Here's Lily (9 page)

Lily looked hard at her little brother to make sure he hadn't suddenly been replaced by Shad Shifferdecker.

“
Everyone
calm down,” Mom said. “There is no need to get hysterical. Lil, when is it?”

Lily whipped a fresh invitation out of her pocket and handed it to her mother with a flourish across the bowl of green beans. Art tried to snatch it, but Mom was too quick for him. For once, Lily was glad her mother was an athlete.

“Riverside Garden Club.” Mom whistled low. “Ritzy.”

“Now I
know
I'm not goin',” Joe said.

“Well, where do you expect them to hold it, Gold's Gym?” Art said.

Dad looked up from the iPhone he was consulting and blinked at Art. “They're having the modeling show at the gym?” he asked.

“Uh-oh,” Mom said.

That was never a good sound coming out of Mom. Lily felt her heart starting to race. “What uh-oh?” she said.

“Thursday the twenty-eighth. That's right at the start of the state championship tournament.”

“Your team goin'?” Joe asked.

“Of course they're going,” Art answered for her. “She'll have them all expelled from school if they don't get to State.”

“You exaggerate,” Mom said.

“Do not. I've seen you work those chicks. Somebody misses a serve and everybody has to drop for push-ups. I'm surprised you don't carry a whip—”

“Stop. Everybody!” Lily had her hands over her ears, and she knew her eyes were piercing into all of them one by one. There wasn't an ounce of poise in sight.

“She's freakin' out,” Art said.

“Art, hush,” Dad put his phone down on the place mat and looked at Lily. “You've got our attention,” he said.

Lily drilled her eyes into her mom. “Are you saying you can't come to my show?”

“I'm saying it could be a problem if my team makes it—”

“They will,” Art put in.

“I have games on Thursday night. I have to be there, Lil. You know that.”

Lily looked desperately around the table. “What about everybody else?”

“Hmm. Let's see.” Art put one finger up to his mouth as if he were giving it serious thought. “Watch high school girls play volleyball, or watch a bunch of middle school girls pretend they're models. Uh, tough choice.” He smirked and then drained the milk from his glass.

“I don't gotta go, do I, Dad?” Joe said.

But Dad ignored him and put his hand on Lily's arm.

“You can count on me, Lilliputian,” he said. “I wouldn't miss it.”

“You will miss it if you don't put it on your calendar,” Mom told him, nodding toward his phone.

And then Art launched into a story about a kid in jazz band that day who had choked on a reed, and Lily sulked and let her meat loaf get cold.

I don't care
, she told herself.
I'm going to show Shad Shifferdecker
—
and save all us girls from him and his evil friends. That's all I
really
care about anyway
.

But at the next class at Rutledge, she very quickly had to care about something else—or there wasn't going to be a modeling show at all.

Nine

K
athleen was late joining them in the classroom, which immediately got the warning butterflies going in Lily's stomach. Kathleen was always on time, just the way she expected them to be.

And when she did hurry in, there was a clump of blondish hair sticking straight out from behind her ear, and her lipstick had worn off. Something was definitely wrong.

“She looks weird tonight,” Cassie whispered to Lily.

“Stressed out,” said Stinky from the other side.

“She better not be too stressed,” Cassie said. “We're supposed to pick out our outfits tonight. Don't tell me she couldn't get the clothes!”

But several racks of inviting-looking garments beckoned from over in the corner, so that wasn't it. Lily was glad when Kathleen raised her hand and everybody got quiet. She was afraid to breathe.

“I may have some bad news for you,” Kathleen said. “There's been a mix-up with the Riverside Garden Club. They've scheduled two events on the same night, and one of them is ours. We've been bumped.”

“No fair!” one of the boys said. Nobody was thinking about Kathleen's rules at this point.

“No, it isn't,” said Kathleen, “but then, life seldom is.” Her mouth was in a straight line.

Cassie nodded and whispered to Lily, “She's stressed out all right. I've seen my mother look like that a thousand times.”

