Here's Lily

by Nancy Rue

  Suzy’s thick, straight dark hair didn’t want to do anything except fall silkily against her cheeks the way it always did, but when Lily put some almost-pink gloss on her lips and Suzy saw herself in the mirror, she smiled.

  “Suzy, that looks good on you, girl!” Reni said.

  Lily studied Suzy’s face critically. She didn’t think the little bit of shine on Suzy’s lips made that much difference, but she did look prettier somehow.

  “Hey,” Zooey said. “She smiled!”

  “So?” Reni shrugged. She sometimes had trouble following rule number four when it came to Zooey.

  “She hardly ever smiles,” Zooey said. “You look good smiling, Suzy!”

  Suzy, of course, looked down at her shoes.

  When it was Zooey’s turn, it wasn’t as easy to find her best features and highlight them the way Lily was learning to do. Lily sure wished Kathleen could help. But since the modeling school was still a secret to everyone except Reni, Lily had to do the best she could on her own.

  Zooey’s hair was thin and the color of wheat bread, and Lily was sure somebody had given her a haircut with a lawn mower. They all wished for a curling iron, but nobody had one her mom would let her take out of the house. Zooey was almost in tears until Lily remembered something Kathleen had said in class to a girl who had a round face and baby cheeks. She’d said to pull her hair up to make it look . . . Well, Lily couldn’t remember that part, but a hair tie was found, and Lily pulled some of Zooey’s hair up into it on top of her head, and Reni brushed the rest of it until it was shiny. Suzy, who was the only one with bangs, took some gel and created some bangs over Zooey’s forehead. Lily wasn’t sure it was an improvement, but Zooey was glowing before she even looked in the mirror.

  “You guys are nice to me,” she said.

  “We gotta be,” Reni said. “The rules say so. Now be still or this lip gloss’ll go up your nose for sure.”

  Zooey had full lips like Lily’s, only her mouth was small like a little bow. They looked cute with some shine on them. She looked like a cherub. Who’d have thought?

  “Definitely blush,” Reni said as she surveyed the finished Zooey. “Ya’ll white girls got the palest skin.”

  “I’m sorry,” Zooey almost whispered.

  “What for? You’re supposed to be white. Now hold still!”

  Lily was about to remind Reni about rule number four again, but Zooey’s feelings obviously weren’t hurt.

  She was beaming so brightly, she really didn’t need any blush. And when Zooey looked in the mirror, Lily was sure she was going to split right open in delight.

  “Look at me!” she said.

  “You look good,” Suzy said shyly.

  “You look great!” Lily looked around at them. “We all do. Let’s walk like we know we look good!”

  Lily was sure if Shad Shifferdecker had seen them, he probably would have folded in half laughing. But the four girls were grinning all the way into their eyes, even Suzy. Lily tossed her hair in the breeze and imagined a filmy skirt blowing out behind her. Next session, maybe they’d talk about clothes.

  The next day at school, when the collages all went up around the room and each person had to tell the class about his or hers, Lily hoped they could all get those smiles back. She decided it was kind of like a test.

  Ms. Gooch called on Reni first. When she went up to the bulletin board, Lily squeezed her hand and Zooey whispered, “Good luck.” Even Suzy took her eyes off her desktop to show her support. Getting up in front of the class was something everybody hated—except Shad, who didn’t care what he had to do as long as it got him some attention.

  “I did my vision on what I want to do when I’m all done with school and everything,” Reni said, jabbing her finger at her collage. “Only I can’t decide what I want to do, so I put a whole bunch of stuff on there.”

  Shad sighed loudly. Ms. Gooch looked hard at him, but she didn’t say anything.

  “I put, like, horse trainer,” Reni went on as she continued to point to the collage. “Veterarian—”

  “Veter-in-arian,” Marcie called out.

  Ms. Gooch cocked an eyebrow.

  “Um, dog breeder, dolphin trainer, like the person that uses dolphins to help, like, crippled kids and stuff—”

  Shad snored loudly. When Lily looked up, he was dropping his head onto Ashley’s shoulder. Ashley pulled away, but she was laughing.

