"Wow, you're soooo pretty," said five-year-old Tiffany Oshiro.
"Why, thank you, Tiffany," the woman said, her curly blonde hair flowing down her shoulders as she bent down. "You're pretty, too. You look just like your daddy."
Tiffany remembered thinking that everybody else said the opposite, that she looked like her mother, but decided not to comment.
"Moira—ahem, Miss Platt is somebody who Daddy knows from work," her father explained. "But, uh...I think she has to be going now."
"Yes. Goodbye, Tiffany," Miss Platt said, casually smoothing out Tiffany's hair as she stood up.
Her father walked her to the door. Tiffany started to head toward her bedroom, but turned back to watch them with a curious eye. Despite her new, fashionable clothes, Miss Platt reminded Tiffany of a fairytale princess, her thin body moving gracefully, her smile as bright as the sun.
Her father seemed to be just as mesmerized. He held her hand as he led her to the door.
So Tiffany really shouldn't have been surprised a few weeks later, when he decided to stop being married to Mommy and went to live with Miss Platt instead.
Ten years later, Tiffany Blum-Deckler was waiting in the Lawndale High School parking lot. She was wearing her new red dress and high-heeled sandals. Her hair had been artfully put up at the salon.
A car pulled up. Out came a woman wearing the same outfit as Tiffany, who spotted her and headed over.
"Are yoouu from the modeliiing agencyyy?"
"That's right. I'm Angelique Williams, and you're...Tiffany, right?"
"Uh-huh." She tilted her head to one side. "You're really pretty."
"Thank you," Angelique Williams said, smiling wanly. She was very tall and very thin. Tiffany was pleased.
"How old are you?"
The model's smile faltered a bit. "Thirty-three," she said, a bit defensively.
Tiffany considered. That was old, but then, Tiffany knew that she couldn't pass off a normal model as her mother, and it was probably younger than any of the other moms. She smiled.
"Okay. Let's go inside."
"Great," said Angelique, following her toward the building. "Now, what kind of event is this exactly?"
"A mother-daughter fashion show."
Angelique blinked, then shrugged. She'd had weirder gigs.
Sandi was talking, but Tiffany wasn't really listening. She was looking a few feet away, where Sandi's mother was talking with Quinn's mother. Both were dressed in the same clothes as their daughters.
Quinn's mom had nicer hair than Sandi's mom, but Sandi's mom looked better in her green dress. Neither looked as pretty as Angelique, though.
Quinn kept stealing glances at Angelique, and Stacy was staring at her more openly. She snapped to attention at Sandi's rebuke, though.
"...so even though we could not all participate—"
"I'm sorry! I told my mom not to go on the business trip, really!"
"Yes, thank you, Stacy. I'm just glad that you've managed to overcome such terrible parental neglect in order to provide the rest of us with moral support. Now, I talked to Ms. Li. Tiffany, you and your…" Sandi paused, looking at Angelique. "...partner go on second, right after Ruby. Are you prepared to represent the high standards of the Fashion Club?"
She directed this question to Angelique, who smirked. "I have some experience with this sort of thing," she said.
"Very good. Now, after her goes Brittany Taylor, and then Quinn…"
Tiffany was distracted again as Ruby Montag passed with her mother. Ruby was quite pretty, but her mom had crow's feet. Kristen Leung was also there, but she was just…ew. Goth. Her mother's black dress was nicer, but she didn't look as pretty as Angelique. Diana Brayshaw was also there, but she wasn't even a contest.
Quinn and Sandi were talking to each other in those not-fighting voices of theirs. Their moms talked to each other the same way. Tiffany knew, vaguely, that the two families were competing with each other again. It didn't matter, and after a moment the two girls went in opposite directions to finish getting ready for the show.
Once they were alone, Stacy gently motioned Tiffany to the side, away from Angelique. "Hey, Tiffany? Can I ask you a question?"
"Yeeaah?"
"It's about your, uh...mother." She nodded toward Angelique, who had taken out a compact to check on her make-up.
Tiffany frowned. "Is theeere somethiiing wrooong with her?"
"No, no! I didn't mean—she's really cute," Stacy said quickly.
Tiffany nodded. "That's good. I aaasked the agencyyy for the prettiest model that they haaad."
"Oh. Okay, then," Stacy said simply, with a rather forced smile. "Never mind."
"Hey, Tiffany Blum-Deckler, right?"
She turned; a sophmore whom she vaguely knew as Rob Koizumi was standing there with a clipboard. He was on the student council, but he wasn't popular.
"Yeah?" she said. She hoped he wasn't going to try and ask her out. He had bad hair, and he wore pink shorts with a black sweatshirt. Ew.
"You and your mom are going on in a minute. Is she…" He looked around.
"I think that's me," said Angelique, closing her compact and flashing a dazzling smile.
A beat passed. "Okay," Rob said finally, checking something off on his clipboard. "Follow me."
He led them to the side of the stage, where Ruby and her mother were now talking animatedly. He vanished, and a moment later returned with Brittany Taylor, accompanied by another young woman with voluminous blonde hair.
Brittany waved; she was wearing pink opera gloves on her hands. "Hey, Tiffany! You brought your stepmom, too?"
