Jan

She was by far the ugliest girl I’d ever seen. I couldn’t stop looking at her though . . . examining her unusual facial features. It was the nose, with its huge anomaly right in the middle of it. And her droopy lower lip. Poor girl. She looked so sad, as though she knew how ugly she was and was helplessly ashamed of herself. My friends were so mean . . . making cruel comments and snickering childishly. She must have been used to it after so many years of public school. But the words still had their intended effect. They’d been doing this to her ever since she moved here. There was nothing she could do but stand there . . . her head hung in shame. Waiting for the bus to come, she tried to dab away a tear without anybody noticing.

“You guys are some real bastards!” I said. My so-called “friends” were stunned. I had never spoken to them like that before. They were younger than me but much bigger because I had stopped growing in Junior High School. I was becoming noticeably different than all of the other kids. Still, I’d never be seen with a girl like her. But I felt sorry for poor ugly Janice Vogelsang. I returned their indignant scowls and made my way across the street to the place where Janice stood at the end of her driveway. I fished around in my pocket for a piece of slightly used toilet tissue to offer her. She pretended not to notice. Probably suspicious of my intentions . . . thinking I had come to do something cruel to impress my friends.

“They’re a couple of idiots,” I said, as she continued to look at the ground in silence . . . occasionally flicking away a tear with her fingernail, the way only girls do. Her nose was running a little, which was kinda disgusting and was making me second guess myself. But it was too late now. I was committed to defending this helpless creature . . . runny ski-jump nose and all. It was REALLY embarrassing being seen with Janice. But as time went by, I started to realize that she was a really nice girl. She had such a sweet, gentle spirit that was very endearing. I started visiting her at home after school, and one particular time I happened to overhear her singing.

“Wow!” I said. “Janice, you’ve got a great voice!”

“You think so?” she said, as though she really didn’t know how good she sounded.

That night I started working on a song and then began taking my guitar over to her house after school and encouraging her to sing. She was so shy, more than a year went by before I could get her to perform the songs I wrote for her in front of her own family. “There’s an assembly coming up at school,” I told her. “And I already spoke to the choir teacher about letting us do one of your songs.” She looked horrified and immediately rejected the idea.

“No way!” she said. “Uh-uh!”

“Why Jan?” I pleaded. “It’s a chance to show everyone that magnificent voice you’ve been hiding.”

“No way!” She insisted. “You’re crazy if you think I’m ever going to sing in public with THIS face! Everyone will make fun of me!”

“Well,” I said, “what if we can change it? ”

Jan looked at me as if I’d completely lost my mind. But what I didn’t tell her is that I had been thinking about her nose problem for over a year. You see, growing up with nothing made me a fairly resourceful person. I told Jan about my brother’s crooked teeth and our lack of money to get him braces. The dentist gave my dad a box of popsicle sticks and told him that my brother could straighten out his own teeth if he spent every waking moment pushing on them.

“What?” I asked my brother. “Does he really think we are that stupid?”

And so now, on top of everything else we got yelled at for, my dad and wicked stepmother were constantly harassing Vernon about pushing on his teeth with a stupid popsicle stick! And so, I started studying, and then I made an appointment at the dentist office across the street from school. I lied and told him I was doing a report for class. I got all the information about braces that I could, then made a set of braces and got my brother out in dad’s garage so that I could take impressions. Only I didn’t have any of that fancy goop that they use at the dentist’s office. But what I DID have was a large can of my dad’s body filler. And so, after several days of arguing and trying to convince my brother it would work, I finally got him to sit down on a gas can and let me put it in his mouth. But a slight miscalculation in the amount of hardener I used caused it to become very warm, which in turn caused my brother’s head to turn very red.

“Ooo mumfin fugga!” he said angrily.

“Hold still!” I said as he tried to spit the stuff out. “You’re ruining my impression!”

I’m not sure what he was saying but I managed to pry the hardened blob out of his mouth with one of my dad’s giant screwdrivers. He was mad at me for a long time and when my dad found out, he was angry also and threatened to whip me if I performed dentistry on anyone else. But after a year had elapsed and my brother’s jagged chompers were now perfectly straight, they both forgave me and everywhere we went Vernon would show everyone his perfect teeth and brag about how his little brother fixed them out in the garage with Bondo and bailing wire. Jan looked horrified when she realized that I was suggesting doing surgery on her nose. She didn’t appear to be the slightest bit impressed by my tale of successful dentistry and, in fact, appeared to be overtly fearful of some unforeseen catastrophic mishap that might result in a botched deformity due to my complete lack of qualifications. But when I showed her that I’d done extensive homework and laid out my step-by-step plan and assured her of a backup contingency in the event of an unforeseen problem, she finally agreed. On the day of the operation, Jan was apprehensive and afraid. She took me by the hand and searched my face for reassurance. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her just the way she is, before any operation. But all I could say was “I won’t let anything happen to you Jan.”

