The Look Page 6

  “Done?”

  “Yep,” Frankie says, as she and Simon examine the Polaroids. Ava crowds in, too. “And they’re not bad. I’ve taken worse.”

  “Really?”

  She laughs at my surprise. “See for yourself.”

  The photos are very plain — just my face and top half — but compared with Ava’s efforts at home, they’re mini-masterpieces. It’s amazing what a white background and some decent lighting can do.

  “So, can you walk for me?”

  I must have misheard her. I thought she said “walk.” Of course I can walk. But when she explains it to me, it’s worse than I could possibly have imagined. It is walking, but it’s across the office next door, in front of the twenty staring people.

  “I — I don’t think so,” I stutter.

  “Don’t be silly,” Frankie says with a hint of a sigh. I suppose she must be used to people who can talk in foreign languages while typing and flirting. I found “just standing there” enough of a challenge. “It’s walking. Up and down. It’ll only take a moment.”

  Ava does her pleading face. Simon smiles encouragingly. I’m still about to say no, but when he opens the door back into the main office, I realize that everyone is still mesmerized by what’s going on between Cassandra Spoke and Nightmare Boy. Frankie nods in their direction and, without thinking, I set off. I’m curious to get a clearer view of him and see what all the fuss is about. It’s quite nice to have an excuse to go closer, actually.

  Nightmare Boy is sitting hunched over, with his back to me, so all I can see is rumpled hair, a faded pink T-shirt, paint-spattered jeans, and dirty sneakers with holes in them. His voice is a low, insistent growl, but he must hear me approaching, because he stops talking to scowl at me. Black-rimmed glasses. His mother’s blue eyes. Pale face. Cute lips. Nice hair. I wish I wasn’t wearing hiking shorts.

  As I near the desk, Cassandra looks up, too. Oh my goodness. The über-agent of über-agents is staring straight at me. I turn around quickly and head in the opposite direction.

  Back where I started, Frankie grins. “Cute walk,” she says cheerfully. “It’s coltish. Don’t lose it.”

  I promise not to, and breathe a sigh of relief. The ordeal is over. There are no further humiliations they can put me through.

  But it turns out that yes, there are more humiliations.

  “We just need to measure you now,” Frankie says, rummaging in her desk and pulling out a tape measure. She wraps it around my nonexistent chest and calls out my measurements to a guy three desks away, so that everyone can hear them.

  Ava giggles. I glare at her. She had better be grateful for this. Buzz Lightyear has now paled into insignificance in the catalog of mortifying moments she has subjected me to.

  Frankie has a quick muted conversation with Simon before taking us over to her desk and laying my Polaroids out on top of the general mess. I’m just relieved I don’t have Snoopy on my head in these pictures. I must remember to ask Ava to delete the ones on her phone.

  “Well, you’ve definitely got something,” Frankie says. “And if you end up working with us, you’ll have such a good time. We’re a close family at Model City.”

  I glance across at Cassandra and her son. Really?

  “But before we make any decisions we need to do a test shoot,” Frankie goes on. “I’ve got one coming up soon that might work for you.”

  Ava grins, but suddenly I’m experiencing my second cold flush, and it’s no more fun than the first one.

  I can’t believe we fell for it.

  Here we were, assuming that they were the real thing, and they were just a bunch of scammers after all. I must say, they disguised it brilliantly, but how much money is it going to take to get out of here? I did google “modeling scams” like Ava suggested, and they said the scammers can be very persistent. They keep telling you that you have to spend more and more …

  “The test shoot — how much would it cost?” I whisper.

  Frankie looks at me quizzically, then smiles. “Oh, it doesn’t cost you anything. We know photographers who need shots for their portfolio, same as you. They don’t charge, and you don’t. See? When you get a proper job, the client pays us and we pay you, minus our commission, of course. Don’t worry, angel, we’ll look after you. We’re totally legit. It’s why we’d need parental approval, by the way. Your parents are OK with you doing it, are they?”

  “Oh, definitely,” Ava chimes in. “They’re really excited. They were just, er, busy today.”

  “Fine. Well, you can bring them in when you come and get your test shots. So, how was that?”

