The Daughters

by Joanna Philbin

  Lizzie blinked. For a moment, she wondered if her mom had taken too many melatonin on the plane. “Okay,” she finally managed to say. “Thanks.”

  Katia hugged her again. “So, no more fighting. Oh, I brought you back some things from Paris. Just some makeup from L’Ete.”

  Lizzie never wore the buckets of makeup her mom brought back for her. She usually just gave it all to Hudson. “Great,” she said.

  “And I’m ordering in pizza for you and Dad,” she said, backing up toward the kitchen. “He’s in desperate need of junk food, he says. We can catch up more at dinner. I’m glad I’m home, honey,” she murmured, and then she pressed through the door and her statuesque frame disappeared.

  Lizzie hurried down the hall to her bedroom, still in shock. She hadn’t expected her mom to apologize first. Now she felt a little embarrassed about the photo shoot with Andrea. If her mom knew that what she’d said had been hurtful, and apologized for it, then had Lizzie really needed to get those pictures taken by Andrea, just to prove a point about what her mom had said? And what if Natasha was right—what if the pictures got out and somehow made her mom look bad? After the YouTube clip, the last thing she wanted to do was embarrass her mom again. So for now, she wouldn’t say anything, she decided. It was just a one-time thing, anyway.

  Lizzie walked into her room, dropped her bag on the white shag carpet, and kicked off her shoes. On her computer was a message from Hudson.

  U WERE AMAZING!

  Lizzie smiled.

  Couldn’t have done it without u, she wrote back.

  Then she lay down on her bed next to Sid Vicious and patted him on the head. He opened one cranky blue eye.

  “Today was a good day,” she told him softly, just before she drifted off for a nap.

  chapter 12

  The only problem with playing the game I Completely Forgot I Knew You is that eventually the person you’re trying to ignore sits down next to you in English and forces you to talk to him.

  A week after her shoot with Andrea in the park, Lizzie was busy proofreading the second draft of her short story and listening to the rain patter against the classroom windows when she heard someone sit next to her.

  “Hey, Lizzie. What’s up?”

  She looked up. Todd eyed her cautiously as he took out his books. It was the closest she’d been to him since that night at his house two weeks ago, and her heart did a little flip. Ever since that horrible morning when she’d heard about him and Ava, she’d done a complete Todd-ectomy, cutting him out of her life. She breezed past him in the hall without eye contact; showed up late to every class so she could choose a seat as far away from him as possible; smiled at him only when she had to in the vaguest, I’m-just-being-polite way. She’d even stopped looking at his Facebook page, just in case there was some way he knew how many times she looked at it and also because the gifts and hugs and cute wall posts from Ava were just too much to handle. Her cold-shoulder routine had worked. She could tell how nervous he was now.

  “Not much,” she answered.

  “That your story?” he asked eagerly.

  “Mr. Barlow read the first draft and had some notes, so I just did a second draft,” she said coldly, but giving him a slight smile. “I’m turning it in today.”

  “Cool,” he said, nodding. “I turned mine in already. But maybe I should have given it to him to look at first—”

  “Oh my God!” a voice shrieked. Lizzie looked up to see Ava walking toward them.

  “Kate’s telling me that I have some weird bug in my hair! Do I? Look!” She dropped into the seat on the other side of him, and as Todd turned his attention to Ava’s possibly contaminated curls, Lizzie went back to her story. Ava had turned into Todd’s warden. Every class she sat next to him; every free period she followed him to the computer lab or the lounge. After school, they hung out for hours at Goodburger with Ken and his friends. Even if Lizzie had wanted to still be friends with Todd, she wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  The classroom door closed with a bang, and Mr. Barlow crossed the room on his stilt-like legs. His hair looked even whiter than usual.

  “All right,” he said, perching his bony posterior on the edge of the desk. “Who wants to tell me the difference between a myth and a story? Anyone?” His watery eyes searched the room as if looking for enemy fire.

  Lizzie and Todd both shot up their hands.

  “Mr. Piedmont,” Barlow replied as he folded his arms and raised one white eyebrow. “Have at it.”

