Unlovely (4 page)

"Let's talk about your relationships with
men."

"I'd rather not. Not today,"
Claudia answered.

Dr. Phillips persisted, "We have to
discuss Mark at some point."

"I understand that," Claudia
said. "But not today. I just can't do it today."

Dr. Phillips looked at Claudia, whose
mouth was set in a stubborn line, and conceded the point. "What would you
like to talk about?"

"I don't know. Just something else.
You pick something else."

"How about self-perception? Can you
tell me something you like about yourself?"

"I like my brain. I think I'm good
at what I do."

"Okay. Anything else?"

Claudia was silent.

"How about we start simple. What
about your appearance? What do you like about your appearance?"

"Nothing."

"Really? I think there's a lot to
like there."

"Really."

"Do you believe you're assessing
yourself accurately?"

"Well, I see these bandages, and
they remind me of how crazy I am. I see this body that no one wants to be near
and this face that no one wants to look at."

"Claudia, is that a true statement?
I just said I think there's a lot to like. Have you chosen to disregard that
opinion?"

Claudia wasn't an idiot. It wasn't like
the doctor was going to agree that she was ugly.

"You're getting paid to raise my
self-esteem," she said. It was rude, but weren't they supposed to tell the
truth here?

"Is that what you think?"

"Yes."

"They could hire a cheerleader to
do that, Claudia. You don't need a cheerleader."

"No, I don't."

"I'm here to help you get well. Do
you really believe that you're an expert at your own self-assessment? Is it possible
you could be wrong?"

"Of course I'm the expert. You
asked me to give a self-assessment. Now you're saying I'm wrong. How can I be
wrong at a self-assessment?"

"Okay. I see what you mean. Let me
put it this way: do you think you're reflecting objective reality, or just how
you feel?"

Claudia looked at her hands. The palm of
her left hand itched terribly. Healing.

"I think I've had sufficient input
through the course of my life to know I'm ugly, Dr. Johnson."

"Okay. Why don't you tell me why
you think this?"

"Really? You need words to
understand what you can see before your face?"

"Yes."

Claudia started to cry. She got mad at
herself for it, but that just made her cry harder.

Claudia met the first day of her freshman year at
Mapleville
High School with a blend of optimism and
pessimism: she anticipated academic success, she foresaw social isolation.

Although Claudia had maintained her
childhood contempt for the mob, viewing most of her peers as little better than
sans culottes
, her sense of superiority in all things began to crumble
as she grew older. She longed for some affirmation that she was acceptable,
that she wasn't just an oddball. There were a few girls with whom she felt she
could share a table in the lunchroom (thank heaven – what a disaster to be
forced to eat alone), and she had Melanie, of course, but for the most part she
felt herself a complete social misfit.

Stepping off the bus onto the pavement,
Claudia was vexed at her anxiety to have the approbation of the students crowding
into the school building. After all, she had grown up with the vast majority of
them. She'd seen them wet their pants, vomit and pick their noses. They were
just human beings – deeply flawed human beings, obviously. Why should she care
whether they liked her or not? But she did. She despised them, but she wanted
them to like her.

Claudia walked past the rows of lockers.
Every now and then she would catch someone's eye and offer a quick,
tight-lipped smile, but for the most part she passed through unimpeded and
unnoticed. Although she was surrounded by the excited chatter of girls and the
loud, lewd laughter of boys, no one stopped Claudia to talk or to give her a
welcoming hug.

A sudden shriek outside the science labs
startled Claudia and made her look around. It appeared that a group of girls
who hadn't seen each other for about a week were happily reunited. Where did
this enthusiasm come from? They could be any place: at a sporting event, at the
movies, even in these stupid hallways, and they were overwhelmed with emotion
at just the sight of one another. No one had ever greeted Claudia like that. It
was puzzling and upsetting: was she missing some social grace that every other
girl her age possessed? Was it a genetic defect? Was it that she'd spent too
much time with her textbooks and not enough with magazines? Was it too late to
change?

Claudia felt her pants start to slide
down toward her hips. Even with the extra holes punched in her belt, she
couldn't keep them up without having to continually hike them. She glanced at
the clock above the library entrance and saw she had a couple of minutes to
duck into the girls' room. Shouldering her way through a trio of sophomores
pushing their way out, and wrinkling her nose as she passed through a cloud of Aqua
Net, she walked over to a free sink, balanced her purse on the tiny shelf above
it, and tucked her shirt deep into her waistband to give herself a bit of
anchoring girth.

Claudia extracted a comb from the dark
depths of her purse and began to work on getting her hair just exactly right.
Her hair was similar to Sylvia's in texture: very thick, curly and difficult to
control, but it wasn't rich and dark like her mother's. It was sandy colored,
almost no-colored. Her mother called it light brown, her father said it was
dishwater blond.

She put the comb back in her purse and
gave herself a good hard look. Not too bad. She'd chosen a purple blouse today
to bring out the green in her small hazel eyes. Sylvia had urged Claudia to try
a little mascara to "open them up a bit," but Claudia thought it made
her look ridiculous and refused.

Despite all efforts to conceal them, her
pimples looked angry and red under the fluorescent restroom lights. She reached
back into her purse for a tube of tinted Clearasil and dabbed some onto a
particularly nasty spot on the side of her nose. Better. She put on a layer of
cherry
ChapStick
and smiled at herself in the mirror.
Claudia's teeth were white and straight. Few people ever noticed them, though,
because Claudia so rarely smiled.

The restroom was clearing out as the
girls hurried to their homeroom assignments. Claudia took a moment to do a
final assessment in front of the full-length mirror.

