Pretty Is: A Novel Read online

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  For my father,

  Homer Mitchell,

  and in memory of my mother,

  Susan Reid Mitchell

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am tremendously grateful to Barbara Jones for being the kind of editor people say no longer exists; this book owes much to her sharp eye and narrative insight. I also want to thank everyone behind the scenes at Henry Holt, especially Lucy Kim for the striking jacket art and Stella Tan for her handling of the details. A profound thanks to Kimberly Witherspoon at Inkwell Management for making it all happen, to Monika Woods for being an amazing reader and providing endless support, and to Alexis Hurley for ensuring that the novel will find readers beyond these shores. I’m grateful to the Vermont Studio Center for the fellowship that allowed me to see the book through its final stages in beautiful surroundings and excellent company.

  There aren’t enough words to thank Gina Barreca—friend, mentor, reader, all-around fairy godmother. Her generosity is unparalleled, her influence immeasurable. Alison Umminger has been a generous, thoughtful, and magically perceptive reader from the start, as well as the very best of friends. Other brilliant friends have also provided invaluable readerly and writerly support—Aaron Bremyer and Dionne Irving Bremyer, Greg Fraser, Chad and Gwen Davidson, Meg Pearson. The English Department at the University of West Georgia has been wonderfully supportive all along, despite having hired me as a Victorianist. I offer love and endless gratitude to my family, my fiercest supporters: Homer Mitchell, Wendy Mitchell Starkweather, Homer David Mitchell, and Kim Marie. Thanks to my cheerleaders on the Masters side of the family, too, including the Karnopps, Noyeses, and Lymans.

  Finally, more than thanks to Josh Masters, this novel’s most enthusiastic fan: for navigating this strange world with me, for sharing his (perfect) vision, for feeding all stray creatures, for traveling with me to faraway lands … For the best kind of love.

  Part One

  Lois

  Everyone thought we were dead. We were missing for nearly two months; we were twelve. What else could they think?

  They were glad to have us back, of course. But nothing was the same. It was as if we had returned from the dead, as if we were tainted somehow. Our unlikely survival made us guilty. We must have sold our souls, I could see them thinking—or worse. Undoubtedly, it had not been our fault (not altogether, anyway), but still. We were not the same.

  And it was true, though not in the way they thought. What mattered to us was that we had been chosen. Singled out. We had always suspected we were different; at last it had been confirmed. There was no point in pretending otherwise; in fact, to our relief, pretense was no longer expected of us. The world acknowledged that we were extraordinary—and kept its distance, as if we might be rigged like bombs, might someday explode without warning.

  Once I insist that we were chosen, it is only fair to admit that he chose me second. Carly May was first. I’d like to think this was pure chance, an accident of geography; that he wanted us equally but happened to be closer to Nebraska, at the time, than Connecticut. But I know nothing was an accident with him. I was second. Carly was first. Forever.

  Our pictures were everywhere, though we never made it to a milk carton. We had that already-doomed, by-now-I’ve-been-chopped-up-and-buried-in-the-woods look in our photographs. The TV stations and the newspapers often showed our school pictures, in which we smiled dreamily, tragically, against smoky-blue backdrops. But they also showed our press photos: Carly with sparkling tiaras perched on her golden ringlets, her lipsticked smile full of disturbing promises. I, Lois, more serious, posed with my spelling trophies, alluring in the way that a hostile kitten is. Or so it seems to me.

  Carly May disappeared again when she was eighteen, this time on her own. She left a note: “Don’t look for me, you won’t find me,” she scrawled on one of her portfolio shots. She had drawn a mustache on herself and blackened the whites of her eyes. I know this because her stepmother, Gail, called me two years later when she was working on her memoir. She thought I might know where Carly May was. I didn’t; I hadn’t heard from Carly for years. This is all in Gail’s book, with an emphasis on her own suffering and her resourcefulness; she sent me a copy. I dropped that book off a bridge.

