Where It Began(12)

This is not as far into the realm of the truly bizarre as it sounds, given that my actual appearance, not to mention my actual life, is so not in Vivian and John’s satisfactory column. And she can pretty much tell that no matter how much she tells me to stand up straight, brush my hair, and slather on zit cream, it’s not going to make a dent in my sub-regularity.

“A makeover?” Lisa says. “Like, you get a new hairdo and a personal shopper? How can you spend a whole summer doing that?”

“You should at least do something you can put down on a college application. You can’t have a blank space the summer before junior year,” Anita says, not because she’s a complete pain, but because if she doesn’t get into someplace a lot better than UCLA, her parents are going to make her go to UCLA and live at home and let them check her outfits every morning.

“It’s not like you have to cure cancer or anything,” Lisa says. “Not that you couldn’t.”

Anita is more realistic. “How many mani-pedis can you get in one summer before you want to jump off a bridge?” she says. And then she says, “Oh no! You’re not getting implants, are you? Do you want me to find you some articles about how unhealthy that is at our age? You can’t even tell how big your boobs are going to get for years.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with them now,” Lisa says.

“Of course not,” Anita says. “That’s not the point. The point is that having plastic surgery before junior year is insane.”

“Not that you’re insane,” Lisa says.

“At least give yourself two years to think about it,” Anita says. “At least if you do it between high school and college, everyone won’t know.”

Vivian probably would have had me redone surgically if she hadn’t blown all those bucks on my vast collection of bazillion dollar T-shirts I didn’t exactly fill out. Seriously. For a couple of months, I was the only kid in the Three B’s who wasn’t anorexic whose mother wanted her to pack on the carbs on the off chance that all those extra calories would somehow migrate to my chest—until it became obvious it wasn’t going to work and she wanted me to go back to subsisting on carrot sticks and cartons of Trader Joe’s soy milk.

Look:

Wave while other people fly off to camp or their family’s cute little cottage or castle or villa or whatever on Majorca for summer vacation.

Watch while I go off to Yuko System of Beverly Hills and get seven hundred dollars’ worth of chemically straightened hair. With extensions. And shimmering blond highlights with color-coordinated low lights. It takes all day.

Then someone named Rolf, who is nevertheless Japanese and wearing extremely tight leather pants, teaches me how girls who have forty-five minutes to blow-dry their bangs, blow-dry their bangs.

And while we’re at it, why not drag me someplace to get my eyelashes dyed in a process that creates so much by way of stinging fumes that I am seriously worried I’m going to be a gorgeous blind girl?

Soon a color consultant with an actual office and a receptionist and everything, as if picking out colors were an actual profession, gets all excited about the perfect color of my now slightly fried eyelashes.

My entire wardrobe, on the other hand, has to go. All this time, I have been recklessly dressing without regard to my season. All those spring T-shirts and summer sweats when I was really an autumn. No wonder I looked like crap. Only now I have to wear a bunch of new stuff that is slightly orange.

“Copper!” the color consultant says.

Oh.

And I can’t get just any old new slightly orange stuff that I happen to like. No, I have to get a personal style. And I have to get one quick before they do my makeup so my face won’t get done in some clashing style that is stylistically hostile to the personally stylish, autumnal skirts I am about to buy to show off my improved stylish legs.

The style consultant, after foisting off a style on me that she keeps describing to Vivian as “kicky,” is all agog over the mother-daughter aspect of turning me into a person my mom can stand to look at. This gives her the overwhelming urge to find Vivian her own kicky yet sophisticated style so we can match. But Vivian is not about to chuck all of her clothes, even if it would enhance my personal stylishness to have a matching mother.

“No,” Vivian says in this pseudo-motherly, pseudo-wisewoman, totally fake voice. “I’ve had my turn and now it’s Gabby’s turn.”

“Your maman is magnifique!” the color lady says in an accent I imagine her practicing for hours on end while standing in front of the mirror in her color-coordinated high-rise condo on Wilshire Boulevard. “What a rite de passage for you, little one.”

By which I figure she has to mean something other than dyeing almost every hair on my body and becoming kicky, since it is hard to extract some big spiritual thing from hair dye. Vivian meanwhile is patting me on the hand and getting off on whose turn it is.

My turn for what?

To turn out like her, mother of a kid who needs an army of exterior decorators?

To live in Bel Air in a shabby house on stilts that is probably going to slide all the way down to Sunset Boulevard the next time the earth quakes or we get a really big rain?

To hang with some guy like my dad who can’t even make it from the bedroom to the den if there isn’t a pitcher of margaritas waiting for him on his desk by way of motivation, and who doesn’t even seem to like her all that much?