“Whoa, how did I miss that?” you exclaim, grabbing Lena’s phone. “This must have just happened. Mona didn’t mention anything when we were at the photo shoot. I wonder who broke off the date with who.”
“Whom,” Lena says, correcting you.
“Who cares?” Jessie says. “The point is their date is off, which means … maybe he’s got another model in his heart.” She winks and nudges Lena knowingly.
You wonder for a moment who they could mean. How many models could Jimmy possibly be friends with, anyway? As far as you know, the only models at school are Mona and … Oh!
“Who, me?” you ask, finally catching on.
“Of course you, doofus!” Jessie throws a balled-up napkin at your head. It bounces off your cheek and lands on the table. “I’ve caught him looking at you once or twice at school. He might not come right out and say it, but I think he’s totally into you.”
“Definitely,” Lena confirms.
Hmmm … Is it possible that Jimmy actually likes you? You have to admit you have thought about him a lot today.
But now that you’ve met Bryan, you aren’t sure how you feel about Jimmy. Besides, if it’s true that Jimmy just had a fight with Mona, he’s going to need some time to get over it. When you tell your friends that, they’re disappointed.
“Does that mean you’re not going to invite him to the Graphic Art Museum party? Wasn’t one reason you did the modeling job to get those passes so you could invite Jimmy?”
“I know, but—”
“Oh, you’re just trying to weasel out of your promise to ask him to hang out with you,” Jessie says accusingly. “If you don’t keep your word while playing Truth or Dare, what good are you, huh?”
“I’ll tell you what good I am,” you say, spying Bryan and Steve walking into the coffee shop together. “What if I told you that I could get an up-and-coming designer to create some one-of-a-kind dresses for the two loveliest ladies I know to wear to Shawna’s party?”
“I’d say you’re my hero!” Jessie says. “Sign me up!” Nothing like some fashion talk to effectively distract Jessie.
“But wait, is there some kind of catch?” Lena asks. “There was a catch this morning, if I recall correctly. Would this designer really be willing to make us dresses?”
“Oh, I’m sure he’d be happy to have my friends wear his designs to the most talked-about party of the year. Right, Steve?”
Steve, who is now standing right next to your table with a garment bag draped over his shoulder and a portfolio tucked under his arm, nods enthusiastically. “Uh, hellooo … Of course I would! That’s just free advertisement for me.”
After you introduce everyone and have Steve show off his killer book of designs, Jessie does a little dance in her chair. “Sweet! We are going to be the best-dressed people at the party—besides Shawna.”
“Hey, don’t compliment him too much. His head is already almost too big to fit through the door,” Bryan says dryly.
Steve shoots him a look. “Don’t pay any attention to my little brother. He’s just mad because we never made it to the arcade.”
But Bryan shrugs, glancing meaningfully at you. “Actually, it wasn’t so bad hanging around the mall today”
You blush, smiling down at your cup of chai. You’re afraid if you make eye contact with Jessie or Lena, they’ll be able to tell that once again you are crushing pretty hard on someone.
But your smile is also because you’re proud of yourself. You took a risk and ended up being a high-fashion model, you stood up to Mona for once, you scored passes to an exclusive Bebe LaRue party, and you made some great new friends. Not too shabby. Today was just like every other day of your life … except way, way better.
Hate to rub this in, but the way you’ve been acting? Not pretty. But hopefully you realize that by now—especially since this is the last chapter of the book! Dude, otherwise you would have to go back to chapter one and try again. Luckily, you have good friends who are always willing to give you a second chance, even when you’re not sure you deserve one.
“Guys, wait up!” you yell, finally spotting Jessie and Lena just as they’re heading out the back entrance of the mall. It took you a while to find them, since you were in a bit of shock after they stormed away. You three have been friends a long time and you don’t remember them ever being this mad at you before. Also, the mall is still full of kids from your school, some of them celebrating their golden ticket wins, so you lost sight of them in the crowd.
Thank goodness you ran into Lizette, who was walking with two very angry twins. Celia and Delia had matching scowls on their faces. And Lizette was smiling for the first time today, despite the glares being aimed in her direction.
“Hey, I heard you won a golden ticket,” you said to her. “Congratulations.” And as soon as you heard that word coming out of your mouth, you realized that you had never so much as congratulated your best friends in the world. All you could talk about was you, you, you. No wonder they walked out. “So which one of your cousins will you be taking?” you asked her, looking from one problem child to the other.
When Lizette just smiled but didn’t say anything, Celia shouted, “Neither one of us! She’s taking—”
“Some guy named Charlie,” Delia continued. “I mean, can you believe that? Who chooses—”
“A guy over her own—”
“Family!” they finished in unison.
You raised an amused eyebrow at Lizette, who shook her head but didn’t seem fazed at all. “Shoot! They’d been giving me the silent treatment until you came along. It was heaven. Thanks for ruining it.” But you could tell from her smile that she was kidding.
“So, Charlie, huh?” you asked with a wink.
“Let me stop you right there,” she urged. “It isn’t like that. Charlie is my friend, and when I saw him crash and burn on Shawna’s challenge, I felt really bad for him. After all, he’s spent the last week and a half plotting out every move he would make in the mall today. He deserved to win.”
“So you decided to take him as your date?”
“It beats taking one of these two, who have had a rotten attitude all day and have generally driven me up the wall.”
