Braless in Wonderland

by Debbie Reed Fischer

  She looked relieved. I guess she was worried my sister would steal her glory. I understood why she was threatened. Most girls were, with The Fluff’s violet blue eyes and compact perfect body. Even I would be lying if I said I’d never felt an occasional twinge of jealousy. I’d just learned to blow it off and remember that I had better hair.

  Because here was the cold truth about two sisters at the same school: one of them was always prettier. And people had a way of reminding you who’s who. Kinda like right now.

  “Um, Allee, could you do me a favor?” she asked.

  “Sure.” So that’s why she was following me. She probably wanted my review notes from Spanish. Why should I do her a favor when I barely knew her? Girls like her were just so used to everyone doing them favors. They expected it. It’s how they got through life.

  She waved the flyer around. “About the model search, could you just forget to mention it to Sabrina? Like, don’t tell her at all, okay?” She glanced behind me at my backpack. “Uh-oh, it’s coming open.”

  “What’s coming open?”

  “The zipper. Wait, I can fix it.” Now she was fumbling with my backpack.

  “Don’t! They’ll all—”

  Fall out. And they did, one after the other, unraveling, streaming down the arts wing, carpeting the hallway. This was a disaster. How was I going to finish my project now? Some comedian shouted, “Hey, look, you’re on a roll!” Then people started tossing pieces in the air, throwing entire rolls around like a game of hot potato. Hillary joined them. They all seemed so relaxed, so happy. I was the only one not smiling or laughing. I wished I could, I really did. But I didn’t have it in me. None of this was funny to me.

  My life was unraveling, just like this toilet paper.

  Smack. A roll hit me square in the forehead. It got me so irritated I picked the roll up off the floor and chucked it. It hit Hillary. Right in the butt. She threw it back, but I caught it, just as a stray piece floated down and landed on my head, covering my face.

  Which is why I didn’t see the next roll coming. It got me good. Right in the ear.

  And then a weird thing happened, even weirder than seeing the hallway carpeted in toilet paper. This time, instead of getting irritated, I got…the giggles. Waves and waves of them. The next thing I knew, I was cracking up, throwing the stuff around with the others. Forget my project. So what if I was about to get the first F of my life? Hilarious! Maybe this was senioritis. Maybe I’d finally caught it from everybody else.

  All I knew was, I hadn’t laughed like this in a long time.

  And it felt good.

  chapter 2

  I didn’t mean to spit it all in her face. It just happened. I seriously meant to swallow it, but when The Fluff announced she was going to be the next big supermodel and made that ridiculous face, it was like, thar she blows.

  It happened at dinner. Mom made the most delish arroz con pollo, chicken with rice. We ate Cuban or Jewish food most of the time because Dad is Jewish and Mom is Cuban-American. We called it Jewban cuisine. But tonight Mom put something American on the menu.

  Pea soup.

  So there we were, eating it and talking about Hillary High Beams, who, by the way, was wasting her time trying to silence me because the whole school had found out about the model search today, including my sister. There were flyers all over the place. Joey DiSalvo, our student council prez, ended his daily intercom announcements with, “For those of you who want information on the modeling thing at the mall, extra flyers will be available at my dad’s place.” DiSalvo’s Bait, Tackle, and Pizza is the nucleus of Cape Comet. Our tiny town was near the Kennedy Space Center and the Air Force base, and whether you were military, techie, or townie, every weekend you’d wind up at DiSalvo’s for a slice and maybe some new rubber worms.

  Anyway, I was telling my sister that Hillary should start wearing a bra. “I’m all for freedom and comfort,” I said. “But bouncing around like that is demeaning to all women.”

  “I bounce too,” Robby said. “I jump on my bed.”

  “I don’t know about it being demeaning,” The Fluff said. “But it’s not a good look for her. I mean, hello, who wears a backless halter top with a D cup? Hillary’s so fashion backward. Although…” She paused to raise her spoon thoughtfully. “She was the first to put rhinestones on her drill team uniform, and that looked hot.”

  “Everyone talks about that girl at all the PTA meetings,” Mom said. “I don’t know how her mother lets her run around like that. Tight shirt, no bra, and those tiny miniskirts she barely fits into. I’d be so embarrassed if that was my daughter.”