  I am having an out-of-body experience.

  They say they’re “legit,” but they’re talking about signing me up. Did they not notice my legs? Or the unibrow? Or the hair? Or the fact that I’m still in school? Or that I don’t know who Mario Testino is? Or that I’m sitting next to a goddess and they haven’t shown the slightest interest in her? These people clearly have NO IDEA WHAT THEY’RE DOING.

  “Ted? Ted? What do you think?”

  But I suppose I should be polite. I put on my brightest smile.

  “Amazing.”

  “Wasn’t that fantastic?” Ava says on the way to the Underground afterward. “Just let me call home.”

  “You’re not telling them what we did?” I ask, appalled.

  “Of course not. Duh!”

  In a serious voice, she explains to Dad that we were badly held up at the hospital, but we’re finally on our way home. She lies so brilliantly and fluently that I’m in total awe of her talent. Then she grins happily at me.

  “See? Easy! Frankie loved you!”

  “It was horrific!”

  “You were great.”

  “You should have seen the way that boy looked at me. Like I was a worm.”

  “Ignore him. You’re gorgeous, it’s official. Ooh, I must call Jesse.”

  She whips her phone back out to tell him the news.

  “He’s totally impressed,” she informs me afterward. “He says congratulations.”

  “I thought he didn’t like models.”

  “He doesn’t like his girlfriend to be a model. Sisters can do what they like. Aw, look, smiley face.”

  She shows me her phone. Jesse has sent her a bug-eyed picture of himself stretching out both sides of his mouth with his fingers, so all you can see are teeth, gums, and tonsils. He still looks better than I did in those Polaroids. I sigh quietly to myself.

  “I’m not doing that test shoot, Ava. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, you are,” she says cheerfully.

  I don’t even bother to argue. There are a million reasons why I can’t do it, from not really knowing what a test shoot is, to lack of “parental approval,” to sheer terror at the very idea of it, to — hello? — my whole face and body. But Ava seems so happy right now that I can’t bring myself to list them. I’ll do it later, when her excitement has worn off.

  It’s not difficult for us to keep what happened at Model City a secret from Mum.

  Monday is what Ava calls “C Day” — the day her chemo starts — and Mum’s totally focused on making sure she’s read all the paperwork, obeyed all the instructions on how to prepare, blown the budget on fresh, organic fruit and vegetables, and got everything ready for making Ava feel comfortable afterward, in case the chemicals make her feel as bad as Nan did, which was so awful that Mum cries whenever she thinks about it.

  We spend the rest of the weekend scattered around the flat, with Mum sobbing into a tissue and Ava telling her off about it, Dad busy trying to fix the gear shifter on his bike (and breaking it beyond repair), and me trying to take up as little space as possible.

  If the guidance counselor were to ask me now, I’d say I feel guilty again. Guilty for being so healthy, while my sister has a plastic tube sticking out of her chest. If I could go halves with her and settle on a shared bad bout of chicken pox, or a broken leg each, I would. But nobody asked me. I am not a part of
this equation. So I keep quiet and try not to make anybody’s nerves more jangled than they already are.

  On Sunday night, we both lie awake long past midnight. I can hear Ava’s breathing, and she can hear mine.

  “It’s going to be fine, T,” she says into the darkness, sensing what I’m thinking. I know I should be comforting her, but in the topsy-turvy world we’ve entered, she’s good at trying to comfort me. “People get this all the time. I’ve just got to get through the chemo and I could be clear by December. You heard what Doctor Christodoulou said about me being fit. He’s an expert. He’s treated loads of people way worse than me. We just need to look after Mum and Dad, because they’re really not taking this well.”

  No kidding. She seems disappointed by their reaction, but I have to say I can totally see where they’re coming from on this one.

  When Monday comes, Mum lets me stay at home while she and Dad take Ava in for her first session. Ava has to sit there for a few hours while the drugs run through her system, then she can come home. I wanted to go, too, but they all said no. So, I have several hours of daytime TV ahead of me. Not scintillating, but at least I get to miss our French oral exam — which was definitely beyond my powers of concentration today.

