Am I Pretty
short story no. 56
It all started when the Grade 12 students of Southcoast all-boys school decided to run among themselves an online poll titled “Who Would You Rather Fuck”. Only two choices: Mrs. Wilfreda Piamonte — music teacher, the only female teaching in the Southcoast faculty because she was well past sixty years old and therefore deemed by the management committee to be unappealing now to the horde of rowdy and libidinous male adolescents the school housed — and her, Tricia Gatdula. She had won by only two votes.
“At least she won,” her classmates said, giggling.
The poll and its outcome had, unsurprisingly, leaked out of the boys’ group chat and made its way to Southcoast’s sister school, Woodfield all-girls school — made its way, in fact, right to her very classroom.
One of the boys had found the results so hilarious that he shared it online with his girlfriend Joyce. Joyce happened to be Tricia’s classmate. Joyce in turn now shared it on her phone to her two other friends at the back of the classroom during the morning recess period and the three were having a good laugh about it. Tricia overheard them from her desk and, turning back, noticed they were glancing at her.
“Won what?” Tricia said. “Why are you all looking at me?”
“Shh,” Joyce said. “Don’t tell her.”
“Tell me what?” Tricia said.
“Do you really want to know?” one of Joyce’s friends said.
Joyce reached out and slapped her softly on the wrist. “Don’t tell her,” she said. They giggled.
“Tell me,” Tricia said. She got up from her desk. She saw that none of them would make eye contact with her. They all looked down to the ground. “Tell me,” she said.
“Fine,” Joyce said. “The Southcoast boys ran a poll.”
“Poll?” Tricia said. “What poll?”
She saw them exchange glances. They were all grinning.
Tricia wiped her eyes at the sink. She turned off the faucet, took a breath, lifted her eyes up to the mirror. There it was. They were right.
It was the first time she ever looked at her own face deadpan — no expression, no contortion of the features. Up until this moment she had unconsciously been making a face whenever she looked at the mirror: she would stretch her neck out and tilt her chin up slightly and suck in her cheeks and scrunch her nose and raise her eyebrows so that her face would stretch. She would not look at her face with fully open eyes either. Instead she would squint so that her skin would blur to a smudge and her features become finer.
Now she did none of these things. Now she looked at her face, blank, plain. And she did not like what she saw. Her round pudgy face with its protruding cheeks and the popped pores and acne marks which stood out angrily red on her light skin looked to her like a stale mass of kneaded dough. For the first time it occurred to her that she looked like shit.
“Oh look at you you look like a celebrity!” This is what her aunts would remark whenever they saw her in Christmas family reunions.
“You know who she looks like, she looks just like Julia Barretto!”
“Oh, you’re right!”
“No, in fact prettier than Julia Barretto! I’m telling you! You only have to lose some weight and you’ll be prettier than Julia Barretto!”
Tricia bought into the flattery entirely. She searched “Julia Barretto” on the browser of her phone and scrolled through the celebrity’s pictures, studied her face. She compared her own face in the mirror.
Could it really be? She had the face of Julia Barretto. Julia Barretto. Her aunts had told her so.
This triggered what would become for her an unromantic crush, an unerotic obsession. In her free time she would throw herself on her bed and scroll through her phone and search for everything Julia Barretto: scrolled through her images, watched all her vlogs — scrutinizing every pixel, absorbing every minute. She studied the celebrity’s hair, her skin, her clothes, how she laughed and talked: the high tone and drawl of affluent Filipina English. She fixated on all these, lying in her bed, gazing at her phone, drunk with worship, thinking This could be me! This is me! I am Julia Barretto!
Julia Barretto became for her the paragon of her very existence. And all other perception, all other external reality, was shaped to fit this interior narrative. So that every experience served only to solidify, buttress her convictions.
She had saved up to buy a white floral blouse she saw Julia Barretto wearing in one of her recent Instagram posts and on the Sunday she planned to wear it to Mass she purposely took a long time in the bathroom so that her family would arrive late at the parish church.
“Tricia,” her mother said, knocking at the bathroom door. “What’s taking you so long?”
“I’m almost finished, Ma.”
“‘Almost’? We’re already late.”
Tricia opened the door and stepped out of the bathroom.
“Oh,” her mother said. She brushed her fingers on her daughter’s blouse. “Is this new?”
“Yeah,” Tricia said. “I just bought it.”
“I don’t know… Seems a bit tight. Revealing. Couldn’t you — ”
Tricia’s father called from outside, “Hurry, let’s go.” He had already started the car and her two little brothers were already waiting inside.
When they arrived at the church the choir and congregation were already halfway through the singing of the Gloria and the pews were almost full, which meant that they could not sit together in one pew as a family as they normally did. They would have to separate and look for vacant spots in different pews. This was exactly Tricia’s plan. Today she wanted to sit beside Gerald.
“Gerald” was the imaginary name she had given the boy whose family, like her, always attended the 8:30 AM Sunday Mass. She was convinced, ever since she became aware of her looks, that he was secretly stealing glances at her throughout the course of the Mass.
