Theodora Twist (15 page)

I open the fridge. Cheesecake. My dad loved cheesecake.

I grab a fork and savor one perfect bite. I can feel my dad all around me.
How’s my princess? . . . Don’t give your
mom such a hard time, she’s trying. . . . The best thing that
ever happened to me was you. . . .

I miss you, Dad,
I say to the ceiling.
So, so much.
Suddenly, the kitchen is full of flowery wallpaper and my mother’s ridiculous salt and pepper shaker collection. My dad’s suit jacket is draped over a chair at the round table. I’m in my house. I’m back home. Any minute my dad will come walking through the front door, huge smile on his face, ask me to guess how many cars he sold today, then twirl me around in a dance when I guess too high.

Crash.
I whirl around. Vic, a skinny elephant, was clearly trying so hard to capture this Hallmark moment with me unaware that he bumped into a shelf on the wall and knocked down a vase. When I turn back around, my dad is gone. The walls are yellow again. And they’re closing in on me. I need to forget. And since Bo and Brandon are thousands of miles away—literally and figuratively— I need to call a car service to get me into the city fast for an hour-long hot stone massage at the Bliss spa.

Emily

How amazing is this? Two days off school for a photo shoot in New York City! And Belle and Jen get to come for two hours this afternoon. I can’t believe it. They can’t believe it.

“Believe
this,
” Theodora says, flipping through
Teen
Vogue
while our car stops in front of an industrial-looking building somewhere in lower Manhattan. “It’s not as fun as it sounds.”

“Maybe for you because you’re used to it,” I tell her. “Being in a magazine?
That
is fun. That is once-in-a-lifetime stuff. The reason I’m absent is all over school. The Samanthas must be seething!
We’re the fabulous ones! We
should be at the photo shoot!
”

I’m so relieved that Theodora’s speaking to me again. When I got home last night from the Lost and Found meeting, she was in our room, listening to her iPod. She said maybe five words during dinner, then excused herself to take the world’s longest bath. And then she went to bed. Even Nicole and Vic were so bored they left early. I tried to get Theodora to talk a couple of times after she turned out her bedside lamp, but she ignored me.

Just like four years ago. Only this time, she’s stuck with me.

We head inside and take a freight elevator up to the sixteenth floor. A frazzled-looking young woman greets us and hands us bottles of organic iced tea.

I peer through a doorway into a huge room with lights, white backdrops, and cool-looking people everywhere.

Theodora told me what to expect on the way over, but she made it sound so easy. You wear what the stylist puts on your body, even if you hate it. You listen to the art director and the photographer scream at each other. Then you do what the photographer says until the photo editor screams at both of them. Then you’re sitting around for an hour or so while they figure it out, which they probably did in a five-hour meeting beforehand. Your makeup gets old and your hair droops, so it’s another hour in an uncomfortable chair while some gay guy with bad breath does your face and someone else does your hair. And even if you hate how you look, you’re stuck looking like that for all eternity in the pages of a national magazine. The end.

I love it. It all sounds so TV!

At first the photo editor is sweet. Full of compliments. “You’re so darling,” she says. I see Theodora roll her eyes, which means “darling” is not a compliment in the photo shoot world.

“It’s condescending,” Theodora whispers to me.

We’re now sitting “in makeup.” A guy wearing all white, with white-blond hair like Theodora’s, is my “face stylist.” Apparently, Theodora tried to arrange to have her personal makeup artist work the shoot, but the magazine wanted their own people.

“I’m not even guaranteed the cover,” Theodora says, grimacing at the photo editor, who is yelling at the art director. Twenty somethings in freaky clothes scatter like flies every time the photo editor or the art director snap their fingers or scream. “That sucks. We’ll have an editorial spread, a bunch of pages of us looking like normal teenagers.” She smiles. “Supposedly looking like you, but we’ll look like the photo editor’s vision of normal, which is totally abnormal. You’ll probably end up looking like a prep school kid.”

My hair stylist
is
doing very strange things to my hair. Sort of tight waves.

Theodora points to a rack of clothes with my name on it. “See—pink and green.” She laughs. “And a blazer.”