But Lily was leaning forward in her seat, heart pounding. What was going to happen? Did this mean they weren't going to have their show?

“I don't want anybody panicking,” Kathleen was saying. “We will have our show, but we may have to postpone it until I can find a place big enough.”

“What about the armory?”

“You could have it at that one movie theater. That's way big!”

“Gold's Gym,” Lily muttered.

Kathleen put her hand up again. “I do have one lead, but it would mean having it on Saturday afternoon instead of Thursday night.”

For once Lily
wanted
to shout out, and she wanted to shout, “No! Not a Saturday! Shad Shifferdecker hangs out at the mall on Saturdays!” She was about to yell, “Let's have it at the mall!” when Kathleen put her hand up yet again and added a finger snap. Lily bit her lip.

“We might be able to get the middle school at the Cedar Hills school complex, but it would help if someone in our group went to one of the schools there. I know one of you does. Who is that?”

She frowned over the group, and every neck craned.

But I don't
want
to do it at Cedar Hills!
Lily thought.
There's no way I'll ever get Shad
near
a school on a Saturday!

“This could be our only option on such short notice,” Kathleen said.

“Come on. Raise your hand!” one of the boys said. “What's the big deal?”

It
is
a big deal
—
for me
, Lily thought.
There has to be some other way
.

And then she saw Kathleen pawing through a stack of files on the table.
Their
files. In about a minute she was going to discover who went to Cedar Hills, and she was going to be disappointed in Lily for not raising her hand.

That would be worse than not having Shad there. Lily shot up her hand and even waved it a little.

“Kathleen!” Cassie said. “It's Lily!”

Kathleen's face broke into the first smile of the evening. “Of course. I remember now. You were the only one I invited from Cedar Hills.” She rested her chin on the tips of her fingers. “Will you help us, Lily? May I use your name when I call them back tomorrow?”

It felt like the whole room was holding its breath. Lily let hers out and said, “Sure. My mother works in that complex too. She teaches at the high school.”

“Excellent,” Kathleen said. Her eyes were shiny again. “Then let's get to choosing our outfits, shall we? And at the end of the evening, I have a surprise for you.”

Lily had to admit that she had fun trying on great new clothes to her heart's content. When she and her mother went shopping, Mom would get bored with the whole thing after two try-ons and would say things like, “If you like that one, just get it in three or four colors and let's go home.”

After at least a
dozen
try-ons, Lily chose a green-shorts-and-summer-top outfit for her casual wear and topped it off with a cool hat and a pair of sandals with a fun bag to sling over her shoulder. For dressy, she picked a blue sundress with a short denim jacket and shoes that made her walk even taller. The best part, though, was when Kathleen told her she'd made good choices.

“You don't look like the same girl who tried to back out of my office with gum on her skirt.” Kathleen eyes twinkled at her. “I think she's disappeared entirely.”

Lily wasn't so sure about that, until she saw the surprise: their pictures and their composition cards. The face that smiled out at Lily from a filmy halo of red-gold hair was somebody Lily would have looked at from far away and thought,
I wish I could look like her
.

“I don't think your parents will have any hesitation about letting you sign on with us when they see this,” Kathleen said. “And after they see you in the modeling show, they're going to realize that you're a natural. I know it.”

She gave Lily's hand a squeeze and moved on to tell one of the boys that he could
not
rip up the jeans he'd picked for the show, but Lily could feel herself slowly deflating like an inner tube going flat.
Mom and Dad aren't going to let me do it if I can't find God in it, and I
know
that
, she thought.
Tonight? Tonight I'm going to pray and pray and pray and tell God I'm sorry I've been ignoring Him, and it'll be all right
.

She did, the minute she'd said good night to Mom, hugged Dad for the final tuck-in, and the lights were out. She didn't grab for the flashlight and an issue of
Seventeen
the way she usually did at that point. She turned over on her stomach and squeezed her eyes shut and prayed, as Art would have put it, “like a mad dog.”

