Be Strong & Curvaceous

by Shelley Adina

  “Fashion show?” I might be a brand-new Christian, but that didn’t mean other stuff couldn’t get my attention. Especially if it had anything to do with clothes. “What kind of fashion show?”

  “Charity gig, of course, meaning gobs of credits,” Lissa said. “Word is it’s going to be called Design Your Dreams. A bunch of San Francisco and L.A. designers are going to send their clothes and Spencer students will model them. The charity part is what the people will shell out for tickets. Students can model their own stuff, too, if they want. It’s almost like an audition for the people who want to go into the fashion industry. Project Runway lite.”

  “And we haven’t heard about this why?” I demanded. I would get a dress into that show or die. Period.

  “Uh, because school hasn’t officially started yet?” Shani pointed out. “Relax, girlfriend. You’ll get your chance to strut your stuff in front of Stella McCartney.”

  “Or the Mulleavys,” I said dreamily. “Or Tori Wu or—”

  The door opened, and all of us turned to look. A little sinking hole formed in my stomach, draining the excitement and warmth out of the evening.

  Mac looked us over. “Hello again.”

  “Mac, this is Shani. Shani, Mac.” They nodded at each other.

  “Did you have a nice time at tent meeting?” Mac shoved her trunk against the end of her bed and began pulling things out of it. A pair of riding boots and a helmet. Books. A leather jacket in black and red that looked as if it might be worn by a motorcycle racer. Shoes: heels, flats, sandals.

  Lissa lost the thread of the most interesting conversation I’d had in weeks and watched the shoes come out of the trunk the way my grandma’s chickens watch her hands when she brings the leftovers from dinner out into the yard.

  “Not a tent meeting,” I said. “Prayer circle. And yes, we did.”

  “Carly’s a Christian now,” Gillian told her. My hands jerked, as if they wanted to fly up and cover her mouth. “It was amazing. We were all just talking about it.”

  “You mean you weren’t before?” Mac asked me. “After tea?”

  “I—I’m not sure,” I stammered. Could I feel any more uncomfortable? And why? I should be singing it from the school roof, shouldn’t I?

  “So what am I to expect now?” she went on. “You’re not going to be a bore and preach or anything, are you? I really can’t have that.”

  “No,” I said. No fear of that. Or of speaking. Or of doing anything but ignoring each other.

  “Good. What are you staring at?” she demanded of Lissa.

  “Are those custom Balenciagas?” Lissa breathed, her gaze locked on the high-heeled sandals dangling from Mac’s fingers.

  “These?” She glanced at them. “I suppose they are. Good eye.”

  “My mother has a pair,” Lissa said with longing.

  “You can borrow them, if you like.”

  Lissa looked as though she’d died and gone to heaven. “Serious?”

  Mac shrugged. “They’re from the spring collection. When I get the fall ones, I won’t want them anymore.”

  Which sort of put a different spin on it. She’d be better off donating them to Career Closet. Lissa straightened. “Thanks, but we’re probably not the same size.”

  “Whatever.” She lifted an eyebrow at me. “I found your Ms. Tobin. About the room arrangements.”

  “Oh?” Please, Lord. Let her have found another room.

  “The only other empty bed, apparently, is with you.” She glanced at Shani. “So since I’m already here, I may as well make the best of it.”

  “Could you be any more unkind?” Gillian inquired. Her tone might have been polite, but her eyes sure weren’t. “Carly is the nicest person you could hope to meet. You don’t need to treat her like trash. Or the rest of us, for that matter.”

  Mac smiled. “I have the cleaning staff deal with trash. I thought I was treating you rather differently.”

  Gillian was up off the bed by now. “Different is right. I suggest an attitude adjustment.”

  “I suggest you toddle off to bed, little rice ball.”

  Gillian flew into her face. “You want to repeat that?”

  The smile had spread into a grin. Mac was enjoying this— deliberately antagonizing anyone within reach. “Are you deaf, too? I said—”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Which one?”

  “Why are you so mean?”

  Mac shrugged. “What difference does it make? You can always leave.”