  By the time Carly resurfaced in my world, she wasn’t Carly May Smith anymore, and we were nearly thirty.

  Carly May

  It’s always been hard to talk about what happened without sounding all melodramatic. And as soon as that happens, I feel dishonest, like I’m trying to pitch an idea for some made-for-TV movie. “Based on a true story,” which isn’t the same as being true. Actually, I haven’t mentioned it for years, not to a goddamned person.

  It wasn’t really melodramatic at all. That’s the shocking thing about it, if you ask me: how calmly we accepted what was happening. For me, getting abducted in broad daylight on the main street of a nowhere little farm town in Nebraska was far from the most fucked-up thing that could have happened that day.

  I left my ballet class and took my time walking down the street to the House of Beauty, where stepmother Gail was having her nails done and God only knows what else. That woman took a lot of maintenance. I was wearing skin-tight biking shorts and an oversized T-shirt, dragging my twelve-year-old feet down the hot, wide sidewalk of Main Street, Arrow, Nebraska, with my dance bag slung over my shoulder. I was thinking about ways to make Gail miserable when the car pulled up beside me. Nondescript, gray. I didn’t know anything about cars. What I did know was that the guy driving it was an actual stranger. In Arrow, that was pretty rare. The man leaned over and rolled down the passenger-side window. He must be lost, I was thinking. I figured he was going to ask how the hell to get back to somewhere civilized, so I stopped walking and waited, more or less willing to explain how to get to the highway. I’m sure I had that snotty twelve-year-old look on my face.

  But he didn’t want directions, and he’d seen enough pictures to know he had the right girl. “Get in,” he said, smiling. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  And so I did. Didn’t think twice. God knows why. When I’ve tried to explain it, I always come back to the way he looked at me—as if he knew me perfectly, as if he could read my mind, as if I were the only person in the world who mattered. Doesn’t everyone want to be looked at that way?

  Later, I studied the photos of me that he had in his file. In some I had a big, toothy, fake smile. In others I looked a little sulky, imitating the pouty faces of models in magazines. I tried to figure out how he knew; how he could have been so sure, I mean, that all he would need to do is open his car door and I’d hop in. I looked for some telltale reckless gleam in my preteen eyes, some hint of latent depravity. I’m sure the police looked for it, too, later. I could never see it, though, not even with the benefit of hindsight. I had already mastered the vapid gaze that we expect from beautiful girls. As far as I could tell, it gave away nothing at all.

 
We drove and drove. I knew only that we were going east. He hardly said a word in those first hours, just flipped through the radio stations occasionally, though he never seemed to find anything he wanted to listen to. He winced at Mariah Carey, Nirvana, Beck—paused once on Johnny Cash, but even then jabbed at the dial after a few seconds. I couldn’t help wondering what he hoped to find, and why he set himself up for disappointment if he already knew the radio had nothing to offer. When the radio was off, I could see out of the corner of my eye that his hands were relaxed on the steering wheel, and somehow that made me feel safe. Every now and then he would glance over at me and give me a little smile: an uncle smile, I thought, or maybe a teacher smile, although I had no uncles and my teachers had so far mostly been anxious young women with permed hair and sad, flowered blouses. He was more of a fantasy teacher, handsome and a little mysterious. I watched his eyes when he looked my way and noted that they rested on my face; they didn’t stray to my tanned, skinny legs or the recent bumps in my pink T-shirt.

  Reassured, I relaxed and watched Nebraska rush by outside the window as if it had nothing to do with me. I had never been out of the state. I was thrilled when we crossed into Iowa, although it looked pretty much the same; I liked the idea of leaving my world behind. At that point we left the interstate and stopped at a gas station, where he pulled a dark brown wig out of a duffel bag in the backseat. He handed it to me as if he were giving me a present, as if he knew already that I would get a kick out of a costume. He waited outside the strangely clean ladies’ room studying a map while I stuffed my long hair under the wig and adjusted it until the bangs hung straight across my forehead. The wig must have been cheap—it was like doll’s hair, with a stiff plasticky sheen. I had never worn a wig, but I took to it right away. I rubbed off the lip gloss and pale frosted eye shadow I’d been wearing at my ballet class and felt like a different girl. In the cloudy, cracked mirror, I tried out my new look. I’d be shy and innocent, I decided. Guileless, though I didn’t know that word then. (The plan didn’t last long.) I glanced up at my reflection through timidly lowered eyelids and basically flirted with my new self until the man knocked politely on the door. He gave me a nod of approval when I finally emerged.