  “A myth tells a story about human nature,” Todd ventured. “The ancient Greeks told them to each other to explain what it meant to be human. So it’s more than just a story, because it’s true.”

  As usual when Todd spoke, the rest of the class craned their heads back at him, giving him their full, wide-eyed attention. His mild English accent didn’t hurt, either.

  “Very good, Mr. Piedmont,” Mr. Barlow said. “That’s correct. Myths illustrate human nature, which is why they’re still being told today, but with updated details, of course. Almost all the stories we read or see on television have some root in classical mythology. Which is why I’ve devised this fun little project. Each of you will update a myth into a modern-day story, and bring it to life using modern details. And you’ll be working in pairs.”

  The room went abruptly quiet.

  “And I’ve assigned them already, just to make it easier,” he added with a slightly sarcastic wink. The room went even quieter.

  He flipped his pad open. “Ilona Peterson.”

  Lizzie looked down the row. At her desk, Ilona had frozen in mid–hair flip, and was giving Mr. Barlow her most advanced deathstare.

  “You’ll be working with Harrison Chervil,” he said cheerfully. “On the Icarus myth.”

  Heads whipped over to the other side of the room, where Harrison Chervil bent over what was probably one of his Lord of the Rings drawings, blushing through his acne.

  “Sophie Duncan,” Mr. Barlow announced. “You’ll be with Ken Clayman. The myth of Sisyphus.”

  Sophie pushed her glasses up her nose, while next to her Jill patted her on the back as if she’d just won the lottery. Across the room Ken looked queasy.

  “Lizzie Summers,” Mr. Barlow barked. “You’re with Todd Piedmont. You’ll be doing Cupid and Psyche. The love myth.”

  Somebody somewhere giggled. Lizzie looked straight down, feeling her cheeks burn. The love myth. She was going to kill Mr. Barlow.

  When he had finished going down the list, Mr. Barlow surveyed his panicked, bewildered class. “This project will count for a third of your grade this term,” he said. “If you choose to write a play or a script, it should be at least ten pages. Same for a short story. And I suggest you get together with your other half to figure out the themes as soon as possible.”

  She refused to look at Todd. For the rest of class, Lizzie could feel him just a few inches away on her right, making that whole side of her body hot with embarrassment. As soon as the bell rang, she sprang to her feet and began to furiously pack her bookbag.

  “If you want to come over tomorrow night and talk about this, that’s cool with me,” Todd offered. His maturity in the face of all this was impressive, she had to admit.

  “Okay, great,” she said, managing to look at him for a second or two. Then she sprinted out of the room, walked into Mr. Barlow’s office, and shut the door.

  “Is there a problem, Summers?” he asked wryly, reading a few phone messages on his desk.

  “You can’t put me with Todd Piedmont!” she exclaimed.

  He stifled a smile. “But just the other day you were begging me to be his tour guide,” he said.

  “That was three weeks ago,” she said. “Everything’s different now. Everything.”

  “I see,” he said, nodding.

  “You don’t understand,” she said, edging closer to his desk. “He’s going to think I put you up to this or something.”

  “Why would he think that?” Mr. Barlow asked,
cocking his head.

  She realized that she didn’t want to explain. Her right leg started to shake.

  “Summers, this is an English project, not a setup,” he said. “I doubt very much that Mr. Piedmont thinks you were the mastermind behind this entire assignment.”

  “Can’t you just put him with Ava Elting?” she asked. “That’s who he really wants to be with. That’s who I want him to be with.”

  “No, I can’t,” Mr. Barlow said, dropping into his chair. “I’m not switching anyone. It’s just an English project. You’ll survive. And how are we doing on that short story?”

  We? she thought. Lizzie pulled the story out of her bag and handed him the pages. “We’re done,” she huffed, then opened the door and trudged out of the office.

  “Good luck!” Barlow yelled after her.

  She hated Mr. Barlow. That was the problem with becoming friends with a teacher. There was always a price to pay.

  She was so annoyed that she barely felt her iPhone vibrate as she stalked down the hall. With just a couple seconds to get to French class, she unzipped the side pocket of her bookbag and pulled out her phone. It was an e-mail from Andrea Sidwell.

  She clicked on it.

