Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by Joanna Philbin
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Poppy
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
Poppy is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company.
The Poppy name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
First eBook Edition: May 2010
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-316-08842-8
Contents
Copyright
We, the daughters
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Acknowledgments
A Preview of Daughters Break the Rules
To my parents
For everything
We,
the daughters,
have formed the following rules and guidelines for optimum happiness and drama-free living:
1. Never read tabloids or surf the celebrity gossip sites. But if you have to, try not to look at the stuff about your parents.
2. All friends are good, but only another Daughter knows what your life is really like. Bond with as many as possible.
3. Friends are always more important than guys. Always.
4. Be nice to everyone, and if people still say you’re conceited, then just let it go.
5. If you need to discuss parental drama, only do so with another Daughter. (See rule #2.)
6. Never talk to the press about your parents. Especially when they’re hanging out in front of your house and yelling at you to say stuff.
7. Always date a guy at least a month before taking him to a red-carpet event. Same goes for taking him on your plane, bringing him on tour, etc.
8. If you see a Daughter being criticized on a blog, always write a post sticking up for her, even if you don’t know her.
9. When meeting new people, only give them one name—your first one.
10. You are not your parents, and your parents aren’t you. No matter how well-known—or mortifying—they are.
chapter 1
“Katia!”
“Katia!”
“Over here!”
“Over here!”
Lizzie Summers stood where she usually did when she was out with her mother—off to the side, hidden in the crowd, safely out of frame—and watched the world’s most famous supermodel drive the paparazzi crazy.
“Katia!”
“Over here!”
With her shoulders thrown back, her back slightly arched, and one manicured hand placed jauntily on her hip, Lizzie’s mother pivoted left and right, her multimillion-dollar smile so bright it could blind people. Today it was even brighter than usual, because Plenty magazine had decided to kick off Fall Fashion Week with a luncheon in her honor. But like most Fashion Week events, there were about fifteen minutes of frantic picture-taking before anything really got started.
“Katia!” someone yelled.
“You’re beautiful!” someone screamed.
Lizzie looked out the window of the Mandarin Oriental’s private dining room, down at the green domes of trees in Central Park and beyond, at the elegant and crowded skyline of Fifth Avenue, and sighed. Um, yeah, she thought. She’s beautiful. Understatement of the century.
Her mother, Katia Summers, wasn’t just beautiful. One fashion designer (Galliano? Gaultier? Lizzie couldn’t remember) had called Katia “walking proof of God.” And if her mother’s twenty-year career as a supermodel was any indication, everyone else thought so, too.
As Katia’s only child, Lizzie had logged more hours of her life looking at her mother in person than just about anyone, and even she had to agree: her mom was Seriously, Jaw-Droppingly, Is-That-Humanly-Possible Gorgeous. Day or night. Made-up or fresh-faced. Bedhead or updo. No matter how few hours of sleep she’d had or how annoyed Lizzie was with her, Katia Summers was never not breathtaking. And if beauty was really the sum of a person’s parts, then each of Katia’s parts was almost perfect. There were the eyes that famously changed color, from turquoise to green to an exotic indigo-purple, depending on her mood; the glacial cheekbones that made the lower half of her face a perfect V; her naturally pillowy lips and the trademark pout, caused by a small overbite her parents had never fixed. There was the thick, extension-free blond hair that fell in waves to the middle of her back, and her lean but voluptuous body. Yes, Lizzie would think, as she looked at her mom across the breakfast table or in the elevator—perfect.
Katia was so perfect that at thirty-seven, when most other models had already hung up their Manolos, she was still in peak demand. She starred in the ad campaigns of at least one A-list designer each season, did spreads in the biggest issues of Harper’s Bazaar, W, and every country’s edition of Vogue, served as the face of L’Ete cosmetics, and once a year graced the cover of GQ or Details, covered by nothing but a macramé bikini bottom and her own strategically placed hands. And now she was about to make the career leap that only a precious few supermodels could even attempt, let alone pull off. She would go from supermodel to super-mogul. Clothes, perfume, housewares—Katia would design it all. Katia Coquette—a “French-inspired” (read: extra-sexy) lingerie line—was just the beginning. And from the sight of the press clamoring to take her photo and the fashionistas watching Katia with approval, Katia Coquette looked like it was going to be a huge hit.
Checking her watch, Lizzie walked over to the open bar.
It was already past noon, and she’d told her best friends, Carina and Hudson, that she’d meet them by one. School started tomorrow, which meant that today they would grab something from Pinkberry, stroll through the West Village, and catch up on their summers—their last-day-of-summer ritual. Since nursery school, Hudson and Carina had been her best friends. Lizzie thought of them as the Brita filters for her life. If something happened to her, good or bad, she passed it through them, and when it came out the other side, she would almost always feel better. Lizzie thought it was because the three of them had one huge thing in common: they each knew what it was like to have a life divided up into two parts: public, and private. They’d even made up their own rules for how to deal with it.