  “Allee, did you get a chance to look at those college brochures I left on your bed?” Dad asked. I shook my head no. “Are you going to?” I shrugged. I hadn’t been talking to him much lately. I knew he hadn’t blown my Yale fund on purpose. I knew I shouldn’t blame him. But it was hard not to. My sister’s eyes met mine. She knew what I was thinking.

  Dad tried again. “Because you’ve already missed some application deadlines.” He kept looking at me through his glasses, silently begging me to answer him, like a puppy hoping for a biscuit.

  And so I caved. “I’ll look at them later, Dad.”

  “Does anybody want more soup before I serve the chicken?” Mom asked.

  “I would, but it’s too salty,” said Abuela. My grandmother. She lived with us. There were two things we tuned out in our house: 1) the constant roar of planes flying overhead from the base, and 2) Abuela.

  “Sabrina, you’ve barely touched your soup,” Mom said. “Eat.”

  “I can’t. I need a flat stomach for the model audition tomorrow.”

  Abuela adjusted her wig and said, “I could have been a fashion model in my youth.” I kood ha-beeng a fachon model een my jooth. Abuela was always announcing what she could have been. So far, according to her, she could have been a famous actress, a millionaire’s wife, a dancer, an opera singer, and a professional harmonica player. From what I saw, she could have been a professional TV watcher.

  “Hey, Mom, did you TiVo that Oprah for me?” I asked her. “The one with that lady who wrote The Vagina Monologues?”

  “You said the F word.” Robby giggled. “Fa-China!”

  Mom slapped her forehead. “I’m so sorry, Allee. I forgot. But I did TiVo the Oprah with all the beauty secrets.” Just another example of how Mom did not understand me at all. Like I cared about eyebrow plucking or preventing wrinkles or whatever. I was way more interested in feminists, always had been, ever since I’d learned about the suffragettes in sixth grade. I even dressed up as Susan B. Anthony for Halloween that year, but none of the neighbors got it. They thought I was Mrs. Butterworth.

  Mom didn’t even need to watch a show about beauty secrets. Her friends were always oohing and aahing about how young she looked and how she could pass for Catherine Zeta-Jones. “Watch the Oprah I taped anyway, honey,” Mom said to me. “You might learn something. Like how to keep your ponytail from getting so messy.”

  I groaned. “I’m not gonna watch a show telling me how I’m supposed to look. Shows like that are the reason women can’t just be happy with themselves,” I told her. “Same with magazines.”

  “Lighten up, Wednesday Addams, it was just a suggestion,” Mom answered. I used to get really insulted whenever she called me that, but then I found out Wednesday Addams was this really smart, wiseass goth kid from an old seventies show. Now I had a WHAT WOULD WEDNESDAY ADDAMS DO? bumper sticker that I’d custom made for my car. Mom went on with her usual lecture. “And you may not like it, Allee, but everyone is judged by their appearance. The way you look says a lot about you. That’s why I wish you’d give up those faded old jeans of yours with the rip in the knee. Do you want people saying you’re a slob?”

  “No, I’ve got you to do that for me.” God, Mom cared so much what other people thought.

  “I don’t call you a slob. I just want you to look your best, that’s all.”

  “I like those je
ans,” said The Fluff. “But rips are so over. You cannot wear those, Allee.” Then she suddenly gasped, “Omigod!”

  “What?” we all asked, alarmed.

  “I still have to figure out what I’m wearing tomorrow for the model search.”

  “Omigod, what if you don’t figure it out?” I squealed. She rolled her eyes at me. “Those model thingies are always scams,” I told her. “It’s in a mall. How real can it be?”

  “In Cuba, they used to write songs about me, I was so beautiful,” said Abuela.

  “Hillary will probably be my biggest competition,” The Fluff said. “Breasts are like, very in right now.”

  It was at this point my pea soup had a little trouble going down.

  “Okay, then I think I’ll try out to be a model,” I said to her. “I’ve got the boobage.”

  “Ha-ha, like you’re serious,” my sister answered. A second later, her forehead filled up with worry lines. “Are you?” Everyone at the table cracked up. I was the last person who would ever be interested in being a model. Hello, I had a brain. “I knew you were joking,” she lied.

