Beauty Tips

Everyone was stupid, so stupid. Tessica just wanted to go home and get online again. It was ostensibly an English class, but the teacher would always go on lengthy tangents or referee irrelevant debates instead of actually teaching. Right now, the question was whether women wore make-up for the benefit of men or for their own happiness. How had they gotten onto this subject from Catcher in the Rye?

Tessica tapped two bitten-down nails against her desk. She wished people would stop raising their stupid hands. What made them think their opinions were so important? Maybe they thought talking as much as possible would get them a better mark. She looked at the faces around her. No, some of them seemed to actually care.

Talking wouldn’t change anything. They could talk until their useless mouths fell off and their heads exploded into oblivion. Everything would just be the same as it had been yesterday, and the day before that. These blithering morons were a waste of oxygen, and forcing Tessica to sit in a classroom with them was cruel and unusual punishment.

When the bell finally rang, Tessica immediately heaved her short, heavy-set frame out of her seat. As usual, she was the first person to reach the door. She left without speaking to or even looking at anyone. They didn’t matter; plebeians, all of them. She wasn’t even out the door before she started checking her e-mail on her smartphone. There were three angry comments from the message board she frequented; the incoherent fury made her smile. She would reply to them once she was home.

Tessica walked home at a rapid pace, death metal blaring through her noise-cancelling headphones. She brushed a stray hair out of her face, accidentally touching an inflamed pimple on her temple; she grimaced. The angry-looking spots covered much of her cheeks and forehead, but she never got used to them. They had developed a couple of years ago and showed no sign of going anywhere. When one did disappear, it left a dark crater in its place, just as ugly as the zit had been; but another one would spring up in the crater soon enough, anyway. Under the acne her skin was the colour of raw umber, framed by longish but woolly and unmanageable brown hair.

Her house sat, squat and ugly, under the highway overpass. She felt no affection for the place, but she had nowhere else to go. Inside, her mother was lying on the sofa watching TV. She tried to walk past her. “Hey!” her mother exclaimed. She glared at Tessica, but didn’t get up.

“I can’t hear you,” Tessica lied, pointing to her headphones. She brushed past her and upstairs to her room, shutting the door behind her. It was a messy oasis, safe and untouched except for her mother’s occasional cleaning foray.

Settling heavily into the rolling chair at her desk, she impatiently typed in a series of ultra-high security passwords. She had set up a somewhat elaborate security system in case her mother ever got ideas about snooping around her stuff.

The beauty tips message board had been her preferred online hangout for the past month or so. It was rarely moderated, and she could get away with posting anything, no matter how controversial or offensive. The previous night, she had made a post saying that a 1:1 dilution of your own urine is an excellent treatment for blackheads. It seemed that quite a few of the image-obsessed idiots had fallen for it, and now they were pissed off – literally.

In the few minutes since she had last checked, there was one more comment – misspelled, inarticulate, and generally ridiculous. She would respond to that one first.

Tessica’s eyes narrowed as she wrote a brief but vicious response from her main account. Then, she logged into another account and wrote another reply, purportedly from an uninvolved observer, standing up for the original commenter, asking if she wasn’t perhaps being a bit harsh.

Back in her first account, she wrote a more extensive – and more sarcastic – version of her original comment. It could be considered a minor masterpiece of rhetoric, if she said so herself. In the second account, she replied again, laughing and saying that she agreed completely.

The other comments were the same. Tessica reread them with derision, unable to comprehend how anyone could be so dim-witted. But she knew that the majority of people were actually that senseless. Look at the people in her English class, for starters. They talked and talked, and yet not one of them ever thought to talk to her. Tessica swallowed hard and pushed the thought out of her mind. She replied to the other comments quickly, without all the elaborate back-and-forth dialogue.

The Internet needed her. The world needed her. She would show people how stupid they were, one by one if she had to. It was all she wanted to do, and she knew she had a knack for doing it. It was a gift, really. She would make people shut up, close their yapping mouths and listen for once.

She would make them notice her.

Tessica didn’t look away from the computer screen until her eyes began to sting. She rubbed them, carefully avoiding touching her forehead; the feel of her oily, lumpy skin on her fingers sometimes made bile rise in her throat. She logged off the computer and slowly stood up. “Mom!” she yelled as she walked down the stairs. “Is dinner ready yet? I’m fucking hungry!”

On the message board, a moderator was posting a new comment in response to Tessica’s latest thread. Please, don’t feed the trolls.