Gorgeous (3 page)

“Interpretive dance of Mayor Morris?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Very symbolic.”

“Definitely,” he said, and smiled that smile again. “See, now I understand the whole Constitution.”

I closed my eyes, though truly, there was little chance I would fall again, since I was still on the floor trapped like a wannabe Houdini inside my own brown corduroys. I tried to look casual by propping myself up on my elbows. “Don’t you have a class first period?”

He shrugged and said, “Yeah, plumbing. But I can’t find my plunger. Have you seen it?”

And then he walked away.

4

I
MANAGED TO KEEP MY
little flirt-fest to myself, luckily, because on our way out of school at the end of the day, with my Eleanor Roosevelt quote card tucked into my pocket beside my cell phone, Roxie and I rounded the corner near the gym and practically smacked right into Tyler Moss, who was leaning with his hand on the brick wall, and between him and the wall was Jade, gazing up at him and, I am not even kidding, batting her long eyelashes.

“Get a room!” Roxie called to them as we strode out the door. If they had bothered to look away from each other, they would’ve seen us looking totally cool and self-possessed, I am sure, despite the fact that I was crumbling inside and carrying a plunger on the outside.

“He is such a slut,” Roxie said, laughing. Then she ranted as we walked out to the bus about the Fascist and how now she had to come up with a J. K. Rowling costume for tomorrow. I just agreed. The Fascist had been telling Roxie for weeks she couldn’t do Harry. I slipped into the window seat with Roxie beside me and ignored Jade, who looked especially pretty, all flushed, when she got on the bus after us.

Roxie asked loudly if I wanted to hang out at her pool again. I didn’t think I could handle another afternoon of self-loathing in front of Tyler Moss, especially after watching him and Jade look so cozy, so I made up an excuse about helping Quinn with her science project to get out of going back there.

I had no idea I was sort of telling the truth.

When we got home, Gosia told us that we should stay upstairs because Mom and Dad were on their way home to have a meeting with somebody and they’d need privacy in the study. Quinn pulled me upstairs and whispered to me, in her room, “You have to get this part down there.”

She thrust the baby’s-room part of the baby monitor at me.

“Me?” I asked.

“You’re sneakier than I am,” she explained.

I couldn’t argue with that. I checked the batteries—dead. Quinn yanked open an assortment of flashlights and remotes around her mess of a room until she found functional batteries that fit the monitor and the receiver. We tested it twice.

“Go!” Quinn whispered urgently.

Her face was pale, with weird little blotches of red beside her nose and on her neck.
So much for Miss Porcelain,
I nastily thought on my way down the front staircase in my socks.

I was halfway through the silent living room when I heard a car pull up. I dashed toward the study and, sensing something nearby, straightened my back against the bookcases. Two seconds later, Gosia peeked in, plucked a microscopic piece of lint off the rug, and disappeared. My heart was thumping hard as I scouted around for a place to stash the monitor.

The desk was too obvious. The bookcase was probably too far to pick up anything.

A car door slammed. Then another.

My phone buzzed. Text from Jade:

Hey. You don’t still like Ty, do u? R U mad @ me?

I cursed under my breath.

No,
I texted back quickly, and kept searching for a hiding spot. On the library ladder? No way, much too conspicuous. In the trash can? I stuck it in there. Nobody would notice it. But would we hear anything? I yanked the trash can out so it sat just behind, but between, two of the chairs.

The door next to the kitchen opened. “Right through here,” I heard Mom say.

I cursed again, and slapped my hand over my mouth. Then, realizing maybe Quinn would be listening, I said, whispering right into the baby monitor, “I think I’m trapped. Maybe I should just hide behind the desk here.”

I heard something drop upstairs and then Quinn’s voice yelling, “Allison!”

I had to stop myself from laughing out loud.
Way to play it cool, Quinn
. I heard Mom offering a drink to somebody as her heels clicked across the kitchen. I had maybe three seconds.

As I dashed from the study, I realized I’d have to cross paths with Mom and whoever. I froze for half a second. Ack!

