Gorgeous (8 page)

14

W
HEN
T
Y AND
I
WALKED
back into the party holding hands, everybody turned to look at us. His hand was kind of sweaty, which sounds gross but it wasn’t. The guy who had sat on my leg accidentally a few days earlier yelled, “Ty! Where were you, man?”

“Out,” Ty said.

The guy looked at me and, grinning, said, “Oh. Hi. I’m Emmett.”

“Allison,” I said.

A light dawned behind his cute, scrubbed-looking face. “The governor!”

“Right,” I said. Ty squeezed my hand.

Even after Roxie came over to us and grinned at me, Ty and I kept holding hands. Even after Jade huffed past us, followed by Serena, with their eyes not quite averted, we didn’t let go. Not until Roxie looked at her watch and gasped that her housekeeper would be waiting at the corner, then chugged her beer and tossed the cup in the trash can, did we let go.

“I’ll, uh, call you,” Ty said.

“Good,” I answered, and followed Roxie out into the cool night.

He didn’t call.

I kept my phone in my hand all night, and must have checked it a hundred times, a thousand.

When it rang at 11 a.m. my heart almost flew out through my mouth, but it was just my mother asking where I was. I told her I was still at Roxie’s and I would be home soon and no, I didn’t have much homework. It was weird to have her want so many details.

My phone was silent from then until after dinner. Poor Phoebe had gotten roped into going fishing with Dad. She had been kind of abandoned by me and Quinn all weekend, I realized, as I watched her pushing her food around the plate with her fork, looking bereft, alone, and seasick no matter how much we complimented her on the deliciousness of the bluefish. She had always seemed so happy and cute before; it was kind of heartbreaking to see her in such a weird funk. It made me want to do anything to cheer her up. So what if boys she didn’t even like and had never kissed called her all the time and the one boy I had ever really liked or kissed was totally blowing me off?

Hmm. I had lost track of why I was trying to make myself be sweet to Phoebe. As I cleared my plate, my phone rang.

I vowed that if it was Tyler, I’d be nice to Phoebe for the rest of my life. Or at least the rest of the week.

I closed my eyes and took a breath before I looked and saw it was Roxie. Instead of saying hello, I groaned.

“Well,” she said. “That answers my first question.”

“How am I going to deal with school tomorrow?” I moaned, heading upstairs.

“He didn’t say he’d call
today
,” Roxie said. “He might have meant during the week. He looked really happy, standing there holding your hand.”

“Really?”

“I swear it,” she said. “You are the cutest couple.”

“You are the best friend,” I said, and my stomach sank.

“Do you think I should like Emmett?”

“Do you?” I asked, surprised. Emmett was sweet, but not especially gorgeous. When I’d liked him, I was embarrassed about it.

“Kind of,” Roxie whispered.

“Yes!” I shouted, surprising us both. Quieter, I added, “But only if Ty still likes me.”

“It’s a deal,” Roxie said.

“I was just kidding. You should so like him, if you like him.”

“Hey,” Roxie said. “I am a big believer in solidarity.”

“Ungh,” I managed.

Not noticing my tumble into despair, Roxie went on. “Anyway, Ty is going to be head over heels for you tomorrow, so it’s not much of a sacrifice on my part. Do you know that this is the first weekend since we moved here that hasn’t completely sucked for me? And right when I got rejected from my favorite magazine. Go figure.”

“Yeah,” I said sinking further down in the devil’s seat, feeling bad about myself in every conceivable way.

“You sound bad,” Roxie said after a little while.

“I am bad,” I answered.

“Here’s what you are going to do,” she said. “Are you listening?”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

“Do you have anything red?”

“Just my phone.”

“You need to wear something red,” Roxie said. “Everybody knows when you wear red, you look hot. Red is the ultimate screw-you color.”

I let out a little laugh.

“You have to wear red, and look your absolute, most drop-dead best, when a boy you thought was going to call you doesn’t. You know what the best revenge is, right?”

“Looking good,” I whispered.

“That’s right. Are you looking in your closet? What do you have that’s hot? No neutrals.”

“I’m all about neutrals,” I moaned.

“No, you’ve just been hiding your light under a bushel. Come on, Double Shot. Rally!”

“Hiding my what under a what?”

“My grandma says that. You know what else she says?”

