It seemed to take hours to get to him. Her knees threatened to buckle with every step. Still, in the first instance of self-confidence Nicola had ever forced upon herself, she headed strongly toward her mission.
The crowd seemed to part as she walked toward him. People stood back and talked in hushed tones—or was that her imagination? She was almost sure she heard her name once or twice.
This was her destiny.
Finally she was before him. He was talking to Perry Sullivan, but they stopped when she got close, and both of them looked at her with (she was almost sure) interest.
“Hi, Steve,” she said, a little breathless.
He frowned. “Uh-huh?”
Wait. That wasn’t the answer she was hoping for. It wasn’t even close.
Uh-huh?
What could she say to that?
She took a quick breath and tried. “So . . . are you having a good time? You know, at camp. Or here. Camp or here, whatever. Is it fun?”
He and Perry exchanged a look, and Perry put his hands up and backed off.
Which was . . . good. Right? Maybe Steve had been telling him he liked this girl and maybe, just maybe, that girl was Nicola. Like, maybe she was picking up on his feelings all along.
She gave Perry a smile and told herself his bark of laughter was a childish reaction to Steve’s affection for her.
But Steve wasn’t really being affectionate.
In fact, he was looking at her like she’d just dropped a dead kitten at his feet.
“What’s your problem?” he asked.
“My . . . problem?” Heat rushed into her cheeks. Something was very wrong.
“Yeah, what’s with the”—he gestured at her with disgust—“makeup or whatever that’s supposed to be?”
Her hand flew to her cheek. She hadn’t looked at herself before leaving the cabin. Maybe it looked too heavy in this light.
She swallowed hard and tried to improvise some sort of response that would make her seem less clownish than she apparently looked.
What would Diane Keaton do?
“It’s just . . .” What? What? “I was . . . we were . . . doing . . . a play? Because . . . I’m an actress? So . . . ?” She just wanted to drop dead, right here, right now. Or disappear into thin air. That would be better—then her stupid body wouldn’t be lying here, proving that this had really happened.
“So what? What would you act in? Frankenstein or something?” He shook his head and walked away, clearly revolted by her, shamed by the attention she had pinned to him and him alone.
The crowd that had seemed to part in the romantic wake of her journey toward him now gathered around her, looking at her, pointing, laughing.
The sound got louder.
Finally, somehow, Nicola’s legs got enough strength to move her, slowly at first, then more quickly, toward the bathroom. By the time she got there, her breath was coming out in soft, pitiful whimpers.
Yet as bad as she felt, as humiliated and embarrassed, it was nothing compared with the utter mortification she felt when she saw her face in the mirror.
She wasn’t prettily made up like Lexi, Tami, and Sylvia. There was no soft mauve shadow in her eyelids or shimmery gold dust highlighting her Maybelline pink cheeks.
No, her eyelids were dusted with an ugly, stark white. Her forehead was streaked with blue. Her cheeks were a vivid red, worse even than the flush that grew even hotter by the second. The gold powder that looked so pretty in a light dusting under Lexi’s eyes was painted onto her nose, creating a gleaming bold beacon on the one feature she prayed every day that people wouldn’t notice.
In case there was any doubt about that, though—the idea of people noticing—there were two wide black eye pencil arrows on each of her cheeks, pointing at her nose.
What she’d thought was Sylvia’s nail scratching her in her haste to make her makeup pretty was, in fact, Sylvia deftly drawing on her, etching humiliation into her skin.
Nicola turned on the tap and a pathetic, cold dribble of water spat out toward the drain. She cupped her hands beneath it until finally she had enough to work the dry, brown-cracked bar of Ivory next to the sink into a measly lather. She rubbed it on her face, her eyes, her forehead, fervently hoping that she would—please, please, please—be left alone long enough just to get this mess off her face and try to leave, if not with dignity, then at least with some anonymity.
It wasn’t easy. The water ran out before she was finished, so she took a handful of the hard beige paper towels and rubbed them on her skin until Sylvia’s artwork was gone. Never mind that she’d left a tender red burn behind; it was better than actual arrows.
When she’d done the best she could, she unlocked the door and paused. She couldn’t go out there again. Everyone had watched her run in here. They were probably still standing there, waiting for her to emerge so they could all continue their big laugh.
Well, screw them.
She turned away from the door and went to the window. It was small, and painted shut, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her. With the choice between parading her degraded self in front of everyone at the dance or leaving through the window, she’d break the glass with her bare hands if she had to.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to. With determination, she was able to open the window about ten inches. Enough to wedge herself through and land in the sharp holly bush below.
It didn’t matter.
She had to get back to the cabin.
She wanted to go home.
She ran through the marshy ground toward the lake, hoping someone was there, operating the boat. It had taken only about five minutes to cross the lake, so they could easily run her back to Camp Catoctin and return well in time to bring the other campers back.
After running what seemed like forever, Nicola saw the dock within view. But the big boat that had chugged them across the water was nowhere to be seen.