You looked at Celia and Delia and saw an uncomfortable resemblance to yourself. Was that how you’d been acting? God, you hoped not.
“Listen, have you seen Lena and Jessie?” you asked Lizette hopefully. Now that you’d seen yourself in a real mirror, you knew you had to beg your buds for forgiveness.
Once Lizette pointed you in the direction she had seen your friends going, you took off like a shot, once again putting your long legs to work. When you saw a blond ponytail bobbing along next to a brown one, moving quickly toward the door, you knew right away that those angry bobs belonged to your friends. Now here you are, begging them to give you—supermodel extraordinaire—the time of day.
“Why should we?” Jessie snaps at you.
“Look, you’re right,” you admit, catching up to them and running ahead so that you’re standing right in their path. “I’ve been a little rude.”
Your friends both raise one eyebrow at you, as if to say Gimme a break. A little rude?
“Okay, fine, I’ve been a monumental jerk.”
Lena nods. “That’s more like it.”
“I’m really sorry,” you continue. “I don’t know what got into me. I guess I just got caught up in my own stuff, but I shouldn’t have treated you that way. Forgive me?” You hold out your hand for one of them to shake.
Lena starts to take your hand, but Jessie reaches out and grabs her arm. “Uh-uh, not so fast. If you’re really sorry, I think you should prove it.”
“Prove it? But how?”
“I have an idea,” Jessie says, pulling Lena a few steps away and whispering something into her ear. Lena looks your way, nods, and then whispers something back. They have the serious expressions of a couple of world leaders. You shift uncomfortably from foot to foot, wondering what they could po
ssibly come up with that would make you feel any worse than you do right now.
Finally they walk over to you with their arms crossed and their faces grim. Lena is the first to break the silence.
“We have decided that if you want back into this friendship, you will have to answer a few trivia questions—just like Shawna would have made you answer for a ticket.”
Oh good, you think. I’m good at trivia. Trivial Pursuit is one of your favorite games.
“But these questions will be about us,” Jessie continued.
You knew there had to be a catch.
“All right. I’m ready.”
“Question one,” Lena announces. “What happens when a person tries to dye her own hair at home?”
You smile at the immediate memory. The three of you were in fifth grade when Jessie decided she was tired of being blond and wanted to become a redhead. Only her mom wouldn’t let her get it done. She said she was too young for that and should be happy being what she was. So the three of you saved up your money and bought an at-home dye kit, and one night when you were sleeping over at Jessie’s house, you followed the instructions as best you could and dyed Jessie’s hair yourselves. But you must have left it in too long, because a couple of hours later, Jessie looked less like Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet and more like a giant pumpkin. Her hair was bright orange!
Jessie screamed so loudly that her mom came running. When she saw what had happened, she just shook her head—and then grounded Jessie for a week. On top of that, even though Jessie begged and begged for her mom to take her to the salon to fix her hair, her mom made her go to school like that, saying that she had to deal with the consequences of her actions. Momspeak for See what happens when you don’t listen to me? At least Jessie was able to convince your teacher, Ms. Morgan, to let her wear a hat in class, and you and Lena wore hats too, in solidarity.
“Your hair turns a nasty shade of orange, and you and your friends end up wearing hats to school for weeks.”
“Correct,” Lena says, and steps back.
Jessie steps forward and clears her throat. “What are the names of Lena’s four goldfish?”
You were at her house when she came home with them and let her four-year-old neighbor, Sammy, name them. “Soggy, Woggin, Drip, and Harry.” You giggle a little. He was so adorable.
“All right, that was an easy one,” Lena says, stepping forward. “Try this one: How long did it take each of us to run a mile in gym class?”
Again, you have to smile, because that was one of those days when you knew you had some good friends on your hands. The morning your gym teacher made the class run a mile around the track, you were getting over a cold, so you weren’t in the best shape. Usually, it wouldn’t have been a problem, but that day you found yourself moving turtle slow, and most of the kids in class were running circles around you. Lena was on the track team, so she probably could have run that mile in eight minutes flat, but when she saw you struggling, she slowed down and jogged beside you. Then Jessie did the same, and they both shouted their encouragement to you until the three of you crossed the finish line together and collapsed on the grass.
“It took us sixteen minutes and twelve seconds,” you say proudly.
Lena smiles back at you, and Jessie, standing just behind her, shoots you a reluctant grin. You hate all that touchy-feely, mushy stuff, but when they both open their arms to you, you run in for a three-way hug. How could you even have considered tossing away their friendship? You’re sure being a model would be great, but nothing beats being a regular girl with real friends.
Crystal Velasquez is the author of four books in the Maya & Miguel series: My Twin Brother/My Twin Sister, Neighborhood Friends, The Valentine Machine, and Paint the Town. She holds a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Pennsylvania State University and is a graduate of the New York University Summer Publishing Institute. Currently a production editor and freelance proofreader, she lives in Flushing, Queens, in New York City.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Crystal Velasquez
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Velasquez, Crystal.
Your life, but better / Crystal Velasquez.—1st trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
Summary: As a twelve-year-old girl whose boring day at the mall turns exciting, the reader determines the outcome of the story by taking personality quizzes interspersed throughout the text.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89599-9
1. Plot-your-own stories. [1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Models (Persons)—Fiction. 4. Shopping malls—Fiction. 5. Personality tests. 6. Plot-your-own stories.]
I. Title.
PZ7.V4877Yo 2010
[Fic]–dc22
2009014433
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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