Pop Princess Read Online Free PDF Page B

Wonder,” Trina said. “You’ll get used to living here, trust me.” Trina had such confidence that when she said those words—“trust me”—I believed.
    For such a sweet-looking girl, Trina was a taskmaster. We spent the afternoon singing songs with mathematical precision, then drawing the songs out for depth and feeling. Trina’s vocal stamina never wavered, but after a while my voice hurt from all the exercises, so Trina said, “Let’s chug some Gatorade and then dance a while.”
    We went into Tig’s living room and without speaking started clearing the furniture to the sides of the room, just like Trina, Lucky, and Kayla used to do when they rehearsed in the basement of our old house in Cambridge. Their determination had awed me back then. When I came home from school, I munched on junk food and watched South Coast and Oprah. Those girls came home and went straight to the basement, set up the speakers and microphones, and practiced singing and dancing for hours, with a precision that was fierce. People think that most pop stars come out of nowhere and are just folks who got lucky to be born good-looking and with a decent singing voice. The truth is, if you look at the careers of most pop stars, even the really young ones, you will see that years of hard work, talent shows, failure, blind faith, and practice practice practice went into creating them.
    That Trina could get me to dance at all was totally, simply, because I didn’t want her to see that I couldn’t do it. I had taken years of ballet, tap, and modern as a kid—I loved it, and was pretty good—but had stopped cold after Lucky died. In the time since, my muscles had turned to mush and I had to lie down on my bed to button my favorite pair of jeans. Feeling my body move again with fire and spirit might have been a welcome release if my body hadn’t gotten so out of shape. And if anyone else besides Trina had been training me, I probably would have given up after the first misstep and said, “Hey, let’s go see what’s playing at the Cineplex instead.” But because it was Trina, and I wanted to earn her respect and show her I could be talented and hardworking like Lucky, I stayed in the game.
    I was sweating buckets and longing for a bubble bath and a really long nap when Trina said, “You know, you’ve got a great sense of rhythm. That’s pretty hard to develop without having it to begin with. A couple weeks of rehearsing is all it would take to whip your slagging behind into shape.”
    I thought that backhanded compliment meant I was excused from working out after the hour of dancing she had just put me through. Wrong. Because I was so good, Trina turned on the music video channel and we danced through another hour of pop music videos, repeating the routines during commercials and stopping only for sips of Gatorade. Trina probably could have gone on all night if the Kayla video hadn’t come on, silencing her instructions and—finally—getting her to zap the TV off and flop onto the couch.
    â€œWhat do you think of those red streaks in Kayla’s hair?” she asked.
    Since becoming a pop princess, Kayla’s long and curly black hair had been straightened and streaked with red highlights, her thick eyebrows reshaped to appear longer, slimmer, and arched, and her body had turned lean and taut, scary skinny, especially in comparison with her ample bosom, which I can assure you were not the real deal. Half the boys’ lockers at Devonport High had posters of Kayla hanging inside.
    I thought Kayla had been prettier when she looked like a real person.
    Tig walked through the door, cell phone to his ear. “Yes, Kayla,” he said, sighing. “The magazine is giving you a cover, not a feature. You know it’s only covers or nothing now. Right. Out.” He snapped the phone shut.
    Tig looked at Trina and me flopped on the