Flavor of the Month Read Online Free PDF

across the floor with a fresh pot of coffee. The girl glowed. Mary Jane watched the young woman as she swayed, balancing the coffee. Though she wasn’t very good, she was very pretty. Mary Jane never would have voted her into the group, but Sam had lobbied for her. And Mary Jane respected his judgment.
    Bethanie was so pretty, M.J. had to work hard at not resenting her. She was the type her grandmother had admired, while the old woman ridiculed M.J.’s own looks. Mary Jane had never forgotten her grandmother’s childrearing: the poor food, the humiliation of the cheap, dirty clothes, the remarks and the scorn she got from Grandma and the other girls at school. But worst of all had been her own awareness that her grandmother had been right—cruel, but right—when she called her fat and ugly and a ridiculous dreamer.
    She remembered sneaking into the dark, mildewed bathroom of the farmhouse to check on her reflection, hoping for some contradiction of her fears. She would turn on the light, a single sixty-watt bulb that extended from the wall over the bathroom mirror without benefit of a shade. She would open, the shallow drawer in the chipped Formica vanity beside the sink and scrabble amidst the old hair clips, broken scissors, and half-used tubes of ointments, looking for the hand mirror. It had been a double-sided one, with a cracked magnifying glass on the back, two ancient rubber bands holding it together. Clasping it in her right hand, Mary Jane had to open the medicine cabinet so that it stood out from the wall, its age-speckled mirror facing the toilet. Then Mary Jane would climb up onto the commode seat and crouch there. It was the only way she could see her profile, and, awful as it was, it mesmerized her.
    Each time, before she looked, she had paused for a moment, closed her eyes, and whispered one last prayer. Her heart always pounded, and her palms were always moist. Then, each time, she held the mirror in her left hand, angling it so that she could just manage to peer into it and see her profile reflected back at her in the larger, medicine-cabinet mirror. And each time her heart sank.
    Her nose jutted out in a high arch from her forehead, her thick eyebrows almost meeting there. Then the nose flared out into a fleshy blob over her thin lips. Her chin, what there was of it, receded into her neck. Her cheeks were too full, formless chipmunk pouches. Except chipmunks were cute, she had thought. Chipmunks were attractive. Her face was unbalanced, horrible.
    Each time that she crouched there and stared at her reflection, hot tears had filmed her eyes, as they did now. And each time she had, in the end, turned back to the mirror to face her enemy. Her eyes, still teary, big and brown, had stared at her from under the beetle brows. Windows to the soul, she’d thought. What good did it do her to have pretty brown eyes? So she could see how ugly she was? Nice joke, God.
    At thirteen, Mary Jane Moran had known a few things. She had known that she was smarter than most of the kids in school. That wasn’t hard in a place like Scuderstown, New York. Let’s face it, she had been smarter than most of the teachers, too. But she hadn’t let it show if she could help it. People didn’t like you if you were smarter than they were. Her grandma had always called her “Miss Smartypants,” and made it sound not like a baby word, but like a real insult. Mary Jane also had known that her grandma didn’t love her. And she’d known that she was ugly, and probably would stay so. So, then, nobody would love her. Ever.
    Now pretty Bethanie refilled Mary Jane’s mug. What skin! She looked as if she’d just had sex! “Oh, bless you, Bethanie. How could you tell I needed it?” Mary Jane sipped the hot liquid and moaned with relief while Beth helped her arrange her wet garments on a chair behind her.
    “So. Tell me. How was Unemployment?”
    Mary Jane paused for a moment. Had she mentioned to Bethanie that today was her