  Hey! You’re a natural!! Want to do another?

  Lizzie clicked on the photo attached at the bottom. In it, Lizzie slouched against the gnarled trunk of a tree, the dark-blue Boat Pond behind her. She gazed straight ahead, bored and defiant, and her expression said Try me. This girl was nothing like the deer-caught-in-the-headlights Lizzie that she was used to seeing in the tabloids. This was Fierce Lizzie. Brave Lizzie. Cool Lizzie.

  Without even thinking, she hit reply.

  Sure! When?

  By the time she walked into French, she had another shoot scheduled for the next day. Meanwhile, Fierce Lizzie was on her way to Carina and Hudson’s inboxes. She had a feeling that they were going to love her.

  chapter 13

  “We’re gonna try something a little bit different this time,” Andrea said the next day, as she ran up the steps of the Canal Street subway station in her purple suede Pumas. “We’re gonna do a little styling. Not that I don’t love the school kilt, but we need to jazz it up a bit. Make your look a little more you.”

  They reached the street, and Lizzie sidestepped a delivery guy threading through the crowd on a squeaky bike. Chinatown had been Andrea’s idea for the second shoot—“the energy down there is awesome,” she’d said over the phone—but now at four o’clock, Lizzie thought that there might be too much energy. Honking cars choked the intersections, and waves of pedestrians squeezed past the vendors selling fake designer bags, jewelry, and bootleg DVDs. Lizzie felt a cool fall breeze wrap itself around her bare legs under her kilt. She wanted to ask Andrea what she meant by making her look more her, but instead she just asked, “Styling? Do you mean accessories?”

  “Yep,” Andrea said, and Lizzie scrambled to follow her down the street, past an open seafood stand with tanks of swimming eels. Even with her square camera bag bumping against her hip, Andrea projected an air of calm, or maybe it was that her black hoodie had a huge green lotus symbol on the back. “Now we just need to find the right store,” she said over a woman yelling in Cantonese out the door of a storefront.

  “Down here?” Lizzie asked skeptically. From what she could see, this slice of Canal Street was a jumble of discount electronic stores, fish stands, fast food places, and stores that sold everything from I LOVE NEW YORK keychains to ten-dollar sundresses. Hudson might have been able to cobble together a cool look down here, but Lizzie doubted that she could. She had a hard enough time picking out things at Urban Outfitters.

  Andrea stopped in front of a store with a red awning that said HSU-FAT EMPORIUM. “Let’s try here,” she said, walking inside.

  Lizzie looked around. Stacks of flashlights, personalized keychains, tube socks, and value packs of batteries vied for space amid racks of hats, scarves, dresses, and metallic tops.

  Andrea reached into her camera case and pulled out some bills. “Just find some cool accessories. Stuff that speaks to you.”

  “Accessories really aren’t my thing,” she admitted.

  “They don’t have to be,” Andrea said, pressing a twenty and a five into Lizzie’s hand. “Just grab whatever looks good to you. Trust your instinct. I’ll wait here.”

  Lizzie wanted to say that she didn’t have instincts for this, but she quietly wandered past the flashlights over to the hat rack. She’d never been a hat person. Hudson could wear those cute newsboy caps, and Carina could rock a baseball cap anytime with a ponytail, but hats on her always made her look a little deranged and dressed from another time, like one of those old ladies she sometimes saw in the park, dressed in a ballgown and pushing a shopping cart. And these hats weren’t cute, girly hats. They looked like the kind of hats men wore in old detective movies.

  Her eye gravitated to a gray fedora with a shiny black leather band. She pulled it off the rack and clapped it on her head. In the mirror it looked a little odd, but so odd it almost looked cool. The tag said it was eight bucks. Huh, she thought. Why not? She put it back on her head and kept going.

  Underneath a shelf of white tube socks, she hit on a pile of beautiful Indian scarves with delicate metallic threads. She unfolded one, and wrapped it around her neck. This time she didn’t even look in the mirror. She kept going.

  Next, she spotted a pair of thick, fake-gold hoops the size of small tangerines. Lizzie grabbed them. Finally she spied a purple vest in a brocaded faux-velvet. That seemed like enough.

