The Girl They Called Trash

The bell rang at 8:12 on Monday morning, and I was already late. I knew the exact time because the clock above the main office at Aldercrest Prep had been stuck at 8:12 since the previous spring, and no one had bothered to fix it. The grounds crew had painted the wrought-iron gates a fresh black the week before orientation, and under the gray autumn sky the whole campus looked like a photograph from a brochure that nobody had asked for. I slid into my seat in Advanced Composition just as Ms. Ridgeway turned toward the board. My boots left a scuff mark on the polished floor. I felt Hollis Vance's eyes on me before I saw her, the way you feel rain before it starts. "Nice eyeshadow," she said from two rows back. "Did you do it in the dark?" I didn't turn around. I had practiced not turning around. Ten months at Aldercrest had taught me that Hollis Vance's cruelty worked best when it had an audience, and the fastest way to disappoint her was to refuse the role of spectacle. "It's called effort," I said. "You should try it." A few people laughed. Hollis didn't. She was a senior, the daughter of a man whose name was on a building at the state university, and she had spent three years perfecting the art of making other people feel small without ever raising her voice. I was a transfer. I was on scholarship. In her world, those two facts made me fair game. What she didn't know was that the blue eyeshadow smeared across my lids was not a mistake. It was a costume. I had built it carefully from drugstore palettes and thrift-store jewelry, from a single tube of white foundation I applied heavier than anyone should, from two strips of fluorescent pink hair that I clipped in each morning behind my left ear. Together they made a girl no one would look at twice. That was the point. The girl underneath the makeup had a face that had once sold shampoo to a million households. She had a photographer's portfolio her mother kept in a locked drawer, and a contract with a director named Elias Vance who was not related to Hollis, though the surname still made my stomach tighten every time I saw it. She had been signed at fifteen and buried at sixteen, and she had been running ever since. I called that girl Wren. It was my middle name. It was the only part of me I let anyone at Aldercrest see. After class, I walked to the west stairwell, where the light came through a single tall window and no one ever came. I pulled the pink clips out of my hair and let my natural color show for a moment, then put them back in before anyone could walk by. That was when I heard Hollis's voice below me on the landing. "Did you see her this morning? It's like she's doing a bit. Like, a whole character." She was talking to Priya Anand, who laughed because laughing was the price of standing next to Hollis. "I heard she was a child model," Priya said. "Someone said she was in a catalog." "A catalog for what? Halloween masks?" I pressed my back against the wall and breathed slowly through my nose. That was the thing about Hollis. She was never wrong about people. She only ever aimed at the parts that were true, and then she twisted them until they sounded like insults. She had no idea how close she was standing to the truth, and that was the only reason I could survive her. Down on the landing, Hollis kept going. "I bet she thinks she's mysterious. The quiet scholarship girl with the tragic backstory. Please. There's no backstory. There's just a girl who can't afford a mirror." The stairwell door on the lower floor opened and closed. Their footsteps faded. I counted to thirty before I let myself move. On the walk home, I stopped at the CVS on Alder Street and bought a new tube of pale foundation. The cashier looked at me the way cashiers always looked at me, with a mix of curiosity and pity, and I paid in cash and left. The apartment my mother and I shared had a view of a parking lot and a water stain shaped like Florida on the ceiling. My mother was in the kitchen when I walked in, sorting mail into two piles. Bills and bills. "You're late," she said. "I know." "There's a letter for you." I took it from her. Cream envelope, no return address. I already knew what it would say before I opened it, because Elias Vance had been sending the same letter once a month for two years, as if repetition were a form of persuasion. The letter was shorter than usual. Two sentences: The offer stands. You would be safer with representation than without it. I folded it in half and slid it into the trash under the sink, where my mother wouldn't see it. That night I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and said the words out loud, the way I did most nights, to remind myself of the rules. "My name is Wren Calloway. I am eighteen. I am nobody." It sounded true. That was the trick of it. If you say a lie long enough in front of a mirror, the mirror starts agreeing with you. But I dreamt about the campaign anyway. A studio in the city, the smell of hairspray, someone calling out my name in a voice I had not heard since I was three.