Gorgeous

by Rudnick, Paul

  I could feel myself blushing, as if a teacher had just awarded me an A-plus and five gold stars on my final exam. I loved what Brant had told me but I also knew that, well, he was a friend of the family.

  That was when it occurred to me to investigate my square, quilted black kidskin purse with the silver clasp worked with Tom’s initials. Inside I found the latest issue of Vogue, which fell open to a full-page ad with a radiant color photo of my mom and Tom Kelly, standing with their arms around me. We were wearing Tom Kelly T-shirts and unlike Tom’s usually disdainful models we were all grinning ear to ear, as if we were sharing the very best secret. We were on a white-sand beach with the bluest ocean and the ad was for a new perfume in a heart-shaped bottle, called Forever by Tom Kelly.

  The ad made me start to cry and smile at the same time. Then I heard my mom’s ringtone, for what I was pretty sure would be the last time, coming from inside my purse.

  I answered the phone. It was Tom.

  “We have to go,” he said. “But there’s someone who’d like to talk to you.”

  “Becky?” said my mom’s voice.

  “Mom?”

  “We love you, sweetie.”

  Before I could say anything, she was gone, forever. But I knew that I’d been so lucky to have a mom like her, and I also knew that wherever she and Tom were hanging out, the cell phone service was incredible.

  I have now been the Queen of England for almost fifteen years and if you believe the online polls and my husband and at least one of my children, I’m doing pretty well at my job. And my life has become bigger and more rewarding than anything I’d ever dreamed.

  Of course after Gregory and I were first engaged, everyone, meaning the English press, was irate and suspicious. The consensus was that Prince Gregory, on a drunken binge, had picked up some drab American hotel employee, renamed her in honor of his great lost love and had then disastrously decided to Do the Right Thing. My name had been the source of international consternation, no matter how often the palace liaison had explained that I was, at most, an extremely distant cousin of Rebecca Randle’s and that I preferred being called Becky and that no, neither the prince nor his fiancée nor any other human being had heard from Rebecca.

  Rocher had ended up solving everything with a highly rated, in-depth interview on an American network newsmagazine. She’d watched this program for years, so she’d known what she was doing.

  “Yes, I knew Rebecca, and Becky is my best friend,” Rocher had begun, while seated on a white marble bench in a picturesque rose garden, wearing an earnest aqua pantsuit, with her hair in a tidy braid. She’d been the image of a fresh-faced, perhaps Amish, girl being truthful. “Rebecca was so lovely, like a beautiful butterfly. She was devoted to Prince Gregory, but she felt a higher calling. She was summoned. I’m not saying that she’s in a convent, in a distant land, heavily veiled and using another name, like Sister Silencia Pax Serena, and that she’s not allowed any contact with the secular world, but who can say?

  “As for Becky, well, she’s the best. She’s a hard little worker and when she was four years old and we would play with our Barbie dolls, her Barbie would always visit the broken toys and the spoiled food left out on the counter and anyone who was sad. And I remember thinking, Becky should grow up and become a registered nurse. Or a princess.”

  When she was asked if Becky and the prince were in love, Rocher had grown misty, gently placing her hand over her heart.

  “I only hope that someday, I can find a love as deep and as lasting, with someone as handsome as Prince Gregory, with a built-in pool and a hot tub.”

  After I’d accepted Gregory’s proposal I’d flown to London, where I’d been introduced to Queen Catherine in the palace library. “But we’ve met before, haven’t we?” she’d said. I’d always trusted the Queen so I’d replied, “Yes we have. For a while I was Rebecca Randle, but then Tom Kelly returned from the dead and changed me back into Becky, and Gregory and I are both fine with it.”

  The Queen had taken a prolonged sip of tea and leaned back in her chair as the corgis looked to her. “We thought so,” she’d concluded and the dogs had happily charged at me, demanding to be petted and nuzzled. Gregory and I had been married in a simple, private ceremony in a reception room at the palace, with only the prince’s immediate family and Rocher in attendance. I’d worn a Tom Kelly wedding dress that I’d bought off the rack.