  “All right, people,” Ms. Gooch said. “That’s enough.”

  It sure is, Lily thought. She looked anxiously at Reni, who was now just jabbing her finger at pictures and shrugging a lot.

  “Go ahead, Reni,” Ms. Gooch told her. “We’re listening.”

  No, they’re not. Lily shifted in her seat and tried to catch Reni’s eye to nod at her. Reni turned from her collage and looked right at Lily. And then she seemed to remember something. She straightened her shoulders and let her arms fall to her sides, and she looked Ms. Gooch right in the eye.

  “I’m done,” she said. And then she went to her desk.

  “Let’s give Reni a round of applause!” Ms. Gooch said.

  Lily, bursting with pride for Reni, clapped enthusiastically. The rest of the class offered a halfhearted spattering of applause.

  That’s all right, Reni, Lily wanted to whisper to her.

  But Zooey evidently didn’t agree. Her hand shot up into the air, and before Ms. Gooch could call on her, she said, “I think you should have a rule.”

  Ms. Gooch lifted an eyebrow. “I have lots of rules, Zooey. You want me to add another one?”

  “No, dude!” Shad said.

  Now he wakes up, Lily thought. She rolled her eyes at Reni.

  “Yes.” Zooey lifted up her chin. “You oughta have a rule that people in here aren’t allowed to say things that make other people feel . . . um . . .” She stopped, her face going red, and turned around in her chair. “How does that one rule go, Lily?”

  Lily stared at her. She saw Reni give Zooey a poke and out of the corner of her eye watched Suzy park her face firmly into her folded arms on the desk.

  Ms. Gooch laughed. “Do you have your own set of rules, Lily?”

  “No!” Lily shook her head and looked hard at Zooey. Something dawned in Zooey’s eyes, and she clapped her hand over her mouth.

  “What was that all about?” Ashley asked.

  “She’s so weird,” Chelsea said.

  “You see what I mean?” Zooey’s face was red all the way up to her new bangs. “People get to say whatever they want, and that’s not right. It—” She turned again to Lily, the right answer glowing in her eyes. “It hurts people’s feelings. That’s it!”

  “ ‘It hurts people’s feelings,’” Shad said in a whiny, mocking voice that came out through his nose. “Poor baby!”

  Ms. Gooch snapped her fingers at him, and then she looked at the class.

  “What do you think, people? Should we make a rule that we can’t say things to hurt people’s feelings? Let’s discuss this.”

  Hands shot up all over the room. Everybody had a comment.

  “I don’t think that many people are being mean,” Marcie said without being called on. “I just think it’s that some other people get their feelings hurt too easy.”

  “And some people just blurt out whatever they want, whenever they want,” Ashley said. She looked right at Marcie. Marcie stuck out her tongue. Ms. Gooch gave them a finger-snapping and an eyebrow.

  Lily pulled a piece of paper out of her notebook and grabbed her favorite purple-inked pen.

  Reni, Zooey, and Suzy, she wrote. Even if she makes it a rule, Shad will never follow it. Let’s stick to our plan. P.T.O.

  P.T.O. meant Pass This On, and Reni did, first to Zooey, who passed it to Suzy. Nobody else noticed because they were all in a lively discussion about rules and punishments and what was fair and what wasn’t.

  All except Shad. He yawned elaborately before looking at Lily and crossing his little eyes at her. She just looked back at him
. Then he pulled Leo over to him by the shirtsleeve and whispered in his ear while staring at Lily.

  Yeah. He was going to be hard to change. Somehow, she had to get him to that modeling show.

  Eight

  That very night, Kathleen came to class with a stack of white envelopes and a brighter-than-usual smile.

  “It’s getting close,” she said, her perfect eyes twinkling.

  Lily put aside her usual attempt to get her eyes to look like that and gazed curiously at the stack of envelopes. She was dying to know what they were, but this wasn’t like Ms. Gooch’s class. Nobody shouted out stuff or raised their hands to ask a bunch of questions Kathleen would answer anyway if anybody gave her the chance.

