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  In my head, I had the most exciting personality. I was witty, charming, and made hilarious observations. Out loud and in the real world, though, I was so generic I might as well have been a robot.

  I tried to think of something funny and clever to say as Mrs. Klein and I walked through the salon. “You better not take so long between cuts this time,” is what I came up with. I was trying to sound like Megan had with that last customer, but somehow I managed to sound just plain rude.

  “Pardon me?” she said, turning her taut face to me.

  “I just mean, uh—ha-ha! You know, six weeks between cuts, we want to make sure you stay looking gorgeous!”

  Rowan, the esthetician, or skincare specialist, leaned in the doorway to the little room she worked in, her arms crossed. Her red hair was pulled back in a ponytail, bursting out in wavy curls from the black elastic. She raised an eyebrow at me as I walked past her with Mrs. Klein, and I knew she’d heard. I wasn’t sure if I should have been upset for saying something dumb or happy that I’d said anything at all. I looked at Mrs. Klein, but I couldn’t tell if she was angry at my stupid comment—the expression on her tight face changed so little.

  “Right in here,” I said, opening the changing room door and handing her a robe.

  Hello, Gorgeous! sat on Camden Way, the most exclusive street in our town, between Esquire Cleaners and a bakery/coffee shop called CJ’s Patisserie. The street has the best shops in town, like an actual cheese monger (which is a fancy name for expert), a high-end bakery that specializes in wedding cakes, and an old-fashioned shave shop, where men pay to get a straight-edged shave. And then there’s Hello, Gorgeous!, home to the best stylists in all of New England, with the most famous, rich, and particular clients around. “Particular,” by the way, is Mom’s code for demanding.

  After showing Mrs. Klein to the changing room, I headed back to help Gladys like I’d promised—only Giancarlo intercepted me before I could.

  “Your presence is requested at reception, lovey,” he said, his sunglasses now propped up on his bald head.

  I took a quick look around the floor and realized that it was dusted with cut hair on both sides of the salon. I picked up the pace, hoping to help out Megan quickly so I could sweep up before Mom saw it.

  Mom was working on a client at her station, which was right in the front, and I tried to dart past her. I didn’t want her ever to have to tell me to do something at the salon—I’d vowed to myself that I’d be so on top of things that she’d never have to. When I looked at her to make sure she wasn’t looking at me, she caught my eye and gave me a tight smile, which I knew was a bad sign.

  “Where is your smock?” she asked in a low, but stern voice as I passed her.

  “Oh. In the back. I’ll get it.”

  “And the floors, Mickey,” she said.

  The dreaded smock! The sweepers and cleaners, like Gladys, had to wear those plastic monstrosities. I was hoping Mom would make an exception for me, but no dice.

  Up front, Megan was on the phone and greeting clients at the same time, asking them to have a seat in the packed lounge area and offering them drinks while they waited.

  “Hey, Mickster,” she said when she saw me. “Could you get Angela there a bottle of water?” She pointed to a woman with pin-straight auburn hair and large sunglasses.

  “Sure,” I said. “Um, where can I find one of those smocks like Gladys’s?”

  “Oh, shoot!” she said, looking down at my outfit. “Yes, I totally forgot. Your mom will kill us both if she sees you without it. Salon rules. There should be some in the back room, in the cabinet next to the towels.”

  “Bring a diet soda, too!” Megan called. Like the batiste robes, drinks were another luxury Mom offered at the salon.

  I got the smock, stopped off at the drinks station, which was right next to the manicure station, and then hustled back up front and handed the water to Angela.

  “Thanks, girl. The diet is for Nicole.” Megan pointed at Nicole, and I almost dropped the bottle when I realized who she was.

  “Hello there, Mickey,” Nicole, aka my homeroom teacher, Ms. Carter, said with a sly smile.

  Oh my gosh. Awkward!

  “Hi,” I said, twisting the top off the soda bottle for her. I should have heard the sound before I felt the spray, but I was so distracted by Nicole (!) that I didn’t realize the soda was fizzing all over my hand . . . the floor . . . and Ms. Carter’s linen shorts, not to mention her legs.

