Sloppy Firsts_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [3]
Seconds after Bridget’s Angels dis, Manda and Sara joined us at the table. "Honors" is a relative term in our school district, so I met them in my seventh-grade classes, too, through Hope. Or Hope through them. See, Hope, Manda, and Sara had been quite the clique in their own elementary school. This is as unfathomable as me being friends with Bridget back in the day. Once Hope and I discovered that we were of like minds, we christened Bridget, Manda, and Sara the Clueless Crew. Now they’re still here and Hope is gone. My luck sucks.
Once all three members of the Clueless Crew were assembled, they commenced their daily ritual of not eating and alternately trashing/worshipping the models and actresses in a teen mag.
"How could they have put her on the cover? Her ass is like, totally huge," cried Bridget.
Bridget is always zeroing in on the hugeness of models’ asses. That’s because Bridget herself is an aspiring model who is convinced she has a huge ass. This is the burden of being beautiful, apparently. In Psych class I learned that the hotter you are, the more paranoid you are about the way you look. That’s because born beauties get so much pretty-girl praise that their appearance becomes crucial to their oh-so-delicate self-worth.
Boo-freaking-hoo.
Anyway, Bridget has been modeling for about a year but has yet to make it in the pages of any of the major teen publications. She’s one of those anonymous, magalog models. But that’s goddamn glamorous for PHS.
"Omigod! My dad’s photographer friend said she has cellulite," said Sara.
"Ewwww!" said Manda and Bridget in unison.
"Yeah, he said they call her quote Stucco Butt unquote behind her back."
Sara all too frequently utters the phrases "Omigod!" and "quote, unquote." To her credit, Sara has stopped making the double-finger-bending gesture that traditionally accompanies the latter. She loves the sound of her own voice, one of dulled consonants and nasal vowels, as though her whole cranium is clogged with a bizillion pounds or gallons or whatever unit measures mucus. Her father, Wally D’Abruzzi, owns Winning Wally’s Arcade, Wally D’s Sweet Treat Shoppe, and other boardwalk gold mines, so she is also the most moneyed chick at Pineville High. This isn’t such a feat in our middle-/working-class district. She could go to some pricey private school, but she begged her parents to let her go public. Here, her family’s extra buckage gives her some social leverage. At a super chi-chi school full of bizillionaires, she knows she’d be a scrub.
I glanced at the covercow in question. She wasn’t skinny, but she definitely wasn’t fat. She looked curvy. Sexy. Strong. I thought about Sabrina, without eyelashes, in a turtleneck. I decided to come to the model’s defense.
"I bet the editors put her on the cover to make us feel good about ourselves. To show that you don’t have to be perfect to be pretty …"
"Puh-leeze, Jess," Manda said, pushing her glasses past the bridge of her nose so she could look down at me over the rims. "Stop being so Naomi Wolf, already."
Manda thinks that reading feminist manifestos makes up for her borderline ho-bag behavior. I’m pretty sure that’s why she wears Poindexter glasses instead of contacts, so she seems less sexual and more intellectual. She’s not fooling anyone, though. Hope and I called her The Kissing Slut because she’d made out with thirty-one different guys by her fifteenth birthday. That’s when she decided it was time to move on to manual stimulation, so we christened her Lend-A-Hand-A-Manda. And when she turned sixteen, well, let’s just say she earned the title The Headmaster.
Manda calls herself an "extreme" virgin and intends on keeping it that way until she finds someone who meets all her criteria: six feet tall; drives a Jeep; lean and cut, but not meathead