  Daisy texts me afterward to say how bad it was. She follows it with a line of question marks and exclamation marks. I’m not sure if these refer to the exam, though, or our phone conversation yesterday, when I told her about Model City. Daisy thinks I’m crazy to follow my sister anywhere, but especially into the arms of a model agency. We both agreed that modeling is for anorexic people with no brain cells. Well, Daisy said it and I agreed. A teeny bit of me was hoping she’d be impressed that they liked my Polaroids all the same, but she completely wasn’t. She kept focusing on the “being crazy” part.

  I’m engrossed in a program about reintroducing the elm tree to the British countryside when my phone goes again. I assume it will be Mum, or Daisy calling back with more angst about French, but instead it’s a number I don’t recognize.

  “Hi, angel,” says a chirpy voice. “It’s Frankie. About that test shoot? We’ve got someone fixed up for next weekend, and maybe you could join her. You don’t have school on Saturday, do you?”

  “Er, no, but —”

  “Perfect. It’s with Seb Clark. He’s really lovely and gentle. I’ll call you later with the details, but I just wanted you to get it on your calendar, OK? God, sorry, got to go.”

  I can hear the sound of another phone ringing in the background, then nothing. If Frankie had stayed on the line I could have explained about not doing the shoot, but I can’t face calling her back. I start trying to figure out the best thing to do, but my brain isn’t really working today. It’s too distracted by what’s happening at the hospital, and also — thanks to this program — what happened to the elm tree. Over twenty million of them were killed by disease in the last forty years. We need to replant the new ones as fast as we can. Soon the call has slipped from my mind, and I don’t remember it again until Ava gets home and asks me about my day.

  Which, if you think about it, is the wrong way around. My day was natural history programs, hers was chemo. But there’s something strange about Ava. Whatever drugs they’ve given her, they’ve had the opposite effect from what I expected. Her eyes still have their dangerous glitter, she’s full of energy, and you’d think she’d just been to a rave — or how she looked when she got back from Glastonbury, anyway.

  “How did it go?” I ask.

  “Ew, at the time,” she admits, taking a bite out of a banana. “But I feel WONDERFUL now. Mum says it’s the steroids. I don’t care. If it’s going to be like this for the next two weeks, fantastic!”

  Are they sure she has cancer? Has she been massively misdiagnosed? Anyway, while Mum gets busy chopping apples, celery, and practically anything else green that isn’t the kitchen door, I tell Ava quietly about the test shoot.

  “Fabulous!” she says when I’ve finished. “Perfect! Hey! My sister’s nearly a mod-el! It’s so exci-ting! Go check her o-out!”

  She dances round the room as she singsongs. What did they put in those steroids?

  “I’m not going, remember?” I point out.

  “Why?”

  She stops dancing and pouts at me.

  “Because I don’t want to. Because it’s silly. Because I’d need permission.”

  “You do want to. It’s a test shoot! How cool is that? Lily Cole had test shoots. So did Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. You’ll be like Heidi Klum.”

  Who are these people? How does she know about so many of them, when I only know Kate Moss and Claudia Something, who Dad fancies? Why would I want to be like Rosie Huntington-Whiteley anyway? OK, I can imagine how people might want to be like them. Attractive people. Just not people like me.

  “Go on, T,” Ava pleads. “You looked great in those Polaroids. It’s just one morning. You’ll have fun. Think of it as work experience.”

  “As what?”

  “I dunno. Stylist? Hairdresser? Makeup artist? Designer? You’ll meet loads of new people. It’ll be good for you.”

  “Just because you want to be a surf instructor —”

  “Cool job, huh? Better than your tree surgeon idea. Or Bob the Builder, I seem to remember. Or Oreo taster.”

  “Not necessarily. And I can’t do it anyway,” I say, playing my trump card, “because Mum would kill me.”

  “Aha!” Ava exclaims, playing hers. “But she won’t know, will she? Because she’ll be at work on Saturday, in that fabulous green uniform of hers, and Dad’s researching at the library. So the flat will be empty and they’ll assume you’re here, doing homework, or at Daisy’s. And if they ask difficult questions, I’ll cover for you. You know how good I am at lying.”