  “I’m so sorry!” I said, twisting the top back on and turning to look for a towel. I bumped right into Megan, who was already rushing over with paper towels she had pulled out ninja-style from underneath the counter.

  “Here you go,” she said, handing Ms. Carter the paper towels as she soaked up the rest on the floor. “You send us the dry cleaning bill for those shorts, okay?”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” she said, dabbing at her shorts and bare legs.

  She may have said it was fine, but she had a look on her face that was more like the one she had when Andrew Zimmer brought a garden snake into class. I wanted to die. I knew I’d probably see kids from school at the salon, but for some reason it never, not in fourteen trillion years, occurred to me that teachers would come into the salon—without any makeup on and in regular, non-teacher clothes. The silk tank she wore showed off arms that were as ripped as Madonna’s. She probably lived on a steady diet of protein shakes and bloody red meat. Maybe she even did bicep curls while grading our papers. What if she’s secretly one of those Las Vegas bodybuilders who gets all oiled up and flexes their quads in a bikini onstage?

  “I’m so sorry,” I said again.

  “Not to worry,” she said tersely, like she was pretending (not very well) that she wasn’t irritated. “I’m just a little sticky now.” She snatched another paper towel from Megan.

  “Mickey, get her some water,” Megan said. My stomach dropped. I felt bad spilling the drink all over her, but hearing the flat tone in Megan’s voice made me feel even worse. I had let her down.

  “Sure,” I said as tears tried to launch themselves out of my tear ducts. I forced them back. Not today, ladies. Not today.

  Just as I got a bottle of water for Ms. Carter, I heard my name again.

  “Mickey!” Devon snapped. “Could you puhleeze ?” She pointed to the floor of her station.

  “Okay, sorry,” I said, more worried about Mom catching me in the act of severe ineptitude than about Devon’s voice. I grabbed my broom, which was leaning against the wall by the hair-washing sinks, and quickly swept Devon’s station, scooping up hairs into the red dust pan.

  Just as I was standing up from pushing every last hair onto the pan, Devon shooed me away—she actually shooed me! With a flick of her wrist she said, “Can’t you go a bit quicker? Client coming. Oh, hi! Nice to meet you! I’m Devon.”

  Okay, don’t get me wrong. I’m a girl who knows her place. I don’t pretend like I’m something special just because my mom owns the joint. But this . . . new chick didn’t have to treat me like I was her personal whipping girl.

  Nobody shoos Mickey into the corner!

  I felt my neck heating up with anger—at myself for not being quicker on the job, and at Devon for treating me like some nobody.

  Understatement alert: The day was not going well. I was a terrible sweeper.

  I tried to calm myself down in the back room. Because if I didnt’ pull myself together soon, my Hello, Gorgeous! career would be over before it ever began.

  CHAPTER 3

  There’s a lot of talk in hair salons. Everyone knows that clients treat their stylists like therapists, telling them their deepest, darkest secrets. So just by being in the salon I overheard a lot of conversations.

  Violet and Giancarlo talked about the arrival of Violet’s mom and how Violet could get through the visit without going all Freddy Krueger on her.

  “Send her to a show in Boston,” said Violet’s client, a woman in her early twenties who wore tortoisesh
ell glasses.

  I even overheard Ms. Carter tell Karen that she had to go home and write a pop quiz for class tomorrow.

  “Pop quizzes,” Karen said as she brushed brick-red polish across Ms. Carter’s nails. “I remember those.”

  After my disastrous morning, I was determined to keep my head down and concentrate on my work. But just as I started to think I was finally finding my groove, the chime above the door announced the arrival of two very special girls.

  Lizbeth Ballinger and Kristen Campbell.

  No, they were not celebrities of the movie, TV, or reality kind, but they were like the Demi and Selena of Rockford Middle School. Like, shut it down because these girls owned it. I’d seen them come into the salon before when I was just hanging out with my mom or Violet or Giancarlo. I always thought they were so much more sophisticated than I was because their hair and nails were perpetually done to perfection. Since, like, the fourth grade. I never really talked to them because it felt a little like they were out of my league.