“I’m afraid to hear,” I admitted, getting off my butt and heading toward my closet.

“You’ve gotta put the bread in the window.”

“Bread?”

“Think about it. What do they do at a bakery? Do they hide the merchandise under neutral sacks? Or do they display it?”

“Bread is neutral-colored,” I pointed out, digging toward the back of my closet, stuff I hadn’t worn since last summer, stuff Jade and Serena and I had decided was “a little much.”

“You know what I mean,” Roxie said. “Hot. Red. And you have to do the smoky eyes. Are you taking notes?”

I laughed. “The thing is, Roxie, in all honesty, I’m not hot. I’m not gorgeous. And acting like I think I am will just be humiliating.”

“Okay, for one thing, you
are
gorgeous. You just usually do everything you can to convince everybody, including yourself, that you aren’t.”

“I wish that were true,” I moaned.

“It is, but if you don’t know it, that’s okay. In that case you just have to fake it.”

“But that’s—”

“Haven’t you ever faked sleep?” Roxie interrupted. “Like, when your parents were coming home and you stayed up late with a babysitter or something?”

“About a million times,” I admitted. “Sure.”

“And what happens if you have to fake sleeping for a while?”

I thought for a few seconds. “I don’t know. I usually fall asleep, I guess.”

“Exactly,” she said. “So, what do you have that’s red?”

By the time I hung up with her I was, if not psyched for the next day, at least down off the ledge, with a pile of non-neutral T-shirts to try on stacked beside my bed.

I set my alarm for six so I’d have time to put myself together to Roxie’s specifications, forcing the thoughts out of my head about how much I didn’t deserve her as a friend. I hadn’t purposefully stolen her dream, and probably nothing was going to come of it anyway. Besides, I had to focus. If I was going to get revenge and look gorgeous in front of not just Tyler Moss, who didn’t call me, but also Jade and Serena, who hadn’t either, it was going to take all my concentration.

15

N
O HIDING TODAY
, I told myself as I leaned close to my reflection to line my eyes with darkest brown kohl. If I have too wide a space between my eyes, if my lips get shy, if my nose is too long and skinny, my eyebrows too dark for my coloring, my big freckle above my lip too prominent, my teeth too big, my thighs too thundering…well, that’s what I look like. No hiding today.

I curled my eyelashes and stroked mascara over them. Figures the blondest thing on me would be my eyelashes. How useless is blond there?

I decided against smoky eyes, just going for a lighter “day” look. Okay, I had studied the
Makeup Tips!
section of the old copy of
zip
I still kept hidden under my bed.
You want a light touch for day,
I reminded myself. Of all things, nerdy me, who for so long had just barely passed as a nice, smart girl instead of a sinking-to-the-probably-more-appropriate status of outcast freak, was now attempting to ascend to the level of hot girl.

Can we just pause and admit that this will never work?
I asked my reflection. My reflection, alas (!), ignored me.

So I made a quick prayer that I wouldn’t make a complete ass of myself as I spread the pink lip gloss Jade had given me over a copper lipstick I’d bought last year but never used after Jade said it wasn’t my color.
Nice girls don’t wear more than a sheer lip gloss and maybe a soft coat of mascara to school,
Jade had whispered to me when we first caught a glimpse of Roxie, last fall. I had agreed, then rubbed off my blush on my way to math.

Well, I’m not nice,
I told myself as I dabbed cover-up around my nostrils. Why hide it?

“Holy…” Quinn said, when she saw me.

“Too much?” I asked, ready to run back to my room and wash it all off, or at least tug my hair down in front to hide.

Quinn studied my face, judging it.

“Quinn!” I yelled.

“No, no. You look good,” she said. “Really good. But why?”

I tried not to roll my eyes. Failed. “You know Tyler Moss?”

“Yeah. Jock? Hottie?”

“Exactly. Well—”

“You like him! I knew it! You denied it but—”

“I kissed him Sunday night,” I whispered. Quinn shrieked but slapped her hand over her mouth in time to stifle it.

“Twice.”

“Shut up!” she screamed under her hand, and did a weird little…well, I think it was a celebratory dance. Or else she really had to pee.

“The thing is,” I continued, “he said he’d call but he didn’t.”

