Here's Lily (2 page)

“Now,” Kathleen said, “I'm going to take you through some basics in skin care, and hair care, and nail care. But instead of just telling you, I'd like to show you. I'm going to pick someone.”

She took a step forward, and hands sprang up and waved like seaweed. Marcie held on to her arm with the other hand as if she were afraid it would fall off, and Ashley's face went absolutely purple as she strained for Kathleen to see her. Even Reni raised her hand tentatively, although she looked at Lily as if to say,
She'll never pick me, so why am I bothering?

Lily seemed to be the only one who wasn't begging Kathleen to look at her. If she did, she knew she'd have Ashley and Chelsea and some of the others hooting and pointing and whispering.
Lily? Her? Too-tall Lily? With too much red hair? Too big a mouth and too-thick lips? What are you thinking?!?

Instead, Lily reached over, grabbed Reni's arm, and held it up even higher. It was at exactly that moment that Kathleen's eyes stopped scanning the desperate little crowd and rested on her.

“Ah . . . you,” she said.

“Yay!” Lily squeezed Reni's hand. “She picked you, Reni!”

But Kathleen shook her head and smiled. “No, honey,” she said to Lily. “I picked
you
.”

Two

M
e?” Lily's jaw dropped. The disappointed groans behind her were a sure sign nobody else believed it either. But Kathleen nodded and held out her hand. “Come on up. What's your name?”

“Lilianna,” Lily said as she stood up stiff as a pole. “Lilianna Robbins, only everybody calls me Lily. It's easier.”

“Great name!” Kathleen said. “All right, Lily, if you'll just sit down in the chair here. There we go.”

She kept talking in her light-as-air way as Lily sank into the chair and once again tucked her hands under her thighs.

I sure hope she doesn't have time to get to fingernail care
, Lily thought,
or this is going to be way embarrassing
.

She could already feel her face getting hot, and she knew there were probably red blotches all over it. Shad Shifferdecker had once said she looked like she had a disease when that happened.

“Now, Lily,” Kathleen said, “would you mind if I pushed some of this gorgeous hair of yours away from your face so we can concentrate on skin first?”

Lily heard a couple of the girls snicker. She darted her eyes over to Reni. Her best friend was leaning forward in her chair, nodding fiercely at Lily. She was concentrating so hard, her dimples looked like poke holes.

“Sure,” Lily agreed. “But you might have trouble getting a brush through it. My hair's kind of thick.”

“
Kind
of?” Ashley whispered loudly.

“I think I have just the brush for it,” Kathleen said, reaching toward the items on the table. “And my first tip of the day—so everyone pay attention—is, ‘Never apologize for any part of your physical appearance.'” She looked out at the group of girls staring back at her. “Start by loving who you are, and then play up your best features.”

By now she had pulled Lily's hair back from her face without tugging so much as a single strand. She picked up a ball of cotton and a bottle of some kind of liquid.

“For instance, not only does Lily have beautiful hair, but she has wonderful, china-white skin. She'll want to take care of it.”

There were some more snickers, and again Lily looked at Reni. She was still nodding and dimpling.

Kathleen dabbed the damp cotton ball on Lily's face and continued talking while she spread it around. Lily didn't hear much of what she said because the stuff was cold. She hoped there wasn't going to be a test on this.

“How do you feel, Lily?” Kathleen said.

“Um, revitalized.”

“What?
” Marcie McCleary burst out. She was as bad as Shad sometimes.

There was a spattering of giggles. Kathleen smiled.

“Great word, Lily,” she said. “Revitalized is just the feeling I was going for.” She turned to the girls. “A gentle cleanser will make your skin feel alive and refreshed.” She reached for a bottle of creamy stuff and applied a light amount to Lily's cleansed face as she continued talking. “At this point in your lives, a good facial wash, a gentle liquid cleanser and toner like this, and a light moisturizer with sunscreen are all you need to be beautiful. Look at Lily—she's lovely.”

Lily wished she could put her hands over her ears. Not only were they turning red too, but she didn't want to hear the comments from Ashley and Chelsea and Marcie.

