The Mosts (5 page)

I immediately thought of a beautiful blonde in a pink bikini.

I clicked onto Google and typed
cheap airline tickets
into the search box. Apparently the cheapest airline ticket from Portland, Maine, to Los Angeles, California, on June fifth
was
$332 one way. Just like my dad had said.

At least he had looked into it. That was something.

And at least I only needed a one-way ticket. Well, to get there. I was
pretty
sure my father would be happy to have me move in with him and Tiffany. It wasn’t like I was a little kid who needed their attention. I could take care of myself. I wouldn’t be in the way of their newlywed whatever. I’d be out with Thom all the time, anyway.

And if my dad wasn’t into the idea of having me move in, he’d have to pay for a return ticket to get rid of me, wouldn’t he?

But how was I going to come up with $332? And as we got closer to the travel date, the fare would likely go up. I’d need to come up with $400 just to be safe. But how?

I wasn’t sixteen yet, not until October, so I couldn’t even vow to pay my parents back with the money from the summer job I wouldn’t be able to get.

I flopped back onto my bed with my favorite photo of me and Thom, the one taken the previous winter break in his backyard. It was just us and the snowman we’d built; I was on one side and Thom was on the other and we were hugging each other through it, snow all over us. Thom looked happy. And so did I.

There was no snow in California. No snow to remind Thom of that day.

Channel Aunt Darcy
, I told myself, eyes closed, photo clutched against my chest. My amazing aunt’s face floated into my mind, her chic swingy bob, her red lipstick that no one else could pull off, her incredible sense of style. What would Aunt Darcy do?

She would think of something. And so would I.

Chapter 5

I
flipped to a blank page in my English notebook and wrote
WAYS TO EARN LOTS OF MONEY FAST
across the top. Ten minutes later, I still had nothing. Babysitting at the going rate of eight dollars an hour would get me as far as New Hampshire, maybe. Working at the farm every day after school and on weekends at the non-intern rate of five bucks an hour would get me—

“Hello? Madeline? It’s me, Elinor. Espinoza?” This was followed by three quick knocks on my closed bedroom door.

Elinor Espinoza? Why?
And why was she
everywhere?
This time I had no intimidating friends to send her running away.

There was another series of knocks. “Madeline?”

Sigh
. I closed my notebook and threw it aside, then got up and opened the door. Elinor, clutching a red backpack with raccoons all over it and
EE
monogrammed in purple thread, stood in the doorway.

“There’s something else I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. I mean, besides this morning.”

I waited, watching the way one of the frizz puffs bounced with her every breath.

“Can I come in?”

I held the door open and she stepped in and glanced nervously around, like she expected Caro or Fergie to pop out and grab her.

“It’s about the list. The Not list.”

“Okay,” I said, waiting. Actually, I was about to explode.
Get to the
point.

She took a deep breath. “I have exactly one hundred dollars in here,” she said, pulling wads of cash from the backpack. “Is that enough?”

“Enough for what?” I asked.

She took another deep breath, and then her words came out in a rush. “To keep me off the Not list. Most Nerdy. Most in Need of an Extreme Makeover. Most in Need. Most Not Cool. You know.”

“To keep you off the list? What are you talking about?”

“Fine, I’ll just say it. I’ll pay you to keep me off that list. So is a hundred enough?” she asked, staring at me. Her lower lip started to tremble.

I couldn’t believe she was bribing me. “Elinor, honestly, I have nothing to do with the list. I’m not lying.”

“Well, you have influence with your friends, I’m sure.”

I dead-eyed her. “So you want to pay me a hundred bucks to tell my friends not to put you on the list.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I want.”

If a hundred bucks would get me to California, I would almost consider doing it. But I’d need an entire backpack full of those crumpled ones and fives that she’d clearly taken out of her piggy bank that morning.

“Elinor, if you want off the list so badly, why not just take your hundred dollars and get a makeover? Just go to the mall.” I stared at the horizontal frizz puff. “Start with a hair salon. A lot of them even offer brow waxing, too. Then go to one of the makeup counters in a department store. You don’t even have to buy anything. Oh, and you could get new glasses, too. And new clothes at the outlets in Freeport. A whole new look.”

“Riiiight,” she said slowly. “So all it takes is a new hairstyle and a few new outfits and suddenly I’m in?”

