Too Pretty to Die (2 page)

It was the sign of things to come, wasn’t it?

She could already see the future, and it was as ugly as she was: being forced to move out of her pretty duplex on Preston near the country club and into the guest house of her mother’s Highland Park manse, undatable and unable to pay rent when she got permanently canned, because what TV station in its right mind wanted an anchorwoman whose features frightened small children?

Talk about a double whammy.

She was unattractive
and
pathetic.

Maybe she should just choke down the bottle of Xanax in her medicine cabinet, chase it with the gin, and be done with it, so she wouldn’t have to live with the sight of her mangled self another day.

Only, Miranda DuBois had never chickened out on life before. She’d always found a way to land on top, no matter what it took. What she wanted wasn’t her name on a marble slab in Sparkman Hillcrest Memorial Park.

Why should she be the one to chuck it all?

Would that make things right?

Miranda drained her drink and slapped down the empty glass on the table beside her, wiping at her mouth with a silk sleeve.

What she wanted was payback.

If anyone knew about revenge, it was a pageant girl. She hadn’t suffered through butt tape and sequins all those years for nothing.

She would make that quack suffer, just as she was suffering.

Hell, she’d get
all
the insensitive jerks who’d given her the cold shoulder. And she had plenty of ammo to do it.

Her quest would start tonight with the good doctor.

Sonja Madhavi wouldn’t know what hit her.

“A
w, c’mon, Andy. Don’t be a chicken. Everybody’s doing it. What’s the big deal?”

I’m not exactly sure why Janet had followed me into the opulent powder room in Delaney Armstrong’s enormous Bordeaux Avenue manse, except to torment me, as she was supposed to be mingling with the loitering ladies swarming the living room: upper crust women in their twenties and thirties, sipping Chablis and waiting for a turn with
über
-dermo Dr. Sonja Madhavi, there to inject the beauty-obsessed with her latest age-defying cocktails. My only consolation was that Dr. Sonja hadn’t brought her fat vacuum to liposuction any thighs or bellies. That would’ve had me running straight out the front door and not just to the can.

If I strained my ears, I could discern the hum of yammering voices alongside the bass of “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summers, being that disco was the night’s background music. No one had asked, but if they had, I’d have kept disco dead and buried.

I was no
Saturday Night Fever
diva, but a rock chick to the core.

Yet another reason why I’d rather have been just about anywhere else at the moment and felt extra grateful for my temporary refuge in the loo.

I’d endured enough Abba and eyeballed enough shallow women wearing Gucci, Fendi, and Prada to satisfy my quota for the year, and I certainly had no intention of experiencing Dr. Sonja’s party favors, since that would mean subjecting myself to a syringe full of God knows what. I’d heard tell that she made up some of her “beauty remedies” on the stovetop in her kitchen. Kind of like an upscale meth lab for the chic.

The idea gave me shivers, but it obviously didn’t do much to scare off the long list of Dr. Sonja’s clientele. Even the
Morning News
had dubbed the exotic-looking doc who wore miniskirts and platform heels “Big D’s Own Fountain of Youth.”

Like a bad case of the flu, Dr. Sonja’s “Pretty Parties” had spread across the city, infecting every wrinkle-fearing, couture-wearing woman in Dallas’s in-crowd from age fifteen to 115.

It was worse than the Tupperware plague of the 1980s.

Plastic wasn’t my thing, not the kind you stored leftovers in or the type that meant reshaping body parts with knives or needles.

Call me crazy—and plenty of folks around Big D did—but hardcore superficiality gave me the heebie-jeebies, not surprising considering that I, Andrea Blevins Kendricks, would forever be known as the “debutante dropout” after bailing on my own cotillion, and deemed fatally etiquette impaired by the city’s blue bloods, despite being reared by the High Priestess of High Society and Matron of Good Manners, my Chanel-wearing mother Cissy Blevins Kendricks.

So why the heck would I want to inject myself with some funky substance just because all the appearance-obsessed females in town were doing it? If peer pressure—and dire threats from Cissy—hadn’t inspired me to don white and debut at eighteen, it sure as heck wasn’t going to work now.

“Baawk, baawk,” my so-called pal, Janet Graham—the culprit responsible for my presence at this particular Pretty Party—squawked in her best chicken imitation, even flapping her elbows to get the point across.

I loaded up my verbal slingshot.

