Gorgeous (6 page)

10

B
Y THE TIME THE FORMS
arrived on Thursday afternoon, I’d become an expert on mail delivery times. The worst thing, I knew, would be for somebody else to get the mail, read something about my short but apparently impressive modeling career, and then be waiting in the kitchen, with a tapping foot, raised eyebrows, and the documents in hand, when I strolled in from school.

So I’d skipped tennis team practice Tuesday and Wednesday, and by Thursday, the postal officer, Evangeline, and I had become close. Turns out she had a son who was heading off for college in the fall, and he’d been a mail stalker while he waited for decision letters in April. So Evangeline sympathized, and waited while I looked through our stack of bills and junk mail until I found it.

“That what you were waiting for?”

“Yup,” I said.

She wished me luck and I sent luck to her son.

So that was nice. I’d spent the week feeling kind of tense and prickly with both Jade and Roxie, but at least I was friends with Evangeline, the mail woman. I almost asked her in for a lemonade.

Another weird but nice thing was that, as I discovered when I sliced open the envelope with a knife in the quiet kitchen, it wasn’t at all a misunderstanding.
Zip
magazine had actually chosen me as a semifinalist model.

Me.

Allison Avery. (Okay, Alison Avery, but still.)

The “interesting-looking” Avery girl. The one of me, Jade, and Serena who was most likely to wear the wrong thing, the worst makeup, the fewest hair products—and to care least about it.

Zip
magazine thought I was one of the twenty most gorgeous teens in America.

And all I’d had to do was let my cell phone go a little wacky.

Well, that realization whomped me right back down to earth. Obviously it wasn’t that I was actually gorgeous; I had cheated. I had sold my cell phone so that a few people would be conned into thinking I was gorgeous. By the devil.

Not that I believed in him.

But maybe I was starting to, because I had to believe either that the devil had magically appeared in my bedroom one night and traded me gorgeousness for my cell phone, or that people whose job it is to recognize gorgeousness chose me as one of the most gorgeous teens in the country.

No contest.

I was dashing up the stairs to hide in my room so I could reread the forms when, as if to emphasize which was real, my cell phone played a series of loud trumpet sounds, had a small seizure, and died.

I scrunched down on the far side of my bed and studied the forms. Before I could compete in the semifinal round of twenty teens, I would need to get a parent to sign a paper filled with small print. The likelihood of that happening was somewhere between
not
and
are you out of your mind
. I read on anyway, just for kicks.

If I won (ha ha ha ha ha), not only would I receive the honor of gracing (yes, “gracing”) the cover of the September issue of
zip
magazine, I would also get a boatload of beauty products (bringing up the irony of giving beauty products to the one person who evidently needs them least) and a free trip to the South of France for myself and one parent, for a weeklong photo shoot, and also $10,000.

Not cash, though. A scholarship. That made me almost laugh out loud. If you’re gorgeous, you get not just stuff to make you even more stunning, but also
a scholarship.
Because stunning looks prove you are a real scholar, as everybody knows.

A knock on my door made me jump. I was still shoving the papers into the envelope and the envelope under my bed when Dad loped into my room.

“Hey, Lemon?”

“What!?” I tried to wipe the guilty look off my face.
Open eyes wide for an innocent look,
I remembered reading in one of Phoebe’s dumb magazines. Oops, the one I might soon be gracing the cover of.

“What’s up?” he asked, his eyes wide, too. Maybe he’d read the same article.

Okay, the thought of Dad thumbing through
zip
was too weird even for me. “Nada,” I said slightly frantically. “Just hanging.”

He nodded.

I nodded.

I am the child my father borrows books from the library about, searching for ways to not scream at me. Somehow he gets along easily with everybody except me. My mother screams at me, too, but she screams at everybody sometimes. (Well, not Phoebe. Nobody screams at Phoebe; she’s the
baby
and so
sweet.
) But Dad, who is the most popular teacher at Willow Brook Elementary, reserves his short fuse only for me.

So I braced myself. Obviously he had found out I’d cut school.