  I swept my mom’s station as she took her client—Rosario Franco, who happened to be one of the local news anchors—up front to pay. Lizbeth and Kristen stood by the polish wall picking out colors for a manicure.

  “I’m not loving any of these,” Lizbeth said as she looked over all the colors.

  “Not like you love Matthew, right?” Kristen laughed.

  “Kristen, stop!” Lizbeth looked around to see if anyone heard and her eyes caught mine. The only Matthew I knew at school was a total prep named Matthew Anderson, whose mom was a Hello, Gorgeous! client. Same Matthew? Probably. I quickly busied myself dusting Mom’s station.

  “Oh, I’m only kidding.” Picking through the polishes, Kristen said, “I feel like I’ve worn them all before.”

  “Like, twice,” Lizbeth said.

  Mom came back and said to me, “Hey, honey. The drinks station is looking a little raggedy. Maybe you should straighten it up?”

  “Sure,” I said. The truth was, I was having a momentary panic. There was no way to get to the drinks station without Lizbeth and Kristen seeing me. In my smock. My plastic smock. Even though working at the salon was what I’d wanted more than anything in my whole life, suddenly how I looked to them—a smock-wearing weekend worker—made me hyperaware. Would they think I was kind of cool for having this job or kind of not?

  As I arranged the drinks—sparkling water, regular, and three kinds of sodas, including extra cans of diet, the house favorite, Megan said, “Thanks, Mickey. Are you okay about the mess earlier?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” I said quickly, trying not to draw too much attention to myself. I didn’t want Lizbeth and Kristen seeing me in my smock and hearing I’d messed up and thinking that my working here was lame.

  “You girls find colors you want?” she asked Lizbeth and Kristen.

  “Not just yet,” Lizbeth said, inspecting a bottle of teal that would look way too bright next to her ivory skin tone.

  “Hey,” Megan said, leaning against the counter and looking at them . . . and me. “I bet you girls all go to the same school, don’t you?”

  I actually felt my chest curving in and my shoulders hunching forward, as if I could make myself smaller and disappear from the scene. Lizbeth and Kristen turned their eyes toward me. They looked at me blankly as if I had just shown up at their party uninvited. With my parents. And a game of Candy Land tucked under my arm.

  Okay. Even though we’d gone to the same school since kindergarten and had been in a couple of classes together over the years, it wasn’t like we’d ever talked to one another. “Yeah,” I finally managed, since they were still looking at me like I could infect them with my dullness. “We go to the same school.”

  “Um, yeah,” Lizbeth said, looking unconvinced. She had dark brown hair, and her brown eyes seemed almost translucent. Especially when they were staring suspiciously at me. “You’re in my history class, right?”

  “No,” I said. “But we had English together last year.”

  “We did?”

  “Yeah.”

  See what I mean?

  Once Megan had completed her task of creating a nightmare moment for me, she turned back to the front to greet a woman who was there to see Giancarlo. I went back to anonymity and straightened the drinks.

  “I guess I’ll just go with this one,” Lizbeth said, taking the teal-colored polish back down from the shelf.

  “I guess I’ll go with my standard sheer pink,” Kristen said. “Such a snore.”

  I hadn’t planned to say anything, but I realized that I couldn’t help myself. The teal was all wrong for Lizbeth and I happened to know that there was a great new color that would look perfect on her. It wasn’t even in stores yet!

  “Um. Hi. Again,” I started. They looked at me like a fly they thought they’d waved out the window. “Well, it’s just that, there are some new colors in the back that would look really good on you, Lizbeth. Also, I think there’s something you’d like, too, if you wanted to try something new,” I said to Kristen.

  They looked at each other, and I prepared myself for them to push me away like Devon had. Instead, Lizbeth shrugged and said, “Yeah, sure.”

  “Okay, great,” I said. I was happy to help and, honestly, to actually be talking to them. But at the same time I worried whether they’d even like what I brought them. “Be right back.”

  In the back, I opened the box with the new shipment of spring colors, where I’d seen my mandarin orange polish. For a few weeks at the beginning of each season, the new colors were hugely in demand. We got a couple of bottles of each, and we reordered whichever ones were popular. I grabbed the two shades, one each for Lizbeth and Kristen, and hoped my color instincts were right. I took them to the front and showed them to the girls.

