microstories
The Earing
by Martine Leavitt
I hated my best friend, Mita.
We started being best friends in elementary school. Millie and Mita – we came a unit. We poked our fingers with needles and mixed our blood. We were blood sisters.
And then puberty made me ugly.
I kept looking in the mirror and thinking, "That's not the face I expected." I was surprised every day when I looked in the mirror and saw that I was still ugly. Once I said to my mom, "Mom, I'm ugly," and she went on and on about how beauty was in the eye of the beholder, whatever that means, and how physical beauty wasn't as important as inner beauty, and how each person was beautiful in their own way - the more she went on, the more I knew I was ugly. I tried different makeup and hair styles, but I had the kind of ugliness you just couldn't hide.
Mitu, on the other hand, she didn't even have to wear makeup to be gorgeous. Her eyes had always been a mesmerizing color of grey. They were blue when she wore blue, and violet when she wore purple and green when she wore green. By senior year she had these cheekbones and these perfect white teeth and this porcelain skin and an incredible figure... When she was around, I was completely invisible to boys. Full: even when she wasn't around, I was invisible to boys.
She was also really nice to everyone. If you're the most gorgeous, why wouldn't you be? So even all the girls liked her. She was also uber smart, so all the teachers liked her. When she was around, I was completely invisible to other girls and teachers.
And we were best friends, so she was always around. Which means I was always invisible.
The one thing I had going for me was that I was Mitu's best friend. Nobody else had that. I tried to make the most of it by treating her in ways nobody else would. Nothing so bad it would ruin our friendship – just enough to make her squirm. Mitu was the sort of person who'd never ditch her best friend.
Her World was a blue pearl earring, a tiny perfect World that dripped from her right ear. She wore it every day, her blue pearl earring, her perfect World. One day I figured out - that was why. No wonder! No wonder.
So one morning, I wake up and I get this plan, and when I get to school, I ask her if I can borrow her blue-pearl earring. She never denies me anything - I'm her best friend after all - but this time she says no.
"If anything happened to it..." she says... "Naturally colored blue pearls are really rare. This one comes from the Sea of Cortez..."
I think she's hoping that I'll take the hint and say, "Oh, I see, well never mind then."
But I don't take the hint, and I don't say it, and finally she says, "Well, maybe just till lunch."
I put it on, and it's heavy. I wear it all morning, and I know I'll never give it back. Two boys comment on my beautiful earring, and I get a smile from a teacher for getting the highest mark on the math test, and I have to hitch my belt over a notch because it's suddenly too loose. In the washroom, one girl lends me her lipstick, and she goes, wow, that makes such a difference...
My day keeps going on like that, and I try to figure out how I can keep it. Maybe I'll pretend to lose it and just wear it at home, or when she isn't at school...
But then it never did matter. She never ate her lunch. I never saw her again, all beautiful like that. The shooter found her in the cafeteria, before I got there with my big story about how I lost her earring.
I take the earring off when I hear.
I take it off and I swear I've never been uglier.
I put it back on, but the ugly doesn't go away.
I throw the earring away, as hard as I can, but someone finds it and returns it to me. I know she was your best friend, he says, crying.
I try to flush the earring down the toilet, but it plugs the toilet as if it were the size of a tennis ball, and Dad has to pay the plumber $157 to retrieve the earring. "I'm glad we paid the money," Dad says, "since she was your best friend."
I take the earring to her mother. Her mother cries. You should keep it, she says,
given that you were Mitu's
best friend.
