Gorgeous (12 page)

21

T
HE REST OF THE WEEKEND
was hell.

Sunday morning Quinn woke me up to sneak back to the guest room to spy again because Mom and Dad were in the study. When we got the baby monitor working, we heard them talking about whether they were going to lose the house.
How do you lose a house?
I almost asked, but then I got it: lose, like not own it anymore. Our house? Quinn and I stared at each other with our hands over our mouths. “Did she say she cashed out her equity as collateral?”

I shrugged. “Some of those words, I guess. You know what that means?”

Quinn closed her eyes. “It means we’re going to lose everything.”

I put my arms around her and we just sat like that for a while.

Compared to that, really, my friendship problems were nothing. That’s what I told myself. The thing was, that didn’t cheer me up at all. It’s not like,
Oh, now it’s all in perspective
; more like,
Oh, great, absolutely everything sucks at once.
It just felt like the floor was turning to dust under me and there was nothing solid to grab on to.

My phone, despite being plugged in, read,
Unable to charge
. Sometimes, just to taunt me, it beeped twice and flashed the words in green, blue, yellow, red:
Unable to charge
.

Nobody was online, either.

Phoebe, golden child, woke up just before noon and told us over cereal what a great time she’d had at her party. Even in my crabby state I managed to be a little happy for her, despite the fact that Mom had lent her the necklace she never took off, and Phoebe kept pawing the sapphire hanging there in her tan little neck notch.
We see it,
I managed to not scream. I just complimented her on how she looked, listened to what a great time she had with her friends and also kissing her boyfriend at the end in the parking lot under a weeping willow—and managed not to throw up even once.

Quinn and I decided not to tell Phoebe yet about the house. At least we could protect her for a little while. We told ourselves we were being good sisters to her.

I went to bed feeling so darned proud of myself. Not. I lay there going over my situation. My family was screwed. We were going to have to move—out of our house, my house, my home. And to where? With no money, where were we expecting to go? Maybe we would have to move in with my grandmother.
Holy crap.
Just as I was finally drifting off into a nightmare, my phone honked twice, to remind me that it was unable to charge.
Thanks, great.
And my life was unable to claw its way out of the toilet. I decided to stop obsessing about family and torture myself about friends instead: My old ex–best friend was probably giving me the silent treatment for (she had to think) blowing her off mid-texting, which, to Jade, would be the height and depth of bitchiness. She was ignoring me online, anyway, and wouldn’t answer her cell when I called from the landline. My new ex–best friend was apparently lying when she said she forgave me for lying to her (I know, I know, karma is a boomerang) and as revenge was hooking up with the boy I loved. Who was, of course, more into her. Who wouldn’t be?

And I had an appointment to try to be a model smack in the middle of English, in twelve hours. During the final I hadn’t studied for. Great, maybe I could add failing out of high school to my list of glorious accomplishments. That was when I remembered my other homework from English that I’d blown off completely because it was too ridiculous to even attempt: write your autobiography in six words. Yeah, right. How about,
I need more than six words
?

I got a pen and wrote that down, just in case we had to read our autobiographies out loud. That got me thinking that maybe I would go for the photo shoot, if only to avoid the horror show of trying to write essays on books I’d never read.

Sleep was obviously out of the question, so I went to the bathroom. When I flicked on the light, the quote card Jade had made was the first thing I saw, and as I wondered if I had done anything all day that scared me, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and jumped. Okay, seeing yourself in the mirror might not have been what Mrs. Roosevelt meant, but I was kind of a sight.

My eyes were bugging out with intensity, and my hair was practically standing straight out in all directions.

Gorgeous? Ha!

I took a good close look at my face, trying to see for real if anything had changed other than my phone’s personality. It was hard to tell, because I generally tried to avoid looking too closely and therefore often didn’t recognize myself in mirrors. My eyes, with their hard-to-say-what color, were still way far apart from each other. My nose was still long and narrow, with a slight detour halfway down. My lips had disappearing issues, and that hideous mole still camped out near my mouth. Nope. It was just a dream, a fluke, a nothing.
I would be an idiot,
I told myself,
to even think I have a shot
.

