by Zoey Dean
Sam scanned the dresses, the purses, and the shoes. The hummingbirds froze, holding their collective birdy breath.
“Thanks for the effort,” Sam said. “But none of this works.”
The hummingbirds exhaled their disappointment. Veronique, the Parisian assistant from Chanel, was the first to speak up. “I sink zere are sum very lovely sings.”
“Zere are,” Sam agreed. She padded over to the costume rack and lifted the gossamer Galliano. “However, only an anorexic could fit her thighs into this.”
“Perhaps eef we try a largeer size—”
“Please, please, just take it all away.” Sam plopped down on her bed, carelessly wrinkling a pale blue silk Imitation of Christ under her left thigh. Sam simply refused to wear a larger size. Approaching double digits in a dress size was worse than chronic halitosis. God, these assistants were just so passive-aggressive!
“Excuse me,” the Imitation of Christ aide said, gently edging the silk dress from beneath Sam’s behind. “I can return to the store and bring over three or four more, if you’d like.”
“No, but thanks anyway.” Sam closed her eyes. No one knew. No one understood. They thought it was all about her father’s wedding to that twit, but it was more than that. Today was the most important day of Sam’s seventeen years on the planet. Ben Birnbaum, the unrequited love of her life, was coming home from Princeton. He was coming to the wedding. And he was coming without a date.
She’d demanded that Fleur Abra call her the moment Ben’s RSVP card arrived to be certain that he’d checked off “party of one.” The call had come three weeks ago. Ben was indeed flying solo. In other words, today was her best—and possibly last—chance to bag him.
Sam had been crushing on Ben ever since that fateful day five and a half years ago when he’d French-kissed her at his family’s annual Fourth of July barbecue. Maybe he’d done it because it had turned out that they were both reading—and hating—Atlas Shrugged. Maybe he’d done it just because he could see the sun, the moon, and the stars of his own reflection in her love-besotted eyes. Whatever the reason, it had been a defining moment in Sam’s life.
Since then, she and Ben had stayed friends. He’d been a year ahead of her in school, but they’d hung out with the same people. Though she kept hoping, he’d never shown any interest in picking up where his tongue had left off, almost as if it had never happened.
It had nearly killed Sam last year when Ben had started dating one of her best friends, Cammie Sheppard. Everyone knew Cammie was a stone-cold bitch with a heart the size of a blackhead. Even after all these years, Sam was still sometimes shocked at the things Cammie would say and do in pursuit of what she wanted. On the other hand, if Cammie was on your side, your enemies were toast.
But Cammie and Ben? It just didn’t make any sense to Sam. The thing about Ben Birnbaum that made him different—other than possibly the cutest ass of any guy in the Pacific time zone—was that Ben wasn’t just smart: He was deep. Which was exactly how Sam saw herself. Cammie was smart, and she had an amazing talent for ruthless strategy in pursuit of whatever it was she wanted. She was also incredibly fun to hang with; Cammie equaled party equaled massive guy attention. However, in Sam’s opinion, Cammie had the depth of the cup size she’d worn before she had her breasts done. So what could Ben possibly see in Cammie, except the obvious: that Cammie was gorgeous? How could gorgeous be everything to a guy as evolved as Ben Birnbaum?
The tragedy of Sam’s life (other than that her mother was missing in action—she’d taken off for an ashram to “find herself” and, except for the occasional postcard to Sam sans return address, never looked back—and that her father more or less ignored her) was that no matter how hard she tried, she was still several standard deviations from gorgeous.
It wasn’t like she didn’t make a supreme effort. She remembered only too well a traumatic incident that had occurred when she was six years old. There had been a fund-raiser at the Chinatown Center for some cause du jour. While the parents of the Hollywood movers and shakers ate dim sum, the nannies took the children for rides on the elaborate carousel. The flaxen-haired and pouty-lipped daughters of other showbiz titans had all claimed the cool sherbet-toned animals, while she and the obese offspring of a fifty-year-old character actress had been left with the uncool dung-colored ones. It might seem trivial, pretty colors versus poopy ones, but it was all about power. After that, Sam, no dummy, had understood that extra effort was called for. For a while she’d tried passing out twenty-dollar bills to all the kids whom she’d wanted to befriend, but that had only earned her disdain as a pathetic suck-up.
