by Meg Cabot
I felt myself turning red…
‘I don’t know about this, Free,’ I said as Frida herded me towards the hot-food line and thrust a tray into my hands.
‘Trust me,’ Frida said. ‘Even supermodels have to eat, don’t they?’
Maybe so. But it might have been easier simply to get something out of the vending machines down the hall, acid reflux or not. I was excruciatingly aware of being the centre of everyone’s attention as I made my way down the food line. My selections were buzzed about as if I’d been Tiger Woods, lining up a game-winning putt.
‘She’s going for the tofu patty,’ I heard them whispering. Then, seconds later, ‘An apple! She took an apple!’
I wanted to throw down my tray and run from the room — run out of the school and all the way back to the hospital and up to the fourth floor into Dr Holcombe’s office. ‘I need a new body! I can’t be in this one a second longer! I can’t be Nikki Howard! I just want to be someone normal!’
Instead, I stepped up to the cashier to pay for my food. Then I followed Frida to her table…
Where the entire junior-varsity cheerleading team was sitting. They all stopped talking as Frida and I approached. I fully expected them to say, ‘What are you doing, trying to sit at our table, loser? The geek table is over THERE.’
But I’d forgotten. I’m not Em Watts, geek, any more. I’m Nikki Howard.
And Nikki Howard is apparently welcome everywhere (except the computer lab).
‘Oooh!’ a dark-haired girl cried, scooting her tray over. ‘I’m so glad you came over here. Sit by me! Sit by me, I’m your hugest fan!’
Frida took the place the girl was offering though, after giving her a severe look. ‘Now, Mackenzie,’ she said sternly. ‘Remember what I said.’
‘Sorry!’ Mackenzie turned beet red. ‘Right, no gushing. Sorry. Sorry.’
The other girls, all smiling up at me, scooted over to make room. I felt a little uneasy. I couldn’t quite believe I was being WELCOMED at a table belonging to the Walking Dead.
But it soon became apparent our table was THE table to be at. Especially when, no sooner had Frida made introductions (none of which I retained, since all her friends appeared to be called either Taylor, Tyler or Tory), a familiar voice cried, ‘There you are!’
And I turned my head to see Whitney Robertson standing there with a tray of salad and diet soda, Lindsey and several other key Walking Dead members from the junior class — including one from the senior class, Jason Klein — right behind her.
‘Oh my God,’ Whitney said. ‘I’ve been looking all over for you.’
And the next thing I knew, she was shoving red and gold uniforms aside to make way for herself, her boyfriend and her best friend.
‘Thanks muchly,’ she said to Frida’s friends, who hadn’t so much as moved as been pushed out of the way. ‘So, Nikki, how are you enjoying your first day here at TAHS?’
‘She’s liking it a lot, Whitney’ Frida, who’d apparently appointed herself my spokesperson, looked enormously pleased. I guess it’s not every day a freshman gets graced with the presence of the most popular girl in school at her lunch table. ‘Aren’t you, Nikki?’
I took a swig of my milk (yeah. Nikki likes milk. Two per cent. She’s got acid reflux, not lactose intolerance).
‘Yeah,’ I said after I’d swallowed.
‘I was telling Nikki today in Public Speaking,’ Whitney said — then added, as an aside to everyone else at the table, ‘Nikki and I have Public Speaking together—’
‘Me too!’ Lindsey cried. ‘I’m in Nikki’s Public Speaking class too! Also her Spanish class. And I’m on the waiting list for that Marc Jacobs tote… ’
‘— how we feel so fortunate that she decided to attend our school, out of all the schools in the city’ Whitney went on, as if Lindsey hadn’t interrupted. ‘Wasn’t I, Nikki?’
‘Yeah,’ I said after swallowing a bite of the salad I’d gotten to accompany my tofu patty… which tasted fantastic, and not at all like the cardboard box I’d been expecting it to taste like.
‘I just wish we’d had more advance notice of her enrolment,’ Whitney went on, to everyone at the table. ‘Because then we could have organized a proper welcome for her.’
