You're Invited (18 page)

“Ah-mazing.” She hauls the suitcase in, tracking sand across Meemaw's white tile. Luckily, Meemaw's nowhere close enough to see, and Dad and I really don't care about a little sand. This is the beach, after all.

“Ta-da! Prepare to be dazzled!” Becca's already
pulling the suitcase up the stairs. Buster's jumping from step to step, swatting at the luggage tag hanging from one of the zippers.

My stomach rumbles again. “Let me preheat the oven for this pizza first.”

“Okey-dokey. Meetcha upstairs,” Becca calls from the top of the landing.

I run into the kitchen (the seriously massive, incredible kitchen), and flip the oven temperature to 425 degrees. Then I pull out the homemade pizza I made last night and set it on the countertop. It's this barbeque-chicken pizza recipe I found online, except I added pineapple. It sounds crazy, but I'm thinking it'll taste really good.

Then I run upstairs and jump into the shower to wash off all the volleyball sweat and sand from this morning. When I come out, Becca's pretty much unpacked her entire room into mine.

“What is all this stuff?” I rub my hair between the two ends of my towel as I take in the nail polish bottles and compacts and makeup brushes and something that looks like a tiny torture device and curling irons and a flat iron and the clothes and . . . exactly how much do you need to look nice?

“Oh,
you know, makeover things!” Becca stands in the middle of it all, hands on her hips and beaming.

“But . . . there's so much of it.”

“I like choices. Lots of choices. Eek! What are you doing to your hair? Halt! Right now! You'll give yourself split ends!”

I don't exactly know how else to towel dry my hair, but I stop anyway. Becca's already picked up a hair dryer and brush, like she can't wait to start.

“Um, I need to go put the pizza in the oven first.” I toss my towel onto the only free space left in my room—the back of my desk chair—and fly downstairs, leaving Becca rolling her eyes behind me.

I pop the pizza in the oven and set the timer. Then I peer out the huge window in the breakfast nook. The sun is super bright, and the waves are crashing onshore. Perfect for surfing. Maybe I should just hang up this makeover idea and go to the beach. Lance and the other guys'll probably be out there. If Lance will even talk to me, that is. He's been acting bizarre since the party. In fact, he was even all weird this morning at the game, mumbling whenever I said anything to him and completely missing the ball when I sent it toward him. Whatever it is, I wish he'd get over it, or our team's
gonna finish at the bottom of the heap.

Also, I might be having second thoughts about the makeover. I liked the way I looked at Linney's party (minus that awful dress), but I really,
really
wasn't okay with how everyone stared at me. I just want to look like maybe I'm not always headed to volleyball. I know I'm supposed to be Vi the Sporty Girl, but sometimes I want to be regular Vi. And who says regular Vi can't have nice hair and nails done in cotton-candy pink every once in a while without people making a big deal out of it?

“Vi! Come on, already!” Becca's voice calls from the stairs.

I guess there's no getting out of it now. I drag myself back up to my room, where Becca directs me to my desk, pointing at the mirror she's set up. She pats my hair with the towel (like that's actually going to dry it), and then attacks it with this huge flat-looking brush. Once the tangles are out, she switches on the dryer and brushes my hair while she dries it.

I'm still really curious about why she's here, doing my hair, instead of dragging me out to wherever Ryan is today so she can get more flirting in. So when she turns off the dryer, I ask.

“So . . . what's going on with Ryan?”

Becca sets the dryer down and puts on a smile that I'm guessing is fake. “Hey! I know! Let's talk about Lance and how he so completely, obviously, adorably likes you.”

My face goes bright red in the mirror. “He does not like me. Not like that. We're friends.” I think. I hope.

“Puh-lease.” Becca flips my hair this way and that, making faces at it in the mirror. “He took one look at you at Linney's party and it was like a scene out of the movies. His eyes fell out of his head.”

“They did not.”

“Then why are you letting me do this, hmm? I know it's not just because you're bored on a Saturday afternoon.” Becca drops my hair and grabs a big plastic box from my bed. She plugs it in and flips open the top, showing a row of curlers—just like the ones Lauren's Bubby had in her hair right before the dog party.

