Someone I Wanted to Be (2 page)

She wore little padded push-up bras and had red bumps, baby acne, on her skinny arms. But Kristy was tiny as a fairy, and she had long, curly, white-blond hair. That hair did it every time. She’d get out of the car with that hair floating around her, and the boys were instantly drugged. I loved her and I hated her. She annihilated me. When she walked in the room, I disappeared.

I always told Corinne, “You’re so much prettier than Kristy.” And Corinne was, with her round cheeks and deep dimples. She streaked her brown hair, hid her freckles under orangey foundation, and wore green heart-shaped studs that brought out the color of her eyes. But there were a million Corinnes in the world, and Corinne knew it. This knowledge was like an arrowhead buried deep in her heart. It gave her eyes an icy glint and was the best part about her.

“Movie-star eyes and a movie-star mouth,” Mrs. Baker always said about me. But I had rolls on my stomach and gigantic pale thighs. My hair and feet were OK, but it was like an erupting volcano of blubber in between.

I was like a princess trapped in a spell of fat. I was in love with Damien Rogers, a junior at Arapahoe High School. He was tall and dark-haired with a dimpled chin. We saw him almost every weekend we went down to Torrance Park. I’d talked to him once. I said, “Hi,” and was almost positive that he heard me.

The bathroom door opened and Kristy burst out in a white terry robe with her hair in a pink turban. “Go!” she said. Corinne slowly got to her feet. Kristy’s ironed size-zero jeans lay on her bed. She’d let the silk conditioner in her hair soak for fifteen minutes.

Kristy grabbed her phone and leaned back against her lace-covered pillow. I sat on the floor. I leaned against the foot of her bed and stretched. “Can I use your laptop?”

Kristy said, “No. Chubs, you got to start waxing those arms.”

I glared at her. She wasn’t even looking at me. I pulled on my hoodie and thought about how his voice sounded. Kurt King. He slowed way down. He said, “I want to talk to you.” His voice had gotten into my head like smoke, like a cat, and curled around me.

When we walked back through the living room, Pastor Steve was on his knees in front of the couch. He held Mr. and Mrs. Baker’s hands, and they all had their eyes closed.

Kristy pulled into the 7-Eleven parking lot.

“He’s here.”

He was standing out front, leaning against the brick wall. He was smoking and had one cowboy boot kicked back against the bricks. I was skewered, pinned to the seat by the sight of him.

He had long streaked hair with bangs that made him look boyish, green eyes, sharp cheekbones, and a mouth that looked like he’d just finished kissing someone. I wanted to put my hands around his narrow hips. He wore jeans torn at the knees and the corduroy jacket with the cheesy leather collar that he’d been wearing the first time we saw him. Corinne called him Mr. Corduroy. I was the only one who knew his real name. Kurt King.

Kristy ran her car into the curb, and we all jerked against our seat belts. One of the oldest kids in our grade, she’d gotten the Civic in September but was still a bad driver. By law she could only have one other kid in the car. She usually had two.

He took one last drag off his cigarette and flicked it across the parking lot. I was in the backseat. I always rode in the backseat when Corinne was with us.

“He’s heading over,” said Corinne in a singsong. She pulled the sleeves of her hoodie down over her hands and jammed her fists in her armpits.

Kristy unbuckled, lowered her window, sat up straight, and stuck out her chest. Her face was framed by a cloud of white ringlets. She was wearing giant silver hoop earrings and a tight lacy top she’d bought at the mall that afternoon. “Do we need cigarettes?” she said, when there were two packs sitting on the dash in front of her. She turned down the radio.

“He’s here,” Corinne said under her breath.

He stood outside Kristy’s door with his arms crossed. He tilted his head to the side and squinted as if she were a car he was thinking about buying.

“Hey,” he said with a crooked smile. He sucked in his cheeks like he had a mouthful of sugar.