I turned and squeezed myself behind the column that held a sculpture the decorator had chosen of a hideous fat baby. The thing shimmied. If it crashed, Mom and whoever would obviously see me, cowering behind the column and among the broken pieces of overpriced clay.
Please don’t fall,
I prayed, despite my atheism. The image of the devil I had dreamed flashed in my mind, and I thought,
Trade you one person thinking I’m gorgeous if you keep me invisible this once.

The thing stopped wobbling. Probably just because it had found its equilibrium.

I’m not saying the devil interceded.

Though I did silently say a quick
Thank you
as my mother and a very tall man with a completely spherical belly preceding him walked right past me and the hideous fat baby without noticing either one of us, and turned to go into the study.

I didn’t budge until after Dad followed them in, with an uncharacteristically stressed expression on his face. He closed the door behind him, and only then did I sprint silently up the front steps, contemplating my until-then-undiscovered and only gift: I could be a totally great cat burglar!

“You want to give me a heart attack?” Quinn complained.

I kissed her cheek. She hates when I do that.

What we heard was mostly static. We tried my room, which was no better. Phoebe, who wasn’t around because she had track after school, got slightly better reception in her room, but the upstairs den was even better, and, following the signal, we found that the best reception was actually in one of the guest rooms behind the back stairs. We crouched over the night table, trying to hear what they were saying.

After Fat Man said “…legal ramifications…,” Quinn said, “This is what I was afraid of.”

“What?”

“It’s Mom’s lawyer,” Quinn whispered. “Those guys at work totally screwed her.”

I shook my head, unsure what Quinn was talking about, but not wanting her to know that.

Fat Man asked something about a paper trail, and Mom said she would get the documents from her files. Quinn sank to the floor.

“I can’t believe they screwed her like this,” I said, trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about.

“I know it,” Quinn agreed. “It’s a team! They make the decisions on what to invest in together. They’re going to make her seem like a total cowboy. She could get fired.”

“Fired?”
No way,
I thought. Mom is a very successful hedge fund manager. She has been on the cover of
Working Woman
magazine. She’s been in the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Columbia Business School Magazine
. She makes a ton of money. She’s one of the Top Women of Wall Street.
Fired?

“Probably not. Hopefully not. She won’t.” Quinn took a steadying breath and whispered, “If she gets fired, it’s all over.”

We heard the study door close and Mom’s controlled voice saying, “Here’s the time line,” just as the back door opened and Phoebe came in yelling, “What’s going on?”

“Get her,” Quinn ordered.

I was halfway down the stairs before the thought occurred to me,
Why do I always have to do everything Quinn decides?
But instead of dealing with that, I grabbed Phoebe and dragged her noisy self up.

She is the loudest thing. She kept asking questions until I almost had to punch her in her button nose. We had trouble hearing much more, especially with Phoebe there, and then they were walking back through the kitchen, so we scooted out of the guest room and across the upstairs den to my room and shut the door so we could talk about what was happening.

Phoebe was all
You guys have to tell me
, like Quinn and I had all kinds of secret knowledge between us. I wasn’t about to blow it by badgering Quinn, too, so I was just acting like I was holding back my incredibly vast knowledge of what the hell was going on instead of lacking it. In reality, I was just as anxious as Phoebe to hear Quinn’s theory.

We were all sitting on my bed about to hear it when Mom and Dad opened my door and announced they were going for a ride and that our tennis instructor wasn’t showing up again. Whatever.

Right after they left, Phoebe’s boy-toy called on her cell phone, and she switched gears seamlessly from family-crisis mode to flirty-girl mode. Her voice got all feathery and sweet and, just like Jade, she was literally batting her eyelashes. Despite being on the freaking
phone
with the boy.
He can’t see you, dim bulb!
Ugh. I almost puked all over my bed, which she and Quinn had demolished anyway with their squirming around on it.

Then on the way downstairs, Phoebe had to twist the knife by asking how it went with Tyler Moss. I explained to her as calmly as I could that Tyler Moss was an obnoxious jock whose name I never wanted to hear again. During the explanation, I may have left a permanent bruise in her flawless upper arm with my vise grip on it.

