by Robin Palmer
“You look like a totally different person,” Laurel said.
“Like how different are we talking about?” I asked nervously. I know Mom wanted Laurel and me to get along, but I didn’t think she’d be too happy if she couldn’t recognize her own daughter anymore.
Roger handed me a mirror. “See for yourself.”
“ Wow,” I said. Obviously it was still short, but somehow the choppy layers helped to make it seem fuller and longer, and the wispy bangs made it a lot less egg-looking and a lot more girly-looking. It was both cute and sophisticated at the same time, which is a very good combination.
Laurel studied me. “Hmm. You know, with your new haircut, just a little bit of makeup would really show off your amazing bone structure and make your eyes totally pop.” Before the word pop had even fully left her mouth, Maya had more brushes out and was fiddling with some palettes of colored powder.
“I’m on it,” Maya said.
“Is that okay?” Laurel asked me.
I nodded nervously. Mom would freak if she knew I was wearing makeup, but she was so busy with Alan in New York falling in love or getting engaged or something, she probably wouldn’t even notice. Like Missy and Rachel had brought up during the dumping, I was not a fan of makeup. Maybe I would’ve liked it more if the one time I wore it—when Missy’s mom had a Mary Kay cosmetics lady come to Missy’s birthday sleepover and give us all makeovers—hadn’t been such a traumatic experience. I’m pretty sure the woman was drunk, because not only did she leave me looking like a clown, but she also poked me in the eye a bunch of times with the eye pencil. The minute she was done, I washed it off and hadn’t gone near the stuff since (except for the Smith’s Rosebud Salve Strawberry Lip Balm).
“Maya, maybe some of the Summer Shimmer highlighter on her cheekbones I wore at the Emmys last year?” Laurel suggested. “And the Smoky Sable liner around her eyes, like we did for the Grammys? Oh, and that Screen Siren lip gloss I wore at the Tonys?” Maya brushed and painted away and Laurel continued to call out suggestions (“Maybe smudge the liner just a little more.” “I’d skip the lip pencil so she doesn’t look like one of those pageant girls.”). If the acting thing ever stopped working for her, she could totally get a job doing makeovers at one of the makeup counters in Macy’s. In addition to acting, singing, and dancing, she could add “knows a lot about makeup” to the list of the gazillion things she was good at.
Maya stood back and turned to Laurel. “Thoughts?”
“Perfect,” Laurel said.
Maya stared at me for a second. “Can I pluck your eyebrows a little bit?” she asked.
“No!” I yelped. The last thing I needed was to lose any more hair. Plus, I knew from the way Mom winced when she did her own that it hurt. I was not ready for that.
“Okay, okay,” she said, handing me a mirror. “So what do you think?”
This was nothing like the clown makeup the Mary Kay lady had put on. When I looked in the mirror, I totally understood why women wasted time that could’ve been spent sleeping a few extra minutes in the morning putting on makeup and then walking around with gunk on their faces all day long. When a real, nondrunk makeup artist who specialized in Hollywood stars did it, it made a huge difference. Thanks to the blush, my face, which was pretty round (back when I lost my first front tooth, I looked like a jack-o’-lantern) looked a lot thinner, and you could see that I had actual cheekbones. The eyeliner made my green eyes look super-green and super-big (but not so big that I looked bug-eyed, like Marissa). And if I had had any interest in kissing a boy, my lips looked very kissable.
Roger put his arm around Maya. “Oh, I never cease to amaze myself with our brilliance.”
“You look awesome,” agreed Laurel.
“Thanks,” I said with a smile. I looked at her. “And I hope you don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but you look awful.”
“I do?!” she asked with her own smile. “Thanks.” In her wig, the sweatshirt, the fake pimples, and the pair of Maya’s plain-lens glasses she had just put on, you’d never know that Laurel Moses was Laurel Moses.
In fact, with my makeover and her makeunder, you could almost now believe the two of us might be kind-of, sort-of friends. I mean, we weren’t friends-friends yet, because you had to spend quality time with them at a mall or a sleepover to see what they were really like, but this was definitely a start.
