The Making of Mia (21 page)

‘Do you—’ Jo caught herself quickly, just as she realised she was about to ask him out. Did she dare do it? she thought. Did
she have the guts to ask him for a drink? She took a deep breath and decided to give in to her physical reactions, to live
a little. She wanted him, and even if he didn’t want to get to know her further she had nothing to lose by asking Gable for
a drink. Apart, she thought, from her pride.

‘Do you want to come and have a drink with me some time?’ Jo said quickly, looking down at the Formica table as her cheeks
flushed red. When Gable didn’t respond instantly she rushed to fill the silence. ‘If you don’t want to that’s fine, I just
thought it would be nice, and you’re the first person to speak to me since I’ve been here, and—’

Gable interrupted her. ‘Sure, that would be cool. How you fixed tomorrow night?’

Jo looked at him incredulously. He had said yes?

‘Yes, tomorrow night is good for me,’ she said, trying to keep her voice calm. Jo couldn’t get over the fact he had just said
yes. He said yes!

‘Everyone’s hanging at Mynt at the moment – want to go there?’

Jo nodded. ‘Yes, sounds good,’ she said, hoping she sounded relaxed.

‘Cool. Meet me here tomorrow night at about nine and we can grab a cab,’ Gable said, and Jo nodded, unable to speak or look
at him. She started to gather up her magazines and notepads.

‘See you tomorrow,’ she said, before quickly glancing at Gable in disbelief. She had a date with the hottest man in Miami,
and she didn’t know how she’d managed it.

The next twenty-four hours passed in a whirlwind of shopping and make-up experimentation. After leaving Ernie’s, Jo rushed
back to her apartment to dump her stuff and to look in the mirror. As she assessed herself she couldn’t believe she’d snagged
a date with such a hot man. How had she succeeded? Her limp brown hair sat on her shoulders now, but it lacked shine, lacked
body, and split ends and flyaway hairs stopped it from looking smooth. She needed an appointment at a hair salon, and fast,
but she didn’t have a clue where a decent place to go was.

As well as the hair issue, Jo realised she didn’t have any clothes that fitted her properly. She was definitely a UK size
twelve, but she didn’t know what American size would fit her. Was she a US ten? A US fourteen? She needed to find a clothes
shop that wouldn’t baulk at the fact she didn’t have silicone breasts, blonde hair extensions and thighs the width of pencils.
She needed help, but there was nobody in the whole of Miami she could get advice from. She was on her own.

In a fit of inspiration Jo grabbed her mobile and phoned Sunshine Cars, asking them to take her to the closest and hippest
salon the driver knew of. They pulled up outside a place
called Mermaid on Lincoln Road and Jo stood at the counter nervously. The salon was painted a deep purple and funky house
was pounding from the stereo. The mirrors were all smashed and stuck back together again, and the floor was painted dark silver.
The other customers all had immaculate, salon-perfect hair or crazy haircuts Jo hadn’t seen the likes of since she was sixteen
and had spent the afternoon in Camden. She felt out of her depth and intimidated.

‘Er, hello,’ she whispered to the receptionist, who looked Jo up and down incredulously. She was probably a size four, Jo
thought miserably, realising that even though she had lost loads of weight she still had a long way to go until she was as
thin as some of the thinnest girls in Miami. ‘I don’t have an appointment, but I am having a hair emergency.’

The receptionist eyed Jo’s hair disdainfully and smirked. ‘Bobby’s free,’ she said in a New York drawl, and Jo was ushered
towards a camp man with pink stripes in his ginger Anna Wintour bob. Jo wasn’t sure she wanted Bobby to cut her hair but she
didn’t feel like she had much of a choice. She was desperate.

Bobby lifted a strand of Jo’s hair up and held it towards the light. ‘It’s a mess, yeah?’ he said more as a statement than
a question, and Jo nodded, accidentally pulling her hair from Bobby’s fingers. ‘Where did you get this hair cut before?’ Jo
could hear a faint Latino accent in Bobby’s voice, and she wondered if he had clocked that she was English. It was time to
find out.

‘Just a cool place in London,’ Jo said. ‘I’ve been growing out a style that I got when I was working on a magazine called
Gloss
,’ she said, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt.

Bobby nodded knowingly and cracked a smile at her while pushing her into a deep leather chair. ‘You want it short?’

Jo shook her head again, more vehemently this time.

