Sealed With a Kiss

by Robin Palmer

“I guess,” I said.

  “Omigod—two sisters going on a double date with two best friends?” the salesgirl piped up. “That is just the cutest!”

  “I know—right?” agreed Laurel.

  “Wait a minute—this is not a double date,” I corrected her. “It’s just four people who happen to be going to the same movie. And might sit next to each other.” Even if I had been sure I had a crush on Connor—which I wasn’t—but even if I had been, having a crush was way different than going out on a date! You needed days to prepare for a date. Maybe even weeks. Not to mention that I was only twelve and a half—I highly doubted even Cristina Pollock had gone out on an actual date yet. You were supposed to have crushes first, and ease into it, not skip right to a maybe-date! “Plus, in order for it to be a real date, you have to share popcorn, and I am not doing that with him,” I added. “His hands have touched worms.”

  Laurel pushed me back into the dressing room. “Okay, you don’t have to share your popcorn, but you do have to take the dress off so we can get going. Roger and Maya are going to do our hair and makeup. We still have a lot to do to get ready for our big da—”

  “Don’t even think about saying what you’re about to say,” I warned.

  “—night at the movies,” she finished.

  A night at the movies that was just going to happen to include walking down a red carpet in heels while the paparazzi blinded me with flashes and I tried not to break my neck with each step. That was a little different than when Dad used to take me to the Northampton Quad Cinema, where you had to look at your seat before you sat down to make sure there wasn’t gum stuck to it.

  Another thing that a night at the movies in Northampton didn’t include was a trip to the Olympic Spa where, after sweating in a steam room, stocky Korean women in black bikinis scrubbed all the dead skin off your body with this scratchy, sponge-looking thing. While you lay on a table naked, with your eyes squeezed shut because you were completely mortified, even though, according to Laurel, the Korean women could care less because they had seen a gazillion naked bodies before.

  “Okay, just so I understand right—this is supposed to be fun?” I yelled over to the next table where Laurel was also being scrubbed. Unlike my table, there were no “Ooh! Ouch!” sounds coming from it.

  “Yeah,” she yelled back. “It was listed in InBeauty as one of the best places to go before a da—a night at the movies. Isn’t it great?” she asked, all excited.

  “Actually, it’s more like really painful!” I yelled back.

  “You’ll see—your skin is going to be so soft when they’re done,” she went on.

  The Korean woman leaned in. “So when Connor Forrester touches your arm, he goes ooh,” she whispered in my ear.

  My eyes flew open. This was insane. Did everyone in the entire world read the gossip blogs?

  “Omigod, Lucy—that picture of you and Connor Forrester on the beach was just too sweet!” Maya said when we got to the trailer after lunch.

  “Yeah. You snagged a good one, girlfriend,” agreed Roger.

  Apparently, everyone in the world did read the gossip blogs. “You guys! I am not going out with him!” I cried.

  “According to this blog, you sure are,” said Roger, pointing to his laptop screen.

  Underneath a photo of me stuffing my face with my enchilada it read: “BREAKING NEWS: Laurel Moses’s little stepsister-to-be Lisa gets her energy level up as she gets ready for another hot date with new boyfriend Connor Forrester!”

  “What?! I don’t even remember that being taken. I know I’m not the world’s most photogenic person, but it would be nice if, once in a while, they printed a photo of me where I don’t look like a total idiot.” I sighed.

  “Welcome to my world.” Laurel sighed.

  “Or got your name right,” Maya added.

  That, too. This was getting seriously out of control. “Can I go see if Lady A is here?” I asked. I figured if anyone could give me advice about what to do when it came to the press talking about your love life, it was her.

  I found Lady A sitting on her couch wearing one of her caftans as Frederick massaged her feet. “Lucy B. Parker!” she boomed. “It’s been forever since we’ve seen each other—you must tell me everything that’s happened since then. I’m just dying to catch up.”

  That was exactly what she said the last time I saw her. It hadn’t been forever; it had been two days, and obviously a lot had happened during them, which is why I was out of breath when I was done telling her all of it.

