Here's Lily!

Chapter One

Lily straightened up and drove her vivid blue eyes into Shad.

"I need for you to quit making fun of my hair," she said through her gritted teeth. She always gritted her teeth when she talked to Shad Shifferdecker.

"Why can't you ever just say `shut up'?" Shad asked. "Why do you always have to sound like a counselor or something?"

Lily didn't know what a counselor sounded like. She'd never been to one. If Shad had, it hadn't helped much as far as she was concerned. He was still rude.

"I'm just being polite," Lily answered.

Leo blinked his enormous gray eyes at Shad. "Shad, can you say `polite'?"

"Shut up," Shad said and gave Leo a shove that landed him up against Daniel Tibbetts, his other partner in seeing how hateful a sixth-grade boy can be to a sixth-grade girl.

Just then Ms. Gooch appeared at the head of the line, next to the water fountain, and held up her right hand. Hands shot up down the line as mouths closed and most everybody craned their necks to see her. Ms. Gooch was almost shorter than Lily.

"All right, people." Lily was glad she didn't call them "boys and girls" the way the librarian did. "We're going to split up now. Boys will come with me-girls will go into the library."

"How come?" Shad blurted out, as usual.

"The girls are going to a grooming workshop," Ms. Gooch said. She raised an eyebrow-because Ms. Gooch could say more with one black eyebrow than most people could with a whole sentence. "Did you want to go with the girls and learn how to fix your hair and have great skin, Shad? I'm sure they'd love to have you."

No, we would not, Lily wanted to say. But she never blurted out. She just turned to Reni and rolled her eyes.

Reni rolled hers back. That was the thing about best friends, Lily had decided a while back. You could have entire conversations with each other, just by rolling your eyes or saying one key word that sent you both into giggle spasms.

"No way!" Shad bellowed. "I don't want to look like no girl!"

"Any girl," Ms. Gooch said. "All right, ladies-go on to the library. Come back with beauty secrets!"

Lily took off on Reni's heels in the direction of the library. Behind her, she heard Shad say-just loudly enough for her to hear-"That grooming lady better be pretty good if she's gonna do anything with Lily!"

"Yeah, dude!" Leo echoed.

Daniel just snorted.

"Ignore them," Reni whispered to Lily as they pushed through the double doors to the inside of the school. "My mama says when boys say things like that, it means they like you."

"Gross!" Lily wrinkled her nose.

Besides, that was easy for Reni to say. Lily thought Reni was about the cutest girl in the whole sixth grade. She was black (Ms. Gooch said they were supposed to call her "African-American," but Reni said that took too long to say) and her skin was the smooth, rich color of Lily's dad's coffee when he put a couple of drops of milk in it. Mine's more like the milk, without the coffee! Lily thought.

And even though Reni's hair was a hundred times curlier than Lily's naturally frizzy mass of auburn, it was always in little pigtails or braids or something. Her hair was under control, anyway. Lily's brother Art said Lily's hair always looked like enough for thirty-seven people the way it stuck out all over her head.

But most important of all, Reni was as petite as a toy poodle, not tall and leggy like a giraffe. At least, that was the way Lily thought of herself. Even now, as they walked into the library, Lily tripped on the wipe-your-feet mat and plowed into a rolling rack of books. She rolled with it right into Mrs. Blain, the librarian, who said, "Boys and girls, please be careful where you're walking."

It's just girls, Lily wanted to say to her. And I'm so glad. Wouldn't Shad Shifferdecker have had something to say about that little move?

Reni steered her to a seat in the front row of the half circles of chairs that had been formed in the middle of the library. The chairs faced a woman who busily took brushes and combs and tubes of things out of a classy-looking leather bag and set them on a table. Lily watched her for a minute.

The lady wore her blonde hair short and combed-with-her-fingers, the way all the women did on TV; her nails were long and polished red, and they clacked against the table when she set things down on it. Lily could smell her from the front row-she smelled expensive, like a department store cosmetics counter.

Lily thought about how her mother grabbed lipstick while they were shopping for groceries at Acme and then only put it on when Dad dragged her to some university faculty party. As for having her nails done-high school P.E. teachers didn't have fingernails.

