by Tyra Banks
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2011 by Tyra Banks
Jacket and endpaper art copyright © 2011 by The Tyra Banks Company Books, LLC. Jacket art and design by Perry Harovas and James Schmitt/Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy. Endpaper art by Hebru Brantley.
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.
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eISBN: 978-0-375-89944-7
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v3.1
TO MA AND DADDY.
THANK YOU FOR BEING ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY
NOTHING LIKE MR. AND MRS. DE LA CRÈME.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1 - T O OKE
Chapter 2 - Exodus
Chapter 3 - Da-tahhhh!
Chapter 4 - 91% Chance
Chapter 5 - Smacking Into Mirrors
Chapter 6 - Stunning, Statuesque, Strobotronic Stars with Stupefying Stratospheric Struts
Chapter 7 - X-O-2
Chapter 8 - Welcome to T-DOD
Chapter 9 - Bzzz
Chapter 10 - Bou-Big-Tique Nation
Chapter 11 - Shiraz Shiraz
Chapter 12 - First Princess of Sans Color
Chapter 13 - The Express Lane
Chapter 14 - Arancia Rossa di Sicilia
Chapter 15 - The Bella Donna’s Burden
Chapter 16 - The THBC Tamasha
Chapter 17 - Home, Sour Home
Chapter 18 - La Lumière
Chapter 19 - CaraCaraCara and The Dormitory Effect
Chapter 20 - Run and Gun
Chapter 21 - Jammers, Chowers, and Poachers
Chapter 22 - Fused Flashback Females
Chapter 23 - The Diabolical Divide
Chapter 24 - W.O.W.
Chapter 25 - One Bee-yotchhh
Chapter 26 - The Porcelain Pact
Chapter 27 - Z
Chapter 28 - The Three Decrees
Chapter 29 - Flute Creepers
Chapter 30 - D-Head and Dread
Chapter 31 - Despairing Desperation
Chapter 32 - There Is No, Has Never Been, and Never Will Be
Chapter 33 - The Mutant Music Monster
Chapter 34 - The Madwoman of the Modelland
Chapter 35 - Deco
Chapter 36 - All Hail Queen Creamy
Chapter 37 - Man Attack and Heartache
Chapter 38 - Left, Right, Left
Chapter 39 - Breathless Sister-Friends
Chapter 40 - The 7Seven Tournament
Chapter 41 - Stone to Bone, and Flesh
Chapter 42 - Les Trois Copines
Chapter 43 - Porcelain Living Dolls
Chapter 44 - Wicked Couture
Chapter 45 - La Camara Brutta
Chapter 46 - With Perfect Execution
Chapter 47 - La Lengua
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Epilogue
YOU WANT to be there. You know you do. Don’t lie, dahling. It’s okay. I know what you’re thinking when you look up at that splendorous place atop the mountain. I know what fills you, spurs you on, fuels your dreams. You’re obsessed with being chosen. Everyone is.
The Land you thirst for has loomed at the top of the mountain in Metopia for as long as you can remember. But for most of the year, it’s covered in fog, its color changing with each passing day as if it’s a gargantuan mood ring. You begin your mornings staring at the fog, longing for the fateful evening when it will turn a golden yellow and then, finally, like a push-up brassiere, lift.
Oh, how you long for that moment, with bated fresh breath, I hope. For it signifies that the luminescent eye will soon blaze in the sky, bathing the whole world in gold, touching every one of its inhabitants … including you.
But dahling, it is no ordinary golden light. Once it tickles you, you are suddenly … transported. You hear the softest of sighs or faintest of giggles in your ear, even if you’re standing alone. The once-stale air around you becomes both sweet and tart, making your nose tingle and sending a charge of excitement through your brain. The finest silk, the softest velveteen, or the supplest suede will brush your skin, but whatever you thought was touching you is nowhere to be seen.
