Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GROSSET & DUNLAP
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Text copyright © 2011 by Taylor Morris. Illustrations © 2011 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. All rights reserved. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Printed in the U.S.A.
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ISBN : 978-1-101-51382-8
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To my niece Catherine,
whose smile alone is more gorgeous than all
the styling tricks in the books—TM
CHAPTER 1
“Mickey, please help!” Lizbeth said, staring at herself in my three-way mirror.
I looked carefully at Lizbeth’s long honey-blond hair, which Kristen had attempted to funkify in a cool way. The key word here was attempted.
“My hair looks like it’s been attacked by the wrong end of a hair dryer,” she said.
Kristen had braided Lizbeth’s hair into several messy sections, making her normally sleek hair look like it’d been sent through a meat grinder.
Kristen had also twisted another section right above Lizbeth’s forehead into a curly lump, like a cat curled up for a long nap.
“It’s supposed to be weird,” Kristen said, planting her fists on her hips. “Hello, don’t you ever read Vogue? It’s the new look: ‘Pretty Ugly.’ Right, Eve?”
We all turned to look at Eve, who sat in the corner where she’d been painting her nails a thick, bright white. Eve was fair skinned with white-blond hair. Playing up that paleness worked well for her.
“Right,” Eve said, checking out Lizbeth’s hair, her eyes wide. “Pretty darn ugly.”
Lizbeth and I laughed.
“Very funny,” Kristen said.
“Kristen, I love you like a sister,” Lizbeth said. “But I cannot show my face outside this bedroom with this hair. Especially not to Mickey’s mom!”
I totally got where she was coming from. My mom is the owner of Hello, Gorgeous!, the best salon in town. She definitely has high standards when it comes to style, and you always kind of want to look your best around her.
I playfully nudged Kristen aside with a bump of my hip and said, “Don’t worry. The pro is here.”
“Okay, fine. Hey, Eve,” Kristen said. “Lemme do your hair?”
Eve, who was blowing on her nails, looked up at Kristen. “Well . . . ,” she said, looking at Lizbeth’s terrorized head, which I was trying to brush out to look something more like, well, hair. Eve had just moved here a month or so ago, so she really didn’t know Kristen and Lizbeth that well. I was still getting to know them myself since we’d only recently started hanging out, but at least I had gone to school with them since we were kids. “Okay,” she said, pushing herself off the floor carefully, mindful of her nails.
Lizbeth, Kristen, Eve, and I weren’t going anywhere tonight. We were just fixing our hair, doing our nails, and having my first-ever sleepover, thanks very much. Camping in the backyard with Jonah in elementary school clearly didn’t count as a real sleepover. Even though he’s been my best friend forever, he is, after all, a boy. He’d never let me style his hair, and believe me, I’d tried.
I was so excited about all the girls coming over that I even took the next day off work to hang out all afternoon with my friends. That was a huge deal, because Saturdays are the craziest days at the salon.
Working at my mom’s salon had helped me overcome my shyness and actually start talking to people. I used to watch Kristen and Lizbeth at the salon and at school, and they were never shy about talking to anyone, especially not Kristen. She had no problem talking to adults, other girls, and even boys she thought were cute. (She loved embarrassing Lizbeth by calling out to boys Lizbeth liked—especially ones named Matthew Anderson.) Now they were here, hanging out at my house for a makeover-themed sleepover with Eve. Sometimes I still couldn’t believe how much had changed in a little over a month.
“Okay,” I said after finally getting all the tangles and braids out of Lizbeth’s hair. “Do you want to look like you’re about to be photographed for a catalog or like you’re about to walk down the runway?”
“Runway,” she said. “Definitely.”
“New York or Paris?”
She thought for a moment. “Paris.”
“What’s the difference?” Eve asked as she blew on her nails while Kristen combed her long hair.
“Paris looks are edgier than New York.” I took the two-inch-barrel curling iron from the side of my vanity drawer and plugged it in. I’d read enough styling and fashion magazines to know that the runways in Paris took crazier, more outlandish fashion risks than anywhere else, even New York—overconstructed dresses with performance-piece hats, accessories, trains. Every outfit was like an exaggerated dream, pure fantasy and fun.
I took a chunk of hair from the crown of Lizbeth’s head and locked it in place with a butterfly clip, then took the rest of her hair and brushed it into a low, side ponytail. Then I started back-combing the top.
“So, you guys,” Kristen said. “What do you think of this Career Exploration class thing we have to do?”
“I’m vomiting,” Lizbeth said.
