Tyra Banks - Modelland

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright 2011 by Tyra Banks
Jacket and endpaper art copyright 2011 by The Tyra Banks Company Books, LLC. Jacket art and design by Perry Harovas and James Schmitt/Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy. Endpaper art by Hebru Brantley.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Childrens Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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eISBN: 978-0-375-89944-7

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v3.1

T O M A AND D ADDY .
T HANK YOU FOR BEING ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY
NOTHING LIKE M R. AND M RS . D E L A C RME .

Y OU WANT to be there. You know you do. Dont lie, dahling. Its okay. I know what youre thinking when you look up at that splendorous place atop the mountain. I know what fills you, spurs you on, fuels your dreams. Youre obsessed with being chosen. Everyone is.

The Land you thirst for has loomed at the top of the mountain in Metopia for as long as you can remember. But for most of the year, its covered in fog, its color changing with each passing day as if its a gargantuan mood ring. You begin your mornings staring at the fog, longing for the fateful evening when it will turn a golden yellow and then, finally, like a push-up brassiere, lift.

Oh, how you long for that moment, with bated fresh breath, I hope. For it signifies that the luminescent eye will soon blaze in the sky, bathing the whole world in gold, touching every one of its inhabitants including you.

But dahling, it is no ordinary golden light. Once it tickles you, you are suddenly transported. You hear the softest of sighs or faintest of giggles in your ear, even if youre standing alone. The once-stale air around you becomes both sweet and tart, making your nose tingle and sending a charge of excitement through your brain. The finest silk, the softest velveteen, or the supplest suede will brush your skin, but whatever you thought was touching you is nowhere to be seen.

Basking in the light is such a naughty tease, like getting a single lick of the most delicious butter-pecan gelato youve ever tasted: it inflames your obsession, increasing your desire a hundredfold. You lust to go to this Land to become one of the only famous people in the world. You ache to be a 7Seven.

But very few ever get the chance.

Nevertheless, you and every young girl in the world vie for an opportunity on The Day of Discovery, which is grander than every global holiday combined. Making the delirium even more intense, the Land sends seven talismans called SMIZEs into the world. (What an arcane word! Who thought of such a thing?) These SMIZEs, which boost your odds of being chosen by ninety-one percent, are propelled through the worlds waterways. Naturally, the week before The Day of Discovery, bathing, showering, pool use, and even sewer diving increase, threatening a drought. Chance meetings erupt into fisticuffs on occasion. Every girl wants to find a SMIZE, dahling.

But not nearly as much as you do.

You ignore the slim odds and disregard the warnings youve heard since birth, like how its easier to grow three inches in a month than it is to score a spot in the newest class. You turn a deaf ear to the cautionary tales whispered in your hometown and throughout Metopia: in dingy alleys and side streets of PitterPatter, during shift changes in Shivera, and on assembly lines of Peppertown factories. Like the rumor that the school often takes inhumane and irreversible disciplinary action. Or that certain disposable civilian girls are brought to the Land to be tortured and then killed, used as human sacrifices for ungodly experiments and animalistic rituals. Its obvious why they torture them, the gossipmongers whisper. Those in the Land bathe in civilian blood to maintain their breathtaking beauty.

Goodness great-shoes! A literal bloodbath, dahling? That crimson elixir must leave a nasty ring round the tub.

And then theres the reality of the Pilgrim Plague, a form of sadness-meets-madness that compels unselected hopefuls to embark dadless on an unauthorized pilgrimage to the Land. Its a sickness that comes with a quickness and afflicts the most determined and desperate. And the trek through the dangerous Diabolical Divide always ends in dismembering death.

Ouch.

As The Day of Discovery dawns, however, you and every young girl around the world tune out the horrifying negatives and concentrate on the glitzy, gaudy, dream-come-true positive. You dredge up every ounce of self-confidence from deep within. This is my year, you say to yourself. And so does every other girl. Theyll choose me for sure.

Every girl feels the same way except one.

Tookie De La Crme.

Have you ever seen her?

The girl whose face not even the meanest person you know would describe as yuck but who youd never in a millionno, a trillion years describe as alluring either. The girl whose eyes are three centimeters too far apart and whose mouth is four centimeters too wide. Not that youd break out a ruler, but when you look at her, its enough to make you say that something is definitely off.

Come on now, youve seen her.

Shes the girl whose hair has multiple personality disorder and cant decide if its supposed to be quasi-curly, silky-straight, frantic-frizzy, or wet-and-wavyor maybe a Power to the People fro.

The girl whose body is a contradiction of itself: a slightly hunched back (from years of poor posture, one must presume), feet the size of snowshoes, and stick-figure arms and legs so fragile, you think you hear them screaming Feed me an entire grilled cow, now! The girl with the humongous, punch-bowl-sized head, with a forehead that goes on and on and on, making her look like the weight of her cranium will topple her over and break her into a thousand pieces.

And not only is her clothing painfully mismatched, so are her eyes, dahling. You heard me right. She has one green eye and one brown one.

Have you ever seen Tookie De La Crme?

I bet you have.

Maybe youve even met her.

You just dont remember her.

No one ever does.

For as unusual-looking as she was, Tookie was a Forgetta-Girl, one of the most forgettable girls in the entire world.

But maybe not for long.