Pretty Is Read Free

brought home the brochures that started everything, it was the first we’d heard of it; I mean, Daddy and I. “I didn’t know they had these things for such young girls,” Daddy said, flipping through glossy pamphlets with his big rough farmer’s hands like he was holding something he’d rather not touch—a dead animal, maybe. “I guess I would’ve thought they’d be older.”
    “Look at those girls,” Gail said, tracing their round, smiling faces with the hot-pink talon of her index finger. “You have to tell me Carly May is cuter than every one of them. No question she could win these things without hardly even trying.”
    “Now why would she want to do that?” said Daddy, handing the brochures back to her and tugging one of my pigtails. “Carly May has a good head on her shoulders.” I was in second grade. “These girls look like a bunch of airheads. Just pretty faces, that’s all.”
    “There’s worse things to have,” said Gail.
    “Pretty is as pretty does,” Daddy said.
    I stared at the glittery, ruffled dresses the little girls were wearing—maybe airheads, maybe not; how could you tell?—and thought about what Gail had said. God, how do kids know the things they know? I remember very clearly understanding two things: one, that Gail was right when she said I was prettier than the other girls. I was only eight, but I knew this like I knew that hens laid eggs. And I sure as hell knew that, since I gathered them from the coop. I’m tempted to say no one told me, but the world must have told me, somehow.
    I also knew that Gail—much as I hated her, even then—was probably right when she said how much it mattered. Being pretty, I mean. And I knew that there was something I wanted, something big, something I couldn’t name. Something outside my present world. So I let her find me later, flipping through the brochures on my own at the kitchen table. Daddy was out.
    That was all she needed to start planning.
    Lois
    I don’t hide my past, exactly. My story did not follow me from high school to college, and I chose not to revive it. I wanted to try being a different Lois, at least publicly. Even when I wrote my dissertation on the trope of abduction in the British novel, no one but my parents and my dissertation director made the obvious connection. I have grown up, it seems, to be respectably anonymous: Lois Lonsdale, assistant professor of English, specialist in very long novels in which, according to my students, nothing happens. Stickler for the proper deployment of semicolons. Until recently, no one remembered the abduction, much less the names of the miraculously rescued girls. There have been too many girls in the news, most not so lucky; as spectators, we allow our imaginations to skitter from one tragedy to the next. Carly May and I essentially ceased to exist once our pictures disappeared from the papers; the reporters abandoned my doorstep long ago.
    Now, though, I have a new secret: I am Lucy Ledger, author of the modestly selling thriller Deep in the Woods , which is, however improbably, soon to be made into a major motion picture. The novel is loosely based on the abduction. My life has become complicated again.
    I have always liked secrets.
    I’ve been teaching Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in my class on the British novel. My plan is to get it out of the way early in the semester and then move on to the fun stuff. More fun, I mean; I admit that it’s relative. I am trying to persuade my skeptical students that Pamela is, in fact, fun. It’s an epistolary novel, of course, a novel in letters, though in a rather perverse way, as most letters in the novel never get to their intended recipients. But you could argue that it’s also a kind of horror novel, spun as a marriage plot. When Mr. B’s none-too-subtle efforts to seduce (or ravish) his young (very young!) servant fail, he abducts her, ships her off to another of his houses, and places her in the custody of his ally and