Gorgeous Read Free

for a smile from her. It was just a fact of her life.
    I stood up and said I had to go. Nobody objected. I walked around Roxie’s house down to the street and toward home, answering Jade’s next message
    where r u?
    by texting back
    hell.
    Phone in hand, I passed three other houses, all well tended, all perfect-looking. This is where I live, I was thinking. Right here in hell. Right here, where if you are not gorgeous, you are nobody.
    U OK? Jade texted back.
    I don’t even exist .
    ??? was all she responded.
    Sorry, I typed with my thumbs. Weird attack. I’m dandy.
    I stuck my phone back in my pocket. It was running out of power anyway, the piece of crap. I trudged home, feeling completely nonexistent, which is a much heavier sensation than it sounds like. I would give anything, I muttered to myself (or at least I thought it was just to myself), to be somebody .

2
    A FTER SUCCESSFULLY DODGING my nosy, annoying family by barricading myself in my room, I read for a while, cleaned out my desk, scrubbed the plunger for my costume in the morning, then found the old baby monitor Quinn had asked me about because she needed it for some project she was doing. It was on the top shelf of my closet. I dropped it on her mess of a desk while she was downstairs practicing piano.
    I spent ten minutes doing my normal half-decent minimum on the night’s homework, and then tried to find something to watch on TV. Nothing. Jade texted me ( we have 2 talk). Ugh. I held the phone in my hand for a full minute, gearing up for the onslaught, trying to think how to minimize the problem.
    Instead I turned off my phone. I knew she’d be way mad and there’d be a price to pay in the morning, but I just couldn’t deal right then. What I really wanted was oblivion, so I crawled into bed and flipped through one of Phoebe’s ridiculous fashion magazines. I took half a quiz about Does He Like You? (he didn’t; shocking!), learned the diet secrets of an actress I’d never heard of (drink lots of water; fascinating!), and eventually bored myself into a stupor deep enough to knock myself unconscious.
    I thought I had woken up a few hours later, but maybe I was still dreaming, because there on the couch in my room was the devil, his long legs crossed, his long arms crossed, and his green eyes not crossed, but rather focused on me with only the slightest expression of impatience.
    Not that I believe in the devil. Obviously. I don’t believe in anything.
    It was just a dream.
    It must have been a dream.
    He leaned back against the seat cushions and said, “So, you’d give anything for your sister Phoebe’s metabolism?”
    “What are you talking about?” I asked him.
    “You called this meeting,” he said.
    I normally have no problem arguing, but I was a little off my game because of still trying to focus my eyes properly, so what I asked (instead of, for instance, Who are you? or What the hell are you doing in my room in the middle of the night?) was, “When?”
    “Well, today you said you’d give anything to be ‘somebody.’ Two days ago, before you burned the waffles, you told your younger sister, Phoebe, that you would give anything for her metabolism.”
    “She burned the waffles, not me,” I argued, kind of missing the main point, but I honestly cannot stand getting blamed for Phoebe’s screwups, which I always do. And the burned waffles were all her.
    “Okay,” the devil conceded.
    “And I was kidding,” I added.
    “Were you?” He arched his eyebrows. He barely blinked his green eyes, looking at me.
    “Yes!” I said. “I swear, I was completely kidding!”
    “Alas,” he said, but made no move to go.
    “Sorry to waste your time,” I added.
    He didn’t budge.
    I needed to go to the bathroom, but I was only wearing a thin T-shirt and boxers. Even though I was dreaming him, and I kind of knew it even in the dream, I didn’t think I should, like, expose myself.
    To the devil.
    Who I was dreaming.
    I pulled the blankets up