"What do you think?" she asked.
I wanted to say, "I think I feel practically bald and you took the one good haircut I ever had and ruined it."
I didn't know what to say, and I knew she was waiting for me to heap praise on her, but I couldn't. It was so not me.
"I usually part my hair on the side," I said.
"We can do that."
I thought maybe it'd look more like me with it parted, but no. Where were my bangs? They were now blended in with the rest of my hair. I felt exposed, and my neck was so naked.
"What about bangs?"
"You don't want to hide behind your hair, do you?" she asked.
That's when I realized it — that was exactly what I wanted to do. "I'm used to having some kind of bangs."
"Well, they wanted to mix up your look, but I guess I could do a long side-swept piece," she said, taking the scissors and barely grazing a tiny piece of hair.
How had my long bangs grown out so fast? Or was my hair so short that the length had caught up to them?
"You look so much more mature," she said. "Definitely older."
Well, that was something. But I started thinking about how I had read that guys liked long hair. And that stupid Carey girl had long hair. What if Vladi hated my hair?
"You don't like it?" she asked.
"It's just a lot shorter…and all one length…no bangs…" I said, stammering like an idiot.
"It's super sleek, modern, and fresh. You needed an update," she said in that "my-work-here-is-done" way. She walked away, and Rylan came up to me.
"Don't you like it?" he asked.
"It's so short. I loved it before," I said. "And I miss my bangs. She said I shouldn't hide behind them, but…I like that."
He glanced over his shoulder and then picked up the scissors. Rylan combed a section of my hair to the side and gently sheared off a little bit. Then he stepped back and then did a little more. He messed it up with his hands and pushed one side behind my ear.
"Better?" he asked.
"Much. It's still so short, but now it looks like…"
"You're a model?"
"Well, the hair looks like it anyway…until tomorrow when I try to do it myself."
"You are a model, you just have to think like one. My girlfriend has a cut similar to yours. She loves having shorter hair. She says it makes her feel sophisticated."
"Don't guys like long hair, though?"
"Some do, but most guys like a girl who is confident, no matter what her hair looks like," he said.
"That makes sense. I like it now that you fixed it. Thanks for the side bang thing."
"No problem. Just push it back until you walk out of the salon. Svetlana won't care if I style you, but she'd kill me if she knew I tinkered with her 'perfection,'" he said, making finger quotes.
I reached for my purse and took out my phone. "Would you mind taking a picture of me with my hair all full like this?"
My mom walked up then. "Oh wow, Landry. It's so short and sophisticated. I wonder if she could do my hair, too."
That's all I needed – my mom and I looking like little clones — again. No thank you.
I told Mom how Rylan had fixed it for me. She walked over to him as he wrote down the styling instructions.
"Do you get a percentage for the products?" she asked. He seemed surprised.
"Yes, but they're giving her some samples."
"Well, what would you recommend?"
He asked if I had a large-barrel curling iron, and I shook my head. Rylan leaned over and whispered they were cheaper at the drugstore.
"What's your least expensive one?" Mom asked.
"Thirty dollars," he said.
She nodded at me. "I think I can spring for that."
He thanked my mom. "Landry, maybe I'll get to work on your hair for the next round. Now work that look like the model you are."
Mom said she'd take the curling iron back up to my room. "Then, I guess I'll go…" she said, looking around. "Makeup's next…unless you want me to stay."
I was the only one with a parent hanging around, so I had no choice but to tell her to leave. She walked out of the salon, and I went to find out what they were going to do for my makeover.
I sat down and the makeup artist handed me a sheet with a hand-drawn face on it shaded in with pinks and browns.
"We're doing natural colors. No more black mascara or liner for you. As for the eyebrows, we don't need to color them, but — how old are you?"
"Fourteen."
"Can I pluck a fourteen-year-old's brows? What did that stupid form say? Forget it. Not worth getting grief from the parents over it. Next!"
One of the head people at American Ingénue walked to the middle of the salon, and the camera followed her.
"We'd like to thank everybody at the Mirage Salon here in Troy and the sponsors for so graciously supplying our girls with gifts. The Little Rose people have provided styling products and accessories for the girls, and Maken Image Inc. has donated their latest ceramic and tourmaline hair dryer to each of the contestants," she said as workers brought out boxes of hair dryers for each of us. I saw that the dryers cost fifty bucks. My crappy ten-dollar one from the grocery store was going in the trash as soon as I got home. The old dryer only had two settings: egg-frying hot and lamb with emphysema attempting to blow.
"As soon as you're done with hair, please move into the lobby until you're called for makeup."
I didn't have to wait too long before someone came to get me. There were two makeup artists, Joi Jasmine and Massimo, assigned to me, and they hadn't decided on my "makeup concept."
"Joi, I thought we decided on natural pinks and soft tones," said Massimo, the man who had shown me the sheet with makeup colors on it.
"It would be more fun to do a smoky eye on her, but with an unexpected color like teal and then have defined lashes. She's got strong features for a blonde, so it would be fun to experiment," Joi said.
"I want to leave it delicate. With that hair color, she could look too harsh with too much eye makeup on," he said.