As the devil had said, alas.

And then things got really fun when at dinner Mom announced that she had been fired.

So it
was
all over, apparently.

Though exactly what was all over I had no idea, and wasn’t about to ask, with Quinn, Phoebe, and Dad all silently eating their dinners. I pushed mine around and stood up as soon as Quinn did and followed her up the stairs.

“Fired,” I whispered.

She closed her eyes slowly and opened them even slower.

“Like some shoplifting checkout bagger at the Food Emporium,” I whispered. “Not promoted, or decided to take a job at another firm, like a normal parent. Fired.”

Quinn, paler than ever, turned to me at the top of the stairs and said, “You’re an idiot.” Then she went to her room and closed her door softly.

Phoebe was coming up the stairs behind me, so I went into my room and closed the door, too. I taped the Eleanor Roosevelt card from Jade up on my bathroom mirror and reread it:
Do one thing every day that scares you.
I thought,
Just one thing? Is that a dare, or a limit?

I surfed the Net for a while, then read, then just listened. Nothing going on. Was everybody really going to sleep at ten? Peeking out my door, all I saw was everybody else’s closed doors, so I snuck back down the stairs to retrieve the baby monitor.
Not so stupid for an idiot, huh,
I was thinking. A big cardboard box blocked the study door. It was full of Mom’s stuff: the portrait of the five of us in the silver frame, her Orrefors vase. So they’d made her clean off her desk and clear out, box of junk in hand, right in front of everybody. How humiliating.

I was just seeing what else was there when Mom suddenly sprang up behind me and screamed that I’d better get my hands off her belongings and get myself up to bed; the last thing she needed right then was trouble from me.

Great. Well, that killed my sympathy for her pretty fast.

I said some nasty stuff about her not needing to take out her work stress on me, and as much as she liked to blame me for everything, I was not the one who got her fired. She yelled back, but I wasn’t listening, so I don’t know which details she was highlighting about my horrible personality. A random track from
The Greatest Hits of Allison Sucks.

I slammed my door, muttering curses under my breath. Washing up, I dimmed my bathroom light so I wouldn’t have to see my hideous face.

5

F
RIDAY
, J
ADE SAT DOWN
next to me on the bus in the morning. Serena sat glumly across the aisle. “You want to come over before we go to the movies tonight?” Jade asked.

So she had forgiven me, and our movie plans were on again. I’d been thinking I’d be spending the night trolling the Internet at home, alone.

“Sure,” I said.

“What should we wear?” Serena asked, leaning toward us.

Jade rolled her eyes subtly, just to me, and then said, “Just henley shirts and Hard Tails, I think. Right?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Whatever. I’ll probably wear a hoodie.”

“So stylin’,” Jade teased me. She pulled a pale pink lip gloss out of her bag and handed it to me. “I got an extra one for you at Sephora. My mom dragged me to the mall with her yesterday, so this was my reward. Try it.”

I smoothed some across my lips, reluctantly.

Jade looked at me critically. “Nice,” she said. “You definitely need gloss, Allison, or your lips disappear. And if you don’t look good, I don’t look good.”

I tried to return her smile without losing my lips.

“So you don’t like Ty anymore?” Jade whispered.

I shrugged.

“If you still do, he’s dead to me.”

“Thanks,” I whispered back. “But, I mean, he’s free to…Anyway, he’s probably out of my…whatever. So go for it, if you want.”

“He’s probably way out of my league, too.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, sinking lower. “Thanks for asking, though.”

“Friends first,” Jade said. “Absolutely. But if you aren’t putting a hold on him…”

“He’s not a library book.”

“Okay, Miss Snippy.” She smiled at me, her smile that let me know I was being a bit obnoxious, but that she forgave me, all at once.

“Sorry,” I muttered.

“Forget it,” Jade said, bumping me with her shoulder. “And may the best girl, you know…not make a fool of herself over him.”

“Right,” I agreed.

