Poseur #3: Petty in Pink: A Trend Set Novel (3 page)

It’s lipstick,
she scowled, rubbing the paper roughly against her cheek. When would she stop making everything so complicated?

She exited the bathroom, her cheek throbbing pink. No longer the effect of lipstick, of course—but friction.

“Just one more thing,” Charlotte advised, beckoning her forward with a backward flap of pale pink polished fingers. The signature
Chanel cachalong camellia ring above her middle knuckle, along with the small hand under it, disappeared into her black satin
tote, emerging later with a beautiful fabric headband.

Behind her oversize Dior sunglasses, the gorgeous brunette blinked. “Kneel?”

Janie hesitated, but did as she as she was asked: she sank to the grass and tilted her face upward. Above her, Charlotte bit
her lip, clamping the hair ornament to her angled head.

“We hereby crown thee the Duchess of Doucheberry!”
Theo Godfrey’s thin voice warbled in the near distance. Janie thought she heard Petra’s voice tell him
Shut the hell up
, but couldn’t bear to turn and check. Her pale cheeks pulsed. Could Charlotte have chosen a
more
public place to officiate her totally embarrassing accessorizing ceremony?

“Magnifique!”
she exclaimed, springing her fingers from Janie’s temples. The Winston Willows framed the scene in feathery branches, slicing
ribbons of light across the heaping plate of grapes and oozing triangle of Brie the three ballerinas called lunch. Having
rejoined her friends on their cashmere Burberry blanket, Charlotte smiled, finding a grape with a polished finger and thumb.
“Turn around?”

Janie turned and the green grape turned with her, snapping at the stem.

“You
do
have the legs for those shoes,” Charlotte breathed, popping the grape into her mouth. Next to her, Laila paled as though
she’d been pinched.

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” she squeaked, and swiftly tucked her legs under her butt, hiding what no diet, exercise, or prayer on
Oprah’s great earth could conquer. Her thick lower calves were the bane of her existence, her greatest weakness…
her Achilles cankle
. “Are you saying I
don’t
have the legs for those shoes?” Laila gaped at Charlotte’s insensitivity.

“And, Janie, the dress!” Charlotte tuned her out, preferring to rhapsodize. “Not everyone can pull off that ivory color.”

Kate reddened, gagging on a grape.

“I’m sure these shoes would look amazing on you,” Janie returned to Laila, aware of the redhead’s bruised feelings, if completely
mystified by them. Laila answered with a sarcastic smile.

“Oh, they
would
look amazing?”

“I can totally pull off that color!” spewed Kate, choking down her grape and pounding the cool grass with her palm. Janie
frowned with worry. Why were they taking Charlotte’s comments so
personally
? Her gray eyes darted from girl to girl: Laila, clad in pink ballet slippers, and Kate, in her black camisole leotard and
pink wraparound skirt. She pushed a nervous hand into her hair, forgetting the headband, which leaped from her head and flopped
to the grass, coiling like a snake. A
black lace over ivory satin Chanel
snake.

Wait. Hadn’t she seen that headband earlier today?

“Oh God.” She whirled around to face Charlotte, her throat parched with dread. “These aren’t… am I wearing
their
clothes?”

“What did you think?” muttered Kate as Laila sniffed beside her, eviscerating a small wedge of cheese. Between the two dance-clothed
girls, Charlotte beamed.

“I explained how important this meeting was, and they
insisted
on lending them to you. Isn’t that nice?” From opposite corners of the plush picnic blanket, her henchmen stiffened, and
Janie broke into a sudden sweat. The black-and-ivory silk dress clung to her skin, sticking like cellophane, sealing off her
pores. Just when she wondered if she really might faint, a heavenly voice echoed in her ear.
I’m dead,
she realized with relief, her gray eyes fluttering shut.
And this is the voice of an angel.

“Whattup.”

Okay, so he wasn’t an angel, but with his tanned, sea salt–scrubbed skin, sun-filled, beach-sand brownish gold hair and limpid
beach-glass gaze, he was the closest thing to it—well, assuming you have clichéd Renaissance notions about heaven, and looking
at Evan Beverwil, just admit it: you do.