Basking in the light is such a naughty tease, like getting a single lick of the most delicious butter-pecan gelato you’ve ever tasted: it inflames your obsession, increasing your desire a hundredfold. You lust to go to this Land to become one of the only famous people in the world. You ache to be a 7Seven.
But very few ever get the chance.
Nevertheless, you and every young girl in the world vie for an opportunity on The Day of Discovery, which is grander than every global holiday combined. Making the delirium even more intense, the Land sends seven talismans called SMIZEs into the world. (What an arcane word! Who thought of such a thing?) These SMIZEs, which boost your odds of being chosen by ninety-one percent, are propelled through the world’s waterways. Naturally, the week before The Day of Discovery, bathing, showering, pool use, and even sewer diving increase, threatening a drought. Chance meetings erupt into fisticuffs on occasion. Every girl wants to find a SMIZE, dahling.
But not nearly as much as you do.
You ignore the slim odds and disregard the warnings you’ve heard since birth, like how it’s easier to grow three inches in a month than it is to score a spot in the newest class. You turn a deaf ear to the cautionary tales whispered in your hometown and throughout Metopia: in dingy alleys and side streets of PitterPatter, during shift changes in Shivera, and on assembly lines of Peppertown factories. Like the rumor that the school often takes inhumane and irreversible disciplinary action. Or that certain “disposable” civilian girls are brought to the Land to be tortured and then killed, used as human sacrifices for ungodly experiments and animalistic rituals. “It’s obvious why they torture them,” the gossipmongers whisper. “Those in the Land bathe in civilian blood to maintain their breathtaking beauty.”
Goodness great-shoes! A literal bloodbath, dahling? That crimson elixir must leave a nasty ring round the tub.
And then there’s the reality of the Pilgrim Plague, a form of sadness-meets-madness that compels unselected hopefuls to embark dadless on an unauthorized pilgrimage to the Land. It’s a sickness that comes with a quickness and afflicts the most determined … and desperate. And the trek through the dangerous Diabolical Divide always ends in dismembering death.
Ouch.
As The Day of Discovery dawns, however, you and every young girl around the world tune out the horrifying negatives and concentrate on the glitzy, gaudy, dream-come-true positive. You dredge up every ounce of self-confidence from deep within. This is my year, you say to yourself. And so does every other girl. They’ll choose me for sure.
Every girl feels the same way … except one.
Tookie De La Crème.
1
T O OKE
Have you ever seen her?
The girl whose face not even the meanest perso
n you know would describe as yuck but who you’d never in a million—no, a trillion years describe as alluring either. The girl whose eyes are three centimeters too far apart and whose mouth is four centimeters too wide. Not that you’d break out a ruler, but when you look at her, it’s enough to make you say that something is definitely … off.
Come on now, you’ve seen her.
She’s the girl whose hair has multiple personality disorder and can’t decide if it’s supposed to be quasi-curly, silky-straight, frantic-frizzy, or wet-and-wavy—or maybe a “Power to the People” ’fro.
The girl whose body is a contradiction of itself: a slightly hunched back (from years of poor posture, one must presume), feet the size of snowshoes, and stick-figure arms and legs so fragile, you think you hear them screaming “Feed me an entire grilled cow, now!” The girl with the humongous, punch-bowl-sized head, with a forehead that goes on and on and on, making her look like the weight of her cranium will topple her over and break her into a thousand pieces.
And not only is her clothing painfully mismatched, so are her eyes, dahling. You heard me right. She has one green eye and one brown one.
Have you ever seen Tookie De La Crème?
I bet you have.
Maybe you’ve even met her.
You just don’t remember her.
No one ever does.
For as unusual-looking as she was, Tookie was a Forgetta-Girl, one of the most forgettable girls in the entire world.
But maybe not for long.
