Mirrored (2 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

1985

From that day on, Greg and I became friends. Sort of. We didn’t really talk much at school, but if a teacher assigned a group project, we chose each other as partners. We’d work at my house or usually Greg’s, making brochures to entice people to move to the Colony of Delaware, or a travel poster for Mars. I loved going to Greg’s house. His father was always building something like a flower box or a huge tree house, and he let Greg and me help. Once, when we were in seventh grade, it was a birdhouse.

“Violet loves birds,” Greg told his dad.

“Do you?” His father’s eyes were brown like Greg’s, and he was tall, but not skinny. He had a belly, which seemed very dad-like. “So you’re a bird expert?”

“Not an expert. But they’re pretty.”

“Right, she’s not an expert,” Greg said, laughing. “The first time I spoke to Vi, she was holding a crow in the palm of her hand. Since then, I’ve seen them follow her.”

I stared at him, startled. I didn’t know he’d noticed, but it was true. Birds seemed to gravitate toward me, animals too; even wild ones like possums and raccoons didn’t scatter as they did when others approached. I kept that quiet, though. It didn’t exactly make me seem normal.

“I think they even talk to her sometimes.” Greg smiled. He had a dimple, just one, on the left side of his mouth.

“Right, Greg. Sure.”

Greg’s dad laughed along. “Well, if you could talk to the Carolina wrens, maybe ask them what’s the proper opening size for their birdhouse. Or you could just look it up.”

“Is that really important? My mom just bought the birdhouse she thought was pretty.”

“Do you see many birds in it?” Mr. Columbo asked.

“No,” I admitted. “Never.”

“If you look it up for me, I’ll build a birdhouse they’ll use—and I’ll make another one for your house.”

“I think I’d rather come over and look at yours.” I wanted to be with Greg, always. The Columbos felt more like a real family than mine, even though it was just two of them. At home, it was just me and my mother, who spent more time on her nails than talking to me.

Still, Greg and I went to the school library during lunch the next day. We looked up the information in a book, finding that the Carolina wren needed a hole between one and a quarter and one and a half inches. Mr. Columbo let me drill the hole myself and even, against my protests, made a second one for me. “You can still come over, Violet.” His eyes crinkled around the edges. “You’re welcome any time.”

After that, Greg invited me over without needing a magazine project as an excuse. We walked home together, at least as far as his house, every afternoon and checked out the birdhouse. One day, we saw a small brown bird moving in. “Wow,” I said, “your dad’s going to be so excited.” There had been birds in my own birdhouse since the first day, but I didn’t tell Greg that.

Greg grabbed my hand and squeezed it. His own hand was cool, dry, and I felt a jolt of electricity run up my arm. “We’ve never had a bird in our birdhouse before, no matter what he said. They came because of you.”

“Right.” I could barely speak from concentrating on the moment, the dizzying tingle of his hand in mine.

“You should stay, at least until Dad gets home.”

I nodded and walked into the house. I thought I could hear one of the birds say
Thank you
, but when I looked over at Greg, he hadn’t heard anything. We spent the whole afternoon sitting side by side at the window, watching the wren build her nest, until Mr. Columbo called us in for dinner. Greg smelled of pencil shavings and Irish Spring soap, and even though he let go of my hand, I could still feel it against mine, far, far into the night.

After that, I went to Greg’s house every day after school. We watched the wrens to see if there were eggs or babies, but we also sat on the sofa, eating brownies we made from a mix and watching
Family Ties
and
The Cosby Show,
shows about big, happy families like ours weren’t. People at school called us geeks in love, and while I pretended to cringe, I secretly enjoyed that people thought it possible. Greg wasn’t my boyfriend—not yet—but I wanted him to be.

But the summer before eighth grade, Greg went to sleepaway camp for two whole months. “It’s like this really outdoorsy camp my dad went to when he was my age,” he told me. “I hate it. I think it’s supposed to make me a man.”

“Sounds fun.” I rolled my eyes, thinking he was perfect as he was. In fact, I was hoping he’d invite me to the Halloween dance at school in the fall. Halloween was my favorite holiday because it let me be someone else, someone better. Or maybe someone worse. I was hoping maybe, costumed as a witch or vampire, I would have the courage to lean in, to will him to kiss me. But that was a long time away. “Can I write you?”

