Fancy Pants (Wynette, Texas #1)(53)

While her twenty-four-year-old big brother had been shouting revolution from the steps of Berkeley's Sproal Hall, Naomi had begun her freshman year at Columbia three thousand miles away. She had been her parents’ pride and joy—pretty, popular, a good student—their consolation prize for having produced “the other one,” the son whose antics had disgraced them and whose name was never to be mentioned. At first Naomi had buried herself in her studies, staying far away from Columbia's radical students. But then Gerry had arrived on campus and he had hypnotized her, right along with the rest of the student body.

She had always adored her brother, but never more so than on that winter day when she had watched him standing like a young blue-jeaned warrior at the top of the library steps trying to change the world with his impassioned tongue. She had studied those strong Semitic features surrounded by a great halo of curly black hair and couldn't believe the two of them had come from the same womb. Gerry had full lips and a bold nose unredeemed by the plastic surgeon who had reshaped hers. Everything about him was larger than life, while she felt merely ordinary. Lifting his strong arms over his head, he had pumped his fists in the air and tossed his head back, his teeth flashing like white stars against his olive skin. She had never seen anything more wondrous in her life than her big brother exhorting the masses to rebellion that day at Columbia.

Before the year was over, she had become part of Columbia's militant student group, an act that had finally won her brother's approval but had resulted in a painful estrangement from her parents. Disillusionment had settled in slowly over the next few years as she fell victim to the Movement's rampant male chauvinism, its disorganization, and its paranoia. By her junior year she had severed her contacts with its leaders, and Gerry had never forgiven her. They had seen each other only once in the past two years, and they had argued the entire time. Now she spent her days praying he wouldn't do something so irredeemably awful that everyone at the agency would find out he was her brother. Somehow she couldn't imagine a firm as conservative as BS&R appointing the sister of a nationally renowned radical as its first female vice-president.

She pulled her thoughts away from her past life and looked down at her present one—the layout spread on her desktop. As always, she felt the rush of satisfaction that told her she had done a good job. Her experienced eye approved the Sassy bottle design, a frosted glass teardrop topped by a wave-shaped navy blue stopper. The perfume flagon would be elegantly packaged in a shiny navy box imprinted with the hot pink letters of the slogan she had created—“SASSY! For Free Spirits Only.” The exclamation point after the product name had been her idea, and one that particularly pleased her. Still, despite the success of both the packaging and the slogan, the spirit of the campaign was missing because Naomi hadn't been able to perform one simple task: she hadn't been able to find the Sassy Girl.

Her intercom buzzed, and her secretary reminded her that she had a meeting with Harry R. Rodenbaugh, senior vice-president and board member of BS&R. Mr. Rodenbaugh had specifically requested that she bring along the new Sassy layout. Naomi groaned to herself. As one of BS&R's two creative directors, she'd been handling perfume and cosmetic accounts for years, and she'd never had so much trouble. Why did the Sassy account have to be the account that Harry Rodenbaugh had made his pet project? Harry, who desperately wanted one last Clio to his credit before he retired, insisted on a fresh face to represent the new product, a model who was spectacular but not recognizable to fashion magazine readers.

“I want personality, Naomi, not just another cookie cutter model's face,” he had told her when he called her on his Persian carpet the week before. “I want a long-stemmed American Beauty rose with a few thorns on her. This campaign is all about the free-spirited American woman, and if you can't deliver anything closer to target than these overused children's faces you've been shoving under my nose for the past three weeks, then I don't see how you could possibly handle a position as a BS&R vice-president.”

The sly old bastard.

Naomi gathered up her papers the same way she did everything, with quick, concentrated movements. Tomorrow she would start contacting all the theatrical agencies and look for an actress instead of a model. Better male chauvinists than Harry R. Rodenbaugh had tried to keep her down, and not one of them had succeeded.

As Naomi passed her secretary's desk, she stopped to pick up an Express Mail package that had just arrived, and in the process knocked a magazine onto the floor. “I'll get it,” her secretary said, as she reached down.

But Naomi had already picked it up, her critical eye caught by the series of candid photographs on the page that had fallen open. She felt a prickle go up the back of her neck—an instinctive reaction that told her more clearly than any focus group when she was onto something big. Her Sassy Girl! Profile, full-face, three-quarters—each photograph was better than the last. On the floor of her secretary's office, she had found her American Beauty rose.

And then she scanned the caption. The girl wasn't a professional model, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. She flipped to the front cover and frowned. “This magazine's six months old.”

“I was cleaning out my bottom drawer, and—”

“Never mind.” She turned back to the photographs and tapped the page with her index finger. “Make some phone calls while I'm in my meeting and see if you can locate her. Don't make any contact; just find out where she is.”