Gorgeous (2 page)

“Sorry,” he said.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said.

Well, that was a lovely interaction.

Then I had a soda. Also nice. Ooh, what a delightful afternoon.

My cell phone buzzed with a text from Jade:

What was up w/ u 2day?

I texted back:

Just another perfect day in paradise.

Meanwhile, Roxie, trying to open up the conversation to include me, said, “Oh, you guys! You have to hear what Allison did to the Fascist today!”

“Who?”

“That’s what Allison calls what’s-her-name, the social studies teacher with the hair? You know?” Roxie held her hair out to the sides and grinned, her dimples deepening their incursions into her cheeks. The boys laughed appreciatively and never moved their eyes from Roxie’s gorgeous face.

“Tell them,” Roxie encouraged me.

Unfortunately I started back a little too far in the story, because instead of being impressed with what a badass I was, Emmett O’Leary got kind of stuck on what state was Gouverneur Morris governor of, and it turned into a comedy routine of
Oh, I thought you said he was governor/No that’s his name/What’s his name/Gouverneur Morris/And what state did you say…

Tyler cracked up, but it was more
at
than
with
. I knew Roxie was trying to throw me a line and rope me into the conversation. I knew she was not intentionally hogging the attention of the four boys practically panting for a smile from her. It was just a fact of her life.

I stood up and said I had to go. Nobody objected. I walked around Roxie’s house down to the street and toward home, answering Jade’s next message

where r u?

by texting back

hell.

Phone in hand, I passed three other houses, all well tended, all perfect-looking.
This is where I live,
I was thinking. Right here in hell. Right here, where if you are not gorgeous, you are nobody.

U OK?
Jade texted back.

I don’t even exist
.

???
was all she responded.

Sorry,
I typed with my thumbs.
Weird attack. I’m dandy.

I stuck my phone back in my pocket. It was running out of power anyway, the piece of crap. I trudged home, feeling completely nonexistent, which is a much heavier sensation than it sounds like.
I would give anything,
I muttered to myself (or at least I thought it was just to myself),
to be somebody
.

2

A
FTER SUCCESSFULLY DODGING
my nosy, annoying family by barricading myself in my room, I read for a while, cleaned out my desk, scrubbed the plunger for my costume in the morning, then found the old baby monitor Quinn had asked me about because she needed it for some project she was doing. It was on the top shelf of my closet. I dropped it on her mess of a desk while she was downstairs practicing piano.

I spent ten minutes doing my normal half-decent minimum on the night’s homework, and then tried to find something to watch on TV. Nothing. Jade texted me (
we have 2 talk). Ugh.
I held the phone in my hand for a full minute, gearing up for the onslaught, trying to think how to minimize the problem.

Instead I turned off my phone. I knew she’d be way mad and there’d be a price to pay in the morning, but I just couldn’t deal right then. What I really wanted was oblivion, so I crawled into bed and flipped through one of Phoebe’s ridiculous fashion magazines. I took half a quiz about
Does He Like You?
(he didn’t; shocking!), learned the diet secrets of an actress I’d never heard of (drink lots of water; fascinating!), and eventually bored myself into a stupor deep enough to knock myself unconscious.

I thought I had woken up a few hours later, but maybe I was still dreaming, because there on the couch in my room was the devil, his long legs crossed, his long arms crossed, and his green eyes not crossed, but rather focused on me with only the slightest expression of impatience.

Not that I believe in the devil. Obviously. I don’t believe in anything.

It was just a dream.

It must have been a dream.

He leaned back against the seat cushions and said, “So, you’d give anything for your sister Phoebe’s metabolism?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked him.

“You called this meeting,” he said.

I normally have no problem arguing, but I was a little off my game because of still trying to focus my eyes properly, so what I asked (instead of, for instance, Who are you? or What the hell are you doing in my room in the middle of the night?) was, “When?”

“Well, today you said you’d give anything to be ‘somebody.’ Two days ago, before you burned the waffles, you told your younger sister, Phoebe, that you would give anything for her metabolism.”

“She burned the waffles, not me,” I argued, kind of missing the main point, but I honestly cannot stand getting blamed for Phoebe’s screwups, which I always do. And the burned waffles were all her.

“Okay,” the devil conceded.

“And I was kidding,” I added.

“Were you?” He arched his eyebrows. He barely blinked his green eyes, looking at me.

“Yes!” I said. “I swear, I was completely kidding!”

“Alas,” he said, but made no move to go.

“Sorry to waste your time,” I added.

He didn’t budge.

