Too Pretty to Die Read Free

out those lines between your brows?”
    Lines ?
    “What lines?” Instinctively, my fingers went up to poke the terrain north of the bridge of my nose.
    “The ones you’ve had since high school, Andy.” She sighed and smoothed the lapels of her 1940s style jacket, armed with shoulder pads that had the wingspan of a 747. “You always scrunch up your brow when you contemplate something, and it’s given you premature creases.” She sighed again, agitated, “You’re doing it right now.”
    I ambled over toward a mirror, as there were several large gilt-framed ones hanging on the velvet-papered walls in Delaney Armstrong’s gargantuan downstairs hall bathroom. The whole mansion was overstuffed and ostentatious enough to look like an old-fashioned bordello (not that I’d ever seen an old-fashioned bordello, but I had been in a strip club once that had red velvet ceilings and chandeliers).
    Did I mention that Delaney was the hostess for this evening’s soiree plugging Dr. Sonja’s miracle cures? And that I’d been tricked into coming by La Femme Janet, who’d invited me out for a friendly “let’s catch up” dinner, only to pull one of her “oops, I nearly forgot, I have to cover this teensy-weensy event for the paper. It’ll just take a sec. Want to go with me?”
    Grrrr.
    She was almost as bad as my subversive Mummy Dearest, and I was far too gullible for my own good. I would never learn, would I?
    I squinted at my reflection, contemplating it so thoroughly my brow was pleated like an accordion. Even when I forced a blank expression, the pleats didn’t erase, not completely.
    Well, shiver my splintered timbers.
    Janet was right.
    I did have a permanent pleat between my eyebrows.
    Why had I never noticed?
    I saw my redheaded chum smile in the silvered glass as she showed off pearly whites that belied her own fortuitous upbringing: we’d both attended the Hockaday School for Girls, though Janet had been ahead of me by a few years. Still, she’d been a rebel in her own right, and I had admired her for it, more so when I’d committed my own heinous act of rebellion (namely, skipping out on my cotillion).
    “Maybe I like my lines,” I grumbled, and I wanted to mean it, even if I didn’t feel the sentiment wholeheartedly. Did frowning make wrinkles worse? I wondered, and turned my back on the mirror.
    “You like your lines?” Janet laughed. “C’mon, sweetie, don’t lie to me. No woman in her right mind wants to look like a Shar Pei.”
    What about left-minded women ? I wanted to ask, but instead said, “There’s nothing wrong with growing older naturally.”
    So long as my wrinkles didn’t bother my boyfriend, Brian Malone. At least, I assumed he didn’t mind that I wasn’t as crinkle-free as polyester. But if he did—if he was that superficial, which he wasn’t—he wouldn’t be worth it, would he?
    “It doesn’t matter anyway. I’d never shoot up my creases with sheep poop,” I declared, and Janet crossed her arms over her brass-buttoned chest, looking skeptical.
    “Doesn’t hitting forty scare you, Andy?”
    Forty ?
    Hello? I had nine more years to worry about that. Though Janet was closer still, possibly the cause behind her sudden interest in Dr. Sonja’s crease-eradicating potions.
    “How does the saying go? That getting old is better than the alternative,” I responded, in lieu of a real answer.
    “Tell that to all the teenage girls who are already getting peels and Botox to stop the lines they haven’t even earned yet,” Janet said with an arch of sculpted eyebrows, and I shook my head at how absurd that sounded.
    Okay, so it was trendy for teenagers to have antiwrinkle gunk injected into their faces as “preventive” measures (’cuz, God forbid, they should live past thirty and develop crow’s-feet). So plenty of society matrons in my mother’s crowd threw Pretty Parties where Dr. Sonja came armed with her syringes and filled their faces with concoctions made from human