Prep Boy Secrets

Chapter Twenty

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C H A P T E R T W E N T Y

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Waking up at six in the morning wasn't exactly ideal, especially on a Saturday. But if Cassie and I were going to fit an Elle interview, a romp of surfing, a shopping trip and an extravagant dinner with her family all in one day, we definitely had to get started early.

I watched the slight dark circles under my eyes disappear at the hand of an eccentric makeup artist. No Elle interview was complete without a full blown photo shoot, even though our feature would probably only be two-pages of the entire mammoth of a magazine. In fact a whole Elle team came to the Cosgrove residence just ten minutes ago to set up camp, from lighting to high-def video cameras to capture "behind the scenes" video for the Elle website.

This hadn't been my first rodeo; I had watched Amber do these "at-home" interviews many a time before. The crew would sweep in like a tornado, making a mess of the entire house, moving furniture to perfect angles, putting light screens over the windows, setting up monstrous tripods and spreading catered food in the kitchen for the crew to nourish themselves through it all. Then it would be chaos until whoever was in charge said "I think we're done here!" and the whole spectacle would disappear without a trace, with not a crumb of leftover food in sight or an upholstered chair out of place. For an "at-home" interview, it certainly wasn't a natural experience.

"You have gorgeous cheekbones darling!" said the Australian makeup artist. I would have smiled or said thank you, but she insisted I kept my face muscles still. So a grunt sufficed to our one-sided conversation. She went on to compliment my eyes, my hair, my lips, my eyebrows, and I began to wonder why I needed so much makeup if according to her I had the "face of Adonis".

But when she finally finished her craft (which included eyebrow plucking, mascara applying, foundation smearing, and bronzing), I realized what all the fuss was about. My skin was perfectly even with not an ounce of shine to be found. My eyes popped against my tamed eyebrows, and my hair (thanks to a hairstylist simultaneously working on my head) was crisp and styled to perfection. I looked like my best self.

"Flawless!" the makeup artist said, "But you did most of the work by being born with great genes." The hairstylist, who didn't speak a lick of English, nodded her head and said something in German.

I sat in the transformed living area of the great room waiting for Cassie to have her own makeup finished. I hardly recognized the space from when I had arrived just yesterday. Within another twenty minutes, Cassie finally appeared and the crew stood in their respective places.

Cassie wore a form fitting azure-shaded peplum dress that hit just above the knee. The color of her dress complimented my own modern dress shirt which was gray for three-fourths of the length; the other fourth covering my chest to my collar was a forest green fabric. One of the many stylists crowded in the great room told me it was "color-blocking," a term I was familiar with but she had guessed otherwise.

Lisa Westford, the Elle journalist, sat rigidly against a chair across from the loveseat we sat on. She had a notepad, her iPhone ready to record the conversation, a Venti skinny vanilla soy latte with extra foam and a set of green eyes prepared to bore herself into our personal lives. This was her job, to create a painting of our glamorous lives for her readers and the words she would use were her paintbrush. Her demeanor was inviting, yet blatantly professional. Sitting across from her, I knew she was trustworthy.

"That long flight from New York to San Diego certainly didn't affect your appearance in any way! You two look amazing," Lisa started. The moments the word escaped her mouth, she pressed record on her iPhone.