Plus
Authors: Veronica Chambers
Table of Contents
Chapter 7 - Are You Kidding Bee ?
Chapter 8 - Bee-lieve It or Not
Chapter 13 - Bee Joins the A-list
Chapter 14 - Like Bee to Honey
Chapter 15 - 2 Cool 2 Bee Forgotten
Chapter 17 - Bee-twixt and Bee-tween
Chapter 18 - Bee’s Boyfriend Is Back
Chapter 22 - Begin the Bee-grime
I was waiting at the Dean and DeLuca on Broadway and Prince when I saw this woman coming up to the counter. She was super-cool looking, around forty, wearing a pink shearling coat, diamond-studded heels, and skinny dark blue jeans.
“I’m sorry, I’m saving this seat for somebody,” I said.
“Did anyone ever tell you that you look a little like Savannah Hughes?”
I rolled my eyes. Yeah, right. Savannah Hughes was a big-time model. She used to be really skinny, then she almost went into cardiac arrest on diet pills. A year later, she was back in the game as a plus-size model.
I look nothing, I mean nothing, like Savannah Hughes.
But the woman wasn’t going away. “Have you ever modeled before?”
I looked down at my chocolate chip muffin.
“Look,” she said, taking my silence for a no. “I’m a modeling agent, and I’m looking for a plus-size girl to star in the new Prada campaign.” I didn’t know what to think. It seemed like those words—plus size—were just hanging in the air like a flag made up of granny panties.
Plus
RAZORBILL
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014,
U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of
Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,
Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New
Delhi–110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1311, New
Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,
Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2009 Veronica Chambers
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
eISBN : 978-1-101-45890-7
1
Meet Bee
This
is the most important thing I’ve learned in my seventeen years on earth. Sometimes dreams change. Take for example, my decision to enter the premed program at Columbia University. Being a doctor sounded all good and noble when I was sitting at home watching a special on TV about Doctors Without Borders in Zimbabwe and imagining that in some small way, I could change the world. But sitting in my dorm apartment, trying to remember the fundamental laws of kinematics, rotational dynamics, and oscillations, I’m pretty sure that I should’ve picked a different major.
I’m looking at the course catalog right now, and I’m here to tell you that outside the world of geometrical optics, there’s some pretty rocking stuff. If I hadn’t been such a doofus and rushed into premed, I could be taking a class called Security, Globalism, and Terrorism. How cool would that be? I bet someone from that class will get recruited by the CIA to be a spy, like Jennifer Garner in
Alias
. I’ve rented the whole series on Netflix. Twice.
I should’ve been a spy. I would’ve been a really good spy. I can hear people whispering all the way across the other side of the room. My dad says I’ve got ears like a bat. He meant it as a compliment. But if you actually look at a picture of a bat, you might think different.
Unfortunately, I am not a spy. I’m a freshman poindexter with a flat chest and size-ten feet. Everyone thinks I have a thing for capri pants, but it’s just that I’ve got this defect where my legs are disproportionately long compared to the rest of my body, so my pants are never long enough. In junior high, they called me “stork legs,” and there are still a couple of knuckleheads I see when I go home to visit my parents who’ll yell out that inane nickname if they see me at Ben & Jerry’s or in Rittenhouse Square.
I skipped a year of high school, so yeah, I’m pretty young to be a college freshman. But I’m what clinical psychologists term an overachiever. I think the Latin term is
doae toomuchus
. If it weren’t for my science whiz skills, I’d be lost. It’s pretty much the only thing that’s always come easily to me. These days, even science is tough.
As my adviser, Professor Kelly (she’s a psychology prof, so she’s the one who diagnosed me as an overachiever), told me, I could’ve taken elementary physics (V-1202) or intro to mechanics and thermodynamics (C1401). But oh no, that wasn’t good enough for me. I had to prove I was a badass. I signed up for C2801, physics with differential and integral calculus, which required special permission from the instructor. Who was I trying to impress? I have no idea. I have three friends from high school and they all went to college in California, so I see them like never.