  He bought us charred gas station hot dogs and we headed east on a rural highway, carving through endless cornfields. I couldn’t have been happier.

  Lois

  It would have been easy to miss her. In the bottom-left corner of the screen, a shadowy woman in dark glasses flung herself to the sidewalk to avoid a bullet. Her action wasn’t important in itself, or necessary to the plot; it only contributed to the general chaos—she wasn’t a main character or even a secondary one. Her fate seemed irrelevant to the larger story. “Is she one of the gangsters?” I asked Brad, squinting at her blurry, half-hidden face.

  “The chick down there in the corner, you mean? Gangster’s floozy, more likely. Or moll? Isn’t moll the word? She’s hot. In that sort of dominatrix-Barbie way.”

  “She’s got her own gun,” I pointed out, keeping my voice light. “She’s no mere floozy.” I noted that she held it in her left hand. As I watched her long, narrow fingers curl around the gun—getting ready to make a run for it, it looked like—I knew I was right. I knew that hand. It was older, longer, more elegant. But I would have known it anywhere.

  I had finished my PhD and landed a teaching job at a small SUNY school in upstate New York, where I was teaching British lit to young students whose brains, I was discovering, were attuned almost exclusively to electronic stimuli. They weren’t all that much younger than I was, but they seemed to be from a different century. I lived in a spacious apartment on the top floor of a turn-of-the-century Victorian with more charm than insulation. (In upstate New York, spacious is a rental agent’s code word for cold.) I spotted Carly May in the corner of my TV screen on a Thursday night in late January. Outside, it was below zero and had been for days. An English department colleague and I were huddled under afghans in front of my TV, watching a movie and eating take-out pizza. When I say huddled, I mean separately huddled. We weren’t touching. Brad Drake and I were the youngest assistant profs in the department. The next tier, the thirtysomethings, had kids, yards, lives. They had dinner parties from which all the guests departed by ten o’clock, yawning and murmuring about the babysitter. I’d been to a few, when I first arrived. Watching-bad-movies-ironically was not a pastime that amused them any longer. Perfectly good colleagues; I knew they’d never be my friends. Which was fine. I didn’t need many friends: Brad sufficed.

  “Go to the credits,” I ordered Brad, who was clutching the remote as usual.

  “Can’t we just wait till the end?”

  “I know that girl,” I said. “I swear I do. I have to check.”

  “How could you know her? You can hardly see her face. And if you do know her, why do you have to check? If you’re so sure, I mean. And—”

  “Why do you have to argue with everything I say?” A pointless question; this was what Brad did. It was an endearing form of perversity, usually, and one of the many traits that justified, at least to me, the decidedly nonromantic basis of our relationship. I seized the remote.

  I scrolled quickly past the characters with actual names, then lingered over the ones identified more cryptically: first dead girl, second dead girl, girl in diner, girl with gun. In this last group I saw a name that was not the one I was looking for, but caught my attention nevertheless: Chloe Savage. The initials were right. And something else: a ghostly echo, beyond logic; a sort of thud in the pit of my stomach. I knew, simply.

  “It’s not her,” I told Brad, feigning disappointment, sinking back into the couch. Subterfuge was instinctive; I didn’t for a moment consider telling Brad the truth.

  It made perfect sense that she would have changed her name.

