The morning had started like any other. Dad had made a great breakfast of oatmeal with fresh berries—I know, oatmeal, but my dad can make it really good with just the right amount of milk and brown suga r—and just as we got settled in, Jonah popped over. That’s what he always did, just crossed through our backyards and let himself in our back door. By now Dad practically had a place setting ready for him each morning. Well, not practically—literally.
When Jonah arrived, Mom had already left for the salon, eager to see what needed to be done before her trip. I’d had a moment of quiet bliss thinking about Kyle and our quick kisses at the front door yesterday. I couldn’t wait to see him today and had dressed with extra care, even borrowing a peach-and-turquoise layered necklace from Mom—with her distracted permission, of course.
“What do you think it’s going to be about?” Jonah asked as we turned the corner toward school.
“I’m not sure,” I said. I wondered if Kyle would smile when he saw me for the first time today or if he’d act cool. Even though we’d been boyfriend/girlfriend for a couple of weeks, we didn’t exactly have a routine yet.
“I’ll bet you five dollars it’s something terrible,” he grumbled.
“Maybe. I didn’t even remember we had an assembly today.”
“Surprise, surprise,” Jonah said. “I can give you one guess why you would forget about something like that.”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” I said, trying to act like I wasn’t about to be busted. Jonah was my best friend, and being my best friend meant he always knew what was on my mind, even when I’d barely said a word.
“Are you thinking about your boyfriend?” he said, dragging out the last word.
“Give it up,” I told him. “Or I’ll have to tell your girlfriend how immature you’re acting.”
“My immaturity is what she likes about me,” he said, but he also dropped the subject. Jonah was with my friend Eve, and they’d been together about a week longer than me and Kyle, which made them the old, boring couple.
As we closed in on the school, I did start to wonder what our school assembly would be about today. The odds of it being something good like a famous person coming in and giving us a concert or a chance to visit them on set were pretty slim.
I saw Kristen and Lizbeth getting out of Lizbeth’s mom’s car and heading up the stairs to school.
“I’ll see you at the assembly,” I told Jonah before heading over to meet my friends.
“They’re probably going to make us build a garden or something awful like that,” he said grumpily as I walked away. “They’ll use us as forced labor!”
“You guys!” I called to Kristen and Lizbeth, running to catch up with them.
“Oh my gosh, Mickey,” Kristen said, shaking her head. “Did you hear? Assembly.”
“I heard,” I said. “But maybe it won’t be anything that bad.” I looked back at Jonah, who was miming digging a hole.
“What is he doing?” Lizbeth asked, trying not to laugh.
“In my experience it’s best to ignore Jonah Goldman when he gets in one of these moods. We don’t want to encourage the poor boy.” We walked into school together and I asked, “What’d everyone do this weekend?”
“Ugh,” Kristen moaned, and it was clear she was not in the mood for Monday or school. I mean, who is? But she seemed exceptionally annoyed with it today. “I had to go to some baseball game of Tobias’s. I swear he plays on fifteen club teams and I feel like I’m expected to go to all of them.”
“Why? He’s your boyfriend, not your brother,” Lizbeth said.
“Eww,” Kristen replied.
“I’m just saying, you don’t have to go to every single game. I’m sure he doesn’t expect you to.”
“Hello, have you met my boyfriend?” Kristen asked. “I know he plays baseball, but his ego is the size of Texas. He expects me to be there, trust me.”
“Doesn’t mean you have to go,” I agreed with Lizbeth.
“You do stuff for Matthew all the time,” Kristen said to Lizbeth.
“Stuff I like,” she said. “This weekend we played tennis at the club. I kicked his polo-wearing butt.”
“Anyway,” Kristen said, rolling her eyes, “I’m putting money on the assembly being something awful, so prepare yourselves. See you there.”
“Save us a seat if you get there first,” Lizbeth said to me as they turned and headed for their lockers.