  “You did not,” I said. “You’re so gullible. Remember when I told you Betty Crocker is a real person?”

  “She is a real person, isn’t she? I mean, her name is on the box.” Hoots of laughter all around. Even Robby giggled and he didn’t even get the joke. The Fluff crossed her arms and narrowed one blue eye at me. Just one. Her signal for war. “I heard something about you today,” she singsonged at me. “I heard you TP’d the arts wing because McDonald failed your project.”

  “Impossible,” Dad said.

  “It’s true,” The Fluff said, folding her arms. “Our little genius finally got a big, fat F.” Why was my sister semi-busting me like this? I withheld information from Mom and Dad to cover for her all the time. And this is how she paid me back? She was lucky I’d never told them about all the parties she went to when they thought she was at the movies, or how many times I’d lied for her when she was on a date, since our overprotective parenting duo had said she wasn’t old enough to date yet.

  “Is it true, Allee?” Mom asked. “Wasn’t art supposed to be your easy A this year?”

  I narrowed one eye back at my sister. “For your information, I didn’t fail anything. I got an incomplete, and he’s letting me turn it in on Monday. So it’s not an F. It’s more like a delayed A.”

  Mom pointed her spoon at me. “You got lucky, Allee.”

  The Fluff kicked the table. “As usual. Well, I’m getting lucky too. Take a good look, everyone, because you’re looking at the next supermodel of the world.” Then she piled her hair on top of her head, stuck her chin out, and did this pouty thing with her lips.

  She looked like a fish sucking on a hose. That was all it took. A monster giggle ignited, just like the one earlier today. The only difference was, this time I had a mouth full of soup. Whoosh. The dam broke. Green pea goop all over The Fluff’s face, the tablecloth, and some of my dad’s arm.

  “Look what you did!” The Fluff screamed.

  “Again, again, again,” Robby chanted. “Sabrina got slimed, Sabrina got slimed.”

  Dad wiped his arm off without a word, but Mom had enough words for both of them. “Oh, very nice, Allee. That’s how you show support for your little sister? Just for that, you can drive her to that modeling audition tomorrow.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “Yes way. You’re taking her.”

  “I want to go too,” said Abuela.

  “But the mall’s an hour away,” I said. “And I have to work tomorrow.”

  “Then switch shifts with someone,” Mom said.

  “But Allee can’t disappoint her Wal-Mart shoppers,” The Fluff said. “How will they ever find the loose screws without her assistance?”

  “Shut up!” I snapped. She was always making fun of my job, especially since they’d moved me from health and beauty to hardware. She got up at the ass crack of dawn to blow her hair every morning, but hell would freeze over before she would ever get up early to get her hands dirty and do some actual work. I couldn’t wait until she turned sixteen and had to get a job. Spoiled brat.

  I had just finished tucking Robby in, after reading five pages of Alice in Wonderland. He always came to me after he had a nightmare, maybe because I was always willing to snuggle under his covers with a flashlight and read to him. Now I was back in my room. The Fluff was in her bed next to mine, tossing and turning. She’d be asleep soon, tired out from spending hours on the phone with her Trendy Wendy clique.

  I climbed into bed and started to read more of Alice. It was probably my favorite book of all time. I loved a lot of nineteenth-century books, but mostly the women writers, like Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. They wrote about strong female characters with opinions, women who didn’t keep quiet and didn’t do what was expected of them.

  But Alice in Wonderland was special to me because it was the first story I really fell in love with. I couldn’t get enough of all the crazy characters in Wonderland. I must have read it twenty times when I was younger.

  Tonight I’d read Robby the beginning, the part with the hedge. I loved the idea that behind something as ordinary as a hedge, there could be a Wonderland hiding. Like, you could really get to an alternate, magical universe if you just stumbled down the right rabbit hole. Robby compared it to how the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have a hidden world in the sewer. Boys.

  Most of all, I loved Alice. When I was Robby’s age, I wanted to be Alice, to just drink something and change, be a different person. Nowadays I wanted to be a different person all the time. Like a person who didn’t get called Queen Serious. Or maybe a person who had more of a social life.

