Gorgeous (4 page)

6

I
GUESS
I
WAS KIND OF
a wreck in the morning waiting for the bus, because Quinn asked what was wrong with me in a way that made me think she somehow knew what I was planning to do. I swore her to secrecy and told her.

“You’re cutting school?”

“Just this once,” I explained.

“Why? Perversity?”

“Maybe,” I said. “If I knew what that word meant, I would tell you if that’s the reason.”

Quinn rolled her eyes. “It’s like, being bad just for the sake of being bad.”

“Oh,” I said. “No. Not perversity. Being bad just for the sake of being a good friend. Per
friend
ity.”

She shook her head, disappointed. “Since when are you even friends with Roxie Green? Who cuts school to wander around the city and get her picture taken by God knows who? I don’t think I like this girl.”

“Well, you don’t have to,” I said.

“Think, Allison. You’re taking a train and then a subway to God knows where without permission so some stranger can take pictures of you?”

“Roxie knows where, too,” I insisted. “She’s from there. Don’t worry.”

Quinn opened her light blue eyes very wide. “Are you an idiot or suicidal?”

“Neither,” I said. “And I’m not getting MY picture taken, I told you. I’m just going with Roxie. I’ll be back at school before the end of the day, so nobody will—You know what? Forget it. I shouldn’t have told you—”

“You’re an idiot,” she interrupted me. “Just what Mom and Dad need right now is trouble from you again.”

“Don’t tell them,” I warned her. “You promised.”

“I won’t! I have no intention of hurting them. But can’t you just—Fine, whatever. Have fun.” She climbed up onto the bus ahead of me.

“Thanks,” I said to her back, just as sarcastically.

I sat with my knee bopping uncontrollably through first period, where I got a slip of paper at the end of the class with the Fascist’s crinkled purple writing on it:

Excellent presentation. Thought-provoking. A–.

I crumpled it in my hand as I left the classroom and shoved it into my backpack. A–? Fine, whatever. I headed toward the back door and, rounding a corner, almost slammed into Ms. Chen, the principal, who said, “Let’s see some smiles, students! Learning is exhilarating!”

I managed a smile for her, like,
Excellent pep talk; my life is turned around now,
before I hurried down the stairs and out of there. Roxie and her mom were in the car at the bottom of the hill with the motor running and the radio on full blast. I slipped into the backseat and slumped down to make my getaway.

“You’re bringing your backpack?”

I thought of making up an excuse, but couldn’t come up with one. “I never go to my locker,” I admitted. “I’m not even sure where it is, maybe over by the gym somewhere? I don’t know. Anyway, I kind of forgot the combination by now.”

Roxie’s mom cracked up, the same loud, barky laugh as Roxie. It was the kind of laugh that was hard to resist joining in on. “That is excellent,” she said as we pulled into the train station. “Lost your locker. I love it. Have fun!”

As she drove away, I said to Roxie, “Your mom has the coolest voice. Like almost smoky.”

“She used to be a DJ, before she had me.”

“You can totally hear why,” I said. “A DJ. That’s so cool.”

“What about your mom?” Roxie asked, looking down the tracks for the train. “What’s she like? Typical suburban mom?”

“No. She’s a hedge fund manager,” I said, and when Roxie looked blank about that, I explained, “It’s, like, with money. She’s the smartest person I’ve ever met, the most beautiful, the most perfect.”

“Wow,” Roxie said. “That must suck.”

I laughed, feeling a wave of surprising relief flood through me. “It does,” I said as the train thundered into the station. “Nobody ever got that before. Including me, I think.”

Roxie shrugged. “My mother used to be a total hellion.”

“Really?” I asked. “She seems so sweet.”

“Well, she nods too much, like my dad,” Roxie said. “But yeah, she’s pretty sweet.”

“I bet my mom would like her,” I said, and then shrugged because maybe that sounded like my mother was desperate for friends or something. Sometimes I could just slap myself.

As we settled into a two-seat, I noticed that Roxie had a manila envelope in her hand. I asked her what it was, so she handed it to me. In the envelope were three identical pictures of Roxie. I pulled one out. In it, she was even prettier than in real life, her freckles gone and her eyes more sparkly than usual, her head ducked slightly enough to make her look simultaneously innocent and sexy.

“Wow,” I said, turning it over to read her stats and résumé.