Kristen and Jonah were probably on to something. The last time we’d had an assembly we’d gotten this monster assignment called Career Exploration. Basically the school didn’t want us to grow up to be deadbeats with no job prospects, so they made us work somewhere for a couple of weeks to learn what it was like to be a responsible adult. Kristen worked at her aunt’s all-talk radio station, Eve worked at a day-care center with little kids, Jonah worked at an antiques store where his mom liked to shop, and Lizbeth worked with me at Hello, Gorgeous!. The whole thing had been a bit of a letdown for me because I didn’t need to career-explore anything—as everyone knew, I was the only one in my class who already had a job and loved it.
Someone tapped my shoulder. I turned to look but no one was there. When I felt a tap on my other shoulder, I knew it was Kyle. I turned to the other side and said, “Hey.”
A smile filled his face and butterflies filled my stomach.
“Hey,” he said.
He clasped my hand, and we walked to first period together.
Two class periods later, I stood just inside the Little Theater looking for my friends. Eve came in and waved when she saw me.
“Hey,” I said, reaching out and pinching her elbow.
Eve pulled her long, white-blond hair over her shoulder and looked out at the auditorium. “Where should we sit? And how much work do you think we’re about to get?” she asked.
“Somewhere Kristen and Lizbeth can join us,” I said. “And probably a lot.”
She sighed and started looking for empty seats. “There are the boys.” She pointed toward Kyle and Jonah a few rows up, and we headed toward them.
“Hey, Mickey.” I turned to see Cara Fredericks and Maggie Williams in the aisle across from us. “Saw you and your mom on TV. Pretty cool.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying not to toss my hair with celebrity fame. Cara’s mom had been coming into the salon since way before I started working there. She was one of the many women in town who only trusted Mom’s stylists with her hair. And guess what? Mrs. Fredericks’s hair always looked fantastic.
“Cute skirt,” Maggie said, nodding to the horizontal-striped skirt I’d paired with a plain white tee and Mom’s long necklace.
Cara and Maggie continued over to seats on the other side of the auditorium with their friends while Eve and I sat behind Kyle and Jonah, where there was extra room for the girls. I ruffled Kyle’s hair as I sat down. Kristen and Lizbeth came in shortly after and plopped into the seats beside Eve.
“Guess who has another baseball game this week?” Kristen whispered—loudly. “If I hear RBI or earned run or whatever I might throw a baseball at his head.”
“Kristen,” Lizbeth warned. “Remember what we talked about when it comes to violence?”
Kristen blew her hair out of her face. “If he’d just mix things up with a different sport now and then. Isn’t it football season?”
I almost laughed. Before I could respond, though, Ms. Carter, who was my homeroom teacher, walked across the stage and stood behind the podium.
“Settle down, now,” Ms. Carter said. She tapped the mic with dull thumps. “Hello! Happy Monday! I know you’re excited, but please take your seats and quiet down.”
Just then, Tobias, the baseball god of Rockville, hurried down the aisle followed by Matthew.
“Dude, K,” he said, holding his hands out at his sides. “Didn’t you save us seats?”
“Mr. Woods,” Ms. Carter called from the stage. “Please find a seat now so we can get started.”
The auditorium twittere
d and Kristen sat up in her seat, crossing her arms over her chest. Before the boys turned away, Matthew leaned down and said to Lizbeth, “See you after?”
She nodded yes, a smile brightening her whole face.
“Hey, what about me?” Kristen called to Tobias. He just waved his hand over his shoulder as he walked to the front of the auditorium, where the only empty seats were. Kristen sighed.
Eve said, “Tell me again why you guys are together?”
Kristen looked at Eve, considering whether she was serious or not. Then she said, “Because we like each other. Not everyone can be as wonderful as Jonah, you know.”
Hearing this, Jonah raised his hand above his head and fist-pumped the air. I reached up and slapped it down.
Finally, when everyone was seated and almost quiet, Ms. Carter said, “Thank you. We wanted to gather you all here today to tell you about our next and final school project of the semester. You all did a great job with your Career Exploration projects.”