  “Oh, darling—that’s all just so marvelous!” she trilled. “I remember the blush of first love.” She sighed. “Don’t you, Frederick?”

  He sighed, too. “I do remember, Lady A.”

  “Okay, (a) not only is this not FIRST love, but (b) it’s not ANY love. Connor and I are just friends,” I said for what felt like the thousandth time. “And the more I think about it, the more I think those little electric shocks and the fluttering in my stomach when I’m around him are because I’m allergic to him.”

  “Whatever you say, my dear,” she said, getting off the couch and going over to the clothing rack that held her caftans. She held up an orange one. “I’d offer to let you wear one of my frocks for your first foray down the red carpet, but I fear it might be a smidge too big for you.”

  A smidge? I could’ve fit three of me in that thing.

  “Plus, it would clash with the red,” added Frederick.

  “Uh, that’s really nice, Lady A, but actually, today I got a new dress to wear. It’s purple with giant flowers. And new shoes—they have cat heels,” I announced proudly.

  “You mean kitten heels?” asked Frederick.

  “Yes, those.”

  “How exciting!” Lady A boomed. “You simply must let me do your hair and makeup! I do love doing other people’s hair and makeup, don’t I, Frederick?”

  “Yes, you do, madame,” he agreed.

  I loved Lady A, but her makeup was more like something you’d see on a circus clown. “Actually, Laurel’s hair and makeup team were—” I started to say.

  “I won’t take no for an answer,” she interrupted, rummaging through a giant yellow toolbox.

  As I saw the different tubes and palettes she took out, I got a little nervous, because they were pretty dusty, and the last thing I needed was for my face to break out because the makeup was past its expiration date. “Really—that’s super-nice of you, but you totally don’t have to,” I said. “I’m sure you have tons of other things to do—”

  “Nonsense. It’ll be fun! Sadly, I never did get around to having children when I had the chance, so this can make up for it.” She opened an orange toolbox and took out a bottle that said Egyptian Oil. “First, we’ll start with your hair,” she announced, dumping some of the oil in her hand.

  Roger was going to kill me. Lady A may have been talented, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t a trained professional. “I was just planning on wearing my purple flower—” I started to say.

  “This stuff is just marvelous,” she went on. “Just a touch of it gives your hair a delightful sheen that the camera just loves,” she explained as she rubbed it on my hair. When she was done, she grabbed a plastic shower cap and placed it on my head. “It works better if you keep the heat in. And now we’ll do your makeup,” she said, dipping a small brush in one of the little pots. “But I don’t want you looking until I’m done,” she said, turning me away from the mirror.

  “I really appreciate this,” I said, “but Laurel’s expecting me back—”

  “Oh, darling—just shush and enjoy yourself,” she ordered.

  I sighed and sat back. Somehow, I had a feeling that arguing with Lady A wouldn’t get me very far.

  After a lot of poking and dotting and brushing, Lady A stood back to get a look at me. “Oh my, I really outdid myself this time, Frederick, didn’t I?”

  “You definitely did, madame,” he agreed.

  “It just needs one final touch,” she said, ru
mmaging in the toolbox. “Ah—here we are!” she said, holding something up that looked like spider legs.

  “Are those false eyelashes?” I gasped.

  She nodded, squeezing a tiny bit of glue out onto a brush.

  “That’s so cool!” I said. “I’ve always wanted to try those.”

  After she was done she stood back and gazed at me. “Much better,” she said. She grabbed the shower cap off my head. “Okay, you can turn around and look at yourself now.”

  “Ahh!” I screamed when I got a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Not because the makeup made me look like a clown—that part I could’ve dealt with. I could just wash it off. But my hair was . . .

  “Blue?!” I yelped. “The Egyptian Oil makes your hair blue?! You kind of left that part out, Lady A!”

  She squinted. “Oh my. It is a little blue, isn’t it?” she agreed. “I wonder why that is.”

  I picked up the bottle and looked at the label. “Maybe because the expiration date is from ten years ago?”

  What was I going to do? I couldn’t walk down a red carpet in a purple dress with blue hair. Talk about clashing.