Luckily, Dad was really distracted when he drove us to the mall. He didn’t say anything about my makeup or the fact that Laurel looked like a total dweeb. (Not that he would’ve said anything about that last part because it would’ve been rude.) He was so out of it, I had to poke him and ask, “Um, Dad, do you notice anything different about me by any chance?” before he picked up on the fact that I wasn’t wearing a hat for the first time in five months.
When we got to the mall, it was filled with the usual weekend crowd of giggling bunches of BFFs. It had been a long time since I had been there on a Saturday, because after the friend-dumping, there was no way I was going to embarrass myself by showing up there with a parent and possibly running into Rachel and Missy. And there was definitely no way I was going to show up with Marissa, even though she asked me to go every week. In fact, when I asked her what she wanted for her birthday back in December, she said all she wanted was for me to go to the mall with her on a Saturday so we could do BFF things like try on bras together. I didn’t tell her that I would cut all my hair off completely before I tried on bras, with her or anyone else. Plus, the kind of BFFs-at-the-mall things I liked to do were more like going into stores and pretending I didn’t speak English or had just escaped from a mental hospital. At least that’s what Rachel and Missy and I used to do.
I had to admit it felt pretty good to be back there on a prime mall-going day, even if (a) I was there with someone who was only a potential kind-of, sort-of friend and (b) that person kept stopping every five steps to take another picture with her phone’s camera. Seriously, you would’ve thought we were in Africa on safari or some other crazy exotic location the way she was acting. Especially when we got to the Food Court.
“You know, I think there’s a brochure of the mall you can get at the information desk that has a bunch of pictures of the Food Court in there,” I said as she snapped a photo of the Orange Julius. This was getting a little embarrassing.
“Ooh—look! Free samples!” she said excitedly, pointing to a tray of baked pretzels over at Uncle Tim’s. “Let’s get some,” she said, dragging me over.
Wow. Who knew Laurel Moses liked free samples? Maybe she was more of a regular kid than I had thought.
“So you really haven’t been to a mall since you got famous?” I asked after we finished our first samples and tried to nonchalantly take seconds without the woman with the wart behind the counter yelling at us.
“Well, when my book The World of Style According to Madison Tennyson came out, I did a signing at the Time Warner Center in New York, but they don’t have a food court, so I don’t know if it’s technically a mall.”
I shook my head. “Nope. It needs a food court to be a mall.”
“Then no,” she said, reaching for a third sample. Gosh, she was brave. I had been yelled at by Wart Lady for double-sampling before, and it was not fun. “I haven’t.”
“But then how do you get your clothes?” I asked.
“Zoë brings them to me,” she replied, hiding her hand behind her back when Wart Lady whipped around and gave us a dirty look.
“Who’s Zoë?”
She reached for a fourth sample. Was she crazy?! Luckily, Wart Lady was now busy helping a woman who kept pointing through the glass and saying, “No—not that pretzel there. That pretzel there.” “Zoë is my stylist. See, designers want you to wear their stuff so it ends up in pictures in magazines and they get free publicity, so they give it to Zoë, and she gives it to me.”
“And you don’t have to pay for it?”
“Sometimes. But a lot of the time, no.”
Wow. If I had a stylist, I would’ve had her call Converse to see if they could send me over sneakers in every color. “And this is, like, nice stuff—not like T.J. Maxx or Marshalls stuff, huh?” I asked.
“Who’s T.J. Maxx?” she asked, snapping a picture of the pizza place.
Okay, maybe she wasn’t that regular.
Laurel may not have been regular, but she was funny. I had always liked the sorry-but-we-don’t-speak-English part of the day at the mall with Rachel and Missy, but it was even more fun with Laurel because she could do all these great accents, including a French one that cracked me up so much I almost peed in my pants. (I’m pretty sure a few drops actually came out, but I just couldn’t help it.)
Thankfully, my plan to keep her undercover was working great. Her voice may have been a little recognizable, but the rest of the disguise made it so that none of the other shoppers had any clue who she was. If they looked at her twice, it was only because she looked like a dork. As we walked past Barbara’s Bra World on our way to Target, I cringed. The humiliation of being told I was going to be very busty when I grew up was still fresh in my mind.
