Carina’s suntanned face looked a little pale. “Something just happened,” she muttered. Lizzie could see that she was holding
her iPhone.
“What?”
“Not here,” Hudson said, shaking her head. They pointed to the door, and Lizzie, puzzled, followed them back out into the
crowded hallway, and then into the ladies’ room.
“What happened, you guys?” she asked, more seriously.
Carina and Hudson squeezed themselves into a single stall like they did whenever there was a crisis, pulled her inside, and
shut the door. This was definitely not good.
“Will you guys just tell me?” she asked.
Carina handed her the iPhone. “Look at this,” she said.
Lizzie looked down at the screen. It was a video clip on YouTube. On it she could see her mother, sitting in a folding chair,
in her purple halter dress, fielding questions from the press. It was the fashion show.
And then she saw herself. Sitting next to her mother. Wearing the strapless Trina Turk dress. And talking into a microphone.
Lizzie turned up the volume, just as she heard herself say the words she couldn’t get out of her head:
Actually, it kind of sucks… And I think her clothes are a little slutty.
She watched it three times until Hudson gently pulled the iPhone out of Lizzie’s hands. “You okay?” Hudson asked, slipping
the iPhone back into her cotton tote, silkscreened with a picture of her French bulldog.
There had been 12,378 hits already. In two hours it would be double that. Every fashion and celebrity gossip blog would have
a link to it by the afternoon. And underneath the clip a post had said:
She’s just jealous cuz her mom is hot. And she got hit with the ugly stick
.
“Lizzie, talk,” Carina said, her brown eyes filled with worry.
“Does your mom know?” Hudson asked calmly. She smelled like Kate Spade’s orange blossom–scented perfume.
Lizzie nodded. “I told her last night. And then we had a huge fight. Now she’s on a plane to Paris. But the publicist was
supposed to take care of it.”
“Well, obviously that publicist’s doing a crappy job,” Carina said. “I say you call her up and complain.”
“Or go down there and talk to her about it,” Hudson suggested, her green eyes sparkling. “Ask her if there’s anything you
can do. She won’t be mad.”
“Uh, right,” Lizzie said, staring at some graffiti of a broken heart that some nameless girl had scratched into the wall.
“You guys haven’t met Natasha. She’s paid to get mad.” She touched the wall of the stall to keep herself steady. “Oh my God,
you guys. I called my mom a slut.”
“You called
her clothes
a slut,” Carina corrected her.
“Why’d you do it?” Hudson asked patiently.
Lizzie shrugged, feeling tears come to her eyes. “I asked her before we got there if I could skip the photo craziness and
it was like she didn’t even hear me. And lately, the cameras and the pictures, the posing with her… it’s just kind of hellish.”
From deep inside her bookbag, her iPhone dinged with a text. Her first thought was that it was her mother. She pulled out
the phone and checked the screen. “It’s Natasha,” she announced to her friends.
She clicked on the message and read it aloud.
“We need to talk. Call me at the office. ASAP. N.”
Lizzie put down the phone. “Great. She wants to kill me.”
“She probably just wants to help you,” Hudson said, twisting her black hair up into a makeshift bun and securing it with a
pencil. “This is not the end of the world, okay?”
Lizzie nodded. Her friends were right: this wasn’t the end of the world. Even if twelve thousand people had already watched
this.
She wrote Natasha a quick reply, saying that she would be able to stop by after school, and then walked back into homeroom,
where Todd waited for her near their usual cluster of desks, looking adorable as usual. “Hey,” he said, grinning. “Everything
okay?”
“Sure, everything’s fine,” she said, even though she wanted to cry.
The rest of the day was torture. During each class, she pretended to listen and take notes, while in her mind a deep male
voice announced
YOU ARE A TERRIBLE DAUGHTER
, over and over and over.
When the bell rang after their last class, Lizzie, Hudson, and Carina walked straight to the corner of Fifth Avenue, hailed
a cab, and jumped in.
When they got to Natasha’s office building in midtown, Lizzie paid the driver and stepped out of the cab.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Hudson asked, looking up at the tall, foreboding skyscraper. It was one of hundreds that
lined the cool canyon of Third Avenue but this one looked especially scary.