And why would I even care? It’s not like all my life I’d wanted to be a model. I was so not about my looks—I couldn’t be farther from a pretty girl, hot and cute and sexy. Oh, please! I totally never cared how I looked or what I wore. I mean, sure, it would be nice, I thought, to have people think I was hot. Or even cute. But that wasn’t me. I was more of a…

I stopped, my hands resting on either side of my sink, and stared into my eyes in the mirror.

I am…what? In six words…

I am Quinn’s sister and Phoebe’s.

I am not a gorgeous girl.

I am getting my homework done!

Insecure lonely insomniac, taking life bumpily.

Despite complete self-absorption, unrecognizable in mirrors.

I picked up my brush and tried to yank it through my ratty, crazy hair, but there were just too many knots and it was making my eyes water. I threw open the under-sink cabinet and grabbed the scissors.

Stop,
I told myself.
This is always, always a mistake.

So the hell what?
I decided, and started to cut my hair off.

“What did you do?” Phoebe asked me in the morning when I came out of my room, dropping my dead cell phone into my backpack anyway, for luck.

“Bad?” I asked, touching my choppy short hair.

Her big green eyes opened wide as she tilted her head and looked at my hair. “Different,” she said. “Maybe you need gel.”

“Okay,” I said, and followed her to her bathroom.

As she wet her hands and rubbed some gel between them, she asked if anybody else had seen my new style yet. I told her she was the first. She smiled, then stood back to look at my gelled hair. She started to laugh, and wouldn’t let me look in her mirror.

“Phoebe!” I yelled.

“I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it,” she said.

“I’m gonna miss the bus,” I complained. “Why are you still in your pajamas?”

“I’m done,” she said. “Remember? I’m in high school now! I’m so psyched.”

“Oh, you should be,” I said. “It’s a total party.”

“You want some lip gloss?” she offered.

I turned and checked myself out in the mirror. I looked like a stranger. “No, thanks,” I said.

“I didn’t really understand your text that you sent me at my party.”

“There wasn’t anything to get,” I told her. How does she manage to walk around that bubbleheaded? How confusing is
have fun
?

She shrugged. “Okay. How about my long socks?” I tried to stop her but she ran into her room and yanked stuff out of her already overflowing drawers until she came up with the longest pair of tube socks I’d ever seen.

“Why, did you wreck my flip-flops?”

“No,” she said. “You just look so funky with the hair, I thought…”

I took her socks and tugged them on. She stood back and looked. “Cool,” she said.

“As cool as the other side of the pillow?” I asked.

She laughed. It was a really sweet, generous laugh. “Sure. Yeah. Definitely cool. Wear your Chucks.”

“You think?” I checked her full-length mirror and, with my red sunglasses dropped down over my eyes to prevent me from making eye contact with myself, I almost kind of agreed.

“You should go,” she said.

I cursed and dashed out, but at her door I stopped and said, “Thanks. Hey, Phoebe?”

“Yeah?”

I tried to think of how to ask her advice about whether I should cut school to go into the city by myself and try to be a model, or blow it off and lie low and not make a fool of myself and probably get in trouble again. But the answer was so obvious I didn’t even have to ask.

“Congratulations,” I said instead. “On graduating.”

She smiled her radiant, perfect smile. “Thanks,” she said. “Everybody is going to love how you look today,” she called after me as I dashed down the stairs. “I swear!”

Well,
love
might have been a strong word. Everybody noticed, that was for sure. On our way to the bus, Quinn had stared, but eventually said no, it actually looked very cool, and asked if everything was okay with me. I told her everything was fine and couldn’t a person cut her hair without it raising alarms? She left me alone after that.

A few people complimented me, including Susannah Millstein, who said, “You look great! What’s up?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“I got your text, and…”

I tried to think if I had texted her. I hadn’t.