Kristy spun around. Her mouth hung open in fake surprise. “Oh! Hey.”

He braced himself against the door and leaned down until he filled Kristy’s window. His streaky bangs fell into his eyes, and he shook them back. His hands were brown and smooth except for the veins that ran like little snakes under the skin. His corduroy sleeves smelled like cigarettes and wind. His lower lip was swollen; his upper lip was thin and curved with a little dip in the middle. His eyes were dark-lashed. He was older than us, in his twenties at least. His face belonged on a magazine cover. He was the kind of guy you couldn’t look away from — you’d try to look somewhere else, and your head would slowly turn back. I was the fat girl with huge thighs.

He said, “What’s going on?” His scratchy voice made me feel strange and secret. I was barely breathing.

Kristy’s shoulders swayed in a little circle to the song on the radio. Rihanna. She laughed for no reason. “Not much,” she said.

He grinned as if she’d said something of incredible wit.

“Did you call me?” He pulled back a little and squinted at her. “Was that you who called me the other night?”

I was invisible. It was like being in a movie theater watching Kristy’s life on the big screen.

“Uh, no,” said Kristy, as she tried to shush Corinne. Corinne was poking Kristy with her elbow and whispering.

“Hey, would you do us a favor?” said Kristy. She twirled her hair around her fingers and widened her eyes. “I remember seeing you here last weekend. Would you maybe buy us some beer?”

Kurt King sighed, stood up, and stared across the parking lot. He slowly ran his tongue across his front teeth. He looked down at Kristy, then cocked his head. “Man, I hate it when kids ask me to do that. But I’ll do it for you, sweetheart.”

“I’ve got money,” said Kristy. She stretched to get the twenty out of her back pocket, and Kurt King just looked her over and drank her in. It was kind of sick, and exactly the way I’d imagined Damien Rogers staring at me.

He crumpled the money into his fist. He had huge nails rimmed with dirt. “Pull around to the back by the Dumpster. What do you want?”

Corinne leaned over Kristy’s lap. “Whatever’s cheap. And get us a pack of Marlboro reds. OK, sweetheart?”

He gave Corinne a glassy-eyed stare, rolled back his shoulders, and swaggered over to the door. He jerked it open. For a minute, we watched him inside in the yellow light. Kristy started up the engine, and the Civic shot backward. She drove the car around the back of the store and pulled up next to the Dumpster. She yanked down the rearview mirror, smeared on some lip gloss, then looked back to see if he was coming just as I leaned forward. She whipped me in the eyes with her hair. “How old do you think he is?”

“Kristy, you like him?” said Corinne with a little shriek. “He’s old! He wears a stupid-looking corduroy jacket! He has dirty hands! He highlights his hair! Mr. Corduroy is disgusting.”

“Corinne, shut up,” I said. “Mr. Corduroy’s coming. He’s right here.”

He walked up to Kristy’s window. He was wearing a belt with a big brass belt buckle engraved with a picture of a bucking horse. He scuffed his boot against the pavement and let us look at his bulky crotch and bucking-bronco belt buckle for a long minute. Then he shoved the case of beer through the window and tossed the cigarettes onto Corinne’s lap.

“There you go. Here’s your change. Now. How you going to thank me?” His face was still and serious.

Corinne set the case on the floor under her feet. There was a big light by the store’s back door, but by the Dumpster it was all shadows. Big blooming shadows like a garden of shadows, layers of shadows, all the different colors of shadow. Kristy sat motionless as a rabbit. She was shivering, maybe because Kurt King was drawing circles on her bare arm with his finger.

“What’s your name?”

Corinne jabbed Kristy’s side. Kristy put the car in reverse and the car rolled backward. Kurt King hung on to Kristy’s window and walked alongside.

“Girl, what’s your name?” he said. “I know it was you who called.”

“I got to go,” said Kristy. When she turned her head, I could see her nose and her thin, glossy mouth through her hair. She was shaking with laughter.