She swiveled around in her seat toward Serena, whose sulk instantly brightened. “Doesn’t Allison’s hair look cute today, Serena?”

“Yes! I was just going to say—”

Jade cut her off, turning back to me. “Not frizzy at all, in the front. Do you want me to do a loose braid in the back, Allison?”

“Sure,” I said. I turned away and closed my eyes while her gentle fingers tugged at my hair and then tied one of her hair bands around the bottom.

She and Serena flanked me all day long, and Roxie hardly spoke to me. That night when I got dropped off at Jade’s, Serena was already there. We hung around for a while, and then Jade’s dad drove us over to the mall. We wandered around until the movie started, then sank into our seats twenty minutes early, because Jade likes to get tenth row center seats and settle in without rushing. We slumped down, knees against the seats in front of us, and watched the ads and then the previews and then the movie. Afterwards, Jade’s dad picked us up and drove us all home. I got dropped off first.

“Hi,” Mom said when I walked in the door. She was sitting at the kitchen counter, bent over her laptop as usual. “Have fun?”

“A blast,” I said, and clomped up to bed.

Another large weekend in the fabulous life of a glamour girl.

But then Saturday morning, Roxie called me. I picked up my phone from a sound sleep and it took me a minute to figure out that it wasn’t Jade I was talking to. What gave it away was when she asked, “Is there anything at all to do in this town?”

“Nothing at all,” I said, and sat up in my bed.

“Want to come over and watch movies all night at my house, then? Or we could play Guitar Hero, or stare at the walls until our eyes fall out?”

“Sounds awesome,” I said. I took a shower, attempted to do something with my hair, gave up, and packed my bag. When I went downstairs, nobody was around, so I left a note saying where I’d be. I considered how to sign it—
Love? Love ya? Love you all?
I just wrote
Allison
and left.

The sky, finally gloomifying after weeks of gaudy blue, pressed down on everything. No birds were singing in the trees; nobody was out walking a dog or even driving too fast down our perfect street.

Hallelujah.

My phone buzzed. Jade.

Serena and I are gonna play tennis at the town courts. Want to come?

I so didn’t, even though I knew Ty and those guys often hung out there, shooting hoops next to the tennis courts. I knew Jade was being generous, not wanting to sneak around and get an advantage without giving me a fair shot at equal time.
If I want any chance with Ty,
I told myself,
I should ditch Roxie and go
. The thought made me feel incredibly sleepy. I stood there holding my phone in the middle of the road.

Before I could figure out what do, Jade texted again:
What r u doing?

I considered for a moment what to say, and then decided on something kind of bold: I told her the truth.

Going over to Roxie Green’s.

In two seconds, she’d texted back

????

She’s great,
I answered, walking fast toward Roxie’s.
We should be nice.
Jade was all about being nice, good manners, the importance of acting appropriate, so there was nothing she could say to that. I hit Send and skipped up Roxie’s steps.

Absolutely. Just be careful,
Jade sent back.
She’s not like us. I don’t trust her & I don’t want u 2 b hurt.

Thanks,
I texted her.
Have fun.

I slipped my phone into my pocket and rang Roxie’s doorbell. She flung it open and said, “Great! You’re here!” and pulled me in. “Do you like cookie dough?”

“Ice cream?”

“No,” she said. “Just dough. I made some.”

“Excellent,” I said. We sank into the deepest couch I’d ever seen, surrounded by dozens of pillows, eating raw cookie dough and watching stupid stuff on TV for the rest of the afternoon. I left my phone in my bag in Roxie’s front hall and didn’t give it another thought. It was awesome.

At night we changed into pajamas and went to her rec house next door with flashlights. We spent about an hour jumping on her trampoline until we were sweaty and exhausted, and then we just lay there making ourselves seasick on it. Then we ran back to her regular house through the rain. We stayed up in her room until it was starting to get light out, listening to music and laughing, like when I asked her if my lips disappear when I smile. That completely cracked her up, and then me, too.

“I like the sound the rain makes against windows,” she said as we were settling down to sleep under puffy comforters.

