#famous by Jilly Gagnon
DEDICATION
To Dad, for telling me to follow my dream;
Mom, for her endless support;
and my sisters, who have always been
my best friends in the entire world
chapter one
RACHEL
TUESDAY, 4:15 P.M.
Loving your mom can lead to some seriously bad decisions.
I’d agreed to tag along on her quest for face creams mainly out of boredom. But the mall with my mother on a Tuesday afternoon—as though I suddenly believed in the calming effects of retail therapy? We’d been here maybe ten minutes and already I was regretting it.
We were almost at the makeup counter that was our raison de mall when she grabbed a black, fluttery top with laces winding up and down the front.
“Ooh, Rachel, isn’t this nice?” She held it out to me. It looked like batwings in a corset.
“Not my style.” I pushed the shirt away, turning to a rack of oversized sweatshirts in neon-bright colors. Where had she even found that thing?
“No, not for you, for me. I think it’s cool. Edgy. Don’t you?” She held the shirt at arm’s length. One chunk of frizzy hair fell from behind her ear onto her cheek. She always cut it too short; at that length, hair as electrical-socket nutso as ours would not be contained behind mere ears.
“Sure, Mom.” I’d be pretty shocked to see my mom commit to a shirt she had to lace herself into. Usually her style tended toward neutral-colored sacks, but if she really wanted to dress like a vampire, I wasn’t going to tell her no. Besides, it’s kind of awesome when parents try to be cool, like watching a baby sloth play the piano or something. Terrible on the execution, and therefore adorable.
“Hey, do you care if I go get something at the food court? I went straight to ceramics club after sixth period, so I didn’t have a chance to get a snack.” Things would move a lot faster if she didn’t have me to bounce awful fashion ideas off of.
She glanced at her watch. “Meet me back here in fifteen minutes. I don’t want to spend the whole evening at the mall.”
“Sure,” I said over my shoulder.
“And don’t be drinking one of those gallon-sized sodas,” she said. “They’re poison.”
Mom was always finding some new threat to my precious development. Too late: I’d topped out at five foot three years ago.
I felt my phone buzz against my hip bone as I passed by Banana Republic, its faceless, elongated mannequins watching disdainfully as I rounded the Wet Seal, following the faint scent of tasty greases.
(From MO-MO): Do you have a new draft of Twice Removed ready yet? I don’t think I’ll be able to look at it until the weekend, but we need to be on top of this.
(To MO-MO): No, I had ceramics today. I’ll work on it soon—we still have what, three months until the deadline?
(From MO-MO): There’s no point in putting it off.
Mo must be stressed about something; trying to micromanage someone else was always her go-to when she had too much on her plate. We were applying together to a summer playwriting program with Twice Removed, but the due date for applications was forever away, and I was doing more of the writing regardless—Mo was more into performing, which meant I usually just let her help with edits. There was no point in calling Mo on it though, unless you wanted to intensify her stress-crazies. The best thing was to divert her to whatever she really wanted to talk about, so you wouldn’t start arguing about not-really-the-point.
(To MO-MO): Don’t worry. I’ll send you something by the time you’re able to look at it. Why so busy?
(From MO-MO): Did I ever mention how much I hate Europeans?
(To MO-MO): That’s racist.
(From MO-MO): You can’t be racist against a continent.
(From MO-MO): Trying to absorb the entirety of their pointless history—which is all just wars and oppressing women, BTW—is making my head hurt. I am SO going to fail this test.
Doubtful. Monique never failed anything. We’d been best friends since we were in diapers, and I couldn’t remember her ever even getting a B. In third grade, she made two entire projects for the science fair in case one was better than the other.
(To MO-MO): That’s what you get for taking smart-kid classes EVEN FOR ELECTIVES.
(To MO-MO): Guess how hard my Art II test will be? Oh wait, we don’t have one.
(From MO-MO): I hate you.
(From MO-MO): I take it back. Distract me. If my head explodes I at least want to die laughing.
I looked around for something I could send to Monique. We had this ongoing game where we’d send each other funny pictures on Flit (basically anything that got an out-loud reaction—from snort to guffaw—scored a point, honors system) and the mall was the perfect spot to play. Monique loved unintentional double entendres or grammar mistakes on store signs. I usually sent funny graffiti or dogs in clothes. There’s something about a dog wearing pants that never gets old.
I glanced around as I made my way across the mall to the food court, but nothing jumped out at me. And now that I was getting close enough to really smell all the different kinds of grease in the air, there was no way I’d be able to focus on the game. I was too hungry to hunt down a costumed Pomeranian. Food would have to come first. I spun around slowly, trying to figure out what I was in the mood for.