Our tale begins on a Thursday afternoon, the most ordinary of ordinary afternoons, a few days shy of the most unordinary day of the entire year. Tookie De La Crème was splayed on her back on the hallway floor of her school, the Bangle, Bauble, and Bead Institute—B3, as it was commonly called. Her large, mismatched eyes didn’t blink as she stared at the stained ceiling. Her gangly legs shot out at odd angles, as though she’d fallen from a six-story building. Her enormous feet pointed straight up. An internal clock counted down the time in perfect cadence. T minus six minutes and forty-nine seconds. Forty-eight … forty-seven …
As Tookie waited, she lifted to her face a cold canister of whipped cream, inserting the nozzle straight into her mouth. She pressed the trigger that delivered the airy sweetness directly onto her tongue. A bit of cream accidentally dropped from her mouth and dripped from her chin to her neck. With each squirt, more and more of the cream fell to her snug-fitting hand-me-up blue blouse, which had once been her younger sister’s. Another squirt landed in her hair. She then licked her tiny baby fingers from thumb to pinky and prepared for the next squirt.
How was Tookie able to lie in the middle of her school’s hallway, during class time, enjoying whipped cream from the can, and not get herself into any trouble? Well, Tookie was the Institute’s best “skipper.” No one, not even the most cunning teachers, noticed she was gone when she skipped out of class way before most of her lessons ended.
T minus four minutes thirty-three seconds … thirty-two … thirty-one …
As Tookie stretched her legs, the backs of her calves touched the bitingly cold marble, making her shiver. Most people would have found it uncomfortable, but Tookie was happy she felt something—at least she was still alive and breathing. Sometimes Tookie was so used to being a Forgetta-Girl that she thought she really was invisible.
T minus five seconds … four … three … two …
A loud but familiar clanging made Tookie jump. The school’s bell was actually an old-time buzzer that had long ago signaled factory shift changes. In days gone by, before the Institute had taken over the building, B3 had produced three things: bangles, baubles, and beads.
Once the bell stopped, a familiar rumbling made Tookie cringe. An oily belch followed, sending a thick cloud of greenish smoke through the vents. A stench filled the air. It smelled like a mix of gasoline, mold, melted plastic, and methane gas emanating from the bowels of the building. Excruciatingly loud school bells weren’t the only relics left over from when B3 had been a factory—the administration had done very little in the way of renovation to convert the safety-code-deficient building into a proper institute of learning. The school let out belches and eruptions all day and leaked fumes from every crevice.
Groaning, the students emerged from their classrooms.
“Ugh,” Ariella Burtona wailed, fanning the odors from her face.
“Nasty,” Tatiana Sharonne said, pressing a sachet of dried flowers to her nose.
“The B4 Institute tooted again,” Jason Milano chortled, trotting out the school’s oldest, tiredest, but aptest joke. Everyone called the school B4, for Bile, Barf, Belches, and Butt Bombs.
More doors were flung open and the sound of footsteps thundered through the halls. Tookie quickly closed her eyes. She then peeked to see just how far the approaching mob was from her prone body. Nine feet away, she estimated.
The conversations of passersby began to wash over her. Tookie felt like a fly on the wall.
“Zarpessa says she’s spending fifty thousand on her prep,” said an annoyed female voice over Tookie’s head. “Hag.”
“What do you think the look will be at T-DOD this year?” a girl with a forehead tattoo whined. “I hope my tatted face will be in.”
“Don’t hold your breath, Inky …,” a male voice answered.
Another voice floated over from the other side of the corridor. “… if they don’t choose me, I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life. I’ll die if I end up working in a belt-buckle factory like my mom. I’ve been crying for a month straight. I hope my eyes aren’t going to stay all puffy like this.”
Many of the conversations had to do with the big event that was taking place in two days, The Day of Discovery, which most people shortened to T-DOD. It was the grandest of holidays, and B3 was even letting its students have Friday off this week to prepare—an absolute rarity. Not that Tookie really cared.
“Where do you think the rest of ’em will be this year?” a girl with a nasal voice asked. “I heard that a girl found one in a pot of boiling sweet potatoes and burned up her hands real bad trying to get it!”