“I’m just glad the weather has finally caught up with my personality,” I said.

We fell asleep giggling and didn’t wake up until noon.

Over bowls of cereal on that dreary Sunday afternoon, Roxie’s mother, Jenny, brought up the idea that changed everything.

“There’s an open call tomorrow,” she said from behind a newspaper called
Backstage.

“Modeling?” Roxie asked.

“Yes,” Jenny answered. “Hey, Allison, you know
zip
?”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling myself blush. “Approximately.” What had I done that was so stupid?

Roxie, laughing, went and found a copy of a magazine called
zip
in a basket near their back door. I recognized it as the same one I had taken from Phoebe’s room the other night, but I just shrugged. I hate those magazines—all those skinny, perfect girls selling junk.

Jenny shoved over the ten boxes of cereal she had taken out for us to choose among and laid down the paper. Her smile and dimples were as bright and cute as Roxie’s, though her voice was deeper and more ragged.

She pushed her long, wavy hair back from her forehead with her thumb and pinky and read the ad out loud to us:

“‘
Zip
magazine, looking for edgy but clean-cut non-pros for feature on the new teen. All types, open call. Monday, May nineteenth, ten a.m. to one p.m.’

“Then the address and all that. What do you say?” Jenny looked at us, full of gung-ho enthusiasm. “You two are definitely edgy but clean-cut!”

“We are?” Roxie asked dubiously.

“Compared to how I was at your age, hell, yeah,” Jenny said, and laughed. She propped her knees up on the table and shook her head. “At least clean-cut. And edgy is easy: all in the clothes.”

“Modeling?” I said. “Not me, obviously.”

“But you’re exactly the type,” Jenny said. She leaned forward to get a closer look.

I ducked my head and said, “I’m not.”

“Oh, come on, Allison,” Roxie begged. “You’re my right-handed man. Let’s just go. Gotta be better than school, right?”

“Well, if it’s okay with your mom,” Jenny offered, getting up to put away the cereal boxes, “I can drive you girls to the train tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll ask,” I lied.

Roxie and I went back up to her room, and over the course of the day, I gave in little by little. I didn’t put up that much of a fight, if I’m honest. I gave in when she said I could just go and hang out with her. I didn’t have to get my picture taken at all if I didn’t want to, and anyway, wouldn’t it be better than being at school?

Honestly, there was no possible argument against that.

But I knew there was no way my parents would ever let me cut school to go with Roxie Green to have her picture taken. No matter how much my parents say it’s important to stand by your friends, they don’t completely mean it. Like, Mom and Jade’s mom only smile tightly when they see each other now. They used to sit on a park bench and totally gossip all summer when we were little. So I knew I’d never win that argument on the merits. Anyway, they had been saying for my whole life that I should be less argumentative.

That’s why I decided not to have the argument.

Also, they were having enough arguments without me. Since I hadn’t gotten the baby monitor out of the study, I listened in when they were whispering at each other Sunday night. I couldn’t hear the whole thing, but it was definitely about money. Mom was saying, “I’ve got it under control, Jed,” and “We really don’t need the entire neighborhood buzzing about our business”; he kept murmuring to her, too, lots that I couldn’t hear, but what I did hear him say was, “I just think it’s inappropriate to be spending that kind of money right now on a party for an eighth-grade graduation. It’s obscene! And we can’t, Claire. We can’t.”

“Don’t say we can’t,” she snarled. “I can certainly—”

“She’s canceling,” he said. “It’s done.”

Then they were back to whispering, but that was enough. Obviously they were making Phoebe cancel her graduation party, poor thing. I wondered how Phoebe would deal.

Knowing her, she would just somehow turn it to her advantage and become even more popular.

Roxie texted me as I was drifting off to sleep that night that she had told her mother I had to drop off something first period and then they could pick me up at the corner down from school to go to the train. I texted back
OK,
then placed my phone beside the baby monitor on my nightstand and stared at both things without blinking until my eyes burned.

I went to sleep to the lullaby of my parents’ whispered arguments, and woke up before dawn, dreading the day.