“Sure. That’d be cool.” He smiled his cute, one-dimpled smile. “I know my dad won’t write that much, not like a mom would.”

“I’ll write.”

Once he left, the long, lonely summer stretched ahead of me, and I wanted to write every day. I didn’t, though. Some dim part of me knew that would look crazy, like I had no life, which I didn’t. I actually did things like an Everglades bird tour, just so I’d have something to write about. I worked on the letters every day but sent them once a week. Greg wrote back twice, then stopped. I told myself it was because he was busy, then because camp was almost over. I’d see him soon. But when he got back, he was always busy. In rushed phone calls, he said he had family in town one day, shopping for school another. So I didn’t see him until the first day of eighth grade.

I searched for Greg in the crowds outside. Usually, he wasn’t hard to spot. He was tall and stayed on the outskirts. But I didn’t see him.

Then, I did. He wasn’t on the outskirts, but in the middle of the crowd.

Greg had always been tall, but now he was taller. Not skinny anymore, though. Suddenly his shoulders were broader, his face more manly. He was standing with some people, people like Nick and Nathan, Jennifer and Gennifer, people who’d always picked on me and ignored him. Popular people. Greg was laughing, his black hair shining in the sun like a crow’s wings, his smile like the sun itself. I made myself walk past him, and even though he seemed to
look right at me, he said nothing.

All week, I tried to catch Greg’s eye, to find a way to talk to him, and all week, nothing. It wasn’t like he was being actively mean. It was worse. It was like I was a stranger. He was just this boy, this suddenly popular, handsome boy at my school, and I was nobody he knew. It was like we’d never done all the things we’d done together, like he’d never been my friend, like I was some stupid girl with a crush on a stranger.

Thursday, I finally got up the courage to call him.

His father answered. “Violet! Long time, no see. We have a new woodpecker.”

“Oh, that’s great!” I smiled on purpose, hoping he could hear it in my voice. Maybe it would all be okay. “Is Greg there?”

But, when Greg got on the phone, I knew it wouldn’t be okay. He sounded different, awkward, like someone wearing too-tight shoes but trying not to show it. “So, um, what do you want, Violet?”

Suddenly, I didn’t know. I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted everything to be the same as it had been the year before. Or not the same. Better. There had been the promise of something more, and now, it was gone, and I wanted to change that. I wanted to change . . . time.

“Are you going to . . . ?”
To what? Invite me over? Say hello in class? Do anything? Be normal?
“I haven’t talked to you since you got back.”

A pause. In the living room, my mom was flipping through television channels. I heard the
Family Ties
theme start.

I bet we’ve been together for a million years;

And I bet we’ll be together for a million more.

Mom changed the channel, and
Entertainment Tonight
came on instead.

“Yeah, about that,” Greg said. “The thing is, my friends don’t like you.”

“Your friends? What friends?”

“Jennifer Sadler and them. They say . . . you’re bossy and mean to them.”

I sucked my breath in. Unreal. Popular people always had some reason why you deserved for them to be mean to you. “And you believe that? That I could boss Jennifer around, that I bully
her
? All you have to do is look at the two of us to know . . .”

I stopped. That was the problem. He had looked at us.

“I don’t know what to believe. I just want to have friends. I don’t want to be alone.”

“You had a friend. You weren’t alone.”

“You know what I mean. I’ve always had a thing for Jennifer.”

I didn’t know that. Why was he doing this to me? Why did Jennifer even want to be friends with Greg? But I knew. Because he was beautiful. And beautiful guys were catnip for Jennifer. A beautiful guy like Greg didn’t belong with an ugly like me. The second she showed interest in him, he knew. I felt so stupid for thinking anyone would ever really like me, especially someone as great as Greg.

“I’m tired of people thinking I’m weird,” he said.

“I thought you were weird, in a good way. I liked you the way you were.”

“I don’t want that anymore.”

