The Makeover
Nicola put her hands on my shoulders. “I hate to tell you this, princess, but it’s time.”
If what she was talking about was what I thought she was talking about, I was in big trouble. “Do you mean—?”
She nodded. “Yup. The makeover part of the movie of your life. Complete with some nauseating up-tempo song sung by a pop star with a nose ring.”
I cringed. I hated those things. The makeover montage was so corny.
“You know, you might actually end up having fun,” Nicola said.
Nicola took out a piece of notebook paper and pen. “Operation Falcon,” she announced as she wrote.
“What’s Operation Falcon?” I asked.
“It’s what we’re going to call the makeover. It makes it sound all top secret. Number one,” she announced, “glasses.”
“Okay, don’t they normally go the other way—girl with glasses gets contacts? I’m already not liking this Operation Eagle thing.”
“It’s Operation Falcon.”
“Same thing.”
As she went back to making her list, I sighed. I didn’t have to be psychic to know this was going to be a very big makeover.
BOOKS BY ROBIN PALMER
Cindy Ella
Geek Charming
Little Miss Red
Wicked Jealous
FOR YOUNGER READERS
Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 1: Girl vs. Superstar
Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 2: Sealed with a Kiss
Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 3: Vote for Me!
Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 4: Take My Advice!
Yours Truly, Lucy B. Parker 5: For Better or For Worse
SPEAK
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by Speak, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2012
Copyright © Robin Palmer, 2012
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE.
Speak ISBN 978-1-101-57249-8
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For Lusia Strus,
a beautiful example of what perfectly imperfect looks like
Contents
the makeover
other books by Robin Palmer
title page
copyright
dedication
prologue
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
epilogue
prologue
In movies, you pretty much know when a Life-Changing Moment aka LCM is happening. Not only does the characters’ hair just happen to look perfect—like they just got it professionally blown out with some special gloss thing added in—but they light them just the right way so that any oil slicks on their face aren’t visible. And then there’s the Song—sappy, but just indie enough to get away with it à la Regina Spektor or Ingrid Michaelson. The one that you download from iTunes as soon as you get home and then play over and over as the sound track to your own imagined LCM until you get sick of it.
But in real life? Not so easy to know when one is happening. Especially if it occurs in a noisy Chinese restaurant in L.A. on a Sunday night in March of your junior year, while fluorescent lighting beams down on a group of waiters as they sing a Chinese-accented “Happy Birthday” to an old grandpa-looking guy at the table next to you.
Nothing about the night was out of the ordinary. Like usual, my dad, his girlfriend, my brother, and I were having our weekly bonding dinner over moo shoo pork and spare ribs. And also like usual, there was absolutely no bonding going on. My workaholic father was pacing in the parking lot with his iPhone glued to his ear, arguing yet again with the head of the network that aired Ruh-Roh—the sitcom he wrote and produced about a man in a dog’s body—about why making the show animated when it had always been live action was a really bad idea.
And so, in an attempt to fill the uncomfortable silence at our fatherless table, my “the glass is always half-full” older brother Max went through his list of crazy conversation starters—things like “If you were a vegetable, what kind would you want to be?”—while Dad’s girlfriend Hillary kept trying to fill my plate with fried dumplings and egg rolls. Like always, I kept moving the plate from side to side to dodge her, which resulted in more than one egg roll rolling off the table onto the floor.
“Hey, Hillary, I’ll take some of that lo mein,” Max said, shoving his plate under the spoonful that Hillary was trying to dump on mine.
I gave him a grateful smile. As annoying as he could be with his always-sunny personality and the fact that he was totally a morning person, I had totally missed him the last two years he had been away at college at CalArts, especially after Hillary had moved in with us that previous fall.
“Simone, are you sure you don’t want it?” Hillary asked.
“I’m sure,” I replied.
She sighed. “Fine,” she said as she dumped it on his plate. She turned to me with a hopeful look. “How about some Kung Pao chicken?”
“I’m good,” I said. I pointed to the nearly empty chicken and broccoli dish. “I ate almost that whole thing.”
“Yes, but it’s so . . . healthy,” she said, sounding disappointed.
Luckily, before I was forced to come up with an argument as to why healthy was a good thing—especially for someone like me, who, not so long ago, would have considered a carton of Kung Pao chicken an appetizer—Dad came back, wearing his bonding-is-fun grin. “Kids, we have some news,” he announced.
Max and I exchanged a worried look. The last time Dad had said that was this past summer when he told us that he’d started dating Hillary. Hillary, who then convinced him to let her stay over for a few weeks while they redid the floors in her condo. Which, to no one’s surprise but his, resulted in her never moving back out and dropping hints about what she wanted her engagement ring to look like.