I had no excuse, so I decided to just take whatever he had to dish out and try not to argue back. That’s what he had advised me to do the last time I got in huge trouble, for pushing Quinn down the stairs. I had thought it was a good idea to let him know why I had chosen to give her a slight shove, which wouldn’t have knocked a sturdier person off balance at all: She had said she would play lacrosse with me in the backyard, so I hauled all the stuff out there, and it had been a really rough day because Jade was mad at me for embarrassing her by laughing too loud at something she’d said in the cafeteria about the smell of tuna, so she and Serena were giving me the silent treatment and I just wanted to whip a ball around. Quinn had said yes and came out after I got everything out there, and then played for, like, five minutes, but then she said she had to go to the bathroom. I waited out there for about half an hour, and when I finally came in to see if she was okay, she was upstairs, reading a book. Apparently she’d had enough lacrosse. So I gave her a slight tap. I was just trying to explain, when Dad was yelling at me, that I had actually shown tremendous restraint by not breaking Quinn’s arms off, and maybe he could at least compliment me about that. But no.

He had insisted, fake-calmly, that in the future I should just listen and then apologize.

So that was my plan, when faced with the fact that I had totally ditched school and anyway still had no excuses.

If he knew I also took the train and the subway and let somebody take pictures of me and then gave out our address, I’d be grounded until I was dead.

“How’s school?” he asked.
Ah, very tricky,
I thought. Trying to get me to admit what I had done.

Laying the groundwork for an excuse, I said, “Boring.”

He nodded.

This was like chess.

“Any clubs or anything interesting?”

“No.”

“Other than the tennis team, right?”

Unsure where he was going with that, I said, “Yeah.”

“Uh-huh. Still loving that?”

“No,” I said. “It sucks.”

“Why?” he asked. Probing, probing. But I wasn’t falling for it.

“Because it’s, like, all about the outfits now. Who has the nicest racquets, who got a new top, who’s wearing the same thing she wore to the last match. I mean, is it a team or a fashion show?”

Damn! He was trapping me! Why was I mentioning fashion? I clamped my mouth shut tight.

He nodded. Roxie had said her parents nod too much, but I had never noticed it about mine before. He was a total bobblehead. How annoying and distracting!
Out with it already, Dad,
I was thinking.
Yell at me, punish me, just stop toying with me!

“I need to talk with you, Allison.”

Uh-oh. My real name. Here we go.

“Something happened Monday.”

I tried desperately to think of an excuse.
I had to cut school because…It’s not my fault because…
Nothing was coming.

“You know what’s going on with Mom, and her job…”

I shrugged. I knew she was fired, but not that much more in terms of specifics. Was he really going the guilt-trip route? Not his usual style.

“Well, because of that, we’re in kind of a bind in terms of cash flow. You know what that means?”

Okay, he was talking to me like I was an idiot kinder-gartner and it made me want to bop him over the head, but actually I
didn’t
know what that meant, so I shrugged one shoulder.

He sighed. “We don’t have a lot of cash. I don’t want you to worry; we’ll be okay. It’s just that right now, we are in a bind.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to figure out how this related to me cutting school Monday. My scalp was starting to sweat.

“You understand?”

“Yes, Dad! I am not the idiot you think I am! I follow. We’re out of money. In a bind. I get it. Move on!”

His face turned a little red, but he took a breath and then another, the way one of his library books had suggested. I read them while he was playing the piano or watching sports on TV, so I would know what he’d be trying on me.

“You won’t be able to go to Tennis Europe this summer.”

His eyes focused on my beige carpet for a few seconds and then lifted to meet mine. They weren’t angry eyes, or accusatory. They looked sad, and kind of apologetic. Weird.

“Did I do something wrong?” I asked. “Am I punished?”

“Not at all, Lemon-head,” he said, reaching toward me. Thinking he was trying to grab the letter, which was in fact touching my left pinky toe under the bed, I hid my empty hands behind my back. “Not at all.” He dropped his hands and came to sit beside me on my bed, which wrinkled my duvet. “You’re not in trouble at all. We are so sorry. But there was a logjam at the bank, apparently, because of some complicated financial maneuverings Mom had to make, which, to be honest, I’m not sure I fully understand myself, and the bottom line is, the payment to Tennis Europe didn’t go through.”

