The Whitest Girl

FROM DAY ONE, TERRY PRUITT WAS TOO GOOD and too white, the whitest girl we'd ever seen. Most of us at Yama Catholic Girls High School were some version of Hispanic, but Terry was whiter even than those whose families were high-class from whatever island we came from, and so were blessed with Spaniard instead of Indo or plantation genes and shot out of our mothers' bellies as pale as little Europeans. There were other Anglo girls of course, but they lay in tanning beds, wore too-dark makeup shades that made them glow orange, studied Spanish, and flashed gold hoops to blend in. But Terry Pruitt didn't even make an effort. Her skin was so pale it was transparent, and we could see the web of veins underneath, including one throbbing blue line that split her forehead in half. Her teeth were jagged and yellow, the front teeth pocked with metal fillings. She had pale gray eyes the color of dirty dishwater, and her hair was a dull mouse-brown, not like our locks of black or chestnut hair we gelled up into ponytails. Her first day of school, all we could do was stare at the audacity of her whiteness.

A group of us followed her home after that first week of school and discovered that she lived in a trailer park with a herd of brothers and sisters, all as translucent and bad-teethed as Terry. Their parents had died and so their grandmother was raising them. The grandmother was too old to drive, so they had to walk everywhere. We were horrified. How did she get admitted to our school? When people that white yelled at us in the grocery store, or assumed we couldn't speak English, or that we were somehow unintelligent, their anger mystified us. When others wanted to dismiss us, we were lumped together with Terry's kind of trailer white, these creatures we didn't understand. We watched her run after a chicken that wandered underneath the trailer, watched her pluck its eggs out from their hiding places to feed her gang of siblings. When the siblings screamed and ran around her and she looked about to break, we saw her put a pillowcase over her head. Then her breathing seemed to slow. She looked peaceful, faceless, that blob of white sagging over her shoulders. We were fascinated.

After that first time we followed her home, we wanted more from the whitest girl we'd ever seen. We were like circus-goers who gasped at the bearded lady and then wanted desperately to know if, underneath all that hair, she was beautiful. We wanted to know Terry's secrets, we wanted to know who she loved, who she hated, what she dreamed of in the bed she shared with her sisters. This is not what we admitted to each other, of course. We said that we hated her, we wanted to ruin her life, or at least get her kicked out of school, and haz mel favor, how dare she? So we became her dark shadows, assigning one of us for every moment she might have been alone. Some of us protested at our cruelty, but the rest of us framed it as a game. Then it all seemed harmless.

One of us reported back that she had joined the choir, but she sang like a cat in heat. Another said she tried to play the clarinet, but couldn't muster enough breath for anyone to hear the notes. She spoke with a lazy Southern drawl that made us wonder if she was, in general, slow, except we heard she had a scholarship. We discovered she was religious in a Puritan, sanctimoniously abstinent way, and not in the ostentatious kissing-crosses-and-crying-Jesus way, which was the one we understood. When she passed through a room, you thought at first she was a ghost or a saint, except that when she smiled with those teeth, you knew she wasn't a thing from the heavens.

She seemed not...