Well, not
in
so much as not
on
the Not list. Some girls faded into the woodwork and were sort of invisible, which meant they never appeared on the Not list. The ones who stood out for being noticeably weird were the ones who made the list. Like Elinor. And Sabrina.

“That’s how I did it,” I reminded her.

She stared at me for a moment, then shook her head. “No, Madeline. That’s
not
how you did it. You didn’t just change your hair and get expensive jeans and cool shoes. You changed
yourself
. Big difference.”

Actually, I hadn’t. I had always been
me
. I’d just changed the outside to match the inside, which was what my aunt Darcy had taught me how to do that summer I visited her in Rome.

The moment Aunt Darcy’s little car had zoomed into the city, I had been transfixed. And when she took me to an outdoor café, where she introduced me to real cappuccinos, I couldn’t take my eyes off a table of Italian girls nearby. The way they were dressed. The way they wore their hair. They way they laughed and enjoyed themselves. And when a group of boys came over, I studied the way the girls flirted yet remained mysterious. In control. Unattainable.

And I told my aunt Darcy I was meant to be an Italian girl. She was delighted, and all day we people-watched and then she took me shopping in boutiques, where the saleswomen taught me how to put together an interesting outfit that was chic and smart. I watched Italian girls without having any idea what they were saying in their beautiful language. I didn’t need to know. I just needed to study them. By the end of the month, in my new clothes with European flair, and with long layers cut into my formerly blah straight brown hair that now shone and swung with the right hair products, and with the new, confident way I spoke to waiters and hotel staff and Aunt Darcy’s friends, I was an Italian girl. Add to that the transformation my body underwent that summer—finally, from lanky and flat-chested to slightly curvy with an almost–B cup (pure biology)—and I was unrecognizable when I went home to Maine.

My mother and Mac had been quite amused when they’d picked the new me up from the jetport. They were big believers in becoming the you-est you, and if being a glamour queen like Aunt Darcy was the me-est me, so be it. They wanted only people who loved the farm to work the farm. People who loved the herd, loved the ducks and hens and chickens, loved the smell of wet hay, loved even the machinery. They thought the animals, and the very minerals in the land,
knew
. So I was exempt from farm duty.

“Anyway, I thought you said you just want off the list, Elinor. That’s a lot easier than becoming a Most. You just have to not stand out so much.”

She stepped inside and closed the door. “So help me. Fix me. Tell me
how.”

How could I tell her to change every single thing about herself and sound like a decent human being? Everything, from the frizz puffs to the socks she wore with her granny sandals to what she talked about, was just
wrong
.

I let out a deep breath. “Elinor, I’m sorry, but I’m just not the right per—”

“So you won’t take the money?”

“No, I won’t take the money.”

She glared at me, looking like she was about to cry. “God, it must be nice to live such a charmed life that you can turn down a hundred bucks to do something so simple and easy, something that would make such a big difference in someone’s life. Thanks a lot.”

What did she know? “Oh, yes, Elinor, my charmed life. I can’t even get to my own father’s wedding because a ticket costs over three hundred bucks. Which means I can’t ask him if I can live with him. Which means I can’t—”

What was I doing? Why was I telling Elinor Espinoza my life story? I shut up fast.

“You’re going to ask your dad if you can live with him? Do you think he’ll say yes?”

I shrugged. “Of course. He’s my dad, right?”

She bit her lip and nodded. “And you’d just leave your friends? Your great life here? Just like that?”

“Sometimes a change is just what a person needs,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

I didn’t comment. She glanced around. “You changed your room since I was here last. I like it.”

She’d been “here last” three years before, when she’d first started interning. When we’d moved here, I was obsessed with having a giant rainbow painted on the big wall, lots of pictures of unicorns, and a pink bed with white furniture. By the time I returned from Rome, my room seemed so babyish. Now it was painted a pale blue, and there were a Japanese rock garden and bamboo. It was all very Zen and supposed to make me think calm thoughts.

The Zen room wasn’t helping at the moment.

“Madeline? You up here?” my mother called as she came up the stairs, gave a quick knock on the door, and opened it. “Oh, Elinor, hello. I’ll just come back later.”

Elinor picked up her backpack. “That’s okay, Mrs. Sklar.” Sklar was Mac’s last name. Elinor hurried out of my room, not bothering to say goodbye.

She was so weird. Good thing she kept her hundred bucks. Because there was nothing I could do for her.

• • •

I called Thom. No answer. I left a message.

An hour later, I tried again. No answer.

