"I'm wonderful. I'm beautiful. I'm worthy."
I stared down at Candace Holt's picture on Teen Vogue, aware I was breaking her rule by not reciting the mantra while looking "purposefully" into my reflection's eyes. But just look at her, she was perfect. Airbrushed, probably, but there was no way those cheekbones weren't hers. I'd give almost anything to look like that.
And in came the self-pity. I turned towards my reflection.
"I'm beautiful. I'm wonderful. I'm worthy," I told my dual image. Though it was difficult to get past the doubting grimace on my face. I had to keep at it, just as Candace always says in her interviews.
Believe it, you're beautiful!
Not exactly poetry, but the sentiment was clear.
Soon, the carrying warm aroma of freshly brewed coffee and apricot danishes from downstairs had me sulking into my mirror. It was back to a routine I hadn't followed in almost three months.
Life is quiet, almost monotonously so, here in Sitka—a small, Alaskan town of less than nine thousand, though also being the largest in land mass in the whole of the United States.
With the weather's cloudy warmth taking a back seat to the oncoming cautionary breeze of the impending fall, a sort of calm washes through the town—right before the massive crap storm. Being, of course, students returning to the tiny, bar-less prison cells of their academic ventures.
For me, it would be my final year of high school. One last hurrah before I'd be sent almost six-hundred miles away to Anchorage, to start my college life.
I stood preening before my full-length mirror, hoping to detect those abrupt summery bodily changes people claim as fact, but of which I've personally never experienced.
Not once since I was thirteen.
My appearance had matured gradually, leading off to a point where I would never mature again. I was never getting any taller, curvier, prettier. And what little looks I managed to tuck away were nowhere near Prue's magnitude.
Prudence Livingston, my best friend and the queen of our school's social hierarchy, has always been rich, beautiful, popular, and flaunting an established collection of high-end friends, all of whom either despised me, seemingly resenting the very oxygen that keeps me out of a pine box, or are flat out oblivious to my existence altogether.
The motive behind the malice, however, has always been lost to me.
But these were Prue's friends, and what's important to her is important to me. So I try to make peace, to fit in with the impossibly good looking—albeit mainly surgically enhanced—royal clan. But most days I had neither the genes nor the green to keep up.
I sighed, fingering the cotton fabric of my blue v-neck, and tossing my strawberry blond tresses behind a shoulder. I turned to the side, mournfully eyeing the petite curve of my bust while fighting the urge to puff out my chest. My pencil width physique hadn't filled out in the slightest, my vision remaining reliant on flimsy-framed glasses, and not at all helping me achieve the sexy librarian motif I was aiming for, while my hair was still as flat as my behind.
I grabbed my backpack and stomped out of my room in a huff, heading for the kitchen where my dad's younger brother and sergeant for the Sitka Police Department, Uncle Liam, was set at the table with his paper, my jaws still so tightly wound I could grind diamonds to dust. I went for the cabinets to find a bowl, plucked a spoon from the dishwasher and plopped down across Uncle Liam.
"Mornin', kid," he greeted from behind the gray pages.
"Morning." I poured myself a bowl of breakfast, reading off the cereal's info label.
Creep-O's Chocolate Swirls, get your creep on!
I put the cereal box with its cringe-worthy monologue back onto the table, feeling not an inch of the hunger that would usually strike me full force at this time on any other day. I was still too busy sulking.
Footsteps rushed in from the stairs, and I hung my head. Summer was over, and so was, apparently, my dad's short-lived good mood. He stalked into the kitchen, work loafers clicking against the tiles, hands fumbling with his tie.
My dad, David, worked as the assistant manager at Aspen Suites, a local hotel here in town, having moved up from his two-year placement in laundry. He took one look at my flipping cereal bits around with my spoon and stopped, eyes flickering to the clock on the east wall.
"Hey, are you eating that, or teaching it to do handsprings?"
I gave my cereal another restless stir. "The Olympics are only two years away."
