by Betsy Haynes
TAFFY SINCLAIR AND THE MELANIE MAKE-OVER
Betsy Haynes
A BANTAM SKYLARK BOOK®
TORONTO · NEW YORK · LONDON · SYDNEY · AUCKLAND
RL 5, 009-012
TAFFY SINCLAIR AND THE MELANIE MAKE-OVER
A Bantam Skylark Book / June 1988
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1988 by Betsy Haynes.
Cover art copyright © 1988 by Lino Saffiotti.
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CHAPTER ONE
"Where's Melanie?" I asked. I had just joined Katie Shannon, Beth Barry, and Christie Winchell, three of my best friends, at our special spot by the school fence where we always meet to talk privately. "She's usually the first one of us to get to school every morning."
Christie and Beth both shrugged, but Katie frowned and said, "I don't know, but if you ask me, she's been acting awfully funny for the past couple of days."
"Yeah," said Beth. "Awfully funny."
Now it was my turn to frown. Melanie Edwards was the other person in our self-improvement club, The Fabulous Five, and we have all been best friends practically forever. In our club we try to find ways to become the most gorgeous and most popular girls in school. We meet in my bedroom every Saturday, and we even have blue T-shirts that say The Fabulous Five across the front that we wear to our meetings. "What are you talking about?" I asked. "I haven't noticed her acting funny."
"Jana Morgan, have you been walking around with your eyes closed?" said Christie. "Melanie's been avoiding us all week."
"You can say that again," said Beth. "She's been acting as if we have a contagious disease."
"All I noticed was that she seemed a little quiet," I mused.
"Speak of the devil," muttered Katie. "Here she comes now, and she's with you know who."
"You know who" could only mean one person—Taffy Sinclair. We swiveled around and stared in the direction Katie was looking. Sure enough, there were Melanie and Taffy walking onto the school ground together, and they were deep in conversation. They were talking and giggling as if they were terrifically good friends.
I couldn't help scowling. Taffy Sinclair has long blond hair and big blue eyes and is the most beautiful girl in the sixth grade at Mark Twain Elementary. She is also the most conceited person in the entire universe. Taffy and I have been enemies for as long as I can remember, and she is always up to something. We had clubs against each other in fifth grade, and once not so long ago she tried to blackmail me. Not only that, she is constantly trying to steal my boyfriend, Randy Kirwan, away from me. Even though Taffy and I are each other's worst enemy, my four best friends are her enemies, too. That's why the instant I saw her with Melanie, I couldn't help wondering what she was up to now.
"Would you look at that," Katie grumbled. "I don't believe it."
"That traitor!" muttered Beth.
"I wish I could hear what they're saying," I said. "She had better not be telling Taffy anything private about any of us."
"Or about The Fabulous Five," Christie added. "I wonder why she's talking to Taffy anyway? She knows what kind of person Taffy is."
I shrugged. Melanie used to be overweight from eating too many of her mother's homemade brownies, but lately she had gotten a lot thinner and a lot prettier—almost as pretty as Taffy Sinclair. Not only that, but the two of them had started talking to each other a lot more ever since they got each other's names in the computer matchup during the Romance Machine Disaster. But I didn't say anything out loud.
"Look out!" Beth whispered. "Here she comes! Don't let her know we saw her talking to Taffy." The four of us whirled around in perfect unison. The Radio City Rockettes couldn't have done it with more precision. Then we pretended to be having a casual conversation and watched out of the corners of our eyes as Melanie rushed toward us.
"Guess what!" she cried. "You'll never believe what Taffy just told me."
Melanie looked from face to face as if she expected us to catch her excitement. Instead, we all stared at her blankly.
"So what's the big news?" I asked after a minute.
"I'm going to become a model," she gushed. "I mean it. Taffy just told me about this modeling school for girls our age that's going to be held at Tanninger's Department Store, and Taffy says it's going to be taught by Laura MacLeod!"
"Laura MacLeod the model?" gasped Beth. "She's famous. Her picture is on the cover of half the magazines in the supermarket."
"Yeah," said Christie. "Isn't she married to that movie star Jedd McBain?"
Melanie nodded. "That's her, and she's in charge of the school. It's called Runway to Beauty, and classes will be held every Saturday afternoon for five weeks. Taffy says that at the end there's going to be a fashion show right there in Tanninger's, and I'm going to be in it! Isn't that great?"
Katie sneered. "A modeling school at Tanninger's, huh? Where did Taffy get her information?"
"Her mother knows Laura MacLeod! When she told Mrs. Sinclair about the school, she signed up Taffy ahead of everybody. It hasn't even been in the newspaper yet. Taffy says I should sign up, too. Right now, before everybody else finds out about it and the classes fill up. She says that she knows a lot about modeling and show business and things like that because she's been on television and that I'd be a natural as a model."
Oh, brother, I thought. It was true that Taffy had been on television. She had a teensy little part in a soap opera called Interns and Lovers, where she played the part of a girl dying of leukemia, but it was such a tiny part that she didn't even say any lines. How could that make her an expert on modeling and show business?