Of course I was panicking. Picturing him with the pink bikini chick.

But then, a half hour later, my cell rang and I jumped for it.
Thom!

“Hey,” he said, and for a moment it felt as if he still lived just a few blocks away. As if nothing had changed.

“Hey,” I said back. “I’m trying to work out the details of when I’ll be flying in for the wedding. Probably June fifth, the day before.”

“Cool,” he said. “I’ve really missed you.”

At least he said he missed me. But there was something sort of … different about his voice. Or maybe I was being paranoid.

Just ask him. Just say
Thom, we’re okay, right? We’re still a couple? You’re not dating a girl in a pink bikini? You still love me?

“Thom, I—”

There were some muffled sounds in the background. “Hey, Mad, the rest of the team is here. I gotta go,” Thom said, sounding rushed. “See ya.”

“I love you,” I said into the nothingness, and I imagined him saying it back.

I had to get to California.

Chapter 6

I
was putting the finishing touches on my essay for English—about how Scout felt about her father in
To Kill a Mockingbird
—when the bell rang. Not a school bell, but our early-morning farm bell. Time for the interns to put down their buckets and brushes and rakes and head to the bunkhouse, which had four small private bathrooms with showers and sinks and everything an intern might need to spruce up for school. Once a week in the spring and summer, the interns showed up to work an hour and a half before school. The bell meant there was twenty minutes until the bus stopped at the end of the long driveway.

I rarely took the bus to school. Usually, Caro’s live-in housekeeper picked up me and Fergie every morning and drove us home every afternoon. A live-in housekeeper—now
that
made for a charmed life.

I’d been working on my essay for three days and had almost forgotten it was due that day. It was a surprisingly good book about this girl named Scout (which I thought was the coolest name) whose dad was a lawyer defending someone for a crime he didn’t commit but everyone in town blamed him for. It was about standing up for what you believed, doing what was right, even when everyone was against you. My dad would do what was right—I was pretty sure, anyway. But wasn’t what was right making sure his daughters could attend his wedding? Even if it was his third?

“Hello? Madeline? It’s Elinor. And Avery. Hello?” I heard whispering from the other side of my closed bedroom door. Then there was a knock.

Elinor and Avery? Who was Avery?

“Come in,” I called out, saving my essay.

Elinor opened the door. Beside her was a girl I’d seen a couple of times on the farm. One of the interns? I hit print and waited for someone to start speaking. They crowded in, Elinor slightly in front.

“This is Avery Kennar,” Elinor said. “She just started interning here last week.”

“You actually do schoolwork?” Avery asked me, craning her neck to peer at my printer.

I collected the papers and stapled them, then slipped the report into my English notebook and slid that into my messenger bag. “Of course. What did you think?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “That maybe you had people do it for you. I saw that in a movie once. This girl paid five different really smart kids to do her homework and write her papers.” Her hand flew to her mouth. “Not that you aren’t smart. That’s not what I meant.”

“Yes, I actually do my homework and write my own papers,” I said.
Weirdo
.

Elinor was just standing there staring at me. Her hair was even poufier than it had been the day before, probably because it was one of those overcast, humid days when it felt a lot hotter than it really was. She wore plaid Bermuda shorts and a navy blue T-shirt—with, for some reason, a shiny dark gray vest and scuffed white sneakers with weird sporty swirls on them. There were dark red pom-poms peeking out of the sneakers.

Elinor cleared her throat. “We have a proposition for you, Madeline. You said you needed over three hundred dollars. Between the two of us, we have three hundred and fifty dollars. We want to pay you to help us change our images.”

The girl did not give up! Were they seriously going to pay me three hundred and fifty bucks to tell Fergie and Caro to take their names out of the running? That was crazy. “I told you I can’t—”

“No,” Elinor interrupted, adjusting her purple plastic glasses on her nose. “This isn’t a bribe. We want you to teach us, like a class, how to get less unpopular. Show us how to change. We want you to change us from the inside out.”

“The inside out?” I repeated. “How am I supposed to do that?”

“The same way
you
did it,” Elinor said. “You learned the secrets. Now teach us.”

“Um, if I can say something?” Avery cut in. “Madeline clearly started out with an advantage: she’s
very
pretty. I’m not exactly ever going to win Most Beautiful.” But she wasn’t ugly. Or even plain. She was actually almost cute. She had straight shoulder-length brown hair and wore khaki capris and a pink tank top and perfectly fine sandals.

