“Wolfgang!” cries Mrs. Sloane as a tall, thin man dressed entirely in black emerges from the elevator at Flash magazine.
“Clementine, darling, it’s been far too long,” he replies, crossing the lobby and kissing her on both cheeks. “You look gorgeous, as usual.” He turns to Mrs. Delaney. “And Shannon O’Halloran! We met at the Soap Bubble Awards party last winter. Enchanting to see you again.”
He turns to the rest of us, his forehead wrinkling in a slightly pained expression as he catches sight of our outfits. Well, everyone’s outfit but mine. His eyebrows shoot up as he examines my gypsy skirt, off-the-shoulder T-shirt, and hoop earrings. He purses his lips and gives me a nod. I feel a warm glow inside. The fashion director of Flash approves of me! I follow along happily as our tour begins.
Every atom in my body is on full alert as we wander the hallways of the magazine’s busy headquarters. We pass racks and racks of clothes, and walls covered with swatches of fabric and design sketches. People are running around importantly clutching clipboards, and now and then a head pops out of a doorway as we go by. Everywhere I hear whispers: Clementine. Mrs. Sloane swans along like a queen, nodding at her fawning subjects and graciously posing for photographs.
My mother looks like she’s landed on a different planet. Kind of bewildered and disapproving at the same time. Me, on the other hand—well, I’ve never felt so alive in my entire life. I feel like I’ve come home. This is my world, I think, pinching myself to be sure I’m not dreaming. This will be me someday. I’m smiling so hard my face feels like it’s going to crack.
We end up in a conference room, where Wolfgang’s assistant appears with a tray of sparkling water for us.
“By the way, Megan, did you happen to bring your sketchbook with you?” Mrs. Sloane asks.
Surprised, I nod. She holds out her hand and I fish it out of my bag.
“There’s something I’d like you to see, Wolfgang,” Mrs. Sloane says.
The room is silent for a few minutes except for the sound of Flash’s fashion director turning the pages of my sketchbook. Finally, he closes it and looks up.
“How old are you?” he asks me.
“Um, twelve,” I reply. I can feel my face turning scarlet.
“Extraordinary,” he says. He stands up abruptly. “Excuse me for a moment.”
Wolfgang returns shortly, accompanied by an icicle-thin woman with a shock of hair dyed an outrageous shade of orange. She’s draped in beads and bangles and bracelets, and she regards us through enormous electric-blue eyeglasses. I recognize her instantly.
Her eyes light up when she spots Mrs. Sloane. “Clementine!”
Mrs. Sloane springs to her feet. “Isabelle! I thought you were in Paris.”
“I just returned yesterday.”
The two of them exchange air kisses, and then Mrs. Sloane turns to us. “This is Isabelle d’Azur, editor in chief of Flash.”
Isabelle inclines her head regally at us. Wolfgang hands her my notebook. Again, the room falls silent. She examines it carefully, and when she’s finished she peers at me thoughtfully through her vibrant glasses. Then she looks at Wolfgang. “Are you thinking what I’m flunking?” she asks him.
Wolfgang nods. “Fresh, young, very hip,” he murmurs. “Perfect.”
“Tell me your name,” Isabelle d’Azur demands.
“Megan Wong,” I whisper, wondering if I’ve done something wrong.
She turns to my mother. Her forehead wrinkles with the same pained expression Wolfgang’s did when he first caught sight of her T-shirt. “A tree hugger,” she murmurs. “How admirable. Ah, Mrs. Wong, we are in the process of starting a spin-off magazine for teens. We’re calling it Flashlite, and we’re looking for promising young teen designers to profile for our first issue. I think your daughter would be a perfect fit.”
The air rushes out of my lungs. Nothing in the world could have prepared me for this. Across the table, Cassidy gives me a thumbs-up. Emma and Jess beam. Mrs. Sloane looks like the cat who ate the canary.
“We’d need your permission, of course,” adds Wolfgang.
“Well, I, uh—” My mother is clearly as surprised as me.
I still can’t speak, but I reach over and grab her hand and squeeze it with all my might. If she says anything about MIT or Harvard right now, I think I’ll burst into tears. She looks at me and sighs. She shakes her head. My heart nearly stops until I see that she’s smiling. “Of course,” she says. “What a wonderful opportunity for my daughter.”