She leaned on the edge of the bar and slipped one throbbing foot out of her mom’s four-inch Christian Louboutin gold peep-toes. She knew that Louboutins were supposedly the best shoes in the world, but they pinched her feet and crunched her toes. She much preferred her thick-soled, extremely-comfortable, eighty-five-dollar Steve Madden platforms, but Katia had vetoed them for these kinds of events.
“Ahhh,” she said, stretching her toes. Nearby a bartender sliced lemons on a cutting board.
“Feet hurt?” he asked. He looke
d like he was in his early twenties, and had one of those little patches of hair on his chin.
“I don’t know how people wear these things,” she said.
The bartender nodded but his gaze traveled over to where Katia was still surrounded by cameras.
“She’s gorgeous,” he said, almost slicing off a finger. “She’s even hotter in person.”
Lizzie looked over at her mom, still posing. She couldn’t resist. “That’s my mom,” she said.
The bartender’s mouth opened as he looked back. “That’s your mom?” he asked in disbelief.
Lizzie smiled. Nobody ever believed her. “Yep,” she said.
“Really?” the bartender asked. “It’s just you guys don’t really look anything…”
Before he could finish his sentence, Lizzie heard her mother’s voice calling from across the room.
“Lizzie! Honey! Come take a picture!”
Lizzie turned around. Her mother was waving one golden, perfectly toned arm in what looked to be her direction.
“Come on!” Katia yelled. “Take a picture!”
Here we go again, Lizzie thought. Every time she went to an official function with her mom, she wound up getting roped into a photo session. Couldn’t Katia have mercy on her, just once?
“Come on, Lizzie!” Katia mouthed over the din of the clicking cameras. “Just a couple!”
The crowd of skinny, pale fashion editors craned their heads to get a look at Lizzie. There was no getting out of this. She slipped her foot back in the shoe and hobbled over to her mom, wishing that her father, Bernard, could have been Katia’s date to this instead. But somehow he always seemed to be on deadline for his column for the New York Times. It was kind of annoying.
When she reached her, Katia draped her slender arm around Lizzie’s waist, and pulled her in tight. “My daughter!” she announced to the crowd.
Lizzie faced the collection of black, vacant cameras lenses in front of her. For a long few seconds, nothing happened. Finally, there was one weak flash. Then another. And then another.
And then…
“Can we have just a few more with you, Katia?” someone yelled. “Just you?”
“Yes, Katia, just you!”
“Hey, Mom,” Lizzie whispered into her mother’s ear. “Can I go meet my friends now?”
Katia squeezed Lizzie’s waist and removed her arm. “Of course,” she whispered.
“Congratulations,” Lizzie whispered back.
Her mom patted her on the back and turned back to the cameras. Lizzie was free.
As she walked out of the room, she felt her shoulders relax and her breath come back. Being at these kinds of things always made her tense. In a few minutes, she’d be on the subway, hurtling downtown toward her friends, and she could forget all of this. But the same question gnawed at her, for what was probably the billionth time, as her heels clicked on the smooth marble floor of the hotel lobby and the mortification of the photo op slowly wore off: Did her mom really not know what her own daughter looked like?
There was a time when the paparazzi had wanted to take Lizzie’s picture, back when she and her mother had been the Sexy Supermodel and her Adorable Kid. When Lizzie was little, the photographers had followed her and her mom everywhere: to nursery school, to the park, to FAO Schwarz.
But then Lizzie got older. And Lizzie changed from the Adorable Kid to the Awkward Teenager. While Katia stayed the Sexy Supermodel.
Actually, awkward was putting it kindly. She was Different. Unusual. Odd.
Or, as Hudson and Carina liked to put it: striking.
“Like what Uma Thurman probably looked like, until she got pretty,” Hudson would say.
But Uma Thurman didn’t have hazel eyes that were so enormous they seemed to bug out of her face. Or a long, meandering nose that faked left and went right. Or straight, thick eyebrows that were as flat and furry as a Sesame Street character’s, even when they were plucked. And Uma Thurman certainly didn’t have bright, curly red hair that was the texture of Brillo and turned into a bush anytime the temperature went above eighty degrees.
And most importantly, Uma Thurman had not been expected to be beautiful. Who expected the daughters of Buddhism professors to turn into Hollywood actresses? But the only daughter of Katia Summers, otherwise known as “Walking Proof of God,” was expected to at least be cute. And that wasn’t quite what had happened.
Lizzie liked to think that her weird looks meant she could avoid the paparazzi. If she were out with her mom, and they got surrounded coming out of a café or Starbucks, clearly she could stay on the sidelines and none of the photographers would mind. But that wasn’t how Katia saw it. Every chance she got, she wanted Lizzie in the photo. Lizzie figured that she was either oblivious to the fact she had a weird-looking kid or trying to prove a point. But how could a supermodel think that looks didn’t matter? As she walked down into the stifling heat of the subway station, Lizzie decided that maybe her mom was just oblivious. Which was worse.