  “And Carly gets to be stuck here with you? We’re better friends than that.”

  “Oh, are we all going to have a nice, cozy pajama party? Because if not, you’re going to have to get out sooner rather than later. Do us a favor and make it sooner, would you?”

  “Are you looking to make enemies?” Shani asked her. “Because let me tell you, this school isn’t the place to do that, if you can help it.”

  “Why is it so different from anywhere else?” The emotional temperature in the room was this close to redlining, and she looked as cool and amused as if she were at a garden party.

  “The people who go here make things happen,” Shani said. “If you make enemies out of everybody, what’s going to happen when you leave and want an internship or a summer job?”

  “I’ll blow dust in their faces, hopefully,” she replied. “You can’t possibly imagine that the opinions of anyone here matter to me.”

  Shani looked at me. “I’m so sorry, Carly, but I have to go. I can’t take any more of this.”

  “Me, too,” Gillian said. “Come on, Lissa.”

  As Lissa hugged me, she whispered, “The first thing the devil does is make you sorry you chose God. Don’t let Mac get to you.”

  Easier said than done, I thought as I watched the door close behind them. I looked at the calendar on my desk.

  Thirty, sixty . . . only seventy-three days left to go.

  LISSA GRABBED ME the next day on our way to U.S. History. “Did you hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  Kids wove and split around us in the entry hall as Lissa dragged me off to the side under a big oil painting of Eleanor Spencer, the Countess of Carrick, who had founded the school when Edward VII was Prince of Wales. I’d never heard of her before I came here, but the gown she’d worn for her portrait had been designed by Worth in 1885, and I never missed an opportunity to study it on my way past.

  “The big news about your roommate. And why she looked so familiar.”

  “Let me guess. She was on WhoWhatWearDaily-dot-com.”

  “No. Not recently, anyway.”

  “She was on some reality show.”

  “No.”

  “Gillian’s cousin found her record in NCIC and you recognized her mug shot.”

  “No. Would you be serious?”

  “I give up, then.” I leaned in a little closer. “Personally, the only news I care about is that she’s on the next British Airways flight to Heathrow.”

  “Sorry.” Lissa made a rueful mouth. “Remember at Christmas I went to Scotland with my dad?”

  “Uh-huh.” He’d been approving locations for The Middle Window, his big Scottish historical that was opening in the fall. Penny Rose was doing the costumes, and that meant I knew as much about it as Lissa did—or maybe more. It also meant costuming loops springing up like mushrooms, a surge in eighteenth-century patterns being posted on the Web, people scouting out the garment districts in London and L.A., duplicating period fabrics. In other words, bliss. “You are totally taking us to the premiere. You know that.”

  “Of course. Focus, Carly. Remember when I said we went to this castle and the earl gave us tea and his horrible daughter went off on her horse so she wouldn’t have to meet us?”

  I stared at her as I connected the dots. “Tell me you’re joking.”

  “Sadly, no. That’s why she looked so familiar. Her school pictures were on the table and I was looking at them while Dad talked business with the earl.
”

  Castle. Earl. “Someone should tell her she isn’t royalty.”

  Lissa shook her head. “No kidding. But she’s definitely the Lady Lindsay who blew Dad and me off. I wonder if she expects us to curtsy.”

  I shuddered. “How did I get so lucky? The only thing worse than having a horrible roommate is having a horrible roommate who’s an aristocrat.”

  No wonder she’d been so blasé about the custom-designed Balenciaga shoes. Daddy was an earl. She probably went to all the Paris shows and designers begged her to wear their clothes, just for the publicity. And here I was, two generations away from prune pickers in the California fields—some of which I knew for a fact had been owned by Brett Loyola’s family. The only reason I was even here was because I’d checked “Mexican American” on my application form and had landed a full ride for board and tuition. It wasn’t often Spencer got to brag about its diversity.

  Not that I’m bitter about it. I’m a realist. I help them with their quota requirements, and they help me get into an A-list college. Fair enough, right?