“Um… ew.” His little sister glowered, impervious (for obvious reasons) to his brooding surfer charms. “Could you and your
ghetto verbal contractions
puh-lease
take yourselves elsewhere?”

He frowned, scratching the back of his tan ankle with the toe of his navy blue Havaianas flip-flop. “Isn’t ‘whattup,’ like,
a compound word?”

“Get. Out!” Charlotte squawked, while Kate and Laila clapped their hands to their mouths, stifling their giggles. As usual,
Evan had
completely
changed their personalities. It was like he’d taken the sticks out of their asses and returned them dipped in Pop Rocks.
Janie turned away, repelled. Crushing on Evan Beverwil was so, like,
obvious
. Like saying, “Hawaii is beautiful.” Or “French fries taste good.” She, for one, resisted convention; she obsessed
outside
the box. And, yeah,
maybe
Paul Elliot Miller, the painfully hot bassist in Amelia’s neopunk band Creatures of Habit, qualified as obvious. But at least
he wore eyeliner, his lip ring was almost
always
infected, and he smelled—as Max, his best friend and drummer, once informed him—“like a Tequila worm, except rancid, and
like, floating in a bottle of butt sweat.” Janie smiled at the memory. It was weird, but liking Paul in spite of—no,
because
of—his repulsive traits, made her feel
interesting
. Like the kind of person who said, “Belarus is beautiful.” Or “Deep-fried dung beetles taste good.”

Of course, there was another,
simpler
reason not to lust after Evan Beverwil. He was utterly, like,
laughably
out of her league. But she preferred her complicated explanation to the more straightforward one (far better to cast yourself
as a beguiling Belarusian beetle-eater than a flat-chested freak with no chance in hell).

Evan tapped the side of her wrist, snapping her from her thoughts, and trained his clear pool-green gaze on hers. “Can I talk
to you for a sec?” he asked in a low voice. He tilted his head and ticked his eyes to the left, adding the unspoken, “Alone?”

“Um… okay.” Janie shrugged, affecting a couldn’t-care-less attitude. And she couldn’t. The stomach spasms she attributed to
gastrointestinal disorder, the light flutter in her heart to early onset angina, and as for her slightly tripped-out color-saturated
vision, she blamed her mother, who had no doubt spiked her breakfast lemon yogurt with LSD. “I’ll be right back,” she assured
Charlotte, who bobbed her delicate eyebrows and flashed Evan an evil warning look. Kate and Laila froze in disgust, two letter
W
’s etched between their eyebrows, a clue (as if Janie needed one) to what they both were thinking.

WTF.

“You totally saved me,” Janie remarked once she and Evan departed the shade of the willows and were well out of earshot. She’d
meant to sound offhand and ironic, and might have succeeded if Joaquin Whitman hadn’t picked up his guitar and floated a quiet,
tender melody across the lawn. Melancholy guitar music has a way of making anything you say sound nauseatingly sincere.
You totally saved me.
“I mean”—she raised her voice, attempting to drown out the Lifetime soundtrack—“Laila and Kate pretty much want me dead right
now.”

“Oh yeah?” Evan appeared to think deeply on the subject. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” she replied.
What if she explained and he took their side?
“Where are we going?”

“The Brat.” He began walking.

Janie nodded. And then she smiled. That she’d just
known
what “the Brat”
meant
; it seemed significant somehow. Sliding her eyes to the left, she pondered Evan’s serious profile: the sandy brown eyebrows,
the long blond-tipped lashes, the barely sunburned bridge of his nose, the soft dent in his rose-wax lower lip. They’d only
had five or six conversations, each of them more inept than the last, and yet—actual information
must
have been exchanged. How else would she know the pet name for his Porsche? Or that he had nightmares about the elephant statues
at the La Brea Tar Pits? And his ongoing obsession with Bob Seger, or the very strange fact that he’d read
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
? Weren’t these the kind of dorky details dudes like Evan Beverwil kept close to the vest? The kind of details you’d never
guess unless, well… you
knew
them?

