and girls without them. It was the distinction that mattered the most,
practically the only one that did matter. But I knew that boys were
dangerous. They'd say they loved you, but they were always after
something.
Even though I didn't trust boys, I sure did wish one would show some
interest in me. Kenny Hall, the old guy down the street who was still
pining away for me, didn't count. If any boy was interested in me, I
wondered if I'd have the wherewithal to tell him, when he tried to go too
far, that I was not that kind of girl. But the truth was, I didn't need to
worry much about fending off advances, seeing how—as Ernie Goad told
me on every available occasion—I was pork-chop ugly. And by that he
meant so ugly that if I wanted a dog to play with me, I'd have to tie a
pork chop around my neck.
I had what Mom called distinctive looks. That was one way of putting it.
I was nearly six feet tall, pale as a frog's underbelly, and had bright red
hair. My elbows were like flying wedges and my knees like tea saucers.
But my most prominent feature—my worst—was my teeth. They weren't
rotten or crooked. In fact, they were big, healthy things. But they stuck
straight out. The top row thrust forward so enthusiastically that I had
trouble closing my mouth completely, and I was always stretching my
upper lip to try to cover them. When I laughed, I put my hand over my
mouth.
Lori told me I had an exaggerated view of how bad my teeth looked.
"They're just a little bucked," she'd say. "They have a certain Pippi Long-
stockingish charm." Mom told me my overbite gave my face character.
Brian said they'd come in handy if I ever needed to eat an apple through
the knothole in a fence.
What I needed, I knew, was braces. Every time I looked in the mirror, I
longed for what the other kids called a barbed-wire mouth. Mom and
Dad had no money for braces, of course—none of us kids had ever even