Define Beautiful

Preface

Charlie didn’t really remember when it got bad.  There were those grey days where she never left her room, sure, but there were good days where she looked like pure sunshine. 

When it happened, it was mid-May, and the sunshine was finally poking through the trees of Baltimore.  Snow jackets were hung in closets for the season, and Charlie began walking to school again.  Heat prickled under her armpits when she sat in school for those dwindling days, avoiding the stares of her classmates and friends.  It’s not that they didn’t like her; they just didn’t know what to say.

What can you say to the girl whose sister tried to swallow her life away?  Charlie’s friends slowly started drifting farther from her, because they felt so lost as to what to do, what to say.  Charlie wasn’t mad; there was nothing that they could do.  Charlie was too busy trying to sort through her own feelings to worry about the feelings of others.  It was around then that Charlie stopped going to dance every day the way she normally did.  She was supposed to be soloing in a recital that June, but it wasn’t going to happen.  She had lost any want for it.

Once upon a time, Charlie had looked up to Liddy, her Elizabeth.  Elizabeth was popular and smart and beautiful by the high school definition, and she made mediocre Charlie seem inadequate.  Charlie was average-looking enough, got straight B’s, and had six or seven close friends that she could count on to remember her birthday, but Elizabeth was so much more.  Elizabeth, with her bleach blonde hair to her waist, her bright blue eyes, and her tan skin, was the apple of every eye.  Her friends reached far and wide over Baltimore, and Elizabeth seemed so inexplicably… charmed.  Yet, Liddy always made time for Charlie.  To the Others, Charlie’s sister was Elizabeth or Liz or Lizzie, but to Charlie, she was Liddy.  Liddy cried sometimes over silly things like when she saw a car run a red light across the street.  Liddy was quiet and sometimes sad, but also funny and inappropriate and everything that a sister should be.  After a while, Charlie realized that Liddy and Elizabeth were two ultimately different people, and that someday it would be too much on her.

That day was in May.

So it was a bittersweet blessing when her mother notified them that they would be leaving Baltimore immediately after exams— for good.

So as Baltimore sweated and panted and ran headlong into the summer months, Charlie and Liddy, the two charming Portland girls, vanished from the jumbling memories of sweaty teenagers and depressed teachers and headed in a completely opposite direction—away.