"Fine, forget the shadow, but at least let's do heavy lashes — lots of lashes," she said.
"Soft is better…"
"What if we do the smoky eye with a lighter shade of teal and just natural mascara?" Joi said.
"What do you think?" Massimo asked me. I was surprised he cared about my input at all. I wasn't used to adults asking my opinion on anything.
I told him that I wasn't good at eye makeup and how I always appeared "kinda goth" when I wore liner.
"I think we could do a defined eye, and we'll show you how to do it so it's not harsh. Do you need oil-free foundation and powder?" he asked.
I nodded, and he and Joi spent another ten minutes fighting over if I was a warm or cool-toned ivory.
"She has a warm tone to her skin…" Joi said.
"Which is why we need a cooler one to counterbalance the sallow tone," he said.
The cameras had just shown up when Massimo started to say how yellow-y my skin was. However, once the camera was on the two of them, they stopped fighting. "We'll mix a little of the warmer base into this cool-toned one and give —" he stopped and checked my name on his sheet " — Landry here a bottle of custom-blended Little Rose oil-free foundation."
The cameraman got closer as Massimo explained that he was going to do a defined eye with natural lips and cheeks on me.
"Reds and dark shades would be too harsh on her lips and bring her jaw out too much," he said.
What was wrong with my jaw? How had I spent fourteen years on the planet not knowing how flawed I was?
"We're not using any highlighter on her because her face is somewhat oval-shaped, although her chin isn't the traditional one. Her features are well-proportioned enough that we don't need to create any extra areas. We will shade around her hair line, but we don't need to contour under her cheeks since she's already thin."
The cameraman moved to the next girl, and I slumped. I was
a string bean with a weird chin. Joi told me not to slouch, and Massimo put his hands on my shoulders.
"I just meant we didn't have to carve cheekbones out of a chubby face," he said. "You're beautiful. Don't worry."
It was nice that a makeup artist would tell me I was beautiful, but that was his job, so I wasn't sure how true it was. Part of me felt like I had to be somewhat pretty to get there, but another part of me —the part that was concerned about my chin and mentally throwing away all my "harsh" makeup — felt like I was there because of my height, my weight, and maybe even because my hair color was unusual. All things that didn't necessarily mean that my face was pretty. I relaxed as Joi had me close my eyes to shade them.
"This is more of a liquid lipstick since glosses can look too plastic-y on TV," Joi said. My makeup was perfect. Joi told me the point of makeup wasn't so people said the makeup was pretty, but so the person appeared awake and pretty. The cameras came over, and Massimo repeated what he had done with my makeup.
Both of them put on big TV star smiles as they thanked Little Rose Cosmetics for providing each contestant with makeup. As soon as we were off camera, they told me to make sure to get to one of them early before the fashion show tomorrow.
"It's going to be a madhouse tomorrow, so we won't have time to blend things as well, so get over to one of us as soon as you can," he said. "And don't come with makeup on, or we'll have to waste time removing it."
The event organizer grabbed me as soon as I stood up and took me over for pictures. They took several shots of me, had me do a bit on camera saying how I liked my new look and thanked the sponsors, and then they piled me into a van with some other girls to go back to the hotel.
"I'm Kyra," said an African-American girl with incredibly long black hair.
"Wow, your hair looks gorgeous," I said.
"Not my hair," she said laughing. "They put in extensions. My mom was terrified they'd want to lighten my hair or something."
"It looks gorgeous."
"Thanks, I was nervous about it. I don't know how people back home will react to it." She shrugged.
I asked if she knew when we were going to get to eat.
"They said we can order room service when we get back to the hotel," Kyra said. "I guess they did a wild card thing in Florida, and three of the girls got into a huge fight in the dining room. It was in the newspapers and everything, so they're trying to keep us all apart as much as possible."
"I haven't even met my roommate yet," I said.
"Me neither. I think they have it worked out so we're all on separate schedules so nobody fights," she said. "Where are you from?"
"Grand Rapids now, but I used to live in Chicago."
"I'm from Flint. No one from home will recognize me with this hair if they watch the webisode. I hate fake hair, but I felt like I didn't have a choice."
With her big brown eyes and dark skin, the long hair made her look so exotic. I had a feeling I was looking at the wild card winner.
"I didn't want my hair this short," I said. "I felt the same way."
We started talking about school, and I found out Kyra was a junior in high school. When we got to the hotel, Carolyn, one of the organizers, said we were to go to our separate rooms and order dinner.
"After we get our meals, could Landry come and eat in my room?" she asked. "I don't want to break any rules, but it would be nice to have somebody to hang out with."
Carolyn said it would be okay as long as I left by 10 p.m. I went to my room and saw a tray with a half-eaten sandwich and cake crumbs. Picking up the phone, I ordered fettuccini Alfredo, which was my favorite meal, and as soon as my food arrived, I went to Kyra's room.
"Wow, you're not worried about calories, are ya?" she said when she saw my plate. I had been so excited about getting pasta, and now I felt like a little kid.