I don’t care what I wear. It’ll be better than anything I have in my closet. I wish Belle and Jen were here already. We’ll only be in one photo together. Theodora will have most of the ten-page spread.

“The spread isn’t as important as the cover,” Theodora says, her gorgeous hair pulled into weird, Goth-looking pigtails. She shakes her head in the mirror, flipping a pigtail in disgust. “Told you.”

“The talent is touching her hair,” the hairstylist yells in the direction of a crowd of people huddled around what looks like a photograph.

“They’re checking Polaroids of us for lighting and features,” Theodora explains.

“Please don’t touch your hair!” the photo editor yells back at Theodora.

Theodora’s makeup artist has given her black lipstick.

“Eww. No way am I looking like this in one of the biggest teen fashion magazines in the world.” Theodora jumps off the chair, grabs her bag, and pulls out her cell phone. “Ashley, I’m wearing black lipstick. I look gross. I thought the whole point was that I’m supposed to look like a normal teen.” She smiles, then hangs up and returns to her chair, ignoring the makeup artist, who’s scowling at her. “The photo editor’s cell will ring in two seconds and I’ll be in my best colors,” Theodora says to me.

It does. She is. A pale pink gloss that makes her look both sixteen and twenty-five. “The pigtails can stay,” she tells her hair guy. “I like them.”

When I finally see my finished self in the mirror, I don’t look like Emily Fine at all. I look very private school, very Samantha. I’m told not to smile in the first two photo sets. I’m to adopt an expression of “polite disdain,” which doesn’t come easily to me.

Theodora ignores the photographer’s directions. More yelling. The art director tries to sweet-talk her into doing what he wants. The photo editor comes over and informs Theodora that there’s no way she’ll have the cover if the pictures “suck.”

“I really don’t care,” Theodora says.

“Well, let me share this,” the woman says. “In two seconds, your phone will ring. And it will be your agent screaming in your ear.” She walks away.

In a minute, “We Are Family” entertains the photo shoot crowd. Theodora barks “Whatever” a lot. Then, “Fine.
Calm down.
”

By the time Belle and Jen arrive, we’ve gotten into the groove, as the photographer likes to say. When someone’s assistant comes over with a lunch menu and asks if we want any extras, Theodora says, “They’re in high school.” I have no idea what she’s talking about.

“Sex with a hot assistant!” Belle whispers, eyeing some very good-looking twenty somethings walking around.

“Belle!” Jen shushes her. “I’m sure he’s talking about lemons or dressing for the salads or something like that.”

Theodora laughs. “He’s talking about drugs. A joint.”

Belle and Jen and I stare at each other. We wait for Theodora to say she’s just kidding, but she doesn’t. She does say I might want to leave that part out of the essay I’m supposed to write about this whole experience for the magazine and for a special Theodora-focused issue of the high school paper.

Might
want to leave it out?

Oak City High Gazette

A RAFFLE FOR AN UNWORTHY CAUSE!

by Tim Conners, reporter, junior class

Rumor has it that a group of students has been selling raffle tickets for a tour of Theodora Twist’s bedroom—and for a half hour alone with the award-winning movie star. Where’s all the money going? The greedy group’s pockets.

“I don’t believe it,” Theodora told me earlier today. “It’s just more gossip, more rumors. But if it is true, anyone who bought a raffle ticket wasted their hard-earned cash. So I hope it’s not true!”

Mr. Opps is currently investigating the rumor. Anyone with information is urged to see the principal right away.

Emily

“I assume we’re invited to your party,” Samantha Paris says to me before English class on Friday morning. “If I’d known you were having a party, I would have canceled mine. Everyone’s going to yours now.”

I smile at her. “It’s going to be really crowded, so . . .”

She looks so pissed and so miserable that it’s all I need. “But I don’t believe in excluding anyone, so of course you and Samantha and Carin and April are invited.”

“Avril,” April corrects.

“See you tonight,” Zach says, smiling at me with that incredible smile.

“Anyone who wants to come can come,” I say defensively as Jen gives me a disappointed look.

My mom is thrilled that I’m having a party. She thinks it proves that doing the show is already changing my life.

“The house is going to fill up with people—and really popular people—because of Theodora. Not me,” I pointed out last night. “So it’s bull.”