  Sometimes I hung out with a group of kids from my AP classes, like at lunch in the caf, but I wouldn’t say I was close with any of them, not like I was with my best friend, Amy. She’d moved away a year ago. Since she left, I’d kinda been on my own.

  Who wouldn’t want to be Alice? She was funny and smart, and she got to escape boring real life for great adventures. The Fluff and I talked about getting out of Cape Comet all the time. It was like the sleepiest burg on the planet. We both felt trapped.

  “Do you think I have a shot tomorrow?” she asked, propping herself up on her elbow so she could look at me. Her hair was rolled up in these little squishy rollers. “Honest opinion. Like, do I really?”

  I could have pulled a sarcastic answer out of my stash, but her eyes were boring into me all searchingly, plus the fact that she was asking me meant she was over the soup thing and I wanted to keep the peace. “Yeah, you’ve got a shot. You know you’ll be the prettiest one there.”

  And what did I get in return for my niceness? “Just make sure you don’t wear that retarded shirt, the one Amy gave you before she left, with that ugly band, what’s-it-called.”

  “Brainless Wankers. It’s from their Excuse Me While I Whip This Out tour.”

  “Yeah. You can’t wear that. If they see you with me, you’ll ruin my chances. And could you please turn your light off already? Seriously. It’s late.”

  “Everything okay, girls?” Mom called from the hall. There it was, her nightly check-in.

  “Yeah,” we both answered. What did she think we were doing in here every night, sneaking in boys and playing strip poker while she and Dad lay in bed watching Everybody Loves Raymond reruns? Or did she just think we were still two-year-olds? Honestly, Mom and Dad were such helicopter parents, always hovering over us.

  “Turn off your light,” The Fluff reminded me.

  “Just one more chapter.”

  “If I have dark circles tomorrow, I’ll kill you.”

  “You won’t.”

  After a few minutes, she said, “I’m sorry I told about your art project.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “I don’t know. I was pissed about the whole Betty Crocker thing.” Her voice was wobbly, as if she was about to cry. “I hate it when you make fun of me.”<
br />
  I thought about that. Teasing was what older sisters did. And she was ridiculous. But I didn’t realize it bothered her that much. “I’m sorry. And I really didn’t mean to spit soup in your face.”

  She giggled. “Who knows, maybe it’ll be good for my skin.”

  chapter 3

  The mall was a zoo. There hadn’t been this much excitement around here since the county Swamp Cabbage Festival. Every school in the county must have gotten flyers because there were about two hundred kids I didn’t recognize. Amazing. All this competition for a job where you exploited yourself and didn’t even use your brain.

  The long line was clumpy with random groups of people, including my sister and her frosh friends. The biggest clump was in front of the table where the model scouts were sitting. A banner that said INTERNATIONAL SCOUTING ASSOCIATES hung over it, with oversize posters of models propped up behind them.

  Why was it that whenever I was at the mall I got this sucky anonymous sensation? Like I was a beige stripe in a rainbow. I usually had a who-the-hell-cares attitude about clothes, which was why I was wearing khaki shorts and a black tank top, but looking around at everyone in cool outfits (except for the troop leader/ soccer mom types in their plastic earrings, Christmas sweaters, and waistband-under-the-armpit mom jeans), I was wishing I had a style, any style. Like that goth girl I saw in Hot Topic wearing an Izod shirt with the alligator all cut up and decapitated with hand-painted drops of blood dripping down. I bet she never felt beige.

  The Fluff was moving forward in line. She’d overdone it with the makeup; her face was a different color than her neck. And she was nervous, shifting around, adjusting the straps of her long, flowy dress, shuffling the photos she brought with her. She’d made the dress herself, copied it from one she saw on a celebrity in CosmoGIRL! My sister might have been the only student at Comet High who actually learned to sew in Domestic Home Skills (aka Desperate Housewife Skills). It was the highest grade she got last semester, a B+, and the only homework I didn’t have to help her with. She would have gotten an A but she didn’t follow the pattern on her final project. It was supposed to be a basic T-shirt, and she turned it into a wild halter top with a jeweled neckline.