Modelland (2 page)

Our tale begins on a Thursday afternoon, the most ordinary of ordinary afternoons, a few days shy of the most unordinary day of the entire year. Tookie De La Crème was splayed on her back on the hallway floor of her school, the Bangle, Bauble, and Bead Institute—B3, as it was commonly called. Her large, mismatched eyes didn’t blink as she stared at the stained ceiling. Her gangly legs shot out at odd angles, as though she’d fallen from a six-story building. Her enormous feet pointed straight up. An internal clock counted down the time in perfect cadence.
T minus six minutes and forty-nine seconds. Forty-eight … forty-seven …

As Tookie waited, she lifted to her face a cold canister of
whipped cream, inserting the nozzle straight into her mouth. She pressed the trigger that delivered the airy sweetness directly onto her tongue. A bit of cream accidentally dropped from her mouth and dripped from her chin to her neck. With each squirt, more and more of the cream fell to her snug-fitting hand-me-up blue blouse, which had once been her younger sister’s. Another squirt landed in her hair. She then licked her tiny baby fingers from thumb to pinky and prepared for the next squirt.

How was Tookie able to lie in the middle of her school’s hallway, during class time, enjoying whipped cream from the can, and not get herself into any trouble? Well, Tookie was the Institute’s best “skipper.” No one, not even the most cunning teachers, noticed she was gone when she skipped out of class way before most of her lessons ended.

T minus four minutes thirty-three seconds … thirty-two … thirty-one …

As Tookie stretched her legs, the backs of her calves touched the bitingly cold marble, making her shiver. Most people would have found it uncomfortable, but Tookie was happy she felt
something
—at least she was still alive and breathing. Sometimes Tookie was so used to being a Forgetta-Girl that she thought she really
was
invisible.

T minus five seconds … four … three … two …

A loud but familiar clanging made Tookie jump. The school’s bell was actually an old-time buzzer that had long ago signaled factory shift changes. In days gone by, before the Institute had taken over the building, B3 had produced three things: bangles, baubles, and beads.

Once the bell stopped, a familiar rumbling made Tookie
cringe. An oily belch followed, sending a thick cloud of greenish smoke through the vents. A stench filled the air. It smelled like a mix of gasoline, mold, melted plastic, and methane gas emanating from the bowels of the building. Excruciatingly loud school bells weren’t the only relics left over from when B3 had been a factory—the administration had done very little in the way of renovation to convert the safety-code-deficient building into a proper institute of learning. The school let out belches and eruptions all day and leaked fumes from every crevice.

Groaning, the students emerged from their classrooms.

“Ugh,” Ariella Burtona wailed, fanning the odors from her face.

“Nasty,” Tatiana Sharonne said, pressing a sachet of dried flowers to her nose.

“The B4 Institute tooted again,” Jason Milano chortled, trotting out the school’s oldest, tiredest, but aptest joke. Everyone called the school B4, for Bile, Barf, Belches, and Butt Bombs.

More doors were flung open and the sound of footsteps thundered through the halls. Tookie quickly closed her eyes. She then peeked to see just how far the approaching mob was from her prone body. Nine feet away, she estimated.

The conversations of passersby began to wash over her. Tookie felt like a fly on the wall.

“Zarpessa says she’s spending fifty thousand on her prep,” said an annoyed female voice over Tookie’s head. “Hag.”

“What do you think the look will be at T-DOD this year?” a girl with a forehead tattoo whined. “I hope my tatted face will be in.”

“Don’t hold your breath, Inky …,” a male voice answered.

Another voice floated over from the other side of the corridor.
“… if they don’t choose me, I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life. I’ll die if I end up working in a belt-buckle factory like my mom. I’ve been crying for a month straight. I hope my eyes aren’t going to stay all puffy like this.”

Many of the conversations had to do with the big event that was taking place in two days, The Day of Discovery, which most people shortened to T-DOD. It was the grandest of holidays, and B3 was even letting its students have Friday off this week to prepare—an absolute rarity. Not that Tookie really cared.

“Where do you think the rest of ’em will be this year?” a girl with a nasal voice asked. “I heard that a girl found one in a pot of boiling sweet potatoes and burned up her hands real bad trying to get it!”

Tookie shifted on the floor. Now they were talking about SMIZEs. Girls had been searching for the magical charms for days, fighting at water spigots, sloshing through sewers, splashing in the Peppertown pool, which everyone knew kids peed in.

“I found the pipe where the gunk water from the Shivera hospital dumps out,” a hopeful girl whispered. “No one is going to be looking for SMIZEs there!”

As more people passed, as more girls chattered about T-DOD, Tookie began to feel lonelier and lonelier. It was yet another day when no one, not a single person, looked down on the floor and cried,
Oh! Check out that girl down there!
All the students rushed past Tookie like water in a stream flowing around a rock. Rubber sneakers
almost
crushed her fingers. Heavy boots
nearly
bumped her shins. A piece of paper fluttered out of someone’s notebook and landed
close
to Tookie’s left hand. The paper’s owner, a dark-haired girl, bent down to snatch it, not even noticing that Tookie was there.

Irrelevant. Expendable.
Forgettable
. All Tookie wanted was for someone to notice her. Anyone. Just a simple kick in the ribs or a sneaker sole that squished her hand or a textbook that slipped from a student’s grip and fell on her large forehead. She wasn’t picky.