I float back to the hotel, completely unaware of the taxi or the traffic or the excited conversation buzzing around me. Isabelle d’Azur, editor in chief of Flash magazine, called me a “promising young designer”!
I’m still floating as we change into casual clothes for the Yankees game. Well, all of us except Emma and Cassidy and my mother, who are already wearing casual clothes.
“There’s one for everyone,” says Cassidy, rummaging in her suitcase and pulling out a stack of Red Sox caps. “Mom and got them for us.”
“We’re probably taking our lives in our hands, wearing these to Yankee Stadium,” laughs Mrs. Delaney, pulling hers on.
At the ballpark, we get hot dogs and sodas and find our seats. The game starts, and while everybody else watches, I replay every moment of our visit to Flash in my head. All of a sudden, there’s a commotion around me and I notice that the crowd is on its feet. I look around blinking. Beside me, Cassidy is standing on her chair.
“It’s mine!” she cries, leaping into the air. She lands on a man standing in front of us, who good-naturedly sets her on her feet and claps her on her back.
“Good job, kid,” he says. “Looks like this is your lucky day”
“I got it!” screams Cassidy, nearly beside herself with excitement.
“Got what?” I ask, still bewildered.
“Weren’t you watching?” Emma shouts. She points to the giant TV screen across the field, where they’re replaying Cassidy’s leap. “She caught a foul ball!”
Not just any foul ball, as it turns out. While I was daydreaming, the Red Sox came up to bat, and apparently anyone who catches a foul ball can get it autographed by the players. So Cassidy now owns a ball signed by her favorite baseball team. Who ended up beating the Yankees, to boot. She talks about it all the way back to the hotel.
Back in our room, she leaps up onto the bed. “I have an announcement to make!” she cries, holding up her prize.
“Cassidy Ann, I thought I warned you about jumping on the bed,” her mother says.
“I’m not jumping, I’m standing,” Cassidy replies indignantly. “It’s different.”
Her mother sighs, and perches on the arm of the chair where my mother is sitting. “Okay then, out with it.”
“This was the most perfect day ever,” says Cassidy. She pulls me up beside her. “Right, Megan?”
I give a little bounce. My mother shoots me the evil-witch-mother eye of death. I stop bouncing. “Absolutely,” I agree, grinning.
Mrs. Sloane stands up. She climbs onto the bed with Cassidy and me. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right?” she says. “Actually, I have an announcement to make too.”
We all stare at her expectantly.
“Tomorrow morning, before we go to the set of HeartBeats, you are all invited to breakfast at the Food Network,” she says. “It’s a little celebration for a new TV show. A show called”—she pauses dramatically—“Cooking with Clementine!”
Everyone stares at her, speechless.
“You mean, cooking with you?” blurts Cassidy.
Her mother nods happily. “And decorating and gardening, too. It’s been in the works for a while now,” she tells us. “Now that David—Cassidy’s father—is gone, I needed to think about earning a living.”
“What about modeling?” I ask her.
“Been there, done that,” she replies. “Crazy hours, too much travel. Anyway, I pitched this idea to the Food Network a few months ago, and I just got word fr
om a producer there, Fred Goldberg, that it’s a go.”
“Did you say Fred?” says Cassidy.
Her mother nods. “Why?”
“No reason.” Cassidy looks over at me and grins. I grin back. She starts to bounce up and down.
Her mother gives a tentative bounce. “Hey, this is fun,” she says, and in a flash I’m bouncing too, and then Emma and Jess and their mothers and my mother jump onto the beds and we’re all bouncing. Emma grabs a pillow and swats her mother with it. Her mother grabs one and swats back. Soon, we’re all leaping from one bed to the other, smacking each other with pillows and laughing hysterically.
“Did you know that the Alcotts used to have pillow fights every Saturday night?” says Mrs. Hawthorne breathlessly. “Bronson thought it was good for the children.”
“I think it’s good for adults, too,” Mrs. Delaney replies. “I haven’t laughed this hard in ages.”
Emma swats Mrs. Sloane. “That is just so cool!” she cries. “Your own TV show!”
“And you’ll love New York,” says my mother.