“Humph,” Kristen said, slumping back in her seat. “Here it comes.”
“So because of that,” Ms. Carter continued, “we’ve decided to do an extension of Career Exploration.” Groans rose up through the auditorium. “We’re calling it Career Online.”
“Told you,” Kristen said, not even bothering to lower her voice.
“You can work in teams if you’d like. And you can expand on what you did for Career Exploration, or you can begin a totally new project. Explore a new career option. Simmer down, everyone,” Ms. Carter called to us as we rolled our eyes and laughed at her lame joke. “You have two weeks to complete this project and the best team will get a catered pizza lunch from Antonio’s! Just a little incentive to keep it fun and reward you for all your hard work this year!”
“It’s like she’s trying to convince us this isn’t a school assignment,” I whispered to Eve.
“Like it’s actually going to be fun or something,” Eve agreed.
Moans and whispers had turned into full-on talking. Ms. Carter tried to get control of the crowd again by tapping on the microphone.
When it was quiet again, she described how the new assignment would unfold. The project would last for two weeks and we would basically start our own fake company online. We could build a website or just create a blog (way easier), but we were required to show proof of traffic to our site. She said they were looking for more than big numbers in page views—they wanted us to grab an “entrepreneurial spirit” and create something that showed innovation, ambition, and passion.
“I’m just wondering,” Kristen said, “if things could get any worse.”
I’d already begun wondering what I’d do for the assignment and who I could get to work with me. It’d be pretty easy to do an extension of my Career Exploration project since I still worked at Hello, Gorgeous! (and still loved it!). Kristen and Lizbeth would probably work together since they were best friends. I wasn’t sure if Eve would want to work with me or if she and Jonah would do something together. What could Kyle and I do together? He wouldn’t want to work on a blog about the salon, no matter how much he supported my career goals. Was it a good idea to mix business with boyfriend, anyway?
“All right, that’s enough,” Ms. Carter said. “Silence this moment or you’ll all have to do your projects individually.”
That shut everyone up. But I was wondering if maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
CHAPTER 3
At lunch we all gathered at our usual table and the only thing on everyone’s mind was the new assignment.
“It’s ridiculous that they’re giving us another huge project,” Kristen said. “I think we should tell the principal about this. Like we don’t have other classes?”
“I’m sure Ms. Kendall knows about it,” Eve said. “Besides, a teacher’s sole purpose in life is to give homework, so it’s not like she’d do anything about it, anyway.”
“Why are you guys complaining so much?”
We all turned to look at Tobias, who sat farther down the table with Matthew. They didn’t usually join us for lunch, but I guess today Kristen had convinced them. Or convinced Tobias. Matthew was pretty easygoing, plus he really liked being around Lizbeth, which made sense considering she was his girlfriend and all.
“You can’t possibly expect us to believe you’re excited about this project,” Kristen said.
Tobias took an unnecessarily huge bite of his burger and said through a mayonnaise mouthful, “I’ll get my dad’s assistant to do it for me.”
Lizbeth looked at Tobias with a mixture of disgust and disbelief. “Gross,” she said. We all knew she meant it about both his manners and his laziness. And the snobbish fact that he would say such a thing.
“What are you going to do, start a blog about cell phone towers?” Kristen said to him. “Nothing we’d all love to read about more than cell phone towers.”
Tobias’s dad had made a fortune building the towers then leasing them to phone companies. Like my dad always said, there are a lot of ways to make a lot of money. You just have to think past the obvious.
“I have no idea what I’m going to do,” I said.
“Me neither,” Kristen said. “Hey, Mick—too bad you can’t style hair online.”
“Seriously.” How cool would it be if I could give girls the perfect updo for the school dance or a quick and simple style for a school day? Just like the salon putting the Be Gorgeous demos online, it would be amazing if I could give styling advice that way, too. And then…
“You guys! That’s it!” I looked around at all the girls at the table. “We can do hair online! We can do, like, a blog, but for beauty. One for girls our age.”