I stood, clutching the phone. I didn’t want to put it back in its cradle. The click it would make would change everything. I felt like, if I just held on, I could hold on to my life. But Greg said he had to do homework. I hung up before he could hear me crying.

The next day, in civics class, Mrs. Davis assigned a group project, an ad for a mock presidential candidate. I tried to make eye contact with Greg, my usual partner, but he turned toward Jennifer Sadler.

“Does anyone not have a group?” Mrs. Davis asked.

I raised my hand, barely flipping up the fingertips, glancing
around to see if anyone else raised theirs. No one. So humiliating. Mrs. Davis asked if anyone only had two in their group.

“Yeah, us.” Nick gestured to himself and Nathan.

“Okay, you can join them,” Mrs. Davis told me.

“Great,” Nathan muttered when I started over to them—as if I was going to be the liability in their group when everyone knew I was the smartest person in class and they were just about the dumbest.

“I can just do the whole thing,” I said. “It’s easier.”

“Will you say we helped?” Nathan asked.

I looked over at Greg, who sat deep in conversation with StupidGennifer and StupiderJennifer.

“Depends. Will you refrain from being complete jerks for the duration of this project?”

Blank stares. I tried to figure out which word they hadn’t understood.

I revised. “Will you be nice?” All single syllables.

They both nodded.

“Fine then.”

I glanced at Greg, but he wasn’t looking. Beside him, Jennifer mouthed,
Ugly.

I realized what I had known, probably all along, what ugly girls since the beginning of time had been trying to deny: Beauty was all that mattered. I might tell myself that if people
really
knew me, they’d look past my weak chin and non-eyelashes, would see into my soul and like me despite it all. But, watching Greg giggle with Jennifer and Gennifer, I knew that was not the case. Greg Columbo had looked into my soul—but he still couldn’t see past my nose. And, if he couldn’t, for sure no one else could. I was disgusted at myself for liking him.

But I still did.

For the next week, Nick, Nathan, and I worked on our project.
Or rather, I worked on our project while Nick and Nathan read comic books under their desks.

Tuesday, I asked my mother to take me to the drugstore for supplies. “I need a poster board, Sharpies, stencils, and one of those scissors with the cool-looking edge.”

“Isn’t this a group project? Can’t someone else buy this stuff?” She squinted at herself in the mirror, looking for age spots. It would be hard to pull her away.

“They’re sort of worthless. You know how it is.”

“Where’s Greg been lately? He was always a nice kid.”

“He changed over the summer. Can we go to Eckerd’s now? You can look at makeup while I find this stuff.”

“Like I’d buy makeup from the drugstore.” Still, she started toward her purse, since it must have been obvious I wouldn’t change my mind. “Changed how?”

“What?” This was more interest than she usually took in my life.

“How did Greg change?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Got too handsome to hang with me.” I faked a laugh.

My mother, of course, was beautiful. Not beautiful the way every kid thinks her mother is beautiful, but actually beautiful. I’d barely known my father. He died when I was little, leaving Mom with enough money that she never had to work, never had to remarry “another old, rich guy,” as she said. Mom had no photos of him she’d admit to, but he must’ve been really ugly because, for sure, I didn’t get my looks from her side. She was tall, with the build of a dancer, blond hair the color of starlight, and eyes the exact shade of the Mediterranean Sea in photos of Greece. Her brows arched high, making her appear wide-eyed and innocent. Her lips were dark and pouty, the type I imagined boys wanted to kiss. No wonder she didn’t know about some people having to do all the work on projects.
I bet guys were falling all over themselves trying to do her homework for her when she was in school.

Another mom would have said something about looks not being important or that I’d get pretty one day when I was older. That she said neither proved that she didn’t believe those things. Instead, she said, “Oh, I guess that happens. Come on. Let’s go.”

As we started toward the door, I looked back into her mirror. She spent so much time in front of it, I half expected it to talk to her.

On Friday, I brought in my/our project. It was perfect, better than a professional graphic designer would have done. I set it up in the front of the room, noting the peeling tape on Greg’s group’s poster, the shaky handwriting on another. Mine—I mean, ours—was the best in the class. I took my seat, imagining that even my rivals were stunned by its beauty.