“If everybody jumped off Reunion Tower with Sub-Zero fridges strapped to their butts, would you do it, too?”

I flung the words at her and stared her down, waiting for her comeback. Oh, and she’d have one, too. I could bet my rarely touched investment portfolio on it.

Janet never lacked for words. She edited the society pages for the
Park Cities Press
newspaper, the rag that covered the upscale Dallas neighborhood I’d grown up in, and she wrote much of its contents. Janet knew everyone who was anyone in the city, and she always had something to say about each one of them (the choicest cuts saved for private snarking sessions).

“I see,” was all she said at first, and cocked her head, sending ringlets of bright red hair cascading over her shoulders—a new and very feminine look for her, as she usually went for no-nonsense cuts. She studied me with eyes made all the wider by her black-rimmed “smart girl” glasses. “So, my self-confident compadre, you wouldn’t try a little of Dr. Sonja’s super-new wrinkle eraser? Not even to wipe out those lines between your brows?”

Lines
?

“What lines?” Instinctively, my fingers went up to poke the terrain north of the bridge of my nose.

“The ones you’ve had since high school, Andy.” She sighed and smoothed the lapels of her 1940s style jacket, armed with shoulder pads that had the wingspan of a 747. “You always scrunch up your brow when you contemplate something, and it’s given you premature creases.” She sighed again, agitated, “You’re doing it right now.”

I ambled over toward a mirror, as there were several large gilt-framed ones hanging on the velvet-papered walls in Delaney Armstrong’s gargantuan downstairs hall bathroom. The whole mansion was overstuffed and ostentatious enough to look like an old-fashioned bordello (not that I’d ever seen an old-fashioned bordello, but I had been in a strip club once that had red velvet ceilings and chandeliers).

Did I mention that Delaney was the hostess for this evening’s soiree plugging Dr. Sonja’s miracle cures? And that I’d been tricked into coming by La Femme Janet, who’d invited me out for a friendly “let’s catch up” dinner, only to pull one of her “oops, I nearly forgot, I have to cover this teensy-weensy event for the paper. It’ll just take a sec. Want to go with me?”

Grrrr.

She was almost as bad as my subversive Mummy Dearest, and I was far too gullible for my own good. I would never learn, would I?

I squinted at my reflection, contemplating it so thoroughly my brow was pleated like an accordion. Even when I forced a blank expression, the pleats didn’t erase, not completely.

Well, shiver my splintered timbers.

Janet was right.

I did have a permanent pleat between my eyebrows.

Why had I never noticed?

I saw my redheaded chum smile in the silvered glass as she showed off pearly whites that belied her own fortuitous upbringing: we’d both attended the Hockaday School for Girls, though Janet had been ahead of me by a few years. Still, she’d been a rebel in her own right, and I had admired her for it, more so when I’d committed my own heinous act of rebellion (namely, skipping out on my cotillion).

“Maybe I like my lines,” I grumbled, and I wanted to mean it, even if I didn’t feel the sentiment wholeheartedly. Did frowning make wrinkles worse? I wondered, and turned my back on the mirror.

“You like your lines?” Janet laughed. “C’mon, sweetie, don’t lie to me. No woman in her right mind wants to look like a Shar Pei.”

What about left-minded women
? I wanted to ask, but instead said, “There’s nothing wrong with growing older naturally.”

So long as my wrinkles didn’t bother my boyfriend, Brian Malone. At least, I assumed he didn’t mind that I wasn’t as crinkle-free as polyester. But if he did—if he was that superficial, which he wasn’t—he wouldn’t be worth it, would he?

“It doesn’t matter anyway. I’d never shoot up my creases with sheep poop,” I declared, and Janet crossed her arms over her brass-buttoned chest, looking skeptical.

“Doesn’t hitting forty scare you, Andy?”

Forty
?

Hello? I had nine more years to worry about that. Though Janet was closer still, possibly the cause behind her sudden interest in Dr. Sonja’s crease-eradicating potions.

“How does the saying go? That getting old is better than the alternative,” I responded, in lieu of a real answer.

“Tell that to all the teenage girls who are already getting peels and Botox to stop the lines they haven’t even earned yet,” Janet said with an arch of sculpted eyebrows, and I shook my head at how absurd that sounded.