“What is it?” I asked warily.
“I’ve rented us a house in Tuscany for
a month this summer!”
“Tuscany, as in . . . Italy?” I asked.
He nodded.
“But why?” asked Max.
“Because Dr. Melman says that extended family vacations really step up the bonding process,” Dad replied. “Especially if I promise to limit my writing time to an hour a day.” Dr. Melman was Dad’s therapist. Dad had been going to him twice a week for the last ten years to help him with his workaholism. Clearly, it hadn’t done much good. “Doesn’t that sound fun?”
Uh, no. The whole thing sounded about as fun to me as getting weighed during my annual checkup. “But we’re not officially a family yet,” I said.
Hillary looked up from one of the many mirror compacts in her collection—this one was silver with the etching of a snake (“It’s a very, very old antique from Egypt,” she had told me when I had asked about it, despite the fact that it had MADE IN CHINA stamped on the back of it). “Maybe not in the eyes of the courts, because your father is still struggling with his commitment issues and hasn’t asked me to marry him yet, but we’re getting closer.”
I rolled my eyes. Some women, when they were trying to snag a guy, liked to play it cool. Hillary? Not so much. She preferred the direct whatever-means-possible-and-I- will-stomp-on-whoever-is-in-my-way-with-my-pointy-Christian-Louboutins route, which may have explained why she had recently been named one of the Hollywood Reporter’s “30 Under 30 Rising Film Execs to Watch”—a fact she liked to remind people of about every fifteen minutes.
“Wow. You know, that sounds like an awesome idea, but I can’t,” Max said. “I got a job today at a photo gallery in Culver City.” Max was a photography major. He said it was because he had an overwhelming urge to express himself through the medium of images, but sometimes I was pretty sure it was more because it was a good way to pick up girls.
“Oh, yay for you, pooh for us,” cooed Hillary, while my dad tried to get away with checking his e-mail on his lap in a way that made it look like that wasn’t what he was doing. “You’ll be missed.” She turned to me and smiled. “And seeing that Simone wouldn’t have anyone to hang around with other than us two adults, I’m sure she has no interest in coming now.”
Actually, she was right—I didn’t. But it wasn’t like she had the right to kick me off the family vacation!
Hillary turned to my dad. “I have a great idea—we can send her to camp.”
Camp?! I was so not a camp girl. First, I was too old—how many sixteen-year-old campers were there? The only time I had ever gone to camp was when I was eleven and managed to shoot myself in the leg with an archery arrow. And the only friend I made was Florence, the woman who worked in the dining hall, who smuggled me out extra bug juice and oatmeal raisin cookies.
Hillary turned to me. “I’m thinking . . . theater camp. There’s one in upstate New York called Stage Door Manor that’s very famous—”
Not just camp, but theater camp?! I may have been a lot of things but theater geek was not one of them. I looked over at Dad for help, but he was still e-mailing. He was so good at it that he could type one-thumbed while shoveling food into his mouth with the other hand.
I turned to Max and gave him a get-me-out-of-this-or-I’ll-tell-everyone-about-that-folder-of-photos-of- Kristen-Stewart-on-your-laptop look.
“I have an idea,” he announced.
I smiled. Of course he did. He was my big brother. It was in his job description to save the day. Right after tormenting me by putting fake rodents under my comforter.
“Simone can come stay at my place while you’re away!”
Okay, that was not saving the day. Max lived in Valencia—miles from Lost Angeles and home to Six Flags Magic Mountain and not much else. The last time I had been to his dust-bunny-filled apartment, his roommate Nick, a music major, had asked if he could tape the sound of my stomach rumbling to use in one of his songs.
“Uh, thanks, Max, but I don’t know. Valencia is sort of . . . far . . . from, you know, civilization.”
“Oh, not there. We just found out the place in Valencia is going to be condemned,” he said happily, “so a few guys and I from school found this awesome Craftsman to rent in Venice for the summer.”
Huh. Venice was cool. My best friend Nicola and I hung out there a lot, especially because my favorite vintage store, One Person’s Garbage Is Another’s Treasure, was there. But still—me plus a house of guys equaled awkward. “How many guys?” I asked warily.
“Six.”
Me in a house with seven guys equaled off-the-chart awkward.
“I don’t know—” Dad started to say.
“Oh, I do!” said Hillary. “I know that’s a fabulous idea!”
Max turned to me and smiled. “Living together would be fun. Like old times!”
