The Pretty App (20 page)

Blake Dawkins

By Nina Carlyle

Excerpted from TeensBlogToo.com

Blake Dawkins is not who she’s pretending to be. This whole “new chance to show I’m good” thing? It’s manufactured, just like her perfectly plucked eyebrows.

It’s time someone showed you the real Blake Dawkins, the one who torments the less fortunate members of the high school social strata, the one who only looks out for herself, the one who has escaped any repercussions for her behavior (besides everyone in our school hating her guts except for her two evil friends) because her father runs the town and her
uncle is the principal of our school. Blake Dawkins wants a new chance? I say it’s too late.

FACT: Blake Dawkins cheated on her first love, Xander Knight, with his best friend and teammate, Woody Ames.

FACT: When she was fourteen, Blake called me “the fat slob on a sled,” plunging me into years of insecurity and image issues.

FACT: During the Pretty App contest, Blake and her two best friends created an Ugly Page to torment an innocent Harrison High School student.

Just thought all of you should know exactly who you’re voting for.

BLAKE DAWKINS IS A MONSTER.

I
spent the early part of the morning texting with Joanna and Jolene, letting them console me about Nina’s post, wishing everything they said about it not being a big deal was true. But I knew it wasn’t. By nine, Nina’s
TeensBlogToo
post had circulated the internet like a bad cold. There were 15,043 retweets on Twitter alone. Reality show viewers from South Bend to South Beach reblogged and commented en masse on the article, calling me a liar and a cheat, and saying I never deserved to be in the contest in the first place.

The worst part was how right they were. Even I felt horrified when I read over the things I’d done—and I was the one who had done them. What was wrong with me?

I sat in the bedroom I’d been assigned to in the east wing of the mansion with Amy and Charisse. Three four-poster beds with way too many plush pillows lined the
walls. The window was cracked and fresh air filtered into the room along with twittering sounds from the birds that jumped from branch to branch on a massive oak tree. On the mauve carpet, our suitcases were splayed open with underwear, bras, leggings, and makeup falling out of them like afterthoughts. I sat in front of one of the three laptops and kept my back to Amy and Charisse while I scrolled through the comments on Nina’s post:

Blake Dawkins sounds ugly on the inside. That alone should get her kicked off tonight.

This girl sounds like a total nightmare. Thanks, Nina, for showing us the real Blake Dawkins.

So typical. A girl who’s only acting nice to win. Can’t wait to vote against her tonight.

Who does sh*t like that? Bitch!

I didn’t need Lindsay to tell me I couldn’t survive a PR fiasco like Nina’s post. Tears spilled over my cheeks as I stared at the computer. I didn’t want Amy and Charisse to know I was crying—and there were cameras posted in two corners of our bedroom that could catch everything. But then my shoulders started shaking, and all I could think was:
Serves you right for everything you’ve done, Blake. Serves. You. Right.

I dug into my suitcase to find Nic’s letter—the one she said to save for when I really needed it. But then I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Blake?” Amy asked gently.

I swiped my tears away and turned to see her sweet face. The way she was looking at me with such empathy made me cry even harder. She set down the
Us Weekly
with its headlines speculating Danny Beaton and Pia Alvarez were dating (
IS THE POP PRINCESS PREGNANT WITH BEATON
’
S BABY
?) and rushed to my side. Charisse watched the two of us without emotion, like we were onstage performing a play and she wasn’t interested in the outcome.

Amy knelt next to the chair. “Don’t worry about the stuff they’re saying online,” she said.

“You saw it?” I asked, mortified.

“Some of it,” she admitted. “My friends sent me a few links. But I told them that I’ve spent time with you and that you’re really nice, and to make sure they wrote comments saying stuff like how you weren’t a witch.”

Charisse rolled her eyes behind Amy.

“You did?” I asked. Was she serious?

“Sure I did,” she said. “Just check out Garrett B.’s comment on
TeensBlogToo
.”

I scrolled through the dozens of comments until I found it. Garrett B. wrote:

I happen to know secondhand that Blake Dawkins is a real nice person deserving of another chance. Plus, she has an amazing rack.

Amy reddened. “I didn’t tell him to write the part about your boobs,” she said.

