But these must be some kind of trick mirrors, because along with your own reflection, you can see what looks like the image of the new girl from school, Mona Winston, the biggest brat ever. You haven’t known each other that long, but somehow you’ve already gotten on her bad side—probably because the first time you met her, you accidentally stepped on her exclusive Christian Louboutin ballerina flats, leaving a barely noticeable scuff mark. It was an accident, but she thought you did it on purpose, and has been making your life miserable ever since. (Although you have a feeling she would have tried to make your life miserable even if the incident had never happened. That’s just how she is.) You almost rub your eyes to clear up this horrible illusion, but you suspect that Sheila would cut off your head if you ruined her makeup job. Instead, you close your eyes for a moment, hoping that when you open them, Mona will be gone and you can assume that her appearance was a bad hallucination. But when you open them, there she is again, getting fitted for a LaRue masterpiece. You heard from Amy that Mona has done some modeling—which would explain her mysterious frequent absences from class—but you just never believed it. So really, what is she doing here?
And what you only thought, Mona says out loud, glaring your way.
“What are you doing here?”
She stomps over to you, her face all scrunched up like she just ate a bagful of lemons. The hairstylist takes one look at Monas pouty face, throws his hands up in surrender, and backs away. Don’t panic. You can handle this, you tell yourself.
“Hey, Mona,” you say, managing to sound friendly. “Looks like Janice needed one more person to rock some of the outfits today and I was in the right place at the right time. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll be strutting down the runway right next to you!” you gush excitedly.
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Mona snaps. “I’m the star of this show!”
What is her problem?you think. But there’s no time to find out. Just then Janice stalks into the room, tugging at your arm. “Steve, this one is done with hair and makeup. Take her to the back and show her the clothes she’ll be wearing. Mona, go finish your fitting. I’d like to get this shoot started sometime this year!”
“Fine,” Mona says huffily. Then, under her breath so only you can hear, she mutters, “This isn’t over.”
You try to ignore her as Steve, a college-aged guy with his short hair cut into a sort of mini Mohawk, leads you to the back room and shows you a brown leather garment bag. “These are your clothes. Don’t tug at anything, don’t rip anything, and, for goodness’ sake, don’t spill anything on them.”
“You forgot to tell her not to roll around in mud or get into a food fight while wearing the precioussss,” a voice adds sarcastically from the corner, saying the last part like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings.
You glance over to see a bored-looking kid around your age. He barely looks up from his PSP game to acknowledge you. He’s definitely a gamer. He’s wearing a large dark blue T-shirt over a long-sleeved white top and a pair of ripped jeans. (Jessie the fashionista would tell you that the proper term is “distressed,” but who are we kidding? Those jeans are crying for mercy!) He has a skateboard propped against his chair, and his messy dirty-blond hair is hanging over one eye in a way that seems both careless and perfect at the same time. You feel a little guilty for thinking this, since you promised Jessie and Lena you would finally get up the nerve to talk to Jimmy today, but this mystery guy is a major cutie.
Steve sighs, clearly exasperated. “Gee, thanks, bro,” he says with mock sincerity. “Always the little helper, aren’t you?” Steve turns back to you and says, “Don’t mind him. That’s just my little brother, Bryan.”
At the mention of his name, Bryan raises a hand and says, “Hey.” You respond with a nod and a slight smile, hoping the gesture looks at least a little cool.
“I promised to drop him off at the arcade after the shoot, but it’s taking longer than expected, so he’s getting a little cranky, aren’t you, cranky pants?” Steve calls over his shoulder.
“Whatever,” Bryan says, stealing another glance at you.
“For the record,” Steve continues, “um, don’t roll around in mud and don’t get into any food fights while wearing these clothes, get it?”
“Aw, there go my plans for the afternoon,” you say dryly. Steve gives you a stern look. “I mean, got it.” You nod seriously. Out of the corner of your eye, you can see Bryan smile a little, though he’s pretending not to listen.