“Lucy, you’re totally right—Target is totally epic!” Laurel announced as we browsed the racks of purses.
“I know. Wait till you see H&M—that’s pretty great, too,” I said.
She held up a red bag with buckles and gasped as she looked at the price. “I can’t believe this is only $14.99—it looks just like my Marc Jacobs one, and that cost over a thousand dollars!” She grabbed the red one, and also grabbed it in blue, green, and black. She turned to me. “Want one?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t that into purses. I hardly ever carried one, which was another reason Rachel and Missy had given as to why they didn’t want to be my friend.
“Oh, okay. Hey, I was thinking . . . I’d really like to buy you a present.”
“A present? For what? It’s not my birthday for another 284 days.” I didn’t have OCD tendencies like Laurel did, but I couldn’t wait to turn thirteen. I had already marked off the days on the calendar on my bedroom wall. A lot of girls I knew (Rachel, Missy, Marissa) couldn’t wait, because it meant they were that much closer to wearing makeup, or shaving their legs, or doing stuff like that. For me, all that seemed more like a pain in the butt than fun. But when you told someone your age and there was a “teen” after it—thirteen, fourteen—you were taken more seriously. At least that’s what I was hoping.
“For, you know, hanging out with me,” she replied. She started digging in her purse for her wallet. “Or, if you want, I could just write you a check and you could save the money for something else you want.”
“Wait a minute—you think you have to pay me to hang out with you?” I asked as I ran my hand through my hair for like the billionth time since Roger had cut it. It was so freeing not to be wearing a hat.
She shrugged. “I don’t know . . . yeah?”
Okay, that was just completely sad and weird at the same time. The more I talked to Laurel, the more I felt like she didn’t live on earth but inside a television set. She was able to sing in front of an entire Super Bowl crowd, but when it came to living in the real world, she pretty much had no clue. If she was as annoying as Marissa, then I could see why she might feel the need to pay someone to be her friend, but she wasn’t. In fact, even though I kept waiting for her to do something that made me have to hate her again, she hadn’t. It was up to me to show her how friends really worked.
“Um, that’s not how it works,” I replied. “I know you have an assistant, and a stylist, and a therapist, and the woman who comes over and gives you massages, and all those other people in your life, but, see, friends hang out with you just because . . . well, because they want to. Not because you pay them with checks or roles on TV shows or gifts when it’s not their birthday.”
“So, you and I . . . we’re, like . . . officially friends now?” she asked shyly.
I wasn’t sure how to respond. People didn’t usually ask each other if they were friends—they just realized one day that they were.
“You’re not just doing all this because my dad is dating your mom, and because things are getting serious and we might one day be stepsisters?” she went on.
I cringed. I was trying very hard to forget that part. “Well, obviously if they weren’t, then we probably never would have met because you’re famous and I’m not,” I said, “and you sort of have to spend a lot of time with a person until you’re really friends, but what you did last night at the ice-cream place in front of Rachel and Missy, and how you let Roger and Maya do my hair and makeup? Those are definitely friend things to do. And spending the day at the mall together is also a friendlike event,” I went on, “so, yeah, I guess you’d say we’re becoming friends. That is, you know, if you want to be . . .”
“Yeah, I want to be,” she said with a smile before walking over to the accessories section and picking up some bobby pins with rhinestone butterflies on the end. “But even if we’re friends, I’m still buying these for you because they’ll look totally cute with your new haircut. I may not have a lot of experience with the friend thing, but I do know how to accessorize.”
After Target we went to H&M so we could play TWUO, which stands for The World’s Ugliest Outfit. It was a game that Rachel and Missy and I had made up in fourth grade, and I had really missed it. It wasn’t like I could play it with Marissa. Because she dressed in weird ugly outfits every day, she wouldn’t get the joke. Also, I didn’t want to admit she was my friend, because, well, she’s Marissa. Because the clothes in H&M were so cool, it was a lot harder to play TWUO there, rather than, say, the Misses Department at Marshalls. Either way, you could never go wrong with sequins or rhinestones. Which is exactly why Marissa was a bad choice—she wore at least one rhinestone thing every day of her life.