“It’s from last year,” Roxie said casually. “Doesn’t look like I’ll end up tall enough to do runway or anything, but maybe I can keep doing commercials and catalogues.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. We just sat there not talking the rest of the ride in.
A model,
I was thinking. And ugly-duckling me. What a joke we must look like. Why hadn’t I thought of putting on at least some of the makeup Jade had given me over the past year? If Jade thought I was mildly unattractive, what must a legitimate model think? I sank down low in my chair for a private little self-hate-fest.

“What do you think of Emmett O’Leary?” Roxie asked as we got swept up in the crowd getting off the train.

I made a slightly nauseated face at the thought that maybe she somehow knew I’d totally crushed on Emmett O’Leary when I was in seventh grade, and asked why.

“Nothing,” she said, pulling me to the left and down a big flight of stairs. “Seems like a nice guy. Kind of sweet.”

“I guess,” I said, unsure if she was trying to fix me up with him because I had no shot at Tyler. Not wanting to seem too anything, I added the only criticism I could come up with of Emmett: “Pale.”

“Yeah, but who cares?” She whipped a thin plastic card out of her wallet and skimmed it through a reader. “Go,” she told me, so I went through a turnstile ahead of her, squished together so it only made one turn.

A subway train roared by on a middle track. I stuck my fingers in my ears when Roxie did, and thought how babyish and followerish I must seem to her.
Ugh,
I thought.
I have become Serena! Somebody shoot me now!

Just kidding,
I added silently, not looking at the two scary guys to my left.

We smooshed onto a packed subway car and jostled our way to the middle of the crowd on the train. I had no idea where I was or how to get home from there.
Quinn was right,
I admitted to myself as a huge woman whapped me with one of her six bags. I was an absolute idiot.

“This is us,” Roxie said after a few stops. I followed her off the train, up a steep set of stairs that smelled like pee. As she practically jogged along the street and I hustled to keep up, I checked my cell phone, considering calling home and asking someone to come pick me up. I knew I wouldn’t, though. I’d just end up in trouble if I did. Meanwhile, Roxie was stalking down the block and into a line of tall, beautiful girls stretching down the block outside a squat brick building.

She spread on lip gloss and leaned against the bricks. I hid behind my hair. I checked my cell phone again. It was still being completely normal and silent. Not even a text from Jade asking where I was.

We waited some more. Roxie checked her hair and smile in a mirror from her bag. I checked my watch.

“Do you like the Black Eyed Peas?”

I shrugged, not sure what black-eyed peas were, exactly. “Do you?”

“Sure,” she said. “I like all bands with colors in their names. Black Eyed Peas, Plain White T’s…”

“Green Day,” I added, and when she smiled, I was relieved. I’m actually pretty out of it, music-wise, and kind of pulled that name out of nowhere—I was scared for a sec it wasn’t even the name of a band.

“Exactly,” she said. “That’s what I like about you, Al. You totally get it.”

She couldn’t have been more wrong, but I wasn’t about to correct her on that. I wasn’t who she thought I was. I was even more nobody than usual, because I was also nowhere. At least, nobody knew where I was. Nobody knew who I was. Like so many great poets, I was anonymous. Maybe I could be a poet, I decided. Too bad I can’t write poetry.

After about an hour, we got through the door and up to the desk, where a skinny guy with spiky peroxide hair and dark-rimmed glasses sat at a desk in front of the sign-in book at 12:12. Roxie bent down to sign her name.

The guy pointed behind him, so Roxie and I started heading toward the line of bored-looking girls waiting there.

“You have to sign in,” he said to me.

“I’m not really here,” I explained.

“My mistake,” he said. “Where are you, then, in school?”

I smiled. “Yeah, fourth period.” Then I started around his little desk toward Roxie.

He grabbed my wrist and said, “You want to be seen, you have to sign in.”

“But I don’t want to be seen.”

“Well, then, you forgot to sprinkle on your fairy dust this morning, darlin’, because I see you.”

“Even though I didn’t sign in?”

He took a weary sip of his coffee. “Don’t be a pain in my ass, huh, dear? Sign in or leave.”

“Come on,” Roxie yelled. A very tall, gaunt woman was holding open an elevator door and beckoning the girls.

I bent down and scribbled my name, leaving out one of my L’s—
Alison Avery
, I wrote. To be more anonymous. Or less me, less there.