‘Absolutely not. Just a trim, and a … a style. And maybe some colour? Some highlights or something?’ Jo looked up at Bobby’s
Bagpuss-style ginger and pink bob and nervously bit her lip. ‘Something subtle?’

Bobby stared at Jo’s hair for the longest time and then cracked his gum. ‘I will give you both highlights and low-lights,’
he said, ‘and I will not so much cut your hair as shape it. You will look divine.’

Two hours and $300 later Jo had to admit Bobby was right. Her hair had been lightly cut so that it was still long, but it
framed her face and brushed against the top of her shoulders rather than just sitting on them. Jo’s hair had been streaked
with delicate strands of gold, honey and sun-kissed blonde, and then, to make the effect more dramatic, Bobby had added the
finest lowlights of chocolate, mahogany and chestnut. Jo couldn’t stop staring at her hair. She looked amazing, and her eyes
shone a deep, velvety green.

‘Oh, my God,’ Jo said, as she raised her hand to her mouth in shock. Despite the broken mirror she could tell she looked a
hundred times better. She looked almost pretty.

‘It ain’t bad, huh?’ Bobby said proudly, as he gathered some of his colleagues to have a look.

‘It’s amazing.’ Jo couldn’t tear her eyes from her reflection. She looked so different.

‘If you don’t mind the suggestion, I have a friend who does eyebrows …’ Bobby’s voice trailed off, and Jo raised her eyes
from her reflection up to Bobby’s before they both settled on her eyebrows. Jo peered at them carefully, and then saw two
faint patches of pink appear on her cheeks. He was right – she did need some work done on her brows. They really were too
thick, especially with this beautiful haircut.

‘Just tell me where to go …’

An hour later and Jo was leaning back in a chair while a man named Fred was expertly plucking hairs from Jo’s eyebrows.
Her eyes watered as she felt the unfamiliar tingling sensation from Fred’s fast, light plucks, but she couldn’t wipe them
as a woman called Serendipity was giving her a manicure.

‘Hold still,’ Fred commanded, as he looked at Jo’s brows with an intensity that made her feel slightly uncomfortable. ‘There,
we are done.’ Jo sat up and looked in the mirror and was shocked at the difference her new eyebrows made to her face. Somehow,
Jo’s eyes looked wider and more almond-shaped. The neat, perfectly arched brows made her face seem younger, fresher, and as
Jo peered down at her newly painted pink nails and back up to her face she realised there was no other word for it. She looked
groomed.

‘You’ll be the belle of the ball tonight,’ Fred said happily, and Jo smiled. When she met Gable tomorrow night she hoped she
would be, but she still had a night to get through and then a whole day of clothes shopping before she saw him again.

The next day Jo hit Miami with her guidebooks sitting in her new Mulberry bag. On Collins Avenue she bought Seven jeans at
Barney’s, glittery turquoise eyeshadow at MAC and some understated Paul Smith tops in Scoop. Jo then headed up to Lincoln
Road, where she spent $300 in Chroma. She found a beautiful black sequinned mini-dress by a local designer called Stern, and
the most gorgeous shoes she had ever seen. They looked slightly like the gold Manolos Jo had been coveting, but they were
black with a rounded toe, 1940s-style straps and the tiniest crystals embedded into the heel. Even though they were $200 Jo
couldn’t resist them. She could even walk in them.

Jo practically skipped back to her apartment, swinging her bags as she walked and checking out her reflection in the windows
of the cafés and shops she passed. If she didn’t know who she really was, she thought, she could have passed
for a girl on Bond Street or on the King’s Road. And the best thing was, she thought, everything she had purchased was in
a US size ten. She was a US size ten! Jo grinned to herself and decided that as soon as she got back to her flat she’d cut
one of the labels out of her clothes and stick it on the wall. She had never, ever bought anything in a size ten before, and
it was something she wanted to savour. But as she cut the label from her dress and pinned it to her noticeboard she suddenly
felt her stomach tense. In the exhilaration of shopping she had pretty much forgotten that she had a date with Gable. And
as she looked at her old watch nervously, noting that she had to get the strap tightened, she realised she only had four hours
in which to get ready.

Jo began with a shower – she washed her hair with Bumble & Bumble and scrubbed her body raw with an exfoliator she had picked
up from the Body Shop. Then she shaved, plucked and polished, liberally smoothing coconut moisturiser all over her body. Jo
tried not to dwell on the dimples on her thighs, or the way her breasts hung low due to the amount of weight she had lost.
She focused on her hair, which she straightened with new GHD tongs, and on her make-up, which she spent almost an hour on,
using the turquoise eyeshadow as liner to bring out the colour of her eyes even more.