She never saw him do it. Whenever she turned to him he must have already turned away, stopped looking. He was obviously very shy. And very nimble with his neck.
But even without seeing it she just knew that he looked at her, eyes feasting on her as though she and not Jesus were the object of worship, the holy bread. And today, with her new Julia Barretto blouse, she planned to sit right beside him, to bask in his direct and unadulterated gaze: not because she liked him, but because she liked to waddle affirmed in her dreamlike and obsessive convictions.
“Excuse me,” she said, as she sauntered crouched down with her hands pressed together in front to enter through the narrow space between pews. The people seated in the pew, Gerald’s family members, shifted up on their seats to let her through. “Excuse me, passing through, sorry, thank you,” she said, whispering over the First Reading. She felt her leg brush his knee. She did not look at him.
Yet she could not help but grin with pleasure, with warm tingling vanity. He was surely looking at her now — staring at her face, her exposed arms in that new white floral blouse — shocked at the blind unfolding of chance and love to make her sit on this very pew on this very spot right beside him. How could he help himself?
And his parents? What would they say, seeing their son now so distracted in Sunday Mass by that good-looking, celebrity-faced latecomer? How would they chastise such indiscretion?
During the singing of the Our Father she held up her hands and she quivered with satisfaction as she felt his hand hold onto hers.
He did not have to. Everyone knew that you didn’t have to hold the hand of the person beside you during the Our Father if the person is not a family member. Yet he did. As she grasped his hand she thought about how he must be shaking inside with pure pleasure, with titillation.
In the greeting of peace she decided she would finally look at him. Finally indulge him one small moment of her attention. She timed her greeting so that their gazes would meet.
“Peace be with you,” he said, bowing his head.
In the brief second that their eyes met she saw that he smiled. Smiled too widely, too earnestly. How joyous he must have felt. He must have been so eager. She could almost feel the anticipation emanate from those eyes. What a moment this must have been for him indeed.
She smiled back. She smiled exactly as she had been studying on the phone and practicing in the mirror for days: the Julia Barretto smile, the shy sweet smile with pursed lips.
“Peace,” she said.
And bowed her head. And looked away. That was it: like some stingy fairy she would grant him that one desire and nothing more. Triumphant, she would never indulge him again. Her attentions were not to be so carelessly lavished.
Now, however, as she stared past her tears at her own newfound face in the girl’s bathroom mirror, she experienced a profound revelation: he had not been looking at her. He never had. No one had, for that matter. At least not in the sense she had expected.
Profounder yet: that once the sheer lamina of perception once enveloping you cracked then shattered at violent contact with reality, you are so overwhelmed with air that you have nothing left to breathe; so overwhelmed with light you cannot see a thing. And where does that leave you?
She stopped looking at the mirror. She never wanted to look at it again. She locked herself into one of the bathroom stalls and closed the lid of the toilet and sat there, her knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around them, face buried in the inescapable abyss of purest reality. She did not go to class anymore that day.
“What’s wrong, Tricia?” her father said. They were having breakfast at the table. “You haven’t eaten a thing.”
“I’ve been noticing too,” her mother said. “You don’t take anything for breakfast. All you do is sit there and sip your coffee. Black.”
“Are you alright?” her father said. “Are you sick?”
“No,” Tricia said, “I’m perfectly fine.”
“Then you’d better eat something,” her mother said. “You can’t be getting hungry. You’ll get dizzy at school.”
“Really, Mom. I’m fine. In fact,” she said, getting up from the table, “I need to start getting ready for school. The service arrives in a few minutes.”
“Tricia,” her mother said.
“Come on, Tricia,” her father said. “Just take something.”
“I’m fine.”
“Sit down,” her mother said. Tricia stopped. “Eat.”
“All right,” she said.
She sat down and took a piece of bread and bit into it. She chewed, she swallowed.
“There you go!” her father said. “Here, have a fried egg.”
When Tricia finished she said, “Can I go now?”
Her parents looked at each other. “Yes, you may,” her father said.
She got up from the table and climbed up the stairs and entered the bathroom beside her bedroom, locking the door. She opened the bathroom cabinet above the sink, not looking at the mirror. She took out her toothbrush and then stood next to the toilet.
She stuck the toothbrush as far back into her throat as she could. She gagged. By reflex the toothbrush rebounded out of her throat and drool fell from her mouth and splashed into the toilet bowl. Her eyes teared up.
She waited until her breathing was back to normal and her throat had settled. She held out a hand against the bathroom wall now, leaning against it. She stuck the toothbrush again into her throat. She gave another dry-heave but this time she fought against reflex and forced her hand to keep the toothbrush there. She felt her stomach give a lurch. She vomited into the toilet.
She knelt, she placed her hands on the toilet seat, her head hovering above the bowl. Her mouth and the back of her throat was filled with a bitter, acidic taste. She spat and she spat and she could not get the taste out.
“Tricia!” her mother called from outside the bathroom. “Tricia!”
“Yes, Mom?”
“Hurry up! The service is outside waiting.”
“Okay. I’ll be right there.”