  She paid for her stuff at the cash register, got her two-fifty in change, and put everything on: the brocaded vest, unbuttoned, over her white oxford; the skinny Indian scarf wrapped once, bohemian-style, around her neck, then the hat and the enormous gold hoops.

  When she walked out, Andrea’s eyes lit up. “Now that is what I call jazzed up,” she said, holding up her hand for a high-five. “You look awesome.”

  “You don’t think it’s too much?” Lizzie said, touching the earrings.

  “It’s perfect. It’s you.” Then Andrea glanced at her tank watch. “Come on. We’re gonna lose the light.”

  They crossed Canal Street and walked north up Broadway to a quieter corner. “Let’s try here,” Andrea said, gesturing for Lizzie to stand against a wall in between a dingy walk-up and a dry cleaners. Lizzie piled her hair underneath the hat, or as much of it as she could, then folded her arms and slouched against the wall, as if she were waiting for someone who was going to be in serious trouble when they showed up.

  Andrea stepped backward. “Okay, Lizzie. Look right at me. And just give me exhilarated. Give me confident.”

  Suddenly that wasn’t so difficult. She put one foot against the wall and cocked her head. In the hat and the scarf and the earrings, she felt like a different person. A confident person. An intriguing person.

  Before she could think too hard, Andrea pressed the button. Click.

  “Yes!” Andrea cried.

  She pressed the button again. Click, click.

  Before Lizzie knew it, she and Andrea had started their dance again—Andrea bobbing and weaving, Lizzie standing still but giving her as much as she could with her eyes. People stared as they walked by but Lizzie kept her eye on the lens. It was easier to concentrate than she thought.

  “Great!” Andrea kept yelling. “Perfect!”

  Each time Andrea pressed the shutter, Lizzie gave her something just a little bit different.

  “Perfect, that’s perfect!” Andrea yelled.

  I’m doing my mom’s job, Lizzie suddenly thought. I’m doing my mom’s job and I’m good at it.

  When the light began to fall behind the buildings on Broadway, Andrea let the camera drop against her chest. She had the same radiance in her eyes that she did after the last shoot, as if she’d just run a few miles. “Wow, Lizzie, the camera loves you. You must get it from your mom.” A strand of Andrea’s hair whipped in the wind and she pulled
it behind one ear with her pinky. “And speaking of your mom,” she asked, placing her camera back into her bag, “she does know about this, right?”

  Lizzie took off her hat for a moment and let her hair fall back down to her shoulders. This was the moment of truth. If she lied, it would only buy her time. And the idea of lying to Andrea seemed gross and deeply unethical, like shoplifting, or cheating on a test. “Not yet,” she confessed.

  Andrea barely blinked. “Why not?”

  Lizzie looked down at the sidewalk. “I know it sounds lame, but at first, she was out of town,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “And we had this big fight right before she left.”

  “About the clip?” Andrea prompted.

  “Right,” Lizzie said. “And when it came out, her publicist told me that it wouldn’t look good for me to be doing this. And that my mom wouldn’t approve. That it would look like I was, you know, using the clip to…”

  “To what?” Andrea asked, looking genuinely puzzled.

  “To turn this into some kind of career opportunity,” Lizzie mumbled. “And that my mom might be offended by that.”

  Andrea zipped up her camera bag and slung it over her shoulder. “That’s not what you’re doing here,” she said, her blue eyes radiating warmth. “I came to you. You only did me the courtesy of responding to my crazy message. And your mom wouldn’t think that about you, I promise. She’d be proud of you. I know she would be.” She touched Lizzie’s shoulder. “Hey. I’d love to send a few of your shots over to New York Style. Would you have a problem with that?”

  “New York Style?” Lizzie wasn’t sure she’d heard Andrea over the keening sound of a car alarm a few blocks away.

  “I know the photo editor and I think you’d be perfect for them. They’re always interested in real people and different looks. I can’t guarantee anything, but it’s just a way for them to get to know you.”

  “Sure,” she gushed. New York Style was the city’s weekly fashion bible. “New designers, new looks, new faces” was its motto. Lizzie had been reading it for years.