Cassidy suddenly stops jumping. “Wait a minute,” she says. “Does this mean we have to move to New York?”
The bouncing stops. We all hug our pillows. Cassidy’s mother kneels down beside her and puts her hands on her shoulders. “No, honey,” she replies. “That’s the best part. I told Fred that no way was I uprooting you and Courtney again so soon. I’ll have to fly down a couple of times a month for meetings, but I agreed to do the show on one condition: that we film it at home in our kitchen in Concord.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see Jess look over at her mother. Her expression is sad.
Mrs. Hawthorne catapults off the bed and crosses to the table. She picks up the phone. “Room service?” she says. “We need eight hot fudge sundaes up here in room 212 on the double.”
“Phoebe, it’s nearly midnight!” says my mother, shocked. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking we need to celebrate all this good news,” Emma’s mother replies gleefully. “First Megan, then Cassidy, and now this. Who can sleep?”
We all scatter to change into our pajamas, and a few minutes later a trolley arrives bearing our sundaes.
“To good news,” says Mrs. Hawthorne, raising her spoon in salute.
“To good friends,” says my mother.
“And most of all, to the Mother-Daughter Book Club!” says Mrs. Sloane, and we all dig in.
CASSIDY
“‘When will he come home, Marmee?’ asked Beth, with a little quiver in her voice.”
“This is your daughter?”
We’re standing backstage on the set of HeartBeats, and I’m wearing my lucky Red Sox T-shirt, the one I had on last night at the game. In the pocket of my shorts is my autographed baseball. I keep pulling it out and looking at it. I still can’t believe it’s mine.
The soap opera’s head stylist is looking at me like you might look at something you discovered stuck to the bottom of your shoe. She glances over at my mother and then back at me again. Bored I gnaw on a hangnail. We get this reaction all the time. Nobody can believe we’re related.
I let out a little burp. My mother sighs. Our trip to my mom’s new TV studio was really fun. The breakfast was amazing—no big surprise there. It is the Food Network, after all, not ESPN. We all stuffed our faces. Mom introduced us to Fred her new producer, and we helped him and his staff brainstorm ideas for the show. Mrs. Hawthorne suggested featuring a Mother-Daughter Book Club tea sometime, and Fred went nuts for it. He wants us all to be on that episode. I don’t know if I really want to be on TV but I guess it will be okay Emma says Becca Chadwick and the Fab Three will die when they find out. I figure that alone is a good enough reason to do it.
Turns out Mrs. Wong and Mrs. Hawthorne had so many good ideas that Fred asked them to be consultants for the show. Mrs. Wong, because she knows everything about organic and natural foods and my mother wants the show to feature healthy cooking, and Mrs. Hawthorne because she’s a librarian and knows just about everything else under the sun. And whatever she doesn’t know, she can find the answers to.
The stylist is still staring at me. Beside me, Queen Clementine draws herself up. She puts her arm around me. “Yes, Cassidy Ann is my daughter,” she replies briskly. “Isn’t she a beauty?”
I stare up at her, astonished. I can’t ever remember Mom calling me a beauty. She’s always too busy trying to fix my hair, and wipe the dirt off my face, and get me not to slouch.
“Cassidy plays hockey,” my mother continues. “She was MVP—most valuable player—for the Concord Comets last season. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? They won the New England regional championship for the PeeWee division last season.”
“Really?” says the stylist, pursing her lips. “Charming.”
She doesn’t sound charmed She plucks at my T-shirt—which really doesn’t smell all that bad—with her thumb and forefinger and leads me over to a salon chair. An assistant appears. “We have our work cut out for us with this one,” the head stylist murmurs. She cocks her head and eyes me critically in the mirror. “Hmmm. Let’s see—good bone structure, nice eyes, freckles aren’t too awful, but the hair—” She pauses and shudders. “Beyond belief.” She snaps her fingers and her assistant jumps. “Shampoo, and plenty of detangler.”
I am led off to a sink in the corner of the studio’s makeup department. When I return, dripping, all the salon chairs are occupied. The entire Mother-Daughter Book Club is busy being fussed over by HeartBeat’s staff of stylists.