  Queen Catherine had died three years later, and because Gregory’s father, Prince Edgar, wasn’t a blood relation, the crown had passed to Gregory. Queen Catherine had left a proclamation that had been read into the record at Parliament, stating that her grandson, “If he applies himself, will become a more than acceptable King” and that her granddaughter-in-law, Becky, “has the makings of a really number one Queen.” Of course I’d had to abandon my American citizenship but I was considered a humble yet welcome bridge between the two nations. I became what one tabloid had headlined, “Queen Becky and Why Not?”

  Gregory and I had then produced two children, a son, whom we named Thomas, because I knew how much it would’ve embarrassed Tom Kelly to become a grandfather, and our daughter, Roberta, for my mom. Prince Thomas, who’s now twelve, still adores me and whenever his father scolds him for running through the palace halls or for eating with his fingers, Thomas likes to claim, “I can’t help myself, it’s the Missouri.” Robbie is only four, but she’s already a heartbreaker and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Maybe someday I’ll warn her about the hazards of beauty, just so she can ignore and pity me. In the meantime, she’s stubborn and she likes to throw things. She’s not being haughty or entitled, she just likes to throw things.

  After my wedding I’d appointed Rocher as my secretary. Since then she’s run my life and encouraged me to wear a down-filled vest with my crown for at least one of my official coronation portraits. Rocher has now been married three times that I know of, first to a bartender she met at my wedding reception, then to a Brazilian soccer player and who can blame her, and finally to the Earl of Lownesderry, who’s squat and sputtering but who lets Rocher introduce him using an exaggerated backwoods drawl to tell people, “And y’all, this here is Earl.”

  Being the Queen of England is, of course, exhausting and yes, I make sure that my staff glues thick felt pads along the interior bands of all my crowns and tiaras, because otherwise I get deep, painfully reddened indentations across my forehead and behind my ears. But together Gregory and I have been able to do some good, and Dr. Barry now oversees five new burn units across England, along with outposts in South Africa, Indonesia and India. I’ve spent time with Selina, who, thanks to countless reconstructive surgeries, now uses a wheelchair and has graduated from Oxford with a degree in a form of mathematics I can’t even pronounce. Her face is still a mass of scar tissue and she sometimes wears a hat with a veil. “I don’t do it to spare people the sight of me,” she’s explained. “I wear it because I get so tired of seeing everyone trying to arrange their own faces into appropriately compassionate expressions. I sometimes wish that just like me, nobody had a face, just so we could all stop wasting so much time worrying about what we look like, and what other people look like, and how we measure up.”

  Which brings us to Rebecca. I have to admit that occasionally, when I see another Exciting Exclusive on her purported whereabouts, I forget what I know and I think, oh, wouldn’t it be amazing if they actually found her! I wonder what she looks like now? Then I catch myself but still, I find myself missing her, as if she’d been an entirely in de pen dent person. Some nights I’ll stumble across Rebecca in a showing of High Profile on late-night cable. I’m glad there’s an irrefutable record of Rebecca’s beauty so that when someone asks, “I don’t get it, what was so special about her?” they can take a look.

  Every so often I catch Gregory, when he’s asleep in bed or dozing on a convenient couch, murmuring, “Rebecca, Rebecca …” But so far, it’s always turned out that he’s been secretly wide awake, so that he can laugh up
roariously at my vanity. Despite this I still love him, which is why at those moments when I don’t feel like making love I pass him the remote and say, “Oh, just watch High Profile and do it yourself.”

  As the years go by I’m more and more aware of what I really look like. I’m remarkably similar to Queen Catherine. I’m not hideous but I’m not even remotely beautiful. People, especially the English people, approve of me because, as many schoolchildren have tended to put it, I’m “a regular sort of person,” like someone they might find themselves standing behind at a grocery store checkout. But because I’m the Queen, I secretly believe that there’s an additional dimension to my neighborly appeal and I like to consider myself majestically ordinary. I also feel that my profile looks very distinguished on all the souvenir shot glasses and tea towels.

