Read Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway for Free Online Page B

word. Tomorrow these idiots were going to see a real freak, all right!
     
    Marie put down the blue coloring. She noticed that some of it had got on her pants. “Shit, Cherie, look at this! Goddamn it!”
     
    “Oh, chill out.” I laughed. “And tell me how I look!”
     
    Marie shook her head. “You look awful. Really, really awful.”
     
    “Good!”
     
    She held up the mirror so I could get a good look at the back of my head. “You did a great job,” I said, admiring her work. “You could do this for a living . . .”
     
    With my hair done, I went back into the bedroom and started picking out my outfit for tomorrow. The bedroom was divided neatly into Marie’s side and my side. You could tell which was which within seconds of walking in. Her wall was nice and neat, with a few black-light posters on the wall that were so “in” back then. On my wall . . . well, there was no wall; there was nothing but an endless collage of magazine cuttings and newspaper clippings on David Bowie. The collection ran floor to ceiling and it was beautiful, my pride and joy. I’d memorized every single line of every article. I’d memorized every angle of his devastatingly beautiful face.
     
    I settled on the most mismatched outfit I could find. A pair of old shredded jeans and my Diamond Dogs Tour T-shirt, topped off with a jacket that totally clashed with it. On the floor was my newest obsession: a pair of red platform tennis shoes. These babies had more rubber than the Goodyear Blimp, and made me a good four inches taller. They cost forty dollars. Or at least they would have cost forty dollars if I hadn’t stolen them. It was a piece of cake: I told the girl I wanted to try them on, and then sent her into the back room to get me something in a different size. By the time she had returned, I was halfway around the block, with the shoes stuffed under my jacket.
     
    Marie was standing in the doorway, watching me get dressed. “The teachers are gonna have a field day with you,” she said, shaking her head.
     
    I shrugged. “They live with it,” I told her. I stopped and looked at myself in the mirror. The image was good . . . but there was still something missing. I went to my dresser and grabbed some fluorescent makeup pencils. I walked over to Marie and dumped them in her hand.
     
    “Okay, last favor. Tomorrow morning, just before we leave for school, I want you to draw a big red-and-blue lightning bolt across my face. Just like the cover of Aladdin Sane. You’ll do that for me, right?”
     
    “Come on, Cherie. You’re taking this too far . . . !”
     
    “Will you do it or not?”
     
    Marie sighed, but she didn’t say no.
     
    Yeah, I wanted to make a point, but it ran far deeper than that. Seeing the abuse that poor seventh grader endured had sparked a recent memory that had haunted me every day since. A few months before, I had come face to face with the most notorious bully in the school. Her name was Big Red and she was the meanest kind of bully, plain and simple. She had bright, wavy red hair: that’s why they called her Big Red. I got the feeling that she liked it . . . that having a nickname like that made her feel big and important. Still, nobody dared call her “Big Red” to her face unless you were one of her goons or followers. Our first encounter was during my freshman year. One day after Phys. Ed. she and two of her goonies came up to me in the locker room. I was in the middle of changing, and all I was wearing was my shorts. I didn’t see her at first. Though I could sense something was off, like you would an impending storm, a gut feeling of a disaster looming in the distance. My eyes slowly and instinctively rose from my locker and there was Big Red, the hulking great she-bitch who had been terrifying the smaller kids all semester.
     
    She closed my locker. “I heard you ain’t afraid of me,” Big Red said, in a voice dripping with threat. Her two crooked cronies’ laughed in time,