Chapter 1 #2
Boys never looked twice at Billie, even in high school.
She was small and skinny and had no figure to speak of.
The two girls didn’t even look related, except that they each looked like one of their parents, who looked nothing alike.
Virginia had been small, delicate, and graceful, like her eldest daughter.
Mickie was tall, slim, and blonde like her father.
She was the brightest star in the county, and Billie was the smartest, at the top of every class.
That’s what got her to MIT, which was just the escape she wanted.
Mickie was the prom queen every year in high school, and had managed to go to the prom even as a freshman.
She had convinced the proctor that she was a year older than she was, and that there was a mistake on her student ID card.
The proctor was an assistant teacher, only a year out of college herself, and no match for Mickie, who could charm anyone, especially a man, into doing what she wanted.
Billie had only gone to the prom once, junior year, with her best friend, not a boyfriend, Tom Carter.
It was his senior prom. He left for West Point the year before Billie went to MIT.
She missed him terribly once he’d left. They’d been best friends since grade school.
They shared their hopes and dreams and secrets.
He was third-generation West Point. His grandfather was a colonel.
Tom went into military intelligence when he graduated.
He had majored in political science, and was currently somewhere in the Middle East, at an intense antiterrorist training camp where he was taking advanced classes for two months.
He had told Billie that he loved working in military intelligence.
He felt like he could really make a difference there.
She didn’t know where he was now. He wasn’t allowed to tell her.
Once in a while, she got a letter from him, when he had a break and was on leave in a neutral place.
He had visited her often while he was at West Point, and she had gone to his commencement.
He would have been at hers if he’d been in the States.
Her father and sister didn’t come to her commencement, which wasn’t a surprise.
They couldn’t afford to. The dairy was being run on a shoestring.
They’d had a couple of bad years. Her father had been sick for a while the year before, and he couldn’t afford good help.
He drank more than he used to when his wife was alive.
He was lonely. There were no single women around on the neighboring farms. He hadn’t had a girlfriend in a few years, and was no longer trying to find one.
No one measured up to Virginia. She had been patient and kind, a wonderful wife and mother, and she had put up with his cold, unaffectionate ways. No other woman would have.
Billie hardly came home anymore. She’d been too busy with papers and exams during her senior year.
She came back for Christmas every year and she worked at the campus bookshop all summer.
Once a year in Iowa was enough. It was too depressing going back there.
Her father still treated her like a misfit, which to him she was.
He thought she’d gotten even stranger at MIT, being with others like her.
He didn’t see that she was thriving and comfortable among her peers at last. Coming back to the farm was a step back into painful history for her, a whole town of people who thought her odd, a sister who had tormented her, and their mother gone.
Their father lashed out at her when he was drunk, which was every night when she was home.
Mickie had dropped out of high school a few months before graduation the year before, gotten her GED, and gone to L.A.
to act in bit parts and model, mostly in trade shows, which paid well and helped manage her share of the rent in an apartment with two other girls.
They all waited on tables at night at restaurants nearby, and she had told her father she was going to make it big in L.A.
You couldn’t keep a girl like Mickie on a farm in a small town in Iowa.
She was destined for a bigger world and had thirsted for it all her life.
She used to steal movie magazines and fashion magazines from the local store, and planted them in Billie’s room so she’d get blamed for it.
Billie didn’t care about movies or fashion.
She dressed in T-shirts and jeans all through high school.
Her mother had known who took the magazines and would take them back to the store when she found them.
But the images Mickie saw in them had marked her forever.
She taught herself to do her makeup like the models, and imitated their hair.
She lightened hers even more, which made her look glamorous, and she spent every penny she could on secondhand clothes that made her look sexy and stylish.
Billie had seen her last on Christmas, and she was wearing a short hot pink dress that clung to her amazing figure, and six-inch heels with red soles that she said were the brand worn on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills on TV.
She looked totally out of place in her hometown, and like a movie star.
She made Billie feel more out of place than ever.
Their father was bursting with pride when she wore a sexy fake leopard coat to church on Christmas Eve.
Billie felt more like a freak and looked like Little Orphan Annie in an old down jacket of her mother’s that was too big for her, but that she wore out of sentiment.
It still smelled faintly of the soap Virginia had used.
People looked right past Billie as they stared at Mickie.
She thrived on the attention, and flirted with the boys she had gone to school with, some of whom were married by then.
Their wives and girlfriends didn’t appreciate the attention she lavished on them.
They didn’t bother talking to Billie. She’d been gone for four years by then, and her only close friend had been Tom.
The “cool girls” in school had been mean to Billie when they were younger and eventually dismissed her as just too weird.
Only a few of them had gone to the state college.
Most had stayed on their farms and gotten married as soon as they graduated from high school.
When Billie went home, she was shocked by how many of them had children.
In an entirely different way, Mickie was as big a freak as she was and didn’t fit.
She just looked better in her expensive secondhand wardrobe, and the other girls envied her.
More than ever now, since she was single and free and lived in L.A.
She had the life they wished they had but didn’t have the courage, the looks, or the means to go after.
The education Billie had gotten was of no interest to them, and she looked no different than she had in school.
Mickie was the epitome of glamour, and had escaped their fate.
It was always a relief to Billie when she left and went back to Boston, to the world where she was comfortable and fit in.
She hadn’t expected her father or Mickie to come to her graduation.
MIT was on another planet for them. But she wished her mother could have been there and seen her.
Mickie would have laughed at her in her cap and gown, and her father hadn’t worn a suit since her mother died.
He wore his work clothes and rubber boots at the dairy.
Billie took a last look in the mirror and left her dorm room to hurry down the stairs to line up for the ceremony.
The graduates were lining up in alphabetical order so she was close to the front of the line.
She glimpsed familiar faces in the crowd and smiled and nodded.
It felt bittersweet knowing that after today, she wouldn’t see them again, even though she had no close friends there.
She had dated a few of the men, but hadn’t had a serious romance.
She’d been too busy studying and getting good grades.
She’d lost her virginity her senior year, on a drunken night with her chemistry partner.
It hadn’t been love, just beer. He was a virgin too.
They dated a few times afterward, and slowly slipped away from each other.
It just seemed awkward and not romantic.
It was a rite of passage and nothing more.
She saw him from a distance a few times after their class together ended, and they never spoke again.
His last name was Ziegler and he was the last one in the lineup for graduation.
They nodded to each other as she walked past to take her place.
She assumed that everyone had family or friends there for the commencement, and thought she was the only one who didn’t, but she didn’t feel lonely or out of place.
MIT had been her home for four years now, and she was far more at ease there than she was on the farm where she grew up.
Most of the students at MIT were like her. In her hometown, she was unique.