“I don’t know,” Eve said. “I think it could be cool, seeing what it’s like to work a real job.”
“Hello,” Kristen said, “we’re thirteen. Are we even legally allowed to work?”
Lizbeth shrugged. “Mickey does.”
Got that right, I thought. After years of begging, on my thirteenth birthday Mom finally let me start working at her salon as a sweeper.
Here’s the deal with Career Exploration: It’s a special class that the seventh-graders have to take in the spring where we meet twice a week to talk about jobs. We’re supposed to learn about personal responsibility, working with others, and discipline. To achieve this, we have to pick a job to work for six hours a week for three weeks. Lucky for me, I was one of the few people already working.
“I’m thinking of working at the day care,” Eve said.
“You’re choosing to work with screaming kids who wet their pants?” Kristen said.
“I like kids,” Eve said a bit defensively. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, me?” Kristen said, like she’d never expected to be asked but was secretly waiting eagerly for the question. “I’m going to work for my rich great-aunt. She has her own radio station and gets to interview, like, all these famous people for her show.”
“She owns an entire radio station?” Lizbeth asked. “That’s pretty major.”
“Yeah,” Kristen said. “I know.”
“Your turn, Lizbeth,” I said, smoothing out the top of her hair after I’d back-combed it. “Where are you going to work?”
“I’ll probably just end up working at my mom’s law firm doing filing or something equally horrible,” Lizbeth said.
I turned her around in the chair to face me and used the pointed end of a comb to piece out the front of her poufed hair, trying to make a tiny, little part.
“Whatever you decide, it has to be by Monday, and if you don’t find one on your own you’ll have to pick one from that list they have. Jonah said he heard those jobs were terrible, like working for the sanitation department or in a hospital cleaning out bedpans.” I put my hand over Lizbeth’s brow. “Close your eyes,” I said, and sprayed strong-hold hair spray all over her hair. After a couple of minor adjustments, I turned her around to face the mirrors. “So? What do you think?”
Her face said it all—eyes widened, mouth dropped open slightly as the corners turned up. She loved it.
“I love it!” she squealed.
See?
“Mickey, you’re amazing!” Eve said.
“Seriously,” Kristen said as she finished up Eve’s lumpy, loose french braid. “Nice job.”
“How did you think this up?” Lizbeth asked, turning her head this way and that so she could catch the different angles in the three-way mirror.
“Sally Hershberger did it once for some celeb at one of the big awards shows,” I said.
“Sally who?” Kristen asked.
“Only one of the most famous hair-stylists-to-the-stars around,” I said. I loved knowing all this stuff my friends had no idea about. “This doesn’t look nearly as amazing as what she did, though. A pretty good interpretation, I guess.”
“If only we were going out tonight to show it off,” Lizbeth said, still admiring her hair.
“We should at least take some pictures,” Kristen said, taking out her cell phone. “We can’t let these amazing styles go to waste.”
After I took several pictures of the new ’dos, I plopped back down on my bed and picked up a thick copy of Le Look, a high-end fashion magazine from Paris. It cost a fortune in shipping and only came out twice a year, but Mom and I both loved it. It had thick pages and incredible styles and fantasy-world layouts. I mean, I didn’t know too many people who went hiking in stiletto booties and ball gowns like these models did. But one spread really caught my eye.
“Eve, look,” I said, holding out the magazine to her. “This looks like you.” She sat on the bed next to me.
In one of the editorials, the pictures looked like they were all shot with a silver lens—like black and white except shinier—making the models look like new robots. The models had long white-blond hair with perfectly straight bangs—probably wigs—and wore metallic miniskirts and boots.
“With your pale skin and hair, you would totally fit in,” I said.
Eve didn’t look flattered. “Um, thanks?” she said. “They look like aliens or something.”
“But in a really cool way,” I said. “These magazines are about taking the crazy fantasy and working it into something you can actually wear. Like, maybe you wouldn’t color your hair silver, but if I added some bright highlights it’d shimmer like the sun was always shining on it.”
“If you added color?” Eve said, smiling slightly. “Or maybe not.”
“But it’s easy!” I said. “It’s like I’ve been watching the training video my entire life.” But Eve was like, no way, so I dropped it.
Looking at her crisp white nails gave me an idea. I got the bottle of black polish I’d used around Halloween last year and a superfine makeup brush I’d never used. “Trust me to do something to your nails?” I asked.
“Of course.” She extended her hand to me. I brushed thin black strokes over the white polish. “So cool,” she said. “It looks like tree branches in the snow.”