I surreptitiously shoved the letter a bit farther under the bed.

“We’re really sorry, but it looks like you won’t be able to go on the trip.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“I know you and Jade and Serena have been looking forward to going together, and it was certainly an exciting opportunity…”

“Seriously, dude,” I said. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

He shook his head and reached out his arms. Before I knew what he was doing, he had gathered me into a hug. “What a generous person you are, Allison. Thank you.”

“It’s no big deal,” I said. “I don’t care about Tennis Europe.”

“I know that’s not completely true,” he said. “But I appreciate your saying it anyway.” He let go and looked at me. “You are really growing up so beautifully.”

My eyes felt tight, like they might start to cry, so I just looked away and asked, “Is Mom okay?”

“Stressed,” he said. “But yes. We’ll all be fine. We’ll find something good for you for the summer, okay, sweetheart?”

Usually he only calls Phoebe sweetheart. “No problem,” I said. “I’ll be fine. I’ll figure something out.”
Like maybe I’ll go to the South of France.

He got up and went to my door. I resisted straightening out my duvet. He smiled at me, so I smiled back, noticing that his lips disappeared, too, and it wasn’t so hideous. It was kind of cute.

When he had closed the door, I fixed the duvet and sat back down to reread the
zip
paperwork. Ten thousand dollars if I won. Ten thousand dollars I could give Mom and Dad. No way Phoebe was making $10,000 this summer, or even Quinn. Ten thousand dollars. I pictured myself handing it over to them, insisting they take it, the whole thing, not even hoarding ten bucks for myself. The whole fat wad of cash, all for them, to help out. To be generous. From their difficult child.

Picturing that was even better than picturing myself on the cover of a magazine I had always—it was true—looked down my (apparently quite lovely) nose at. I grabbed an envelope from the box on my desk and addressed it. My heart was pounding as I reread the forms. Ten thousand dollars. I forged Dad’s signature and licked the envelope shut before second thoughts could overtake me.

11

T
HE NEXT MORNING ON
the way to the bus stop, I had the envelope in my hand, which was sweating inside my sweatshirt pocket. Well, it’s not like I could have left it overnight in the mailbox with the flag up the way I did when I was little and I left notes out there for the tooth fairy. (I know, I know, you’re supposed to leave your tooth under your pillow, but there was no way I could go to sleep thinking some lady was about to fly into my room and take away one of my body parts for a minimal payment—sorry, that’s creepy.) First of all, I wasn’t completely convinced anybody but the tooth fairy checked the mailbox for outgoing mail, and didn’t want to offend Evangeline so early in our friendship. But second and more importantly, one or both of my parents could easily notice the flag up, I realized, and if they went to investigate, I’d be cooked.

So I had to drop the letter in the mailbox halfway up our street toward the bus stop.

My plan was to be up and out early and for once leave without Quinn, but it didn’t exactly work out. Phoebe had taken my flip-flops again over the weekend and I had to scrape the muck off them before I could wear them, and then our toaster was freaking out as usual (our appliances have way too much personality), and by the time I was in a sweat and dashing out the door, Quinn was right by my side.

So I decided, as we approached the mailbox, to just be casual. “Oh, Dad asked me to mail this,” I said, as if,
What a pain but no big deal,
waving the letter carelessly but quickly so she couldn’t read the address. I opened the mailbox door and, as it creaked, flipped the envelope onto it, facedown, and let go fast.

Only, Quinn’s hand was on it, holding it open. With her other hand she lifted the letter off. The mailbox creaked shut.

“What is it?”

“How should I know?” I said, a little too high.

“You addressed the envelope,” Quinn said, showing it to me.

I raised my eyebrows.

“So…?”

“It’s a subscription, if you must know,” I lied. “I just decided I need to learn more about, well, fashion. And celebrities. And how to do my makeup. You know. I know I’ve always made fun of those stupid magazines, so I’m a little embarrassed and didn’t want you to know, but…”

“It doesn’t say
Subscription Department
,” Quinn pointed out. “It says
The New Teen Contest
.”

“Um,” I said. “We’re gonna miss the bus if we don’t hurry.”