"Don't worry about it. If I weren't allergic to cheese, I would have ordered it too," she said, cutting her chicken sandwich. "I heard they won't even give us our gift baskets until tomorrow, because in Florida some girl put some laxative stuff on the apples so her roommate would be too sick to compete.
"That's crazy," I said, wondering if my roommate had done anything weird to the toothpaste tube I had left on the sink.
"I want to win this round, but I'm not going to do any crazy stuff," she said. "I need to start putting money away for college now. This is the year I need to start getting serious about it, and my mom said I am going to need a scholarship and a lot of financial help if I want to go to med school later on," she said.
"Oh, you aren't trying to get, like, a big modeling contract out of this?" I asked.
"I wouldn't turn down the chance to be rich and famous, but I want to be a doctor. My dad wasn't around when I was a kid, so it was just me and my mom, and she got sick — like super sick. She's fine now. Well, she gets tired a lot, but she's much better. I mean, for three years we were constantly going to doctors and stuff, and I just want to be able to help somebody the way someone helped my mom out, you know?"
I nodded and told her my dad was a doctor and how his so-called friends tried to talk him out of med school.
"Do you think that maybe I could talk to your dad sometime about what med school is actually like?" she asked.
"Yeah, he'd totally talk to you about it. Don't tell him I said this, but he's great with advice on stuff."
She told me none of her friends knew she was back in the competition. She said some of them got weird last time she tried out. I nodded.
"I am doing it for the scholarship money, but some girls at school were saying I was so stuck up and only doing it to get attention from guys and stuff," she said.
Someone knocked on our door to tell us curfew was about to start. I went back to my room and got ready for bed. I had just flipped off the lights when my roommate came in. I sat up and said, "Hi, I'm Landry."
She said, "I'm Raine," without looking at me and then got into her bed. So much for making a new friend.
Chapter Thirty-Three
My alarm went off and I woke up wondering where I was. It took me a minute to remember. I glanced over, and Raine was already gone, so I got ready and went downstairs for breakfast. Carolyn called us all over for some group shots. We were told not to have our cellphones on, but they hadn't confiscated them like the contract said they would. I noticed my roommate was taking pics with hers, which was a definite no-no, but none of the adults were around to see it.
They had us do some runway walking that they filmed. The organizer said it was just practice, but I could tell it was the real deal, so I made sure to try and look confident, even though my knees were trembling. Kyra seemed so confident as she straightened her back and walked in front of the camera. Then I saw Talisa Milan and Jem standing over to the side, watching us.
"Oh wow, do you see them?" one of the contestants said. "Jem is even prettier than her pictures."
One of the other girls was kind of rude and made a comment that Talisa had obviously been airbrushed in her last ad.
"She has, like, acne on her chin," she said.
I stared at Talisa, and there was one microscopic bump on her perfect chin. What was with the girl behind me?
"Dude, negative much?" someone else said.
"What? That's disgusting. She's all broken out. Gross."
How could anyone call one tiny blemish gross? And let's be honest, if they were going to judge someone as flawless as Talisa for a teensy skin problem, what chance did the rest of us have?
I saw Raine lift her phone and take a picture of Jem and Talisa.
"You guys, we're not allowed to send pics or anything during the contest," one of the girls said. "No one is supposed to know which of the Ingénue models they brought to which competition, because it might give too much away."
"I'm not doing anything with the picture," Raine said. "I just want it to remember this day by. And Kyra took one earlier."
I thought that was weird of her to say when I knew Kyra didn't hav
e her phone with her. In fact, I saw her leave it in the room when we came down.
All afternoon the producers had us do interviews on camera, test pics, and then more walking in front of the judges. After a while, I was too tired to be nervous. Some of the girls were complaining about their feet from being in heels all day. Pretty soon there was a pile of shoes in the corner. They gave us a snack break and said we could check our e-mail, but we weren't allowed to send out any e-mails out, because it might "compromise the suspense and integrity of the show." I glanced over at Kyra.
"Huh?"
"She means we might give something away on accident," she said.
I checked my e-mail, hoping for something from Vladi, but I just had two from Thalia and Peyton. Kyra was reading a message from her mom, and I saw Raine playing on her phone.
"I have to go to the bathroom super bad," Kyra said. "I'll be right back."
I went back to reading my e-mail from Thalia when Raine came over and asked if I could run up to the room and see if she left her medicine bottle there.
"I'd go myself, but I'm a little dizzy. I need my meds. They're in a red bottle on the nightstand. Thanks," she said.
I was worried she might get sick, so I went up to the room. When I found the bottle, I realized it was just a vitamin supplement. That seemed a little odd, but maybe it was important for her. I went back down to the media room, and she was sitting in Kyra's seat. She jumped up when she saw me.
"Thanks, you're a lifesaver," she said, yanking the bottle out of my hand.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Carolyn called us down to tell us they had narrowed the group down, and she needed us all in the ballroom to film. We rushed to touch up our makeup and then headed to the room. I saw they had put tape on the floor where we were supposed to stand. One of the managers was telling us to hit our marks on the floor without looking down at the tape. Meanwhile, there was a bright light blinding us, so I wasn't sure how we were supposed to even see the marks.
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