By age ten Sam had turned into a chubby, hairy loner with an overbite. She had already decided to follow in the footsteps of other chubby, hairy loners and become a movie director. Growing up as her father’s daughter, in the rarified world of the Hollywood A-list, she tended to see her life as a movie anyway, mentally scoring her most dramatic moments, mentally framing her most visual moments, mentally scripting her most important conversations. She’d started prowling around with a video camera, and thus, in the pursuit of cooldom, she’d ended up discovering her muse.
It was during one of these prowls that she’d come upon her father and the live-in nanny, Aquarius, on the custom-made rocking horse that Sam’s father had given her for her sixth birthday. Aquarius was doing bareback tricks on the horse, and Sam’s father was riding Aquarius.
Aquarius got fired, Sam’s parents got divorced, and the rest was history.
Within a year her father had remarried, to a semi-famous actress with whom he had just finished shooting a movie. A week after that, when Jackson Sharpe had gone on location to shoot a new picture, the famous actress had performed her first stepmotherly act: She’d taken young Sam to get her eyebrows, legs, and back waxed. That outing was quickly followed by others: to Dr. Attberg for invisible braces, to Fekkai’s for chemical hair relaxing, and to a bariatric doctor who put Sam on a diet complete with cute little pink pills (“This will be our little secret, honey,” she’d said) that made Sam run around in circles in the backyard like a terrier chasing her own tail.
When her father had returned home at the end of the shoot to find his much cuter, much thinner daughter, he’d never asked how she’d lost so much weight so quickly. But he had rewarded her by buying her a pony—a real one this time. Sam had never ridden a horse in her life, nor had she ever expressed any interest in horses. (Four years of psychotherapy later, Sam had an epiphany about the equestrian gift and the time she’d found her father and Aquarius playing Ride ’Em, Cowboy!)
Sam returned to school and discovered that now that she was semicute, she was considered semicool. So she undertook phase two of her remodeling campaign. She started workouts at Crunch. She had her too-wide nose and receding chin done. Freshman year, she got hair extensions from Raymond and began twice weekly blowouts at Mimi’s. She wore the hippest, most expensive clothes, the best makeup, and Clé de Peau Beauté’s four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-jar face cream. And she’d successfully moved up the social ladder.
But, dammit, she was still not beautiful.
As Sam got older, she figured this out: The more famous her father got, the more clout she had. Now, after two Academy Award nominations and one actual Oscar, Jackson Sharpe was very, very famous. So, though the best that could be said for Sam was that she was “attractive,” she had the power of the beautiful. It wasn’t nearly as good as actually being beautiful, but it was better than nothing.
Once Sam was in with the in-est of the in, her skills with a video camera—and access to top-notch production gear—gave her even more clout. Two-thirds of the kids at her school were wannabes of one sort or another; they all wanted to be in Sam’s short films. She took a perverse pleasure in casting really gorgeous girls and making them do humiliating things on camera, like picking their nose or squeezing zits. Sam always told them it was integral to her film, which was total bullshit. What amazed Sam was that they all did whatever she told t
hem to do.
All of this didn’t make Sam as cool as, say, the daughter of a certain world-famous director who, though barely older than Sam, had already directed a big-time movie and posed for perfume ads, even though she had beady little eyes and a nose that begged for rhinoplasty. Why she didn’t ax that beak was something Sam could not fathom. If Sam could’ve fixed her fire-hydrant calves and fat ankles with plastic surgery, she’d have done it long ago.
Sam sighed and sagged onto the bed. Even seven months preggers, her stepmother-to-be still had perfect, slender gams. So did all the girls in the wedding party, except for Sam. They’d all look just fine in those horror-show gold bridesmaid’s dresses. But Sam might as well just wear a sign around her neck that screamed, “YO, BEN, CHECK OUT MY FAT LEGS!”