“Tell me what this is,” Quinn said in her slow, slow way, “or I will rip it open and see for myself.”

She lifted her other hand and was starting to rip when I caved.

“Okay, okay. I’ll tell you.” She froze, waiting to see if I really would tell. “It’s that thing I went to with Roxie. They chose me.”

“As what?” Quinn asked.

“As a security guard,” I said. “What do you think? As a semifinalist.”

“Seriously?”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“No, it’s not…I mean, you’re gorgeous, everybody knows that; it’s just—”

I had to blink away a surprise tear. “No, I’m not!” I yelled. “Stop mocking me!”

“I’m totally not, Allison,” Quinn said. “You’re mad beautiful. I mean, you were kind of a weird-looking kid, but you’re really coming into yourself these days.”

I sniffled and punched her shoulder. “Great, thanks.”

“I’m just saying, what did Mom and Dad say? How did you explain it to them?”

“I haven’t yet.”

We heard the bus rumbling half a block away.

“So what is this?” Quinn asked.

“I just had to fill out a form with my information,” I told her half truthfully. “The last thing Mom and Dad need right now is to worry about me, right? It’s meaningless. The other girls are all probably, like, professional models. The most that could happen is what? I get a certificate for being a semifinalist?”

“So then why are you doing it?” Quinn asked.

The tears welling up in my eyes caught us both by surprise when I answered, truthfully for once, “Because I never get the certificate.”

“Oh, Allison,” Quinn said, softening.

“You have no idea how that feels, Quinn.” I sniffed hard and collected myself. “Can you put it in the mailbox so we don’t miss the bus, please? I really don’t want to push my luck and be late.”

Quinn frowned. She has never been late in her life. She sighed and opened the mailbox. Before she placed the envelope in, though, she lifted it to her lips and kissed it. “For luck,” she whispered.

“Thanks,” I managed, and then we sprinted toward the bus together.

It wasn’t until Jade and Serena were on their way onto the bus at the next stop that I realized I was going to have to come up with something to tell them about why I wouldn’t be going with them to Tennis Europe. It hit me that I should’ve come up with a story ahead of time, but honestly, how much deception can I be expected to plan in one night?

Jade must have seen my face looking shocked, because her face morphed from her usual look of determined innocence to one of concern, and she slipped right in beside me. “What’s wrong, Allison?”

I opened my mouth but for once nothing came out.

“Did they find out you ditched school?”

“Yes,” I told her, secretly thanking her for solving my problem.

“How?” Serena asked from across the aisle.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, panicking afresh. “How could they have found out?”

“Maybe the school called,” Jade whispered. “Or one of the teachers who’s friends with your dad.”

“Right,” I agreed. “That must be it.”

Jade shook her head. “I told you, Allison. I don’t know why you did that. It’s so not like you. So what did they do? How much trouble are you in?”

It was almost hard not to grin, this was going so well. I could keep my family’s business and my own all private without breaking a sweat. I really am the Fort Knox of secrets, I congratulated myself, while saying, “Large trouble.”

Serena leaned into the aisle, her elbows on her knees. As a soap opera addict, she had to be in heaven with this.

“I’m out of Tennis Europe.”

“No!” Serena and Jade both gasped.

I nodded sadly.

“That’s so harsh!” Serena said.

“She cut school for the whole day,” Jade said. “We’re in ninth grade, Serena; this isn’t baby stuff anymore. You cut school for one day and you could totally wreck your college chances. It could go on your transcript. You think the competitive colleges want someone who just ditches school?”

“Whoa,” Serena said, and I thought.

“I mean, it stinks, but can you really blame Allison’s parents? She’s lucky she’s not suspended.” She turned to me with a disappointed look on her pretty oval face. “Where did you and Roxanne Green go, anyway? I hope it was worth it.”

“It kind of was,” I couldn’t help saying, especially because in truth I actually hadn’t suffered any consequences. Maybe I’d feel different if I’d really been caught and screwed up my whole future, which would probably be murky at best even without radically stupid moves on my part like cutting school. Still, the more I thought about not being able to do Tennis Europe, the more relieved I felt. It was weird, because I’d begged to be allowed to go only a few months earlier, and now it felt like a too-small hat had suddenly been removed from my head.