"Modeling is disgusting," said Katie, almost spitting out the words. "It's degrading to women. It turns them into sex objects." Katie is the feminist of our group, and she always puts in her two cents about things like that.
Beth looked confused. "I thought you said it was beauty contests that were degrading to women."
Katie shot her a poison-dart look. "They are. But so is modeling."
"What I don't understand is how you could stand to be around Taffy Sinclair for five straight Saturdays," said Christie. Melanie dropped her eyes, looking embarrassed. Then Christie went on, "What I also don't understand is how you could walk to school with her and stand around talking to her instead of being with your best friends."
"I'm sorry," Melanie murmured. She scuffed one foot in the dirt while she spoke. "It's just that she was talking to me about being a model and stuff. Taffy even said . . ." She didn't finish her sentence when she looked at the rest of us and saw that she wasn't getting any sympathy. "Just forget about it," she said with a sigh.
Fortunately the first bell rang before anyone could say anything else. As we trudged silently to our lockers, I couldn't help thinking that I was beginning to smell trouble for The Fabulous Five—trouble spelled Taf
fy Sinclair.
CHAPTER TWO
I forgot all about Melanie the moment I got to the hall where my locker stood. Suddenly the air was split by a hideous sound. The fire alarm! Then I noticed that there was a bluish haze in the air and it smelled smoky. Kids started rushing past me, heading for the door.
"Come on, Jana! There's a fire!" yelled Curtis Trowbridge. He grabbed me by the arm and swung me around, pulling me in the direction the crowd was going. "It's in the girl's bathroom. The trash can is smoldering."
"Yipes!" I shouted as I raced along with Curtis. "A fire? In the girls' bathroom? Has anybody called the fire department?" I knew that if anybody would know, Curtis would. Curtis may be the nerd-of-the-world, but he's also sixth-grade editor of the Mark Twain Sentinel, and he's always after a story.
"Not yet," Curtis said. "The custodian just went in to try to put it out."
When we got outside, there were clusters of kids everywhere, and all of them were talking about the fire in the girls' bathroom.
"I'll bet some girl was in there smoking," said Joel Murphy. He was smirking as if he knew everything.
"Yeah," said Mark Peters. "That's just like girls, sneaking into the bathroom to smoke."
All the boys in the crowd broke into fits of laughter. It made me furious. Everybody knew that the boys were the ones who tried to sneak around at school and smoke.
My best friends and I turned our backs on the boys and started talking to Alexis Duvall and her friends, Lisa Snow and Sara Sawyer.
"Lisa said she saw Mona Vaughn coming out of the bathroom just before someone smelled smoke," said Alexis.
"That's right," said Lisa. She was nodding her head earnestly and looking toward Mona, who was standing beside Taffy Sinclair and nervously shifting from one foot to the other. "She was getting out of there so fast that she was almost running."
"I'll bet she's the one who started the fire," said Sara.
"She couldn't have been the only one who stopped in the girls' bathroom before school," I argued. "Why does everyone always pick on Mona?"
Everybody was looking at me as if I were speaking in a foreign language, so I didn't say anything else. Besides, I knew why kids picked on Mona. She was the homeliest girl in Mark Twain Elementary. In fact, she was just as homely as Taffy was pretty. To make matters worse, she worshiped Taffy and hung around her all the time so that no one could help but notice the difference in the two of them. Sometimes it seemed as if kids tried to punish Mona for not being pretty by picking on her.
Just then Mrs. Winchell, who was the principal as well as Christie's mother, came out of the front door. She stopped on the steps and raised her hands for quiet. "The fire's out," she said, and everybody started yelling and applauding like crazy. Then she raised her hands for silence again. "Please file quietly into the building now. Go to your lockers, if you need to, and then go to your rooms. Classes will begin immediately."
Most kids just grumbled to themselves as we all headed into the school again, but at the back of the crowd someone booed. I glanced at Mona just before I went in the door. She was all by herself now, looking sad and lonely. Taffy Sinclair was nowhere in sight.
It took our class a few minutes to get settled once we got to our seats. Everyone was still talking about the fire. Finally our teacher, Miss Wiggins, announced that the custodian had doused it with water, then carried the trash can to the edge of the school ground so that there wasn't any more danger in the building. "Now that we've settled that matter once and for all," she said sternly, "let's get down to business."
The morning went pretty slowly except for once when Randy Kirwan turned around and gave me his 1,000-watt smile. Randy is the handsomest boy in the world. He has dark, wavy hair and gorgeous blue eyes, and all the girls in the sixth grade, including Taffy Sinclair, are crazy about him. But he's my boyfriend. He has even kissed me twice, and so when he gave me that super smile my heart started doing flip-flops.
I was so busy thinking about Randy that I didn't notice who pitched the note onto my desk. I checked to make sure Wiggins had her back turned before I picked it up. I turned it over in my hand a couple of times before I opened it. I was remembering the fake secret admirer notes I had gotten for a while when Taffy Sinclair was trying to take Randy away from me and all the trouble they had caused. I opened the paper and spread it on my desk. Then I leaned on my elbows and bent over it so that nobody else could read it.