“Phone number?” the guy said. “Preferably cell.”

I smiled to myself and, as I was writing down my number, muttered, “My cell phone is possessed by the devil.”

“Aren’t they all?” he answered.

I smiled up at him and then dashed across the concrete space toward Roxie. The elevator door closed behind me and up we went.

7

F
OR ONCE IN MY LIFE
I was one of the shortest girls in the room. These girls were practically giraffes. We could’ve taken on the Knicks. If anybody needed a can of stewed tomatoes from a top shelf, we were totally on the job.

And there might have been three percent body fat in the room, on average. Not that I was obese, but you know how they say if Bill Gates walked into a room of a thousand homeless people, the average net worth in the room would shoot up to millions per person? Yeah, well, I was like the Bill Gates of body fat in that room.

The widest part of the girl’s legs on the metal chair beside me was her knees. It was seriously alarming.

Nobody talked or smiled. We all just sat there gorgeously wasting away, except for me. I just sat there.

One by one our names were called. Knees Girl was right before Roxie, so when she went to door number two, Roxie held my hand. Hers was clammy. I squeezed it. When a bored-looking guy with a British accent called her name, she crossed her eyes at me and strutted across the room. I had to smile. She was way prettier than any of those other skeletons. But I did notice, as she crossed the room away from me, that she was really skinny, too.

My phone started playing unrecognizable jazz. I was grabbing it out of my pocket when Mr. British Empire frowned like something smelled rancid and said, “No cell phones.”

“I’m not…” Just as I got it out, it died completely.

“That’s better,” he said. The door to room three opened and he sighed, saying, “Alison Avery.”

I stood up to explain my situation as a six-foot-tall girl ambled out of the room, biting her puffy pink lip and holding a sultry, much more attractive picture of herself in her long fingers.

“Go in, phone girl,” English Accent Guy said. “Go in, unless we’re interrupting you.”

I leaned toward him and tried to explain quietly, “No, I just…I’m not—”

“I don’t care, go!”

Feeling all the beautiful eyes in the room on me, I went.

“Stand on the line,” a woman with a pale blond bob ordered as the door slammed behind me.

I stood on the blue line of tape and said, “I’m not really—”

“No talking.”

She raised a Polaroid camera and aimed it at me as if it were a gun. I normally hate having my picture taken, but I had to almost laugh at the thought that I’d somehow been tried and sentenced to death by firing squad for the offense of cutting school.

The flash practically blinded me. The Camera Nazi took two steps back and said, “Stop blinking. Jacket off.”

“I don’t really…Fine, whatever.” I dropped my zip-up sweatshirt on the floor and stood there in my tank top feeling like a total dork while she snapped another picture.

“Allison Avery,” she said, writing my name on the margins of the two photos as I bent down to retrieve my sweatshirt. “Oh. Only one L in Alison?”

“I lost one on the way in,” I said, heading for the door.

“Interesting-looking,” she said.

“So they say,” I muttered with my hand on the door handle.

“Wait,” Blondie ordered.

I turned around.

She came close and stared at me like she was looking at a picture, with no expectation that I was there and alive, looking back. It felt beyond weird. “Yes,” she said. “Interesting. We’ll see. Go.”

Roxie was waiting for me near the big metal door near the elevator, with a smile pressing her dimples deep into her face. “How’d you do?”

“Well, they didn’t fingerprint me,” I said. “You?”

She laughed and threw her arm around my shoulders. “Thanks for coming with me. You’re the first normal person I’ve met since moving out to the burbs.”

It was the first time anybody’d accused me of being normal.

In the elevator going down, she whispered to me, “I have to tell you something, but not here.”

I nodded and stayed as silent as the three other stick figures in there with us and a completely bald guy in a purple blouse.

Out on the street, Roxie linked her elbow through mine and started walking fast. I had to take huge steps to keep up with her. “My mom is picking us up at the two-forty-seven, so we have time. That was quicker than I thought, but you will never believe what happened!”

“What?” I asked her. For once the sun wasn’t offending me. People were jostling by us with scowls on their faces, talking psychotically to nobody but—at least I had to figure in most cases—their hidden cell phone ear things. Women in heels I’d never manage just standing still in were beating men in wingtips in dead sprints across packed intersections, as cabs beeped and buses groaned.