The thing is, math and science were always so easy for me. I guess it’s genetics: when you take a mama nerd and a papa nerd, they tend to give birth to a really geeked-out strain of super-nerd. My dad is a scientist at the Franklin Institute, a museum back in Philly. It’s an egghead heaven where you can walk into a giant human heart and see how it works or step into a chamber that simulates how it feels to walk on the moon. When I was a kid, there was a school trip to the Franklin Institute every year, and I always loved the way Dad would come out to the giant main lobby in his white lab coat, looking smart and kind and a little loopy, like he was the Wizard of Oz, like he had the answer to any question you might ever have—which most of the time he did.
Dad’s been a big proponent of the grossology trend in science museums: meaning he creates exhibits about things like boogers and farts. It’s a little too much for me, but Dad loves it. All you have to do is sneeze in front of him to get a twenty-minute speech on the wonders of snot. He’s a funny guy. I guess in some ways, he’s also the reason why I decided I wanted to become a doctor. I want to be the girl in the white lab coat, the one with all the answers.
My mom is an economist and does a lot of work with the World Bank. She’s really involved with micro-loans to women in India and other developing countries. I guess the idea is that if you give a woman like a thousand dollars, she can buy fabric or goats or coconuts and make stuff she can sell in the market, and it helps her family and her whole community and creates some sort of sustainable economy. What this meant in practical terms is that my mom refused to buy me a decent pair of jeans and I spent all three years of high school dressed in tribal outfits made by women in countries like Ghana and Peru. She refuses, I mean refuses, to buy anything in a real store since she claims that it’s all made by underpaid child workers in third world countries.
So anything I wanted, I had to buy for myself. I tried to argue that giving a girl who does the dishes, cleans the guest bathroom, and takes out all the recycling FIVE DOLLARS A WEEK in allowance IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY made me as exploited as a child laborer in China. But Mom just got even more mad at me and said, “And how much do you think they pay children to dig up land mines in Cambodia?” You’d think my dad would intercede, but he and my mom have this rule where they never contradict each other. I think the Latin term for this is:
gangio upsa onihi daughterus
.
It took me nearly six months to save up enough money to buy a pair of jeans, and even then I was still wearing Mexican peasant blouses and hand-beaded moccasins every day. Honestly, it’s gotten to the point where I kind of like my global village clothes. But it would be nice if my mom would take me on a trip to some of these places so when people go, “Nice poncho, where’d you get it?” I’d have some cool story about how I spent the summer in the Amazon instead of having to tell them my mom bought it at a fair-trade store in Washington, D.C.
But lest you think my life totally sucks: I should tell you that I have this rocking boyfriend. His name is Brian Alexander. He’s a sophomore, and he’s like something out of a J.Crew catalog. I’m tall—around five-foot nine—though honestly, I’ve stopped measuring because I swear if I grow another inch, then the giraffe wranglers at the zoo are going to come and get me.
That’s why it’s extra nice that Brian is taller than me. He’s six-two with this massive red hair, so you can always spot him in a crowd. He’s got these adorable freckles and this smile that could melt butter. The thing is that he’s such a good guy. I swear he’ll probably be president of the United States one day. He’s really into public service. Not in an annoying way like my mom, but in a cool way like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.
I met Brian during frosh orientation when I went to a Blue Key meeting. Blue Key runs a lot of the charitable groups on campus like blood drives and the soup kitchen and all kinds of fund-raisers. Brian was giving the welcome talk, and he was so good looking, he could read the telephone book and I’d find it fascinating. The talk he gave was super-powerful.
We were sitting in a room of about thirty students. I was at the back, helping myself to the free cookies, when I noticed him approaching the podium. He got up and said, “The summer after my freshman year, I traveled with the Red Cross to tsunami-affected villages in Tamil Nadu. It was a shock to me because of how I grew up, and what I was taught at school and was aware of, to see that there was a world with so much poverty and so much distress. We all hear about charities fighting for clean water, fighting for shelter. The question is, is it charity or is it a right? I joined Blue Key because I believe it’s a right. It’s not simply a question of being nice and helping with these things. It’s not about good people doing nice things for desperate families. I disagree. Children should have an education. Children should have clean water. This is their right. It’s not charity; it’s human rights.”