Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nancy Rue has written over 100 books for girls, is the editor of the Faithgirlz Bible, and is a popular speaker and radio guest with her expertise in tween and teen issues. She and husband, Jim, have raised a daughter of their own and now live in Tennessee.

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Here's Lily

Thomas Nelson

Chapter One

Lily straightened up and drove her vivid blue eyes into Shad.

"I need for you to quit making fun of my hair," she said through gritted teeth. She always gritted her teeth when she talked to Shad Shifferdecker.

"Why can't you ever just say 'shut up'?" Shad said. "Why do you always have to sound like a counselor or something?"

Lily didn't know what a counselor sounded like. She'd never been to one. If Shad had, it hadn't helped much as far as she was concerned. He was still rude.

"I'm just being polite," Lily said.

Leo blinked his enormous gray eyes at Shad. "Shad, can you say 'polite'?"

"Shut up," Shad said and gave Leo a shove that landed him up against Daniel Tibbetts, his other partner in seeing how hateful a sixth-grade boy can be to a sixth-grade girl.

Just then Ms. Gooch appeared at the head of the line, next to the water fountain, and held up her right hand. Hands shot up along the line as mouths closed and most everybody craned their necks to see her. Ms. Gooch was almost shorter than Lily.

"All right, people." Lily was glad she didn't call them "boys and girls" the way the librarian did. "We're going to split up now. Boys will come with me. Girls will go into the library."

"How come?" Shad blurted out as usual.

"The girls are going to a grooming workshop," Ms. Gooch said. She raised an eyebrow. Ms. Gooch could say more with one black eyebrow than most people could with a whole sentence. "Did you want to go with the girls and learn how to fix your hair and have great skin, Shad? I'm sure they'd love to have you."

"No, we would not," Lily wanted to say. But she never blurted it out. She just turned to Reni and rolled her eyes.

Reni rolled hers back. That was the thing about best friends, Lily had decided a while back. You could have entire conversations with each other just by rolling your eyes or saying one key word that sent you both into giggle spasms.

"No way!" Shad said. "I don't want to look like no girl!"

"Any girl," Ms. Gooch said. "All right, ladies, go on to the library. Come back with beauty secrets!"

Lily took off on Reni's heels in the direction of the library. Behind her, she heard Shad say, just loud enough for her to hear, "That grooming lady better be pretty good if she's gonna do anything with Lily!"

"Yeah, dude!" Leo said.

Daniel just snorted.

"Ignore them," Reni whispered to Lily as they pushed through the double doors to the inside of the school. "My mama says when boys say things like that, it means they like you."

"Gross me out and make me icky," Lily said, wrinkling her nose.

Besides, that was easy for Reni to say. Lily thought Reni was about the cutest girl in the whole sixth grade. She was black (Ms. Gooch said they were supposed to call her "African American," but Reni said that took too long to say), and her skin was the smooth, rich color of Lily's dad's coffee when he put a couple drops of milk in it. Mine's more like the milk without the coffee! Lily thought.

And even though Reni's hair was a hundred times curlier than Lily's naturally frizzy mass of auburn, it was always in little pigtails or braids or something. Reni's hair was under control anyway. Lily's brother Art said Lily's hair always looked like it was enough for thirty-seven people the way it stuck out all over her head.

But most important of all, Reni was as petite and dainty as a toy poodle, not tall and leggy like a giraffe. At least that was the way Lily thought of herself. Even now, as they walked into the library, Lily tripped on the wipe-your-feet mat and plowed into a rolling rack of books. She rolled with it right into Mrs. Blain, the librarian, who said, "Boys and girls, please be careful where you're walking."

It's just girls, Lily wanted to say to her. And I'm so glad. Shad Shifferdecker definitely would have had something to say about that little move.

Reni steered her to a seat in the front row of the half circles that had been formed in the middle of the library. The chairs faced a woman who was busily taking brushes and combs and tubes of things out of a classy-looking leather bag and setting them on a table. Lily watched her for a minute.

The lady wore her blond hair short and obviously styled with product, the way all the women did on TV. Her nails were shiny and had perfect white tips. They clacked lightly against the table when she set things down on it. Lily could smell her from the front row. She smelled expensive, like a department store cosmetics counter.

Lily thought about how her mother grabbed lipstick while they were shopping for groceries at the Acme and then only put it on when Dad dragged her to some university faculty party. As for having her nails done—high school P.E. teachers didn't have fingernails.

Lily's mind and eyes wandered off to the bookshelves. I'd much rather be finding a book on Indian headdresses, she thought as she looked wistfully at the plastic book covers shining under the lights. Her class was doing reports on Native Americans, and she had a whole bunch of feathers at home that she'd collected from their family's camping trips. Wouldn't it be cool to make an actual headdress ...

"May I have your attention please, ladies?"

Reluctantly Lily looked at the lady with the white-tipped nails and wondered vaguely just how she got them that way. She was facing them now, and Lily saw that she had on lipstick that matched her sweater, put on without a smudge, and gold hoop earrings that brushed against her cheek. Something about her made Lily tuck her own well-bitten nails under her thighs and wish she'd looked in the mirror before she came in here to make sure she didn't have playground dirt smeared across her forehead.

Nah, she thought. If I did, Shad Shifferdecker would've said something about it.

Besides, the lady had a sparkle in her eyes that made it seem like she could totally take on Shad Shifferdecker. Lily liked that.

"I'm Kathleen Winfrey," the lady was saying, "and I'm from the Rutledge Modeling Agency here in Burlington."

An excited murmur went through the girls, followed by a bunch of hands shooting up.

"Well!"

Kathleen Winfrey smiled, revealing a row of very white, perfect teeth. Lily sucked in her full lips and hoped her mouth didn't look quite so big.

"Questions already?" Kathleen said. "I've barely started. How about you?"

She pointed to Marcie McCleary, who was waving her arm so hard that Lily knew all her rings were going to go flying across the library any second.

"You're from a modeling agency?" Marcie asked breathlessly. "Do you, like, hire models?"

"We hire them, and we train them," Kathleen said.

"Could we be models?" somebody else said.

"Is that why you're here—to pick models?"

"Do they do, like, commercials or just fashion shows and stuff?"

"I was at this fashion show at the mall, and this lady came up to my mother and said I could be a model like the ones they had there, and ..."

"Ladies!" Kathleen laughed in a light, airy kind of way that made Lily vow never to giggle like a hyena again. "Why don't I tell you why I am here and that will probably answer all your questions at once. I've come to...