The Look (8 page)

After a while, she goes off to change and Seb turns to me.

He gestures toward the chair. I sit on it unhappily. He checks me out through the viewfinder of his huge black camera and looks unhappy, too. First he adjusts a couple of lights, then he returns to me.

“Could you … uh … face … to me … Uh … hands?”

I look at him — not that I want to. That camera is so scary. Then I look down at my hands. What’s wrong with my hands? They’re just sort of hanging down beside me. I mean, sure, they look like dangling twigs, but what else can I do with them? I try placing them on the back of the chair and resting my chin on them to cover them up. Seb jolts like a startled bear.

“Uh … no. Too low. Your … uh … back. Humpy. Try …”

He leans back and sticks a leg out sideways to show me what he means. He looks hysterical. I grin.

“Nice,” he says, looking slightly less depressed. “Nice grin.”

Then Julia steps in to save me.

“Why don’t we try turning the chair back around? Then you can try some different poses. I think Seb wants you to play with it a bit. Feel free. Relax. Have some fun with it.”

Feel FREE? RELAX? Have FUN with it? I’m suddenly conscious of bits of my body I normally take for granted. My ankles. My elbows. What do I do with them? Where do they go? And my twig fingers — how do real models make their fingers look so
normal
? Never mind my face. I try every sort of smile I can think of until my mouth hurts, but Seb just looks increasingly depressed.

Eventually he says, “Uh … not the chair … Uh … try just standing?”

Aha! “Just standing” is something I can definitely do. I tried that at Model City and it worked. As long as “just standing” can also include “slightly jiggling,” because Seb’s speakers are playing a song I really like, and it’s categorically impossible not to move. I go over to a piece of wall that Seb and I agree has great peeling texture, and “just stand” in various poses. Hands on hips. Hands not on hips. Leaning against the wall. Half leaning against it. Even standing sideways on and looking up at the high windows. Then, when I think Seb’s finished, I do a bit of actual dancing, waving my hands above my head and wiggling my hips — or what would be my hips, if I had any.

“Great!” Seb says. “Hold it! I mean … uh … keep doing that.”

He clicks away and I find that as long as I stare at the floor, not him, and only think about the music, I can keep going. Finally, I look up to check if he’s still taking pictures and he clicks one final time and says, “Done. You can … uh … change now.”

I stop moving.

“Change?”

“Into the dress? Did Julia show you the dresses?”

She didn’t. Now she does. They’re hanging on a rack upstairs. It turns out that after the “casual, figure-hugging clothes” shots, they want to take more pictures of us in not-so-casual, but even more figure-hugging, minidresses. Oh.

At this point, the door to the studio opens and Cassandra Spoke walks in, dressed impeccably in a white silk shirt, black skirt, and high-heeled sandals. Followed by her nightmare son.

Luckily, the floor opens beneath me and swallows me whole.

Except, of course, it doesn’t.

Cassandra clicks across the concrete floor and gives Seb two impressively large air kisses, just skimming his beard with her golden skin.

“Seb, darling! How gorgeous to see you!” she says. “I just had to show you — they’ve finally published your pictures in
Dazed & Confused
. Don’t they look wonderful? Nick wanted to say thank you.”

Nightmare Boy sticks his hands in his jeans pockets and looks as though he doesn’t want to say anything at all. His face bristles with discomfort behind his glasses. Cassandra takes a magazine out of her handbag and lays it open on the table. Her son scowls behind her, while I sneak back down the stairs and look over Seb’s shoulder to see what the fuss is about.

There’s a double-page black-and-white spread of a girl with big hair, doing headbanging poses in front of a wall-sized, swirly, spattery painting.

“Ooh, it’s a bit like a Jackson Pollock,” I say without thinking. Miss Jenkins would beam with pride. Jackson Pollock is one of her Top Three Abstract Painters and all our art class can recognize his style a mile off by now.

Nick coughs, and turns around to face me. “I was going more for Cy Twombly, actually. Although it’s influenced by Abstract Expressionism, of course.”

“Wow!
You
did that?”

His scowl cracks slightly. “Yes.” Then he stiffens again. “Seb kindly offered to showcase my work. Er, thanks, Seb. Great pictures.”

He forces the words out. Something about these pictures makes him super-uncomfortable.

“What Nick
forgot to mention
,” Cassandra says with a smile at Seb and a quick glare at her son, “is that he just might get a place at art school on the back of these. It’s exactly the exposure he needs. You do me the nicest favors, Seb darling.”

She air-kisses Seb again, making sure to avoid the beard, while Nick does the “please swallow me up” look at the floor that I was just doing.

Poor Nick. He’s trying to be cool and artistic and his mother is organizing his life for him. I’m starting to get why she drives him crazy. He looks up, catches me grinning at him, and smiles for a moment, before glancing down to fiddle with a fleck of paint on his T-shirt. It’s interesting that he doesn’t seem to possess any clothes that aren’t worn, torn, and paint-spattered, despite his mother having a magazine-worthy über-wardrobe. He’s cute when he’s embarrassed. Still out of my league, though. Actually, I don’t even have a league.

