The Daughters
Copyright © 2010 by Joanna Philbin
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Poppy
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Poppy is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company.
The Poppy name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
First eBook Edition: May 2010
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental
and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-316-08842-8
Contents
A Preview of
Daughters Break the Rules
T
o my parents
For everything
have formed the following rules and guidelines for optimum happiness and drama-free living:
1
. Never read tabloids or surf the celebrity gossip sites. But if you have to, try not to look at the stuff about your parents.
2
. All friends are good, but only another Daughter knows what your life is really like. Bond with as many as possible.
3
. Friends are always more important than guys.
Always
.
4
. Be nice to everyone, and if people
still
say you’re conceited, then just let it go.
5
. If you need to discuss parental drama, only do so with another Daughter. (See rule #2.)
6
. Never talk to the press about your parents. Especially when they’re hanging out in front of your house and yelling at you
to say stuff.
7
. Always date a guy at least a month before taking him to a red-carpet event. Same goes for taking him on your plane, bringing
him on tour, etc.
8
. If you see a Daughter being criticized on a blog, always write a post sticking up for her, even if you don’t know her.
9
. When meeting new people, only give them one name—your first one.
10
. You are not your parents, and your parents aren’t you. No matter how well-known—or mortifying—they are.
“Katia!”
“Katia!”
“Over here!”
“Over here!”
Lizzie Summers stood where she usually did when she was out with her mother—off to the side, hidden in the crowd, safely out
of frame—and watched the world’s most famous supermodel drive the paparazzi crazy.
“Katia!”
“Over here!”
With her shoulders thrown back, her back slightly arched, and one manicured hand placed jauntily on her hip, Lizzie’s mother
pivoted left and right, her multimillion-dollar smile so bright it could blind people. Today it was even brighter than usual,
because
Plenty
magazine had decided to kick off Fall Fashion Week with a luncheon in her honor. But like most Fashion Week events, there
were about fifteen minutes of frantic picture-taking before anything really got started.
“Katia!” someone yelled.
“You’re
beautiful
!” someone screamed.
Lizzie looked out the window of the Mandarin Oriental’s private dining room, down at the green domes of trees in Central Park
and beyond, at the elegant and crowded skyline of Fifth Avenue, and sighed.
Um, yeah
, she thought.
She’s beautiful. Understatement of the century
.
Her mother, Katia Summers, wasn’t just beautiful. One fashion designer (Galliano? Gaultier? Lizzie couldn’t remember) had
called Katia “walking proof of God.” And if her mother’s twenty-year career as a supermodel was any indication, everyone else
thought so, too.
As Katia’s only child, Lizzie had logged more hours of her life looking at her mother in person than just about anyone, and
even she had to agree: her mom was Seriously, Jaw-Droppingly, Is-That-Humanly-Possible Gorgeous. Day or night. Made-up or
fresh-faced. Bedhead or updo. No matter how few hours of sleep she’d had or how annoyed Lizzie was with her, Katia Summers
was never
not
breathtaking. And if beauty was really the sum of a person’s parts, then each of Katia’s parts was almost perfect. There
were the eyes that famously changed color, from turquoise to green to an exotic indigo-purple, depending on her mood; the
glacial cheekbones that made the lower half of her face a perfect V; her naturally pillowy lips and the trademark pout, caused
by a small overbite her parents had never fixed. There was the thick, extension-free blond hair that fell in waves to the
middle of her back, and her lean but voluptuous body.
Yes
, Lizzie would think, as she looked at her mom across the breakfast table or in the elevator—
perfect
.
Katia was so perfect that at thirty-seven, when most other models had already hung up their Manolos, she was still in peak
demand. She starred in the ad campaigns of at least one A-list designer each season, did spreads in the biggest issues of
Harper’s Bazaar
,
W
, and every country’s edition of
Vogue
, served as the face of L’Ete cosmetics, and once a year graced the cover of
GQ
or
Details
, covered by nothing but a macramé bikini bottom and her own strategically placed hands. And now she was about to make the
career leap that only a precious few supermodels could even attempt, let alone pull off. She would go from supermodel to super-mogul.
Clothes, perfume, housewares—Katia would design it all. Katia Coquette—a “French-inspired” (read: extra-sexy) lingerie line—was
just the beginning. And from the sight of the press clamoring to take her photo and the fashionistas watching Katia with approval,
Katia Coquette looked like it was going to be a huge hit.
Checking her watch, Lizzie walked over to the open bar.
It was already past noon, and she’d told her best friends, Carina and Hudson, that she’d meet them by one. School started
tomorrow, which meant that today they would grab something from Pinkberry, stroll through the West Village, and catch up on
their summers—their last-day-of-summer ritual. Since nursery school, Hudson and Carina had been her best friends. Lizzie thought
of them as the Brita filters for her life. If something happened to her, good or bad, she passed it through them, and when
it came out the other side, she would almost always feel better. Lizzie thought it was because the three of them had one huge
thing in common: they each knew what it was like to have a life divided up into two parts: public, and private. They’d even
made up their own rules for how to deal with it.
