Pretty Is Read Online Free Page A
Author: Maggie Mitchell
it’s technically still morning, so I compromise. Then I go back and reread the opening scene. I need to make sure I haven’t lost my mind.
* * *
Martin is out of his office and not answering his cell. I leave him five messages. I need to know if this is some kind of joke. I don’t see how it could be; then again, I don’t see how it could be anything else. There are differences: We were upstairs when it happened, not in the main room. There was no jigsaw puzzle; we were making costume decisions about a play we were working on. But the clothes, the hair. The cabin. The man in the Adirondack chair. My fucking story.
It takes a lot longer than it should to realize that I would not be playing one of the kidnapped girls. No, I would be the female detective who gets too involved in the case, helps to track the girls down, becomes obsessed with the kidnapper, must confront disturbing truths from her own past, blah blah blah. That would be me. Although I should find it comforting that I have no idea who the hell this woman is and can only assume she’s totally fictional, like the jigsaw puzzle, I find it aggravating, instead. So much of the story is familiar that the discrepancies are weirdly jarring.
The beginning is the end. The rest of the script tells the story of everything leading up to that point. Everything from the moment the first little girl gets in the man’s car, with some more lies thrown in.
* * *
Here’s my story. The story that Lois has stolen. (It has to be Lois; who else could it be?) We never stopped at motels, the man and I. We slept in the car. I dozed on and off all the time, in a sort of lazy, pleasant way. He took quick catnaps in empty parking lots, on dead-end roads, in little parks. The first time we did this, he strung a sturdy rope through my belt loop and tied it to his own wrist; if I moved, he said matter-of-factly, he’d wake up. He didn’t make it sound like a threat, though I guess on some level it was. By then I knew that he had a gun in the glove compartment. In Nebraska, everyone had guns—but this was different, a little handgun. A TV gun , I thought. I’d never before seen anything but hunting rifles.
You never know who’s out there, or what crazy things they’ll do, he said when I saw the gun, as if he wanted to make sure I understood that the gun was not intended for me but for troublesome strangers we might meet on the road. He sounded apologetic, a little embarrassed.
We didn’t meet anyone, though. People must have assumed we were father and daughter, if they thought about us at all, though he would have been pretty young to have a twelve-year-old. One of the things that struck me on that trip was that most people seemed awfully preoccupied. They had their own shit to deal with. I was used to the small-town busybody-ness of Arrow, and it fascinated me to see that out on the road we could drift through town after town like ghosts, and no one paid any attention to us at all.
Glad as I was to be leaving Nebraska, I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to get anywhere else in particular. I liked watching the world flow past my rolled-down window, farmland blending into small, dusty towns, the hot wind stirring my ugly-Barbie wig. Partly I remember the trip as a succession of smells: cowshit, chicken farms, fast food, charcoal grills, freshly mowed grass, doughnut shops. Once we got stuck in a town that was having a parade, for no apparent reason, and since we couldn’t get through anyway we got out and watched, as if we belonged there. I can still smell the thick haze of cotton candy and sausage sandwiches and fried dough that made the atmosphere in the village seem like something you could eat, though you’d be sorry later.
He bought me cotton candy on the way back to the car, and I twirled sticky strands of it around my tongue for miles and miles, glad not to be the blond Dairy Princess who had ridden through town in a white convertible, swiveling her
* * *
Martin is out of his office and not answering his cell. I leave him five messages. I need to know if this is some kind of joke. I don’t see how it could be; then again, I don’t see how it could be anything else. There are differences: We were upstairs when it happened, not in the main room. There was no jigsaw puzzle; we were making costume decisions about a play we were working on. But the clothes, the hair. The cabin. The man in the Adirondack chair. My fucking story.
It takes a lot longer than it should to realize that I would not be playing one of the kidnapped girls. No, I would be the female detective who gets too involved in the case, helps to track the girls down, becomes obsessed with the kidnapper, must confront disturbing truths from her own past, blah blah blah. That would be me. Although I should find it comforting that I have no idea who the hell this woman is and can only assume she’s totally fictional, like the jigsaw puzzle, I find it aggravating, instead. So much of the story is familiar that the discrepancies are weirdly jarring.
The beginning is the end. The rest of the script tells the story of everything leading up to that point. Everything from the moment the first little girl gets in the man’s car, with some more lies thrown in.
* * *
Here’s my story. The story that Lois has stolen. (It has to be Lois; who else could it be?) We never stopped at motels, the man and I. We slept in the car. I dozed on and off all the time, in a sort of lazy, pleasant way. He took quick catnaps in empty parking lots, on dead-end roads, in little parks. The first time we did this, he strung a sturdy rope through my belt loop and tied it to his own wrist; if I moved, he said matter-of-factly, he’d wake up. He didn’t make it sound like a threat, though I guess on some level it was. By then I knew that he had a gun in the glove compartment. In Nebraska, everyone had guns—but this was different, a little handgun. A TV gun , I thought. I’d never before seen anything but hunting rifles.
You never know who’s out there, or what crazy things they’ll do, he said when I saw the gun, as if he wanted to make sure I understood that the gun was not intended for me but for troublesome strangers we might meet on the road. He sounded apologetic, a little embarrassed.
We didn’t meet anyone, though. People must have assumed we were father and daughter, if they thought about us at all, though he would have been pretty young to have a twelve-year-old. One of the things that struck me on that trip was that most people seemed awfully preoccupied. They had their own shit to deal with. I was used to the small-town busybody-ness of Arrow, and it fascinated me to see that out on the road we could drift through town after town like ghosts, and no one paid any attention to us at all.
Glad as I was to be leaving Nebraska, I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to get anywhere else in particular. I liked watching the world flow past my rolled-down window, farmland blending into small, dusty towns, the hot wind stirring my ugly-Barbie wig. Partly I remember the trip as a succession of smells: cowshit, chicken farms, fast food, charcoal grills, freshly mowed grass, doughnut shops. Once we got stuck in a town that was having a parade, for no apparent reason, and since we couldn’t get through anyway we got out and watched, as if we belonged there. I can still smell the thick haze of cotton candy and sausage sandwiches and fried dough that made the atmosphere in the village seem like something you could eat, though you’d be sorry later.
He bought me cotton candy on the way back to the car, and I twirled sticky strands of it around my tongue for miles and miles, glad not to be the blond Dairy Princess who had ridden through town in a white convertible, swiveling her
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