Pretty Girls

“Jesus Christ,” she mumbled, because she had forgotten that she got her mustache waxed today, and that the girl had used a new astringent and that the astringent had caused an angry rash to come out on Lydia’s upper lip so that instead of the one or two stray hairs she had a full-­on, red handlebar mustache.

She could only imagine Mindy Parker conveying this to the other Mothers. “Lydia Delgado! Mustache rash!”

Lydia crammed another handful of chips into her mouth. She chewed loudly, not caring about the crumbs on her shirt. Not caring that the Mothers could see her gorging on carbs. There was a time when she used to try harder. That time had been before she hit her forties.

Juice diets. Juice fasts. The No-­Juice Diet. The Fruit Diet. The Egg Diet. Curves. Boot Camp. Five-­minute Cardio. Three-­minute Cardio. The South Beach Diet. The Atkins Diet. The Paleo Diet. Jazzercise. Lydia’s closet contained a veritable eBay of failures: Zumba shoes, cross-­trainers, hiking boots, belly dancing cymbals, a thong that had never quite made it to a pole-­dancing class that one of her clients swore by.

Lydia knew that she was overweight, but was she really fat? Or was she just Westerly Fat? The only thing she was certain of was that she wasn’t thin. Except for a brief respite during her late teens and early twenties, she had struggled with her weight her entire life.

This was the dark truth behind Lydia’s burning hatred for the Mothers: she couldn’t stand them because she couldn’t be more like them. She liked potato chips. She loved bread. She lived for a good cupcake—­or three. She didn’t have time to work out with a trainer or take back-­to-­back Pilates classes. She had a business to run. She was a single mother. She had a boyfriend who occasionally required maintenance. Not just that, but she worked with animals. It was hard to look glamorous when you’d just come from aspirating the anal glands of a slovenly dachshund.

Lydia’s fingers hit the empty bottom of the potato chip bag. She felt miserable. She hadn’t wanted the chips. After the first bite, she didn’t even really taste them.

Behind her, the Mothers erupted into cheers. One of the girls was doing a series of handsprings across the gym floor. The movement was fluid and perfect and very impressive until the girl threw up her hands at the finish and Lydia realized she wasn’t a cheerleader, but a cheerleader’s mother.

Cheerleader’s Mother.

“Penelope Ward!” Mindy Parker bellowed. “You go, girl!”

Lydia groaned as she searched her purse for something else to eat. Penelope was heading straight toward her. Lydia brushed the crumbs from her shirt and tried to think of something to say that wasn’t strung together with expletives.

Fortunately, Penelope was stopped by Coach Henley.

Lydia exhaled a sigh of relief. She pulled her phone out of her purse. There were sixteen emails from the school noticeboard, most of them dealing with a recent plague of head lice wreaking havoc in the elementary classes. While Lydia was reading through the posts, a new message popped up, an urgent plea from the headmaster explaining that there really was no way to find out who had started the lice pandemic and for parents to please stop asking which child was to blame.

Lydia deleted them all. She answered a few text messages from clients wanting to make appointments. She checked her spam to make sure Dee’s permission slip hadn’t accidentally gone astray. It had not. She emailed the girl she’d hired to help with paperwork and asked for her again to submit her time card, which seemed like an easy thing to remember because that was how she got paid, but the child had been hand-­raised by an overbearing mother and couldn’t remember to tie her shoes unless there was a Post-­it note with a smiley face physically attached to the shoe with the words TIE YOUR SHOE. LOVE MOM. PS: I AM SO PROUD OF YOU!

That was being ungenerous. Lydia was no stranger to Post-­it mothering. In her defense, her helicoptering tended to revolve around making sure that Dee could take care of herself. LEARN HOW TO TAKE OUT THE TRASH OR I WILL KILL YOU. LOVE MOM. If only she had been warned that teaching this sort of independence could lead to its own set of problems, such as finding an overpacked suitcase in your daughter’s closet when she had ten whole months before she was supposed to leave for college.

Lydia dropped her phone back into her purse. She watched Dee pass the ball to Rebecca Thistlewaite, a pale British girl who wouldn’t be able to score if you put her face through the basket. Lydia smiled at her daughter’s generosity. At Dee’s age, Lydia had been fronting a really terrible riot girl band and threatening to drop out of high school. Dee was on the debate team. She volunteered at the YMCA. She was sweet-­natured, generous, smart as hell. Her capacity for detail was astounding, if not highly annoying during arguments. Even at a young age, Dee had had an uncanny ability to mimic back whatever she heard—­especially if she heard it from Lydia. Which is why Dee was called Dee instead of the beautiful name Lydia had put on her birth certificate.

“Deedus Christ!” her sweet little child used to scream, legs and arms kicking out from her high chair. “Dee-­dus Christ! Dee-­dus Christ!”