I needed to go to the bathroom, but I was only wearing a thin T-shirt and boxers. Even though I was dreaming him, and I kind of knew it even in the dream, I didn’t think I should, like, expose myself.

To the devil.

Who I was dreaming.

I pulled the blankets up around me and started getting the giggles at the strangeness of the situation.

He cocked his head, interested.

“I don’t normally have such vivid dreams,” I explained.

“Ah,” said the devil.

“Were you, like, going to trade me Phoebe’s metabolism for my soul?”

He didn’t answer, just kept looking at me.

“Do people actually make deals that are so lopsided?”

“Lopsided?”

“Her metabolism isn’t even that awesome,” I pointed out.

“Okay,” he said.

“Would she, like, get fat?”

“If that’s important to you, we could negotiate it,” he said.

“It’s not!” I told him. “I was just curious! But seriously, for my soul? A slightly faster metabolism? Would anybody make such a stupid deal?”

“Why do you think it took me two days to come?” he said slowly. “There’s a wait list.”

“Oh my God,” I said.

“No,” he answered.

“Oh, no, I mean, I didn’t…”

“Kidding,” he said, with a smirk. “So what
do
you want?”

“As a trade for my soul?”

“While I’m here…”

“I don’t even think I have a soul, I should warn you. I kind of suck.”

He smirked.

“Oh! You already know that about me, right? I mean, is that, like, part of your job?”

He cocked his head slightly; since he looked more intrigued than annoyed, I went on.

“I’m nasty and jealous and very sensitive, if you believe my sisters. I’m totally selfish. And cranky, too. So I don’t know why you’d negotiate for my soul at all. I mean, if you exist, and if
it
exists, neither of which I am convinced of, by the way, you’ll definitely be getting my soul eventually anyway.”

He nodded. “Eventually. But you could have something now, if you want it. What do you want, Allison?”

“Oh, that’s easy. To be gorgeous and brilliant and maybe immortal—no, wait, I shouldn’t be so selfish, right? How about a long, happy, healthy life for me and everybody I love, world peace, and a million more wishes.”

“I’m not a genie.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right. No million more wishes?”

“No,” he said. “I’ll give you gorgeous.”

“Sell my soul to be gorgeous?”

He shrugged.

“But then I could, like, die within a day of turning gorgeous, or something.”

He smiled. “Very good. Okay, you’ll be gorgeous, and you’ll live at least a normal life span, unless you do something crazy like lie down on the train tracks or start smoking or something. I won’t kill you off early just for spite.”

“Awesome. Thanks,” I said. “But how about if I give you something else? Instead of my probably nonexistent soul.”

“Oh?” he asked. “What have you got?”

I looked around my room. “TV?”

He shook his head. “Mine’s nicer.”

“Tennis racquets?” I pointed at them, lying beside him on my couch. “You can have them both. They’re brand-new almost, top of the line.”

“I play golf,” he said.

“My cell phone?” I offered.

He didn’t budge. I wasn’t sure if he was hearing voices from, like, the underworld or something. I listened but heard nothing.

After a minute he said, “Let me see it.”

I picked my cell phone up off my night table and tossed it to him. He opened it, pressed a few buttons, turned it over and over again in his big hands. “The camera doesn’t even have a flash.”

“So what?” I said.

“Midlevel cell phone…gorgeous.” He held my phone in one hand and, I suppose, my imaginary gorgeousness in the other. Apparently my imaginary gorgeousness weighed significantly more.

“I could, like, spread rumors about how cool you are, plus the phone,” I offered.

He squinted slightly at me, which crinkled the corners of his eyes. He was actually a hottie, despite being, like forty, and also imaginary. “I’m not in the market for a new PR rep,” he said. “On the other hand, I like you, and I like the springiness of the keys on this phone. And I’m already here. So. Tell you what. Choose somebody, and that person will
think
you’re gorgeous.”

Tyler Moss immediately sprang to mind, but I altruistically countered, “What about the whole world-peace thing?”

“You don’t even get decent Internet on this,” he said, using both thumbs and making my phone beep and buzz like it had never done before.

“Fine, I don’t have to
be
gorgeous. Everybody can just
think
I’m gorgeous. Come on. It’s apparently got a ton of ring tones…”

He scrolled through my phone book. “Isn’t seeming gorgeous the same as being gorgeous?”

“No,” I said.

He smiled to himself. “Damn close, though. Fine, choose three people who will forever think you are gorgeous.”

“Ten,” I countered. “The keys are so springy.”

“Five.”