  “This one is called Peppermint Shake,” I said of the light green color with tiny pink sparkles. Lizbeth took the bottle and inspected it. “It’ll look good on you. And this is called Cornflower Blues,” I said, handing over a bottle of light blue polish to Kristen.

  “Love,” Kristen said of the polish.

  “Yeah, seriously,” Lizbeth said. “I haven’t even seen these colors, like, anywhere.”

  “They’re new for the spring season,” I said.

  Then I suddenly became hyperaware that I was talking to Lizbeth and Kristen and I froze. I stood there like a spaz and nodded my head.

  “Well, thanks a lot,” Lizbeth said. As I picked up my broom and started sweeping again, Lizbeth said, “And I like your hair.”

  I touched the ends with my free hand and said, “Violet did it.”

  Lizbeth smiled and said, “It looks good.”

  Just as I thought of something to say, Devon’s voice cut through the salon.

  “Mickey! My station!”

  And whatever nugget of genius I had finally come up with fell right out of my head.

  CHAPTER 4

  I was so exhausted by the time I had my lunch, I felt like crumbling to the ground. I also felt defeated. Not soul-crushingly defeated, but not too far off, either. I mean, it’s not like I expected to become some hair style maven in one day flat, but I had totally crashed and burned on the salon floor. Not long after lunch, Mom told me that maybe I’d had enough for my first day and said I could leave early.

  My stomach sank, knowing I’d let her down.

  When I got home, Dad was sitting on the couch, leafing through a cookbook.

  “Hey, superstar,” he said. “How was your first day?”

  I dropped my bag by the couch and dragged my feet toward the kitchen.

  “What’s wrong? You didn’t chop off someone’s hair, did you?”

  I took a Double Fudge Yoo-hoo out of the fridge and made my way back through the living room toward the stairs. “No. I’m just really tired.”

  “Well, wake up. I’m grilling shrimp for dinner!”

  That was usually the one dish that could cheer me up after a bad day. Usually.

  Upstairs in my room I
grabbed a stack of magazines from my desk and dumped them on the floor by my bed. I sat cross-legged in front of them, sighed deeply, then picked up Medusa, one of my favorites that featured far-out looks that no one would ever wear unless they were walking down a Paris runway. I loved fantasizing about how I might one day be like Mom or Violet and have the most stylin’ clients in town. Today, though, I saw those looks as a symbol of my failure—because how could I be a great stylist if I couldn’t even do simple tasks like open a bottle of soda without creating a mess?

  I had to remind myself that there was one good thing that had happened. I had actually spoken more than two words to Lizbeth and Kristen and didn’t humiliate myself. I tried to take comfort in that, but knowing I still had to face Mom set my stomach in tight knots. She wouldn’t care that I had spoken to some popular girls. All she’d care about was the fact that Devon had asked me to sweep her station twice.

  When I heard Mom come home, I stayed hidden in my room. Why rush the inevitable? I didn’t leave until Dad finally shouted for me to come down because my dinner was getting cold.

  Dad brought out a plate of grilled shrimp with lemon and salad with cherry tomatoes and crumbled goat cheese. He knew this was one of my favorite spring dishes of his, and I felt a little guilty knowing he probably made it special for my big day.

  Mom gave me a weak smile when she sat down. Even after ten hours on her feet, she still looked beautiful. Her hair had come a bit undone from her bun, but on her it looked like it was supposed to be that way.

  When she sat down she placed her napkin in her lap and Dad served her shrimp and salad. I looked at my plate, wondering how I could possibly eat.

  “Well, Mikaela,” Mom began. I cringed hearing her use my full name. “How do you think today went?”

  I pushed a shrimp across my plate. “Okay. I mean, it could have gone better.”

  “Okay, but it was your first day, sweetie. Don’t look so defeated. Think about how you’ll do better next time,” she said as she speared a cherry tomato.

  Total relief. I really thought she might rip my head off. After all, Mom didn’t get to where she was by tolerating anything short of perfection.