  In U.S. History, the instructor talked about the suffragettes tying themselves to the railings in front of the White House. I gazed at her and didn’t see any of it—instead, I saw the shoes and the expensive leathers coming out of Mac’s—sorry, Lady Lindsay’s—trunk.

  It had been easy enough to fool people into thinking my family was as well off as any student’s here. After all, Papa sent a limo for me every Friday night to take me down to San Jose. What they didn’t know was it was the company limo, and the driver was my cousin Enrique, who made a few bucks on the side by doing it.

  How was I going to keep my secret, with Mac’s sardonic blue gaze taking in every outfit, every shoe, every clever knockoff handbag? What if she decided to talk about the sad state of my closet? What if it got back to Vanessa Talbot, and therefore to Brett?

  I was invisible to him now, but at least there was hope that he’d notice me. I mean, as it was, once in a while he nodded to me when I handed him things in the chem lab. But if I was just the Mexican scholarship case, I wouldn’t have a prayer. The doors of friendship—or anything else—would slam shut, and there I’d be, permanently outside in the cold.

  There would probably be a dance or reception connected to Design Your Dreams, and Brett would find some lovely trust fund baby in a couture dress to parade on his arm. I didn’t have a trust fund, but I wanted to be that girl on his arm, wearing the dress that had won major attention at the fashion show. That had maybe even landed me a summer internship with a designer.

  I had to do something.

  If only I could figure out what.

  DGeary Just heard about Design Your Dreams. Sign me up!

  VTalbot I can use the help. Need to get a group together. This kind of gig is all new to Spencer. Planning starts asap.

  DGeary You do so much for this school.

  VTalbot It’s nothing.

  DGeary Better make sure our royal exchange student is on the list.

  VTalbot Ha ha. She’s not royal. She’s only a Lady, not an HRH.

  DGeary Whatever. But Dani’s cousin said that some Brit pop star told her that Lady L’s mom is all kiss-kiss with John Galliano.

  VTalbot ::sigh:: So?

  DGeary So if LL gets some visibility, we could get some fabu Dior swag, girl! And the Euro and Brit papers would pick it up. Think how that would look on the old college apps.

  VTalbot I can get into any school I want without asking her for anything. Don’t you have anything better to do than annoy me?

  BY THE END of the week, I still hadn’t come up with any good ideas. Meantime, the news about Mac had infiltrated the entire school, even the maintenance staff, whom I overheard talking about it in Spanish in the girls’ bathroom. I couldn’t imagine why they would care—or maybe they just made a habit of talking about the students when they thought no one was listening.

  I walked across the playing field on my way back from the field house, where I could watch the girls’ soccer practice from the dance studio’s big windows. I’d opted out of team sports this term and had chosen dance instead, the better to control my muscle tone. When Emily Overton caught up to me, I thought she was trying to brush past, which was a little weird considering there was, like, an acre of grass around us.

  “Hi.” She sounded a little breathless. “Good game, huh?”

  I nodded cautiously. This was the first time in, oh, the entire two-and-one-tenth terms I’d been here that she’d actually spoken to me. “Nice goaltending,” I said. “Especially on that last shot. I thought for sure their forward would bend it past you.”

  Emily smiled with modesty that looked real enough. “Parker always sends it to the top right corner. I had her pegged as soon as she started for me.”

  I fell silent, unsure what had brought on this burst of team spirit when I wasn’t even on the team.

  “So,” she said, “you probably don’t know this, but I’m on the DYD committee. You know, the charity fashion show in June. I’m helping Vanessa recruit people to help.”

  “Oh?” I’d been wracking my brain trying to come up with a way to get myself on the committee—because, of course, you didn’t just volunteer. If Vanessa was running things, you had to be chosen from among her circle. I’d come up with and discarded half a dozen ways to manipulate her into choosing me, but in the light of day I’d been forced to conclude that none of them would really work.

  “Interested in joining us?”

  I stared at her. Had I slipped into an alternate universe where gifts just fell out of the sky? Where I, too, was popular and did high-visibility things like organize school events? “Joining you?”

  “Sure.” When I still couldn’t get my mouth to work, she went on, “There are perks to it, of course.”