“Thanks a million, Mr. Corduroy,” sang Corinne. She put her feet up on the dash and stuck her elbow out the window.

Kristy drove slowly around the store to the street. Kurt King walked beside the car, still hanging on to her window. His boots crunched against the asphalt. “I’m not letting you go,” he said, “until you tell me your name.” Kristy leaned back, laughed, and chewed her gum. Her eyes gleamed. I watched her in the rearview mirror.

Kristy stopped the car before she turned onto Tenth. “We got to go, dude.” She smiled to herself and pretended to look for something in her purse. “We got to go.” She shook out her hair.

Kurt King let go of Kristy’s window and leaned into mine. His big fingertips pinched the door. “Hey, quiet girl. What’s her name?”

His eyes, just a few inches away, looked steadily into mine. Warm breath blew against my cheek; it smelled like cigarettes and beer and something minty and dark and hot. I could have gotten drunk on his breath.

“Ashley.” That was the name I’d always wanted.

He put his big, dry hand around my chin. “Thanks, sweetheart.” My mouth brushed his palm as we pulled away.

Kristy and Corinne grabbed each other’s arms and shrieked with laughter. The car shot forward, spraying gravel, and Mr. Corduroy jumped back. He yelled, “I’ll be seeing you, Ashley!”

Kristy and Corinne laughed the whole way to Torrance Park. Besides the mall and the mountains, there was nowhere else to go in Hilton, Colorado.

We drove down Torrance Avenue through Hilton’s dinky downtown: brick buildings, a scabby park, one little skyscraper. Past downtown, the avenue widened into a four-lane road lined with lumberyards, warehouses, junkyards, fast-food restaurants, a couple of gas stations. The park was at the end, right before the road turned into a highway. Torrance Park had a concrete-block recreation center that was never open and a tiny basketball court with bent hoops. Other than that, there was just a stretch of weedy, thorny grass and a huge parking lot hidden from the road by a line of dark pines.

Kristy pulled into the parking lot, checked to see who was there, then backed into a space on the east side, where West High kids hung out. She sat sideways in her seat and started drinking Mr. Corduroy’s beer. She was so small, like a kid in a blond wig, but she could really put it away. She chugged a can and cupped a hand under her chin so the beer wouldn’t run down her neck. Corinne curled in her seat, sipped beer, and watched the boys.

I sat in the backseat and played it all back in my head. How his voice had sounded when he said, “Thanks, sweetheart.” I could still feel his hand against my mouth. Kristy twisted around and stared at me, then squawked with laughter and blew yellow streams of beer out her nose.

Some boys strolled up to Corinne’s window. She lowered it and handed out cans of beer. “Dudes, we don’t have that many! OK, one more.” Corinne loved it when boys crowded around her like that. And the boys would gaze sweetly down at her — she was exactly what they had in mind for the night, just the ticket.

Then they’d look farther in and see Kristy and her hair, and they’d start to bristle and shove each other. And me? Their eyes would slide right over me and my thunder thighs all squashed in the backseat. That was fine. Nothing could touch me that night. I was in love with Damien Rogers, and a guy whose face belonged on a magazine cover had touched my cheek.

Kristy got out of the car and headed across the parking lot. Boys called to her and followed her like a swarm of bees. Some boy would say, “Hey, Kristy!” She’d turn around and yell, “What the hell do you want?” Then she’d stumble over, and he’d put his arm around her and hold his cigarette or whatever he was drinking to her mouth, and she’d take a puff or a sip, protected in the curve of his arm.

Corinne and I got out and sat on the hood of Kristy’s car. We lit cigarettes, unzipped our jackets to show off our tops. I crossed my legs so my thighs would look smaller. Our hair, perfumed by shampoo, hung in silky curtains around our faces. We both wore Kristy’s rose-petal lip gloss and smoky mauve eye shadow. The night boiled with possibilities.