I smiled a little, but then my eye caught the comments below Garrett’s:

The funny thing is that Blake’s the ugliest one there! So now
that we know she’s mean, too, it’s time she gets the boot.

Sayonara, mean girl.

And she walks kinda weird, too.

She’s totally the ugliest!

There were so many times I’d said worse stuff to other Harrison kids, so cavalierly, so utterly unconcerned about how it would make them feel. I was everything Nina had said and more. I tried to look away from the computer, but I couldn’t tear myself from the comments parading down the page.

And how stupid did she sound when she answered that question about the issues facing American teens?

She basically froze and that judge tried to save her. Haha. She’s mean, stupid, and the least pretty person in the contest.

So true! She’s by far the worst looking. Let’s vote the stupid ugly mean girl off!

The irony stared me in the face: I’d spent years tormenting the kids I’d thought were somehow less than me. But all of that time
I
was the freak. I was the monster. The more comments I read, the harder I cried, until Amy could barely hold onto me. “Blake, please, calm down,” she said.

“I’m a monster,” I said, sobbing. I took a breath and tried to calm down, or at least lower my voice. “I blew this
contest. And it was the one thing I thought I had that could redeem me. Now everyone knows the truth about me.”

“You didn’t blow anything,” Amy tried. “It’s not over till it’s over.”

I sniffed back tears, not wanting to admit what I was about to say. “Amy, all those things that girl Nina wrote about me are true.” I fiddled with the thin gold band on my index finger. “You should know the truth about me, too,” I said. Here Amy was defending me to her friends, not knowing everything I’d done.

Amy considered me. Her light blue eyes were rimmed with thick black lashes, and she had a way of looking at you that made you feel like she could really see you. A little while ago, that would’ve made me feel uncomfortable. But now, I prayed she
could
see me, or at least see the somebody I wanted to be.

Amy glanced up at the two cameras positioned in the corners of our bedroom. She angled herself so that she was facing away from them. “Once I stole tampons and candy,” she said in a hushed voice. She tucked a lock of curled blond perfection behind her ear. She looked nervous, like I was going to tell on her or something.

“What kind?” I asked her.

“Tampax Pearl,” she said.

I laughed a little. “I meant the candy,” I said, and then she laughed, too.

“I think Good and Plenty,” she said, “but I forget. I was only fourteen.” She glanced over her shoulder at Charisse, who was busy folding her half-dozen lace thongs into
triangles and rearranging them in her suitcase, and then at the cameras again. She lowered her voice to say, “My family hit on hard times a few years back. My father lost his job, and our food budget meant no coffee, no snacks, and definitely no candy. Quitting candy cold turkey felt like how they describe withdrawal in health class. I swear I had the shakes.”

I smiled at her. But it wasn’t the same. She wasn’t bad like me. She was pure goodness. “Stealing candy isn’t as bad as hurting someone,” I said.

“We all do things we feel bad about,” she said. “And when we do, the only thing to be done is to move forward in a different direction.”

I wanted to believe her, but what if what I’d done was so bad that there was no way to make up for it, no way to redirect my course?

“My mom is sick, Blake,” Amy said in a low voice, “and we don’t have health insurance. Remember how I told you I want the new house part of the prize because I share a room with my sisters? That’s not really why. I don’t care about sleeping in the same room as my sisters. I kind of like it, actually. What’s really going on is that we’re about to lose our house. And I’m scared we’ll all get separated and have to live with different relatives.” Her voice was so quiet I could barely hear her. “I’m telling you this because I trust you,” she said, leveling her light eyes on me. “So tell me: How can everything this girl says about you be true when you’re the only person here who’s shown me kindness? Maybe that girl was writing about an old version of you, but the past is past.”

I looked into Amy’s clear blue eyes, wishing I could fix everything she needed. “Is your mom going to be okay?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t,” Amy said. “I hope so.”

My tears had stopped, but now hers had started. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders. “I hope so, too,” I said, pulling her tight against me. I felt a hollowed-out space within me that was ready to be filled with something different. Everything Amy had said played through my mind on repeat, like each and every word could save me. What if she was right? What if I could start over?

I pulled Amy closer, rubbing her back as she cried. “It’s going to be okay,” I said over and over again, praying my words would come true.

