The Exene Chronicles

Chapter 2

Right before her disappearing act, Ryan had finally blossomed. With the help of ninety-nine cents worth of drugstore peroxide, she had transformed from a brunette with a head full of muted brown hair to a blonde possessed of the sort of ravishing, buxom beauty of almost another era. For there was something very film noir, a dollop of some essence teetering toward the burlesque about her—like a young Monroe. Unfortunately for Ryan, her particular look did not draw a parallel to a Marilyn of fifteen or sixteen; Ryan was an approximate, though more tender, prototype of Ms. Monroe at middle age, when her figure had stretched beyond the voluptuous to a form slightly more grotesque.

This strange beauty of Ryan’s—her husky voice, her height (from the ages of eleven to thirteen, she had shot from 5’ 3” to 5’ 9”), her quaking limbs, large hands, and heaving bust—gave her a grand and dramatic beauty wholly unsuitable for a girl in a Southern California middle school. The young boys her own age were singularly intrigued yet frightened and repulsed by the sight of her, striding down the hallways at school all Viking and grandiose, while older men simply couldn’t get enough of her. The sole arrow that pointed to any girlish charm was her face: young, heart-shaped, pale, and baby plump: the mien of some milkmaid in a nineteenth-century painting.

Ryan set everyone at ease with her affable babysitter charm. Yet beneath her sunny, unblemished exterior, there brewed an intensity, a profound impatience with the purgatory of adolescence. Striding around the Baxter family master bedroom, a rogue babysitter in a pair of Mrs. Baxter’s pumps, the mistress’s black negligee pulled tight over her ample body, Ryan laughed and tossed her head back and rolled about the bed in a fit of giggles. Lia stood by, remonstrating with her like a stern parent. “Ryan, stop it! The Baxters will be home any minute and you’ll wake the kids.”

Lia and Ryan’s inseparability formed of near necessity, as grand things sometimes do. Ryan, who at eleven had been menstruating and wearing bras before every other girl in her class, was something of an outcast. Lia, small and wide-eyed and pretty to everyone except herself, was one of about only five black kids in the entire middle and high schools combined. Both were somewhat withdrawn and more in love with the dreams floating inside their heads than social obligations that demanded perfectly blow-dried hair.