“But she could show you how to look as good as you
can,”
Elinor said. “That’s what Madeline knows; that’s what she’s always understood. And she can teach us much, much more,” she went on. “As I talked about while we were washing the milking tubes, getting off the list takes more than just a new look.”

What had Elinor promised this Avery chick? “I’m
not
a teacher,” I said, turning a glare on Elinor. “And I’m not running a Learning Annex class.”

“Please?” Elinor said, folding her hands together in front of her. “I really, really need this. I really need to change. God, I just want to be … 
normal.”

I looked at their hopeful faces as they waited for me to say yes. I stared at Avery. She didn’t need much help. A little makeup, some trendier clothes. She had the basics.

“I just moved here from Massachusetts and it’s like I’m totally invisible,” Avery said. “I look like everyone else, just like I did in my last school, and I wasn’t exactly Miss Popularity there, either. I want to stand out. And I have no idea how. I’ve tried talking to people, but they ignore me. I overheard Sam Fray say he was interning at a dairy farm, so I signed up for it too. I figured the proximity to a popular guy would help. Like maybe I could get to be friends with him and then he’d sort of introduce me to his friends.”

“Has it worked?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “He wears an iPod most of the time and never hears me when I say hi. And he seems really into the work.”

“Sam is very out of our league,” Elinor said. “And anyway, standing out can be dangerous, Avery. That’s the reason I always make the Not list in the first place.”

“Well, I don’t want to look
worse
,” Avery said. “I want to look
better
. I want to look more than better—I want to look like you, Madeline, and your friends.” Elinor stared at her with pride, at this girl who dared to dream big. “I just don’t know
how
. Even when I go shopping and try stuff on that I see you and your friends wearing, I just look … stupid. Like I’m trying too hard or something. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, I understand what you mean.” I did, because I used to
be
Avery.

“So?” Elinor said to me. “Three hundred and fifty bucks to teach us how to be more … normal before the Not list comes out.”

“This is crazy,” I said. “In what, four, five weeks’ time, I’m supposed to turn you both into totally different people?”

They nodded.

“Different enough to not make the Not list,” Elinor said. “That’s what I want. And Avery wants to look better enough to possibly make the Most list! Yay, A!” she added. “Omigod, that rhymes!”

Omigod was right. Was she really this corny? If she said something like that around Caro and Fergie, they’d torment her with it forever.

“Three hundred and fifty dollars,” Elinor repeated, knowing that would cover what I needed. “I’m paying more, since I need the most help and I’m planning on passing what I learn to my sister. She’s in middle school, but it’s never too early.”

I pictured my dad marrying a woman I’d never met. I pictured Thom and the blond girl in a bikini in math class. He was pulling the strings to her top. She was giggling.

Maybe some lessons in how to be popular—how not to be a total dork, really—wouldn’t be such a big deal. A few hours of my life here and there for three hundred and fifty bucks. For California.

“We can give you half the money right now and the other half in two weeks,” Elinor said. “That’s when I’ll have the last hundred from babysitting the Cotter twins. They’re four.”

I took a very deep breath.
California. California. California
. Half the money in my possession now, to make it feel real. And the other half in two weeks.

“Okay. I’ll do it,” I told them. “I’ll try to change your image. But I can’t guarantee anything.”
I’m a high school sophomore—not a miracle worker
.

Elinor started jumping up and down and clapping. The almost cute girl took a deep breath.

“Elinor, lesson number one,” I said. “Don’t jump.”

The interns, excluding Sam, who rode his bike to the farm and to school most days, were waiting in their cluster by the Blueberry Ledge Farm sign at the main road. I sat on a huge rock—on my English notebook—across the dirt driveway, waiting for Mandy, Caro’s housekeeper, to pull up. Caro lived in an amazing house a mile away on the Atlantic Ocean. The first time Caro had invited me over, I’d thought her house was one of those fancy bed-and-breakfasts. That was how big it was, how grand. Mandy had been with the Alexander family forever, since Caro and her older brother (he was in college already) were babies, so Caro treated her with a degree of respect.

Elinor whispered something to Joe, the other guy intern, and he looked over at me. Now
there
was someone who could use a little fashion advice. He wore a T-shirt tucked into blue shorts. All that was missing were kneesocks.

“Could I ask you something?” he said to me.

Oh God
. I nodded.

