Now You See Her by Jacquelyn Mitchard Page A

you’re at your best? You could end up leaving there for a movie. I bet you don’t even get to graduate.” I knew that she was right about this, at least.
    So I started by starving until I was almost the thinnest girl at Starwood, practically, except for a couple of dancers. I had cheekbones that stuck out and made me look like photos of old movie stars. I studied Audrey Hepburn’s clothes and started wearing big sunglasses and capri pants and flat shoes on our “free day Fridays” and on weekends. I would just sit and stare in the mirror and measure how much thinner my face was every day. I was so skinny I looked sick, but sick in a beautiful way. They even asked to see me in the infirmary. But there was nothing wrong with me. I thought quickly and said
    I had just started running and I hadn’t really done any hard exercise before, plus I was getting taller. They wanted me to come back after Thanksgiving to be checked, or they would contact my parents. Like my par- ents would have cared! My mom was giving me StarCaps when I was twelve! I knew enough not to get creepy, insect thin. When I got famous, I didn’t want to end up in magazines for being thin. So I walked this fine line. I looked in library books about the Oscars. I was sort of a dark-haired Gwyneth Whatever-Her-Name-Is. Like Keira Knightley, but dark-skinned. I had seen some of those Oscar movies. Most of them my mother had to make me watch; but then, it made sense why she wanted me to see them. I would be able to do comedy like that, like, so moving that it would make you cry. I would do tragedy so sly you could laugh. I would make all the stars in People look like dogs, but I would be womanly, too, and mysterious. The perfect combination of all of them. Not some teenybopper in cute movies about single dads with daughters who were twins.
    Real films.
    So that’s what I started getting ready for. My break.
    I was sure it would come as soon as I got my first real role.
    I ordered forty monologue books with my mom’s
    credit card, and I started memorizing. After all, I only had to pass the other classes, not ace them. And they were easy. Science but not real science. Just enough so you weren’t a moron. My parents would have me tutored for the college entrance exams and have some- one write the essay for me. Eating got to be something I didn’t even want to do. One night, totally out of the blue, Carter, my brother, called me. He was like, “Are you all right?” and I was like, “Whatever.” I said, “How are you?” He said he was good. I was nice to him because I was that lonely. But I pushed it down. I was on a total quest.
    Then, a lightning bolt hit the ground next to me.
    I saw Logan for the first time in the cafeteria, where I was picking at my salad, sitting alone at one of the long wooden tables. He had just come to the school for his senior year, even though he’d already done a couple of guest appearances on a TV show. He came into the room like he was making an entrance, for which I didn’t blame him, and even the guys looked up. He wasn’t tall or big, but he made you feel he was tall and big and powerful. He scanned the whole room, with his hands stuck in the pockets of his old leather bomber jacket. And then he started across the room. Toward me! He came and swung his leg over the bench and sat down beside me! My breath started to come faster until I was almost dizzy.
    But I told myself, Keep your thoughts straight. Stay in the center.
    “What would you say if I told you that you were beautiful, kiddo?” he asked. And like, I know that was a line. But who cares?
    I said, “I’d tell you that you were probably smart. And dumb. I might be beautiful. But you don’t just come up and tell a girl that.”
    “Exotic.”
    “Just different.” “Beyond different.” “It’s your call.”
    “Then I’m calling it,” he said, and starting eating my cherry tomatoes.
    It was like lines from a movie, and we were the stars. That natural