Modelland (25 page)

She trudged up to one of the twenty-five sinks cut into a long slab of white and gray marble. Over each sink hung a white-framed rectangular mirror with different-sized holes in it. One hole spat a perfect plume of cold blue water. Another shot out red-tinged hot water. A large hole emitted purplish-tinged water, a perfect combination of hot and cold.

Tookie spotted Piper at a corner sink and walked toward her, trying not to fall over from another sudden stomach spasm. Piper had laid out a series of toiletries, including a toothbrush, toothpaste, a hairbrush, and a comb, in a neat, even line. When she bumped one out of place, she quickly pushed it back into position. She was also playing with a puzzle that had many moving pieces with scrambled parts of a picture. A golden light overhead danced on her delicate skin, enhancing the elegant angles of her chin and shoulders.
Every movement Piper makes could be a beautiful picture
, Tookie thought.
She’s posing, even though she doesn’t realize it
.

“Where’d you get all that stuff?” Tookie asked.

Piper looked up at her and smiled. “This I brought from home.” The tiles formed a picture of Piper’s mother on a throne with a stately man standing next to her. Piper tried to hide the puzzle from Tookie, snapping the last tile into its proper place. “The other stuff was on my nightstand. You didn’t get a toiletries kit?”

Tookie blinked. “It’s back in my room. Do you mind if I borrow some paste?”

“Sure,” Piper said. Then she shoved the puzzle at Tookie, making sure to hold it upside down so Tookie couldn’t see the picture. “Would you mind messing this up for me first?”

Tookie stared at her. “But you just solved it.”

Piper raised one shoulder. “I know. But I’ll solve it again. Playing with it keeps me sane.”

Puzzles weren’t Tookie’s thing—it would probably take forever for her to figure this one out. But she’d heard this about people of SansColor: they were geniuses, adept at all subjects, masters of science, mathematics, music, and art.

She took the puzzle and rearranged the pieces for Piper without looking at it. “Who are you rooming with?” she asked.

“Dylan and I are in with that strumpet Chaste.” Piper rolled her eyes. “And the Likee sisters—I believe Modelland is counting them as one. They’re all sleeping squashed together in one bed.”

“Weird,” Tookie murmured. She opened her mouth to receive the waterspout. Bright blue water sprang out, hitting her upper lip and her nostrils, sending shivers and cramps up her nearly bare back.

“You look freezing,” Piper said. “Didn’t a robe appear in your closet this morning?” She pointed to her own.

Tookie lifted her right shoulder and raised her eyebrows. Then she grabbed Piper’s toothpaste, doled out a narrow strip on her left index finger, and started rubbing her teeth.

“Does that
do
much?” Piper asked curiously.

“Better than nothing. Plus, I don’t have time for a shower.”

Piper looked closely at Tookie. “I would recommend you
not
skip bathing today, Tookie. This is the one week where you want to be as spotlessly clean as possible.”

Tookie shut her eyes, wincing again with another pain. “Piper, my back and tummy are killing me!” she whispered.

Piper shrugged. “Join the club, Tookie. Every new Bella started menstruating at the exact same time this morning.”

“Wait.
What?
”

“You’ve never heard of menstrual synchrony, or the dormitory effect?” Piper asked. “Menstrual synchrony is a theory that suggests that the menstruation cycles of women who cohabitate—think army barracks, female penitentiaries, convents, and university dormitories—synchronize over time. It usually takes months for the alignment to occur, but here at Modelland, it seems to have happened in twenty-four hours.”

“But I’ve never
gotten
my period before this,” Tookie whispered.

“Well, Tookie, looks like you’re a woman now,” Piper said.

Tookie was about to protest—there was no way she was any more womanly today than she had been the day before—but all of a sudden, she felt that perhaps something in her
had
changed. Those abdominal pains made so much sense, after all. And that certainly made them more bearable—for once, she felt
normal
, like everyone else.