The room was quiet, though, and Lily sneaked a look. In the second row, tiny Suzy Wheeler was nodding her head, and so was Zooey Hoffman.

“What do you know about lovely, Zooey?” Ashley said.

“I'll tell you what
I
know about lovely.” Kathleen's voice wasn't so light and airy now. It made them all freeze in their seats and look at the floor. “Lovely is a woman who does not make mean remarks about anyone else. She appreciates the beauty every female has.”

Kathleen's eyes swept the library. It was quiet as midnight. The only person who moved was Zooey. She pulled her plump self up tall in her chair and smiled at Lily out of a round, cherry-cheeked face. Lily smiled back.

Marcie raised her hand. “Don't we get to see anything about makeup?” she said.

“As I told you, good clean skin and some moisturizer are all you really need, but I will admit that makeup is fun to experiment with. Lily, would you mind if I tried a little blush on you?”

“Yeah!” a bunch of the girls said.

Lily didn't look to see if Ashley was one of them. She felt good all of a sudden, and she didn't want to spoil it.

“Sure,” Lily said. “Only not too much. I don't think my parents would like it.”

“I would never go against anything parents say,” Kathleen said. “We'll put on just enough to see how you'll look, and then you can wipe it right off if you want.”

She tickled Lily's cheeks with a big fluffy brush and stood back to observe.

“Wow—that looks good!” Marcie said. “Can you do me, please?”

“I'm not finished with Lily yet,” Kathleen said. “Would you mind a little lip gloss, Lily?”

A little? On these lips, you're going to need a whole container
.

Kathleen seemed to be watching her closely. “You have incredible lips, you know. Women all over America are going to plastic surgeons to get lips like yours.”

“Nuh-uh!” Ashley said, and then clapped her hands over her mouth.

“It's true. We'll apply some gloss just to play up that wonderful mouth, okay?”

Lily nodded and then closed her eyes while Kathleen put something smooth and cool on her lips. When she opened her eyes, she saw Reni smiling from one earlobe to the other.

“Lily!” Marcie said. “You look
good
!”

She sounded like that was the surprise of the century, but Lily didn't mind. The girls were all murmuring to each other and casting the same kinds of glances at Lily. She was dying for a mirror.

“Now,” Kathleen said, “you will notice that we haven't done anything to change Lily's appearance. We're just enhancing what she has. Do you know what
enhancing
means?”

Ashley stuck up her hand. “It means making something look good that didn't look that good before.”

“Absolutely not correct,” Kathleen answered briskly. “Anyone else?”

It took a minute before anyone else raised her hand. Lily was surprised when Kresha Ragina put hers up. Kresha didn't speak English that well—she was Croatian—so she hardly ever answered in class.

Kathleen nodded in her direction. “Yes, pretty lady.” Frankly, Lily had never thought of Kresha as pretty. She seldom combed her tangle of almost-blond hair, and matching colors was obviously something they didn't worry about too much in Croatia.

Wow
, Lily thought,
Kathleen really does look for each person's own beauty
.

Kresha cleared her throat. “It mean . . . to make you notice . . . what—what . . . um . . . what is beautiful already.”

“Beautifully put,” Kathleen said. “And exactly right. Caking on a bunch of makeup doesn't make you beautiful. You are already beautiful. If you wear makeup, it is only to make people notice your best qualities.” She turned back to Lily. “Now, another way to do that is with color. Lily, would you mind if I put something over the top you're wearing?”

Lily looked down at her black T-shirt and shook her head. Kathleen reached into her classy bag and pulled out several scarves in different colors.

“I'm going to hold each one of these up to Lily's face,” she told the class, “and I want you girls to tell me which one brings out Lily's beauty the best.”

By now, almost everyone had scooted to the front of her chair, eyes glued to Lily. Kathleen held a yellow scarf over Lily's tee, and only a few heads nodded. With a red one, heads shook. When blue, just the color of Lily's eyes, covered her, Lily thought Marcie McCleary was going to spring out of her chair.

“That's the one!” she said.

“What do you think?” Kathleen asked Zooey.