“Eight. I already lost a cell phone once this year,” I explained. “If I have to go to my mother and say I lost this one too, she’ll give me hell.”

He grinned, looking up from the phone.

“No offense.”

“On the contrary; I’m flattered.” He held the phone toward me in his open palm. It looked tiny, lying there. “But you won’t have to tell your mother anything. You’ll have the phone. I’ll just
possess
it.”

“Isn’t
having
the same as
possessing
?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Oh, the other kind of…Right. So I’d keep the phone?”

“Yes,” he agreed, his arm still outstretched with the phone resting in his big hand. “And I’ll meet you in the middle. Seven. Seven people will think you are absolutely gorgeous.”

I got a little distracted, is my only defense. Seven is obviously closer to eight than to five.
I won
is what I was thinking when I said, “Deal.”

He said, “Deal,” and disappeared, or else I just stopped dreaming about him. Well, whatever. I woke up the next morning having forgotten about it completely.

Until my cell phone started freaking out.

3

“L
EMON
!”

My eyes flashed open as Dad knocked on my door and added, “Rise and shine!”

I saw my clock and started cursing.

It was too late for a shower, which I desperately needed. It was also too late to figure out a better costume for my presentation or, obviously, a change of topic and thesis for my end-of-year twenty-percent-of-my-grade social studies project. Not that I was ever considering dumping Gouverneur Morris, my one-legged slutty brilliant hideous hero, but still. As if it’s not bad enough to have my paper (another twenty percent of my grade) dissed by the teacher in front of the class yesterday—well, and then shredded by me—I now had to present it, in all its B–glory, to my whole class.

In costume.

As the one-legged hideous slutty genius himself.

A normal person (Phoebe) would have done somebody easy. Actually, Phoebe would probably do a movie star so she could go in looking even more beautiful than usual. Quinn did Galileo last year. She just wore her hair in a bun and held a pendulum. She had hers totally memorized, of course, having practiced it in front of Mom and Dad a thousand times.

Not only was Jade’s Eleanor Roosevelt costume perfect, she even had a great bonus prepared. I had helped her make little business cards to hand out to everybody after her project with a quote:
“Do one thing each day that scares you.” E. Roosevelt.
Did I have handouts? No. I had a plunger.

“Why didn’t you wake me earlier?” I yelled to anybody who was listening. Or wasn’t.

I whipped open my closet to find my loose brown cords and the white blouse I had “borrowed” from Quinn, who sometimes does dress, luckily, like an eighteenth-century guy, all frills and velvet. Usually just for piano concerts, but I am convinced she actually enjoys it.

“Who took the plunger?” I screamed, when I realized it wasn’t beside my couch where I’d left it. “I need the plunger!”

Dad wandered by with some crack about stuffing up the toilets. He thinks he’s such a guy, so laid-back and cool.

“It’s for my costume, dude! I have a project today?” If it had been Quinn’s project, the whole family would’ve been expected to be gluing cardboard buckles onto wingtips, but since it was my project, it was obviously a joke.

“Where the f—”

Before I could finish, our housekeeper, Gosia, was at my door with the plunger. I grabbed it from her. “I left it here on purpose,” I told her.

Gosia raised one perfectly tweezed eyebrow and tiptoed silently away toward the back steps, down to deal with lunches. She totally favors Phoebe. Maybe it’s a straight-shiny-hair/perfect-skin/skinny-girl-bonding thing. Or that Phoebe doesn’t scream at her. Not sure which.

I’d had an idea about doing a ponytail-flip thing to make myself look more like Gouverneur Morris, but my hair, like the rest of my life, was refusing to cooperate. I had the scissors out from under the sink and in my hand before I talked myself down off that crazy ledge, reminding myself of past horror shows that were the result of self-induced haircuts. I tucked the huge mass of it all into the cap I had taken from Dad’s closet. It was completely anachronistic, but would have to do because Dad didn’t actually own any tricornered hats. Or if he did, they were all in the kindergarten classroom where he is king and jester all rolled into one.

I made my bed, straightened my room in three seconds flat, and flew down the back stairs to hit the kitchen just as Quinn was threatening to leave without me. Gosia thrust a disgusting nutrition bar into my bag as we left.

“Are you seriously getting on the bus with a plunger?” Quinn asked.

“You are so mean,” I said. “It’s my peg leg.” I tried to demonstrate but almost fell over, and had to jog to catch up to her. “The bus isn’t even there yet.”

“And where’s your hair?” she asked.

“Am I repulsive?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Awesome,” I said. “Thanks. After I spend the night finding your crap for you.”