Then, as she glanced down at the sink again, she noticed Piper’s toothbrush. It was made of an iridescent pearllike substance, and its bristles were fashioned in the shape of an eye.

Just looking at the toothbrush made a memory strike her hard:
She is uncoordinated, unattractive, and unmemorable.… She’s not mine, Creamy
.

The words were like daggers in her heart. She was allowed to keep only two personal items but in reality had come to Modelland with heavy
baggage
she couldn’t get rid of. Tookie moved her face closer to the mirror. As if knowing why she was doing so, the mirror inched closer to Tookie’s searching face, kindly refraining from spouting any frigid or blazing water. Tookie stared deeply into her multicolored eyes, seeking a clue. She silently begged the mirror for some similarities, for any portion of her face to resemble her father. She took her baby fingers and traced the lines of her face, ending with the outline of her round, full lips.

Nothing.

She looked nothing like him.

Hot tears fell from her eyes. She picked up a spare comb from the counter and ran its teeth through her hair. The comb snagged and then broke into two pieces, just like it always did.

Moments later, Tookie ran out of the D toward Beautification Boulevard. She was now dressed in the official first-year-Bella green Modelland uniform she’d had on the day before when she’d emerged from THBC. Most of the uniform had been easy to put on correctly, and although wearing the leotard over her pants
felt
strange, it certainly was a cool look. But Tookie didn’t understand
the Sentura at all. It didn’t fit the way it had the day before. It kept slipping off her hips.

When she’d gone back to the bedroom from the bathroom, a bottle of perfume was on her nightstand.
POUSSER
, said a sign on the plunger. When Tookie depressed the atomizer, a fine blood-orange-scented mist had spritzed into the air. Slowly, the mist had assembled into an onionskin-thin sheet of paper. It was her schedule for this semester—or
quadmester
, as it was called in Modelland.

She shuddered from another abdominal cramp, then looked at her schedule again:

Midnight-Blue? Kelly Green and Goldenrod, Sharp? Tookie needed to learn how to tell time all over again.

Tookie stared at the whirling, kaleidoscopic clock on Beautification Boulevard. All around her, girls were rushing past, just as confused as she was about the wacky colored clock.

She tried going right, thinking CaraCaraCara—“FaceFaceFace” in Gowdee’an—might be in that direction, and found herself on a path she’d never traveled before. An enormous, half-finished stadium loomed in the distance. Hulking male models from Bestosterone worked giant construction machines. Some of them welded metal beams together with silver flashlight-like devices that shot
red-hot liquid glue. Others struck overtly sexualized poses for a photographer while they worked.

Suddenly, a deep voice rang out behind her. “Are you lost?”

Tookie turned and saw a muscular Bestostero with chiseled features walking toward her, blueprints tucked under his arms. His pecs swelled under his shirt. His skin was smooth and richly colored, and his eyebrows looked naturally arched, which was almost as bad as if he’d been a religious waxer. Tookie had never been a fan of the pretty-boy-arched-eyebrow look. Theophilus’s unique features were more her taste.

“My name’s Bravo,” he said, looking straight at Tookie. “From Bestosterone. Are you a new Bella?”

Tookie opened her mouth but then shut it again. The guy was staring at her so
pointedly
, like she had worms crawling out of her hair.

“We’re building this new 7Seven stadium for you,” Bravo went on, gesturing to the site. “A couple of years ago, a huge fireball decimated the old stadium. It came out of nowhere, from the other side of the wall. Some people say the spirits over there get pissed at us sometimes and want to burn Modelland down.”

Tookie still couldn’t say a word. Then two boys appeared behind Bravo, both in fashionable workmen’s uniforms. One had pale skin, an angular face, and piercing hazel eyes, and the other was stockier, with dark skin and the fullest lips Tookie had ever seen—even fuller than her own. “What’s
that
you’re talking to, Bravo?” the angular-faced one said.