“T
hat’s right, ladies! Roadkill. America’s thirty-second most common cause of automobile accidents is now your number one priority.”

The late-morning California sun bore down on us twelve contestants lined up along Highway 405. Delores fanned herself next to me. Cindy got teary-eyed and said, “The poor creature.” (The cameras weren’t even filming her: That’s just the first thing that came to her mind when she saw the skunk. Maybe animals were her soft spot?)

I was trying not to look at it, but the skunk smell was so strong you couldn’t really pretend it wasn’t there. The whole situation was ridiculous enough to distract me from the awful (and mostly true) things being said about me online. I was trying to focus on everything Amy had said this morning, but it was difficult to remember when I saw how a bunch of Harrison kids had joined in the fun, posting
random pictures of me captioned with the mean things I’d said or done to them since the start of high school. I knew deep down that Amy’s words were true, but why was it so hard to hold on to the truth when bad stuff started happening?

“Squirrels, rabbits, deer, skunks, possum,” the roadkill woman said. Her white-streaked hair was tied back with an actual rubber band, not the kind they make for hair. She wore a blue-gray jumpsuit uniform with
ETTA
stitched above her uniboob. Sun glinted off her aviator shades and the buckles of her combat boots, and she wasn’t smiling.

A cameraman zoomed in on Etta as she waxed on about the safety of handling most forms of roadkill. “Lots of folks in other parts of our fine country actually like to eat roadkill,” she said. “Waste not, want not! Hell, PETA even says right on their website that roadkill is a superior option to the neatly shrink-wrapped plastic packages of meat in the supermarket.”

My stomach turned. She couldn’t be serious.

“But it seems roadkill isn’t good enough for fancy, highfalutin, Los Angelenos,” Etta said as she passed out shovels. “They’d rather eat at Spago.” Etta thrust a heavy wooden shovel in my direction, and I grabbed the handle, trying not to think about what we were about to do.

“And that’s where you ladies come in,” Etta said. Her grin revealed a shiny silver tooth. “Let’s Prettify America!” she bellowed into the camera.

Delores nudged me. “Check out Sabrina,” she said.

I craned my neck to see Sabrina dry heaving dangerously
close to the highway as another cameraman filmed her. Cars whizzed past. Sabrina’s hair blew wildly in the breeze, and she tried to gather it away from her face, but it was so long and luxurious that she couldn’t quite get it all in her grip.

We spent the next few hours in our jean shorts and SBC Network–issued
The Pretty App Live
tank tops (white tanks, hot pink lettering across the chest) shoveling up roadkill and plopping it into the back of a yellow dump truck that drove ahead of us with lights flashing. Earlier that morning, Rich Gibbons had reminded us that America would be watching streaming video of everything we did, and that we should think about presenting ourselves in the very best light to win their votes. Viewers could vote all day, and as many times as they wanted. The voting didn’t cut off until the very last second before they announced the winner. Even though America seemed to hate me, and I was pretty certain I’d get voted off tonight, I still tried to smile for the camera and say upbeat things about the roadkill. Might as well try my best till it was over.

When the camera people went on break (union rules) Mura picked up an animal and said, “This is what America wants?” Then she smiled into an imaginary lens. “I’m going to bring this squirrel home and grill it tonight for dinner,” she said cheerily, like she was doing a commercial. “Roadkill is an excellent option for a low-cost meal high in protein!” We all laughed as she flung the squirrel into the back of the truck.

A few hours and several obsessively thorough showers
later, a limo carried us to a public school in downtown Los Angeles. Mura sat in the back of the limo, breathing into a brown paper bag while Casey and Jessica rubbed her back.

We should have known: the cameras are never off.

While the regular camera crew ate their lunch, one of the assistant producers had whipped out his buyPhone and filmed the whole Mura roadkill-as-what’s-for-dinner episode. The video clip had spread across the internet, along with headlines like
BEAUTY QUEEN EATS ROADKILL
. Someone from her hometown had submitted a photo of Mura holding her two hamsters and captioned it:
ARE THEY NEXT
?

It felt like a war zone online, like if anyone captured a photo or video of you doing something embarrassing or scandalous, they got off on spreading it. I’d spent all of high school reading gossip blogs without thinking twice about what it would feel like to be the celebrity behind the gossip. Now I knew.