“I think so,” Lizzie said. She looked enviously at the people walking past, their faces free and innocent of wrongdoing. Chances
were that none of them had ever insulted their mothers on YouTube. “Okay, let’s go, you guys,” she said.
She swung her bookbag to the other shoulder and led the way through the revolving doors, into a soaring atrium-style lobby.
After a swift, silent elevator ride, they walked out into a sterile-looking reception area done in a depressing burgundy color
scheme. She’d been here only once before, with her mom.
“You want us to go with you?” Hudson asked, biting her pouty lower lip with concern.
“No, that’s okay. You guys wait out here.” Lizzie gestured toward the two couches.
“Just don’t forget,
she
works for
you
,” Carina said, bossily pointing an index finger in her face.
“Right.”
Lizzie headed toward the frizzy-haired receptionist. The phones were ringing off the hook.
“You can go right in,” the girl said, pointing down the hall. “Last office on the left. Natasha’s expecting you.” Apparently,
she’d seen the YouTube clip, too.
Lizzie turned and padded down the soft-carpeted hallway, her bookbag sliding onto her arm.
Relax
, she told herself, tying her hair into the best version of a ponytail she could. One ten-second clip wasn’t the end of the
world. It wasn’t like she’d done anything illegal. Natasha was used to DUI arrests and panty-less crotch shots. Surely she’d
be able to put this in some kind of perspective for her. Even if she was a tad uptight, from what Lizzie remembered.
Toward the end of the hall, she heard a familiar, withering English accent.
“She’s a
teenager
!” the voice said. “You know how
bloody
disagreeable they are, they say
whatever
comes out of their mouths. It’s not like it
means
anything!”
It was coming from the last door on the left.
Maybe Natasha won’t be able to put this in perspective
, Lizzie thought.
“No, Katia
doesn’t
have a comment, and there are
no
problems at home,” the voice went on. “And my God, there is
real
news out there. Haven’t you ever heard of Darfur?”
It was too late to turn back. With a gulp, Lizzie stepped through the doorway.
Natasha sat behind a desk piled so high with trades and magazines and newspapers that at first Lizzie could barely see her.
She was tinier than Carina, and always looked like she was playing dress-up in her uniform of sharp, pinstriped suit and lace-trimmed
camisole. She wore her usual accessories—a thick silver cuff bracelet and a silver Cartier tank watch, and a razored fringe
of black bangs ended just above her tiny, raccoon-lined eyes.
Those eyes darted in Lizzie’s direction, like a cobra’s, as she said, “Look darling, I have a meeting. Another crisis, you
know. Yes, lunch would be fab. Talk soon.” She pulled off her Bluetooth and tossed it in between a stack of newspapers and
a thick September
Vogue
. “Well, hello, Lizzie,” she said. “Speak of the bloody devil.”
Lizzie sat down in a Lucite chair in front of her desk. This had almost definitely been a mistake.
“I just wanted to say I’m so sorry about what happened,” she started. “This was all a big mistake. And if there’s anything
I can do—”
“Do you have
any
idea what kind of a day I’ve had?” Natasha demanded, in a tone that suggested she was about to answer her own question. “
Do
you?”
“Um, actually, uh…,” Lizzie began.
“On an average day, I get a
hundred
phone calls—a hundred and
ten
, tops,” she said, gesturing to the sky. “But today, I’ve had one hundred and
seventy-five
phone calls, all because of you, Lizzie, and it’s not even four o’clock!”
As if on cue, her six-line phone began to ring. Natasha inhaled deeply and pressed her index finger against the inner corner
of her eye, as if she was trying to prevent a total nervous breakdown. “Amanda!” she hollered toward the door. “Can you get
that, please?” Natasha removed her finger from her eye and took another deep breath.
“You’ve had a hundred and seventy-five phone calls?” Lizzie asked.
“I have had calls from
Star
, from
Us Weekly
, from TMZ, from the
Daily Mail
in London, from Paris, from Tokyo,” she continued, lifting each of her black-polished fingers. “All of them wanting to know
why Katia’s daughter said such horrible things about her mother.”
“But my mom said you were taking care of it—” Lizzie said.
