Anything to Have You. Paige Harbison

brought it up! Jesus.”

      “Watch it, Brooke.”

      Brooke took a deep breath that filled her chest, and then sat on the couch next to me. She stared at the wall with her arms crossed, saying nothing but gnawing on her thumbnail until her mom left, talking loudly on her cell phone about a layover she wanted to avoid.

      Once she was gone, Brooke popped up, said nothing about the verbal squabble and went back to being her normal self. Like always. I had come to know and expect this.

      “I’ll be right back,” she said, and disappeared upstairs and out of sight as I turned up the music. She returned with the Tiffany Blue crate full of bottles, lotions and tools that usually sat on the bottom of her bathroom shelf.

      The first thing she did was slather some horrid oil in my hair and wrap it up in a little terry-cloth turban. The second thing she did was pop a bottle of champagne.

      “I had Aiden get one of his friends to bring us some bubbly. I think it’s necessary.”

      I laughed and took the glass she handed me.

      “Now,” she said. “You might want to down that first glass.”

      “Oh, no, why...?” The thought of drinking again made my stomach turn, but as always, I had trouble saying no to her. She was the only person who consistently had this effect on me.

      “Because this mask is going to burn a little.”

      It did. The next seven processes we did were equally uncomfortable. There was so much burning, tingling, plucking, pulling...and so therefore quite a few refilled glasses. I chucked two of them in the sink when she wasn’t looking.

      “All right, now on to the last portion.”

      “I’m dying to know why we’re wearing your freshman-year bikinis, Brooke.”

      “Because!” She pulled a screw-top tub of nasty greenish-brown stuff from the blue crate. “Come on over.”

      “What is that?”

      “It’s, like...seaweed and oatmeal and honey and chamomile and about forty other things. Come here, I have to slather you!”

      I took a few timid steps, and she took a handful and laid it on my bare stomach.

      “Oh, my God, that is gross.”

      “It really is.” She spread it around, grimacing. “But it’s worth it! Because—and I’m really sorry this is how it is—boys like girls who are put together.” She gave a what can I say? shrug. “What do you want to be? Do you want to be a Pretty Girl with a capital P and a capital G? Or just a regular ol’ pretty girl?”

      “I mean, I guess...the first one?”

      “Well, there are a couple of things you have to be before you can be a Pretty Girl. I’m not saying you should slab on the makeup until you end up with a three-layer cake on your face, but you have to take extra-special care of yourself. You don’t end up with skin that is the softest he has ever felt by using a regular soap bar and nothing else. Or hair that is so shiny that he wants to reach out and touch it, and find out if it really is as smooth as it looks.

      “You don’t end up with lips he longs to kiss again and again when you don’t slough them off with a sugar scrub every once in a while. When he imagines you, he should think of every sensation of you before he remembers how you look. How you sound when you laugh at a joke he makes, how your soft, sun-kissed shoulder feels in his calloused hand, how your lips taste like sugar and how when you get just close enough to him, he can catch a slight breeze of you and he’ll always remember that you smell like flowers and sunshine.” She finished covering me in the mud, looking nonchalant, as if she hadn’t just recited words that could have carried a whole ad campaign.

      I gawked at her. I had never heard her be so profound, had never had so much insight into how she became the glistening goddess she was. “Wow, Brooke.”

      It did make perfect sense, though, that Brooke’s entire outlook was based on appearance. Her foundation of life and love started with the belief that you needed to look and, thusly or at the very least, feel beautiful.

      “It is only then,” she went on to say, “that he should remember that you’ve got a bangin’ bod and ass that don’t quit.”

      “And back to the Brooke I know and love.”

      She laughed and handed me the tub to slather her up. “I’m just saying. In movies, when they picture the girl who got away or who changed them completely, it’s never just a nice-looking girl being average and having normal problems. The girls are always laughing in the sunlight, moving a strand of perfect Aniston hair back from their eyelashes or lying in bed, with brushed, flossed and whitened teeth, no grocery store mascara in the corners of their eyes or hair filled with nasty product residue. You go for natural, but you make it the natural you choose. And of course, to top it all off, you need sparkling confidence and daring wit. Honestly, all of these things get you to the point that makes you the most confident, and that’s what causes the ‘smiling in the sunshine’ effect more than anything else. And you’ve already got wit, so you’re totally on your way.”

      I thought about what she’d said as she stood, arms out for me to rub in the grossness, and took a sip from her glass.

      She really was an oddly wise and glamorous girl.

      When I finished, we washed our hands and champagne glass stems, then put the final potion on our faces. She grabbed four slices of cucumber, and we took some towels and lay them down in front of the enormous hearth in her living room. She had at some point lit a fire.

      We lay down, side by side, and covered our eyes with the cucumbers.

      “I’m sorry if I’m pushing you too hard about finding a guy,” she said after a few minutes. “I want someone to see you, and for you to feel the way that only a guy can make you feel. Maybe that’s Eric, maybe it’s not. But I want you to find someone.”