
“Do I have a time limit? Like, how long do I have to consider my options?”
“Let’s try to keep it under five minutes, how about that.”
I went back to the beginning of the senior class pictures. “Can I have some Post-its or something?”
She opened her desk drawer. “You’re taking this very seriously.”
“You’re the one who asked me to do it,” I said as she tossed me some little pink sticky flags.
So I started with Abadah, Renee, and kept going. It was a harder exercise than I would have thought, partly because reduced to a two-by-two-inch square and wearing the same top, the girls all started to look kind of the same, and partly because I kept wondering if this was some kind of trick. Was she hoping I’d pick someone not obvious? Someone who looked just like Bethany? I couldn’t figure out what the point was, and it made me uncomfortable. Finally, after I’d gone back through everyone I’d left a Post-it on, I settled on Garcia, Claudia.
“Claudia,” she said thoughtfully.
“Was she nice?”
“It was a big class,” she said. “I didn’t really know her that well, but I think she was. Why’d you pick her?”
I shrugged and looked back at the picture. “She has a nice smile,” I said. “And her hair looks good.”
“Okay, that’s valid.” She took a piece of paper off the top of her desk. “So here’s what I did before you showed up….I wrote down the names of the four girls in my class everyone thought were the prettiest, the ones who kept getting elected to the homecoming court and things like that.”
I reached forward and took it from her. “Is she on it?” I asked.
She wasn’t. I went back and looked up the pictures of those four girls. I mean, they were pretty. I’d flagged three of the four. But they weren’t any prettier than the girl I’d picked. Less, I thought. To be honest, they really weren’t any prettier than, like, the top third of the class or so.
“What do you notice about those four girls?” she asked.
“Well, they’re all skinny and white,” I said. “So basically you’re telling me you went to a crappy high school.”
“It had its problems for sure,” she said. “Now. Pick the ugliest.”
I felt a little like I’d been punched in the gut. I hate that word, especially applied to people. Ugly sentiments I can live with. Ugly buildings, sure. Ugly people? I hated hearing it.
“What?” I said, like maybe I’d misheard what she was asking me to do.
“You heard me.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s mean!” I handed her the book back. I was actually about ready to leave at that point. “Please tell me you did not write down the name of the ugliest girl in your class.”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
“Then why ask me?”
“Because I knew you wouldn’t do it.”
I sat back on the couch. “I think maybe you should stick to Muppets,” I said. “That was gross.”
“You don’t like to hear that word applied to other people.”
“No.”
“But you use it when you think about yourself. You said it in here the other day.”
“I don’t think so.”
She held up her notepad. “I write stuff down, remember? So why do you think you’re less deserving of your own kindness than other people?”
I didn’t have a ready answer. “I just like to be honest,” I finally said.
“What I’m trying to get you to see is that attractiveness—conventional attractiveness—is completely arbitrary. It’s not real.”
“That’s not totally true,” I said. “It has to do with facial symmetry and—”
“No. Aphra, no. And the other thing I’m trying to tell you is that the people who you think meet the definition for conventional attractiveness aren’t empirically any more beautiful than the people who don’t. Was it hard for you to look through that book and pick someone?”
“Yeah. It was.”
“Mm-hmm. You probably thought about half the class looked pretty good. Am I right?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“And the ones you didn’t pick, it was probably because their glasses were out of style or they had weird makeup or too much hair spray.”
“What is your point?”
“My point is that you are getting completely hung up on an illusion. You picked Claudia, but I can tell you that back in the day no one was beating down her door asking her out.”
“So what you want me to say is that beauty is an illusion, I look just as good as Bethany, and I should have scooped up Greg for myself. Come on.”
“What I want is for you to see that beauty is relative, you are not ugly, and you should have given the boy a chance to say yes before you put the no in his mouth for him.”
I put a mint in my mouth. I was already up to my third, which meant I’d run out before the end of the session, and that annoyed me badly.
She said, “When you went to that college party, what was the first thing that happened to you?”
“Uh,” I said, because I didn’t think I should mention that the first thing that happened was that someone gave me a cocktail. “I talked to the guy who was working the bar.”
“No. You got hit on by the guy who was working the bar.”
“It was dark,” I said.
She scoffed.
&nbs
p; “It was. And he was not completely sober—are you going to tell my parents this?”
“No.” She got up and went to the door and flicked off the light switch, leaving only the light that crept in around the edges of the closed blinds. “Was it this dark?” she asked.
“Maybe a little darker.”
“But close.”
“Sure,” I said, rolling my eyes and hoping it was too dark for her to see. “It was close.”
“Can you still see what I look like?”
“Yeah, mostly…”
“Uh-huh. But you think this boy couldn’t see you. It was light enough that he didn’t trip over your feet, but you think he has no idea what you looked like.”
“He was—”
“Drunk boys still have eyeballs.” She turned the lights back on. “I’m going to be straight with you right now.”
“You mean you haven’t been up until now?”
“I haven’t used this word because I knew you’d just fight me on it, but what you have is called a dysmorphia.”
I threw up my hands.
“Nope. Nope, nope, do not answer back to me, Aphra Brown. Here is the honest-to-goodness truth about you: you don’t look like a Barbie doll. Guess what. Neither do I. Neither do most people.” She held up a finger. “However, you are also not ugly. Not even close.”
“My nose—”
“Is big. You have a big nose, Aphra. That doesn’t mean you’re ugly. It just means you have a big nose. That’s it. That’s all it means.”
But it wasn’t all it meant. Not really. Not at all. Because it wasn’t just my nose. It was everything.
Greg and I had three days to plan a party for Bethany that was ostensibly not for Bethany.
This was no problem, I told Greg, because I had an idea.
It wasn’t even a new idea. It was something the team had been talking about for the last month. The idea was that the girls’ crew team wanted to have a fund-raiser to help offset the cost of next year’s uniforms. We’d gone around and around about whether to go door-to-door or do a car wash or have a bake sale, and it occurred to me: we could use the fund-raiser as a cover for Bethany’s party; all we’d have to do was move it up to this week. And instead of selling brownies or whatever, we’d have a party at Sophie’s—she’s the only one with a house big enough—and charge five dollars at the door.