  We’re getting so poised, Lily thought. She crossed her ankles just so and tried to look expectant. Beside her, Cassie was clicking her polished Midnight Mauve fingernails together.

  “These,” Kathleen said when she was finished teasing them with her silence, “are your invitations to the modeling show we’re going to give in just two weeks.”

  There was a ripple of excitement. Cassie’s fingernails clicked louder.

  “I have exactly ten for each of you—one for each person you would like to invite, not each family.”

  Lily’s head turned immediately into a calculator. Mom, Dad, Joe, Art—that was four. Reni, Zooey, Suzy—that made seven. Plus somebody to bring them, maybe Mrs. Johnson—that made eight.

  She gave a long sigh of relief. That left two—one for Shad and one for somebody to bring him.

  “You will notice,” Kathleen was saying as she doled out the envelopes in little piles of ten, “that our event will be held on a Thursday evening at 7:00 p.m. at the Riverside Garden Club. The space is limited, which is why you may invite only ten people.” She stopped and gave them all a sly look. “There are several important people I am going to invite, of course.”

  Cassie could no longer contain herself. Her hand shot up into the air, grazing Lily’s arm with a nail as it went.

  “Yes, Cassie. Question?”

  “Are those important people, like, talent scouts or something? My mom will want to know.”

  My mom won’t, Lily thought suddenly. There was still the question of whether she and Dad were going to let Lily sign on with the Rutledge Agency at the end of the course. It depended on—

  Lily felt a sharp pang, a lot like the kind she got when she forgot to do a homework assignment, only worse.

  It depended on whether she could find God anywhere in this modeling business, and so far, she hadn’t tried very hard.

  I’m going to try right now, tonight, she told herself firmly. I’m going to focus on looking for God. I know He’s got to be in this somewhere.

  But that promise faded the minute Kathleen put her stack of ten invitations into Lily’s hand. They even felt elegant, just lying there on her palm. And then when Lily opened one, she gasped out loud. They were printed invitations, done in important-looking black script like someone’s perfect handwriting, only it wasn’t. Lily ran her fingers reverently across the letters and thought of Shad Shifferdecker being too impressed to say anything, much less something insulting and evil. There would only be the disbelieving eyes, the glinting braces as his mouth hung open . . .

  In fact, that was all she could think of for the rest of the evening. She didn’t even show Mom the invitations on the way home. She was determined that Shad was going to be the first one to lay eyes on them. Every time she felt the envelope in the pocket of her skirt the next day at school, she grinned to herself over just how delicious it was going to be.

  Once Shad caught her smiling into space between words on the spelling test and whispered across the aisle, “What’s the matter, Snobbins? Bad gas?”

  She kept smiling and waited for the perfect moment.

  It came just before lunch. Everyone else was finishing up a math test, and Lily and Shad were the only ones done—Lily, because math was easy for her; Shad, because he didn’t know how to do half the problems and wasn’t interested in trying. Ms. Gooch tapped each of them on the shoulder and beckoned them to follow her.

  “I have a job for you two,” she whispered when they got to her little glass-walled office cubicle.

  “I don’t have to touch her to do it, do I?” Shad said. He writhed away from Lily as if she had leprosy.

  “No, Shad,” Ms. Gooch answered patiently.

  Lily just patted the envelope in her pocket and tried to let her eyes sparkle the way Kathleen’s did.

  “You’re too weird,” Shad whispered.

  “I need for you two to count how many books are in each of these stacks and record the number in this notebook.” Ms. Gooch pointed to six tottering stacks of beat-up textbooks.

  “Where’d all these come from?” Shad asked. “We don’t gotta use all these, do we? Dude, they look old!”

  He has absolutely no poise, Lily thought smugly.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ms. Gooch said. “I’m putting them all in storage because they’re cluttering up the classroom and I’m never going to use them.”

  “Yeah, but how come—”

  “You don’t need that much information,” Ms. Gooch said. “Just count them. Unless, of course, you want me to give you your next math assignment.”