“Oh, hello.”

We all look around. Mireille is standing on the staircase, freshly changed. She is drop-dead gorgeous in a tight pink minidress from Julia’s rack, but a bit flushed at the sight of the über-agent in person.

Cassandra gives her a gracious smile. “Don’t you look lovely? Actually, why don’t I see how you’ve been getting on?”

To my surprise, Nick doesn’t seem that interested in Mireille. Maybe, after years of traveling around with his mum, models bore him. He wanders off, as Seb offers to show Cassandra the photos he’s taken so far. Mireille joins us at the computer and Cassandra quickly scrolls through shot after shot of her looking fantastic, until she gets to the ones of me. She sighs. I can’t bear to watch.

“These ones are getting better,” Cassandra says. They’re the shots of me looking at the windows. Then, “Ah.” These are the ones of me dancing. “Shame she’s not looking into the … Oh.”

They’ve got to the last picture: the one where I thought Seb had finished and he caught me with my arms in the air, looking straight at him. And do you know what? I can see why Cassandra said, “Oh.” It’s all right, that picture. There’s something about it — the way I’m moving, the look of surprise on my face, my gangly arms waving — that’s quite interesting. The girl in that picture looks … OK. Not like Lily Cole, or Kate Moss, and not like Mireille, but OK.

“Well,” Cassandra says decisively, “either way, I think we’ve got what we need. Good job, Seb, darling. I don’t think we need to bother with the dresses.” She doesn’t sound entirely happy, and I don’t blame her. I only produced one good shot out of
about a million — well, over a hundred, anyway, and poor Seb’s been working for hours.

But that one shot is good enough for me. I can’t wait to show Ava. I excuse myself and rush off to the kitchen area to see if she’s awake yet.

She’s just sitting up and stretching when I get there, looking tons better after her nap.

“Sorry!” she says, yawning. “Did I miss the whole thing?”

“You did. But guess what? Seb actually managed to take a decent picture of me. Only one, but it’s really quite nice. It’s, like, the first one
ever
. It must be that camera. I think I might save up for a Nikon one day …”

I trail off. Nikon cameras are so out of my price range. I was definitely getting a bit carried away there.

“It’s more the lens than the camera,” says a voice behind me. I whip around. “But it’s a load of other things, too. The light. The background. The composition. Mostly the light, though. You could do it on your phone if you tried hard enough.”

It’s Nightmare Boy again. I wondered where he’d got to. He’s been busy getting himself a Coke from a vending machine in the kitchenette.

“Really?” I say. “I noticed that the brickwork in the background was good. Seb chose this great, peeling bit. And it’s true: He didn’t use many lights in the end. It was mostly daylight.”

“The best shots are,” he says. He looks up at me and gives me another quick smile. “You should check out the style blogs. They mostly use natural light. I’m Nick, by the way.”

“I’m guessing you’re a photographer,” Ava says, stretching and coming over.

He peers at her. “You look familiar. Have we met?”

“Not exactly,” she says. “You were in your mum’s office when we came round.”

“Oh.” He frowns. “Anyway, no. I’m an artist, really, but I dabble in photography. Not this sort of thing, though.” He waves a dismissive hand toward the studio.

“What sort of thing, then?” Ava asks, looking hurt on my behalf.

Nick considers. “Experimental. Documentary. Pictures with a purpose. I’m still working it out. Look, I use this website — a group of us do.” He pulls out a tiny notebook from his pocket, tears out a page, and scribbles on it. “If you want some ideas, look here.”

He hands it to me. The paper is thick and creamy: sketchbook paper. It’s still warm from his body heat.

Ava’s phone goes off in her bag as Cassandra’s voice wafts through the door.

“Darling? I’m going. Are you ready?”

He sighs, rolls his eyes, and walks out without another word.

“Huh: ‘dabble,’” Ava says, making a face at me.

I’m not really listening. I’m looking at the piece of paper. There’s a brilliant little pen-and-ink drawing of Mario the labradoodle on the back. Nick may be a nightmare, but he’s talented. The spattery painting in the background of the fashion photo was fab, too.

Ava finds her phone. “Oh, hi, Dad. Which theater are we at, did you say? I suppose it has been a long time, hasn’t it? We
decided to see three films after all. Are you sure you want to pick us up?”

She gestures at me helplessly, but I just stare straight back at her. She got us into this mess, and she can get us out of it.

Y
ou can fool a lot of people a lot of the time, but you can’t fool an academic historian forever — or even, as it turns out, for more than about six hours on a Saturday. Dad got back ages ago from his research trip to the library and he’s had a long time to pick holes in our movie story. When Ava can’t actually name any of the films currently showing at our local multiplex, he insists on coming to pick us up from wherever we are, and when he finds out exactly where that is, I seriously wonder how his cell phone is going to survive the power of his reaction.

“WHAT? In a POST OFFICE BUILDING?”

“Not exactly —” Ava says.

“In NORTH LONDON? Who’s with you?”