When Jo squeezed herself into her black sequinned dress and looked in the mirror she gasped. She barely looked like the Jo
Hill she knew, and she felt liberated and drunk with possibilities. She was in Miami, nobody knew her, and she had a date
with the hottest man in Florida. Jo blew a kiss at herself in the mirror and blushed.

But by the time she’d left Ernie’s Famous Deli with Gable, Jo had lost some of her confidence. Gable had done nothing wrong
– he’d held the door open for her as they had left the diner, and had helped her into the cab he had hailed to take them to
Mynt – but he hadn’t done anything right, either.
Apart from commenting on her ‘bangs’ (which she soon worked out meant her fringe) and her shoes, he had barely looked at her
at all. He certainly didn’t look at her as though he wanted to ravish her, and Jo couldn’t work out what she had done wrong.

‘I once had the most amazing conversation with Justin Timberlake in here,’ Gable said, as he led Jo past the roped-off queue
into Mynt.

Jo started to tell Gable about when she’d interviewed Justin for her school magazine, but he was so busy checking out the
crowd that he didn’t hear her.

‘He was just the coolest. Turns out we knew loads of the same people from LA. Including,’ he said, with a knowing wink, ‘Cameron.’

Jo blinked and tried hard not to look shocked. Was Gable implying he’d slept with Cameron Diaz? Suddenly she felt stupid in
her dress and new shoes. If Gable only spent the night with stunning A-list Hollywood actresses then she hadn’t a hope in
hell. Being a published journalist from London just didn’t have the same kudos, and she knew it.

‘Mojito?’ Jo took her drink from Gable and looked around the bar. It was cool. The green walls seemed to give off a minty
aroma, and deep red lamps hung from the ceilings, casting a decadent light over the beautiful, shiny, perfect clientele. Jo
took a sip of her mojito and smiled. It was subtle, like the bar, and she had a fleeting memory of the first time she had
seen Gigolo. Miami was laid-back cool, and Mynt captured that attitude. In comparison Gigolo and Winchester seemed like they
were trying way too hard.

‘Wanna sit?’ Gable led Jo to a spare table and gazed at her intently. Jo felt a hit of lust rush to her knickers and she wondered
if Gable could feel their sexual attraction too. By the way he was staring at her she couldn’t imagine that he wasn’t experiencing
it. ‘So tell me about yourself,’ he said.

Jo wondered where to begin. As she filled Gable in on her school-days, on the time she spent at The Royal Oak (‘They served
partridge? That’s a real bird?’) and how she had pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes at
Gloss
she could sense his enthusiasm for her increase. He slapped his thigh and laughed several times, and Jo grinned. She hadn’t
realised her life was so funny.

‘Man, that sounds like something out of a film,’ he said excitedly, and Jo smiled at him. She supposed it did in a way. ‘So
you’re going to go back to London and have revenge on this Joshua?’

Jo nodded and gulped down most of her mojito, trying not to grin at Gable’s American-speak. Revenge was definitely the plan,
even though she didn’t know how she was going to do it yet.

Gable looked her up and down. ‘You know, I just can’t imagine you as some fat ugly ducking,’ he said. ‘I mean, you’re not
beautiful, sure, but you’re not
that
bad. Which is something, because everyone knows English girls don’t look after themselves properly.’

Jo felt Gable’s words hit her violently and her eyes began to sting. Gable didn’t think she was beautiful? Anger rose up inside
her as she thought about the money that she had spent getting ready for this date, and the time and effort she had put into
losing weight. She didn’t want to date someone who didn’t think she was stunning, did she?

‘Yes, it’s a shame that us English girls are too intelligent to spend all our time grooming ourselves. Why, if we did we’d
nearly look as perfect as you,’ she said, sarcastically. Gable didn’t hear her deadpan voice, though, and nodded enthusiastically.

‘You got it,’ he said. ‘Looking like this has taken years of work.’ Jo looked at his body and tried to work out what he meant.
His muscles, defined underneath a tight white T-shirt,
weren’t that impressive. Compared to William, she thought, they weren’t amazing at all, and she felt as though she had been
put under a cold shower. The more he spoke, the less attractive he became. ‘You wouldn’t believe the pain I’ve gone through.’