It must have been back at the Camp Catoctin dock. Or—who knows?—maybe these canal-like offshoots wound to other places, too. Nicola was just going to have to sit here and wait until it came back to pick everyone up.
Which meant she’d have to sit here and wait for everyone else to come down to the dock, where they’d probably have nothing better to talk about than the reappearance of the stupid girl who had come to the dance with writing on her face and gold dust on her big nose, and who had tried to escape out the bathroom window.
Maybe drowning in the dark water would be better.
Not that she’d really consider that, but looking out across the glassy black expanse, she did notice a little boat at the end of the dock. With hope thumping in her heart and a quick glance behind her to make sure she wasn’t being watched, she went to the boat. It was a splintery old wooden rowboat, affixed with a rusty outboard motor.
But it smelled like gas, which meant it had been used recently. She couldn’t tell if there was water in it—but if there was, it wasn’t much, because the thing was still on top of the water and not at the bottom of the lake.
By an incredible stroke of luck—and, given the night she’d had, any luck felt incredible—Nicola knew how to start an outboard motor and steer a boat through murky waters.
She hadn’t spent summers at her grandfather’s bay house in Shady Side for nothing. Granted, she’d never had to navigate a strange craft through the night with no one watching her, but she was willing to take that chance.
She climbed into the boat, feeling relief at the sound of the water slopping up against the side.
The sound was so much better, right now, than Journey singing “Don’t Stop Believing.”
She unlooped the tether from the end of the dock, pulled the starter cord, and the motor coughed and sputtered out. She pulled again. And again. And finally it putted to life and she steered it with shaking hands out into the open water.
This is crazy. This is really stupid. In twenty years, I won’t even remember these people—they are not worth dying for in the middle of
the night in the middle of some mucky lake. . . .
It was easy to imagine the worst-case scenario on the lake, but it was even easier to imagine the even-worse-case-scenario of going back to the dance—possibly drenched with dank water and with reeds and fish in her hair—to admit defeat.
So she steered the boat onward, her heart leaping with every choke of the engine, heading straight into blackness. Several times she thought about going back, but she didn’t know if she’d already passed the halfway point and figured that, if she had, it was wiser to keep going.
So with only a modicum of faith and possibly even less gas, she chugged forward, trying to quell the eerie retellings of urban legends that played in her head—the bloody hook hanging off a car door handle in the woods; the slimy creature raising a glistening hand from the swamp—and concentrating on the fact that, if she kept going straight, she’d have to hit land eventually.
But time wore on, and she saw nothing before her. Had she gone in circles? Woven around in such a way that she was always out of sight of land?
She was about to lose heart, but she heard the distinct sound of an engine starting, and the boat that had taken them over to Echo Lake sprang to life in a hail of little lights.
Camp Catoctin’s dock was directly ahead.
The larger boat drew back and passed her, unknowing, creating a wake that caused her own boat to buck wildly. But it didn’t matter because her destination was close enough to swim to if she absolutely had to.
Within minutes, she was on land. She’d let the little boat go, knowing that anyone who missed it would find it easily in the lake tomorrow, and hopefully would believe it had accidentally gotten loose.
When she got to cabin 7, she peeked in the window first to make sure Brittany wasn’t sitting up, waiting for her campers to return or, worse, waiting for Nicola to return so she could question her about the missing boat.
But Brittany wasn’t there. No one was except Holly, so Nicola went in, deliberately letting the screen door slam shut behind her.
“Well, thanks a lot,” she said, peeling off her wet clothes.
“What?” Holly looked up from her sketchpad.
“Turn around. I’m undressing,” Nicola barked. Then, when Holly did so, she continued, “I’ve just had the most humiliating night of my life, and you could have stopped it, but, no, you had to pretend to be sick.”
Holly set her sketching and charcoal aside. “What happened?”
“Like you care!”
“I do!” Holly insisted. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, but . . . I just couldn’t go. But I’m here for you now. Tell me what happened.”
So Nicola told her, including every terrible detail, saving nothing for private embarrassment, until finally she was just crying in Holly’s warm arms.
“I’m sorry.” Holly fretted. “I just didn’t want Lexi making fun of me anymore.”
“You were right.” Nicola hadn’t seen it clearly until just now. She’d tried to befriend Lexi and her stupid friends so she’d be cool. It was a stupid, stupid mistake. “It’s not your fault at all.”
“But I’m still sorry!”
“Me, too!”
They had only about twenty minutes before everyone got back, but it was long enough for them to lie in the dark on their bunk beds, plotting revenge against Lexi Henderson to the soundtrack of crickets and bullfrogs.
Lexi was finally going to get what was coming to her.
She was going to pay—big time—for what she’d done to Holly and Nicola.
4
The Present
“You want me to be honest with you, right?”
Nicola always hated that question and its implication that what followed was bound to hurt.
But what could she say? No? Of course she needed the truth. Especially when her agent had information that could get her out of the “homely girl makes good” roles and into some serious, Oscar-contending parts.
