Gorgeous by Rachel Vail

blinking. Jacket off.”
    “I don’t really…Fine, whatever.” I dropped my zip-up sweatshirt on the floor and stood there in my tank top feeling like a total dork while she snapped another picture.
    “Allison Avery,” she said, writing my name on the margins of the two photos as I bent down to retrieve my sweatshirt. “Oh. Only one L in Alison?”
    “I lost one on the way in,” I said, heading for the door.
    “Interesting-looking,” she said.
    “So they say,” I muttered with my hand on the door handle.
    “Wait,” Blondie ordered.
    I turned around.
    She came close and stared at me like she was looking at a picture, with no expectation that I was there and alive, looking back. It felt beyond weird. “Yes,” she said. “Interesting. We’ll see. Go.”
    Roxie was waiting for me near the big metal door near the elevator, with a smile pressing her dimples deep into her face. “How’d you do?”
    “Well, they didn’t fingerprint me,” I said. “You?”
    She laughed and threw her arm around my shoulders. “Thanks for coming with me. You’re the first normal person I’ve met since moving out to the burbs.”
    It was the first time anybody’d accused me of being normal.
    In the elevator going down, she whispered to me, “I have to tell you something, but not here.”
    I nodded and stayed as silent as the three other stick figures in there with us and a completely bald guy in a purple blouse.
    Out on the street, Roxie linked her elbow through mine and started walking fast. I had to take huge steps to keep up with her. “My mom is picking us up at the two-forty-seven, so we have time. That was quicker than I thought, but you will never believe what happened!”
    “What?” I asked her. For once the sun wasn’t offending me. People were jostling by us with scowls on their faces, talking psychotically to nobody but—at least I had to figure in most cases—their hidden cell phone ear things. Women in heels I’d never manage just standing still in were beating men in wingtips in dead sprints across packed intersections, as cabs beeped and buses groaned.
    Two little white dogs turned up their noses as they passed each other in the crosswalk, and a four-foot-tall woman with hot-pink hair decorated in bits of tinfoil barked curses at nobody in particular.
    It was great.
    “Okay,” Roxie finally said, leading me into a Starbucks.
    “What happened?” I asked her as we waited in line.
    She grinned. “They took two.”
    “Two what?”
    “Two pictures,” she whispered. “Usually they just take the close-up, but the guy who looked at me was all, like, ‘Oh, yeah, good,’ and then he said he wanted to get a three-quarter view, so he took that, too!”
    “That’s great,” I said, not wanting to disappoint her by letting her know they wasted a second picture on me, too, so that was probably standard. “Seriously, Roxie.”
    She scrunched up her nose. “I think so, too.” We had reached the front of the line, so she turned to the barista and said, “Hi how are you I’d like a half-caf tall sugar-free vanilla skim extra-hot latte, please. Al?”
    I was just going to get a water like usual, but her order sounded so sophisticated. I didn’t want to seem like a suburban baby, but I also didn’t want to be like Serena the Shadow and just order whatever she had, so I ordered what my mom usually gets. She worked in the city. Or she had until she got fired.
    “Doppio macchiato, please.”
    Roxie looked at me with big open eyes and said, “Wow,” so I figured I’d ordered well.
    We paid, which used up most of the money in my wallet, picked up our drinks, and took them out into the bright sunshine again. Two steps down the sidewalk Roxie stopped short at a sunglass table and we tried on a few pairs for each other while sipping our drinks. Mine was seriously hot and the most vile, bitter thing I’d ever tasted, but I didn’t want to be like, Ew! What the heck is this, engine grease? So I just tried to