  I scrambled out of my seat and barely squeaked out a good-bye to Lady A and Frederick. Thank God for Roger—he’d probably yell at me for letting an untrained professional touch my hair, but at least he’d fix it for me.

  Except by the time I got back to Laurel’s trailer, Laurel had her nose buried in her phone and Roger and Maya were gone. Because after promising that they would do the producer’s daughter’s hair and makeup for her Sweet Sixteen party that weekend, they had gotten tickets to the premiere, too, and had gone back to the hotel to get ready.

  Laurel looked up from texting. “Lucy, your hair is blue!” she cried.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” I said. Between this Oil Incident, the Hat Incident, and the Straightening Iron Incident, it was like all my bad luck was concentrated on my head. “What am I going to do?” I asked, starting to panic. I looked at my watch. “The screening starts in an hour.”

  “Okay, okay, let me think,” said Laurel as she paced up and down the trailer. “You can . . . wear a hat?” she suggested.

  This was just like the old days, after the Straightening Iron Incident. I had been positive that all those months of having to wear a hat because of my egghead had totally taken care of any and all bad-hair luck I may have had. I was wrong. “You can’t wear a hat with a maxidress. Even I know that!” I cried. “I’ll end up on OhNoYouDidNot.com for sure if I do that.”

  “Well, if we can make it even more blue, then you can pretend you’re trying to pull a Grace Steppenwolf. You know, hair-as-fashion-statement.” Grace Steppenwolf was a singer who was always dyeing her hair wacky colors like blue and pink. Once she even managed to put hearts in it for Valentine’s Day. I bet her hair person had gone to lots of school for that.

  I shook my head. “I can only imagine what the tabloids would say about that,” I moaned. Or Mom.

  She stopped pacing. “I know—you can wear one of Lady A’s turbans.”

  “Are you crazy?!”

  “It’ll look cool. And now that you’re famous, you can start a trend. Like I did when I wore my sweater on inside out that time.”

  I remembered that. Almost every girl at my school back in Northampton ended up copying her. Even me. Except in my case I hadn’t meant to do it—I had woken up late and grabbed the first thing my hand had landed on in the big pile of clothes on my floor and forgotten to look in the mirror before I ran to catch my bus.

  She led me to Lady A’s, who was more than happy to help us out. “What a marvelous idea you came up with, Laurel!” Lady A announced. I sat at her dressing room table in my new dress as she finished adjusting the gold turban that she had put on my head. “Don’t you think it’s a marvelous idea, Frederick?”

  “I do think it’s a marvelous idea, Lady A,” he agreed. Except I could have sworn that I saw him shake his head a little, as in “Nope—it’s totally NOT a marvelous idea!”

  “You think so?” Laurel asked, pleased.

  “Oh yes,” she replied. “It’s the perfect complement to the dress. Very Talitha Getty 1968, don’t you think, Frederick?”

  “Yes, very Talitha, Lady A,” he agreed.

  I didn’t know who this Getty person was, but the way they were going on about it, it sounded like it was a good thing.

  She stood back. “There. Now it’s perfect.”

  I reached up to pat it. It kind of felt like I had a bird’s nest on my head, but that was better than walking down a red carpet with blue hair.

  I turned to Laurel. “What do you think?”

  “I like it,” she said. “It’s very . . . fortune-teller-esque.”

  She wasn’t wrong. But I liked to think that because of the gold and the dress, I looked like an expensive fortune-teller—not like Madame Zara, the one with the big MADAME ZARA—PCYCHIC READINGS FOR $5 sign on West Eighty-fifth Street (“I don’t know if I trust a psychic who can’t even spell psychic right,” Beatrice always said when we walked by).

  Hopefully my prediction that things could only get better was right.

  chapter 14

  Dear Dr. Maude,

  Guess where I am RIGHT NOW?? Okay, you’ll never guess, so I’ll tell you. I’m in the car on the way to my very first movie premiere, and it’s going to have a red carpet and everything! Laurel’s agent got us invitations, and I’m super-excited even if I am wearing a turban because my hair is blue. That part is kind of a long story, so I won’t go into it, but the reason I’m writing you now is that I was wondering whether you had any advice about how a person who has suddenly found herself kind-of, sort-of famous can get people to leave her alone so she can go back to being a regular person?