All the girls nodded in agreement. Jason, I noticed, was staring at my boobs. I’m not even kidding.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Thanks. That’s really great. But I feel plenty welcome enough.’
‘Well,’ Whitney said ‘I’m going to be sure to get you a list of extracurriculars, in case you decide you might want to join in on some of the fantastic clubs and organizations our school has to offer. I, for instance, am president of the junior class, as well as captain of the Spirit Club.’
‘Really,’ I said. ‘The Spirit Club. What’s that?’
Not that I didn’t know. I just wanted to see if she’d describe it the way Christopher and I used to: as the Society for the Lame.
‘Oh, well, the Spirit Club makes an effort to foster school spirit amongst the student population by promoting events in and around Tribeca Alternative such as pep rallies, health fairs, aluminium can drives, casino nights, weekend carnivals—’
‘Casino nights,’ Lindsey chimed in.
‘I said that already,’ Whitney said, giving Lindsey a dirty look. ‘Really what it’s all about is —’ Whitney lowered her voice as if she was afraid of being overheard — ‘some people who go to this school don’t appreciate all the fantastic programmes and opportunities it has to offer. So the Spirit Club does its best to get students excited about these events, such as games, community-service programmes… things that will look great on their college applications.’
I blinked at her. ‘Why are you whispering?’
She glanced around, then seemed to realize that the school’s two worst malcontents — Em Watts and Christopher Maloney — weren’t within hearing distance. ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that some people think having school spirit is silly. But I don’t think there’s anything silly about wanting to take as much advantage as possible of what, for me at least, have truly been some of the best years of my life!’
Whoa. If high school was supposed to be the best years of my life — at least so far — I was truly destined to have a sucky adulthood.
‘Wow,’ I said again. ‘That sounds… great.’
‘Enough about this school crap,’ Jason Klein said, leaning forward so that his massive — and, to me, revolting — biceps swelled beneath the sleeves of his pink polo. ‘What clubs can you get us into?’
‘Jason!’ Whitney lady-slapped him on the shoulder while she giggled. ‘Stop! Don’t pay any attention to him. He’s so bad.’
Jason ignored her. ‘I saw you got into Cave last night,’ Jason said. ‘Can you get us into Cave?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe what?’ Jason demanded. ‘Can you get us in or not?’
‘If it’s Jerks Who Interrupt Their Girlfriends Night,’ I said. ‘Then I can probably get you in.’
Whitney gasped. Lindsey let out a giant horse laugh.
But what impressed me most was that quite a few of the JV cheerleaders turned around and high-fived one another, impressed by the fact that I’d dissed Jason Klein. If this, I realized, was the kind of company Frida was keeping, then I had been quite badly underestimating the TAHS JV cheerleading squad — and possibly cheerleaders everywhere. They were a fun bunch.
Frida, however, just glared at me. I mouthed What? and shrugged. I really don’t see what else she’d expected me to say.
But Jason took it good-naturedly.
‘OK, OK,’ he said, smiling sheepishly. ‘You got me. I’ll shut up.’
Which was just another sign of how different life is when you’ve got a supermodel’s face as opposed to just a normal one. If I had said something like that to Jason back when I’d been in my Em Watts body, I’d never have heard the end of it… especially from Whitney.
But since I was
Nikki, and not Em, all was forgiven. In fact, as we were putting our trays away, just before the bell rang, Whitney sidled up to me and, to show there were no hard feelings, said in a low voice, I guess so the others wouldn’t overhear, ‘Listen, Nikki, if you’re not doing anything after school, maybe you could come up to my place and I could help you out with some of your homework. I know it must seem like you’re never going to catch up at this rate — plus I know it’s been a while since you were last in school. So I just thought—’
‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘Thanks. But I have a shoot.’
Even if I hadn’t, no way would I waste any of my precious time going to Whitney Robertson’s penthouse so she could show me the wrong way to compute the area of a triangle. Or try on different-coloured sparkle eyeshadow, or whatever it is the Walking Dead do in their spare time.
‘Some other time though,’ I added with a smile when I saw her face fall.
As soon as she saw the smile, Whitney smiled back.
