Keeping The Moon(42)

giveaway of low self-esteem.”

I sat up.

She pulled back my hair with a headband, then scrutinized my face. “Morgan.”

“Yes?”

“Hand me that Revlon Sand Beige makeup. And a sponge. And the tweezers.” She held her hand out flat, like a surgeon waiting for a

scalpel.

“The tweezers?” I said as Morgan slapped them efficiently into her palm.

“Good eyebrows take maintenance,” she said, leaning forward with her eyes narrowed. “Deal with it.”

She plucked. I sat there, staring again at all the beautiful girls while she worked her magic. She spread makeup over my face,

blending and dabbing until all of its normal bumps and ridges were smoothed away. She curled my eyelashes as I squirmed, her hand

fixed hard on my shoulder. She lined my eyes with black kohl, smudging it with her thumb, then brushed blush on my cheeks and added

mascara, drawing my lashes out farther and farther. Then she pulled my hair back, letting a few strands wind down, just like hers.

And all the while I studied those perfect faces, one after another, until I came back to my own.

And I saw a girl. Not a fat girl, or a loser, or even a golf course slut.

A pretty girl. Something I had never been before.

“Sit up straight,” Isabel said again, poking me in the spine with the hairbrush. “And put your shoulders back.”

I did.

“Now smile.”

I smiled. In the mirror, over my head, Isabel frowned.

“Do me a favor,” she said, leaning in so her face was right beside mine. “Can you take that thing out?”

She was pointing at my lip ring, and I instantly ran my tongue across it. It was my touchstone, after all. I needed it. “Urn,” I

said. “I don’t know.”

“Just for one night,” she said. “Humor me.”

And I looked back at myself in the mirror, at all those faces, and then glanced at Isabel’s cousin. She stared back through her

thick glasses, her face plump and wide.

“Okay,” I said. “But just for one night.”

“One night,” she agreed, as I reached up to take it out, the last remaining part of what I once was. “One night.”

Chase Mercer had been new to the neighborhood, just like me. His dad did something in software and drove two Porsches, a blue and a

red. He didn’t fit in much at first either, since he had a sister in a wheelchair; she had something wrong with her legs, and a

nurse wheeled her up and down the street every day. Whenever she saw me, she waved. She waved at everyone.

I met Chase at a neighborhood pool party at the country club. We were both with our parents. The adults were clumped around the

bar, my mother working the crowd, and all the kids had disappeared to do whatever kids did in Conroy Plantations, so Chase and I

started walking across the golf course. It was late summer and all the stars were out. We were just talking. Nothing else.

He was from Columbus, with thick blond hair that stuck up in the back. He liked sports and Super Nintendo, and when he was six he’

d had pneumonia so bad he’d almost died. His mother sold real estate and was never home, and his sister had been sick since she

was born and her name was Andrea. He missed his old friends and his old school, and all the kids he’d met in Conroy Plantations

were rich and obnoxious and cared too much about clothes.

I told Chase Mercer about my mother suddenly becoming famous. About my father, whom I’d never seen aside from a picture of him and

my mother standing by the Alamo, in Texas. About how all the girls in Conroy Plantations made fun of me because I’d been fat and

were only nice to me when their mothers made them.

I told Chase Mercer a lot of things.

We ended up sitting on the grass at the eighteenth hole, both of us staring up at the stars. Chase knew almost all the

constellations—he’d had a telescope in Columbus—and he was picking them out, one finger pointing while I followed it with my

eyes. He had just spotted Cassiopeia when I heard the voices.

“Yoo-hoo!” Then a light flickered across my face, a flashlight beam darting from me to Chase and back again. “Oh, my God,”

someone shrieked. There was an explosion of giggling. “Chase, you dog, you,” someone else yelled out.

“Shut up,” Chase said. He stood up and brushed himself off, raising one hand to shield his eyes from the light.

“I always knew she was a slut,” I heard a girl say, and even without looking I knew it had to be Caroline Dawes, who was skinny

and tan, with straight black hair she spent a lot of time swinging around. Her mother had made her invite me over just after I

moved in, and we’d spent a long, painful afternoon in her room, where, as I watched, she lay on the bed talking on the phone. We’

d already been in gym class together for almost two years, and she’d tortured me with every fat name in the book until I’d lost

the weight. Now, with my awful luck, we were neighbors, and she had something new to hold against me.

“Let’s go,” someone said, and the light flicked across us once more, landing square on my face. It hurt my eyes. “Oh, gross,”

another voice said. “Chase, you must have been desperate, man.”