“Welcome to Clearview Elementary School,” Marsha said as our limo pulled in front of a gray concrete building. The camera people filmed us lining up single file and passing through a metal detector. They followed us down a long hallway and through an open classroom door. My heart squeezed when I saw the judges. Leo stood between Shilpa and Bradley Searing Jones as the three of them watched Danny Beaton sing his new song, “Girl, You Amaze Me,” a cappella for a classroom of rapt eight-year-olds. Carolina leaned against a blackboard with arithmetic scrawled in yellow chalk. Leo examined his fingernails, looking bored out of his mind. I had no idea he’d be here,
and now I was a thousand times more nervous than before. The emotion racing through me from the events of the last twenty-four hours felt like way more than I could handle, but I had to. I didn’t want to live up to Marsha’s
train wreck
label. I was the one who wanted a career in Hollywood, and I knew I could do this.

I took a breath, and when Danny finished, I smiled and applauded along with everyone else as the cameras scanned the twelve of us contestants.

Pia appeared from behind an easel. “Here are the
Pretty App Live
contestants now!” she said, grinning. Leo’s head snapped in my direction. His hair was wavier than usual and a little mussed, like he’d spent the morning at the beach. He watched us file into the classroom, his eyes never leaving me. His presence felt like a force, like I was being pulled in his direction and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

“Good afternoon, contestants,” Pia said, tucking a golden-brown strand of hair behind her ear. M&M-size diamonds dotted her earlobes. (Probably another gift from a famous jewelry designer.) “Please meet Mrs. Cesarz’s third-grade class.” Pia wore a plaid jumper that looked like a private-school uniform and seemed weirdly out of place. Most of the kids wore ripped jeans, T-shirts, and beat-up sneakers or flip-flops. “Today, you’ll be painting a mural over the vandalism that the school endured last week,” Pia said, her voice dipping into
this is super serious
mode. “The mural will represent hope, forgiveness, and all the ways
The Pretty App Live
is prettifying America!”

We all smiled at the cameras and the children, who looked much less excited about us than they had about Danny Beaton.

Pia led us outside and the judges followed. There was a smudged yellow-chalk mirror image of 22 + 22 = 44 on the back of Carolina’s vest from where she’d been leaning against the chalkboard. Marsha raced over and tried to beat it off, and Carolina snapped, “Be careful! It’s cashmere!” I tried not to notice how close Leo was standing to me, but I couldn’t help it. His nearness felt like warmth on my skin.

“Our thanks to Benjamin Moore Paints for their generous donation,” Pia said to the camera, gesturing to the dozen or so cans of paint that lined the sidewalk. Black spray-painted letters spelled racist words on the wall of the school. The third graders looked anxious, seeming embarrassed that we were seeing it. One little girl started to cry, and Amy went to her side. “It’s okay,” Amy said, kneeling so that she was at the girl’s level. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Cara,” the girl said.

“I babysit a little girl named Cara back home,” Amy said, and the girl grinned. “You do?” she asked. Amy nodded, and the camera caught her giving the little girl a hug. Of course Amy was good with children. No surprise there.

Marsha passed out paintbrushes. I watched her hand one to Leo, who thanked her. He met my glance just for a breath and then busied himself examining his paintbrush.

“I think we should paint a rainbow,” Charisse said. “Do you kids like rainbows?”

I rolled my eyes. Of course they liked rainbows. Who didn’t?

“Or puppies,” Cindy said, sidling next to Charisse like they were a team. Sabrina stood next to me, looking pissed.

“Or cutesy little babies,” I said. “C’mon, ladies! Have some imagination. I say we do a rock-and-roll scene. What do you kids think?”

The third graders cheered. “Like Metallica!” a little boy shouted. “My dad listens to them.”

“Or Yanni,” another girl said.

“Um,
no
,” Sabrina said to the girl.

The kids flocked around us and started shouting their ideas for a rock-and-roll mural. Cindy and Charisse looked annoyed, but Amy was grinning. “Whatever makes you kids happy,” she said, moving close to Sabrina and me with a smile that said
I don’t care that you called me a Manure-Shoveling Cowgirl, Sabrina. We’re all in this for the sake of the children.