The dark-skinned guy he was with snickered and nudged him. “Webb, you need to stop trippin’, man,” Bravo said.

Tookie bristled and turned away. Webb’s insult wasn’t anything
she wasn’t used to. She glanced over her shoulder just once. Pretty-boy Bravo was still watching her. Finally, he returned to his friends, and they retreated toward an immense eye made out of shiny metal. Its iris was constructed from green jade and the lid wore yellow eye shadow like a SMIZE.

Finally, Tookie found the CaraCaraCara building. It was the massive boat she’d seen during orientation. A bridge made of driftwood led from shore to the vessel’s door.

“Hey! Tookie!” Dylan stood in front of the building. Piper and Shiraz were standing with her, both bearing the same achy, period-stricken looks the other Bellas had had in the bathroom earlier. “We were lookin’ for you, girl! You made it!”

“Barely.” Tookie almost considered telling them about the Bestostero and his rude friends, but she decided against it. Why bother?

The girls walked across the bridge into the floating classroom. An immense bust of the BellaDonna leered from the ship’s bow. “It’s made out of some element that doesn’t exist in the periodic table,” Piper whispered.

Tookie shivered. She felt like the stony eyes were watching her. Would they ever see the BellaDonna for real, or only bizarre, rocklike representations of her?

They ducked their heads through the entryway and entered a classroom whose ceiling and walls were made entirely of bleached bones in the shape of a giant skeleton. “Hmmm,” Piper said, examining the interior. “Dermal corset of flexible, collagenous fibers, hexagonal tesserae … oblique and serrated teeth not attached to the cranium. It’s a shark!”

There were no seats, but Zarpessa and Chaste were standing
front and center in the middle of circles on the floor with their names printed in the center. Tookie, Piper, Shiraz, and Dylan found circles of their own in the row behind Zarpessa and Chaste. As soon as they stopped, individual spotlights shone straight into their faces. Piper squinted hard.

“Is it Lumière?” Shiraz exclaimed excitedly.

Chaste turned around. “Of course not, little girl. That only happens at night.”

Just then, a wooden door on the other side of the boat snapped open. In bounded a tall man wearing an embroidered cape and a red jumpsuit with a vibrant multicolored serape sash around his waist. He had poochy lips, a button nose, bushy eyebrows, and twinkly, saucer-shaped eyes that immediately generated a smile from Tookie and all of the girls in the shark-room. His features flapped and twisted as if they were made of something much more flexible than flesh and bone. But despite all that, Tookie thought he was quite handsome in his own special way.

“Wassup with rubber man?” Dylan whispered to the girls.

“
¡Hola! ¡Hola! ¡Hola!
I am Guru Pacifico Cruz from the land of Texicoco!” he announced. “At Modelland, we are not fans of last names, so please call me Guru Pacifico. This, my dear Bellas, is CaraCaraCara class! Being a
modela fantástica
is all about mastering how to maneuver your face. And speaking of faces, this course will prepare you for what you will face out in the real world too, if you become Intoxibellas!”

“If?”
Zarpessa rolled her eyes. “Not if, honey.
When.
”

“Mi clase,”
Guru Pacifico continued, “is located within a great white shark not for comedy, no. You sit within the belly of the sea beast to remind you of the
real
sharks in the world. They will
swim around you if you become Intoxibellas. They will want to rip you to shreds, jealous of your fame and fortune. They will wait for you to bleed and then swallow you whole, leaving nothing to bury but your fancy stilettos!”

Tookie wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

“So my class is
muy importante
, Bellas!” The Guru’s eyes sparkled. “It will tighten your guts, cement your resistance, and strengthen your core! If you’ve noticed, we are on a rocky boat.
Metáfora
intended! And … your, shall I say … cycles have all been
synchronized
, I’m sure you have noticed by now. Crampy, sí?”

Groans sounded throughout the room. Tookie pressed on her abdomen.