Modelland (3 page)

“Are you okay?” Theophilus Lovelaces stood above Tookie like a royal guardsman coming to the aid of his queen. The pin on his lapel was one of the good-luck charms he passed out to B3 students in hopes of getting reelected every school year. He’d never given one to Tookie, though.

The noises in the cafeteria ceased to exist. Tookie was groggy from her fall, her ears rang to the point of leaving her deaf, and her
mouth felt like it had been anesthetized, but that didn’t stop her from noticing his imperfectly perfect features: sun-kissed, tightly curled hair, a left cheekbone that was sharper and more defined than the right, and sympathetic golden-brown eyes the exact color of two salted caramels, Tookie’s favorite candy. He wore a camel-colored suit of the finest fabric, an indication of his family’s prestige—they were the wealthiest in all of Metopia—and yet he didn’t carry himself with an air of privilege or self-righteousness. In fact, he chose to attend B3 over a private school in his own neighborhood because he wanted to be “among the regular people.” And now he was smiling at Tookie kindly and generously, as though they were equals.

Yes
, she had wanted to tell him.
I’m
better
than okay!
But her mouth wouldn’t work.

Theophilus tilted his head to the side, his lip curling over a slightly chipped tooth. “That was quite a spill.”

And then, amazingly, he had reached down and taken her hand. Tookie’s tongue was frozen solid. She had imagined what she must look like to him—like a rag doll without most of its stuffing, and with trace lines of drool on both of her cheeks.
Disgusting
.

After a few moments of Tookie lying there, just staring, Theophilus stepped back, an apologetic look on his face. “Okay. Um … sorry.”

And then he had turned around and left. They hadn’t talked since.

Now Theophilus was fast approaching.
T minus ten, nine, eight
. Albert Talbert, the most disheveled student at B3, walked alongside him, his unlaced shoes flapping against the hard, shiny floor.

T minus three seconds, two …

Maybe Theophilus would see her today, splayed out in the SPLD. Maybe he would do as he did last year, standing above her, extending his hand, asking,
Are you okay?
And then Tookie would stare into his salted-caramel eyes and tell him exactly how she felt.

Theophilus crossed in front of Albert and stumbled over Albert’s shoelace as if it were a trip wire. His body pitched forward. Tookie reached up her arms to catch him. Unfortunately, Theophilus caught hold of an open locker and steadied himself. Something plopped onto Tookie’s chest, and she did a half sit-up to peer at it.

Theophilus’s button.

Tookie stared at the button for a long time. Finally, she tentatively reached for it, thrilled to touch something that had so recently been so close to Theophilus’s skin.

Tookie’s hand was two centimeters from reaching
VOTE FOR LOVE
when
whoosh!
A field-hockey stick grazed her abdomen and sent the button flying across the hall.

Tookie sat up fast, panicked. There
LOVE
was, rolling right up to Manny Manuel’s locker.
It’s mine!
Tookie lurched to her feet and charged through the stomping crowd, nearly knocking Manny over.

She scanned the floor for the button.
Where is it? WHERE IS IT?!

Then she spied it.
There! Near that pair of hairy legs!
The legs belonged to Abigail Goode, who wore her superthick long, wavy black hair with pride—even from her armpits. Abigail took a step
forward and her sharp heel squished the
VOTE FOR LOVE
button, which shot out from under her shoe. Tookie cried out in pain, as if the button were her own tender skin.

LOVE
careened down the stairs. Tookie bolted at top speed down the steps, taking two, then three at a time.

Follow the
LOVE
, Tookie, follow the
LOVE
.

A shiny black boot kicked the button and sent it sailing through the stale cafeteria air right into a trash can. Tookie pursued it like a lion after a zebra. She wanted that button. It felt like the only new thing anyone had ever given her in life—not that Theophilus had exactly
given
it to her, but Tookie wasn’t one to quibble over semantics.