We broke up in the store to make our choices, then met up at the dressing rooms. I thought the outfit I concocted was pretty good (and by good, I mean horrible): orange tube top with little mirrored squares all over it, a hot pink wool miniskirt, and a polka-dot headband. But when Laurel opened her dressing room door, the combination of a red-and-black-striped turtleneck, zebra-print skirt, a purple shrug, and a leopard scarf was so ugly it almost made me want to throw up. That or laugh, especially because her wig was all crooked. She looked in the mirror, and we both cracked up.
“You definitely won,” I said after I could finally stand up straight again. My stomach hurt from laughing so hard.
“I don’t know—orange is pretty bad,” she replied, wiping her eyes. “The only time I was ever on one of those Fashion Disaster lists, it was because I was wearing an orange dress.”
“Yeah, but mixing animal prints always wins,” I replied. I was impressed, she was even good at being ugly—was there anything Laurel Moses wasn’t good at?
Suddenly, I heard a shrill voice. “Omigod—I can’t believe it! Lucy, what are you doing at the mall on a Saturday?! You hate coming to the mall on weekends!”
Marissa.
Laurel and I looked at each other, panicked. Just what we needed—the biggest mouth in all of Northampton had spotted us, and was probably ready to blab that Laurel Moses was in the dressing room of H&M wearing the ugliest outfit in the history of ugly outfits.
I turned around. “Marissa, what are you doing here?” I asked nervously, stepping in front of Laurel to try to hide her and her winning ugly outfit. “Weren’t all you guys from the sleepover going to the movies?”
“We were supposed to, but the only thing non-R-rated that wasn’t sold out was Barking My Way Back to You, and no one except me wanted to see it, so we’re shopping instead,” she replied. “Hey, who’s that behind you?”
“Ahh . . . this is . . . my cousin,” I said, trying to push Laurel back into the dressing room.
“What are you talking about? You don’t have any cousins,” she said, confused. “Remember, we had to do that family-tree assignment last year and you didn’t have any cousins and ever
yone thought that was really weird?”
“What I meant was that I didn’t have any American cousins,” I said. “This is . . . my French cousin, Dominique.”
“Bonjour!” said Laurel, popping out from behind me. She leaned over to pick up the glasses that had fallen off her face when I pushed her behind me, and her wig shifted. Oh no. This was not good. If the disguise went, we were in big trouble.
Marissa gasped. “Omigod—you’re from France?!” She moved closer and started yelling very slowly. “DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?” she yelled. “OH, AND I LOVE YOUR OUTFIT! YOU FRENCH PEOPLE HAVE THE BEST TASTE IN CLOTHES! CAN YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”
“Nope—she doesn’t,” I said, stepping backward to put some distance between us and Marissa. I heard a loud crunching sound—I had stepped on the glasses. Uh-oh. My coordination problem was not helping things. “And now she can’t see, either, so you should probably just go away now, Marissa, because there’s no use for you to try and talk to a person who can’t see or understand you.”
Marissa ran to the edge of the dressing room. “Hey, you guys! Come here!” she yelled out into the store. “Lucy’s here with her cousin from France who doesn’t speak a word of English—you have to come meet her!”
I sighed. Everything had been going so well up until now. I wondered if I had been born with some gene that made it so no matter what, things in my life were bound to blow up. I looked down and saw that Laurel’s wig had somehow managed to get so loose that it had almost completely turned around so that the long part was in her eyes and the bangs were on the side of her head.
Marissa turned around and spotted Laurel fixing her wig. “Wait a minute—that’s not your cousin!” she gasped. “That’s Laurel!” She ran back to the entrance of the dressing room before I could stop her. “You guys! It’s not Lucy’s cousin—it’s Laurel Moses!” she yelled out. “You have to come see her—she has the most awesome outfit on!”