Tookie shifted on the floor. Now they were talking about SMIZEs. Girls had been searching for the magical charms for days, fighting at water spigots, sloshing through sewers, splashing in the Peppertown pool, which everyone knew kids peed in.
“I found the pipe where the gunk water from the Shivera hospital dumps out,” a hopeful girl whispered. “No one is going to be looking for SMIZEs there!”
As more people passed, as more girls chattered about T-DOD, Tookie began to feel lonelier and lonelier. It was yet another day when no one, not a single person, looked down on the floor and cried, Oh! Check out that girl down there! All the students rushed past Tookie like water in a stream flowing around a rock. Rubber sneakers almost crushed her fingers. Heavy boots nearly bumped her shins. A piece of paper fluttered out of someone’s notebook and landed close to Tookie’s left hand. The paper’s owner, a dark-haired girl, bent down to snatch it, not even noticing that Tookie was there.
Irrelevant. Expendable. Forgettable. All Tookie wanted was for someone to notice her. Anyone. Just a simple kick in the ribs or a sneaker sole that squished her hand or a textbook that slipped from a student’s grip and fell on her large forehead. She wasn’t picky.
Spin, thud, spin, thud, spin, spin, spin, thud.
Tookie looked up at a spinning dervish approaching, taking in her long, thick, curly wheat-blond hair, her silver-dollar-sized aqua eyes, and her perfectly symmetrical face. It was as if Tookie’s wish had come true—sort of. For here was her sister, Myrracle, someone who did notice her. Except, well, Tookie didn’t really want her to.
Spotting Tookie sprawled on the floor, Myrracle began to sing. “You. Are. Not. My. Deeee. Nay. Nayyy.” She gave one spin for each word, making the hem of her blue dress flutter. It was a dress, Tookie guessed, that would pass to her as a hand-me-up in a matter of days.
Tookie rolled her eyes a
t her sister’s mispronunciation of DNA. Beyond her looks and fancy flights of footwork, what was most disturbing to Tookie about The Myrracle, as Tookie’s mother called her, was not that she was Tookie’s younger sister. The most disturbing fact was that The Myrracle was distinctly, indisputably, flat-out … dense. As dumb as a lobotomized turkey—and turkeys were said to raise their heads to the sky during rainstorms and drown themselves. Oh, Tookie tried to give her sister the benefit of the doubt—Myrracle had memorized every intricate dance step of the twenty-two verses of “The Shivera Shuffle,” after all, and at least she understood the concept of DNA, even if she got the pronunciation wrong, but in all honesty, Myrracle wasn’t the brightest tube of lipstick in the makeup caddy.
Luckily, Myrracle pirouetted out of sight almost immediately. Problem gone … for now.
Tookie sighed and reached for a small, thick yellow book wedged under her lower back. It wasn’t just any regular yellow, but the color of a taxicab that had been freshly painted and spit-polished. And it wasn’t just any regular book, but a collection of letters Tookie had written to people she’d encountered throughout her life. Not that she would ever dare send them.
She called this book T-Mail Jail. Tookie found it ironic that the book’s initials, TMJ, also stood for an ailment that impaired a person’s ability to open her mouth. The front cover displayed Tookie’s first name, handwritten in beautiful calligraphy. The spine of T-Mail Jail read DON’T KEEP OUT! The back cover urged, INVADE MY PRIVACY—PLEASE! If one were inclined to follow these instructions, the inside cover challenged, I DARE YOU TO TURN THE PAGE.
But no one dared … or, more accurately, cared.
As the crowd continued to move around her, Tookie opened T-Mail Jail to a blank page. She closed her eyes, selected one of the dozens of colored pens tucked into the pocket of the book’s back cover, and held it in front of her face. Blue, in her color code, was for the English language. Boorrrring, Tookie thought.
Tookie uncapped the pen, held the journal in the air over her head, and began to write to her only friend in the world. She had been missing for over six weeks now, and Tookie feared she’d never see her again.