She forced her shoulders back
unnaturally so she was standing up straight: she was a couple of inches taller
than most of her classmates and had a tendency to slouch. She pulled her shirt
back out a tiny bit to puff over the waistband of her jeans and cover that
overtaxed belt.

Claudia viewed herself in profile and
sighed. Not impressive. You could have the face of a frying pan in high school,
but if you had breasts you might still get positive attention. Claudia didn't
have them. Sylvia, well aware of the importance of womanly curves and
remembering her own lean years in high school, had taken Claudia shopping for
bras lightly lined with fiberfill, hoping to make up with structural
engineering what hadn't been supplied by DNA. Sadly, the fiberfill didn't hold
up to
repeated
washing, so the cups tended to collapse
after a week or two. The result was a pair of breasts not merely small, but
dented as well. Today the dents weren't obvious because the breasts appeared
non-existent.

In homeroom Claudia received her locker
assignment and schedule. She was placed into the college-bound curriculum, and
she looked over the classes she'd be taking with a sense of satisfaction. She
was taking the hardest load of classes she could for her grade level. Claudia
was promised a brilliant future. All of her teachers said so. She just had to
survive high school.

The bell rang and the students headed to
their first period classes. Claudia's was only a door down and across the hall:
geometry. She was the first to arrive at the room, so she took a seat near the
front and examined her surroundings. The bulletin boards were bare, the
trashcan was empty, the chalkboard was black as coal,
the
chalk was still in long sticks on the shelf. Everything was fresh and new.
Claudia tapped her foot nervously, waiting to see who would be joining her.

"Hey, Claudia." A red-haired
boy in jeans and a Genesis tee shirt walked in and took the seat behind her. It
was Pat Meyers. "How was your summer?"

Claudia panicked. It would be polite to
turn to face him, but she knew she would blush and stammer, so she continued to
face the board. "Fine." Her mind raced to find something clever to
say, but she couldn't come up with a thing.

"Good," he said. He began to
beat a rhythm on his desk with a pair of pencils.

Claudia did her best to ignore him, but it
was hard. She felt her cheeks flush hot, and she worried that her blush would
spread to the back of her neck and he would know how uncomfortable she was.
She'd had a crush on Pat last year and she still kind of did. He'd greeted her
so nicely every day and even walked her to her locker a few times. She'd
thought that he liked her, but it turned out that he was in love with Lori
Fisher, even though she was a horrible person and couldn't have cared less
about him. Claudia had cried on the phone with Melanie for hours.

It still irked her. Lori Fisher was a
truly terrible human being, but there was no denying she looked cute in her gym
uniform. Once again Claudia regretted that her own cells hadn't arranged
themselves in a more aesthetically pleasing way, and she continued to obsess on
this thought while the classroom filled. Students entered alone or in pairs,
almost all of the girls in new jeans and tops, all of the boys in old jeans and
tee shirts. Most of the girls had clearly taken special care with their hair
this morning. Their lips shone with gloss.

The teacher herself finally arrived with
the bell, balancing a mug of coffee, a lesson planner and an attendance folder.
Unlike many of her colleagues, Shirley Abbot did not look forward to the first
day of school as a new beginning, but regarded it simply as a continuation of
the same dull process that had begun when she was first hired. She had spent
her young adulthood, her thirties, and now half of her fifth decade of life
trying to convince hormone-plagued adolescents that math was interesting and
worth knowing. Every now and then someone popped up who inspired her to carry
on, but not often. She was waiting it out for her pension.

Mrs. Abbot set down her books and mug,
then looked over the teenagers in her first period class. They were combing
their hair and whispering in small groups, muttering occasional curse words.
The gifted kids. Drat. While it was true that freshmen geometry students tended
to be attentive, they were still discouraging to teach. As a rule they had no
love for the subject – their motivation was grades. As college-bound students
they were expected to take the most challenging classes they could get into and
to do well in all of them. You would think they would be enjoyable to teach because
they at least cared, but they weren't. They were obsessed with every point on
every exam. It was wearying.

Oh, well. One hundred seventy-nine days
after this one.

Mrs. Abbot walked to the corner of the
room and pulled a wheeled cart loaded with geometry books over to her desk. She
proceeded to take roll, simultaneously calling each student up to receive his
textbook. It was a tedious business. Two of the students smiled and greeted her
as they approached. The others grabbed a book and shuffled sullenly back to
their seats. Mrs. Abbot successfully matched books to students until she got to
the letter
H
.

"Hanson, Gretchen," she
intoned. There was no response.

"Gretchen?" she repeated,
searching the room for the distracted student.

Claudia looked around. No, Gretchen
wasn't here. That was odd. She should be in this section. She was good in math.

Sue Sherlock raised her hand. Now
that
was surprising. Claudia hardly expected to see Sue in here. Sue had barely made
it out of Algebra with a C.

"Yes?" Mrs. Abbot said.

"May I come up to speak to you at
your desk?"

"Is it necessary?"

"It's about Gretchen."

"Very well," Mrs. Abbot
sighed.

Sue made her way to the front of the
room and spoke to the teacher in hushed tones. Mrs. Abbot's eyes narrowed as she
listened. She shook her head solemnly. Horrible. This certainly augured badly
for the rest of the year.

"Thank you," Mrs. Abbot said,
standing to get the class's attention as Sue returned to her seat.

Was it really possible that they didn't
know already? Doesn't news like this travel?
she
thought. Apparently not. She was going to have to make an announcement. What a
rotten way to make the acquaintance of the class.