I tried to blend in with the kids, using my paintbrush in broad strokes and pretending I didn’t care when a little girl painted a black streak along my brand-new AG jeans. “Sorry!” she said, and I tried to smile forgiveness through clenched teeth. Children were not my strong suit.

“Can I make a butterfly?” a little boy asked me.

“Um, this is sort of an indoor scene,” I said, working with my brush to make a microphone stand.

“So?” the little boy asked.

The camera was filming both of us.

“Butterflies don’t usually hang out inside,” I said,
forcing a smile. I used my most gentle voice, but the boy suddenly looked like he was going to cry. America hated me enough already: I could
not
make a little boy cry. “But maybe your butterfly flew in through a door to see the concert,” I said. A laugh sounded next to me and I turned to see Leo. I ignored him, pouring my attention back onto the little boy. “Want me to help you?” I asked, and the boy nodded. We worked together for a few minutes, outlining the wings and talking about different kinds of butterflies. As far as children went, he was actually pretty cute. Leo finally left to work somewhere else, and I was almost starting to enjoy myself when I heard Sabrina growl, “What the hell?”

I followed the direction of her paintbrush to see Delores painting a near-perfect picture of James Hetfield, the lead singer of Metallica. His black T-shirt read
METALLICA
in white letters, and Delores was in the process of giving him light blue jeans with rips on the knees. The portrayal was so accurate it could’ve appeared on his
Wikipedia
page.

“Incredible,” Leo said softly.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up at the sound of his voice. I hadn’t realized he was close again. I turned to face him. Nearly everyone had flocked to watch Delores, and we were standing by ourselves. “Please, Leo,” I said. “Don’t make this harder.”

I smelled his perfect boy smell and let my eyes fall on him. I didn’t want to get emotional on camera—I’d done that enough already—but just being there with him and hearing his voice made me choke up. Warm California air
stirred between us as I tried to breathe. A lone child tottered past to get closer to Delores.

Leo reached down and turned off his microphone, and then so did I.

“I’m not trying to make anything harder,” he said. His dark blue shirt was untucked and a streak of white paint raced along his jaw like a lightning bolt. “I’m just trying to talk to you.” His voice went so low I could barely hear him. “
I’m just trying to tell you that everything that happened between us was real
.”

My heart quickened. His words felt like everything I’d ever needed to hear, and for a split second I worried I’d made them up. Hot tears stung my eyes as I took a step away from him. “Then why did you do this to me?” I asked, the words coming out softer than I meant them to. I wanted to be strong: I wanted to tell him that what he’d done wasn’t okay.

“It was a mistake,” Leo said, closing the distance between us. I wanted to lean my head against his chest and feel him fold his arms around me. I wanted to tilt my chin and let him kiss me. But I couldn’t. Not in front of everyone, and not with everything that had happened. “I’ve wanted to explain this to you, Blake, you have to believe me. But it’s not like I can do anything over the phone—I can’t text, I can’t call. Public can easily access my phone,” Leo said quickly, keeping track of where the cameras were.

I opened my mouth to say something, but Leo wasn’t finished. “I went to Harrison as part of a job,” he said, his
voice urgent, like he was going to tell me this no matter what. “I’m nineteen, but I never actually graduated high school, so it was easy to get in as long as I had an address in the school district. I was supposed to watch Audrey, to keep her from doing what she’d done last time, which was basically almost bring Public down.” He glanced around us, and then dropped his voice again. “That was the big priority. But you were there, too, and they wanted me to make sure you’d compete in the contest after your dad suggested that it would be in ‘everyone’s best interests’ for you to make the finals. Public wants him happy. I’m sure you know that.” Leo lifted a hand like he wanted to touch me, to hold me, to make sure I understood what he was telling me. Instead, he dropped his hand to his jeans and stared at me like maybe, if he wished it hard enough, I would somehow magically be okay with his explanation.

But I wasn’t.

“My dad fixed the contest. And you set me up,” I said.

“It’s not like that.”

“It’s exactly like that.”

“Okay,” Leo said, stepping the tiniest bit closer. “Maybe it is like that. But I didn’t know you when I signed up for this. I thought it was going to be like any other job.”