  After Brad left, dragging his sleepy self reluctantly out into the snow with a wistful look that suggested he was hoping for an invitation to sleep on the couch, I went straight to the computer. I found enough photos of Chloe Savage to confirm what I already half knew. The bios available were disappointingly sketchy, not to mention full of lies. Only one detail linked her to Carly May: competed in beauty pageants as a child. The bios didn’t say she was Miss Pre-Teen Nebraska. They said, in fact, that she was from Connecticut. Like me, I thought. She was borrowing that from me. In an obscure way, that, too, counted as evidence.

  I printed everything I could find: bios, filmographies, photos. I placed them neatly in a folder and labeled it Carly/Chloe. Then, for no reason, I slid it into the bottom of a drawer, as if to conceal it from—what? Prying eyes? I could have kept top-secret government documents on my bedside table at that point, and they would have been perfectly safe.

  Nevertheless, I hid the folder. It felt like the right thing to do.

  Chloe

  I was cute as hell. Tall for my age, willowy, with pale gold curls and sapphire-blue eyes. Like a little fairy. A sexy little fairy, I should add, once they started dolling me up. That was after Gail showed up. By the time Daddy brought her home to meet me, it was already pretty much a done deal: she had agreed to marry him. She had dyed red hair and violet contacts and long pink nails. Nature had made her a drab, mousy little person, but she had done everything in her power to color herself in. It was like Technicolor, though: unconvincing. She had a high, nasal voice. To me, at seven, she seemed like a cartoon. Why sad, quiet Daddy would want to marry a cartoon just two years after my mother’s death was something I would never understand. He must have thought I needed a replacement mother; maybe he assumed I would welcome siblings, which Gail was quick to produce, in the form of two little half brothers. Wrong on both counts, but he never bothered to ask.

  “Doll” is what Gail called me the first time we met. “Oh, Carly May, you’re such a little doll!” she gushed. “Hugh, you never told me what a doll she was!” My father just kept unloading grocery bags from the trunk of the car. I noticed right away that he tended to let Gail do the
talking.

  After I left the second time, Gail published a book. Notice I didn’t say wrote a book. I swear she never wrote more than a grocery list in her life. No, it was ghostwritten by Liz Caldwell, whose name is in small print in the lower-right-hand corner, like an artist’s signature—you only see it if you’re looking. “With Liz Caldwell,” it says. I can picture what with meant: Gail sitting in the living room, wearing enough makeup for the frigging Oscars, with a cigarette in one hand and every ring she owned smashed onto her chubby fingers, wallowing in self-pity and a pathetic vision of her own importance. Liz Caldwell across from her, pretending to be impressed by Gail’s wisdom and strength of character, consulting her notes and offering an occasional gentle prod, tape recorder whirring away beside her. How do I know Liz was pretending? I know Gail, is all. In fact, Liz might not have had to bother hiding her contempt; Gail would’ve been too caught up in her own drama to notice. Sensitivity to other people’s emotions was never her strong point.

  Even the book’s title is a lie: Losing My Daughter Twice. It would be nauseating even if it were true, granted. But I am not—was never, in any sense of the word—Gail’s goddamned daughter. And you can’t lose what was never yours.

  I was smart, believe it or not. Am smart. People don’t expect it. My mother, who died in a car accident when I was five, was a schoolteacher. My father liked to read. He would come in from the barn and collapse into his recliner and pick up a book. Nonfiction, mostly, but novels, too. They read to me when I was little, talked to me like I was an intelligent life-form. I got good grades in school, if I bothered, though under the Gail regime there didn’t seem much point in trying.

  She must have researched the pageants on her own. This was pre-Internet, so it would have been harder then than it is now. She would have had to send away for information. Anyway, when she brought home the brochures that started everything, it was the first we’d heard of it; I mean, Daddy and I. “I didn’t know they had these things for such young girls,” Daddy said, flipping through glossy pamphlets with his big rough farmer’s hands like he was holding something he’d rather not touch—a dead animal, maybe. “I guess I would’ve thought they’d be older.”