My mom smiled. “You know, Em, sometimes it can be okay to let the ends justify the means.”

“I have no idea what you just said.”

“Having a famous roommate for a month is supposed to change your life,” she went on. “Parties, popularity, boyfriends. It’s what you
do
with what you’re suddenly given that’s the important thing.”

“So everyone’s coming here tomorrow night instead of going to a party I was excluded from. What am I supposed to do with that?”

She smiled again. “You’ll just have to figure it all out as it comes. Just like I’m doing. Just like Stew is doing.”

I glanced at Stew. He was sitting in his den, watching a game on TV, but folding laundry at the same time. His cameraman filmed him for a few minutes, then took a bathroom break. Stew, amazingly, kept folding.

“He can’t fold to save his life,” I said.

My mom laughed. “And that’s okay. It’s called a really good start.”

“So I still don’t get how this blind speed-dating thing is going to work,” Belle says that night as we’re getting ready for the party. We’re all wearing jeans and cute T-shirts. Belle borrowed one from Theodora and is convinced it makes her look curvier. It’s a plain black T-shirt from the Gap. “We have to go to the prom with whoever picks us?” As matchmaker extraordinaire, Belle has never been able to fix up herself.

“No, whoever you match with,” Theodora says, dabbing on some lip gloss. “Everyone can pick up to five people they would want to get to know better. If the person—or people—you pick also pick you, you’re given each other’s name and phone number.”

“But we have no idea who we’re picking,” I say. “That’s so weird. I could pick Todd Tuttle and not know it. Or Zach Archer.”

“But you probably wouldn’t,” Theodora says. “That’s the point. Guys like Todd and Zach are jerks. You’ll know it in two seconds.”

“And with a bag over his head,” Belle adds, “Zach won’t have the cute factor to make him seem nicer than he is.”

“And I won’t have the movie star factor to make me any different than anyone else,” Theodora says. “Guess I’ll find out if I have a good personality.”

I glance at her. I think she said that for the benefit of the camera. The whole thing has to be pretty strange for her. If she’s just another girl under that bag, what will she say? What will she talk about?

Buzz!
Doorbell.

Belle and Jen and I look at each other. This is my first party. And everyone who is anyone, as they say, is coming. My mom and Stew expect things to get totally out of control, number-of-people-wise. Which is why they are chaperoning. Stew will be in the living room the entire time, “reading” in his recliner in the corner. My mom will be gardening by moonlight in the backyard, where the party will definitely spill out.

“Where’s the keg?” Zach Archer’s friend Scott asks the moment he walks in with at least eight guys. Groups of people are behind them.

“This is a booze-free party,” Theodora says.

They stare at her. “Theodora Twist just spoke to me,” Scott says, swooning.

“Anyone caught with alcohol will be escorted out,” Stew announces loudly. All heads turn to him; then Belle puts on a CD and the party starts.

Theodora disappears in the crowd. I notice that Zach follows her, but she ignores him every time he tries to start up a conversation. She’s surrounded by groups everywhere she turns.

The Samanthas arrive in coordinated teeny-tiny miniskirts and tight pastel-colored tank tops. None of them speaks to me, of course. An hour into the party I realize no one is really speaking to me, except for Belle and Jen and Stephen and Tim Conners, who I promised a tour of the house for the
Oak City High Gazette.
We’re trailed by a group of people, peering in every room with bored faces, and Nicole. I take Tim through the first floor, where there’s barely room to move. We head upstairs. Out of the corner of my eye I see Todd Tuttle dart into my room. Jerk. He’s probably looking for something of Theodora’s to sell on eBay.

I hear a shriek. I run to my room and throw open the door and freeze. Samantha Paris is standing in my room— which is lit only by the bedside table lamp—in her bra and underwear. Todd Tuttle is holding what looks like a raffle ticket. They both look like they’re going to throw up.

“You’re not Theodora Twist,” Todd tells Samantha, who grabs her clothes from the back of my desk chair and runs into the bathroom. “Either produce her or give me back my two hundred bucks,” he yells at the closed door.

“Two hundred bucks?” Tim asks.

“I bought twenty raffle tickets to get a half hour alone with Theodora, and I won,” Todd explains, glaring at Samantha when she emerges.