You Look Different in Real Life by Jennifer Castle Read Free Book Online Page A

voices.
    I’ve thought about this and have decided I’ll wait until Mom calls me down, like I was so engrossed in something I completely forgot we were expecting visitors. But now that I’m standing by for my cue, it all feels sort of Scarlett O’Hara.
    Mom yells, “Justine! Lance and Leslie are here!”
    I check myself in the mirror. Outfit looks uninspired but functional: blue jeans and a black V-neck sweater, with my special-occasion silver-toned sneakers. It’s rare for me to wear something completely plain like this, unadorned by a graphic or funny comment. I feel naked and overdressed at the same time.
    Mentally, I trim twenty pounds off my body. If I’d lost the twenty pounds I’d wanted to lose but somehow couldn’t—because, let’s be honest, I just didn’t try hard enough—would my face be less round, my chin pointier? Would this part of my hips be gone? Would I look like how people imagined I would look? Or rather . . . how I imagined I would look?
    The fact that I go right to thinking about people aka audiences makes me mad, and the fact that I don’t know how to change that makes me even madder. But what can I do? They’ve got what they’ve got and maybe that should be my punishment. For not having the willpower, for being so lazy. I deserve for them to see me on-screenand whisper to whoever’s sitting next to them, Whoa. She chunked out.
    I’ve taken a preemptive Zantac for my stomach, which I know won’t actually help but it’s nice knowing it’s in there.
    Then I make my way down the stairs. Not too fast, not too slow. Leslie, Lance, and my mom are waiting at the bottom in our foyer.
    When Leslie sees me, she blurts out, “Justine. Oh my God!”
    “Hey,” I say.
    Now Lance looks up but his face is stone. His eyes travel slowly from my head down to my toes before he cracks one side of his mouth amusedly upward.
    “I almost didn’t recognize you,” says Leslie, trying to hide the shock in her voice. I wish I could take a picture of the contrast between her expression and her husband’s.
    “That’s been happening,” I say.
    She steps toward me, tentatively like she’s not sure it’s really me, and reaches out to touch my hair.
    “What’s a color nobody’s ever seen you wear?” Amelia asked me at the salon.
    “Pink.” It popped out of my mouth like a bubble, catching a rainbow with the light.
    So now my hair is chin-length, sliced into choppy chunks with the help of a razor blade. The pink that streaks through it is dark, dramatic, a shade you might see in a once-a-year sunset.
    It’s so not me that it’s suddenly, totally me.
    I can tell Leslie’s fighting a battle: Wanting to Seem Excited vs. Being Inwardly Horrified. My mom had the same satisfying reaction. Finally Leslie just says, “Well, then,” and pulls me into a hug.
    Leslie has her long blond hair in a neat ponytail, with a rhinestone-studded headband looking pretty but unnecessary. When she draws back and turns to say something to my mother, I notice a frown line between her eyes, which was obscured by the hat that day outside the library, and it’s much deeper than the one I remember. In the pictures I’ve seen of her at the premiere of their last film, the frown line is not even there, and I wonder how much makeup it takes to spackle up a crevice like that.
    Lance steps forward and gives me a quick hug, grinning like he just won a grand prize. Ethically, he’s not allowed to encourage us to look or dress a certain way. But I’m guessing he likes it when things work out for him in that area. The ratty superhero T-shirt I wore every day in Five at Six and that gray fedora I was partial to at eleven. Now this, with the pink streaks.
    With his head uncovered, I can see Lance has less hair than he used to but it suits him, and he also looks deeply tanned. I flash on a conversation I had with Rory when we were eleven.
    “Don’t you think Lance is kind of a hottie?” I asked her as we were sitting on the