That got her attention. “You found the baby monitor?”

“I left it on your desk!”

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t see it.”

“Maybe if you ever filed a paper, you’d—”

“Shut up, Allison,” she said.

“What kind of project are you doing with a baby monitor, anyway?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t see what you could make for chemistry with a baby mon—”

“It’s not for science, okay? Jeez, Al, you almost touched me with the plunger.”

“Sorry!” I held the plunger down. We were steps from the bus stop and, of course, no bus in sight. She always worries we’ll miss it, so we’re always there way early. “So then, why did you need the baby monitor? To spy on somebody?”

“Yes,” she said.

I stopped arguing, stopped swinging the plunger, stopped everything. “I was kidding,” I said. “Are you?”

“No,” she said.

Quinn is the most straight, moral person who ever walked God’s green earth. She doesn’t curse or cheat; she doesn’t even whine or complain or eat ice cream right from the container. She works hard and plays by the rules. She flosses, for goodness’ sake. She would never spy on anyone. “Who are you spying on?”

“You can’t say anything.”

“You know me,” I said. “I would never tell; you know that.”

“True. Okay. Mom and Dad,” she said.

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure if I should be relieved or disappointed it wasn’t me. “Why are you—”

“What was that?” Quinn asked. “Did you just turn your phone off?”

“No,” I said. “You paranoid spy. That was yours.” But when I grabbed my phone out of my pocket to check, it was off. “Weird,” I said, and tried to turn it back on. Nothing.

“Maybe it’s dead.”

“I charged it last night,” I started to protest, but then it turned back on by itself, in my hand.

“You just have to hold down the thing for three seconds,” Quinn instructed me in her slow-talking way that makes it sound like everybody is stupid except her.

“I know,” I protested. “Why are you spying on them?”

She rolled her eyes but leaned close, like the trees might overhear. “I heard them arguing last night, and then I heard Mom tell Dad that…Allison!”

My phone turned off again, making its loud sign-off music.

“Will you quit it?” Quinn demanded impatiently.

“I didn’t do anything!” I told her. “Oh! I know what happened! I had the weirdest dream last night. I sold my—”

“Allison,” Quinn growled. “I honestly don’t give a crap about your dream. Do you want to know what I think is happening with Mom or not?” The bus was finally screeching and jolting its way down the hill toward us.

“Yes,” I said quickly, slipping my phone back into my pocket. “Of course. Chill, would you?” She is always telling me to chill. She is the most chill person in the world. Normally. It was odd—and, I have to say, sort of great—to be the one telling her to chill for once.

Quinn took a breath and leaned close. “Last night I heard her arguing with Daddy about—”

She interrupted herself to glare at me. My phone was beeping inside my pocket.

“I’m not doing anything!” I told her. I yanked the phone out again and showed her what was happening on the little screen: It was scrolling down a list of options I didn’t even know existed on my phone, choices of modes like Outdoor and Pager. I tried to get it to stop, but it wouldn’t.

“It’s dying,” Quinn diagnosed.

“No,” I said. “I sold it to the devil.”

“Forget it.”

“Fine, don’t believe me,” I said. “You are so nasty. Do I look different today?”

Quinn shook her head and exhaled, without really looking at me.

“Seriously,” I said. “Do I?”

She looked. “You’re wearing a hat,” she said. “And holding a plunger.”

As I was hitting her with the plunger, the bus squealed to a stop in front of us and farted. While we waited for the doors to wheeze open, I tried to catch a glimpse of myself in the reflection from the windows. I couldn’t really see anything conclusive. Not that I expected to. But my phone was squawking in my clutch again, so I was kind of cracking myself up by thinking,
Maybe it really happened
.

Quinn got on ahead of me and made her way up the aisle to where the tenth graders were sitting. I plunked down in my usual seat, three back from the driver, and stared out the window. Jade and Serena were waiting at the next stop. I could see them as we came over the hill.

The bus screeched and jolted still. I looked up. Jade looked at me and then away. Serena did the same. Instead of sitting down with me, Jade took the seat in front of me, and Serena giddily bopped down beside her.

So that’s how it was going to play out. I should have known there’d be the silent treatment. Maybe I had known. You don’t suddenly throw your report at a teacher and cut a class with the wild new girl and, worst of all, turn off your phone and then just go back to normal. Not with Jade.

I was on my way to first period, alone, when Roxie bounded up and grabbed me, talking before I could even listen, telling me a long, convoluted story about how she missed the bus as always because, this time, she’d been tearing through everything in her parents’ closets coming up with a costume since 6 a.m. She was laughing straight through the telling, so I missed some of what she said, but I had to smile anyway, she was enjoying herself so thoroughly. We were almost at the door of social studies when she interrupted herself with a gasp.