After everyone’s finished being primped, we change into the outfits we shopped for yesterday. Mrs. Wong is the biggest surprise. My mother picked out these slim black pants for her, and high-heeled sandals—Mrs. Wong in high heels! Amazing!—and she’s wearing this short-sleeved red silk dragon lady-style tunic, the kind with the little buttons down the front that look like knots. It’s pretty cool-looking. I might even think about wearing something like that. Plus, the hair stylist did something to her hair that makes it look softer, and she’s got makeup on, to boot.
“Lily, you are a vision!” says my mother, and Mrs. Wong looks embarrassed but pleased.
Mrs. Hawthorne and Emma are wearing matching dresses, which sounds incredibly dorky but somehow isn’t, and Jess’s hair has been twisted up into what Megan informs me is a french braid. Mrs. Delaney tucks a blue flower into it that’s the same shade as her sundress. She gives her a hug. “You look beautiful, sweetie,” she says.
Mrs. Delaney is slathered with way too much makeup, but that’s the way they do it on soap operas, I guess. She’s wearing this green ballgown thing for the day’s shoot, which is about to start. She told us at breakfast that we’re going to watch them film a very dramatic scene where Judd Chance decides to leave Larissa LaRue after a fancy charity event.
“Now you look more like Clementine’s daughter,” the head stylist says, looking at me approvingly.
I stare at myself in the mirror and scratch at my dress. It’s a little itchy, but it’s cool at least. It’s hot under all these lights in here. Looking at myself feels weird, like looking at someone else. My hair is all smooth and shiny, and they cut it shorter so that it slants forward a bit, just below my chin. Whenever I turn my head, it swings a little, which is distracting. I keep reaching up to shove it behind my ears, and my mother keeps grabbing my hand. “Leave it alone,” she says. “It looks great.”
A man with a clipboard comes striding in, along with the actor who plays Judd Megan suddenly goes all red in the face. I watch with interest as she sneaks little glances at him. Maybe Zach Norton is on the way out.
“I’m not at all happy with this dialogue,” the man with the clipboard says to Mrs. Delaney. She and Judd Chance peer over his shoulder as he taps the script with his pencil. “This line here, after Judd tells Larissa that he’s leaving for California, and you say, ‘Oh, my darling, I only wish you’d reconsider!’ It just doesn’t ring true.”
“That’
s because it’s too nice,” Emma pipes up. “Larissa LaRue would never say that. She has more backbone. She’s put up with way too much from Judd already. She should say something smart-alecky like, ‘Can I help you pack?’”
The man with the clipboard looks over at her in surprise. “And who are you?”
“That’s my daughter Jess’s friend Emma Hawthorne,” says Mrs. Delaney.
The director looks down at the script. He frowns. “You know, that’s exactly right,” he says. “Perfect, in fact.” He looks up. “How do you spell your last name?”
Emma tells him, and he makes a note.
“Well, young lady, I’m going to see to it that you are added to the credits for this episode as an assistant writer,” he says, winking at Mrs. Delaney.
Emma’s mouth pops open. I slap her a high five. “Way to go, Hawthorne!”
Her mother beams. “That’s my girl,” she says proudly.
“It looks like Megan’s career isn’t the only one that’s been launched this trip,” says Mrs. Wong, as the man with the clipboard strides out, followed by Judd Chance.
“New York must be our lucky city,” says Mrs. Sloane.
Only Jess doesn’t have anything to say. She’s been quiet all afternoon, and every time I look at her I catch her watching her mother.
We file onto the set and take our seats to watch the filming. It’s kind of boring, actually—there are a zillion takes for each scene, and there’s way too much kissing. But Mrs. Delaney seems really happy to have us here, and she keeps waving at Jess between takes.
The director finally calls for a break, and I head for the water fountain. As I bend over to take a sip, Jess and her mother walk by. They don’t see me.
“When are you coming home?” I hear Jess ask.
“Oh, sweetie, I’m not sure,” her mother replies.
“Couldn’t you work out a deal like Cassidy’s mom did? Couldn’t they film HeartBeats in Concord?”
Mrs. Delaney sighs. “Jess, I really, really wish I could be both places at once. But you’ve got to understand—this is the chance in a lifetime for an actress my age. I’m forty, honey. I’m not just starting out. This could be the last crack I get at a real career.”