  If you read the gossip blogs, then you already know this, but they’re all writing about how I’m Connor Forrester’s new girlfriend, which is completely annoying, because, like I keep telling them, I’M NOT. Not only that, but they keep calling me Lisa instead of Lucy, which is even worse. I know lots of people in the world spend a lot of time trying to become famous, but my question to you is this: how do you become UNfamous?

  Looking forward to hearing from you.

  yours truly,

  LUCY B. PARKER

  P.S. Not to put any pressure on you or anything for tickets, but I’m leaving in three days.

  For someone who was trying to become unfamous, tripping on the hem of her new dress as she stepped out of a limousine didn’t help things. In fact, it just made the photographers go crazy, with even more flashes going off, ruining my vision even more.

  “Great,” I mumbled, standing up and fixing my turban, which had somehow managed to slip off to the side. I turned to Laurel, who, because she was used to heels and fame and did not have a coordination problem, was smiling away as she posed for the photographers. “Do I look okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. Then she squinted. “Except one of your false eyelashes came off.”

  I reached up. “So that wasn’t a bug I smooshed in the limo—it was a false eyelash. Then I’ll just take the other one off.” Except when I yanked at it, it didn’t budge. I yanked again, but all that managed to do was pull half of it off, so it was just hanging there like a spider.

  “Lisa! Over here!” yelled one of the paps as he snapped a photo.

  Great. Now there would be a picture of me looking like I had a spider hanging off my eye floating around the Internet. “I keep telling you guys—IT’S LUCY! LUCY B. PARKER!” I yelled.

  “You tell ’em, dude,” said a voice behind me.

  I turned around to see Connor standing there. Looking very cute. Which, when you’re trying to figure out if you kind-of, sort-of, maybe have a crush on someone, is NOT helpful.

  “Hey,” I said. I smacked my stomach in hopes of stopping the fluttering that had started.

  “Well, that’s a totally rad getup. You look like a gypsy. Wait—my publicist didn’t tell me we were supposed to wear costumes to
this thing,” he said.

  “You’re not. I just—See, Lady A—” I sighed. There was no way I could explain it. “Oh, just forget it.”

  He squinted. “What’s hanging off your eye?”

  “A false eyelash,” I replied. “I can’t get it off. It’s stuck because of the glue.”

  “Let me see if I can do it,” he said, reaching for it.

  As he yanked, another round of flashes went off. It didn’t budge.

  “Look at the happy couple!” someone yelled.

  “OW!” I yelled as he yanked really hard.

  “Here you go,” he said, holding it toward me. A flashbulb went off. I could only imagine what they’d write underneath that picture.

  Austin tapped us on the shoulder. “You guys ready to hit it?” he asked, motioning to the red carpet.

  “Wait a minute,” I said nervously. “You want me to walk down that with him?” I squeaked, pointing at Connor.

  The three of them nodded. Oh God. This was so going to look like a date. I wondered if I could sneak around to a back entrance, but when there’s a chorus of “Come on—move it already! Start walking!”s behind you, and Connor’s publicist Sandi is pushing you, you don’t have much of a choice.

  Connor put his hand out. “Ready?”

  I sighed. “I guess,” I replied as I took it. It was even softer and squishier than before. Did he use hand cream? Maybe I’d ask him for some beauty tips later.

  Thankfully, I was able to make it down the red carpet without tripping again, or losing my turban. My eyes, however, were in bad shape from all the flashes and the False Eyelash Incident. “Connor! Lisa!” yelled the photographers.

  Connor stopped walking. “It’s not Lisa—it’s Lucy B. Parker,” he corrected them.

  I turned to him and gave him a grateful smile. If I had had time to take my advice book out, I would’ve written, If you’re going to kind-of, sort-of, maybe have a crush on someone, make sure it’s someone who realizes how important it is to you that people get your name right.