Spin, thud, spin, thud, spin, spin, spin, thud
.

Tookie looked up at a spinning dervish approaching, taking in her long, thick, curly wheat-blond hair, her silver-dollar-sized aqua eyes, and her perfectly symmetrical face. It was as if Tookie’s wish had come true—sort of. For here was her sister, Myrracle, someone who did notice her. Except, well, Tookie didn’t really want her to.

Spotting Tookie sprawled on the floor, Myrracle began to sing. “You. Are. Not. My. Deeee. Nay. Nayyy.” She gave one spin for each word, making the hem of her blue dress flutter. It was a dress, Tookie guessed, that would pass to her as a hand-me-up in a matter of days.

Tookie rolled her eyes at her sister’s mispronunciation of
DNA
. Beyond her looks and fancy flights of footwork, what was most disturbing to Tookie about The Myrracle, as Tookie’s mother called her, was not that she was Tookie’s younger sister. The most disturbing fact was that The Myrracle was distinctly, indisputably, flat-out … dense. As dumb as a lobotomized turkey—and turkeys were said to raise their heads to the sky during rainstorms and drown themselves. Oh, Tookie tried to give her sister the benefit of the doubt—Myrracle had memorized every intricate dance step of the twenty-two verses of “The Shivera Shuffle,” after all, and at least she understood the
concept
of DNA, even if she got the pronunciation wrong, but in all honesty, Myrracle wasn’t the brightest tube of lipstick in the makeup caddy.

Luckily, Myrracle pirouetted out of sight almost immediately. Problem gone … for now.

Tookie sighed and reached for a small, thick yellow book wedged under her lower back. It wasn’t just any regular yellow, but the color of a taxicab that had been freshly painted and spit-polished. And it wasn’t just any regular book, but a collection of letters Tookie had written to people she’d encountered throughout her life. Not that she would ever dare send them.

She called this book
T-Mail Jail
. Tookie found it ironic that the book’s initials,
TMJ
, also stood for an ailment that impaired a person’s ability to open her mouth. The front cover displayed Tookie’s first name, handwritten in beautiful calligraphy. The spine of
T-Mail Jail
read
DON’T KEEP OUT!
The back cover urged,
INVADE MY PRIVACY—PLEASE!
If one were inclined to follow these instructions, the inside cover challenged,
I DARE YOU TO TURN THE PAGE
.

But no one dared … or, more accurately, cared.

As the crowd continued to move around her, Tookie opened
T-Mail Jail
to a blank page. She closed her eyes, selected one of the dozens of colored pens tucked into the pocket of the book’s back cover, and held it in front of her face. Blue, in her color code, was for the English language.
Boorrrring
, Tookie thought.

Tookie uncapped the pen, held the journal in the air over her head, and began to write to her only friend in the world. She had been missing for over six weeks now, and Tookie feared she’d never see her again.

SPLD stood for Silent Protest by Lying Down. Tookie pronounced it “spilled.” As an oblivious classmate almost whacked Tookie’s head with a rusty fencing épée, Tookie licked the tip of her pen, gripped it in her right hand, and continued to write. She wasn’t a natural right-hander, but her mother had slapped her wrist so many times for writing with her left that Tookie had begrudgingly made the switch.

Over the
i
in her name, Tookie added a tiny
FG
for Forgetta-Girl. But before closing
T-Mail Jail
, she thumbed through its previous entries, admiring the rainbow of colors. Every color represented a different language: flamingo-pink for Gowdee’an, cabernet-grape for Très Jolie, mandarin-orange for BayJingle, and skyscraper-gray for Colorian, the language spoken in the distant land of SansColor. Tookie had a knack for quickly picking up foreign languages, and wrote whole letter entries in them. By the age of eleven, Tookie knew twenty-eight languages. Now, at fifteen, she spoke nearly every world tongue. The nagging truth, though, was that this incredible linguistic gift of Tookie’s seemed wasted—it was almost a cruel cosmic trick. Why give this ability to a girl with whom no one wanted to speak?

The thundering crowd in the Bangle, Bauble, and Bead Institute hallway started to thin. Tookie nervously smoothed out her shorts, closed her
T-Mail Jail
, and straightened her body out of its position suggestive of traumatic injury—and then she heard the bowlegged footsteps she’d been waiting for:

Step-pause-step-pause-step
.

Coming. Her. Way.

There was only one person at B3 who had spoken to Tookie besides Myrracle: class president Theophilus Lovelaces, the very
step-pause-step-pause
figure quickly approaching. It had been one year ago, almost to the day, but Tookie hadn’t forgotten it—in truth, it was why she had invented the act of SPLDing in the first place. There were many letters in
T-Mail Jail
written to Theophilus, all expressing unrequited admiration and affection. Tookie longed to slip one into his locker, but she knew she never would.

A year ago, Tookie had taken a
real
spill, tumbling down the narrow spiral staircase to the cafeteria. All she clearly remembered about that moment was one foot touching that first step and then both enormous feet flying into the air. She was falling … falling … there was the floor … 
boom!

Tookie had landed so hard the world had gone black for a few minutes. Spots began to appear before her eyes. Bodies swept past her, but not one person tried to help. Tookie had just lain there while the day continued as usual for everyone else at the Bangle, Bauble, and Bead Institute.

But then a figure in a pin-striped jacket had appeared. Tookie’s vision was still blurry, but she could make out a small, round button on the figure’s lapel.