“That's it,” Zooey said.

“I totally agree.” Kathleen knotted the scarf casually in the front, and then finally she reached into her bag and pulled out a mirror. “Take a look at yourself, Lily,” she said. “See if you like what you see.”

Lily gazed into the mirror, and she saw her eyes go wide.
It's me, all right
, she thought.
Only it's like a different degree of me
.

“Do you like yourself?” Kathleen said.

“I do.”

“You should. You are a lovely young woman. Now—”

“Do me!” Marcie cried. Surely she was going to burst a blood vessel any minute.

Kathleen gave a sly smile. “Did I say I was finished with Lily yet? Now then, Lily, stand up for me. Everyone stand up.”

They all scrambled to their feet, buzzing to each other, and Kathleen told them to stand with their arms at their sides, to place their feet the same distance apart as their shoulders, and to focus on an eye-level spot on the wall.

“Concentrate on your backbone,” she said. “Pretend those vertebrae in there are Legos. Stack each one neatly above the one below it.”

There was a lot of giggling and whispering from the other girls, but Lily put her mind to her Legos, snapping each one carefully into place. She was amazed at how different she felt.

“Excellent, Lily,” Kathleen said. “Everyone look up here.”

Necks stretched again.

“Lily looks so elegant and confident, doesn't she?”

Ashley and Chelsea both shrugged, but some of the others nodded. Reni, of course, dimpled all the way through.

“How do you feel, Lily?” Kathleen said.

“I don't feel like a giraffe right now.”

Ashley spewed out a laugh that sprayed everyone in front of her, but Kathleen ignored her.

“Good answer,” she said, “because you certainly don't look like one either.”

Kathleen showed them how to walk without falling over their own feet and how to stand and not feel like they didn't know where to put their arms, keeping Lily at the front to use as an example. The rest of the class went way too fast as far as Lily was concerned.

By the time the workshop was over, Chelsea had stopped laughing at her. Ashley had too, but she'd also quit listening to Kathleen and was yawning and looking at the clock and re-braiding her hair. By that time, Lily had pretty much forgotten all about her.

When Ms. Gooch came into the library to get them, nobody wanted to leave, and Kathleen had to help her shoo everybody toward the door. But when Lily went up to give Kathleen her blue scarf back, Kathleen took hold of her arm.

“Can you stay for a minute, Lily?” she asked. “I want to give you something.”

“You don't need to give me anything,” Lily said. “It was fun helping you.”

“It's not a thank-you gift.” Kathleen opened Lily's hand and pressed a cream-colored card into it. “This is my phone number at the agency. You're model material, and I'd love it if you would tell your mother I said that and have her call me. We'll be starting a new class soon, and I'd like to have you in it.”

“Me?” Lily felt her face doing that blotchy-red thing again. “Oh, this is because I was your example. Really, it won't hurt my feelings if you give it to Reni or even Ashley. They're way prettier—”

Kathleen laughed her feathery laugh as she pressed Lily's fingers closed over the card. “No. I'm giving you this because
you
are the one I'd like to have at my agency.”

It was way too hard to believe. That was why when Lily got outside the library, and Reni said, “What did she say to you?” Lily just said, “She thanked me. Come on. We better hurry or we'll get our names on the board.”

Then Lily tucked the card into the pocket of her jeans—and tucked the warm glow she was feeling into the back of her mind, where she could bring it out later and feel it again.

Three

L
ily did think about Kathleen and the card later, when she was setting the table for dinner. The thoughts were nice, but they didn't drown out the usual commotion that was going on in the kitchen.

“Outside with that, Joe,” Mom told Lily's nine-year-old brother, who was bouncing a basketball on the tile and rattling the dishes in the cabinets in the process.

“Hey, Art, go for a lay-up!” Joe called out. He motioned toward the hanging onion basket and tossed the ball to Lily's older brother.

Art looked up from the basket he was dropping bread into and smacked the ball away. It bounced off the corner of the counter and hit Lily squarely on the right fanny cheek.

“Mo-om!” Lily said.

“Mo-om!” Joe echoed her.