The Look (13 page)

T
his was not how I imagined telling Mum.

“I can’t believe it,” she says, gasping for breath, as soon as we get in.

She’s sitting on the sofa, with the TV still on the same channel that featured Sandy McShand. Ava must have brought her the glass of water sitting beside her, because it’s clear she hasn’t moved for ages.

“Wasn’t she grand?” Dad says, still hoping for a miracle.

Mum doesn’t even look at him. She’s staring at me.

“How long?” she asks, her face drained and pale. “All summer?”

I nod.

“All by yourself? Oh my God — what have we done?”

“Well, not by myself,” I point out. “I had chaperones. There were lots of people around.”

“Every day, you’ve been doing this?”

I stare at the carpet. “Most days. But not working. Just trying to get work.”

Mum looks helplessly to Dad, then back to me. “When were you going to tell me?”

“When I got a job. A good one.”

“And appearing on
national TV
didn’t count as a good one?”

“Well … when you put it like that …”

She sighs so deeply it sounds as though all the breath is coming out of her. I was expecting her to blaze with fury, but she’s beyond blazing. This is almost worse, because there’s panic in her eyes. Poor Mum — spinning further out of orbit, and I’ve put her there.

“I can’t believe I didn’t realize,” she says, squeezing her eyes closed and pressing her hands to her head. “My little girl … out there, surrounded by sharks …”

“They weren’t
sharks
exactly …”

“Come. Sit here.” She pats the sofa beside her. When I sit down, she looks at me wonderingly and reaches up to stroke my hair — which is a bit stiff and sticky because it’s still full of about a million hair products. She strokes my arm instead. Her voice is surprisingly gentle, now that the panic’s subsiding. “How was it? Really?”

“Really?”

The tenderness in her voice catches me off guard. For the first time since Ava got her diagnosis, she’s looking at
me
— really looking at me and wanting to know how
I
am — and this is
so
not a good time to ask. I wish she’d asked me after the day Cassandra called, or Kite-Tail Day, or the day Nirmala removed the caterpillar. I wish I wasn’t starting to cry.

“It’s been OK,” I sniff, moving into her open arms. “Well, nobody likes me, and I only got one job, and they said I was very nothing, and my ankles are fat, and all the other girls seem better at it than me …”

I’m crying quite a lot now. I can’t help myself. Mum passes me a tissue. She always has them on hand now, just in case.

“I bet they aren’t,” she says with a dawning smile. “Just so you know, darling, I thought you looked fabulous in those” — she starts shaking — “really, really silly platforms. And those
suspenders
! What was that stylist
on
?”

The smile creeps across her face. The panic has gone and instead there’s her old, familiar twinkle. She gets the craziness of Sandy McShand! And she thought I looked fabulous. I snuggle into her as closely as I can. Oh, I’ve missed my mum. It’s funny how you can share a flat with someone and still miss them so much.

“And I ought to say, Mandy —” Dad pipes up.

Mum glares at him to cut him off and remind him this is all partly his fault, but he stands his ground.

“— your daughter has been getting up on time, every day, and finding her way to God-knows-where around London, and sticking with it despite all the rejections, and never complaining. And she’s been poring over fashion books and learning about photography. You’d hardly recognize her.”

Thanks, Dad. I think that was supposed to be a compliment.

Mum pulls me even closer. “Just don’t do it again, darling, promise. Not without me there, anyway.”

I promise. Not that I stand much chance of doing it again — not after today.

Ava comes in from our room, where I guess she’s been hiding.

“Sorry,” she says to me sheepishly. “She switched channels when Gran called and I couldn’t stop her. How did it go?”

“Oh,” I sigh, just glad the whole thing is finally over, “it was nothing.”

Later, at the library, they find me last month’s copy of
Dazed & Confused
. I want to check if the head-banging girl with the extraordinary hair was Sheherezade. It’s not surprising Nightmare Boy felt uncomfortable that day in Seb’s studio if he was being forced to look at pictures of his ex-girlfriend. Was she really as stunning in the pictures as I remember?

I find the feature. And yes. Yes, it was her; and yes, she was stunning. Wearing painted silk hot pants and a tight cotton jacket, Sheherezade has an energy in her photos that’s electric. She hasn’t just mastered her fingers, feet, and elbows; she can fling her body in five different directions at once and still look amazing. No wonder he went out with her.

Amazing. Not my word anymore. Someone else’s.

What was I thinking? I could never, simply
never
, be this girl.

Ava blames herself. But I tell her not to worry. As Dad said — good things happened as well as bad this summer. I made friends with Sabrina. I know who Karl Lagerfeld is, and what brush to use for what type of blusher application. I can find my way around the weirdest corners of London. If nothing else, I could always get a job as a local tour guide now.

Meanwhile, there are less than two weeks left of vacation, and I’ve got my Still Life project to get on with before the start of term. Things are about to get serious at school. It’s better not to have any more summer distractions.

I call Frankie to let her know that I’m not available for go-sees anymore.

“Oh, are you sure, angel? It was just starting to go somewhere.”