‘Great!’ she gushed. ‘Well, toodle-oo!’
Seriously. That’s what she said to me. Toodle-oo.
I kind of wished Cosy had been with me, because I could have looked down at her and gone, ‘Well, Toto. I guess we’re not in Kansas any more.’
Except that I’ve never actually been to Kansas.
Although I’m fairly sure Nikki has. Nikki’s been everywhere.
Except where I most want to be.
Twenty-two
The Elle shoot was a snap compared to the Vanity Fair shoot the day before. For one thing, I at least had a little bit of an idea what I was supposed to be doing now. Plus, I didn’t have to smush my boobs against anyone this time, or wrap myself around anyone else’s physical person (such as Brandon Stark). This time, it was just me.
Don’t get me wrong. I still had to smile just the right way, but it was more important that the gowns I was wearing flowed right. I swear, every two minutes I heard, ‘Wait — hold on —’ and someone was running over to adjust a fold or smooth a wrinkle. It was a little maddening.
And even though I don’t particularly care about fashion, I sort of get it now. I mean, about why other people care about it, and why it’s interesting and sort of important to some people.
The truth is, fashion can be sort of… well, fun.
I know! I never ‘got’ fashion before. Clothes were just things you threw on to keep from being naked or cold.
But the dresses — I mean, gowns — that were at this shoot were so gorgeous, I actually caught my breath when I saw them on me. I can’t even imagine where you’d WEAR a bright red long dress trimmed with dyed black ostrich feathers with a neckline that plunges to your sternum. I mean, except maybe to the Oscars.
But I couldn’t help but be curious about who’d designed them — which surprised the people at the shoot, because they said I should have known without asking, just by the feel and look of them.
But then Kelly reminded them quickly of my head injury (which the hairstylist, Vivian, had already found). And then they all wanted to talk about that (my interview was going to run in the same issue, but I wasn’t meeting the journalist who was doing it until Saturday).
Anyway, they all took great pleasure in telling me about the designers who had gowns at the shoot, and other favourite designers of Nikki’s as well. And I have to admit, their stories were kind of interesting. Like, even my MOM would have gotten a kick out of the story of Miuccia Prada, a feminist mime who took over her grandfather’s leather goods company in 1978, making ‘Miu Miu’ one of the thirty most powerful women in Europe (according to the Wall Street Journal), with an estimated fortune of 1.4 billion dollars.
And Coco Chanel, who popularized the little black dress for women and founded a fashion empire, becoming the only fashion designer ever to make Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Twentieth Century.
All this — plus the lecture the make-up guy gave me about the dark circles under my eyes, thanks to my lack of sleep, and the fact that my mom would not stop calling (but I couldn’t exactly pick up in the middle of a fashion shoot), my employer is maybe (OK, probably) spying on me, and the tugging and wrenching and holding my breath required to get me into the corsets I needed to squeeze into some of the gowns — was enough to keep my mind off what had happened in school earlier that day with Christopher. The fact that I nearly passed out several times, the corsets were so tight, and that I could barely move helped too.
The truth was, I don’t know how Nikki did it. I was supposed to stare off into the distance as if I was gazing at a far-off star (when really what I was looking at was a piece of paint peeling off the rafters on the ceiling) while NOT thinking about how I couldn’t breathe and my feet hurt and how tired I was…
… and, oh yeah, how everyone saw me being carried out of Cave last night like I was the drunk one, not my so-called boyfriend, and that the guy I’d actually like to be dating by the way doesn’t know I’m alive?
No, I mean, literally doesn’t know I’m alive. He thinks I’m dead, and I can’t tell him I’m not. And he isn’t too impressed with the new body I’m in. In fact, he might just be the only guy on the planet who’s not.
How can anyone concentrate on looking beautiful when all that is going on around them, and inside their head as well? Modelling isn’t easy. Modelling is actually really hard. Modelling is ACTING. You have to ACT like you’re actually enjoying yourself, when the truth is, every single inch of you is hurting and uncomfortable… most of all your heart.
I mean, if you’re me.
