Glitter Girl Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Toni Runkle and Stephen Webb

  Cover and internal design © 2013 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover illustration © Katie Wood

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage an retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  www.jabberwockykids.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1: All That Glitters Comes via UPS

  Chapter 2: As Chelsea Ambrose, Jr. VP, Likes It

  Chapter 3: The Merry Maids of Wendell Willkie Junior High

  Chapter 4: What Light from Yonder Laptop Breaks?

  Chapter 5: Some are Born Great (Others Watch Greatness Drive Up in a Really Cool Pink Convertible)

  Chapter 6: The Stuff That Glitter Girls Are Made Of

  Chapter 7: Much Ado about Pink Tickets

  Chapter 8: For Now Sits Expectation in the Air

  Chapter 9: Canst Thou Bring Me to the Party?

  Chapter 10: We Few, We Happy Few

  Chapter 11: Kat’s Influence: Like a Wreath of Radiant Fire

  Chapter 12: The Course of True Love Runs through the White Oak Mall

  Chapter 13: To Go or Not to Go, That Is the Question

  Chapter 14: Cruel to Be Kind?

  Chapter 15: One May Smile and Smile, and Be a Villain

  Chapter 16: The Winter of Kat’s Discontent

  Chapter 17: What’s Done Cannot Be Undone

  Chapter 18: The Readiness Is All (Plus a Really Kickin’ Sound System)

  Chapter 19: Get Thee to a High School Costume Shop on the Other Side of Town

  Chapter 20: Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears the Crown

  Chapter 21: To Thine Own Self Be True

  Chapter 22: Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be (Unless You’re in a Really Big Hurry)

  Chapter 23: Friendship Is Constant in All Things

  Chapter 24: All’s Well That Ends Well

  Chapter 25: What’s Past Is Prologue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Back Cover

  For Katrina and Julia, our daughters,

  our inspiration, our joy.

  Chapter 1

  All That Glitters Comes via UPS

  There it was. In the middle of the Connors’s living room. The Box. It had been shipped overnight from Los Angeles. Kat had to look at it twice before the reality sank in. It was her name all right: Ms. Katherine Connors, 5473 Jasmine Court, Carmel, Indiana. Her name looked funny there on the box, even though she’d seen it a million times before on papers, report cards, and the Christmas cards that she and her BFF Jules always sent to each other.

  But this box was special.

  This box was going to make her the first Glitter Girl in all of Indiana.

  Maybe no one had heard of Glitter Girl yet, but that was about to change, and Kat was how that was going to happen.

  Glitter Girl was a new line of products for teens and tweens. Kat hated that word, “tween.” Who invented it? she wondered. This company in California (Remoulet Worldwide, Inc., according to Kat’s googling on the matter) was going to start selling these products next month. But before that, Remoulet Worldwide, Inc. wanted to get everybody excited about it.

  That’s where Kat Connors came in. And that’s why the box ended up in the middle of her living room. Inside that box was simply every Glitter Girl product that any girl could ever want. Kat’s hand reached closer to the box; she could only imagine what treasures were waiting inside.

  “No, Kat,” she told herself, pulling her hand back. “You promised Mom you wouldn’t touch the box until the sleepover tonight when Jules and everyone else is here.”

  Kat told herself that, but it’s hard to listen to yourself sometimes, especially with all that stuff sitting right in front of you. Lip gloss! In who knows how many different shades! And every cool other thing in the history of coolness! And they were giving it all to Kat. For free!

  As her hand still hovered over the box, Kat thought about how and why this package came to her in the first place. And how she knew, just knew, that this box would change her life. Forever. Obviously, this was no ordinary box. Which made sense. Because Kat Connors was no ordinary girl. She was an Alpha Girl.

  Chapter 2

  As Chelsea Ambrose, Jr. VP, Likes It

  The new mint-green convertible shimmered in the LA sun as it pulled into the parking lot at Remoulet Worldwide, Inc. A perfectly pedicured toe peeked out of its open-toed sandal and stepped down on the gas pedal. The convertible found its way to a spot with a name on it: “Chelsea Ambrose, Junior Vice President.” That same Chelsea Ambrose took a deep breath before getting out of the car.

  Today was the day that she was going to “wow” them. She was going to present her new marketing plan for Glitter Girl to the Remoulet board of directors. Glitter Girl was a new line of makeup, accessories, and style products aimed at the teen and tween market. (Chelsea loved that word, “tween.” Who invented it?) The board of directors at the company included a grand total of zero women, which was just fine with Chelsea. She was hired to bring a woman’s touch to the marketing department, and bring it she would.

  Chelsea’s heels clicked as she crossed the lobby and got into the elevator alone. She adjusted the lapel of her jacket and checked her lipstick and makeup in the reflection of the elevator door. Perfect. Her smarts, ambition, and supermodel looks had gotten her this far; it wouldn’t take much more to carry her over the finish line. She pressed “35” on the elevator button and started to ascend to the top floor—where all the big decisions got made, the place where she hoped to have a corner office very soon.