The bus was pulling up to school by then, so we grabbed our stuff and trudged off toward the side entrance of school.

“So?” Jade asked again. “Why aren’t you telling us where you went when you cut?”

“I already told you,” I said as we approached Jade’s locker. “We went into the city.”

“By yourselves?” Serena asked, shocked.

“Yeah. Roxie used to model, and—”

“She really did?” Serena asked. “I thought that was just a rumor.”

“Rumors aren’t always false,” Jade murmured.

“Cool,” Serena said, sounding, as always, vaguely astonished.

“She’s done commercials and catalogues, lots of stuff,” I told them as Jade completed her morning locker-crap-sorting ritual. “Anyway, we went to this open call for models for this magazine called
zip
.”

“I
love zip
!” Serena shrieked. When she caught Jade’s condemnatory look, she continued in a forced whisper, “Well, it’s the hottest magazine, isn’t it? Roxie is in
zip
?”

Roxie flumped up just then, and said, “Apparently not.”

I looked at her and she half smiled back. “No call,” she said. “So, I guess I wasn’t moe again.”

“Who’s moe?” Serena asked.

“Inside joke,” Roxie said, and I caught the split-second tightening in Jade’s face. Roxie apparently didn’t, because she just forged right ahead, saying, “I don’t know if Allison told you guys, but we went to try out for this cover-model contest, the New Teen or something. There were probably close to a thousand girls there, don’t you think?”

I shrugged. Jade and Serena were looking from Roxie to me and back like we were aliens.

“They would’ve called by yesterday if we’d made the next round. Did they call you, Allison?”

“No,” I lied.

“Me neither,” she said. “So I guess that’s that. Oh, well, I still think we’re gorgeous, don’t you?”

I half shrugged, half shook my head. Jade made a disgusted clucking sound as she rearranged her books at the bottom of her perfectly neat locker. She cannot tolerate bragging.

“Anyway,” Roxie continued, either oblivious to or ignoring all the little psychodramas she was causing, “I’m kind of down in the dumps about it and thinking, What the hell, it’s Memorial Day weekend and I have no plans and nothing exciting going on, so do you guys want to make it a party Saturday night? Or we could do Sunday, whatever; I’m flexible. My parents are going to Bermuda with clients.”

“Um,” Serena said. She and—I have to admit—I both looked at Jade to see how she’d respond.

She smiled. “That sounds great, Roxanne,” Jade said evenly. “But unfortunately Allison and Serena are coming with my family to our place in Sag Harbor.” She turned to check her lip gloss in the little round mirror she had affixed to her locker door.

“Oh, well.” Roxie shrugged. “It was an idea. Have fun, then, you three.”

Just as she was turning away, I said, “Actually, I’m not going.”

All three of my friends looked shocked, although once again I may have been the surprise winner in the who-did-I-shock-most contest.

“Grounded,” I explained.

Jade put her arm around my shoulder and said, “Oh, Allison.”

I closed my eyes, feeling almost as terrible as I was pretending to feel.

“She got caught cutting,” Jade was explaining to Roxie. “You didn’t get a call from the school?”

“She had permission,” I said quickly.

“Oh, Double Shot, that totally sucks,” Roxie said. “When did your parents find out? Who called?”

Uh-oh,
I thought, but said, “They wouldn’t say.” I kept my eyes closed and felt Jade’s arm tighten around me. She smelled, as always, clean and shiny from her floral shampoo.

“Your mother lets you just skip school and go into the city for the day?”

Roxie half shrugged and nodded at the same time. “I guess.”

Jade slid her eyes away, making it clear what she thought of Roxie’s mother’s parenting philosophy. “Well, this school takes stuff like unnecessary absences and cutting really seriously,” Jade explained quietly. “You really have to be careful. You don’t want to be one of those girls who just foolishly throws away her future.”

As Jade was leading me away, with Serena fast at her heels, I heard Roxie, behind us, saying, “No. I want to be one of those girls who throws away her future with brilliant forethought.”

In spite of myself, I had to smile. Just a little bit, and mostly on the inside.