“It’s the bloody Internet, for God’s sakes!” Natasha snapped. “Now, I’ve done what I can, but listen to me, Lizzie, listen
to me very carefully,” Natasha said, placing a hand on her heaving chest. “I don’t know how you behave at home, but you can’t
just go shooting your mouth off when you’re in public. And especially not in front of a
camera crew
. This is the twenty-first century, Lizzie. Privacy doesn’t exist anymore. Do you understand that?” Natasha shook her head
as if privacy was too absurd for even her to contemplate. “And at Fashion Week? My God, you’ve been there enough times, you
know how things get. If this were your first time I would have understood, but my
God
…” She let her voice trail off with outrage. “You have to be smart, Lizzie. You have to
think
,” she said, vigorously tapping the side of her head. “You
have
to be more careful about what you say. To call your mother’s designs slutty, Lizzie, I mean, honestly. You have to
protect
your mother. We
all
have to.”
“I was just surrounded,” Lizzie stammered. “I got freaked out, the guy ambushed me—”
“You say to them everything’s fine, everything’s good, and that your mother’s an
inspiration to women everywhere
,” she emphasized. Natasha’s phone rang again. “Amanda?” Natasha yelled toward the open door.
“Have you heard from my mom?” Lizzie asked tentatively.
“Not yet. But I’m sure I will. It’s causing quite a stir.”
“Oh,” Lizzie mumbled.
Natasha turned around to face her computer monitor. “Let’s see,” she said, reading from the screen. “The
Post
wanted it to be the lead story for their Entertainment section this weekend. Famous mother and daughter catfights through
history, or something like that.
Star
wants to put you and Katia on the cover for next week. Oh, and Tyra wants to do an intervention-type show with you and Katia.
When Your Mom Is Hot
,
and You’re Not
. We’re
obviously
not returning that call.”
A tall, twenty-something girl in skinny jeans and with a hangdog expression knocked on the door. Lizzie could only guess it
was the long-suffering Amanda.
“Yes?” Natasha asked.
Amanda trudged into Natasha’s office. “That photographer called again for Katia’s kid. About the ugly modeling?” she announced,
placing the slip on her desk. “Don’t worry, I got rid of her.”
There was a long silence. Lizzie pretended to become very interested in the box of Kleenex on Natasha’s desk.
“Amanda?” Natasha said sweetly. “This is Lizzie Summers. Katia’s daughter.”
Amanda went pale as she stared at Lizzie. “Oh,” she said. “Hi. Sorry.”
“You can go now,” Natasha commanded.
Without a word, Amanda walked out. Natasha turned toward Lizzie and gamely attempted a smile. “I was going to tell you about
that,” she said. “A photographer saw you on the clip. She thought you had a
unique look
,” she said, hooking her fingers into air quotes around the words.
“It was for ugly modeling?” Lizzie asked. Maybe it was time she finally embraced this.
“That’s just the slang term for it,” Natasha said. “It’s
real
-
person
modeling. Using people who aren’t
traditionally
beautiful to sell products. It’s starting to get some attention here and there in the ad world. But speaking as
your
publicist, too, it’s out of the question,” she said, crumpling the message slip. “I want you to stay away from anything and
any
one
with a camera. The longer you make yourself scarce, the sooner this circus will go away. And really, Lizzie… would you want
your mother to think that you turned this into a career opportunity?”
She tossed the slip toward the trash can at the side of her desk just as the phone rang again.
“Oh God, hold on,” she said, glancing at the screen. She clipped on her Bluetooth. “Hello?” she whined. “Yes, hi. Yes, I know
it looks bad. But my God.
Slutty
isn’t the f-word,” she said, swiveling to the side.
Lizzie looked back at the trash can. There, on the carpet, just inches from Lizzie’s feet, was the slip. Natasha had missed
the can. The crinkled piece of paper lay just inches from her foot, begging to be picked up. Suddenly she wanted to see the
words in writing: “ugly modeling.” Maybe it would help her finally accept it.
In one seamless motion, she leaned down, snatched up the slip, and stuffed it into the front pocket of her bookbag.
“Yes, I know it’s Katia, but I don’t understand why this is news,” Natasha said, still looking out the window. “Haven’t you
ever heard of the Sudan?”
Lizzie got to her feet. This seemed the right time to make her exit. She waved at Natasha, who still hadn’t seen her get up.