Two little white dogs turned up their noses as they passed each other in the crosswalk, and a four-foot-tall woman with hot-pink hair decorated in bits of tinfoil barked curses at nobody in particular.

It was great.

“Okay,” Roxie finally said, leading me into a Starbucks.

“What happened?” I asked her as we waited in line.

She grinned. “They took two.”

“Two what?”

“Two pictures,” she whispered. “Usually they just take the close-up, but the guy who looked at me was all, like, ‘Oh, yeah, good,’ and then he said he wanted to get a three-quarter view, so he took that, too!”

“That’s great,” I said, not wanting to disappoint her by letting her know they wasted a second picture on me, too, so that was probably standard. “Seriously, Roxie.”

She scrunched up her nose. “I think so, too.” We had reached the front of the line, so she turned to the barista and said, “Hi how are you I’d like a half-caf tall sugar-free vanilla skim extra-hot latte, please. Al?”

I was just going to get a water like usual, but her order sounded so sophisticated. I didn’t want to seem like a suburban baby, but I also didn’t want to be like Serena the Shadow and just order whatever she had, so I ordered what my mom usually gets. She worked in the city. Or she had until she got fired.

“Doppio macchiato, please.”

Roxie looked at me with big open eyes and said, “Wow,” so I figured I’d ordered well.

We paid, which used up most of the money in my wallet, picked up our drinks, and took them out into the bright sunshine again. Two steps down the sidewalk Roxie stopped short at a sunglass table and we tried on a few pairs for each other while sipping our drinks. Mine was seriously hot and the most vile, bitter thing I’d ever tasted, but I didn’t want to be like,
Ew! What the heck is this, engine grease?
So I just tried to swallow tiny sips without letting it touch my tongue, in between modeling sunglasses.

As we tried them on, Roxie told me this story about how she and a friend of hers (her old right-handed man) from the city went one time last year to the makeup counter at Bloomingdale’s and Roxie said she thought she had left her sunglasses there while trying on makeup a few days earlier. The lady asked what color and Roxie said sort of brownish? And the lady hauled this big plastic bin up onto the counter and let Roxie try on all the lost sunglasses until she’d found a pair she liked.

“Where’s Bloomingdale’s?” I asked.

Roxie grinned. “You are so bad.” She looked at her watch. “We don’t have time.”

That’s not even what I meant, but she looked so delighted with me I didn’t say,
No, I was just making conversation and trying to avoid jealous questions about this old right-handed man who seemed so much more fun and wilder than me.
Roxie had a pair of red sunglasses on, so I grabbed another pair just like them so we could smoosh our heads together in the mirror and make faces. We actually looked pretty cool, I have to say, and Roxie insisted they were the bomb on me, so she bought them for me as a thank-you present for coming with her. I told her she didn’t have to, but she insisted and then bought the matching pair for herself and we walked on, linked again but now shaded, with coffee drinks.

“
We
are the bomb,” I said, and she threw her head back and laughed out loud.

As we crossed a huge street the light changed, so we decided to just hang on the bench there on the island between lanes of traffic.

“If I tell you something,” Roxie said, looking straight ahead, her legs stretched out ahead of her, “will you promise never to tell anyone?”

“I told you the other day,” I reminded her, “I am like the Fort Knox of secrets. I never reveal anything. It’s my only virtue.”

“Really?”

“Sad but true.” I said. “Who would I tell, anyway? You’re pretty much the only person in school still talking to me.”

“Your best friend is kind of a prig.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling shaky though not really nervous. Why would I be nervous? “She’s great, but opinionated.”

“If you say so,” Roxie said doubtfully. “Seems to me like the cheese has blown completely off her cracker.”

I laughed. “You think?”

“No doubt,” Roxie said seriously. “So, swear you won’t tell, even her?”

“I swear I won’t tell Jade or anybody else what you are about to tell me,” I said. My heart was pounding hard, though I totally didn’t feel worried about keeping her secret. I’m not good at much, but I really can keep a secret.

“We didn’t move to the suburbs because of gardening.”

“Okay,” I said. Sweat was starting to soak my forehead.

“We moved because of me,” she whispered, leaning back to look at the sky.

I took another sip of the crude oil in my cup and tried to calm myself down. What was going on with me?

“I didn’t get into high school,” she whispered.