Lizzie swiped her MetroCard in the turnstile and dashed down the steps to the waiting train. As the doors closed, she found a seat and pulled The Great Gatsby from her bag. She wanted to finish it before tomorrow, even though Gatsby was summer reading for the tenth grade, not the ninth, at the Chadwick School. But her taste in books had always been a little advanced. She’d learned to read at three, tackled the first two Harry Potters by six, and begun writing stories at eight. She’d been writing ever since and this summer she’d attended the exclusive Barnstable Writer’s Workshop out on Cape Cod for six weeks. There a writer had kept talking about Fitzgerald, and Lizzie had been embarrassed that she’d never read him before. Now she didn’t want the book to end. There were paragraphs that were so beautiful that she read them over and over. One day, she hoped, she would be able to write a quarter as good as Fitzgerald. Or maybe a tenth.
At Bleecker Street, she got off the subway and limped up the steps to the sidewalk. Her aching feet wobbled in the Louboutins, and it was all she could do not to fall on her face as she walked past sienna-colored brownstones with flowerboxes in the windows, and plate-glass storefronts of bakeries and coffee shops. She loved the West Village—it always reminded her of an earlier New York, when the city was filled with artists and writers and before that, horses and carriages. Now the streets were dotted with fancy clothing boutiques and sushi joints, and filled with NYU students back from summer break, carrying shopping bags from Bed, Bath & Beyond. One day, when she was a famous writer she’d live down here, she thought, just as she turned the corner and saw the blue and green facade of the Promised Land. Otherwise known as Pinkberry.
She threw the glass door open and rushed inside, toward the table in the corner where two girls, one petite and blond, one taller and black-haired, sat waiting for her.
“Lizzie!” shrieked the blond girl as she leaped out of her chair. Carina Jurgensen threw her tan arms around Lizzie as if she hadn’t seen her in years. “Oh my God, hi!” she said, jumping up and down on her flip-flops, as her blond ponytail swung back and forth. “I missed you, Lizbutt!”
“I missed you, too, C,” she said, returning Carina’s frantic hug as best she could. “And you’re so tan.”
“And you’re so tall,” Carina said admiringly, letting her go. “Pretty soon I’m gonna feel like a midget around you, I swear.” Her cocoa-brown eyes were wide and electrically alive. Sometimes Lizzie thought Carina was more alive than anyone she’d ever met.
“Oh my God, that dress is to die for,” said Lizzie’s other best friend, Hudson Jones, as she stood up and hugged her, too. Wavy black curls framed her heart-shaped face, and her green eyes sparkled. “Is that Margiela?” she asked in her soft, gentle voice, looking at Lizzie’s dress.
“It’s my mom’s,” Lizzie said. “And it barely fits.”
“Then have some Pinkberry,” Carina said as they sat down. She pushed a tub of pomegranate yogurt with mochi across the table. “Here, got you your favorite.”
Car
ina Jurgensen had lived her entire life in New York, but at first glance she looked like a surfer girl from the north shore of Oahu. Petite but athletic, with sunstreaked hair that never faded and a sprinkling of freckles on her button nose, Carina actually did surf, and snowboard, and climb mountains, and anything else that allowed her to be outdoors. She was fearless. Ever since they’d been little, Carina had been the first of them to do anything scary—whether it was Rollerblading straight down a hill in Central Park on a crowded Sunday, or flirting with the guys at St. Brendan’s. Because she was unable to sit still for longer than a few minutes, Carina didn’t like to spend a lot of time in front of the mirror, and she was so pretty she didn’t need to. Her favorite season was summer, and her favorite summer look was what she wore today: shorts, a T-shirt with cut-off sleeves, and camouflage-patterned flip-flops. Guys tended to find Carina Jurgensen completely adorable, though she usually didn’t notice.
“I so need this,” Lizzie said, digging into her yogurt. “It’s a gazillion degrees outside.”
“Yeah, but Hudson’s still cold,” Carina joked, nodding at their friend.
“No I’m not,” Hudson argued, pulling her deconstructed fringed wrap closer around herself. “I’m just being sun-savvy.”
If Carina was the beach-blond surfer girl, then Hudson Jones was the sophisticated urban hippie-chick. She was beautiful, with French toast–colored skin and dazzling green eyes, courtesy of her mom’s Afro-Caribbean heritage and her dad’s French-Irish background, and she had the slender build and perfect posture of a girl who’d studied dance all of her life. Hudson was also incredibly stylish. Under her wrap, she wore a silk coral-colored tunic dotted with sequins, gladiator sandals with crisscross straps that traveled up to her knees, gigantic silver hoops, and a one-of-a-kind multicolored woven bag that she’d picked up in Buenos Aires. On Hudson, it all managed to look perfect.
“How was your mom’s thing?” Hudson asked, taking a small bite of her green tea yogurt with blueberries. Hudson was always going for the healthy option.
“Good, but she roped me into a photo op again. When is she gonna get that nobody—nobody—wants to take my picture?”