Free Mirrored by Alex Flinn Page B

gingerbread back. It was comfort food.
    “Then you will have to win him back with your own looks and abilities—not by harming Jennifer. But it will be a difficult task.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “Because, my dear, he never really loved you in the first place. He was friends with you because he was lonely. With Jennifer, he has a whole circle of friends.”
    I remembered Greg and me, walking to his house after school, doing crazy science experiments like putting Mentos in Diet Coke so it would explode, checking our birdhouses daily. I’d had my first wren of the year last week, and I’d so wanted to tell Greg. But I knew he wouldn’t care anymore. I guessed he’d never cared. I nodded, knowing Kendra was right.
    “It’s so unfair. Why do they hate me, Kendra? I always thought it was because I was ugly. But now, I’m not that ugly, and they still hate me. What’s wrong with me?”
    Kendra frowned. “I think you chose to like the wrong girl’s boyfriend.”
    “But that’s not fair. I saw him first.”
    “Since when are bullies fair?” Kendra asked. “Do you think they issue some sort of Bully Code of Conduct—only pick on people who deserve it?”
    In truth, I guess I felt I had deserved it. Why would they pick on me if I didn’t? I’d deserved it because I was an ugly freak. But now I knew they’d picked on me because they could, and maybe because I cared. Some part of me had once longed to be friends with Jennifer, to sit at her lunch table and go shopping at Dadeland after school. I couldn’t explain why I wanted that. She was horrible. But part of me wanted to deserve them, the beautiful girls.
    “I don’t know why no one likes me. I thought it was my looks, but now, I don’t know.”
    “I like you.” Kendra put her arms around me. The dress was taffeta, a stiff fabric that felt like hundreds of Pringles chips when I hugged her. But I sunk into her embrace. She was the absolutecoolest friend in the world.
    “There, there,” she said, “I love you. And, someday, others will too. You’re going to be an incredible woman. You’ll see.”
    “I don’t want to be an incredible woman,” I sobbed. I knew I was no better than anyone else. I’d only been happy to be smart because I was ugly. Really, I wanted to be beautiful and be loved. “I only want Greg!”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
    HarperCollins Publishers
    ..................................................................
10
    1989
    Over the next few years, I changed everything about myself. Everything I could, at least. My hair. The color of my eyes. My height. By seventeen, I was beautiful, tall with the body of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, strawberry blond hair that never got messy, and eyes the color of lavender dish soap—or, well, violets. I hadn’t had a zit in four years, and even little details like the amount of space between my eye and my eyebrow (ideally the size of another eye) or my philtrum (the area between lips and nose—ideally about fifteen millimeters) didn’t escape my notice. I was Pygmalion to my own Galatea, every part sculpted perfectly.
    No one cared.
    Or noticed.
    I also developed talents, as Kendra had suggested. I could singlike Celine Dion, dance like Janet Jackson. I used these abilities in school musicals and on the Cougarettes dance team. I was so talented they couldn’t reject me even if they hated me.
    Which they did.
    It wasn’t as overt now. I wasn’t ridiculed, not usually. But even though strange men, and even women, approached me on the street to beg me to visit their modeling agency and new boys at school asked me on dates, I had no one to love me, no one I wanted. And, at the end of Cougarettes practice, when the popular girls got into their cars to go to the mall together, have dinner together, do homework together, I was the only one stuffing my pom-poms into my backpack alone. And watching Jennifer leave with Greg.
    Yes, after all this time, they were still together. It was