Because, of course, you have to be beautiful for that. And, more often than not, uglied down for the role.
Nicole Kidman in The Hours.
Charlize Theron in Monster.
It was ironic.
“Yes,” she said, mentally bracing herself. She’d just auditioned for a movie that promised to be one of the biggest of the year. It would be the biggest break of her career. If there was anything she could do to make it happen, she had to do it. No matter how hard. “Of course I want you to be honest with me.”
“You’re not going to like it.” Mike Varnet was a good agent with a clumsy bedside manner. He’d risen to the top with Nicola when she starred as the homely girl who got the hot guy in the sleeper hit Duet, but he had somehow managed to stay up while her career had drifted back downward. She’d had only one more starring role, in a movie that failed miserably at the box office and on the shelves, and then a series of increasingly diminished parts; from the bitter lesbian sister of the hot guy in a frat house comedy to the quirky neighbor on a TV pilot that went nowhere.
“Tell me.” Her voice was tight. Every muscle in her body was tight.
“Well . . .” He sighed. She could picture him leaning back in his chair and fiddling with a pen, the way he had since he’d stopped smoking. “The general consensus is that you’re just not pretty enough. You’re too scrawny and your nose is too big. You just don’t fit the ideal for a lead actress. Unless they remake Popeye and need an Olive Oyl. Rob Leiman said that, by the way, not me.”
Nicola sat down.
It was finally out in the open. Finally, after all her years of insecurity, all her years of therapy and self-help books, all her years of telling herself that she was okay with who she was and that she was far more critical of her own looks than anyone else would be, someone had finally come out and said what she’d suspected since third grade.
We’ve all been talking and we all think you’re ugly.
In fact, you’re too ugly to be near us, so just go away.
This was not a surprise. Or it shouldn’t have been.
When Duet had come out and become the sleeper hit of the summer, everyone raved about Nicola’s “unusual beauty,” “exotic looks,” and a million other euphemisms for “she’s not Meg Ryan,” and Nicola had made a conscious effort to believe the press. She’d tried hard to feel good about being “a new kind of pretty.” But even then, she’d known the truth, and even then, she’d been bracing herself for an ambush just like this.
The failed follow-up, the subsequent minor roles, had all felt more familiar to her. Auditioning for the lead and ending up as the sidekick felt a lot like her all-girls high school, when she always got the male lead because, Miss Bradshaw said, she was more talented than whatever fluffy blonde got the lead, and that it required more talent to take on the male role.
“You there?” Mike sounded impatient. He probably had more successful, more attractive clients to call.
Nicola struggled to find her voice. “I’m here. I just . . . I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know what this means.” It wasn’t just the Carell project she was upset about now. She had to worry about everything else suddenly, too. “Am I just not going to get work? Ever? Anywhere? Should I just resolve myself to performing as Anne Boleyn in a traveling Renaissance festival?”
“That would be three years’ worth of work at least.”
“What? Are you joking?”
He didn’t answer fast enough.
“Mike, are you seriously telling me that I should give up on the film industry entirely and move to community theater? Really?” Her voice rose. She couldn’t stop it. Hysteria bubbled in her chest.
Could it really all be just over?
Just like that?
“Cool it, Nic. I’m just telling you the feedback I’m getting. It’s a tough business. You know that.”
Of course she knew it. She’d always known it. Well enough to invest the disproportionately high paycheck she’d gotten for her second major movie and parlay it into an ostrich-sized
nest egg.
That didn’t mean she wanted to retire now.
And it damn sure didn’t mean she wanted to fail.
“What should I do, Mike?” She hated how desperate she sounded. And how desperate she felt. But now was the one time in her life that did not call for acting. It called for honesty. “I’ll do anything to get my foot back in the door.”
“Are you asking me who you should blow?”
“No!” Was there someone? “I’m asking if there is anything within my power that I can do. Maybe more acting classes, or a new method—”
“You’re a great actress. No one’s got a problem with that. This business is about looks as much as that, maybe more. You know that. Get yourself a nose job and eat a cheeseburger, and we can talk about bigger roles. Short of that, you’re looking at more of the same.”
“As I said before, the bruising and swelling will still be somewhat dramatic at first.” The doctor’s voice was soothing and his touch light and nimble as he removed the bandages from Nicola’s nose. “If I could keep my patients from looking in the mirror at all for the first couple of weeks, I would, but everyone wants to see.”
“Including me,” Nicola confessed. “I haven’t told anyone about this, and my friends and family are starting to wonder why I don’t want to go out.”
This was the very beginning of what she was thinking of, to herself, as the New Nicola Project.
It was the only project she was 100 percent sure she’d be part of these days.
Dr. Bernstein chuckled mildly and gave the last of the adhesive a quick yank. “This will be quite the surprise for them.” He sat back and looked at her. “Excellent. Excellent. This is some of my best work. It was quite a challenge, you know.”
That could have been insulting, but Nicola realized he was talking solely about the level of difficulty of his task. The truth was the truth.
Thin, Rich, Pretty Page 5