“Good. Now, where in the world did I put those gold flats?” Steve says, checking around the room in a panic.
“Can’t I just wear the shoes I have on?” you offer. Steve whirls around and looks from your beat-up old Nikes to you. Nikes, you. Nikes, you. He cocks one eyebrow and kind of smirks, like You’re kidding, right? Okay, guess not.
“I’ll go find the shoes. Take those things off and hide them somewhere and pray Janice doesn’t notice them. Better yet, burn them. And you”—he points to Bryan—“take your PSP in the other room like a good little monster and give the lady some privacy”
Bryan gets up from his chair with an exaggerated sigh. “That’s my big brother—always bossing me around.” He gives you a quick nod. “See you later.” And it could just be your ears playing tricks on you, but you could swear that he mumbled under his breath, “I hope.”
As soon as they leave, you open the bag and almost squeal with delight when you see the clothes. You try not to giggle as you pull on a royal blue eyelet dress with a scooped neck and a chunky leather belt around the waist. Then you slide into the cropped jacket that goes with it, careful not to ruin your makeup. Checking yourself out in the mirror, you admire the way the dress flares out a little when you twirl. You love it! Just then you remember that you haven’t checked your Sidekick in a while. You click it open, wondering if Jessie and Lena have made any progress, but you’re not getting any reception back here. So you tiptoe out of the room, bare feet and all, when suddenly you hear whispering on the other side of the curtain.
“I don’t really care what you want, young lady. This is your job.”
That was definitely Janice. You’ve known her for only about an hour, but already you’d recognize that ice-cold tone anywhere.
“But, Moooom,” a whiny voice replies, “it’s so not fair!” Hey, that’s Mona! But wait a minute. Did she just call Janice Mom? Hmmm … this could be interesting.
And the plot thickens, as they say. You’ve taken the plunge and found yourself on a real-life high-fashion photo shoot (your dream!) only to be confronted with bad cell reception and your archnemesis, Mona (your nightmare). Meeting Bryan has softened the blow of that unpleasant surprise a little—especially since you haven’t seen Jimmy yet—but you’re still going to have to deal with Ms. Star of the Show to have any hope of doing well today and scoring those passes to the wrap party. Listening in on this convo between Mona and Janice (Did she really call her Mom?) could be the key. And let’s face it: you’re just curious. Still, are you the kind of person to eavesdrop? Not sure? Looks like you’d better take the quiz to find out.
QUIZ TIME!
Circle your answers and tally up the points at the end.
1. You’re home alone when you happen to notice that your little sister left her diary open on the kitchen table. Something has definitely been up with her lately. So you:
read it from cover to cover. You wouldn’t call that snooping—you’re just a concerned older sister. If she’s not going to tell you what’s wrong, you have to find out somehow, right?
“accidentally” read a few pages just to get the gist. You reason that her choice of red pen was a cry for help and she probably wanted you to read those pages anyway. (That’s your story and you’re sticking to it.)
close the diary without reading a word, but vow to grill her about what’s been going on with her as soon as she gets home. If she won’t talk to you voluntarily, maybe she needs a little push.
respect her privacy and
close the diary immediately. You then put it back in her room so no one else can read it either. When she’s ready to talk to you about whatever’s bugging her, she will.
2. When you go to the food court with your friend, you try to sit at a table that is:
right in the middle of the most crowded section. You just love hearing everybody’s conversations around you. You can pick up the best gossip that way.
somewhere near the flat-screen TV that is always tuned in to the entertainment channel. You and your friend love to hear all the celebrity dirt and then talk about it for hours.
near the Johnny Rockets, where all the popular kids hang out. The queen bee of that crowd is always stirring up some sort of drama, and if you sit in the area, you’ll be right there to see it. If not, you’ll still have a great time downing milk shakes with your friend and talking about school.
at a two-seater off to the side. You love having a quiet place where you can tune everyone else out and really catch up with your buddy.