“Um . . . I'm not sure about curlers,” I say.

“Hot rollers,” she corrects me. “Trust me, your hair will look so super cute when I'm done with it. And you never answered the question.”

I'm about to call her out on not answering mine either when—

Beep beep beep.

Saved by the pizza bell.

“Be right back.” I race downstairs and pull the super-yummy-looking pizza from the oven. Normally I'd wait for it to cool a little before slicing, but I can just picture Becca dragging those curler things down here and snapping them into my hair if I don't hurry up.

I slice the pizza, slip the whole thing onto a big plate, and take it upstairs.

“That smells soooo good.” Becca reaches for a slice, but I slap her hand away.

“It's hot. Wait for a moment.”

“Whatevs. More time for
you
to answer my question now. Also, sit. Hot rollers wait for no man.”

Ugh. I kinda hoped she'd forgotten she'd asked it. “I don't know . . .” I sit down and squirm a little in my chair. “I guess I liked the way I felt walking down the runway. Not the way everyone stared at me, because that was weird. But how I felt . . . pretty. I guess.”

“There's nothing wrong with feeling pretty,” Becca says.

“I just like having choices, you know? I don't always want to be the girl in the ponytail and flip-flops. Sometimes I want to look different. But sometimes I don't.”

It feels really weird saying this stuff out loud, but Becca's
nodding like she completely understands.

“People aren't all one way or another,” she says. “Variety is the milk of life. Or something. Like yesterday, I didn't do anything with my hair. I only dried it and put it back in a headband.”

She's so earnest that I don't have the heart to tell her that that's way more than I do with my hair most days.

“Now watch what I'm doing so you can do it yourself. And don't tell me you don't have any hot rollers, because I'm leaving these here.” Becca plucks a curler, or hot roller, or whatever it is, out of the box and winds my hair around it. Over and over and over again until I have a head full of rolled-up hair. I look like a piece of cauliflower.

“Pizza time! Followed by makeup time!” Becca snags a slice for each of us. “Okay. This is seriously ah-mazing, Vi,” she says, swallowing a bite. “Hold up! Omigosh, omigosh, omigosh! Guess who just had the best idea for RSVP? Moi! We can advertise your fantabulous cooking skills. Like set up a booth in the Visitor's Center with some samples, and give them out with flyers. Once people taste your food, they'll be coming up with excuses for parties left and right. Plus
we can for sure charge more if we're supplying the food.” Becca looks happier than she's seemed all day.

Which makes it really hard to burst her bubble. “Sorry, Becs. I'm not cooking for anyone besides my friends and my dad.” I bite into the pizza, and it
is
pretty good. The pineapple was the perfect touch.

“But whyyyyyyyyyy? Wait. This doesn't have something to do with that sleepover a bazillion gazillion years ago and how Linney acted about your spaghetti, does it?”

I look down at the pizza slice in my hands. It does. But it sounds so babyish to admit that Linney got to me like that. So I lie. “No.”

“Uh-huh. Well, think about it, okay? Pinkie swear? Because you've met me, right? I'm so not gonna quit bugging you about it until you acknowledge how totally and completely genius my idea is. Kind of like what I did with Lauren.” Becca shoves the last of her pizza into her mouth and brushes the crumbs from her hands. Then she dances across the room and gathers up nail polish and makeup. And tweezers, which she aims at my eyebrows.

I duck out of reach. “What are you doing?”

“
Tweezing your eyebrows.”

“Um, no.” That sounds beyond painful. Why would I want little hairs ripped out of my face?

Becca crosses her arms. “Come on, Vi. I promise it doesn't hurt . . . very much. And I won't do a whole lot. We just need to create a shape, that's all.”

“A shape?” Really, I don't see anything wrong with eyebrows being eyebrow-shaped.

“Let me just do one, and then you tell me if I should stop, okay?”

“Okay, fine.” I clasp my hands between my knees and close my eyes. Becca leans in close. There's a little tugging on one of my eyebrows followed by a pinprick feeling.

“Okay?” she asks.

I nod. It does hurt a tiny bit, but it's not too awful.

