Too Pretty to Die Read Free Page A

placenta and cow fat. I’d been raised in a world where middle-aged wives were routinely dumped for newer models, so I could understand harboring that kind of fear.
    But I was neither a self-conscious teenager nor a youth-obsessed society matron; and, though I’d recently hit thirty-one and had the creases to show for it, I was not about to have foreign substances shot beneath my skin so I could purportedly shed a few years.
    Did anyone really know what that goo would do in time? Maybe it would harden like concrete and turn once-human faces to statues.
    Besides, I liked to think when I expressed an emotion, my facial muscles followed suit. I knew too many women who smiled and looked as numb as movie zombies.
    Hello ? Can you say ‘Cher’?
    Or this evening’s hostess, Delaney Armstrong, a fellow prep school alum from the Hockaday School for Girls. She’d never been beautiful in the classic sense, but bright-eyed and energetic: the kind of girl who’d taken charge of things, like pep rallies or dances or club meetings. Delaney’s square-jawed features probably would’ve aged very attractively. Only Delaney hadn’t allowed for growing old naturally. She’d had so much dermabrasion, peels, and Botox that her entire face appeared frozen and vaguely swollen. Her once nut-brown hair had been dyed pale blond and highlighted to within an inch of its life. Her lips looked like someone had inflated them with a tire pump.
    I’m not sure whose idea of beautiful that was.
    Perhaps Delaney’s hubby liked having a wife who could double for a wax statue at Madame Tussaud’s. If I ever met the man, I might be tempted to ask.
    “Dr. Sonja’s giving everyone freebies,” my insistent pal, Janet Graham, tried again, as if that would entice me. “She wants to get everyone good and hooked, so they’ll keep running back to her office for more.”
    “Pass,” I told her.
    I had no intention of letting Dr. Sonja fill up my cracks with spackle made from squid intestines, not even if it was on her dime.
    The whole fast-food mentality of the anti-aging business creeped me out immensely.
    The hip and trendy cosmetic dermo had even opened up several Pretty Place clinics in various upscale shopping malls around the city. So, after you bought your size two, low-rise, boot-cut jeans at the Gap and picked up a salad to-go from La Madeleine, you could pop into The Pretty Place for wrinkle shots and a brow wax.
    How convenient.
    “You’re really not curious to try a little?” Janet bugged me, shrugging when I said most assuredly, “No.”
    “Well, I’m thinking of having my lips done,” she said, toddling over to the nearest mirror on stiletto heels and then proceeding to pout at her reflection, resembling a demented fish more than Angelina Jolie. “What d’you say, Andy? Could I use a little plumping?”
    “Pillows should be plumped, not lips,” I groused. Janet looked perfectly fine to me. She’d always had her own sense of style, never playing to what was trendy or popular. So what had gotten into her? Why would she suddenly want to look as artificial as the Park Cities socialites she wrote about?
    “You can say that, Andy, ’cuz you’ve got good lips. Mine are as thin as a bird’s.”
    “I didn’t know birds had lips.”
    Janet nudged me. “Stop it, Andy. I’m serious.”
    “You can’t be,” I said, because . . . well, she couldn’t be. It was so not like Janet Graham to fret over less-than-ripe lips. She was more apt to get worked up over sexism or racism, or drivers on Central Expressway who talked on their cell phones and applied mascara while weaving from lane to lane. So why was she suddenly so concerned about appearance?
    “I’m dead serious,” she assured me, squirming uncharacteristically. “What’s so wrong with wanting a sexy mouth?”
    I wished I didn’t believe her, but I did.
    She had the most earnest look on her face, maybe even a little sad, like a woman who was questioning her self-worth and