3. You’re in a bathroom stall when two other people come into the restroom, having a private conversation. You:
lift your feet so that they can’t tell you’re in there. Conversations that girls drag their friends into the bathroom to have are usually pretty juicy, and you’ve got the best seat in the house … so to speak.
don’t hide your presence, but don’t exactly announce it either. Hey, it’s not your fault if they don’t notice you’re in there. Everybody knows you’re supposed to check under the stall doors for feet before you spill your guts.
cough and make a lot of noise unrolling the toilet paper. You’ve revealed embarrassing information before when you didn’t know somebody was in the stalls listening, and it made you cringe. You’d hate to make someone else feel that way.
hurry up and finish your business and get out of the bathroom. It is an understood rule among girls that the bathroom confessional is sacred, and you wouldn’t want to violate the code.
4. When you go online, you:
check all your friends’ MySpace and Facebook pages to see if they’ve added anyone new. Then you check out the pages of all those people too and Google anyone you find interesting. Then you check your Twitter account to see what your friends are up to at that precise moment. Some would call it being nosy. You say you’re just thirsty for knowledge!
check your Facebook page and read up on everybody’s status for the day and see if any of your friends have written new notes. It’s the next best thing to checking in on them in real life.
check your own e-mail and maybe your horoscope. Then it’s back to your homework. Running your own life is a full-time job. Who has the energy to monitor everyone else’s?
do whatever research you need to do for school, and that’s about it. You check your e-mail only once or twice a week, figuring that if anything really interesting were going down, one of your friends would call to tell you. And Twittering seems like a big ol’ waste of time. Do you really need to know if so-and-so is eating a cheeseburger right that second? Hardly.
5. On your way to the library, you spot a celebrity you’re a big fan of sitting alone at a table for two in a fancy outdoor café. Unbelievable! So naturally, you:
hang back behind a tree and watch. You want to see what he orders. Will he go the healthy route and order a spinach salad? Or will he totally pig out and get the endless pasta plate smothered in heavy cream and cheese? And will some A-list starlet be joining him for a not-so-secret rendezvous? You’ve just got to know!
walk up to him and politely ask if it would be all right for you to bother him for his autograph. With any luck, it’ll take him a while to find a pen, and while you’re standing there, his mystery date will be revealed. If not, at least you’ll leave with an autograph.
settle for using your camera phone to click a few quick pictures of your idol, then keep on heading for the library. You’ve heard that celebrities hate it when fans invade their personal space while they’re trying to have a meal, and you don’t want to be one of those pushy people.
keep on walking. It’s cool to see a star in your hometown but you know that he’s just a person and he deserves some privacy just like the rest of us. You think the paparazzi who follow him around are the biggest creeps in the world.
Give yourself 1 point for every time you answered A, 2 points for every B, 3 points for every C, and 4 points for every D.
—If you scored between 5 and 12, go to chapter 6
—If you scored between 13 and 20, go to chapter 7
You are a hopeless romantic. You’re always first in line to help decorate for the Valentine’s Day dance, and you’re still heartbroken that Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt broke up. Some may accuse you of having your head in the clouds, but you don’t care. You believe in love. Good for you! Just remember not to spend all your time daydreaming or you’ll miss out on everything else.
You could very well be dreaming this, but it looks like you’re sitting at a booth in Johnny Rockets with Lena, Jessie, and Jimmy Morehouse! After the two of you crashed in the hallway, your friends came running to see what happened. What they found was Jimmy holding his bruised forehead with one hand and holding your hand with the other—and Amy Choi recording the whole embarrassing scene with her video phone and forwarding it to her entire contact list. Great, you thought. You wouldn’t be surprised if that clip showed up on YouTube tomorrow.
