Read Gorgeous for Free Online Page B

feature on the new teen. All types, open call. Monday, May nineteenth, ten a.m. to one p.m.’
    “Then the address and all that. What do you say?” Jenny looked at us, full of gung-ho enthusiasm. “You two are definitely edgy but clean-cut!”
    “We are?” Roxie asked dubiously.
    “Compared to how I was at your age, hell, yeah,” Jenny said, and laughed. She propped her knees up on the table and shook her head. “At least clean-cut. And edgy is easy: all in the clothes.”
    “Modeling?” I said. “Not me, obviously.”
    “But you’re exactly the type,” Jenny said. She leaned forward to get a closer look.
    I ducked my head and said, “I’m not.”
    “Oh, come on, Allison,” Roxie begged. “You’re my right-handed man. Let’s just go. Gotta be better than school, right?”
    “Well, if it’s okay with your mom,” Jenny offered, getting up to put away the cereal boxes, “I can drive you girls to the train tomorrow morning.”
    “I’ll ask,” I lied.
    Roxie and I went back up to her room, and over the course of the day, I gave in little by little. I didn’t put up that much of a fight, if I’m honest. I gave in when she said I could just go and hang out with her. I didn’t have to get my picture taken at all if I didn’t want to, and anyway, wouldn’t it be better than being at school?
    Honestly, there was no possible argument against that.
    But I knew there was no way my parents would ever let me cut school to go with Roxie Green to have her picture taken. No matter how much my parents say it’s important to stand by your friends, they don’t completely mean it. Like, Mom and Jade’s mom only smile tightly when they see each other now. They used to sit on a park bench and totally gossip all summer when we were little. So I knew I’d never win that argument on the merits. Anyway, they had been saying for my whole life that I should be less argumentative.
    That’s why I decided not to have the argument.
    Also, they were having enough arguments without me. Since I hadn’t gotten the baby monitor out of the study, I listened in when they were whispering at each other Sunday night. I couldn’t hear the whole thing, but it was definitely about money. Mom was saying, “I’ve got it under control, Jed,” and “We really don’t need the entire neighborhood buzzing about our business”; he kept murmuring to her, too, lots that I couldn’t hear, but what I did hear him say was, “I just think it’s inappropriate to be spending that kind of money right now on a party for an eighth-grade graduation. It’s obscene! And we can’t, Claire. We can’t.”
    “Don’t say we can’t,” she snarled. “I can certainly—”
    “She’s canceling,” he said. “It’s done.”
    Then they were back to whispering, but that was enough. Obviously they were making Phoebe cancel her graduation party, poor thing. I wondered how Phoebe would deal.
    Knowing her, she would just somehow turn it to her advantage and become even more popular.
    Roxie texted me as I was drifting off to sleep that night that she had told her mother I had to drop off something first period and then they could pick me up at the corner down from school to go to the train. I texted back OK, then placed my phone beside the baby monitor on my nightstand and stared at both things without blinking until my eyes burned.
    I went to sleep to the lullaby of my parents’ whispered arguments, and woke up before dawn, dreading the day.

6
    I GUESS I WAS KIND OF a wreck in the morning waiting for the bus, because Quinn asked what was wrong with me in a way that made me think she somehow knew what I was planning to do. I swore her to secrecy and told her.
    “You’re cutting school?”
    “Just this once,” I explained.
    “Why? Perversity?”
    “Maybe,” I said. “If I knew what that word meant, I would tell you if that’s the reason.”
    Quinn rolled her eyes. “It’s like, being bad just for the sake of being bad.”
    “Oh,” I