Tiffany blinked. "Stepmooom?"
"I love your dress!" the blonde woman said.
"Thank you," Angelique replied. "I love your hair."
Ms. Li was now onstage, talking to the crowd, and when she was done Ruby and her mother strutted out. "We're next," Angelique murmured. "You ready, hon?"
Tiffany nodded, but she felt nervous. Would she and Angelique look pretty enough? She glanced onstage. Ruby was a good model, but her mother didn't strut well. People applauded politely.
She took Angelique's hand and led her onstage, walking down the catwalk in front of at least one hundred people.
Tiffany's nervousness quickly evaporated. It was like in that movie, where Cinderella shows up at the party and everyone is shocked by how good she looks? Tiffany could feel that sense of awe radiating from the crowd. She loved that feeling. She thought about it every day when she picked out her outfit, and strove to feel it when she walked down the halls at school.
It was the feeling of being pretty.
They headed backstage, passing Brittany and her stepmom as they went. The audience clapped.
Tiffany smiled.
Tiffany was still glowing as the event ended, and Angelique bid her goodbye with a languid smile. She hardly noticed how Quinn fumed at her mother, nor the Griffins' smug looks. Their performances didn't matter; hers had been a success.
She changed into some more normal (but still quite fashionable) clothes before heading home, her red dress in a dry-cleaning bag. She was still smiling softly as she walked into the house.
Her little brother looked up as she entered. He was sitting in the armchair, reading a book. "Where have you been?" he asked.
"The Fashionnn Cluuub."
"Well, Dad called one of your friends and now he's mad at you about something. Dad! Tiffany's home!" he added, not looking up from his reading.
Tiffany's stepfather, Murray, came in from the kitchen. Sure enough, his face was stony.
"Thanks, Brandon," he said, a bit sardonically. "Could you please go upstairs while your sister and I talk?"
Brandon complied, grumbling as he went. Murray and Tiffany stared at each other; if she knew why he was angry then she didn't show it.
"Whaaat's wrooong, Murrayyy?" Tiffany called her stepfather by his name. Brandon called him "Dad," because he was the only dad whom Brandon could remember.
"I was trying to find out if you would be home for dinner, so I called your friend Sandi's house. Her father said that you and the rest of the Fashion Club were at some kind of mother-daughter fashion show at the school."
"Uh-huh."
"I don't remember your mother mentioning anything about that."
"That's becaauuse I didn't tell heeer."
"Yeah, I figured that out," he said, the sarcasm in his voice much more noticeable now. "I want to know why. It sounds like something that your mom would have loved to do with you."
Tiffany looked down at the floor. "Sheee's not prettyyy enough."
"How can you say that?!"
"Sheee's faaat."
Murray looked outraged, but whatever he was about to say was interrupted as the front door opened again.
"Oh, finally home. You would not believe my last client, she was completely—is something wrong?"
Susan Blum-Deckler frowned as she looked from her husband to her daughter. Tiffany stared back at her, an unusually pensive look in her eyes.
Tiffany hated it when people said that she and her mother looked alike, but the fact is that it was true. They were almost the same height, the same hair—even the same fashion sense, as her work clothes were much nicer than anything that Quinn or Sandi's mothers wore.
But where Tiffany was straight lines and angles, Susan had nothing but soft, fleshy curves. She must have weighed twice as much as her daughter. Granted, most doctors would claim that Tiffany was underweight, but that didn't make Susan any less fat.
It took Murray half a second to recover, bending down to give his wife a peck on the lips. "No, everything's fine, dear. Now, what was that about your client?"
"Oh, it was that one lady in Crewe Neck, the one who's had three designers in the past six months—so we've been talking about her living room for a week, and then she suddenly decides that—"
Tiffany took this opportunity to slip away up the stairs. She caught a look from her stepfather, telling her that their conversation would continue at some point in the future.
She went up to her room, putting the red dress away in her closet with a small sigh. She and Angelique really had looked pretty. She wondered if she could get a photo of the event; it would look nice along with the other pictures that Tiffany had decorating her mirror.
Then her eyes fell on her nightstand. She hesitated, then glided over, taking an old photo album out from the top drawer. She sat down on the bed and opened it.
The first page was a wedding photo. Her father—not Murray, her real father, whom she hadn't seen in years—beamed at the camera, looking handsomer than any boy whom Tiffany had ever seen. Her mother's smile was radiant; here she really did look like Tiffany, except a few years older, and with eyes that were wide and shining in a way that Tiffany couldn't quite match.
She leafed through the first few pages, with more and more happy pictures...until she got to the ones where her mother was pregnant. Pregnant people always look awful—it's like the worst kind of fat, just jutting out of your gut and impossible to hide. Her face had become chubby, too, and it only got worse in the photos where she was pregnant with Brandon.
Her dad still looked so handsome, though. He looked as good in every photo and in every memory that Tiffany had, up until the day that he left.
Tiffany closed the photo album, returning it to its drawer. Then she wandered over to the mirror, sitting down to apply her facial mask before bed.
She stared at her reflection for a moment. A small smile returned to her lips.
"I am really am pretty," she said, and then slathered on the gel to make sure that she stayed that way.