Uncle Liam's hoarse chuckle sounded from behind the newspaper, while David looked entirely unimpressed, his sharply defined visage screaming repugnance. It was enough for me to sink into my chair like a concreted body in the ocean.
There was a time when David would have laughed at the lameness of my idiocy, back when he wasn't busy spending his time nursing his regularly intoxicated wife in the nights, while still working twelve hour days with regular periods of mandatory overtime.
He was the "Fun Dad" before all that, the man a younger me had once looked up to. Now, often times, I was too afraid to look, for I haven't seen anything resembling adoration on his face since the last time mom swore she'd put the bottle down for good.
"Just hurry up and finish or you'll be late for school." He stormed his way out of the kitchen, leaving me glowering at the spongy mess in my bowl.
Sitka High. That merciless, soul-sucking trench of teenagery angst. I don't understand how it happened. One day I was sifting through channels in between re-runs of MASH, and the next I'm sitting here, picking morosely at some milky, sugary goop, twenty minutes before attendance.
I consider myself of the optimistic variety. Except for life and death situations, things aren't always as bad as they seem at first. It was something that suffering through a lot of truly awful moments in my life had taught me long ago. This wasn't a life or death matter, no one was hurt, the world wasn't ending, and besides the gaping hole in my stomach stirred on occasionally by nerves, I was totally healthy.
I'd have a break from David and Sheri—or at least a break from noticing that I'd been left alone in a dead silent house for the majority of the day, with only the dulled prattling of whatever half-decent sitcom was on television.
Most people would've paid for the stillness, but it's hard craving something you've had a nearly endless supply of for most of your life.
"Don't pay him any mind, Didi."
I peered at my uncle from atop my glasses, plunging the spoon into my cereal.
"Yer dad's aimin' fer the wind. Signed himself up fer the manager program just last week."
"He's applying for the manager position?" I didn't know that. Why didn't I know that? Did Sheri even know? Would he even bother telling her?
"Yeah. So don't worry if he's men-struating more than usual," Uncle Liam flashed a buoyant smirk at the Sahara dryness of his own humor, something of his I apparently inherited, "he just has a lot goin' on, right now."
I nodded absently, still caught up on the primary. David hadn't even mentioned wanting a promotion. Causal conversing was one of those things that he and I didn't do much of. It was as true as it was pitiful, but this was pretty big news. Had he every intention of keeping me in the dark forever? I leaned back into my chair, catching Uncle Liam's weighty gaze through my peripheral.
"When doesn't he have a lot going on? The man's an underground mob lord, complete with his own entourage." I tried smiling, but my lips felt like rubber pulling against my skin. I didn't like worrying my Uncle, but at the same time, his concern for me was almost...nice. It was awful. I shouldn't want him to worry, but I did.
Worry constitutes caring.
"Ya help him all ya can, kiddo," he said, obviously not buying my front. "It's up to him to meet ya halfway. No one can make that trek fer him."
I swirled my cereal again, and gave it a flippant splash with the spoon, getting the milk all over my T-shirt. "Crap." As I fussed over trying to dry the splattered stains, Uncle Liam also gave the clock a look-through.
"Ya should probably get goin'. The bus'll be en route by now."
"Prue's giving me a ride."
"Her again." There was a noticeable scowl lining my uncle's face from behind his coffee mug.
"Every summer I hope fer a change in the maturity fare, and every summer I'm left with egg on my face."
With vexed lips already pursed, I looked at him from where I was wiping up milk from the floor. "Prue's about as grown up as the rest of us—"
"I was talking about you, Didi."
"Me?"
"That girl's not yer friend." His eyes were back on his paper, gaze steeled. "She barely even likes herself."
"Well, I like her." Why was it always like this—our conversations about Prudence? They always began with some off comment, a critical snipe, and my defending her. Always. Why? "I wouldn't have made it through middle school without her."
"She sticks up fer ya one time in a game of laser tag when it meant losin' to the other team, and then before you know it yer swappin' blood oaths."
"We never did that!"
The sound of a car horn made my head snap towards the door like a wild hare hearing the screech of a hawk.