“I didn’t see Roxie today,” Susannah said, then leaned close and whispered, “Maybe she didn’t want to face you.”

“Were you at the party Saturday night?” I asked her.

Susannah blushed. “Well, not at the…Did you mean mine? I just had a few people over. Well, two people. So it wasn’t, like, a party, not like the one everybody…So, I guess most people didn’t really want to come to mine so much, but I didn’t think ninth graders…I texted you about it, but you didn’t…So, I just figured you were at the…”

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t get your text.”

“No, no, mine was way boring anyway. No worries,” Susannah said, and smiled weakly. “Plenty of chips left, if you want to come over sometime…”

“Sounds great,” I said.

Jade walked by fast, ignoring me even when I called her name. I followed her to first period and slipped into my seat, feeling everyone’s eyes on me.

“Allison?” the Fascist asked.

“What?” I asked defensively. Did she think I really cared what
she
thought about how I looked?
Could everybody just stop looking at me like that, please?

She handed me a slip of paper. I’d apparently been chosen to present as Gouverneur Morris at the Wednesday assembly. “Congratulations,” she said, beaming at me. “You did a good job. You’ve really pulled yourself together lately.” Then she whispered, “And you look terrific, too. Good luck on the final!”

I cursed silently for having forgotten all about the social studies final, having been too busy not studying for the English final to pay decent attention to not studying for this one. I chewed on my pen and listened to the clock tick as I made my guesses about events in history. If I didn’t decide soon whether to go be a model or stay in school flunking finals, the decision would be made for me. When the bell rang to end first period, I checked my wallet. Yes, there was twenty-seven dollars in it; I could get a round-trip train ticket for sure. So that wouldn’t settle it for me. Something had to.

On the way out of the classroom, I grabbed Jade. “My phone died,” I told her. “Did you get my messages?”

She stared at my fingers on her sleeve until I let go. “What did you do to yourself?” she asked.

I forced myself not to touch my hair. “I needed a change.”

“You look like a freak,” she whispered. “And when we text, I would appreciate it if you didn’t copy it to every person in your contact list.”

“What?” I yelled. “I didn’t!”

She was walking away, with Serena following. Serena daringly turned around fast and mouthed, “Yes, you did!”

Then, with a quick glance at Jade, she dashed back to me and held up her phone. On it was a text from me to her:

Roxie Green is a jealous slut.

I just stood there with my mouth hanging open.

“Allison?”

I turned around. It was Tyler. I walked away from him.

“Hey,” he said. “Wait up!”

I didn’t. I kept walking. I walked right out of school.

He followed me. “Where are you going?”

“Train station,” I called back, over my shoulder.

“Why?” He had caught up to me.

“To be a model,” I said, without looking at him.

“Oh,” he said.

“You’ll be late for second period,” I said after a few moments.

“Yeah,” he said. He touched my hair near the back of my neck with his fingertips.

“What?” I asked.

“Fierce,” he said.

“I’m thinking of bleaching it,” I said.

“Cool,” he said. “Um, I got your text.”

Fantastic
, I thought.
Why don’t I chop my own head off?
“It wasn’t intended for you,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Roxie was pretty devastated….”

“She got it too?”

He nodded.

“About her being jealous?”

“‘Jealous slut,’ I think was the phrase.”

“My phone is possessed.”

“You mentioned that.”

We walked awhile without talking, until I stopped in front of him. “Look,” I said. “I know what happened Saturday night.”

“What happened?” he asked, all innocent, but he blushed deep red. That was all the proof I needed.

“Please,” I said. “It’s fine, you don’t owe me anything, we’re not going out or anything, though she is going out with your best friend, which is kind of lousy of you both, by the way.”

“Allison, that’s completely—”

“But would you please do me the favor of not trailing me around town? I have a train to catch.” I sounded so like my mother I almost smiled, so I quickly pivoted and walked away.

He caught up again.

“Roxie is my friend, too,” he said. “She’s physical; she’s flirty. That doesn’t make her a slut. I wasn’t hooking up with her; we were just hanging out.”