  I do. She inherited all the lying genes, whereas whatever I’m thinking is written all over my face.

  “And look, Frankie’s gone to all that trouble, just for you. You can’t let her down now, can you?” She does her pouty face. “I’ll call and pretend to be Mum and tell them that it’s all sorted. I’ll help you get ready. You can tell me all about it. And I’ve just had chemo, T. How can you resist me?” Mega-pout.

  But this time I’m ready. I pull myself up to my full five feet eleven inches and stare her straight in the eye. “No way ever. Not in a million years. And that’s final.”

  She doesn’t say anything back. She just points to the area in her chest where the tubes are, and smiles a wicked smile.

  And so, at eleven o’clock on Saturday, I find myself standing outside Highbury & Islington Underground station, watching Ava study Dad’s A-Z map of London and wondering when I will ever learn. Probably never. When we’re in our nineties, I’ll be doing something stupid with my walker because my older sister made me.

  And she’ll be around then, obviously. Because what’s happening is just a blip. Ninety percent of people are totally cured. Totally.

  I’m still not sure how she talked me into it. I lasted twenty-four hours. Then I crumbled and she really got to work. First, she had to make the call pretending to be Mum, giving me permission to go on the shoot and saying that sadly she couldn’t come along because she had a hospital appointment. (Untrue on all counts. The next appointment is on Monday.) Frankie hemmed and hawed, because apparently I HAVE to have a chaperone if I go to a shoot at my age, but then Ava said — as Mum — that I have an older sister who’d be happy to come along instead, and Frankie agreed. Unfortunately.

  Then we had to figure out what “casual, figure-hugging clothes” were, because apparently I’ve got to wear some, and I don’t have any. Well, I have that gray tank top that I wore to Model City’s offices, which seemed to be OK, so my top half is set. But I don’t possess “casual, figure-hugging” pants, and I am NOT wearing my hiking shorts again. I refuse to subject some poor photographer to my legs unless absolutely necessary. I couldn’t wear Ava’s jeans, even if she let me, because they’re too generous around the bum and only come down to m
y shins. So I’ve borrowed a pair of Mum’s yoga leggings. I couldn’t look more ridiculous, but my sister insists.

  Finally, we had to figure out how to get there. The address is an old post office building in North London that’s been converted into studios. Ava’s good at getting to shops and sports venues. I’m good at getting to public galleries, parks, and gardens. But neither of us has tried to get to a post office building in Islington before. I haven’t started modeling yet, and it’s already a lot more difficult than it looks.

  “This way,” Ava says, in a semi-confident tone. “What’s the matter, Ted?”

  I’m still thinking about the expression on Dad’s face when she told him she felt like seeing a couple of films at the movie theater today, and that I’d agreed to go with her. He gave me an odd look and peered at me for ages before he said good-bye to us. Any minute now he’s going to figure out we’re up to something, and come and stop us. I wish he would. There’s something seriously wrong with my sister, and it’s not just lymphoma.

  “Oh, come on! Aren’t you excited?” she goes on. “Modeling studios! Makeup! You’re going to look gorgeous!” She grabs my arm and hurries me along.

  Five minutes later, we’re standing outside the sort of abandoned-looking building where bodies are found in detective series.

  “This is it!” she says, checking the map for the last time. “Second floor.”

  She bounds ahead and I follow, cautiously. We let ourselves in through a large, unlocked door and head up a flight of concrete steps. If I thought being accosted by Simon on Carnaby Street was weird, this whole situation is positively disturbing. Doing it with a sister high on steroids isn’t helping.

  When we reach the second floor, Ava leads me down a long corridor until we hear the sound of voices. We poke our heads through a doorway at the end, and there we are: in a huge, light-filled room with a concrete floor and white-painted brick walls. A guy in a black T-shirt and shorts is sitting at a rickety table, with a shiny laptop in front of him, calling out instructions to someone I can’t see. Ava knocks on the open door and he turns around to look at us. I gasp slightly. He has more facial hair than I would have thought possible. Bushy beard. Massive sideburns. Unusually large eyebrows. Underneath it all, he looks as if he might be quite young, but it’s hard to tell.