“I’m sort of interested in going in on this thing that Elinor and Avery are doing. But, I’m a guy, you know? It’s not like you can give me advice on makeup or whatever.”

“She can help you be more like her boyfriend and his friends,” Avery said. “How to dress, how to act, what to say.”

Wait a minute. Two girls, fine. Now there was a guy in the mix?

“So you can really teach me how to talk to people?” Joe asked me. “I never know what to say, so I never say anything, and then when I get home, I suddenly think of what I should have said.”

And yet that was quite a mouthful.

“With Joe in, your fee can be an even four hundred,” Elinor said. “If that helps.”

It helped.

“So do you think you could help me?” he asked. “Be less a total dork? I’m totally aware I am a dork, mostly because I get called a dork loser ten times a day.”

That had to suck. Worse than being completely ignored and invisible was being tortured.

“I could try,” I said.

Joe shrugged. “Okay, I’m in.”

Elinor did her little clapping jump again. Avery just eyed me.

Great. Just great. Now there were three.

When Mandy’s car pulled up, the interns backed away, as they always did, as if they were afraid Caro would wave her magic wand at them and turn them into trolls or something. Mandy’s car was small, a Honda Civic, so it wasn’t like I could invite the interns to ride with us. As if Caro would let them in the car, anyway.

“God, Madeline,” Caro said as we pulled onto the main road. “Remember when you used to be friends with that weirdo Frizz Puff girl?” She slicked on some lip gloss. “It’s almost amazing, really, that you went from hanging out with
that
to hanging out with us.”

Fergie laughed next to me. “Your life could have been so different, Madeline.”

As Fergie searched through her purse for something, I could feel Caro’s eyes on me. I wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing she’d reminded me of where I’d come from. And if there had been a threat in there somewhere, that she could kick me to the curb anytime, I really didn’t want to acknowledge it. Or think about it.

I hadn’t been friends with Elinor. She’d just talked my ear off in classes and trailed after me, talking away. We hadn’t been friends.

But now I’d be hanging out with Nots a few times a week for the “class.”

I’d need to make it clear to my friends that I
wasn’t
hanging out with them.

“So you will never believe what the interns—excluding Sam, of course—at my parents’ farm are paying me to do for them,” I began, then launched into the whole story. About my dad’s wedding, the cost of airfare, how I was dying to go so I could also spend time with Thom.

I didn’t mention my plan to ask my dad if I could live with him. I didn’t think voluntarily moving three thousand miles away from your best friends would go over well. Then again, Caro probably wouldn’t mind. If she’d had the money herself, she would probably have given it to me just to separate me from Sam. Caro’s family was rich, but they were tightwad rich. A lot of Caro’s amazing clothes and shoes and handbags were hand-me-downs from her mother, a fashionista size four. Caro rarely bought anything new, but then again, she didn’t have to.

Caro wouldn’t give me the money to go chasing after Thom. She wanted me to hook up with someone at Freeport Academy, someone who’d take me off the available list.

“So what do you think I should teach them?” I asked. How was I supposed to even teach them anything? Did I just tell them each how to look better? What to say when a guy said, “See you in school”?

They were both staring at me as though I’d sprouted another head, the crazy head that had made me agree to such a thing.

“Please tell me you’re kidding about doing this,” Caro said as Mandy pulled into the Freeport Academy parking lot. “You’re going to help a bunch of freaky loser farm interns so that maybe they’ll be normal enough not to make the Not list.”

I glanced at Mandy to see if she’d give Caro a look for being so mean, but she didn’t. She never did.

“Right,” Fergie answered for me. “That’s how I heard it.”

“And does that make any sense to you?” Caro asked.

“Oddly, yes,” Fergie said. “Madeline is Most Popular. She’s teaching them how to be more like her.”

“Right. Because all it takes is some advice on clothes and makeup and conversation to be like us,” Caro said. “They’re throwing away their money.”

Maybe not. I had some cute clothes of my own and some hand-me-downs from Caro and Fergie. (Selena wasn’t a great dresser, and Annie was a bit hopeless in the style department and tended to go sporty.) I had a pair of Sevens that my aunt Darcy had bought me in Rome and some very nice tops and shoes. Why couldn’t I just put Elinor in the outfit I was wearing now? Cute flippy skirt. White T-shirt, interesting necklace. Great sandals. She could borrow some of my stuff the way I borrowed a lot of Caro’s and Fergie’s clothes.