I was almost sagging with exhaustion when the art director, Veronica, said, ‘I think that’s all we need, Nikki. You can go now.’
I swear I nearly ripped that last couture gown off, I wanted to get out of there so badly.
‘… you’ve got the Vogue shoot tomorrow at three… ’ Kelly was telling me as I ran down the steps to the limo.
‘I know,’ I yelled over my shoulder.
‘And don’t go out tonight,’ she shouted at me as I collapsed into the back seat. ‘You need to get some sleep! You looked awful today.’
‘I won’t!’ I slammed the limo door behind me. Finally! We didn’t have much time.
‘We’re making a stop before we go to the loft,’ I said to the driver. ‘The computer store on Prince and Greene.’
The driver looked at me sceptically in the rear-view mirror. ‘It’s almost eight o’clock, Miss Howard.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘The store is open late on Thursdays.’
I sank back against the leather seat and watched as we glided along Park Avenue, making our way downtown. I’d realized as I’d been standing there ‘gazing at a far-off star’ that I couldn’t take Nikki Howard’s Stark-brand hot-pink laptop to school tomorrow for Christopher to set up my email account on. For one thing, it was just too embarrassing. I mean, seriously — hot pink?
And for another, how could I be sure it didn’t have some other kind of tracking software built into it with which Stark Enterprises was watching my every move online? No. I needed a whole new, non-Stark computer. Just like I needed a new, non-Stark cellphone on which to talk to my parents.
I’d pick up both on the way home. Thank God the Apple store was open until nine on Thursday nights.
And I had Nikki Howard’s platinum American Express card.
There were perks to being rich and famous after all.
Especially when you’re rich, famous and have your face plastered all over a Stark Megastore a few blocks away from the computer store, and everyone in there recognizes you the minute you walk in. Even late as it was, there was a queue. But when you’re Nikki Howard, I’m sorry to say, you get treated differently from everyone else. A salesperson came right over to me, almost before I’d gotten ten feet into the store, and I heard the usual buzzing that started everywhere I seemed to go. He asked if he could help me, and I told him what I wanted.
And he told me to wait right there while he went and got it.
As mu
ch as being Nikki seriously sucked sometimes, it could seriously rock at other times. I had my new laptop and phone and was out the door ten minutes and fourteen autographs later.
It was as I was waiting for the limo driver to swing around and pick me up (he’d been forced to circle while I shopped due to the number of mounted cops in the area) that I heard a voice behind me say, ‘Nikki?’ and I turned around expecting to see another autograph hunter…
… and was shocked to see Gabriel Luna instead.
‘You!’ I cried.
He looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him.
‘Are you stalking me?’ he asked in that adorable British accent. But he was smiling, so I knew he was joking.
‘I think you’re stalking me,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I live just up the street,’ he said. ‘I’d ask what you were doing here, but it’s obvious.’ Always the gentleman, he took hold of the enormous boxes I was carrying. ‘Here, allow me. Are you trying to find a taxi again? You’ll never get one at this corner, you know.’
‘No, I have a ride,’ I said. ‘He’s just circling. But thank you.’
‘Oh,’ Gabriel said. ‘So you’ve recovered from last night?’
Remembering in a rush the last time I’d seen him, I said, sticking out my chin, ‘That was… I wasn’t even… Gabriel, I don’t even drink. Seriously, you can ask any of the bartenders. Next time you go to Cave, have them pour you a Nikki.’
He blinked at me. ‘A what?’
A Nikki. It’s just water. ‘And I was only trying to get Brandon out of there. I mean, Brandon’s just — we’re friends.’
‘Oh.’ Gabriel stared down at me. He looked confused. ‘I see.’
‘I’m not who you think I am, Gabriel,’ I said. I could see the headlights of the limo sliding towards us. It was stuck behind a traffic light, but coming inexorably towards us. Still, there was something I needed to get off my chest. ‘My idea of a fun night is playing computer games. I didn’t even want to go out last night. I just did it because Lulu threw a surprise welcome-home party for me and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings because she’s been really sweet to me. I’m going to go home tonight and do homework. That’s my wild, crazy life. Really.’