The Chic Shall Inherit the Earth Read Free

an e-mail as soon as I got back to our room, I decided. Maybe it had just never occurred to him.
    After we’d gone all around the circle, skipping over the crew guys, who never said a word when they came, Gillian played while we belted out her current favorite praise song.
    “I love listening to you sing that,” I told Shani as we collected our handbags. “I can’t believe they didn’t snap you up when you auditioned for the chorus.”
    “I’m not a chorus type,” she admitted. “I’m a soloist, and that wasn’t what they were looking for. I’m okay with it. I’d rather sing with my friends, anyway, than have a whole bunch of people staring at me.”
    “I hear ya. Especially since you gotta believe they’d be thinking of… you know.”
    The prince
. He was like Brett’s hangers-on, only invisible. Everywhere Shani went, the story of the girl who had turned down the Lion Throne of Yasir went, too. You could ignore it, but you just couldn’t shake it.
    “Who’s coming to Starbucks?” Carly asked.
    It was a couple of blocks’ walk down one of San Francisco’s steeper hills, which is why I could knock back an entire grande-with-whip mocha and suffer no ill effects from the calories. The climb back up the hill to the school wiped them out as if they had never been.
    As we crowded out the double front doors and onto the stone steps that led down to the school’s gravel drive, Vanessa Talbot passed us on the way in. The limo she’d just climbed out of bowled away toward the gates, and she tugged her Furla shoulder bag higher and swung an Elie Tahari shopping bag onto the other arm.
    “Vanessa’s been out shopping alone?” I murmured to Carly. “Is that even possible? How can she function with no one to fetch her coffee and hold her bag while she tries things on?”
    Carly coughed to cover up a giggle. Sorry about the catty remarks. But Vanessa Talbot is a sore point with me, after what she did to me last year.
    “Finished praying for the night?” she asked sweetly as she passed us.
    “Yes.” Gillian’s reply was sarcasm-free. Sometimes that is the only way to deal with nastiness. “Unless you want us to put in a good word for you.”
    Vanessa rolled her eyes. “Like I’d ever need anything from you losers. How does it feel to be on the outside again, looking in?”
    Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something as the door swung shut on the last word.
    “What?” Carly said. “It’s too late for that snappy comeback I see on the tip of your tongue.”
    “Did you see that?” I wagged a thumb over my shoulder as we walked down the drive toward the wrought-iron gates, where, sure enough, a photographer lounged in a beat-up subcompact, his telephoto lens propped on the open window frame. One or more were always there, trying to catch a thousand-dollar shot of one of the celebrity offspring or children of minor royalty like Vanessa. “Vanessa was wearing Apple Bottoms jeans.”
    Carly swung around to look at the front door, but of course the other girl was long gone. “Impossible. You must have been hallucinating.”
    “The mushrooms in the soup at supper were morels, not anything stronger,” I retorted. “I know my jeans, and that girl was not wearing her usual custom Stella McCartneys.”
    “She has been packing on the pounds,” Brett said as we headed down the hill. “But she always was too skinny.”
    Shani gave him a look. “Everyone knows that the camera puts twenty-five pounds on you. She’s photographed all the time. Of course she’s going to be skinny. If she were bigger than a size zero, she’d look like a Dumpster on SeenOn-dot-com.”
    “Whatever.” Brett obviously thought of body mass in terms of how much torque a person could put on an oar, not how they looked in front of a camera. “She just looks healthier with a few extra on her, that’s all.”
    Healthy
wasn’t the word for it. She hadn’t just been wearing Apple Bottoms. That babydoll top wasn’t the norm for