Ava doesn’t have the phone on speaker. She doesn’t need to. She tells him about Seb and Cassandra.

“THOSE SCAMMERS? ARE YOU OK? Have they kept you hostage? Stay exactly where you are. I’m on my way.”

It takes a very long time on the Underground to get from South London to Highbury & Islington. Long enough for Julia
to help me take off most of my geisha makeup, and for Seb to get going on Mireille’s photographs on his laptop, choosing which to keep and using a clever program to adjust the lighting and bring out the incredible luster of her hair.

“When your dad gets here I’ll, uh … go,” he says.

Great. I shall be forever known as “the would-be model that kept the photographer hanging around while she waited for her dad.”

The waiting is bad, but Dad actually arriving is worse.

“Oh, thank God you’re safe,” he mutters, glaring at us. Then he thanks Seb, very formally, for staying behind to look after us — as if we’re about four years old — and tells us off loudly and repeatedly for twenty minutes, until we find a café where he can get some food into us.

By now his panic has solidified into colder, more organized anger.

“I don’t know who to be more ashamed of,” he says. “The one who’s supposed to be looking after herself, or the one who should know better.”

“But they said to keep living normally, Dad!” Ava complains.

“You call this
normal
?”

“And they’re not scammers. I got it wrong. They’re a top model agency and they like Ted a lot.”

“Well, they did,” I mutter, spitting crumbs from my large blueberry muffin, “until I —”

“And you thought you’d just take her along to some ABANDONED BUILDING to meet a TOTAL STRANGER, without anyone knowing where you were?”

Ava pouts. “Converted, not abandoned. And Louise knew,” she says quietly.

“Louise?” Dad throws his hands up. Ava’s friend Louise, though brilliant at volleyball, is not affectionately known as Ditz for nothing. If anything had gone wrong, she might not even have noticed we were missing for days. And she’d probably have deleted the text saying where we were. He sighs. “Ted, love, I thought you had more sense.”

I
do
have more sense. I absolutely have more sense. I’m tempted to say, “But she made me!” — except that’s what I’ve been saying since I was three, and I promised myself when I turned fifteen that I wouldn’t say it anymore.

“Anyway, I’d better get you back,” Dad says. “Ava, have you taken your pills?”

She bites her lip and looks guilty. Dad sighs again and, worse, closes his eyes and wipes a hand across them. Ava’s supposed to be taking a cocktail of pills this week: a combination of chemo, steroids, and other scary blue things that mop up some of the side effects of the other two. I don’t blame her for “forgetting.” Dad does, though.

“We promised, love,” he says, not angry now but verging on upset. “I know it’s hard, but if you don’t take them …”

He’s thinking about the ninety percent, and apparently she’s not going to be in it unless she’s positively rattling with pharmaceuticals.

“Fine, whatever,” Ava says grumpily. She preferred it when she was lounging on a sofa, with me dancing in front of brick walls for a hairy bloke with a camera.

“Your mother must never find out,” Dad grumbles. “I left her
a note to say I’d taken you out for a walk by the river, OK? And if she asks, that’s what we were doing.”

Ava smiles gratefully. It takes me a second longer to catch on, and even then, I still don’t get it. Normally Mum and Dad present a united front in the face of misbehavior. Mum is
much
scarier than Dad, so it’s great that he doesn’t want to tell on us, but why?

On the way home we sit side by side on the Tube, all looking at bits of the newspaper that Dad has brought along and not talking. I can’t help remembering the way the light fell on the paint-peeling bricks, and how perfect Mireille looked in every single picture, and how that last one of me was … surprisingly less awful than it might have been. And how Seb somehow got us to do what he wanted, even though I’ve never known anyone less talkative. I’d love to tell Daisy about it, but she wouldn’t be interested. At least Ava and I can talk about it after lights-out, when we’re supposed to be asleep.

When we get in, Mum’s back from work and still in her green polo shirt, reading Dad’s note.

“Did you have a nice time?” she asks in a tired voice. “Were there lots of boats out?”

“Hundreds,” Dad lies confidently. I can see where Ava gets it from.

Mum smiles a sad little smile that reaches halfway up her face and stops dead. Her eyes are dull and wrinkled, and haven’t gleamed since Ava’s first diagnosis. Now I realize why Dad didn’t want to tell her what we were up to. She’s like a satellite, spinning out of orbit, and it’s as if any jolt might send her into
outer space. I assumed Dad was out there, spinning beside her, but he’s not. He’s watching as helplessly as I am, just trying not to make things worse.

Dad’s right to protect her. I promise myself I will never enter an abandoned building to meet a stranger with only my sick sister for company again. It wasn’t our most genius idea. I guess, looking back, something could have gone wrong — apart from my total inability to even sit on a chair backward without looking like a complete idiot.

Then I realize Mum’s staring at me.

“What?” I ask.

“Oh, Ted,” she sighs. “Look at you. Those shoes are falling apart. We’re going to have to get you new ones. And why are you wearing those bizarre black leggings?”