  I wish with all my heart that my kids could’ve known their grandparents, but mostly I’m grateful for my own unorthodox upbringing. I’ve decided that my mother, for my first eighteen years, taught me how to be good and then Tom Kelly taught me everything else. Since he’d only been given a year, Tom had packed in as much tough-love fathering as possible. He hadn’t been a conventional dad but that didn’t matter so much. You can learn a lot from three dresses.

  And when I’m feeling glum, because Gregory’s away or because my daughter’s just hurled her full glass of milk at my head, or just because time is passing, I like to scroll through the annual East Trawley High School online newsletter, which gets mass-emailed by Shanice Morain, who’s on her second marriage and who cohosts her own Christian Soul-Support and Teen Prayer Variety Hour on local TV and who’s been appointed our class secretary. In the current Alumni Notes section I read that Katelynn Streedmore has just been named the head dietitian at the Jamesburg Assisted Care Facility, that Cal Malstrup and his wife Chelsea Marie have just welcomed their fifth bundle of joy, whom they’ve christened Blake-Jorlinda Malstrup, and that Becky Randle is still the Queen of England.

  I would like to thank my editor, Rachel Griffiths, for her inspiring enthusiasm, her pitch-perfect insight, and for making this book so much better, and shorter. I am also endlessly grateful to everyone at Scholastic for making me feel so welcome, including Lori Benton, Ellie Berger, Stacy Lellos, Bess Braswell, Leslie Garych, Sheila Marie Everett, Tracy Van Straaten, David Levithan, Kelly Ashton, Rachael Hicks, Elizabeth Parisi, Annette Hughes, Elizabeth Whiting, Corrine Van Natta, Alan Smagler, Jacqueline Rubin and everyone in the sales department, Lizette Serrano, Candace Greene, Catherine Sisco, and Emily Morrow.

  I would also like to thank David Kuhn and his terrific staff for making sure this book found such an ideal home.

  For their patience, humor and support, I am hopelessly indebted to Jay Holman, Todd Ruff, Patrick Herold, Susan Morrison, Claudia Shear, Christopher Ashley, Harriet Harris, Peter Bartlett, Dana Ivey, Jamie Krone, Scott Berlinger, Robert Wyatt, Kim Beaty, Adrienne Halpern, Allison Silver, Marea Adams, David Colman, Albert Mellinkoff, Dan Jinks, Candida Scott Piel, Andre Bishop, David Remnick, Scott Rudin, and for friendship and wisdom on all things royal, William Ivey Long. I’d also like to thank Robert Bookman for his many years of advice and dedication.

  Finally I must, as always, thank John Raftis, for putting up with so much, for making my life possible, and for baking the very best brownies, from scratch and otherwise.

  In my opinion, all of the people mentioned above, and anyone who has read this book, are all impossibly gorgeous.

  Paul Rudnick is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, whose screenplays include Addams Family Values and In&Out. He’s written for Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker. His plays have been produced both on and off Broadway and around the world, and include I Hate Hamlet and Jeffrey. Paul lives in New York City.

  Copyright © 2013 by Paul Rudnick

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rudnick, Paul.

  Gorgeous / by Paul Rudnick. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When eighteen-year-old Becky Randle’s mother dies, she is whisked away from a trailer park to New York City, where fashion designer Tom Kelly offers to transform her into a glamorous Rebecca, a girl fit for a prince — but soon she begins to fear that she will lose touch with her real self.

  ISBN 978-0-545-46426-0

  1. Identity (Psychology) — Juvenile fiction. 2. Beauty, Personal — Juvenile fiction. 3. Princes — Juvenile fiction. [1. Identity —

  Fiction. 2. Beauty, Personal — Fiction. 3. Princes — Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.R8792Gor 2013

  813.54 — dc23

  2012046062

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-46489-5

  First edition, May 2013

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.