Where It Began

Then someone named Rolf, who is nevertheless Japanese and wearing extremely tight leather pants, teaches me how girls who have forty-five minutes to blow-dry their bangs, blow-dry their bangs.

And while we’re at it, why not drag me someplace to get my eyelashes dyed in a process that creates so much by way of stinging fumes that I am seriously worried I’m going to be a gorgeous blind girl?

Soon a color consultant with an actual office and a receptionist and everything, as if picking out colors were an actual profession, gets all excited about the perfect color of my now slightly fried eyelashes.

My entire wardrobe, on the other hand, has to go. All this time, I have been recklessly dressing without regard to my season. All those spring T-shirts and summer sweats when I was really an autumn. No wonder I looked like crap. Only now I have to wear a bunch of new stuff that is slightly orange.

“Copper!” the color consultant says.

Oh.

And I can’t get just any old new slightly orange stuff that I happen to like. No, I have to get a personal style. And I have to get one quick before they do my makeup so my face won’t get done in some clashing style that is stylistically hostile to the personally stylish, autumnal skirts I am about to buy to show off my improved stylish legs.

The style consultant, after foisting off a style on me that she keeps describing to Vivian as “kicky,” is all agog over the mother-daughter aspect of turning me into a person my mom can stand to look at. This gives her the overwhelming urge to find Vivian her own kicky yet sophisticated style so we can match. But Vivian is not about to chuck all of her clothes, even if it would enhance my personal stylishness to have a matching mother.

“No,” Vivian says in this pseudo-motherly, pseudo-wisewoman, totally fake voice. “I’ve had my turn and now it’s Gabby’s turn.”

“Your maman is magnifique!” the color lady says in an accent I imagine her practicing for hours on end while standing in front of the mirror in her color-coordinated high-rise condo on Wilshire Boulevard. “What a rite de passage for you, little one.”

By which I figure she has to mean something other than dyeing almost every hair on my body and becoming kicky, since it is hard to extract some big spiritual thing from hair dye. Vivian meanwhile is patting me on the hand and getting off on whose turn it is.

My turn for what?

To turn out like her, mother of a kid who needs an army of exterior decorators?

To live in Bel Air in a shabby house on stilts that is probably going to slide all the way down to Sunset Boulevard the next time the earth quakes or we get a really big rain?

To hang with some guy like my dad who can’t even make it from the bedroom to the den if there isn’t a pitcher of margaritas waiting for him on his desk by way of motivation, and who doesn’t even seem to like her all that much?

Oh yeah, sign me up for that.

The thing is, as totally fake as I know it all is, and as much as I don’t want to turn into some pseudo-pretty grown-up stuck in Three B Hell, I look really good. My eyes look huge and sleepy and my mouth is big in a good way, even if it is slightly orange. My eyelashes look like the lush tips of mink paintbrushes.

And the hair: It doesn’t even feel like hair. It feels like a silky rabbit. Somehow the hair-dye guru has managed to make it look as if light is radiating from my head, like a saint in a medieval painting.

And even if none of the carbs I am now supposed to forget even exist actually regroup at their intended location, a couple of hours at Victoria’s Secret and everything I have that can possibly be pushed up is pushed up and defying the minimal gravitational force that affects such small mass.

The only downside beyond feeling totally fake is that I am embarrassed that everyone will think that I’m trying too hard and I’m a deeply superficial person who only cares about the way she looks. I am embarrassed to walk around outside in case anybody sees me. Not that it isn’t embarrassing enough inside my own house. How totally crazed Vivian is to get me back to Winston so people can see her handiwork and how she keeps carrying on about the New You.

Meaning the New Me.

XI

THEN, AT THE END OF AUGUST, LISA AND ANITA GET home from their uplifting summers of fun that will look great on a college application, and Lisa starts phoning me.

I kind of avoid her phone calls until I can figure out how I feel about looking like someone else, but eventually I answer my cell phone when she calls from a blocked number, and I am trapped into girlie coffee in Westwood.

And here’s the thing: When I walk into Starbucks, Lisa and Anita look up—and then they look down again.

I’m not completely sure if my friends not recognizing me is a good thing or a bad thing, but I am sort of fixated on the bad thing aspect of it, thinking about turning around and leaving fast if I can just come up with a not too obvious way to do it, when Lisa yells.

Everybody looks up from their laptops and their lattes and the people they’re flirting with to stare at me. People no doubt come out of the bathroom to stare at me.

“Gabby, you look so different!” Lisa hurls her arms around me in some kind of a frenzy. All I want to do is to sit down and be inconspicuous.

“You look really, really good,” Anita says.

“You do,” says Lisa. “Not that you didn’t look good before.”

“You know what I mean,” says Anita. “How did you get your hair to even do that?”

They both sit there googly-eyed, staring at the New Me and I basically want to go into the bathroom and rip my face off, or more accurately, peel it off.

But I change the subject instead. “How was camp?”

Lisa had been on a religious Outward Bound where she learned how to survive if she ever gets stranded in Wisconsin with only dehydrated stew, a toothbrush, and a pocket Bible. She met a lot of boys with great tans and six-packs but, given that she was somewhat streaked with dirt and smelled sort of funky the whole time, she was not exactly ripe for romance.

“And then there’s Huey, of course,” she says, looking down.

All right. She has been hanging out with Huey, making the discreet, religious version of goo-goo eyes and getting her picture taken maybe two dozen times a day ever since seventh grade, the pictures lined up chronologically and perfectly cropped in little plastic albums that Huey, besotted and creepily well organized, buys by the truckload at Rite Aid and hauls to school to show her every time he fills a new one. But given that she would appear to be completely and u

Anita had volunteered to help out orphan children in New Delhi all summer where she lived with her grandma and learned once again that (1) she is Indian, and (2) things are a lot better back in L.A.

“But,” she says, sipping her mocha Frappuccino, “I met someone.”

Tragically, he is an extremely cute French guy from Marseilles who was in India emulating Mother Theresa because he is thinking about becoming a priest, which makes the chance of his taking up with an underaged Hindu girl somewhat remote. Which is especially a

“They wouldn’t even let me go to a kickback at Derek Dash Sharma’s house at four o’clock in the afternoon yesterday. Because his mother wasn’t home, if you please. But look at you,” Anita says. “You look like a completely different person! Also more confident. With very good hair.”