Where It Began(13)
Oh yeah, sign me up for that.
The thing is, as totally fake as I know it all is, and as much as I don’t want to turn into some pseudo-pretty grown-up stuck in Three B Hell, I look really good. My eyes look huge and sleepy and my mouth is big in a good way, even if it is slightly orange. My eyelashes look like the lush tips of mink paintbrushes.
And the hair: It doesn’t even feel like hair. It feels like a silky rabbit. Somehow the hair-dye guru has managed to make it look as if light is radiating from my head, like a saint in a medieval painting.
And even if none of the carbs I am now supposed to forget even exist actually regroup at their intended location, a couple of hours at Victoria’s Secret and everything I have that can possibly be pushed up is pushed up and defying the minimal gravitational force that affects such small mass.
The only downside beyond feeling totally fake is that I am embarrassed that everyone will think that I’m trying too hard and I’m a deeply superficial person who only cares about the way she looks. I am embarrassed to walk around outside in case anybody sees me. Not that it isn’t embarrassing enough inside my own house. How totally crazed Vivian is to get me back to Winston so people can see her handiwork and how she keeps carrying on about the New You.
Meaning the New Me.
XI
THEN, AT THE END OF AUGUST, LISA AND ANITA GET home from their uplifting summers of fun that will look great on a college application, and Lisa starts phoning me.
I kind of avoid her phone calls until I can figure out how I feel about looking like someone else, but eventually I answer my cell phone when she calls from a blocked number, and I am trapped into girlie coffee in Westwood.
And here’s the thing: When I walk into Starbucks, Lisa and Anita look up—and then they look down again.
I’m not completely sure if my friends not recognizing me is a good thing or a bad thing, but I am sort of fixated on the bad thing aspect of it, thinking about turning around and leaving fast if I can just come up with a not too obvious way to do it, when Lisa yells.
Everybody looks up from their laptops and their lattes and the people they’re flirting with to stare at me. People no doubt come out of the bathroom to stare at me.
“Gabby, you look so different!” Lisa hurls her arms around me in some kind of a frenzy. All I want to do is to sit down and be inconspicuous.
“You look really, really good,” Anita says.
“You do,” says Lisa. “Not that you didn’t look good before.”
“You know what I mean,” says Anita. “How did you get your hair to even do that?”
They both sit there googly-eyed, staring at the New Me and I basically want to go into the bathroom and rip my face off, or more accurately, peel it off.
But I change the subject instead. “How was camp?”
Lisa had been on a religious Outward Bound where she learned how to survive if she ever gets stranded in Wisconsin with only dehydrated stew, a toothbrush, and a pocket Bible. She met a lot of boys with great tans and six-packs but, given that she was somewhat streaked with dirt and smelled sort of funky the whole time, she was not exactly ripe for romance.
“And then there’s Huey, of course,” she says, looking down.
All right. She has been hanging out with Huey, making the discreet, religious version of goo-goo eyes and getting her picture taken maybe two dozen times a day ever since seventh grade, the pictures lined up chronologically and perfectly cropped in little plastic albums that Huey, besotted and creepily well organized, buys by the truckload at Rite Aid and hauls to school to show her every time he fills a new one. But given that she would appear to be completely and unnaturally fine with the fact that she isn’t allowed to wear clothes that show any cleavage or go on car dates or think thoughts with body parts in them, and given that she is not exactly open about how she feels or what they’ve been doing together for the past four years, it’s hard to tell what, if anything, is going on.
Anita had volunteered to help out orphan children in New Delhi all summer where she lived with her grandma and learned once again that (1) she is Indian, and (2) things are a lot better back in L.A.
“But,” she says, sipping her mocha Frappuccino, “I met someone.”
Tragically, he is an extremely cute French guy from Marseilles who was in India emulating Mother Theresa because he is thinking about becoming a priest, which makes the chance of his taking up with an underaged Hindu girl somewhat remote. Which is especially annoying since the chance Anita’s parents will let her go out with some cute older guy they didn’t more or less pick out back home in Beverly Hills is even more remote.
“They wouldn’t even let me go to a kickback at Derek Dash Sharma’s house at four o’clock in the afternoon yesterday. Because his mother wasn’t home, if you please. But look at you,” Anita says. “You look like a completely different person! Also more confident. With very good hair.”
Lisa and Anita have both had these supposedly transformative summers doing all this deeply meaningful stuff that is going to change their lives and get them into college, but we can all tell that after three months of beauty salons, color consultation, and Pilates, I am the one who is transformed.
“I’ll bet your mom is happy,” Lisa says.
“Orgasmic. I look just like a Slutmuffin.”
Lisa and Anita shake their heads and deny what we all know is true. The whole Winston School Slutmuffin crew would have nodded to me in the street if they didn’t figure out who I was first. That is how hot and totally debauched I look.