“With styles girls our age can actually do?” Lizbeth asked. “I hate reading in magazines how it only takes three simple steps to do a formal updo. Like anyone but a pro could do that! Or Mickey.” She winked across the table at me.
“Thanks,” I said. “And that’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
“And maybe,” Eve said, “we could have the latest styles and trends and the best products and accessories. But stuff that people here at school actually use, not just stuff we got from some random Web site and no one we know uses or does.”
“Perfect!” I said, getting excited. I dug in my bag and pulled out a crumpled worksheet from history and a dull pencil. I started scribbling notes. “We’ll keep everything affordable and legit. No crazy-expensive products you can only get at specialty makeup stores.”
“Oh, I know!” Lizbeth chimed in. “It can be a do-it-yourself or how-to sort of thing. We can give advice that’s really easy to follow.”
“And then we can each have a specialty or a job,” Eve added. “We can do this together.”
We all nodded, looking at one another for a moment. Finally I said, “You guys. This is going to be amazing.”
“Sorry, you were talking about me?” Kyle asked from beside me. He gave my knee a squeeze and made me jump.
Oops! I’d totally been ignoring him. I mean, all the guys had pretty much been forgotten by then, but still. “Sorry,” I said to him. “But we have just struck GPA gold. We’re going to kill this assignment. Do you have any ideas for what you might do?”
See? I can be an attentive girlfriend, too.
He shook his head. “When did Ms. Carter say our proposals were due?”
“Like, tomorrow,” I said.
“Glad they’re giving us plenty of time,” he said and sighed.
“Mickey,” Lizbeth said. “What about do-it-yourself accessories and face masks…”
“… and how to properly do a home dye job with the stuff from the drugstore,” Eve said, giving me a little smile.
“I thought the blue suited your skin color perfectly,” I teased back.
“If only my mother had felt the same way,” she said. “Or me.”
“I think this is going to be the best assignment we’ve ever done,” I said. How could it not be? I’d be working with my frien
ds, writing about all things hair. All my dreams were coming true!
People started to clear their tables and head out of the cafeteria on the way to their next class. The guys stood up and started gathering their things.
“We should meet tonight at the salon and keep coming up with ideas. We can have a huge proposal laid out by tomorrow and really get started,” I said.
“Calm down, Mickey,” Jonah said as he crumpled up his paper bag. “Ms. Carter only asked us to give her an idea, not an entire business plan.”
“Jonah, ease up,” Kyle said, and for a moment I felt a burst of pride—my boyfriend, standing up for his girl! “Mickey is actually excited about a school project, which means there’s a chance of her doing well on it.”
“Yeah.” Kristen laughed. “This project could go down in history as the one that she not only did well on but that didn’t get her in trouble.”
“You guys are hilarious,” I said as we tossed our trash and headed for the exit.
“One thing I know for sure,” Jonah said, “is that there’s always hope of Mickey getting in trouble.”
CHAPTER 4
As I pushed through the doors of Hello, Gorgeous!, the little bell above announcing my arrival, I took it all in—the soft, flattering lighting like a dream and the smell like a field of fruit and flowers. I felt a renewed sense of this is where I belong.
“There she is!” called the receptionist, Megan. I don’t want to say it’s because of me, but her full cheeks seemed to shine pinker when she saw me. Everyone at the salon was a tight family, and I knew I was part of that.
“Hi, Megan,” I said, leaning both elbows on her desk and looking past her into the bustle of the salon. Every station was occupied, beauty in progress. Violet, Devon, Piper, Giancarlo, and my mom all stood behind their chairs cutting, curling, coloring, and everything in between so that their clients would walk out looking even more stunning than when they walked in. Hello, Gorgeous! took your own beauty and made it brighter.
“It’s another busy one,” Megan told me. “Lots of walk-ins, too. And your mom said she’s heading out of town in a few days?”
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