The Kings Of Cool

82

She stares into the mirror and slowly, meticulously draws the eyeliner pencil under her eye.

The eyeliner is perfect, the mascara is perfect, the subtle blue eye shadow is perfect, the slight blush that highlights her porcelain cheekbones is perfect. She brushes her straight, lush blonde hair to a perfect shine.

Coldly, objectively, critically, Kim decides that she is perfect.

Getting up from the stool, she steps over to the full-length mirror attached to the door of her tiny room in the double-wide down in the flats of San Juan Capistrano near the strawberry fields.

Kim straightens the classic little black dress and checks that it shows enough-but not too much-thigh, and enough-but not too much-cleavage. The dress represents months of waiting tables at the Harbor Grill in Dana Point for shitty tips and sidelong glances because Kim is a looker who doesn’t look seventeen.

She decides that the dress is perfect.

So is the black bra that pushes her breasts into the perfect globes she sees in Vogue, Cosmo, and even Playboy, which she studies to discover what men think a woman should be, and Penthouse to learn what men think a woman should do.

Kim doesn’t otherwise know because she’s never had a boyfriend, never gone out on a date-she isn’t going to get into the backseat, she isn’t even going to get into the car.

She is Kim the Ice Maiden, Kim the Frigidaire, and she doesn’t care what they say about her-she isn’t going to waste herself on high school boys who can’t do anything to make her life better or give her what she wants, which is

Something better-much better-than the series of crappy apartments and mobile homes that her mother has worked her ass off to provide, better than the series of bedmates that her mother brings home and urges to leave early before her daughter wakes up.

Kim has been saving herself, keeping herself to herself.

Watching, watching

Waiting, waiting for her body to grow into her soul, for it to be

Perfect, and

Perfectly irresistible

Because you use what you have.

The world didn’t give her money, or family, or position, but it gave her beauty

And now she sees that she’s ready to go looking- hunting, really for a better life.

Kim has a plan.