Angel nearly pointed out that dress styles were likely to change between now and whenever Priscilla found someone to marry her, but then, turning another page, reflected that the dresses all looked basically the same, so maybe not.
But even without an interest in a real, honest-to-goodness boyfriend, Angel enjoys—enjoyed—sex. Or rather, she enjoyed what sex did, the way it established an invisible connection between her and the guy, a secret knowledge. She remembers after the first time, last summer, when she’d been eager to transform herself and get this part of high school over with, she couldn’t believe how easy and unremarkable it had been. So much hoopla over that? It didn’t even feel like a sin. But after, she’d see the guy around school, and she’d know certain things about him: his secret sounds, his self-conscious laugh. She felt powerful, getting these guys—who’d once been so swaggering—naked, with their zitty backs and needy, nosing penises. They were pathetic in their grunting urgency and in those slack, defenseless minutes after.
“You’re lucky,” complained Priscilla as they walked through the briny-smelling halls of the school when it started up in August. “People know who you are now.”
“They know who you are, too,” Angel said kindly, but Priscilla was right: once you’d proven that you were desirable, you actually became more desirable. Older kids called out to Angel in the parking lot. They invited her to parties. With Priscilla and among their friends, Angel became both an expert and worthy of discussion. Soon she pitied these other girls their hopeless innocence.
Eventually, at least in her relationship with her best friend, things did become emotionally complicated. Priscilla is skinny and tough and sometimes not very nice, and as the fall semester wore on, she got nastier.
“It’s crazy that you became such a slut,” Priscilla told her as they fixed their makeup at the trough-like bathroom sinks. “Not in a bad way. But it’s not like you’re as pretty as, like, Kylie or Sabrina.” The Espa?ola Valley High School bathrooms could be in a prison. There were no doors. Instead of mirrors, which could come in handy in a riot, smeared steel plates were screwed to the walls. The whole architecture of the place put you in mind of mutiny, escape.
Angel peered at her blurry, distorted reflection. “So? I’m okay-looking.”
“I just never would have guessed it in middle school. Remember what a nerd you were? Also, isn’t it kind of rare for a fat girl to become a slut?”
“I’m not fat,” said Angel, and she wasn’t, just didn’t happen to be a skinny old bone bag.
So it felt good when, after Priscilla had called her fat for the millionth time, Angel found herself drunk at a party and talking to surly Kevin Gabaldon with his stupid patchy upper lip, whom Priscilla had liked since seventh grade without ever actually making a move. And it was so easy to make him smile, then to step closer, to go from talking to kissing to the urgent press in the dark laundry room of the apartment complex. Angel loved that urgency, garment after garment dropping away as though they’d always been extraneous.
Priscilla was mad enough when she heard about Kevin that she texted around the school a headless naked picture claiming it was Angel. Angel had seen the pic and the text, thanks to Ryan Johnson, who intercepted her in the library after school.
“Hey,” Ryan Johnson said, and shifted his weight uncomfortably from one Converse sneaker to the other.
Angel looked up from her math notebook and rolled her eyes. “What do you need?” He’d already asked her out again twice this year and she’d declined nicely, but her patience was wearing thin. The guy couldn’t get it through his knobby head that a hookup was just a hookup. He’d been trailing her like a lost fawn.
Ryan palmed his thin blond hair and bit his cracked bottom lip. Hadn’t he ever heard of ChapStick? “Um,” he said, then shoved his phone at her.
It was all pretty laughable. Look what someone sent me poor angel!!!! I feel so bad!!!! The person in the photo had a body twenty times better than Angel’s, a body that was at least semiprofessional, given the spherical breasts and the blond landing strip between her spread legs.