  As Chelsea opened the door to the boardroom, she saw ten suits around the table.

  “Gentlemen, good morning,” Chelsea said, giving them her best homecoming queen smile. “I know you’re busy men, so I’ll keep my presentation brief.”

  “This better be good,” one of the suits said, already putting a tiny hole in Chelsea’s confidence balloon. She recognized him as Gregory Remoulet, the CEO of the entire company. She’d walked by the huge painting of him in the lobby a thousand times. Still in shape and handsome at fifty-six, he was the son of the company founder and, from all the gossip around the water cooler, not a man to be trifled with.

  Undaunted, Chelsea nodded to an assistant, who dimmed the lights. Chelsea clicked her laptop a few times, and PowerPoint presentation slides lit up the room as she began her sales pitch.

  “How have companies launched products in the past?” she said, circling the room like a lioness moving in on a herd of defenseless gazelles. “They’ve spent millions of dollars on print ads, run commercials at the Super Bowl, and basically pummeled their brand into the consciousness of potential customers with blunt instruments. It was effective, but very expensi
ve.”

  “You’re not kidding,” one of the nameless suits said. “Those Jessica Aguirre infomercials have cost us a bundle.” He was referring to the ad campaign for Remoulet’s signature product, CleanSweep, a facial cream that absolutely positively removed all traces of acne from the teenage face. They had signed an exclusive contract with teen singer Jessica Aguirre to be the face of the campaign and had flooded the airwaves with infomercials and ads that were played constantly.

  “It was a great campaign for its day. Mr. Remoulet, you and your team really put the company on the map in personal-care products,” Chelsea continued. “However, times have changed. Forget TV ads. These are the days of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, where one day you’re singing a song in your jammies in your living room and the next you’re selling out stadiums.

  “This is what kids are into today. They don’t want adults or even a celebrity to tell them what to buy. They look to their friends and classmates to confirm their style choices. To sell Glitter Girl, I propose we harness this, the teenage girl’s most primal need—the need for the approval of her peers—and combine it with the power of twenty-first-century technology.”

  “And how exactly do we do that?” asked Remoulet, clearly intrigued.

  “With something so innocent that nobody would expect it. We infiltrate the teenage slumber party! What could be more wholesome? These rites of passage have been going on forever, but no one has seen their potential as profit-generating mechanisms until now. We start by picking fifty girls to host fifty slumber parties on the same night, one in each state in the nation. We make sure everyone at the party is draped in Glitter Girl products, and by the time each girl gets back home to her computer the next morning, our campaign will be well on its way.”

  “So that’s it? A slumber party?” said one executive, clearly not yet on board.

  “The parties are just the start,” replied Chelsea. “At the same time, we pit these fifty girls against each other by manufacturing the biggest popularity contest this country’s ever seen! And at the end of it, we select one of them as the new Face of Glitter Girl. We design our print and broadcast campaign around her, this girl that we’ve plucked out of obscurity, and we announce it all on our website. They’ll be falling over themselves to move our products. Before you know it, Glitter Girl will be on the lips of every girl in the country, and at a fraction of the cost of a huge marketing campaign.”

  “But how are you going to choose these girls?” said Remoulet, looking over the figures in front of him in his marketing packet.

  Chelsea smiled. “It’s already been taken care of. If you look in the back of your marketing packet, you’ll see names and bios of each of the fifty girls. We call them our ‘Alpha Girls.’”

  “Alpha what?” said one of the suits.

  “Alpha Girls,” Chelsea said, as she clicked her laptop again and a slideshow of the fifty girls began on the screen behind her. “Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet, and these are the first girls that other girls look to for guidance. Guidance on fashion, music…well, almost anything that matters to girls at this age. They’re the most popular girls in school times ten! They are the trendsetters. They’ve got blogs with a nation of readers, Twitter feeds with thousands of followers, and they wield enormous influence over the girls in their community.

  “Take this girl Kat Connors from Indiana,” said Chelsea, stopping the slide show on a close-up photo of Kat. “She keeps a style blog, and we’ve been secretly tracking her picks for six months. She’s been ahead of the curve on almost every trend, including the unexpected resurgence of tartan plaid last April. Kat and these other girls are media-savvy instruments waiting to be played. We know from our research that once we get an Alpha Girl to start wearing and using our products, the rest of the pack, if you will, will follow along.”

  “You make them sound like a bunch of animals,” said Remoulet.

  “Not animals,” Chelsea said, “something far more dangerous when provoked—teenagers.”

  “But how do you know this Connors girl and the other Alphas will even like our products?”

  “Oh, trust me, there’s no way they won’t,” said Chelsea smiling slyly. “I’ll see to it.”

  “It all seems, I don’t know, a little underhanded,” said Remoulet, looking at Kat’s picture. “I like it!”

  Chelsea wasn’t quite sure how long the discussion among the executives lasted or even what was said. It was all a magnificent blur when she thought about it later, like how some brides describe their wedding day. But she did know they bought her plan hook, eyeliner, and proverbial sinker.