Lena offered to take care of Jimmy while you ran off to the shoot, but you just didn’t have the heart to do that. Especially since the heart you did have was beating a mile a minute. So instead, you said, “Hey, let me buy you a milk shake.” It was the least you could do, considering the brain damage you’d probably caused him. (Side note: You managed to utter eight whole words to him without bursting into flames! Niiice.)
He smiled shyly at you, let you pull him slowly to his feet, then shrugged and said, “Sure. Why not?” How cool is he? He wasn’t even mad that you’d plowed into him like a freight train.
And now here you all are in a red leather booth, drinking your thick-as-ice-cream milk shakes and sharing a giant plate of fries while you listen to Elvis sing “All Shook Up” on the jukebox. And as Jessie fills Jimmy in on your quest to find Shawna, you could swear his sneaker is slightly touching yours under the table. There are even other kids from school here to witness this miraculous event. You already see Mary Sunshine and her best friend, Holly Happy-Go-Lucky, heading toward your table. Those aren’t their real last names, obviously. It’s just what people call them behind their backs, because they are the total opposite of that. If you look up “gloom” and “doom” in the dictionary, you’d see a picture of these two. They always look unbelievably bored and miserable, no matter where they are, kind of like Eeyore from those Winnie the Pooh cartoons.
“Hey,” Mary says, nodding toward your group, her black shaggy hair hanging over her eyes. “You guys haven’t seen Shawna yet, have you?”
“Hey, Mary,” Jessie answers brightly. “No, no sightings yet.”
“See?” Holly laments, looking up at Mary, who is almost five inches taller than her. “Told you this whole thing was bogus. Shawna probably just wanted to see the whole class running around the mall like morons.” She rolls her eyes, then throws her head back, her long chestnut brown hair falling back to reveal a black Paramor T-shirt. “Man, what a waste of a day!”
“Yeah, we might as well have stayed home,” Mary adds, kicking invisible rocks.
“Wait—so you guys want to go to the party?” you ask, a bit shocked. You just didn’t think a party would really fit into the whole doom-and-gloom way of life.
Mary looks away nervously, as if you have caught her doing something embarrassing. “Not really,” she says with a shrug. “It’s just, you know, something to do. Whatev.”
“Right,” Lena says. “Well, don’t give up yet. Amy said somebody saw Shawna at Sephora.”
“Doubt it.” Holly gestures with her head to Mary for them to leave. “Later.�
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As the two of them shuffle off, a storm cloud following their every move, you swing your eyes back to Jimmy, who is struggling to hold in a laugh. When Mary and Holly are finally gone, he lets it out, his eyes watering a little. His laugh is the greatest sound in the whole world. Like he’s hiccupping and laughing at the same time. He even snorts a little! Adorable.
“Sorry,” he says, wiping his eyes. “But those two are like Dementors or something! Where’s a good Patronus when you need one?” Everybody at the table cracks up. Wow, he’s cute and he’s a Harry Potter fan. Who knew that Jimmy could be outgoing? When he’s not being a shy, brooding artist, he’s pretty funny.
As if that weren’t enough, when the check comes, Jimmy insists on paying for everybody. “Nuh-uh,” you object. “I’m the one who caused you internal bleeding. I should pay.” You reach for the check, but he snatches it out of your reach.
“No way. The guy with the severe blood loss gets to decide who pays, so back off,” he says with a smile. “Besides, you need to save your money to pay for all the stitches I’ll need.”
Amazing. Not only does he kind of look like Zac Efron, but he’s fun, sweet, smart … Okay, fine. Maybe you’re biased because you are definitely crushing on him. But that doesn’t make it any less true. And by the way Lena and Jessie are smiling at the two of you and nudging each other, you can tell they’ve already given him their official stamp of approval and will no longer be calling him comicbook geek. They didn’t even make a big deal about it when he accidentally tipped over the ketchup bottle and sent sticky red goo squirting across the table. If anything, that just made you like him even more. He is like your klutzy twin soul.
Your Life, but Better Page 4