"Ugh, my hips are so repulsive," Regina whined, making poses in front of the giant mirror in her room.
"My dimples are like, nonexistent!" Gretchen grumbled, sucking in her cheeks and pulling her hairline back. Karen stood behind them, using her hands to push her boobs up—even though they already rested prodigiously high on her chest.
Regina turned to look at Cady expectantly. Cady froze, sitting on the edge of the bed where she had been thumbing through the massive pink book in her lap.
"Uhh, I don't know what we're doing, but I'm ugly too!" she chirped, standing and joining them in front of Regina's massive mirror.
To be honest, she liked the way she looked. Her strawberry blonde hair always stayed light from the excessive sun she got in Kenya—she'd have to see if that changed with an Illinois winter. Her nose had a slope to it that was slightly upturned but not so much you could see her nostrils facing her straight on, and her lips were even and fairly full. She had never spent much time looking at her own eyes before—she got the creeps just staring herself down in a mirror. They were blue, with more depth than Aaron's had had earlier in the classroom, but not as much as Janis's, in the dark of her converted garage. Nothing compared to Janis's eyes—even just thinking about them now gave Cady that same weird feeling in her stomach. She wasn't jealous—brown eyes would look strange with her fair hair—but it did make her feel like she was missing out on something important. She suddenly wished she were with Janis and Damian, wherever they were.
"Take a picture, it will last longer," Regina elbowed Cady jokingly, mocking her for staring at herself in the mirror, despite the fact that that was exactly what she had been doing just moments before. Cady smiled bashfully and averted her eyes, subtly trying to take in what the girls around her were doing so she could mimic it. Karen was still pushing on her boobs, and Gretchen was staring at her phone screen, her thumbs flying over it so fast they were becoming blurry. Regina surveyed her minions—raising her eyebrows at Cady standing there, just watching them—and turned to Karen, eying her face.
"Karen, let's fix your eyebrows," she said lazily.
"Ok!" Karen replied gamely. "Can I still have two?" She followed Regina into the bathroom gamely.
Gretchen made to follow them, but Regina slammed the door in her face, shutting her out. Cady watched Gretchen press her ear to the wooden door, struggling to hear what the two girls inside were saying.
"What are we laughing at?" she asked loudly through the door, then pressed her ear to the wood to hear a response. Cady couldn't help but smile to herself as she watched—how was Gretchen so pathetic? She felt embarrassed for her just sitting there and watching. It was a wonder she wasn't in the book—thinking of it, she returned to the bed and flipped the pink book open once more.
Each page had a different person's picture inside, along with a comment written in black sharpie. The comments weren't very nice—they were almost always about someone being ugly, fat, dumb, or some combination of the three. Cady figured that Gretchen and Karen both had their place in the book if those were the criteria, but of course she would never say that—something told her Regina's cruel honesty didn't extend to her posse as well.
"Hey, Cady? Did Regina seem like, mad at me just now or something?" Gretchen perched next to Cady, still eying the door warily.
"What?" Cady asked, confused. "Why would she be mad?"
"Oh, I don't know, just, you know, things," Gretchen alternated between checking her split ends and watching the door. A peal of laughter rang from inside and Gretchen bolted back towards it, pressing her ear against the solid wood again.
"Gretchen!" Cady laughed. "You're fine, Regina's probably not mad."
"Then why are they in here, and we're out here?" Gretchen asked worriedly. "Did you do something? Am I just being lumped with you by association or whatever?"
Cady shrugged, returning her attention to the book in front of her.
"Oh my god, where did you find that?" Gretchen squealed, momentarily leaving her position of pining at the door to sit next to Cady on the bed. Cady looked at Gretchen with confusion—had she really not noticed the book until now?
"It was sitting out on Regina's desk," she said, still flipping through the pages, taking in the nasty captions and graffitied photos. Gretchen giggled at a few of them, pointing out pictures and fleshing out the stories in more detail. If Cady had been secondhand embarrassed for Gretchen before, she felt like crawling into a hole for the girls inside the book now—how could they live with themselves after doing such humiliating things?