“There,” Becca says after she finishes my other eyebrow. “Done. Now, nails!” She hauls out a bag filled with a rainbow of colors. I pick out a very pale pink (even though she tries to sell me on a glittery blue), and she gets to work.

Once I have fingers and toes tipped in pink, Becca breaks out the makeup. I try to take notes in my head as she dabs gloss onto my lips and brushes light brown
powder across my eyelids. She takes the torture-looking thing and attaches it to my eyelashes.

“What are you doing?” I say around her wrist, which is right in front of my face.

“Curling your eyelashes. Trust me. This will make your lashes look ten times longer and your eyes look as big as an anime character's.”

What she's describing sounds like some kind of freakish mutant person. She finishes with the torture machine and swipes at my eyelashes with a mascara wand.

“There. Perfect. Now pick out something to wear, and then we'll take your hair down.” Becca caps the mascara, and I glance at the clothes lying around the room.

She's grouped them into outfits, complete with shoes (which are all mine, since our feet are completely different sizes) and a purse and jewelry. Becca is nothing but serious about fashion. Buster's lounging on a blue skirt that reminds me of the pretty blue dresses at Linney's party. I roll him off and pick up the skirt.

“That would look ridiculously fabulous with your coloring!” Becca gushes.

I hold it up to my waist (really carefully so I don't smudge my nails) and look in the mirror. The skirt comes
about halfway down my thighs. Which makes sense since Becca's like four feet tall. Or, at least, that's how it feels when I stand next to her. “Um, no. Too short.”

“What are you talking about? You wear running shorts all the time! They're the same length.”

“That's different. Those are shorts. What about this?” I pick up a long yellow maxi dress.

“Try it on!” Becca hands me the white sandals she picked to go with the dress. The pair of sandals that Meemaw bought for me to wear to Dad's coworker's wedding last spring (Dad complained until Meemaw insisted they were an early birthday present). I've never worn them since.

I tug on the dress and stuff my feet into the sandals. They actually aren't too uncomfortable since they're flat. But no way are they as comfy as my flip-flops or running shoes.

“Vi! Omigosh, you look divine,
dah
-link! Eeeee! Let's get your hair down.” She pushes me back to the chair and unrolls my hair. Bouncy blond curls bob around my face. It all feels so . . . girly. “Okay, now we just have to squick some of these apart.” Becca separates the curls until I have a lot of bounciness bopping me in the nose and covering my eyes.

“I can't see,” I
say through the hair.

“Hang on a sec.” Becca's rifling through a little bag. She pulls something out and starts gathering some of the hair out of my eyes. Then she slips in a big barrette with white shells glued to it, and fastens the barrette behind my head. “Voila! Stand up.”

She drags me over to the full-length mirror on the back of my door. This sunshiny person with bouncy hair and huge eyes looks back at me. She's kind of . . . pretty.

“You're totally wearing this to Illumination Night next weekend, you know that, right?” Becca says.

“I'll never be able to do this myself, you know.”

“It's not that hard, silly. You just need to make the time for it.”

“I guess . . .”

“Really, I swear on Dread Pirate it isn't. Just start small. Like, maybe tomorrow, only put on mascara and lip gloss. Then add something else the next day. Easy peasy.”

I start to bite my lip, but then think better of it. I don't want that shiny pink gloss all over my teeth. It can't be that hard to swipe on some lip gloss, right?

“Cross your heart and promise me you'll try? If I don't see longer eyelashes tomorrow, I'm coming over
here and taking home all this stuff I'm leaving for you to use. And your surfboard. And probably all your flip-flops, too. So you better promise, or else.” Becca raises her eyebrows.

“Okay, okay! I promise. But . . .” I turn away from the mirror so I'm facing her. “You have to promise me that you'll lay off the whole Vi-cooks-for-the-business thing.”

“Noooope . . . no can do.”

“You know how you clearly don't want to talk about Ryan? That's how I feel about this cooking thing.” I twist the ends of my hair, and it takes Becca all of a half second to swat my hand away from my head.

Becca sighs likes I'm asking her to keep the secret of the century. “Fine. You win. But can I take some of that pizza home?”

“Knock-knock. Vi?” Dad's voice comes from the other side of my door.