  I managed not to laugh—she obviously thought I had to be sold. I was just trying to think of a way to say yes without blubbering in gratitude.

  “Besides modeling the clothes, I mean. For one, we get to keep them if we want. And you meet the designers personally at a reception before the show. We all get free tickets. And best of all, Curzon has agreed to let us skip Life Sciences for the term and get five community service credits, as long as we’re working on show stuff.”

  Life Sciences. That was Spencerese for things like Cordon Bleu cookery classes, interior decorating, and fashion design. But wait—how could I give that up when I needed every class to produce a dress for the show? “Do you have to skip?” I asked. “I mean, I’ve been taking Fashion Design as my elective all year and I really like it.”

  “You do?” She looked at me as if I’d said I enjoyed trimming my nails with pinking shears.

  Not for anything would I tell her my plans. “Yeah. I’m going to be Penny Rose’s assistant someday. It’s good training.”

  “Whatever. No, you don’t have to skip, but you do need to come to the official committee meetings. Vanessa and DeLayne have already contacted a lot of the designers—and of course hardly anyone is saying no—but now we have to start doing actual work, like hiring an event planner to put together the reception. That kind of stuff.” She made a production of fanning her face. “Fund-raising and charity work are a total grind. With the Benefactors’ Day thing last fall, we were working on it during summer vacation.”

  “It’s probably not a grind for the people the money goes to.” She stared at me blankly. I went on casually, “Who’s on the committee so far? Vanessa’s friends? The boys, too?”

  She nodded. “The boys are ushers for the regents and college scouts who are in town for grad week. It’s okay if they have dates—mostly they just show people where to go and then take off. But I know Brett and Rory will come once in a while. They’re not stupid. They like a free credit as much as anyone.”

  This was a total no-brainer. “I’d love to help out. Thanks for inviting me.”

  She grinned. “Great!” We had nearly reached the main building. “Oh, one more thing. Not that we wouldn’t
love to have you, but it is sort of conditional.”

  A chill ran through my stomach. “What, like I have to audition?” I could come up with some design sketches, if that’s what she meant.

  “No, like you can be on the organizing committee after you do one thing.”

  “Whatever it is, I can do it.”

  “Good attitude. We need you to get Lady Lindsay to join us, too. In fact, Vanessa wants her to be the public face of the show. You know, dialing it up and giving it the whole international aspect. Not just local Californians making good. This is going to be big.”

  “Oh.” The sound I heard was the crash of my expectations and hopes tumbling down around me. “Doesn’t Vanessa want to be the face of it? Her family is about as international as it gets.”

  “Uh-uh.” Emily’s eyes widened. “She wants to spread the visibility around. She’s happy to work behind the scenes—and, of course, she’ll be one of the models.”

  I translated: The event would be huge—which meant that if things went wrong, they’d go wrong on a massive scale, and Vanessa wanted Mac to be stuck with the public humiliation. “I’ll ask her when I see her.”

  No matter what her motivation was, one thing I knew: Vanessa was too proud to admit she’d picked the wrong person to alienate. Such a social faux pas, treating a titled British girl the way she had. So to fix the problem, they had to use an intermediary. A neutral party.

  Lucky me.

  Chapter 4

  SAYING YES to whatever they wanted was the easy part. Asking Mac if she’d be interested in being the “face” of Design Your Dreams was, well, asking for a helping of humiliation with a side of sarcasm.

  I must have been insane to agree to this. But if it meant my being on the committee, I’d do it—and more.

  After dinner, I went back to my—sorry, our—room to work. I was barely holding my own in AP Chem, and that was only because Gillian was my lab partner. After I finished the two dozen word problems Mr. Jackson, the math instructor, had assigned, I read over my chem notes one more time. Don’t ask me how I placed into an AP class. It must have been a computer error. And with the workload, I’d have to kiss good-bye my plan to be a tutor. In any case, I’d managed to survive this far, and I was determined to finish out the year so I could spend my senior year in nice, low-stress biology, taking lots of lovely design and history electives as my reward.