There was so much. Nails, tanning, hair, apparel of every specific variety. So many one by one details that needed tending each hour. The sheer volume of technical exactitudes was staggering.But it wasn't that it dragged her down. Standard repertoire, she maintained. The relentless need, the constant effort forced her hardy, more durable.
How many things had the word Girl in the title: where the girls are, when you're a girl, girl 6.
The mall was the only unreservedly positive feature that spoke for this particular less-than-metropolis. It was, thankfully, huge. Always crowds, but never crowded. The multitiled floor that made for a constant din of clacking heels.
There were smells of coffee and plastic airbed mattresses and window cleaner and bath oils.
A gigantic mural painted over an unoccupied storefront with old-timey cottonfield scenes—ostensibly to represent what in this spot a couple of milleniums before the mall. The whole sentimental idea enough to give her brother an asthma attack.
There were vast sheets of glass everywhere and clear cathedral ceilings and fountains, the omnipresent clattering of water. You couldn't really get away from the sound.
Cheerleaders strolling through like they belonged to the underground regions of a particularly nervy videogame. Beaucoups of black eyeshadow and gloss. The look wasn't bad. It made her wish they could have pushed the envelope harder back when she was. More edgy.
Sunglasses always. The longer you stayed in a place the more doubletakes you got. Aren't you on the channel 8 news. The outright staring. Even autographs.
Even the married guy you had lunch and so forth with, wife and two kids in tow. Who looked twice to make sure she wasn't seeing, and when she was, he wouldn't look. Wives know. Even kids know.
Still, better than the ones with wives who never looked at all.
Flowing through the crowd, swerving more here, a little less here. Brushing past, the lightest possible touch and yet still a touch. A question perpetually loaded into RAM: why doesn't that woman do something with her hair.
Imagining walking with parts dangling. Men's bodies evoked the word ridiculous.
The assurance of scent present in your wake.
That you are one of more than half the world and that you are totally unique and special because of the utter uniformity of the other half.
Being a TV reporter was really only insurance.
Those huge posters at the lingerie outlet. Whose secret? Not the bitch in the picture, not anymore.
Into the mall bookstore, a matter to let drop to her brother. "Oh guess what I saw in the bookstore?" His eyebrows. Not that it would impress him. Not at all. Only that it went toward lowering the total number of points against her in the long run. Against the lifelong indictment of being his sister. Not that he thought that she thought it mattered.
There, in the back, was where she saw the girl. In the paperback fantasy section: dungeons & dragons, swords and queens, diaphanous gowns and plastic boobs. Kelly can't help but look. She turns away, but looks again. A girl, fifteen maybe. The living portrait of homely. The worst kind of homely. Pooch belly already, one thin ponytail, fat lips, coke bottle glasses. Not a caricature. The real thing. And she knew it was supposed to be sad. She couldn't look away. It was sad.
But she didn't feel it. Couldn't allow herself to feel it. Living for the latest in a series of books not romance but fantasy. Spells, wizards. More than that: Power and Justice.
And it wasn't true; that the girl could just fix herself up and make a difference, any difference at all.
What she herself had, she had. She didn't thank God for it. She didn't dismiss the possibility of God's role in it, either.
She didn't want to help the girl.
She just wanted to go home and lie down on the cool bed in the cool mint-scented air conditioning in the perfect bedroom in the perfect apartment and not be her. The girl.
Not be her. Forever and ever and ever.