“Why do you look like that?” she asked me.

“I’m Gouverneur Morris. Didn’t the Fascist say you couldn’t be a fictional character?”

“Who’s changed the world more than Harry Potter?” Roxie demanded, shoving her wire-rimmed glasses, octagonal instead of round, up her nose. “Man, I can’t see in these at all.” She whipped them off and stared at me. “No, seriously, Allison. You look different.”

“Hat,” I said. “Plunger.”

“Hot,” she argued.

“Really?” I asked. “Um, can I hide behind you? I have to lose half a leg.”

“Sure.” The bell rang. Roxie spread her arms to turn her mom’s poncho from Harry’s robes into a makeshift changing room. I had to scrunch low and hide inside Quinn’s blouse while I pulled down my pants to wiggle my right leg out, bend it, and tuck my foot next to my butt. Then, while barely managing to zip my squishy pants, I stood up and stuck in the plunger, plunger-side up, all the while praying nobody had used the thing since I’d scrubbed it the night before. I was in a soaking sweat.

The Fascist picked on me to present first, probably as revenge for having been confettied, so I was in a total sweat as I limped up to the front of the classroom.

Maybe that was a good thing, though, because I forgot about the fact that my best friend was totally glaring at me and that I hadn’t gotten around to memorizing my paper. I just acted pissed off and superior and told the first-period ninth-grade social studies class about my (well, Gouverneur Morris’s) theory that only the aristocracy could be trusted to run the country, but that, at the same time, yes, I was the one who wrote the preamble to the Constitution, starting with “We the People” rather than, as some of the twits in the Constitutional Convention had wanted, “We, the Several States of the Union” or some uninspired crap like that. And I further denied categorically that all of my mistresses were murderers, insisting that not even a majority of them ever killed anybody of note.

It was fun.

After I finished, nobody said anything. I just stood there and suddenly felt off balance, awkward, humiliated, and sweaty again. “Whatever,” I said. “Anyway, that’s it.”

Then Roxie started clapping, and a few other people joined in. Including the Fascist herself. Not Jade, though. No way.

“Wow,” the Fascist said. “Allison, that was, well, remarkable. That is, I felt I was listening not to a ninth grader reciting a report, but to this historical figure as a real person.” She squinted at me.

I could tell she was thinking maybe Quinn had written it for me or performed it for me or something. Maybe she was trying to figure out if Quinn had actually come to the class dressed as me dressed as Gouverneur Morris. “What?” I said, yanking the plunger out of my pants leg and knocking myself off balance into her desk.

“Excellent,” she said, and turned to the class. “That will be a hard act to follow. Who’s feeling daring?” she asked them.

I couldn’t get my leg free, is why I had to ask to go out into the hall for a second. It wasn’t because I needed to recover from the shock of getting a compliment from the Fascist.

At least, not only that.

I hopped out into the hall and leaned against the wall to catch my breath. That’s when Tyler Moss sauntered by.

“Hey,” he said as he passed.

“Hi,” I said back. He couldn’t wreck this day for me. I had just totally rocked in social studies. What does it matter that the boy you have had a crush on for months doesn’t know you exist, when you have just stood with your knee in a plunger for ten minutes in front of the class and…Hmm.

I could feel my buzz being killed.

He looked at me, then stopped and looked again, and said, “I know you.” He squinted slightly, like he was trying to decode me.

“Allison Avery. I was at Roxie Green’s with you yesterday,” I said, and managed not to add,
Also you hit me with your glove last February eleventh.

He tilted his head slightly, evaluating the bit of information I’d said aloud. Clearly, he was unconvinced. “You look different.”

“I wasn’t holding a plunger,” I said, swinging it. “And I had both legs.”

He looked down and, seeing only one foot on the linoleum, opened his deep blue eyes wide with alarm.

“It’s a costume,” I quickly explained. “Gouverneur Morris?”

A smile broke slowly across his face, a wise-guy smile, crooked and naughty. “Senator from New York?”

“No, governor,” I corrected. “No! Representative!”

He laughed. “Whatever you say.”

If I’d had both feet on the floor at that point I still might’ve wobbled, but as it was, with one foot falling asleep up near my butt, I lurched left, overcorrected, tipped right, and only managed to not fall flat on my face in front of Tyler Moss by whipping around into a drunken-looking pirouette and landing on my back.