Chapter One
"Aw, c'mon, Andy. Don't be a chicken. Everybody's doing it. What's the big deal?"
I'm not exactly sure why Janet had followed me into the opulent powder room in Delaney Armstrong's enormous Bordeaux Avenue manse, except to torment me, as she was supposed to be mingling with the loitering ladies swarming the living room: upper crust women in their twenties and thirties, sipping Chablis and waiting for a turn with über-dermo Dr. Sonja Madhavi, there to inject the beauty-obsessed with her latest age-defying cocktails. My only consolation was that Dr. Sonja hadn't brought her fat vacuum to liposuction any thighs or bellies. That would've had me running straight out the front door and not just to the can.
If I strained my ears, I could discern the hum of yammering voices alongside the bass of "Hot Stuff" by Donna Summers, being that disco was the night's background music. No one had asked, but if they had, I'd have kept disco dead and buried.
I was no Saturday Night Fever diva, but a rock chick to the core.
Yet another reason why I'd rather have been just about anywhere else at the moment and felt extra grateful for my temporary refuge in the loo.
I'd endured enough Abba and eyeballed enough shallow women wearing Gucci, Fendi, and Prada to satisfy my quota for the year, and I certainly had no intention of experiencing Dr. Sonja's party favors, since that would mean subjecting myself to a syringe full of God knows what. I'd heard tell that she made up some of her "beauty remedies" on the stovetop in her kitchen. Kind of like an upscale meth lab for the chic.
The idea gave me shivers, but it obviously didn't do much to scare off the long list of Dr. Sonja's clientele. Even the Morning News had dubbed the exotic-looking doc who wore miniskirts and platform heels "Big D's Own Fountain of Youth."
Like a bad case of the flu, Dr. Sonja's "Pretty Parties" had spread across the city, infecting every wrinkle-fearing, couture-wearing woman in Dallas's in-crowd from age fifteen to 115.
It was worse than the Tupperware plague of the 1980s.
Plastic wasn't my thing, not the kind you stored leftovers in or the type that meant reshaping body parts with knives or needles.
Call me crazy—and plenty of folks around Big D did—but hardcore superficiality gave me the heebie-jeebies, not surprising considering that I, Andrea Blevins Kendricks, would forever be known as the "debutante dropout" after bailing on my own cotillion, and deemed fatally etiquette impaired by the city's blue bloods, despite being reared by the High Priestess of High Society and Matron of Good Manners, my Chanel-wearing mother Cissy Blevins Kendricks.
So why the heck would I want to inject myself with some funky substance just because all the appearance-obsessed females in town were doing it? If peer pressure—and dire threats from Cissy—hadn't inspired me to don white and debut at eighteen, it sure as heck wasn't going to work now.
"Baawk, baawk," my so-called pal, Janet Graham—the culprit responsible for my presence at this particular Pretty Party—squawked in her best chicken imitation, even flapping her elbows to get the point across.
I loaded up my verbal slingshot.
"If everybody jumped off Reunion Tower with Sub-Zero fridges strapped to their butts, would you do it, too?"
I flung the words at her and stared her down, waiting for her comeback. Oh, and she'd have one, too. I could bet my rarely touched investment portfolio on it.
Janet never lacked for words. She edited the society pages for the Park Cities Press newspaper, the rag that covered the upscale Dallas neighborhood I'd grown up in, and she wrote much of its contents. Janet knew everyone who was anyone in the city, and she always had something to say about each one of them (the choicest cuts saved for private snarking sessions).
"I see," was all she said at first, and cocked her head, sending ringlets of bright red hair cascading over her shoulders—a new and very feminine look for her, as she usually went for no-nonsense cuts. She studied me with eyes made all the wider by her black-rimmed "smart girl" glasses. "So, my self-confident compadre, you wouldn't try a little of Dr. Sonja's super-new wrinkle eraser? Not even to wipe out those lines between your brows?"
Lines?
"What lines?" Instinctively, my fingers went up to poke the terrain north of the bridge of my nose.
"The ones you've had since high school, Andy." She sighed and smoothed the lapels of her 1940s style jacket, armed with shoulder pads that had the wingspan of a 747. "You always scrunch up your brow when you contemplate something, and it's given you premature creases." She sighed again, agitated, "You're doing it right now."
I ambled over toward a mirror, as there were several large gilt-framed ones hanging on the velvet-papered walls in Delaney Armstrong's gargantuan downstairs hall bathroom. The whole mansion was overstuffed and ostentatious enough to look like an old-fashioned bordello (not that I'd ever seen an old-fashioned bordello, but I had been in a strip club once that had red velvet ceilings and chandeliers).
Did I mention that Delaney was the hostess for this evening's soiree plugging Dr. Sonja's –miracle cures? And that I'd been tricked into coming by La Femme Janet, who'd invited me out for a friendly "let's catch up" dinner, only to pull one of her "oops, I nearly forgot, I have to cover this teensy-weensy event for the paper. It'll just take a sec. Want to go with me?"
Grrrr.
She was almost as bad as my subversive Mummy Dearest, and I was far too gullible for my own good. I would never learn, would I?
I squinted at my reflection, contemplating it so thoroughly my brow was pleated like an accordion. Even when I forced a blank expression, the pleats didn't erase, not completely.
Well, shiver my splintered timbers.
Continues...
Excerpted from Too Pretty to Die by Susan McBride Copyright © 2008 by Susan McBride. Excerpted by permission.
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