“Oh,” Quinn said, catching her breath and returning to her usual pale color from hot pink. She nodded. “Okay. I get it. Red.”

“Does everybody know that rule except me?” I asked, heading down to breakfast.

“You apparently know it, too,” Quinn said.

Before I could answer I saw Phoebe, already in the kitchen and looking blotchy for the first time in her life. I’d been planning to wear my flip-flops, but there they were, on Phoebe’s feet again. But I couldn’t even bring myself to yell at her to get them off. The poor kid looked like a wreck, and was getting Gosia to drive her to school, making some excuse about having an early meeting.

It had to be something about having to cancel her graduation party. Her friends were probably giving her hell. If it was going to help her to wear my flip-flops, fine. I tried to ask her if she was okay but she skittered away, eyes averted. Probably she was still mad Quinn and I hadn’t solved the problem for her the other day. Still, I felt sorry for her. Well, sorry enough to let her go with my new flip-flops.

I put on my black low-top Chucks instead. No socks. I wasn’t sure if black counted as neutral, but it was them or sandals, and as much as I wanted to look screw-you hot, there was no way I was going to school in heels.

Light blue shorts and a red T-shirt were enough.

Plus makeup. Plus hair. I was more put-together than I’d ever been on a school day in my life.

It was also the first time I hadn’t cringed, looking at myself in the mirror, since I was maybe ten.

I stood in front of Mom, who was messing with her BlackBerry, and telling Quinn about whatever meeting she had. I wanted to see if Mom would be one of the seven people who would think I was gorgeous. Or if she was immune to me, and the devil, too.

If she was ever going to think I was gorgeous, I thought, it would be right now. I took a breath and relaxed my face, waiting.

Eventually she looked up and noticed me, behind Quinn. “What?” she asked. “If you need some breakfast, you have to get it yourself. I have a billion things—”

“I don’t need anything,” I said, but didn’t budge.

“See you later,” Mom said, opening her laptop.

Doubt it,
I thought, following Quinn, as always, out the door.

Roxie took the bus, for the first time in forever, and was waiting for us at the bus stop when we got there. She and Quinn got into a whole thing of complimenting me that was so embarrassing that if the bus had been another minute late, I would’ve just turned around and walked home.

Roxie took the aisle seat. I scrunched down next to the window. She yanked my arm and whispered, “Be tall and proud. Just keep two, no, four words in your head all day:
I’m gorgeous and screw you
.”

“That’s five,” I argued.

She thought for a second and then said, “You can forget the
and
.
I’m gorgeous. Screw you
.”

We were still laughing when Jade and Serena got on, so we had to catch our breath to say hello. They both did double takes, and Serena even smiled a bit at me, but they didn’t say anything. They sat down in the seat behind us and started whispering. I sank lower in my seat.

Roxie elbowed me, then stood up, turned around, and kneeled, peering over the back of our seat at Jade and Serena. Their whispering stopped, of course.

“So,” Roxie said. “Can you believe this heat?”

“Mm,” Jade murmured, noncommittal.

“Good thing I put on a double layer of deodorant this morning or I’d already have big sweat moons showing through my T-shirt. How about you, Jade? You put on enough deodorant this morning? Serena doesn’t look like that much of a sweaty person, are you, Serena?”

“Not really, no,” Serena answered, sweet and squeaky. I had slumped lower in my seat, but I knew the look Jade was giving her. I had no doubt that was the last thing we’d hear Serena say that morning.

“But you, Jade,” Roxie continued. “I bet you can sweat good and stinky, right? You and me, we could stink up a boys’ locker room.”

“Speak for yourself,” Jade quietly answered.

“Yeah, but I put on a double layer, myself,” Roxie said. “It’s you who’s got the sweat moons.”

Roxie plopped back down next to me. I half expected her to start snorting and laughing, and my stomach clenched again.

Instead she leaned close to me and whispered, “The silent treatment is mean. She could say hello.”

Then she sat back and stuck her buds into her ears and rocked out a bit in our seat.

I watched the town go by backward as we approached school, thinking that maybe the weirdest thing in my life was not that I was wearing a tight red T-shirt and makeup to school, or that I was (secretly) a semifinalist for a magazine modeling competition, or even that the devil had taken possession of my cell phone (which, at that moment, began to play “Pop Goes the Weasel” incessantly at top volume despite all my attempts to shut the thing off), but that Roxie Green really was my best friend.