I smiled, watching as Eve held out her hand to inspect her nails, Lizbeth posed in the mirror with her new style, and Kristen carefully read over a how-to style article in another magazine.
The truth? I couldn’t believe this was all happening. I finally had friends of the girl variety. They were at my house for a sleepover. And they thought I was a styling genius.
I couldn’t imagine things getting any better.
CHAPTER 2
The next morning, I had pictured us sleeping in late, then getting up to eat fresh croissants that Dad would pick up from CJ’s Patisserie, which was right next door to Hello, Gorgeous! Then, I thought, we could all go to the mall and see a movie or just pig out on fresh-baked cookies and free samples in the food court.
Not quite how it went. We didn’t even sleep in. Eve was up by nine thirty brushing her teeth. Lizbeth stretched out of bed, then walked over to the vanity. “What do you think?” she asked, smoothing down her jacked-up hair. “Do I look like I’m ready for the tennis courts?”
“Your hair is about as fierce as your backhand,” Kristen said.
“But I have a terrible backhand,” Lizbeth said. Kristen smiled. “Oh. Very funny. Mickey?” She pointed to her hair and I went to fix it, starting with the ponytail.
“You’re playing tennis today?” I asked as I fastened the hair tie, then smoothed out the top.
“Yeah,” she said. “Mom and I are doing the mother-daughter thing. Brunch first at eleven.”
“Oh,” I said. I was bummed she was leaving, but at least Kristen and Eve and I could still have a fun afternoon.
We all headed downstairs. Dad had, in fact, gone to CJ’s and gotten us chocolate, almond, and plain croissants, which we all gobbled up.
“Our last Saturday of freedom before Career Ex starts,” I said, even though I usually worked Saturdays.
“I still can’t believe we’re being forced to work,” Lizbeth said. “Seems like it should be illegal or something.”
“Hurry and finish,” Kristen said to Lizbeth, chugging down the fresh-squeezed orange juice. “We gotta jet.”
“You’re going to play tennis, too?” I asked.
“Her mom is dropping me off at ballet,” Kristen said, picking up almond slivers from her plate with her fingers. “Although the last thing I want to do after eating this awesome pastry is put on a leotard.”
“What about me?” Lizbeth said. “I’m about to go eat again.”
“I’m glad you guys came over,” I said, trying to hide that I was disappointed they were leaving so soon. “It was fun.”
“Definitely,” Lizbeth said. “Next time we’ll do it at my house. Maybe we can all go to the club first for dinner in the café.”
“Totally,” I said.
And then they left. Eve and I watched Lizbeth and Kristen walk down the lawn to the sidewalk and head home. At least Eve and I still had the entire day ahead of us.
“So! I was thinkin
g,” I began. “Wanna go to the mall and try on makeup and go to a movie or something?”
“Don’t you have to work today?” Eve asked.
“I took the day off to hang out with everyone,” I said, feeling kind of lame. “I guess I shouldn’t have assumed no one had plans for the day.”
“Maybe it’s loser-ish to admit this,” Eve said, “but I hardly ever have plans, especially since moving here. So I’m totally free for the day. We can still have fun.”
“Yeah, totally,” I said. “Just us. I can show you the best place at the mall to buy accessories.” I’d been wanting to hang out more with Eve—today was the perfect chance.
“Perfect,” Eve said. “You don’t know this, but I am an expert mall shopper. My plan of attack of the stores is as brilliant as—oh no,” she said suddenly. She was looking out at the street. “My mom.”
A tan four-door had just pulled up to the curb, and the driver—Eve’s mom—waved at us. Eve waved back.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
We watched her mom walk across the lawn to us. She had short, spiky hair and wore yoga pants and flip-flops.
“Hi, girls!” she said as she approached us. “Hi, Mickey, how are you?”
“Hi, Mrs. Benton,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Mom,” Eve said. “What are you doing here?”
Mrs. Benton turned back to Eve and said, “I was just running some errands and I ran into Deanna Keller, the woman who runs the day care center you want to work at. She said she’d love it if you came down today and talked to her. I can take you now before we go visit Nana.” She looked at me. “You girls have fun last night?”
“Yes, we had a good time.”
“Look what Mickey did to my nails,” Eve said, holding her hands out for inspection.
Her mom glanced down at them and said, “Cute.”
I wanted to tell her that I had a whole day planned, but it seemed like she wasn’t asking Eve if she was ready to leave. She was telling.
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