  “One, two, three—”

  “I thought so.” Ms. Gooch gave Lily a knowing smile. “Bring me the list when you’re finished, okay?”

  “Of course,” Lily said, and she kept eye contact with Ms. Gooch until she was all the way out of the room.

  “Why do you act like the lady at the bank?” Shad asked Lily when Ms. Gooch was gone.

  “What?”

  Shad stiffened his neck and pursed his lips. “ ‘Of course, Ms. Gooch,’” he said in a high-pitched voice. “That’s the way the lady at the bank talks to my mother, like she’s all kissing up to her or somethin’.”

  Lily could barely keep from laughing out loud. This was too perfect.

  “It’s called poise,” she said. “You should learn about it.”

  “It’s sissy.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Lily stifled a meet-in-the-back grin. “Boys can have poise.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You could see for yourself.”

  It was time. Lily slid her hand into her pocket and pulled out the envelope, still perfect and unwrinkled. She held it out to him.

  “Read this,” she said.

  Shad looked at it the way he looked at every paper Ms. Gooch had ever passed out and said, “What’s this?”

  “Open it and find out,” Lily told him. “It’s for you.”

  Shad gave it one more long, beady-eyed look before he snatched it out of her hand and tore into it. Lily tried not to cringe as the perfect white paper suffered a ruthless rip. She kept her eyes on him as he pulled out the printed card and read, his lips moving soundlessly. It took him so long to read the whole thing, Lily nearly yanked it out of his hand and read it out loud to him. But, no—she wanted to enjoy this.

  When Shad got to the bottom of the card, he turned it over and looked at the blank side. Then he curled his lip up at Lily. “So?”

  “So, there will be boys in it, and you can come. That’s an invitation. I—they—are only giving out so many, and you can’t get in without an invitation.”

  “Yeah, but why would I want to? Who wants to go to some dumb fashion show? It sounds lame!”

  Then he crooked his finger and with it flicked the invitation right into Lily’s face.

  It isn’t the fashion show that’s lame, Lily thought as she picked the envelope off the floor, jaw tightened, and tenderly tucked the invitation back into her pocket. I’m the one who’s lame. Why did I ever think he would come to it just because I gave him the invitation? There’s got to be some other way to get him there.

  She would have loved to ask the Girlz if they had any ideas at that afternoon’s meeting, but she hadn’t even told Reni about the show yet, and the other two still didn
’t even know she was going to Rutledge. No, everything had to be just perfect before she told them.

  But Lily did have to tell her family. The wipe-off calendar on the refrigerator was already covered with stuff everybody had to do in November. If she didn’t get the show on there, it might get crowded out by some faculty party or some dumb soccer practice. Now, talk about lame.

  After they all had raised their heads from the blessing at the dinner table that night, she said, “We got our invitations.” She’d been holding it back for so long, her voice sounded breathless, even to her. “Kathleen gave them to us last night.”

  “Invitations to what?” Joe said.

  “Why do you sound like you have asthma?” Art said.

  It was as bad as Ms. Gooch’s class with all the questions. Even Dad had one.

  “Who’s Kathleen?” he said.

  “Another birthday party?” Mom groaned. “I think every person you know has at least two birthdays a year.”

  Joe let out a shrill whistle. “Yeah!” he said. “Can I do that? Like, have one every six months?”

  “Do not whistle like that in this house,” Mom said. “You’re going to pop somebody’s eardrum. And then I’m going to pop you.”

  “No!” Lily’s poise was slipping away. “Kathleen—at the Rutledge Agency. She gave us our invitations to the modeling show we’re giving at the end of the class.”

  “Why do you need an invitation if you’re in it?” Joe said.

  “They’re not for me. They’re for you.”

  “Lil, hon, your face is getting blotchy,” Mom said. “Calm down.”

  “For me?” Joe said, looking like he’d just been offered Brussels sprouts. “What do I want with an invitation to a modeling show? La-ame!”

  Lily looked hard at her little brother to make sure he hadn’t suddenly been replaced by Shad Shifferdecker.