God, I'm sorry I've been so rude to You. I'm as bad as Shad Shifferdecker. No, worse, because he probably doesn't even know any better, but I do. I know how much You love me and want me to figure out who You made me to be, and that's why I know You're in the modeling agency somewhere. Will You please help me find You so I can stay there?

Lily opened her eyes a slit as a thought hit her: What if God didn't want her to stay there? What if, like Mom and Dad said, she wasn't serving Him there? Didn't that make her just as, well,
selfish
as Shad?

But if Shad comes to the show, he'll see that I'm not some bony giraffe with fleas. Then he'll act better, and I'll be the one who did it, which means I've served
.

It sounded so good that Lily almost bounded out of bed to go down and tell Mom and Dad right then. But it would be so much better to tell them
after
Shad had eaten every one of his evil words with a fork—no, make that a shovel. Lily fell asleep with a vision of Shad chowing down on words he'd shoved into his mouth with a bulldozer.

But from the moment she got up the next morning, nothing—
absolutely nothing
—went in the right direction.

“I have a game right after school today,” Mom said as she crammed sandwiches into the brown bags lined up on the counter. “If we win, we go to State.”

“Will you have games next Saturday if you do?” Lily said.

“If we get that far in the tournament.”

“You know you're gonna walk all over everybody,” Art said. “Hey, since State's gonna be at Cedar Hills, pep band is playing for it.”

“So you have to be there too?” Lily said.

Art rolled his eyes at her. “Am I in the pep band?”

“Yeah, but—”

“No, Lily, I
am
the pep band.”

“We really need to work with Art on his self-esteem,” Dad said dryly as he passed through the kitchen. “Has anybody seen my glasses?”

Joe looked up from the homework he was still finishing at the kitchen table and lowered his eyebrows. “I wish I was in the pep band. No, I wish I was on the team—the water boy, anything! Man, I don't
want
to go to some fashion show!”

“Nobody's asking you to!” Lily said. “I wouldn't want you there if you paid me to let you.”

“Huh?” Joe said.

“Lily. Blotchy,” Mom said. “And, Joe, don't get your boxers in a bunch, okay, pal? You don't have to go to the fashion show. You'd actually have to comb your hair, and we all know that isn't going to happen.”

“It's not a fashion show,” Lily said. “It's a modeling show.”

“For wannabe models,” Art said. “Which one's my lunch, Mom?”

“I hope it's the one with the arsenic in it,” Lily said, and she snatched up her backpack and stormed out the back door.

“Does this mean I don't have to walk with her today?” she heard Joe say as the screen door slammed. “She's always telling me to hold my shoulders straight and walk like I look good . . .”

Lily was glad she didn't hear the rest. In fact, all she
could
hear were her own thoughts:
It doesn't matter. I just have to get Shad there. I just have to get Shad there
.

But about the middle of the morning, when they were just getting into the geography lesson, Lily got a note from the office that erased even that hope.

It was from Kathleen:

Good news, Lily! We have the Cedar Hills Middle School auditorium for our show next Saturday afternoon, thanks to you and your mother! I called her this morning, and she was a great help. I wanted you to be the first to know. I'll see you for our last rehearsal Tuesday.

Kathleen

Lily didn't take the time to notice how perfect Kathleen's handwriting was or even to try to imitate it on her geography worksheet.

She just crumpled the note into a ball and dropped it into the trash can when she went to the pencil sharpener.

She was on her way back to her seat when she felt someone tug at the bottom of her sweater. She thought it was probably Shad, and she was about to abandon poise and snatch it away from him, but when she looked down, she saw it was Kresha Ragina looking shyly back up at her from beneath her tumble of hair.

“No trouble?” she whispered to Lily.

“What?” Lily whispered back.

“Trouble . . . from de office?”

She pointed to the trash can. Lily shook her head.

“No trouble,” she answered. “It was just a note from somebody.”

Kresha's face lit up like a little sun. “Oh, that's good,” she said. “You always so happy, you know? I see you sad, I think,
Oh no. Lee-lee has trouble
. But no?”