Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner Read Free Book Online

threw back the covers and went to the bathroom like I hadn't already been in there for over an hour. I brushed my teeth again, pulled on my jeans and boots and a pink sweater, tucked my mascara and lip gloss into my pocket, and went downstairs to the kitchen, where I found my mother holding the red kettle in her hands like it was some kind of magical object she'd never seen before. I counted out my almonds. She didn't move. "Mom?" I finally asked.
    She set the kettle on the burner and clicked on the flame. "Sorry, honey." She sat down at the table across from me and sighed before patting her scrunched-up hair, as if that would help (it didn't). "Just thinking."
    "About what?"
    She fussed with her hair some more and smiled kind of sadly. "Oh, you know. Grown-up stuff." Which was, I thought, exactly what a mother would say to her daughter. If her daughter were four.
    She dropped me off, as usual, outside of the chain-link fence that separates the empty play yard from the sidewalk. I stopped in the empty first-floor girls' room, where I pulled my lip gloss out of my pocket and smoothed some onto my lips. Then I unzipped my backpack and pulled out my lunch, which was stored in a zippered, insulated pink bag with my name monogrammed on the front. I transferred the food out of the horrible pink bag and into a plain plastic bag from the grocery store, which is what every other kid uses.
    At last I reached behind my straightened hair, pulled out my hearing aids, and slipped them into my pocket. It's not like this is going to fool anyone. Almost every kid in my class remembers how I started kindergarten with the big, square, horrible behind-the-ear hearing aids. Up until third grade, my teachers would wear wireless microphones, and I would wear earphones, like the ones from an iPod, so I could hear them. I'd try to fluff out my crazy, frizzy nest of hair so nobody could see the hearing aids or the headphones, but everyone knew they were there. Which wasn't entirely bad: The one spell of popularity I'd ever had occurred after Mrs. Mears left her microphone on when she went to the teachers' lounge and the entire class huddled around my earphones to listen (the next day, instead of discussing photosynthesis, Mrs. Mears's lecture was "Irritable Bowel Syndrome: It Is Not a Joke").
    In sixth grade, I graduated to the kind of hearing aids that sit inside my ears. I'm supposed to wear them every day and sit in the front row. But last summer Aunt Elle came to the beach for a week's visit with the tiniest black bikini I'd ever seen and a canvas tote bag full of Elle and Vogue and In Touch and InStyle . My mother shook her head as Aunt Elle stacked the glossy magazines next to her chair and started smearing oil over her shoulders. We don't have magazines like that in our house. My mother thinks they're a bad influence. "Those are manipulated images," my mom said, frowning at the beautiful, long-limbed models on the covers, explaining how the pictures are specially lit and airbrushed and edited. She even downloaded pictures on the computer to show me how the editors smoothed out wrinkles and slimmed down backs and arms and thighs and, in one case, even erased a model's hand and made her arm longer.
    "For God's sake, Cannister, it's a frickin' magazine," Elle had said, and she'd slipped me copies when my mother wasn't looking. After seven days straight of reading Vogue and watching my aunt, I'd decided that this year, seventh grade, would be when I would change. I'd ditch my hearing aids and my special seat. I'd straighten my hair and wear makeup and tuck in my shirts. Then people would see me differently from the way they always had; they'd see that I wasn't the geeky girl with only two friends and crazy hair and a mother who treated her like a baby.
    So far, it hadn't worked, but when I walked into homeroom that morning I had my first glimmer of hope that things might be changing. The first thing I saw was Tamsin and Todd huddled in the corner,