Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell

putting on lipstick and heels to pick my brats up from school. Those are the happy endings. I could also be in prison. I could be dead. You think that’s melodramatic? Here are some ways I could have died: I could have been killed in a car crash with some drunken asshole at the wheel. Killed in a snowmobile accident, ditto. Dead of a drug overdose in somebody’s skanky trailer. Dead of anorexia, trying too hard to disappear. I knew kids who died in all of these ways. It could just as easily have been me; I was as stupid and reckless as anybody. Anybody who thinks small-town America is a safe, sheltered place to grow up hasn’t spent much time there.
    By the time I was a sophomore in high school—the same year I was crowned Miss Nebraska Teen—nobody mentioned the abduction anymore. Kidnapping. Whatever. Which doesn’t mean they didn’t think about it; there just didn’t seem to be anything else to say. I hardly ever brought it up unless I needed Gail to feel bad. (The fact that she’d been having her eyebrows waxed when I rode off with a stranger hadn’t played very well in the press, as you can imagine, though it was actually one of the few things I didn’t blame her for.) But even if it was buried as far as everyone else was concerned, it was never very far from my mind.
    Daddy was always out on the farm; it seemed like he came in later and later all the time. I didn’t blame him. The house had gradually been taken over by Gail and her kids, and by then they practically had full control. It was their world—not mine, not Daddy’s. She’d had two boys pretty much one after the other, bam bam, after Daddy married her. My half brothers, technically. But from the start I didn’t feel any real connection to them. They looked nothing like me, nothing like Daddy. The first one, Braden, was a boy version of Gail, a pale lumpy little thing. Jaden was different—taller, dark-haired, even handsome—but if he didn’t look like a little boy-Gail, he sure as hell didn’t look like my father, either. Which, after the Miss Nebraska Teen pageant, I had a definite theory about, as you might imagine. Still, if my half brothers had just left me alone, it would have been okay. I would have been happy to pretend they didn’t exist. Stupidly, they made this impossible.
    They tormented me, for one thing.
    Which is no fucking excuse for maiming anyone, obviously, though that’s what damn near happened. And although it could have ruined everything, my outburst of violence actually got me one step closer to gone. Maybe I should have suffered more; it’s easy to feel guilty, looking back. If I’m completely honest, I have to admit that I even felt guilty at the time. And scared as hell; it was terrifying, frankly, to realize what I was capable of.
    It happened one weekend morning when the boys and I were alone in the house. I was locked in my tiny bedroom as usual. We lived in an old farmhouse, with small, odd-shaped rooms, slanting ceilings, and narrow hallways. No right angles. It always felt crowded, like the walls were closing in. I was scribbling in the diary I’d kept since my return from the cabin when one of them started pounding on my door. “Carly May, look, Carly May, you have to see!” It was Jaden, yelling.
    I jumped up from my bed and flung my door open, half hoping he would fall through it. Usually I made them wait longer. I had no interest in whatever he wanted to show me. I just wanted to scare him away.
    Jaden, with a dirt-smeared face, had balanced one of my tiaras on his head, a stupid grin stretching his mouth wide. He would have been about seven then, I guess.
    “Take that off, you little shit,” I said. “You look like a retard.”
    “We’re not supposed to say retard , retard.”
    “Take it off, or I’ll kick your skinny little ass. Gail isn’t home to stop me. You know I’ll do it.” This is how I spoke to them. Nice, isn’t it? I’m not defending myself. Anyway, I was half-serious and