She had invited me to her home, let me borrow some of her clothes, and taught me how to do my makeup. I’d never bothered wearing any before. She liked to paint my nails when we hung out together, a different color every time we met. Sometimes she would draw letters with varnish, one on each nail to spell out a word on my fingers: CUTE or SWEET or NICE were her favorites. She was always calling me nice. It’s still the word people use most often to describe me now. I’ve grown to detest it. The sound those four letters make translates from a compliment into an insult inside my ears. As though being nice is a weakness. Perhaps it is. Perhaps I am.
Rachel also bought me little presents all the time—lip gloss, scrunchies for my hair, sometimes tops and skirts that were a tad too tight, to encourage me to lose weight—and she even took me to her hairdresser’s one weekend, to get my hair highlighted the same way as hers. She knew I couldn’t afford it, and insisted on paying for everything. I did wonder where the money came from, but never asked. Rachel also let me sit next to her and her friends at lunchtimes, and I was glad about that too. There were some people who sat alone and I didn’t want to be like them.
Catherine Kelly seemed nice enough to me. She was always eating chocolate or chips, and she looked a little strange—with her white-blond hair, braces, and scruffy uniform—but she didn’t do or say anything to upset anyone. She didn’t say much at all really, just sat quietly reading her books. Mostly horror, I noticed. I’d heard that her family lived in a strange place in the woods, at the edge of town. Some people said it was a haunted house, but I didn’t believe in ghosts. I thought it was a shame that she didn’t seem to have any friends at all, and I felt sorry for her.
“Should we invite Catherine to sit with us?” I asked one day, slowly eating the lunch ladies’ interpretation of lasagna and fries.
The other girls stared as though I had said something offensive.
“No,” said Rachel, who was sitting directly opposite me.
“Are you actually going to eat all of that?” said Helen, staring at my plate. I had noticed that she always skipped lunch. “Do you know how many calories are in that processed crap?” she continued when I didn’t answer.
I didn’t know; it wasn’t the sort of thing I thought about much.
“I like lasagna,” I replied.
She shook her head and put a small bottle of pills on the table.
“Here, have these. Call them an early birthday present.”
“What are they?” I asked, staring at the unexpected “gift.”
“Diet pills. We all take them. It means you can be slim without feeling hungry. Put them in your bag; we don’t want the whole school knowing all our little secrets.”
“Why do you want to invite Smelly Catherine Kelly to join our gang?” Rachel asked, changing the subject.
The others laughed.
“I just know how happy it makes me to eat lunch with all of you, and I thought she looked lonely—”
“And you wanted to be nice, right?” Rachel interrupted. I shrugged. “You know, being too nice is a sign of weakness.”
Rachel stood abruptly, her chair scraping the floor. Then she picked up her can of Coke and left the cafeteria. Nobody spoke, and when I tried to make eye contact, they all stared at the uneaten salads on their plates.
Rachel returned a few minutes later, her smile reattached to her face. She put the can back down on the table, and picked up her cutlery to continue barely eating. The other girls did the same. They always took their lead from her.
“Well, go on then,” she said between mouthfuls. “Invite her over.”
I hesitated for a moment but then dismissed the uneasy feeling in my stomach, choosing to believe that Rachel was being as kind as I knew she could be. It seems na?ve looking back, but sometimes we believe what we want to about the people we like the most.
I weaved my way through an obstacle course of chairs, tables, and schoolgirls to reach the sad little corner of the cafeteria where Catherine Kelly always ate alone. Her long blond hair looked like it hadn’t seen a brush for a while. She tucked it behind her sticky-out ears, and blushed when the other kids called her Dumbo. Despite all the snacks she liked so much—chips, chocolate bars, endless fizzy drinks—she was a skinny girl. Her shirt was a little loose around her neck where a button was missing, and there were stains on her tie. I noticed that her navy blue blazer was covered in chalk, as though she had rubbed up against a blackboard. Close up, I could also see that her eyebrows were almost completely bald, where she was always plucking the hairs with her fingertips. I’d watched her doing it in class, making tiny piles of herself on the desk, before blowing them away like wishes.