She reached the trash can, took a deep breath, and plunged her hands into it. She felt slimy banana peels, congealed macaroni and cheese, crusty heels of bread, and sticky soda cans. Finally, her fingers curled around the button, and she pulled it out with glee. The poor thing was badly damaged, dented, and slimy from its voyage. In fact, it no longer said
VOTE FOR LOVE
. Instead, the
V
and
O
and
E
of the first word were gone, the
F
and
R
of the second were totally erased, and of the last word, the
L
was knocked into nonexistence and the
V
was scratched so badly it resembled a
K
, but the
E
remained intact. Tookie almost threw the button back into the trash before her eyes focused again and she saw that it now spelled its own version of … her.

“Me!” she gasped.

And then she looked up. To her astonishment, Theophilus
stood at her side, staring at her gunked-up hands above the trash can. He was quite short, only coming up to Tookie’s chin, and there was a whisper of a bemused smile on his lips. “You find what you were looking for?”

It was astounding. Amazing. The second sentence Theophilus had ever said to her. Tookie stared at the button in her hand. Maybe she could show it to Theophilus.
Look how your slogan changed into my name
, she could say.
Don’t you think it’s a sign too?

“Theophilus?”

Tookie’s and Theophilus’s heads swiveled to the left. Zarpessa Zarionneaux strolled into the hallway. With long, single-textured, bone-straight auburn hair, flawless skin that didn’t need an ounce of concealer, eyelashes that required not a stroke of mascara, and a tall, lean body kissed with subtle curves, she made every head in the B3 hall whip in her direction. And just like that, Tookie’s heart drooped to her hand-me-up shoes, which were two sizes too small. Zarpessa was Theophilus’s girlfriend. They’d been an item for the past three years.

“There you are!” Zarpessa trilled, swinging her goldenrodhued Dream Bag, this year’s five-thousand-dollar
it
purse, in her hand. She glided toward Theophilus with the grace of a swan and held up a massive poster written in gold glitter pen.
ZARPESSA ZARIONNEAUX PRESENTS THEOPHILUS LOVELACES FOR PRESIDENT
 … 
AGAIN!
“This is made with real gold dust,” Zarpessa boasted. “My father had some to spare. And our mayor’s sister’s psychoanalyst’s neighbor’s BFF told me that posters written with precious metals like this definitely get you reelected,” she added.

Theophilus turned his attention from Tookie and looked at Zarpessa. “Oh. Um … great, Zar.” He unconsciously reached to
the area of his chest where his
VOTE FOR LOVE
button used to be. The empty spot made him pause for a moment, flustered, but then he kissed Zarpessa gently on the lips.

It was hard for Tookie not to stare. Oh, how she wanted it to be
her
lips Theophilus was kissing right now. She had imagined it so many times: she and Theophilus alone together in the dry Peppertown forest, their lips moving closer … closer … closer … and finally touching, to give Tookie her first and only kiss.

Zarpessa would be forgotten. Tookie would be remembered.

The happy couple walked away arm in arm, leaving Tookie alone by the stinking trash can. She slipped the button into the pocket of her shorts, the fabric so tight she could feel
T O OKE
digging into her hip. All sorts of emotions flooded through her—hope, then disappointment, then embarrassment, then shame. Even if Theophilus had spoken to her, it wouldn’t have meant he wanted to know her. It would take a miracle—no, not Tookie’s sister, but a real miracle—for Theophilus to notice her in the way she wanted.

And for Tookie De La Crème, miracles were impossible to come by.

Oh, the smell! The dreadful smell! Poor Tookie, covered in the wretched decay of other people’s refuse
.

How I wish I could hand her a pair of loofah mitts or offer her a scalding bath with the essential oils of eucalyptus, bergamot and ylang-ylang with three boxes of baking soda, a gallon of laundry detergent, twelve capfuls of all-purpose bleach, two squirts of antibacterial hand soap, and a dash of ammonia
.

Oh, dahling, I can feel the burn now. But you know what they say … no pain, no removal of funk stain
.

Screech
. As Tookie was exiting her last class of the day, a course called Autology, which stressed that students must look
inside
themselves to determine what kind of factory work best suited them, the speaker over her head bleated out five seconds of screeching feedback.