  “It’s settled then,” said Chelsea, packing up her laptop, “I’ll go to Indiana to personally supervise the Connors girl, and we’ll dispatch reps to each of the other states. We should have hard numbers within a week of the slumber parties.”

  She noted, with great satisfaction, the jealous looks she saw around the table. The idea had been so simple and so awful that the other executives must have been surprised that their own devious brains hadn’t cooked it up. But how could they have? They were men. They didn’t know about girls and how they wanted—not wanted—ached to fit in. But Chelsea knew and she figured out how to turn that ache into cold, hard cash. “Alpha Girls,” as Chelsea had called them, were the key. And Chelsea knew full well that it was Alpha Girls who ran the world.

  And how did Chelsea know these Alpha Girls so well?

  It takes one to know one.

  Chapter 3

  The Merry Maids of Wendell Willkie Junior High

  “Did you even know what that geometry homework was about?” laughed eighth grader Kat Connors as she headed into Wendell Willkie Junior High. “I mean, really? Who was Pythagoras? And why is he bothering us with his silly theorem?”

  “It has to do with triangles,” said Jules Finch, Kat’s BFF and neighbor since they were two years old. Jules was busy wrangling her clunky math textbook out of her backpack.

  Kat, whose math textbook was nowhere to be seen, was dressed head to toe in the trendiest outfit ever and looking quite fabulous, thank you very much, as she found her way to her locker right outside Mr. Adams’s science lab.

  “Hey, girl!” she yelled to Candace Mack, a pint-sized seventh grader moving in the other direction. “Rockin’ the high pony today! Looking totally therocious!”

  “Therocious” was Kat’s word. She made it up last year and it meant thoroughly ferocious—in other words, the coolest thing possible.

  “Thanks, Kat!” replied the beaming Candace as she scampered to catch up to her admiring friends, who were impressed she’d been spoken to by “the” Kat Connors.

  Jules looked at Kat. “You sure made her day. That was really nice of you.”

  “Well, I remember when we were that age. The upper-grade kids were so nasty to us. I hated it.”

  “Nice to see you’re using your ‘immense influence’ in positive ways,” laughed Jules.

  “Well, like all those who wield power, I must always use it for good and never for evil. I’m kinda like Spider-Man or the Justice League or something.”

  “Oh yeah, right. You’re exactly like Spider-Man,” said Jules, closing her locker door. “I was just thinking that myself.”

  “Shut up,” laughed Kat. “You know what I mean.”

  Even though the first bell had already rung, Kat was clearly not in a hurry to get to class. Instead, she lingered by the lockers. It was here she could always be found between classes and before and after school, surrounded by admiring girls and the occasional boy who was brave enough to approach Kat and make an attempt at small talk or being clever.

  “Anyway, back to that triangle thingy,” said Kat as she deftly maneuvered her own hair into a fishtail braid. “Jules, we totally have to have a study party on this one after school. You bring the brains and I’ll supply the popcorn.”

  “It�
��s actually pretty simple. I’ll explain it to you after you’re finished holding court,” said the more studious Jules.

  That’s what Jules called this daily routine anyway—“holding court.” Jules, who was way into the Renaissance and was vice president of the school’s Shakespeare Club, had told Kat that was what royalty used to do. They’d have people come to court and pay homage to them.

  Kat wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or if Jules was being sarcastic. It was hard to tell with Jules lately. She sure didn’t seem too keen on Kat’s newfound popularity since they’d hit junior high last year. But Kat couldn’t help it if the other girls gravitated toward her and looked to her for what was “in” and “cool.” It wasn’t like she set out to do it. Her mom, Trudy, said it was “in her blood.” The Connors women, they of honey blond hair, fair skin, and striking blue eyes, were always ahead of the curve on just about everything. They just knew what was what.

  • • •

  “Kat! Kat! Check it out! I got it!” the girls heard over the morning buzz in the hallways. It was Zoe Palmer, one of Kat’s new “junior high” BFFs. Her long, black, perfectly straightened hair sailed behind her as she pushed her way through the crowded hallway. Tagging along behind her, struggling to keep up, was Darcy Riddle, Zoe’s redheaded constant companion.

  The two girls dodged the hordes and arrived breathless at Kat’s side. In Zoe’s expertly manicured hand was something white and sleek. “My parents finally caved and got me the new iPhone!”

  “That’s great, Zoe,” said Kat genuinely. “Make sure you watch your data usage, though. The first time my dad saw my phone bill, he totally freaked out.”

  Zoe held the phone as if it were a precious gem. “I love it. It’s just so cool! And it’s just like yours, Kat. I’m so glad I finally ‘convinced’ my parents to buy it.” She made little air quotes with her fingers on the word “convinced.”

  “Wow. I guess whining is an effective negotiating tool,” snarked Jules. She had finished wrestling the books out of her backpack and was now leaning against a windowsill reading a tattered paperback copy of Shakespeare’s poems.