The operation on Jan’s nose could only be classified as a miraculous success, seeing how she survived without me having to call an ambulance or rush her to the hospital. After a few weeks, the bruising went away. We managed to hide it from Jan’s parents for several days, but eventually we had to show them what we’d done. At first they were shocked and angry. Everybody was yelling and Jan’s brother Jesse appeared to be on the verge of doing some reconstructive surgery on MY nose with his fist. But when Jan showed everyone the successful results, they were all amazed at how good her new nose looked, and their anger quickly faded. Jesse was so impressed that he asked if I could fix his massive schnoz also. But I was afraid that if something went wrong he might flip out and kick my ass and so I tried to talk him out of it. I told him that his nose was so big that I didn’t know if it was fixable. His narrow eyes and clenched jaw told me that he wasn’t totally convinced.

Everyone could see a drastic change in Jan. She was so happy. Nobody could ever call her ugly Janice Vogelsang anymore.

Not surprisingly, she received a lot of attention from the kids at school. The girls were fawning all over her, amazed at her new look. And the boys were suddenly noticing her shapely figure and the stunning beauty that now radiated from her face.

“Some boys are asking me out,” she said.

I tried to pretend like I was confident and secure in our relationship, but in my mind I was trying to figure out exactly who it was so that I could keep an eye out for them and possibly implement some kind of preemptive sabotage on them . . . the rotten bastards. Everybody knew that Jan was MY girl and I never had to worry about it before. But now it seemed like I was worrying about it all the time.

I was making a lot of money for a seventeen-year-old kid. When everyone saw my brother’s perfect teeth and heard him tell of how I fixed them out in dad’s garage, I began receiving all kinds of requests to do dental work. I was working out of an old Chevy van in the parking lot at school, doing mostly minor cavity repairs and braces for high school kids. Naturally, Jan’s brother Jesse found out and decided that he wanted me to fix a cavity that was giving him trouble. I didn’t really mind . . . it looked like an easy fix; except he wanted me to do it for free. But, worse than that, he basically let me know that he was going to punch me in the mouth and knock some of MY teeth out if I didn’t fix his damn tooth, today!

Needless to say, I was worried. Jesse was A LOT bigger than me. But, for some reason, whenever somebody threatens me like that an unexplainable stubbornness kicks in that I cannot override with intelligent reasoning or basic common sense. Inside I knew that even if I wasn’t big enough to beat somebody in a fight, I could always find a way to punish them through clandestine measures, which might involve camouflaged clothing and tippy toeing around their car tires with a knife late at night.

As I was working on Jesse’s cavity, I got an idea.

“I’ll make you a deal,” I told him. “There’s a lot of dudes trying to get a date with Jan.”

“Yeah?” he said. “So?”

 “Yeah, so here’s the deal,” I said. “You gotta tell them punks, for me, that they can’t.”

Jesse looked at me like I was crazy. I held a five-gallon bucket up to his chin so that he could spit the rinse water out of his mouth.

  “I’ll fix your nose,” I added, as I handed him a clean towel to dry his face on, knowing that he’d do anything to get his nose fixed.

  “Alright,” he said, after considering the proposition momentarily. “Who’s been asking her out?”

  I pulled open the sliding door on the side of my van and pointed across the parking lot and said, “That weasel that drives that Dodge Charger right over there.”

Jesse squinted into the distance with his hand over his brow acting like a visor from the morning sun.

“You mean Tom Anderson?” he asked incredulously.

Tom Anderson was big and handsome, and a popular football player with a reputation for being tough. But Jesse was tall and muscular and had something of a reputation for being tough himself. I was pretty sure that Jesse could take him in a fight. But just to add a little extra motivation I said, “He’s been going around talking about taking Jan’s virginity!”

Oh boy! That did it! You could see the anger instantly flash across his face. It’s a good thing Tom Anderson wasn’t in his car right then because Jesse would have gone over there and pounded him without any explanation.

“Virginity, huh?” he said, as he examined my face for evidence of guilt. “I thought you two were…ahhh…”

“No!” I said, a little embarrassed.” Far as I know she’s never done it.”

He looked off into the distance, eyes blurry in contemplation. Then he said, “I’ll kill the bastard!”

Quickly I extended my hands out in a holding gesture and said, “No Jesse, you don’t have to hurt him. Just tell him to stop offering her a ride home.”

When school let out, Tom Anderson found Jesse Vogelsang leaning on his car in the parking lot. I was observing the entire ordeal from my vantage point nearby. Tom Anderson told Jesse to get off his car, which he did, but only to grab Tom by the shirt and lift him up off the ground. I’m not exactly sure what he said but, whatever it was, it worked, and Jan never got any more invitations for a ride in Tom Anderson’s fancy Dodge Charger.

On the day of the operation, Jesse seemed to be scanning my face, searching for assurance.

“Stop worrying,” I told him. “I’m going to do the exact same thing I did to Jan’s nose . . . everything’s going to be fine.”

Jesse was understandably emotional at the thought of having a normal nose for the first time in his life, and he said, “I love you bro!”

I smiled and reflected back on how we’d gone from being adversaries over Jan to becoming fairly close friends.

“Yeah,” I said, “I love you too but, I kinda got a thing going on with your sister.”