Well, there was no way around it. All the more reason she had to find a drop-dead, flattering confection to wear afterward. She had the movie moment all planned out—very Bridget Jones. She and Ben would dance, they’d exchange witty banter, perhaps go for a walk. They’d once had a long conversation about Machiavelli at a party where everyone else was playing Wasted Twister in their underwear. Ben would understand her pain over her father’s latest nihilistic nuptials. He’d look at her with new eyes (hopefully from the waist up). He’d want to comfort her. They’d kiss, the music would swell; cut to them having mind-blowing sex, dissolve to a soft-focus shot of the two of them walking in a dewy morning rain, with Ben madly in love with her. Not with Cammie Sheppard. Nor any of her other really great-looking friends, may they all rot in hell in their size-zero Earl jeans.
“Samantha?”
Sam opened her eyes. The hummingbird designer assistants were still flitting about.
“There’s a black Marc Jacobs I forgot to bring along. But now that I’ve seen you, I think it would be divine,” a very small, very gay man suggested. He stroked the bottom of his very small, very gay goatee.
“Don’t bother.” She was sure that his “now that I see you” remark was a discreet way of saying, “Now that I see your ass is the size of New Jersey.” She’d had enough humiliation for one afternoon. She’d just have to recycle something in her closet, much as she hated to do that. For one thing, some eager-beaver photo editor would find a still of her in the same outfit and publish the two pictures side by side. Plus, even if it was a kick-ass dress, everyone knew that the true magic of any apparel existed only the first time you wore it.
“Wow!” someone breathed from the vicinity of the bedroom door. Sam recognized the Marilyn Monroe-esque baby-soft voice without looking. It was her other best friend besides Cammie Sheppard, Delia Young.
“Hi, Dee.” Sam rolled onto her stomach. Her friend, who was wearing teeny jeans and a teenier tee, carried a leather garment bag and a Louis Vuitton overnight case. They had planned to dress together for the wedding.
Dee had the flaxen hair, upturned nose, and wide blue eyes of a porcelain doll, and a perfect little body. Whenever Sam had to have her picture taken with Dee, she always wedged half of herself behind her diminutive friend.
“Sorry I’m late—my oxygen facial took forever.” Dee hung the garment bag over Sam’s mirror. “So, did you pick a dress?”
“Nothing worked.” So much for Sam’s transformed-by-the-perfect-dress Pretty Woman fantasy. She turned to the assistants, who were gathered near the window. “Guys, you can go. Thanks for stopping by.”
The assistants masked their disappointment and efficiently gathered up their clothes, bags, and shoes. Dee watched, a self-satisfied smile on her face, as they straggled out of the room, arms full.
“Are you smiling at my misery?” Sam asked. “Because I so have nothing to wear.”
“Do you want to know why you love me?” Dee asked gleefully, and then hastily added, “I didn’t mean that in a Georgia Sands way.”
“That’s George Sands,” Sam corrected. Dee was a sweet-natured and loyal friend, but she had a bad habit of internalizing forever the personal quirks of whatever guy she dated, then leavening them with her own very average brainpower. The boyfriend before last had been a poetry major at USC who parked cars at Sunset Plaza by day and was allegedly writing the Great American Novel (“Screenplays are so ephemeral and transitory,” he’d tell her) by night.
“Well, you know what I mean,” Dee insisted.
“Okay, Dee. I’ll bite. Why do I love you?”
“Because I brought you the perfect dress. Ta-da!” Dee opened the leather garment bag to reveal two dresses. One was a teensy pale pink confection that obviously belonged to teensy pale pink Dee. The other, though, immediately got Sam’s interest. It was black and strapless, with a fitted black-lace-over-nude-silk bodice that gave way to a chiffon-and-net skirt that flowed to midcalf.
Sam touched the material and examined the cut. Then she slipped off her robe and pulled the dress over her head. Dee zipped her into it, and Sam regarded herself in the department-store-style mirror in the corner. It fit perfectly. The three-quarter length showed off her smooth shoulders, it was fitted where she was fit, and it hid what needed hiding. “It’s genius,” Sam marveled.
“I knew it!” Dee chortled. “I saw it hanging in the window at that new boutique on Rodeo next door to—”
“Who is it?”
“Donna Karan.”
Sam clutched her chest. “Donna Karan? Forget it! She designs for women with fat asses.”
“She does not. Besides, you’re not fat, Sam. You wear a size eight.”
“So? You’re a zero.”