I’m not sure if it was the hair, or the T-shirt, or the makeup, or the whole selling my cell to the devil—or if it was maybe the fact that I was taking longer steps to keep up with Roxie as we sauntered through the halls—but for the first time in my life, people noticed me. I saw eyes focus on me as we approached, and mouths smile as we got near. More kids said, “Hey,” or, “What’s up,” to me than in the whole year put together.

A couple of times in class my cell phone beeped and buzzed, but no teachers yelled at me about it. I just kept it in my back pocket and sat on it. After second period, when it was doing a samba in my shorts, I took it out and read a text from Tyler:

Hey

So I texted back:

Hey

Okay, so it wasn’t
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day
, but I was still pretty psyched, and, if I didn’t know me, I would say I might have been smiling as I walked into French class.

At lunch, Roxie and I strolled around the fields, arms linked. I hesitated as we came to the upper field where the boys were playing football, but Roxie yanked me on and yelled, “Hey, Ty,” as we passed.

He looked at her, then at me, and stopped. He smiled, then frowned, then got hit in the chest with the football and said, I think, “Oof.”

“Moss, come on, man!” Emmett yelled at him, but then followed his eyes toward us. Roxie waved at him and he blushed right up. “Oh, hi,” he said, standing next to Tyler.

“Head in the game, dumb-asses,” another guy yelled at them, shoving them both after picking up the ball.

Roxie turned me and we walked on. We did three laps around the field before we finally sat down on the far end under a huge hemlock tree to eat our lunches.

On our way back in, at least three girls gave me compliments about my hair, and one, Susannah Millstein, who is president of the class every year and plays first singles on the tennis team even though, like me, she is only in ninth grade, made a point of coming over to ask why I had quit tennis.

“I just have so much going on,” I said.

“Oh.” She sighed, looking genuinely disappointed. “I know it. Well, good for you—I wish I could quit something!”

“Really?” I looked at her. She practically glowed with health, confidence, and accomplishment. “Maybe you should.”

She laughed and squinched her eyes a little at me in a really cute way. “Yeah, maybe. It would be fun to just hang out sometime.”

“Everybody needs to hang out sometimes,” Roxie said, dumping her bag of crap all over the floor in front of her locker, and then squatting down to sort through. “It’s a medical fact.”

“Maybe I’ll have some people over this weekend,” I suggested, much to my own surprise.

“Pool party!” Roxie yelled.

Susannah brightened even further. I dropped my new red sunglasses down to shield my eyes even though we were in the dim hallway.

“I’ll give you my number,” Susannah suggested tentatively. “If…I mean…whatever. We have that tournament in Scarsdale Saturday—oh, stress, we’re gonna get whooped—but maybe after that? I was thinking of inviting some people over Saturday night, unless you—”

“No, yeah,” I told her. “That sounds great.” I handed my cell phone to the most popular girl in my grade and had her program in her phone number for me. It was surreal.

She left, calling over her shoulder, “See you later, Allison!”

It was the best day of school I’d had since the day in second grade when I lost my tooth
and
it was my birthday
and
my mom came to school with cupcakes and a book to read to my class
and
I got to say the morning announcements over the loudspeaker, all in one day. Back then I was actually friends with everybody, too—even Susannah Millstein. I was more fun in elementary school.

It hit me then that the girl I was kind of pretending to be all day, as I hid behind my sunglasses, was like an older version of my elementary school self.

Okay, that is kind of a weird thing to be
pretending
to be, I realized. An older version of my younger self? What did I think I
actually
was, if not that?

That twisty thinking made me feel light-headed. I might even have been almost laughing to myself as I passed Jade, leaving school. She gave me one of her most killer looks. So apparently she still wasn’t talking to me.

Oh, so what,
I decided. Everybody else was, and Tyler Moss definitely kept finding ways to cross paths with me and say hey. I felt pretty confident that now he would call me, that I could have people over, that I was entering a new phase in my life, coming into my own, as my grandmother predicted I eventually would. I walked home swinging my arms, convinced for the first time in forever that it didn’t matter one bit if Jade was pissed off.

I didn’t find out how wrong I was about everything until I walked into my house.