In retrospect, Lydia could see it had been a mistake to let her know it was funny.

“Lydia?” Penelope Ward held up a finger, as if to tell Lydia to wait. Instantly, Lydia checked the doors. Then she heard the Mothers tittering behind her and realized she was trapped.

Penelope was something of a celebrity at Westerly. Her husband was a lawyer, which was typical for a Westerly dad, but he was also a state senator who had recently announced he was going to make a run for the US House of Representatives. Of all the fathers at the school, Branch Ward was probably the most handsome, but that was largely because he was under sixty and still had a clear view of his feet.

Penelope was the perfect politician’s wife. In all of her husband’s promos, she could be seen looking up at Branch with the googly-­eyed devotion of a border collie. She was attractive, but not distracting. She was thin, but not anorexic. She’d given up a partnership at a top law firm to pop out five fine, Aryan-­looking children. She was president of Westerly’s PTO, which was a pretentious and unnecessary way of saying PTA. She ran the organization with an iron fist. All of her memos were bullet-­pointed to perfection, so concise and focused that even the lower Mothers had no trouble following. She tended to speak in bullet points, too. “Okay, ladies,” she would say, clapping together her hands—­the Mothers were big clappers—­“refreshments! Party favors! Balloons! Table dressings! Cutlery!”

“Lydia, there you are,” Penelope called, her knees and elbows pistoning as she jogged up the bleachers and plopped down beside Lydia. “Yum!” She pointed to the empty bag of chips. “I wish I could eat those!”

“I bet I could make you!”

“Oh, Lydia, I adore your dry sense of humor.” Penelope pivoted her body toward Lydia, establishing eye contact like a tense Persian cat. “I don’t know how you do it. You run your own business. You take care of your home. You’ve raised a fantastic daughter.” She put her hand to her chest. “You’re my hero.”

Lydia felt her teeth start to gnash.

“And Dee’s such an accomplished young lady.” Penelope’s voice dropped an octave. “She went to middle school with that missing girl, didn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” Lydia lied. Anna Kilpatrick had been one year behind Dee. They’d both been in the same PE class, though their social circles never overlapped.

“Such a tragedy,” Penelope said.

“They’ll find her. It’s only been a week.”

“But what can happen in a week?” Penelope forced a shudder. “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

“So don’t think about it.”

“That is such fantastic advice,” she said, sounding both relieved and patronizing. “Say, where’s Rick? We need Rick here. He’s our little shot of testosterone.”

“He’s in the parking lot.” Lydia had no idea where Rick was. They’d

had a hideous fight this morning. She was pretty sure he never wanted to see her again.

No, that was wrong. Rick would show up for Dee, but he would probably sit on the other side of the gym because of Lydia.

“Rebound! Rebound!” Penelope screamed, though the girls were still warming up. “Gosh, I’ve never noticed before, but Dee looks just like you.”

Lydia felt a tight smile on her face. This wasn’t the first time someone had pointed out the resemblance. Dee had Lydia’s pale skin and violet-­blue eyes. Their faces were shaped the same. Their mouths smiled in the same way. They were both natural blondes, something they had over every other blonde in the gym. Dee’s hourglass figure only hinted at what could happen later in life if she sat around in sweatpants inhaling potato chips. At that age, Lydia, too, had been just as beautiful and just as thin. Unfortunately, it had taken a hell of a lot of cocaine to keep her that way.

“So.” Penelope slapped her hands on her thighs as she turned back to Lydia. “I was wondering if you could help me out.”

“Oka-­a-­ay.” Lydia drew out the word to convey her great trepidation. This was how Penelope sucked you in. She didn’t tell you to do things; she told you that she needed your help.

“It’s about the International Festival next month.”

“International Festival?” Lydia echoed, as if she had never heard of the weeklong fund-­raiser where the whitest men and women in North Atlanta sat around in Dolce & Gabbana sampling perogies and Swedish meatballs made by their children’s nannies.

“I’ll resend you all the emails,” Penelope offered. “Anyway, I was wondering if you could bring some Spanish dishes. Arros negre. Tortilla de patates. Cuchifritos.” She pronounced each word with a confident Spanish accent, probably picked up from her pool boy. “My husband and I had escalivada while we were in Catalonia last year. Ah-­mazing.”

Lydia had been waiting four years to say, “I’m not Spanish.”

“Really?” Penelope was undaunted. “Tacos, then. Burritos. Maybe some arroz con pollo or barbacoa?”

“I’m not from Meh-­i-­co, either.”

“Oh, well, obviously Rick’s not your husband, but I thought since your name is Delgado that Dee’s father—­”

“Penelope, does Dee look Hispanic to you?”