Lily's mind and eyes wandered off to the bookshelves. I'd much rather be finding a book on Indian headdresses, she thought as she looked wistfully at the plastic book covers shining under the lights. Her class was doing reports on Native Americans, and she had a whole bunch of feathers at home that she'd collected from their family's camping trips. Wouldn't it be cool to make an actual headdress-

"May I have your attention please, ladies?"

Reluctantly Lily peeled her eyes off the Indian books and looked at the lady with the long fingernails. She was facing them now, and Lily saw that she had matching lipstick, put on without a smudge, and dainty gold earrings that danced playfully against her cheek. Something about her made Lily tuck her own well-bitten nails under her thighs and wish she'd looked in the mirror before she came in here to make sure she didn't have playground dirt smeared across her forehead.

Nah, she thought. If I did, Shad Shifferdecker would've said something about it.

Besides, the lady had a sparkle in her eyes that made it seem like she could take on Shad Shifferdecker. Lily liked that.

"I'm Kathleen Winfrey," the lady was saying, "and I'm here from the Rutledge Modeling Agency here in Burlington."

An excited murmur went through the girls, followed by a bunch of hands shooting up.

"Well!" Kathleen Winfrey smiled, revealing a row of very white, perfect teeth. Lily sucked in her full lips and hoped her mouth didn't look quite so big.

"Questions already?" Kathleen said. "I've barely started. How about you?"

She pointed to Marcie McCleary who was waving her arm so hard, Lily knew all her rings were going to go flying across the library any second.

"You're from a modeling agency?" Marcie asked breathlessly. "Do you-like-hire models?"

"We hire them, and we train them," Kathleen answered.

"Could we be models?" somebody else asked.

"Is that why you're here-to pick models?"

"Do they do-like-commercials or just fashion shows and stuff?"

"I was at this fashion show at the mall-and this lady came up to my mother and said I could be a model like the ones they had there and-"

"Ladies!" Kathleen interrupted. She laughed in a light, airy kind of way. "Why don't I tell you why I am here, and that will probably answer all your questions at once. I've come to Cedar Hills Elementary today to talk to you about taking good care of your hair and skin and nails, not to hire models."

The whole library seemed to give a disappointed sigh. Except Lily. It had never occurred to her to be a model in the first place, so what was there to be bummed out about? As for learning how to take good care of her hair and skin and nails-

Lily pulled out her hands and scowled at the nails bitten down to quicks. I need all the help I can get, she thought. That evil Shad Shifferdecker was probably right: this lady better be pretty good!

"Not everyone is model material," Kathleen went on. "Just as everyone is not doctor material or astronaut material-"

"Or boy material." That came from Ashley Adamson, the most boy-crazy girl in the entire school. Lily turned to Reni to roll her eyes just in time to see Ashley pointing right at her and whispering to Chelsea, her fellow boy-chaser. Lily could feel her face stinging as if Ashley had hauled off and slapped her.

"But every woman can be beautiful," Kathleen said. "And since you are all on the edge of young womanhood right now, I'd like to show you some ways that you can discover your own beauty."

This time Lily looked straight ahead so she couldn't see what Ashley was doing. As it was, she heard Ashley sniff, as if she'd discovered her beauty long ago and could show Kathleen a thing or two.

"Now," Kathleen said, "I'm going to take you through some basics in skin care, hair care, nail care-but instead of just telling you, I'd like to show you. I'm going to pick someone-"

She took a step forward, and a sea of hands sprang up and waved like seaweed in a lake. Marcie held onto her arm with the other hand as if she were afraid it would pop off, and Ashley's face went absolutely purple as she strained for Kathleen to see her. Even Reni raised her hand tentatively, although she rolled her eyes at Lily as if to say, She'll never pick me, so why am I bothering?

Lily seemed to be the only one who wasn't begging Kathleen to look at her. If she did, she knew she'd have Ashley and Chelsea and some of the others hooting and pointing and whispering. Lily-you? Too tall Lily? With too much red hair? Too big a mouth and too thick lips? What are you thinking?

Instead, Lily reached over, grabbed Reni's arm, and held it up even higher. It was at exactly that moment that Kathleen's eyes stopped scanning the desperate little crowd and rested on her.

"Ah-you," she crooned.

"Yay!" Lily squeezed Reni's hand. "She picked you, Reni!"

But Kathleen shook her head and smiled. "No, honey," she said to Lily. "I picked you."

(Continues.)