"Oh, you saw that?" Regina was suddenly in front of them, Karen tottering behind her. She had finished massacring Karen's eyebrows—thankfully she was blonde, so the damage wasn't too visible.
"Oh, uhh, Cady pulled it out! I just saw it!" Gretchen jumped up and away from the bed like it was on fire—clearly she thought Regina wouldn't think kindly of them flipping through the books pages.
"Oh my god, take a chill pill," Regina laughed, sitting next to Cady and taking the book from her hands without asking. "My mom found it earlier when she was snooping through my closet—can you believe she thinks she can still wedge into a size two?—and she pulled it out for me to look at. I thought it was funny."
She flipped the page and Cady did a double-take.
It was a picture of Janis. It was clearly a yearbook picture, maybe from her freshmen or sophomore year. Cady had thought she wore a lot of make-up now, but her current look had nothing on the amount piled on her face in the photo. She looked like a raccoon, and while she still favored a darker plum lip now, she had worn pure black lipstick in this photo. Her eyebrows were plucked paper thin and penciled in dark black as well—Cady couldn't believe it; she and Janis had a game now where they'd try to rub each other's eyebrow hairs against the grain. They had found out by accident that it was a pet peeve of theirs that they shared, and since then it had become a sort of inside joke to try and get that rasping feeling on the other person. Cady envied Janis's thick, dark, natural brows—she didn't wax or pluck them at all, and they were full and even and gorgeous. Cady's own paled in comparison—the same light color as her hair, all patchy in the middle. But looking at the photo, it was clear that Janis didn't use to have brows like those—it looked like she didn't have brows at all, besides those she could draw on with a pencil.
She had thick, heavy bangs—not the flattering kind—and her hair was a mess, matted and fuzzy around her face in a total hack job she probably did with kitchen scissors. She looked tired, with big bags under her eyes and a certain hollowness in her expression that spoke to a deeper exhaustion. She looked angry, too, though that could be the devil horns and mustache drawn over her face. Beneath the photo, someone had written, "JANIS IS A SPACE DYKE."
"Wait," Cady stopped Regina from flipping the page. "Janis is a space dyke?"
"Oh my god, I almost forgot about that!" Regina laughed airily in a way that told Cady she had most definitely not forgotten about it.
"Oh my god yeah!" Gretchen echoed. "She's the freak that's always hanging around that Damian Hubbard kid—the one who does all the musicals and stuff?"
"I like him," Karen sighed, admiring her eyebrows in the mirror. "He dances pretty. Prettily? Prettily. And he smells good."
"He's like, too gay to function," Cady snorted with laughter, remembering the way Janis had joked about Damian when she introduced them. Had that really only been just a few weeks ago? Damian had done a jazz square or whatever he called it when she had said it too—a typical, flamboyant response.
"Ooh, Cady, that's a good one!" Regina stood abruptly and walked over to her pink vanity, pulling a yearbook out from the bottom drawer. She grabbed a pair of eyebrow scissors from a rack on the surface of the vanity and thumbed through the book until she found what she was looking for—Damian's photo from the year before.
"Oh I didn't mean it like that. . ." Cady tapered off, watching Regina cut carefully around the edges of his photo. She grabbed a roll of tape from her desk and meticulously cut pieces to fasten the corner of the photo to the page opposite from Janis's. Cady watched, transfixed by the ritualistic nature of Regina's actions—she was almost reverent as she pulled the cap off the black sharpie and wrote: "TOO GAY TO FUNCTION." She finished the drawing with a black sharpie crown drawn on Damian's pudgy head. A sour feeling filled Cady's mouth, but she shook it off. It was all good fun—she could tell Janis and Damian about this book later and they could all laugh at it together. Speaking of which. . .
"Why is Janis in there?" she asked tentatively. "I mean, in the burn book." She was almost afraid to hear the answer.