She leaned on the edge of the bar and slipped one throbbing foot out of her mom’s four-inch Christian Louboutin gold peep-toes.
She knew that Louboutins were supposedly the best shoes in the world, but they pinched her feet and crunched her toes. She
much preferred her thick-soled, extremely-comfortable, eighty-five-dollar Steve Madden platforms, but Katia had vetoed them
for these kinds of events.
“Ahhh,” she said, stretching her toes. Nearby a bartender sliced lemons on a cutting board.
“Feet hurt?” he asked. He looked like he was in his early twenties, and had one of those little patches of hair on his chin.
“I don’t know how people wear these things,” she said.
The bartender nodded but his gaze traveled over to where Katia was still surrounded by cameras.
“She’s gorgeous,” he said, almost slicing off a finger. “She’s even hotter in person.”
Lizzie looked over at her mom, still posing. She couldn’t resist. “That’s my mom,” she said.
The bartender’s mouth opened as he looked back. “That’s your
mom
?” he asked in disbelief.
Lizzie smiled. Nobody ever believed her. “Yep,” she said.
“Really?” the bartender asked. “It’s just you guys don’t really look anything…”
Before he could finish his sentence, Lizzie heard her mother’s voice calling from across the room.
“Lizzie! Honey! Come take a picture!”
Lizzie turned around. Her mother was waving one golden, perfectly toned arm in what looked to be her direction.
“Come on!” Katia yelled. “Take a picture!”
Here we go again
, Lizzie thought. Every time she went to an official function with her mom, she wound up getting roped into a photo session.
Couldn’t Katia have mercy on her, just once?
“Come on, Lizzie!” Katia mouthed over the din of the clicking cameras. “Just a couple!”
The crowd of skinny, pale fashion editors craned their heads to get a look at Lizzie. There was no getting out of this. She
slipped her foot back in the shoe and hobbled over to her mom, wishing that her father, Bernard, could have been Katia’s date
to this instead. But somehow he always seemed to be on deadline for his column for the
New York Times
. It was kind of annoying.
When she reached her, Katia draped her slender arm around Lizzie’s waist, and pulled her in tight. “My daughter!” she announced
to the crowd.
Lizzie faced the collection of black, vacant cameras lenses in front of her. For a long few seconds, nothing happened. Finally,
there was one weak flash. Then another. And then another.
And then…
“Can we have just a few more with you, Katia?” someone yelled. “
Just
you?”
“Yes, Katia, just you!”
“Hey, Mom,” Lizzie whispered into her mother’s ear. “Can I go meet my friends now?”
Katia squeezed Lizzie’s waist and removed her arm. “Of course,” she whispered.
“Congratulations,” Lizzie whispered back.
Her mom patted her on the back and turned back to the cameras. Lizzie was free.
As she walked out of the room, she felt her shoulders relax and her breath come back. Being at these kinds of things always
made her tense. In a few minutes, she’d be on the subway, hurtling downtown toward her friends, and she could forget all of
this. But the same question gnawed at her, for what was probably the billionth time, as her heels clicked on the smooth marble
floor of the hotel lobby and the mortification of the photo op slowly wore off: Did her mom
really
not know what her own daughter looked like?
There was a time when the paparazzi had wanted to take Lizzie’s picture, back when she and her mother had been the Sexy Supermodel
and her Adorable Kid. When Lizzie was little, the photographers had followed her and her mom everywhere: to nursery school,
to the park, to FAO Schwarz.
But then Lizzie got older. And Lizzie changed from the Adorable Kid to the Awkward Teenager. While Katia stayed the Sexy Supermodel.
Actually, awkward was putting it kindly. She was Different. Unusual. Odd.
Or, as Hudson and Carina liked to put it:
striking.
“Like what Uma Thurman probably looked like, until she got pretty,” Hudson would say.
But Uma Thurman didn’t have hazel eyes that were so enormous they seemed to bug out of her face. Or a long, meandering nose
that faked left and went right. Or straight, thick eyebrows that were as flat and furry as a Sesame Street character’s, even
when they were plucked. And Uma Thurman certainly didn’t have bright, curly red hair that was the texture of Brillo and turned
into a bush anytime the temperature went above eighty degrees.
And most importantly, Uma Thurman had not been
expected
to be beautiful. Who expected the daughters of Buddhism professors to turn into Hollywood actresses? But the only daughter
of Katia Summers, otherwise known as “Walking Proof of God,” was expected to at least be cute. And that wasn’t quite what
had happened.
Lizzie liked to think that her weird looks meant she could avoid the paparazzi. If she were out with her mom, and they got
surrounded coming out of a café or Starbucks, clearly she could stay on the sidelines and none of the photographers would
mind. But that wasn’t how Katia saw it. Every chance she got, she wanted Lizzie in the photo. Lizzie figured that she was
either oblivious to the fact she had a weird-looking kid or trying to prove a point. But how could a supermodel think that
looks didn’t matter? As she walked down into the stifling heat of the subway station, Lizzie decided that maybe her mom
was
just oblivious. Which was worse.