I shouldn't have worried. It was from Beth. It said:
Dear Jana,
I have been thinking about the modeling school at Tanninger's, and I have a super idea. Meet me at our place by the fence at recess.
Love,
Beth
When Katie, Christie, Melanie, and I got to the fence Beth was already there, jumping up and down with excitement. She had passed notes to all of us, and she began talking the instant we got near.
"Okay, guys. Answer this. What is the purpose of The Fabulous Five?" Beth raised her shoulders and held out her hands, palms up, in an exaggerated shrug.
"It's a self-improvement club," Christie said in a bored voice. "You know that."
"Aha!" Beth shouted, punching the air with her forefinger. "And what do we do in our self-improvement club? Tell me that."
"You know what we do," I grumbled. Sometimes I wished that Beth wasn't always so theatrical and that she got to the point faster. "We try to find ways to become the most gorgeous and most popular girls in Mark Twain Elementary."
"Right! So we can all sign up for the modeling school at Tanninger's. You know they're going to teach things like how to style your hair and how to use makeup and how to walk across the room so that everyone will look at you and think you're beautiful. It's perfect! And it even meets on Saturday, the day we have our Fabulous Five meetings."
"Gross," said Katie. "You'll never get me there in a million years. I have better things to do with my time than parade up and down a runway with everybody looking at me. Besides, like I told you before, it's degrading. It gives people the wrong impression of what kind of person you are."
"Gosh, people already have the wrong impression of me," said Christie. "I'm tired of everybody thinking I'm a brain and a goody-goody because my mom is principal of the school. Maybe if I got glamorous, my life would be more interesting."
"Oh, come on," gushed Melanie. "Everybody sign up. Please. Just think, we would have a famous person for a teacher. It would be so much fun if we all did it together. And Beth's right. It's perfect for The Fabulous Five!"
Everyone was looking at me to see how I felt about it. I didn't say anything for a moment. It wasn't that I agreed with Katie. Not exactly, anyway. But how could I explain why I didn't want to do it? I mean, I'm not really the gorgeous type. Besides, even though I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, I know there's one thing I don't want to be. A model!
Melanie grabbed my hand and looked pleadingly into my eyes. "Oh, come on, Jana. Please? Do it for The Fabulous Five."
"Yeah, Jana," said Christie. "Do it for our club. And just think about how you'll impress Randy."
I hadn't thought about that. I cocked my head and gave Christie a sideways glance. "Do you really think Randy would be impressed if I went to modeling school?"
"Of course he would," she said. "He already likes you, doesn't he? Just think how much more he will like you when you learn everything about being glamorous."
"Christie's right," Beth added. "I'm planning to knock Keith Masterson dead with what I learn."
A picture flashed into my mind. It is in the morning, just before time for the bell, and Randy and Keith are standing near their lockers when Beth and I come gliding by, walking smoothly and in perfect rhythm the way models always walk. Our hair is perfect and we look totally gorgeous from head to toe. Keith looks up first. Then Randy catches sight of me. His face lights up and he gives me his 1,000-watt smile, only this time it's 2,000 watts! Then the four of us walk down the hall together, right past Taffy Sinclair. I sighed as the dre
am faded. Maybe Christie was right. Maybe going to modeling school would make me so fabulous that Taffy would never stand a chance with Randy again.
"Come on," Beth insisted. "If you do it, Katie will, too. Won't you, Katie?"
Katie looked at me, and then at Beth, and I could tell that she was weakening. "If everybody else does," she conceded. "But I won't parade around on any runway."
I knew it was up to me. I was just about to say yes when I thought of something awful. Turning to Melanie, I asked, "How much does it cost?"
All of my friends looked at me, and I could tell that they were thinking the same thing I was. They all knew that my parents had been divorced since I was three and that my mom tried to support us on what she made working as classified advertising manager of the Bridgeport Post and that my dad hardly ever sent support checks.
Melanie looked crushed. "Twenty-five dollars," she whispered.
I shook my head slowly and frowned. "Twenty-five dollars is a lot of money. I know Mom can't spare that much."
It was all I could do to keep my chin from quivering as we went back in from recess. Just a few minutes ago it had seemed like a silly idea to go to modeling school, but now—now that I realized what super things it could do for my romance with Randy—it was plain to see that I wouldn't get to do it in a million years. But that wasn't the worst of it. Taffy Sinclair was going to go, and all I could think about was how she would probably get so glamorous that Randy would forget all about me and start liking her instead.
CHAPTER THREE
At lunchtime I couldn't believe my eyes. I had gone to my locker to get my lunch the way I always do and was on my way to meet my friends at our regular table in the cafeteria when I saw them. Melanie and Taffy. Together for the second time that day.
They were standing in the hall just outside the cafeteria door, and Melanie was listening intently while Taffy explained something to her. I ducked behind the Coke machine before they saw me and then peered around it to watch what they were doing. They were still there, and even though there was a lot of noise in the hall, I could hear what Taffy was saying.