"Because she's a space dyke," Regina laughed derisively. Cady wasn't entirely sure what the word meant, but together with the joke earlier at their lockers, she could piece it together—they thought Janis was a lesbian.
"Get this: Regina and Janis used to be like, best friends!" Gretchen acted like it was the juiciest piece of gossip she'd ever shared. Cady shook her head to clear her thoughts—hadn't Gretchen pretended to not even know who Janis was, like ten seconds earlier?
"Ugh," Regina rolled her eyes. "Don't remind me."
"What happened?" Cady asked.
"It was eighth grade, and I was going to have a pool party for my birthday, and my mom said I could only invite like, six friends, so I couldn't invite her because she would have been number seven or whatever. And when I told her she got really crazy. Like, she was already kind of obsessed with me, but after the party thing, it kind of showed her true colors, you know? She was like, a stalker or whatever. Totally scary. Anyways, she went totally psycho and her parents had to pull her out of school and send her to rehab or 'art therapy' or whatever. When she came back freshmen year, that's what she looked like," Regina nodded at the photo in the burn book, opposite to where she was now pasting Damian's. "And now she's all 'painting her feelings', which essentially means painting dead babies or rabid kittens or whatever."
"Did she not look like that before?" Cady asked, ignoring the last joke—Regina was always like that with things others loved.
"No. Believe it or not, she actually looked kind of normal. I know, right? Hard to believe, what with her Hot-Topic-Wannabe get-up now." Regina rolled her eyes.
"Oh," Cady said. Sure, Regina was being a bit of a snob about the whole thing, but it seemed anticlimactic. Why was Janis so bent out of shape about one stupid birthday party? Sure, it sucked that Regina couldn't invite her, but she could always go to the next party. Cady would have to follow up later with Janis and see why she hated Regina so much—from what Regina said, it sounded like maybe Janis was overreacting just a little bit.
They spent the next hour flipping through the burn book, laughing at the pictures and sharing stories about people as they were prompted by the old drama recounted inside.
"Oh yeah, Cady! You have to come to the kickback Karen's hosting tomorrow night. We haven't gotten you drunk yet. Have you ever even had alcohol before?" Regina was actually seemingly interested in the prospect of getting Cady drunk.
"I'm having a kickback?" Karen asked, still standing in front of the mirror and playing with her boobs. Regina rolled her eyes at Cady as though sympathizing over Karen's stupidity. Gretchen mimicked her almost immediately, like a shadow.
Regina didn't need to know that Cady drank with Janis and Damian almost every weekend. She also didn't need to know about the plans Cady had with Janis and Damian tomorrow night to watch Sixteen Candles—Damian claimed Cady needed more Molly Ringwald to channel—she could always just cancel them or postpone them or something. If it meant penetrating the plastics inner circle, Janis and Damian would understand.
"Ok! Sure! We can do that. I've uhh, I've only tried wine with my parents, a couple of times." Cady laughed awkwardly. She opened her phone to text Janis her cancellation.
Caddy: Hey girly, plastics invited me to something tomorrow night. I think Aaron might be there! Plus I can do more spying. Can we postpone?
"And it's going to be intimate, tomorrow night, Cady, you understand?" Regina was eying Cady's phone as she set it down, clearly disapproving. She opened her phone as well, beginning to text somebody. "Don't go inviting anybody."
"Of course," Cady laughed awkwardly—she hated how her laugh was becoming less of a humor reaction and more of a reflex to the uncomfortable things Regina would say to her. "I wouldn't dream of it!"
"Good, good," Regina replied absently, her nose in her phone.
When she finished sending her text, she began planning her Halloween costume. Gretchen was 'approving' of everything with so much gusto that she reminded Cady of a hyena submitting to the pack alpha. In fact, the resemblance between Gretchen and a hyena was pretty remarkable. . .
Cady's phone buzzed in her hand. She looked down to see a text from Janis.
Janis: sure.
Awesome! She could hang with the plastics and chill with Damian and Janis on Saturday. They got it. Important recon on the plastics, right? And more time with Aaron, if he was invited!