“Yeah. If our parents had had six other kids,” I replied.
“Think of all that wonderful quality time you’d be able to share!” said Hillary.
Personally, I would have enjoyed some quality time with Dad, but ever since his TV show had become a hit a few years ago, he spent less time doing things like trolling the Rose Bowl flea market on Sundays with me (he collected old record albums while I hunted around for stuff from Paris and vintage concert T-shirts) and more time in his office coming up with wacky-but-believable scenarios if dogs in men’s bodies really existed. Nowadays, forget it. Our bonding time took place when we passed each other on the stairs as I was leaving for school and he was going to sleep after all-night writing sessions.
I turned to him. Sure, ever since Hillary had come into the picture, he had pretty much let her run the show, but this time he wouldn’t. We weren’t talking about leaving me behind for a weekend while they went to that fancy Two Bunch Palms spa in Palm Springs, where Hillary walked around in a bikini covered with mud and Dad broke his promise to Dr. Melman and wrote an entire script in four hours. This was an entire month of my summer vacation. Which, for someone like me—whose high school experience was definitely not filled with parties and dates and pompoms—was the only two months of the year to look forward to. Before I could open my mouth to tell him that, Hillary beat me to the punch.
“Sweeettiiie,” she purred, as she snuggled up to him, “did I tell you how great I think it is that you’ve raised two kids who are so generous and loving and self-sufficient?”
Dad smiled. “Really? You think so?”
She snuggled in closer. “Nope—I know so.”
I couldn’t believe it. My father—a guy who was in charge of a staff of fifteen comedy writers and made millions of dollars a year off talking-dog bobble heads—was blushing.
“And not that it’s any of my business or anything, but because you’re such a wonderful father, I think you’d be doing them a real disservice if you didn’t give them the opportunity to spend the month together,” she went on. “Think of all the great memories they’ll get out of it.”
Which ones? Me wading through empty pizza boxes and athletic supporters? Or triple-locking bathroom doors so no one would walk in on me?
“As much as I’ll miss having Simone with us, I really think you owe her this opportunity. If not, she may hold it against you and end up spending three weeks of therapy sessions on it when she’s in her thirties.”
Okay, this was enough. Hillary may have had a killer body because she went to the gym six days a week and didn’t eat carbs and read magazines with articles like “How to Drive Your Man Wild with Just a Wink,” but my dad wasn’t that stupid. He had to see through her, right?
He turned to her. “Hillary, I have to say—”
You’re a total suck-up whose main goal in life is to snag a rich husband like me so you don’t have to work anymore and can afford to have your Pilates teacher make house calls. C’mon, Dad, you can say it.
“I’m always so impressed by your ability to take the future into co
nsideration like that.” He turned to me. “Simone, I agree with Hillary. I think staying with your brother for the month is a great idea.”
Okay. Apparently, he did not see through her.
Hillary clapped her hands. “Fantastic! Not that we have to worry about money or anything, but now we can upgrade to the extra deluxe villa instead of just the plain old deluxe one!” She reached over and grabbed my arm with her perfectly pink manicured hand. “Simone, I’m so excited for you. This could turn out to be the best summer of your entire life!
Sure. Or it could also be the worst.
one
I wish I could say that being shoved off on my brother and his six roommates for a month because my normally meek and boring workaholic father had fallen under the spell of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Hollywood executive with zero body fat was the beginning of the end for me. But to be honest, things hadn’t been going all that swimmingly for me for a while. Like, say, since birth, when my mother had literally died while popping me out. (“You do realize you so win the Most Dramatic Way to Lose a Parent for that one, right?” Nicola liked to say. “That’s even worse than Staci Simon’s mother’s face literally exploding from all the cosmetic filler she had injected.”)
Despite all my wishing and hoping that my junior year of high school would be different, the fact that it was going to suck just as much as the two years that had come before it had been obvious, even way back in the fall when school started.
“Look at it this way,” Nicola had said one Tuesday afternoon back in October as we went through the racks at One Person’s Garbage Is Another’s Treasure. Owned by a beer-bellied guy named Brad with long hair who spent his weekends poking around garage and estate (read: fancy garage) sales, One Person’s Garbage (not a great name, but less of a mouthful) specialized in stuff that had been “pre-owned by major celebrities.” Although in this case, “major celebrities” were people who had one-line speaking roles as bus drivers or waitresses. “Studies have shown that people whose high school years suck are ninety-nine percent more likely to have wildly exciting adulthoods filled with fame and fortune and travel to exotic locales with superhot boyfriends.”
Wicked Jealous: A Love Story Page 1