Dee blew shaggy bangs out of her enormous blue eyes. “But I’m only five-one.”
Sam turned her back to the mirror and peered over her shoulder to check out her fat ass. Her shrink, Dr. Fred, had told her that she had borderline body dysmorphic disorder, that she thought she saw fat where fat did not exist. Ha. She lived in Beverly Hills. Fat existed everywhere. All Dr. Fred had to do was to spend five minutes in the girls’ locker room at Beverly Hills High and he’d see why she was the only girl who wore boy shorts instead of a thong.
But this dress pretty much hid those reasons. “What size?”
Dee looked away. “I can’t recall.”
Sam pulled the dress over her head, looked at the label, and gasped in horror. “This is a size ten!”
“So?”
“So, I can’t wear a ten. What if someone found out?”
“If you don’t want to wear it, don’t wear it. I’ll get the maid to return it. But honestly, Sam, it looks great on you.”
“You think?” Sam checked out her reflection again, sucking in her stomach. It really did look good. And now she recalled that the time she and Ben had talked philosophy at that party, she’d been wearing a black cashmere tee. He’d said she looked nice, too. “Ben likes black.”
“Ben?” Dee’s voice was sharp. “Ben Birnbaum? What does Ben Birnbaum have to do with anything?”
Damn. Why had Sam been stupid enough to say aloud what she’d been thinking? No one knew how she felt about Ben. Like she’d ever be dumb enough to tell Dee (a girl with a pathological inability to keep her mouth shut) that she’d been crushing on him. The news would end up on a billboard above Highland Avenue the size of Hollywood billboard queen Angelyne’s.
“Ben has good taste, that’s all,” Sam explained. “How many straight guys do you know with good taste?”
“Sam, you wouldn’t have said his name unless he was on your mind or something.” Dee’s azure eyes widened. “Are you into him?”
“I only like him as a friend, Dee.”
“Translation: I want to jump his bones,” Dee quipped.
“I’m just looking out for Cammie,” Sam improvised. “She wants him back.”
“How do you know?”
“I was with her when she left a message on Ben’s cell that she wasn’t bringing a date and they should talk,” Sam said patiently. “You know she still hasn’t gotten over the fact that he broke up with her.”
“Hmmm.” Dee nibbled her lower lip. “And he
is coming to the wedding alone.”
“How do you know?”
“Cammie must have mentioned it,” Dee said evasively.
“You mean he called her back and she didn’t tell me?”
Dee shrugged innocently. “Maybe.”
“Did he?” Sam demanded. “Not that I care, personally.”
Dee looked at Sam through narrowed eyes. “Methinks thou art protesting too much.”
Sam winced. Dee’s last boyfriend had been a pretentious young actor from Minnesota who was forever misquoting famous works.
“It’s ‘the lady doth protest too much,’” Sam corrected.
Dee frowned. “Did you miss a session with Dr. Fred? Because you’re very hostile.”
Sam saw Dr. Fred five times a week. She was one of the few private clients he’d kept after he started his national cable television show on Lifetime. On television he had the uncanny ability to get women to share the most intimate details of their lives and then respond gratefully to whatever life-fixing advice he had to offer. Sam often wondered why it was that she needed such extensive therapy while his television clients had their problems solved in a single seven-minute segment.
“I saw him yesterday, between tapings,” Sam said. “Unzip me?”
Dee did. “I mean it.”
Sam pulled the dress over her head. “You’d be a bit hostile if you were about to inherit a twenty-one-year-old stepmother who couldn’t pass a ninth-grade exit exam.”
“Not everyone is as smart as you are, Sammie. Maybe your dad really loves her.”
“Please. We both know that Daddy Dearest doesn’t love anyone except himself,” Sam said. “But I didn’t mean to take it out on you, Dee. I adore the dress. You’re a lifesaver.” She leaned over, hugged her friend, and then hung the dress over the mirror.
“If you’re happy,” Dee breathed, “I’m happy.”
Sam smiled. Dee was one of the most well-meaning people she’d ever known, and had befriended Sam long before Cammie Sheppard had deigned to acknowledge Sam’s existence. Plus Dee was the kind of friend who would see a certain dress and buy it because it was perfect for you. And she’d be right. That counted for a lot.