“Not really,” I point out. “Sandy McShand didn’t like me.”

“Hmm. Did he tell you that? Well, that’s just an opinion. You’re gorgeous! Don’t let one little Scottish stylist get you down. Anyway, are you off somewhere nice?”

“What?”

“On your vacation?” she insists. “Isn’t that why you’re stopping the go-sees? Then you’ve got school, of course, but we can pick things up at fall break or Christmas —”

I see. That’s why she’s so relaxed about it. She assumes I’m jetting off somewhere glamorous for a few days, not giving up entirely.

“Well, actually, Frankie —”

“Oh, God, Rio. VIP.” I can hear her other phone ringing insistently in the background. “Sorry, angel, got to dash this minute. No problem about the go-sees. Call me when you’re back, OK? Have fun!”

I would so love to be the girl Frankie obviously thinks I am. The one who mixes modeling with posh vacations. The one whose school friends beg for details of her glamorous life. The one who thinks Freaky Friday is Lindsay Lohan’s finest moment, not a term of abuse.

“Yeah, right. Thanks,” I say. But she’s already hung up the phone. She’s talking to some VIP in Rio.

And I have a whole bunch of bananas to shade in this morning.

I’m on my third banana (having made the bunch smaller by eating two of them) when I hear an angry growl from the sofa. Ava’s watching the classic movie channel, which has become a recent favorite of ours. I assume that Spencer Tracy has said something deeply irritating to Katharine Hepburn.

“Idiot!” Ava calls out.

“What’s he done this time?”

“He’s invited me to a party.”

“Who? Spencer Tracy?”

“No, T. Honestly. He died decades ago. Jesse.”

I look around. She’s furious.

“Wait a minute. Your boyfriend has invited you to a party?”

“Yes,” she seethes. “Idiot.”

I’m not totally following this. I go over to the sofa to join her, so she can explain it to me.

“So what’s the problem?”

She rolls her eyes. “He’s planning a barbecue on the beach in Cornwall for when he gets back from that yacht in October. He wants to know if I’ll be well enough to go. Look at me. He still doesn’t get it.”

“Well, that’s because you don’t tell him,” I point out.

Ava has gradually cut herself off from all of her friends except Louise. She doesn’t want them to see her on her bad days, when she’s sick and exhausted from the treatment. She doesn’t want to hear the pity in their voices when they ask how she’s feeling. She doesn’t even like me knowing how bad it is a lot of the time, which is why I normally pretend not to notice.

“He doesn’t want to picture me like this. Think about it, T. He’s surrounded by cool sailor girls all day, with highlights and toned abs and red bikinis.”

“You’ve been checking out his friends on Facebook, haven’t you?”

She looks guilty.

“There’s one in particular who’s like a walking Barbie doll … He works with her every day, T. He says he misses me, but he’s just being nice. Long-distance relationships never work. Three Hollywood couples split last week because of it.”

I make a mental note to tell Mum to confiscate her celebrity magazines.

“And he always said I looked like a movie star. Well, I don’t anymore.”

In a familiar gesture, she puts a hand to her patchy hair. It’s lasted very well, but she’s on her third cycle now and the chemo is getting to it. She hasn’t cut it yet, which means long strands on the pillow, in her hairbrush, in the shower … What’s left on her head is lank and tired, like the rest of her.

“You don’t
at the moment
,” I correct her. “Actually, you do at the moment. You look like Anne Hathaway doing an Oscar-winning performance of a girl bravely fighting cancer. Slam-dunk award. Promise.”

She looks at me with hollow eyes. Then her lower lip starts to wobble. Her upper lip joins it. They tilt up. I think she’s giggling. She IS giggling. Anne Hathaway did it. Finally.

“You’re sweet, T,” she says, “but the drugs have made me blow up like a balloon. Anne Hathaway never looked this pale and puffy.”

“You forget that you made me watch
The Devil Wears Prada
for fashion research,” I point out. “Pale, yes. Bony, rather than puffy. But even then, she still looked like a movie star, same as you do. Look, I’ll prove it to you.”

I go into the hall, where my modeling bag has been sitting untouched for the last few days, and come back holding Ava’s camera.

“We’ll turn our room into a studio. I know how to do that now. We just need to hang up a couple of white sheets to create a background and get the lighting right. I’ll make you look glamorous. You can do the makeup, because you’re better at that than me, but I can get you to do some cool poses. You saw what they did to me: You can turn
anyone
into
anything
with enough lipstick and mascara.”

She looks up at me, not angry now, but frail and confused, and really not like my big sister at all.

“But … why?”

“To show Jesse, if you insist on not seeing him in person. So he can be thinking about you instead of Barbie Girl.”

Actually, that’s not it exactly. It’s to show Ava herself that she doesn’t look as bad as she thinks. Different, yes. Patchy-haired, possibly. But still basically gorgeous. Some things you just don’t lose.

“Really?” She sounds almost convinced. “Not now, though. Honestly, T. Give me a couple of days. Right now I feel … Excuse me.”