Remember back in high school there was that one girl who stood out for all the right reasons? She was smart, dressed a cut above the rest and was stunningly beautiful. She was funny and confident. She wore high heels. She had it all. At Hope High School in tiny Port Lavaca, Texas in the late 1990s, that girl was Hope Dworaczyk. That the school’s name matched her own was a coincidence, though it really did seem as if it had been named for this one student. Hope’s grandma was the principal, to boot. People looked at the statuesque teenager and said, “Hey, she could be a model.”

You always wonder what becomes of the It girl. Does she end up with her own episode of Intervention? Does she fill her trunk with junk and become a leg breaker for the Mob? You never know. For Hope, happily, things went just as planned. She won a Texas beauty pageant. She aced her accelerated-studies program and graduated early, at the age of 16, then got an agent and started modeling professionally. She had the balls — let’s rephrase that, the poise — to blossom into a successful überbeauty. Today the 24-year-old is a fashion model and a host of the Canadian television series Inside Fashion. She’s also Miss April 2009.