“What?” He paused at the gleaming door of his fire engine red Porsche 911 convertible. Janie blanched, suddenly aware that
she’d been staring.

“Oh,” she shook her head quickly. “Nothing.”

Pushing some air from between his lips, Evan bobbed his eyebrows—
whatever
—and grabbed the door handle. Planting one navy blue flip-flop on the ground, he slid into the black leather–upholstered driver’s
seat, craned sideways, and popped open the glove compartment. His faded moss green Pintail t-shirt strained across his broad
back, inched above the waistline of his navy-silver board shorts, and revealed a tantalizing stretch of taut, tanned torso.
Then the glove compartment clapped shut, and the t-shirt closed down like a curtain.

“Here,” he gestured, getting out of the car. A flimsy Utrecht Art Supplies bag dangled under his hand. He presented it to
her, scratching the back of his neck.

“What is this?” Janie frowned with mock suspicion. Plastic rustled around her wrist as she hesitatingly reached inside, removing
a cellophane-sealed tin box. “Oh…,” she breathed. It was a Prismacolor Premier colored pencil set, 132 pencils, the largest
set available. Of course, at $190-something, she’d had to restrict herself to the more modestly priced twelve-pencil set,
a familiar array of colors like crimson red, grass green, lemon yellow, black, and white. But here in her hands, so much more:
Copenhagen blue, celadon green, dahlia purple, Spanish orange. Colors so beautiful they made her heart ache.
Why is he giving this to me?
she wondered. And then, inanely, an answer:

He likes me?

“So,” his boyish voice echoed behind her dreamlike thoughts. “I was thinking, like, maybe you could help me design something?”

Briskly, Janie glanced up, attempting to shake off her daze. “Design… what?”

“A
tattoo
,” he half smiled, like he’d had to repeat himself. “I’m turning eighteen in a couple months, and like, I want something custom-drawn.
Look,” he added, all business, “it’s not like I wouldn’t
pay
you.”

“Oh,” she replied, allowing the mists to part. Returning the pencil set to the bag, she happened to glimpse her reflection
in his curved, tinted sports car window. Her mutant face smeared across the glass, expanding on one side like a half-wet sponge.
That she’d actually allowed herself to think he
liked
her!

It was so impossibly pathetic.

“You know what, I’m sure you’re busy, so don’t worry about—”

“No, no!” she stopped him, whipping away from the car window. “I’ll do it, I mean”—attempting to mask her sponge face behind
her hands, she glanced up—“I’d like to.”

“Oh,” he nodded slowly. “Cool.”

The bell rang, signaling the end of lunch. All around them, car doors unlocked, hiccuping mechanical chirps, and kids began
to mosey to their cars, glugging the dregs of their bottled Cokes and organic Kombucha teas. Janie gave Evan a nervous smile,
I should go,
and turned to leave.

“I meant to ask you,” he stopped her. She turned around again, more alert than ever to the surrounding rabble—the wheezing
hydraulics, the car trunk
kuh-klunks,
the shrieking laughter. “Weren’t you wearing something different before?”

“Oh,” she flushed. Would he realize her clothes belonged to Charlotte’s friends? Would he think she stole them from a coat
check, Lindsay Lohan–style? “Um, yeah,” she confessed miserably.

“I thought so,” he pursed his lips, upwardly tilting his chin. “I was going to tell you, like, cool shoes. But then you changed,
so…”

She frowned, hugging the plastic bag to her chest. It made a sound like dead leaves.

“
Not
that what you’re wearing now
isn’t
cool,” he quickly backtracked. “But…”

“But…?” she prompted, squeezing out a terrible laugh. She could only imagine his response: but you’re too tall for high heels.
But you’re too tomboyish for dresses. But you’re too sponge-faced to live.

But what?

“Nothing, it’s just”—his chlorine green eyes locked into middle distance, the pupils furling into small points—“it’s just
what you were wearing before was more, like,
you
. You know?”

Janie’s heart rose in her throat. She swallowed, daring to meet his half-moon-shaped pool green eyes. She’d never heard “you”
said in quite that way. Like “you” was something good. Something
complimentary
, even.