“ ’ttention, ’angle, ’auble, and ’ead students!” Principal Robby Cosby boomed over the horrendously unreliable PA system. “We have ’emporarily shut off all water due to the heightened misuse ’ecause of the SMIZE craze. So if you have to use the ’estroom, you must hold it until you are off school premises.”

Perfect
, Tookie thought, looking at her hands, still mucky from her date with the trash can.

She walked down the bank of battered lockers, rusty and chipped, some with doors nearly off their hinges and all with students’ names written on strips of paper, and finally arrived at a space without a locker. At this crevice in the wall was a small door split across the middle. As Tookie pushed down hard on the bottom half of the door, both halves retracted, one into the floor, the other into the ceiling, revealing a dangling rope. She pulled the rope to raise a hidden shelf. It was a dumbwaiter, another relic from when B3 had cranked out baubles, bangles, and beads. Factory workers had used it to pass items like jeweler’s tools, food, and garbage between the floors of the building. Today, this old relic was Tookie De La Crème’s locker.

On the first day of high school at B3, all of the lockers had been taken. Left to fend for herself, Tookie improvised with the dumbwaiter. But she didn’t mind it at all: beside the usual piles of textbooks and novels, Tookie had installed a miniature, fully stocked cooler.

She opened the cooler, pulled out a box of wipes, and cleaned the grime from the trash bin off her hands as best she could. Then she considered her snacking options—Tookie was
always
hungry, so she liked to have an arsenal of food on hand. There were buttermilk biscuits, plastic containers of sausage gravy, vanilla sandwich cookies, every condiment from spicy ketchup to Dijon mustard to mesquite, honey, and chipotle barbeque sauces, her favorites. She pretty much liked all food except chocolate—she’d once gorged at a chocolate festival her mother had dragged her to in the district of LaDorno, home of some of the finest chocolatiers in the world. She’d eaten so much she’d gotten sick on the drive home, but her mother hadn’t shown her any sympathy when Tookie had demanded they pull over so she could throw up. So she had thrown up in the car. For punishment her mother had grounded her. Literally. Tookie had been forced to sit and sleep on the floor for one month solid.

Finally, Tookie selected a canister of strawberry-flavored whipped cream and shot a spurt of cold, delicious, whipped-berry yumminess onto her tongue. Then she grabbed the books she needed for homework, slammed the dumbwaiter shut, and continued toward the double-door exit.

Most of her classmates were still burbling excitedly about T-DOD.

Kylie, a bronze-skinned girl wearing bamboo earrings the size of her head, read aloud from the
Peppertown Press
. “ ‘The Mayor of Metopia, the Honorable Devin Rump the Sixth, predicts the biggest turnout ever. Spectators who have traveled to Metopia from all over the world are paying record prices for prime spots. Rump has launched an aggressive campaign to arrest scalpers who are selling tickets to VIP sections. “I’m making it my personal mission,”
declared Mayor Rump, “to protect every young girl’s inalienable right.” ’ ”

Not
every
young girl’s inalienable right
, Tookie thought as she pushed through the school’s double doors.

A huge sign across the street confronted her:

WELCOME TO PEPPERTOWN,
ACCESSORIES MECCA!

Metopia was split into four quadrants, each with its own weather system—there was frigid Shivera, tempestuous Pitter-Patter, lovely LaDorno (only the elite lived there, and it was where T-DOD was always held), and finally, sweltering Peppertown, as hot as—you guessed it—a Scotch bonnet. That was where Tookie lived and where B3 stood.

Each quadrant butted up against the others like the seams of a garment, and oh, what a shock it was to travel from one quadrant into the next! The thing was, because of Metopia’s expansive range of environments and wealth of natural resources, the city’s politicians realized that a great many things could be produced there—and a great deal of money made. The city grew into the global center of the fashion and beauty industry. The majority of Metopia’s residents worked on inhumane fashion- or beauty-factory assembly lines—in fact, the majority of B3 students who weren’t selected for the grand Land on the mountain would end up doing the same. There were always job openings.