Okay, so it was trendy for teenagers to have antiwrinkle gunk injected into their faces as “preventive” measures (’cuz, God forbid, they should live past thirty and develop crow’s-feet). So plenty of society matrons in my mother’s crowd threw Pretty Parties where Dr. Sonja came armed with her syringes and filled their faces with concoctions made from human placenta and cow fat. I’d been raised in a world where middle-aged wives were routinely dumped for newer models, so I could understand harboring that kind of fear.

But I was neither a self-conscious teenager nor a youth-obsessed society matron; and, though I’d recently hit thirty-one and had the creases to show for it, I was not about to have foreign substances shot beneath my skin so I could purportedly shed a few years.

Did anyone really know what that goo would do in time? Maybe it would harden like concrete and turn once-human faces to statues.

Besides, I liked to think when I expressed an emotion, my facial muscles followed suit. I knew too many women who smiled and looked as numb as movie zombies.

Hello
? Can you say ‘Cher’?

Or this evening’s hostess, Delaney Armstrong, a fellow prep school alum from the Hockaday School for Girls. She’d never been beautiful in the classic sense, but bright-eyed and energetic: the kind of girl who’d taken charge of things, like pep rallies or dances or club meetings. Delaney’s square-jawed features probably would’ve aged very attractively. Only Delaney hadn’t allowed for growing old naturally. She’d had so much dermabrasion, peels, and Botox that her entire face appeared frozen and vaguely swollen. Her once nut-brown hair had been dyed pale blond and highlighted to within an inch of its life. Her lips looked like someone had inflated them with a tire pump.

I’m not sure whose idea of beautiful that was.

Perhaps Delaney’s hubby liked having a wife who could double for a wax statue at Madame Tussaud’s. If I ever met the man, I might be tempted to ask.

“Dr. Sonja’s giving everyone freebies,” my insistent pal, Janet Graham, tried again, as if that would entice me. “She wants to get everyone good and hooked, so they’ll keep running back to her office for more.”

“Pass,” I told her.

I had no intention of letting Dr. Sonja fill up my cracks with spackle made from squid intestines, not even if it was on her dime.

The whole fast-food mentality of the anti-aging business creeped me out immensely.

The hip and trendy cosmetic dermo had even opened up several Pretty Place clinics in various upscale shopping malls around the city. So, after you bought your size two, low-rise, boot-cut jeans at the Gap and picked up a salad to-go from La Madeleine, you could pop into The Pretty Place for wrinkle shots and a brow wax.

How convenient.

“You’re really not curious to try a little?” Janet bugged me, shrugging when I said most assuredly, “No.”

“Well, I’m thinking of having my lips done,” she said, toddling over to the nearest mirror on stiletto heels and then proceeding to pout at her reflection, resembling a demented fish more than Angelina Jolie. “What d’you say, Andy? Could I use a little plumping?”

“Pillows should be plumped, not lips,” I groused. Janet looked perfectly fine to me. She’d always had her own sense of style, never playing to what was trendy or popular. So what had gotten into her? Why would she suddenly want to look as artificial as the Park Cities socialites she wrote about?

“You can say that, Andy, ’cuz you’ve got good lips. Mine are as thin as a bird’s.”

“I didn’t know birds had lips.”

Janet nudged me. “Stop it, Andy. I’m serious.”

“You can’t be,” I said, because . . . well, she couldn’t be. It was so not like Janet Graham to fret over less-than-ripe lips. She was more apt to get worked up over sexism or racism, or drivers on Central Expressway who talked on their cell phones and applied mascara while weaving from lane to lane. So why was she suddenly so concerned about appearance?

“I’m dead serious,” she assured me, squirming uncharacteristically. “What’s so wrong with wanting a sexy mouth?”

I wished I didn’t believe her, but I did.

She had the most earnest look on her face, maybe even a little sad, like a woman who was questioning her self-worth and finding it lacking; though it was hard for me to believe that someone as independent and tough as Janet Graham would ever lack in self-confidence. I’d watched her blaze through Hockaday with her ever-changing hair colors and artful adjustments to our uniform of white blouse and plaid, never pushing the envelope far enough to get in trouble but making it clear that she wasn’t like everyone else.

She wasn’t just a breath of fresh air, she was positively tornadic, knocking down everything in her path, never letting anyone tell her “that can’t be done,” and leaving a lot of stunned glances in her wake.