"That's her now." I rushed to put the milk away, my free hand still blotting away at the edge of my blouse with a napkin.
"Why don't you change yer shirt?" he called to me, as I grabbed my backpack from the chair's back and tossed it over my shoulder.
Another honk from outside. "There's no time!" I rushed to peck his cheek and swiveled for the door. I knew it was wise to keep Prudence waiting for only so long.
"Well, at least take this!" He tossed his old windbreaker at me, my hands missing the catch, which resulted in it wrapping about my head by its sleeves.
I thanked him and yanked the jacket off, threw it over my arm, grabbed my house key, and was out the door, just as another two honks shattered the stillness of the stale morning air.
I nearly tripped twice over my unlaced Converses on my way off the stoop and into Prudence's Mercedes Benz G-Class. A ridiculously flashy tanker against the small town modesty was just her taste.
I tossed my bag and Uncle Liam's jacket onto the back pink leather seats and was immediately greeted by Prudence's scrunched face, her surgically improved nose twitching like an attentive rodent's.
"Ugh, you reek of sour pudding cups," she whined, furiously digging into her Chanel tote.
"I know." I strapped myself in while Prudence yanked a perfume bottle from her bag and began spritzing me with an unbearably flowery layer of glittery mess, making me hack unrelentingly into my arm.
"What the heck is that?" I coughed.
"Bvlgari, it'll help. It's better than whatever tres leches thing you got going on." She dropped the expensive fragrance back into her bag and pulled out from the curb.
The misplaced aroma of herbs and tea brought my attention to the plastic bottle of Grass Fast Prue was sipping from in her free hand. "Early start?" I said, discreetly shielding my nose from the intense odor with my shoulder.
The herbal drink, Grass Fast—which was a medicinal blend of spices and wheatgrass puree "guaranteed to shed off those stubborn few pounds"—was the multi-million dollar industry the Livingstons' were famous for.
Why the proprietor of such a lucrative family business would want to live so far out of the way of anything was always explained to me by Prue as her family's attempt of "getting away from the stipulations of a celebrity lifestyle."
And it seemed to me that moving clear across the country to an area small enough to lessen populace recognition, yet large enough to hide, was a pretty good call.
Prue took another hearty gulp of the drink, tucking it into the cup holder. "I have my eye on this gorgeous Vera strapless Daddy had shipped in from New York to wear on homecoming. But this was, like, in June, so I totally let myself go with all this summer slack back fat. I have more neck roles than Jeffery."
I doubted it. The Livingstons' English bulldog, Jeffery, was tough competition.
"Summer slack back fat, say that five times fast." I smirked at the scowl she sent to the windshield.
"This isn't a time for jokes, Didi. The Steinbeck pool party is coming up and I've just got to be bikini ready by then."
Come on, Prue, haven't we ridden this train before? First, you stress the week before the summer holidays end, become depressed and go on a binge comprised of chocolate chip waffles and marshmallow fluff, work out the new fat and the one you gained before, but gain more on top because you're convinced you'll never lose all of it before the party—a whopping two pounds and seven ounces—cry yourself to sleep over a pint of raisin rum ice cream, then wake up to ask your dad to phone in a pricey one piece from outta town, which you'll opt to trade in for a lacy crop top and a g-string.
It's what I wanted to say. Instead...
"You look great, Prue. You're too thin if you ask me. I can practically see right through you."
"Didn't I say I wasn't in the joking mood?" she snarled, pounding a dainty fist against the steering wheel.
"Careful, you don't want to set this thing off, it could blow any minute." I couldn't help it. My tongue was jammed on replay today.
"You're such a nark."
"You don't have to get salty. Especially if you plan on dieting—"
Prue scoffed prissily. "Always with the quips. That's probably your best feature, it helps you stand out. Especially with so little else going for you."
Ouch. She, on the other hand, really wasn't joking. I'd only been trying to cheer her up. But then again, Prue never took to being ignored too lightly. I felt my shoulders sag with the sigh that heaved from my body. "Thanks," I mumbled listlessly.
And so the circus begins.