“What do you mean?” I took off my sweatshirt jacket and sat there sweating and shaking like a junkie in my tank top. Luckily Roxie was staring at the sky, so she didn’t notice.

She smiled, but not her normal happy smile—a tight, sad smile. “Private school, right? I went to a K-through-eight, so in eighth grade you have to apply out. I was, like, whatever, not stressed, you know? I mean, my parents know everybody and obviously I wasn’t going to Brearley or whatever, but…”

She kept talking about schools I had never heard of as if anybody would know why you would roll your eyes about one place or another. I was busy trying not to have a heart attack in the middle of traffic.
Deep breaths,
I was telling myself, catching just bits and pieces of what she was saying, until the punch line. “Zero for eight. Not even wait-listed, and my mother is on the board there.”

“That sucks.”

“To put it mildly,” she said. “My parents are all, like, ‘It was just bad luck. Or a tough year.’ A lot of the schools are like eenie-meenie-miney-moe, my mom says, and apparently I just was never moe.”

“Eh,” I said. “Who’d want to be moe, anyway? Moe blows.”

She smiled a little. “Or maybe I’m just stupid.”

“You are so not stupid!” I swabbed my face with my sweatshirt.

“Yeah, well, my former right-handed man was telling me about her cousin who got rejected from everywhere, and that everybody was all, ‘It was a tough year,’ but in truth it’s just that the cousin was kind of dim.”

“Your former right-handed man has no cheese on her cracker.” I put my half-full cup down on the pavement with my shaking hands while Roxie chuckled. “Or whatever you said before. Your parents are completely right. You are so obviously smart it’s ridiculous.”

“I guess it’s just easier to believe the bad stuff,” Roxie said.

“Yeah, well,” I started, knowing exactly how she felt. “Maybe you just have to get over that.”

Roxie looked up at the sky. “Easy to say.”

I accidentally kicked over my cup with my jiggling foot and said, “I think there’s a lot of caffeine in this.”

Roxie cracked up and said, “You think?” She grabbed the empty cup and tossed it into the wire trash can beside us. “Doppio macchiato!”

“Yeah,” I said. “I actually have no idea what it is.”

She laughed loud and hard. “It’s a double shot of espresso!”

“Yeah, well, it tastes like crude oil.”

“Forget Alison with one L,” Roxie said, wiping tears from her eyes but still laughing. “From now on, I call you Double Shot.”

“If I die of a heart attack here, don’t tell my mother I got my picture taken, okay?”

She looked at me, full of concern. “You look like hell.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She helped me up and we walked awhile. I started feeling better after maybe five blocks, but I kept my arm around her shoulder for a few more anyway. When we got to Grand Central Terminal, we were still ten minutes early, so we sat on the sidewalk leaning against each other.

“Thanks,” Roxie said.

“For practically passing out?”

“No,” she said. “For not being all, ‘You are so dumb no high school wanted you, you loser.’”

“It was easy. I don’t think that.” I shrugged. “Anyway, I’m glad you moved, even if you’re not. What would I be doing if you’d gotten into one of those stupid private schools?”

“Not having heart palpitations on the sidewalk?” she offered. “Hanging out with Jade and Hyena?”

“Serena.”

“Whatever.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “So, lucky for me you weren’t moe.”

She smiled at me, that radiant smile that got her into all those toy catalogues and pajama ads. “You could totally do commercials,” she said.

“Could not,” I said, and then put on a fake smile and said, all cheery, “I just love fast food!” Then I laughed. “No way.”

“Don’t mock,” she said. “You have a cool look.”

“Ugh.”

“Seriously,” she said. “You, my friend, are cooler than the other side of the pillow.”

That cracked me up until she started looking at me the way the woman at the photo shoot had, like I wasn’t inside my own skin. “You have a really cool look, plus, you’re gorgeous.”

“Well, if I am, it cost me my cell phone.”

“What did?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Come on,” she said, leaning close and searching my eyes. “What cost you what?”

I sighed. “I sold my cell phone to the devil and in exchange, seven—well, maybe six—people will think I’m gorgeous. So if you think I’m gorgeous, that only leaves me five more people.”

“Holy crap,” she said. “You know the devil! Really?”

“Obviously not really. That’s the dream I had the other night. Weird, right? The devil was in my bedroom. Wonder what my ex-shrink would say about that!”