smart? All anyone cares about is how I look! And I look awful!”
“You don’t look awful,” Seth protested. “You look—” He stopped, seeing in her eyes that if he said she was pretty, she wouldn’t believe him. “You look interesting,” he said. “So your face isn’t like Heather Dunne’s. Who cares?”
“I care,” Angel wailed. “I don’t want to be ‘interesting.’ I want to be pretty.” She turned around again and was staring at herself in the mirror when Seth appeared next to her. For a long minute the two of them stared at her reflection in the mirror, and then Seth cocked his head slightly and a little smile played around his lips.
“What?” Angel asked, still truculent. “Are you going to try to convince me I
“Will you be quiet for a minute?” Seth broke in. “I was just thinking — have you got any makeup?”
“You mean like lipstick and eyeliner and that kind of stuff?” When Seth nodded, Angel shook her head. “My mom won’t let me wear any, except on Halloween. Last year I was going to be a vampire, but—”
“But what?” Seth pressed. Angel said nothing, but Seth thought he knew the answer to his question. “Nobody invited you to a party, did they?” The tightening of Angel’s expression told him he was right. “Nobody invited me to any parties either,” he went on. “So, you still got the vampire stuff?”
“It’s just junk!” Angel protested. “It’s not makeup.”
“Sure it is,” Seth told her. “I bet it’s the same stuff they sell in the cosmetics section of the drugstore in a different package. Get it out.” Angel didn’t move. “Oh, come on — it can’t hurt just to try something, can it?”
Still not sure what Seth was up to, Angel rummaged around in the bottom drawer of her dresser until she found the unopened package that contained not only the makeup kit for the vampire, but the teeth and a black cape as well. “This is stupid—” she began, but Seth had already taken the package out of her hand and began ripping it open.
“Cool!” he said, shaking out the cape and throwing it around his shoulders, then gazing at himself in the mirror over Angel’s dresser. Then he opened the box that contained the makeup. “ ‘Dead white,’ ” he read off one of the labels. “And they have ‘bloodred,’ ‘bruise purple,’ and a bunch of other stuff. Put it on,” he told her.
Angel reddened. “I–I don’t know how,” she finally admitted. “I’ve never put on makeup before.”
Seth rolled his eyes. “Then I’ll do it,” he said. “Come here.” He pulled her over so she was standing in front of him. “This is going to be fun,” he said. “Like painting a picture on your face.”
Angel glanced sourly at her reflection in the mirror. “You can’t fix my face with makeup,” she told him.
“Bet I can,” Seth retorted. “Besides, I don’t want to fix anything — I’m going to make everything bigger.”
Angel’s eyes widened. “Are you crazy?”
“Be quiet,” Seth told her. “I’m just going to try it, okay? I mean, what can it hurt? No one’s here but me, and if it doesn’t work, we can just take it off.” He held up a small jar of cold cream. “See? They even put it in the kit, in case the sight of blood makes you sick.”
Angel made a face. “That’s disgusting. And besides—”
“Stop arguing,” Seth said. “Let’s see what happens.”
Angel reluctantly turned back to Seth, but still couldn’t believe he was actually going to try to make her features even bigger. Everything was already so large!
“First we’ll do your eyes,” Seth said. Opening the purple eye shadow, he began carefully applying it, first to her eyelids, then below her eyes.
“How’d you learn to do this?” Angel asked.
“I was in a play last year — Mr. DeBerg showed us. Now be quiet — every time you say something, your whole face moves.” Finished with the shadow, he found the black eyeliner and began outlining her eyes, pulling the line outward on both sides so her eyes seemed to be a little farther apart, just like the drama teacher had showed him.
When he was done with the eyeliner, Angel turned to look at herself in the mirror. Her eyes actually did look even bigger, but somehow, with the color Seth had added, they looked deeper too.
“Is that so terrible?” Seth asked.
Angel shook her head.
“Then let me do the rest.” Seth set to work, accentuating every feature Angel had spent her life hating, making her cheekbones look higher and more pronounced, her nose longer, and finally applying “bloodred” to her lips. “Cool,” Seth pronounced when he was finally finished. Turning Angel toward the mirror, he stood beside her as they gazed at his work. “Nobody’s going to say ‘yuck’ when they see that!”
Angel stared silently at her own reflection, and as she slowly got used to what Seth had done, she found herself thinking that maybe she actually
And then the bedroom door suddenly opened, and Angel turned to see her father framed in the doorway. His eyes fixed on her, shifted to Seth for a moment, then came back to her. “What the hell’s goin’ on in here?” he demanded, his slurred words telling Angel that he’d been drinking.
“Nothing, Dad,” she began. “Seth and I were just—”
“Nothing?” Marty Sullivan repeated. “I come home and find my little Angel painted up like some whore, with a boy in her bedroom? Don’ tell me nothin’s going on.” His malevolent gaze swung back to Seth Baker. “Get out, you little punk.” Abruptly, he lunged forward, grabbed Seth by the shirt, jerked the vampire cape off his shoulders, and began propelling him toward the door. Seth barely had time to grab his backpack before Marty pulled him out of the room.
“Dad!” Angel cried out, but Marty Sullivan didn’t even hear her. He was already half dragging Seth down the stairs.
A moment later Angel watched from the window as her father shoved Seth off the front porch. “You stay away from my girl, you hear?” she heard him yell. Then the front door slammed shut, and she saw Seth run across the yard and disappear down the street.
Hearing her father coming back up the stairs, Angel ran to the bedroom door, closed it, and twisted the key in the lock.
“Let me in,” her father called a moment later as he began pounding on her door. “Don’t you think you can lock me out! This is my house, and you’re my daughter, and you’ll by God do what I tell you to do. Now open this door!”
But instead of opening the door, Angel backed away from it, praying that her mother would come home before her father broke it down.
Chapter 15
ETH BAKER STOPPED SHORT AS HE TURNED THE corner onto Elm Street. A quarter of the way down the block Chad Jackson and Jared Woods were throwing a football back and forth across the street between the Jacksons’ and the Woodses’ front yards. Chad and Jared had been best friends for as long as Seth had known them, which was ever since kindergarten, but he hadn’t paid much attention to them until the day eight years ago when his parents bought the house on Elm Street — and suddenly Chad and Jared’s favorite thing to do had become the torturing of Seth Baker.
Or that was the way it seemed to Seth.
He’d tried to be friends with them, or at least tried to get along with them, even though the two things they seemed to like best — baseball and football — were the things Seth hated most. Still, he’d done his best, knowing better than to argue the first time his father had sent him out into the street to join in the softball game Chad and Jared had organized. They’d let him play just long enough to find out he wasn’t any good at it, and then, when it got too dark to play any longer and everyone but Chad and Jared had gone home, they’d “pantsed” him and thrown his jeans up into the big oak tree in front of the Jacksons’ house. He’d tried to climb the tree, but only succeeded in skinning his legs, and finally went home in his underwear and T-shirt.
His father only wanted to know why he’d let it happen, and told him that the next time they tried it, he should fight back.
