Poseur (4 page)

And how does this relate to Jake and Janie?

When you’re this obsessed with France, even insults adhere to theme. Which is to say, Charlotte was responsible for Janie’s
highly unfortunate Winston nickname. Not that she ever took the credit. She didn’t have to. Who else could have come up with
it?

Ninth Grade * Intermediate Ballet * 3:58 p.m.

“Who did you say she looked like?” Laila Pikser asked as they warmed up at the bar. Laila was kind of a ditz, but her arabesques
were positively perpendicular.

“It’s a
what,
not a
who,
” Charlotte explained, keeping her eyes to the wall-length mirror. “I said she’s the human version of
Centre Pompidou.
”

“Who’s Sandra Pompidoo?”

“The modern art museum in Paris,” Charlotte sighed, pinning a renegade curl into her loosely coiffed bun. “The ugliest, weirdest,
stupidest building in the world.”

“Oh,” Laila sighed, extending her long leg to the bar. “Can’t you just say she’s ugly and weird?”

“Boring,”
Charlotte sang.

“That girl Janie’s in my mother’s French class,” Kate Joliet announced mid-plié. Kate’s pliés were a sorry affair, but her
French was flawless. Madame Joliet, Kate’s mother, taught Beginning French at Winston. “She told me she thought she was ‘quite
beautiful.’ ”

“No, she did not.”

“She said she had delicate features and a neck
comme un cygne.
”

“Like a
swan
?” Charlotte choked in translation. “Do swans get acne? I forget.”

“That’s what I said!” Kate (who always said what Charlotte said) declared.

“Maybe they get acne but the feathers cover it,” Laila suggested.

“Anyway,” Kate continued, ignoring Laila, “my mom got all pissy and was like, she’s just going through an awkward stage .
. .
try to be kind.
” She groaned and tipped her head back in despair.

“Quit checking yourself out in the ceiling mirror, Kate,” Charlotte instructed.

“I am not!” Kate gasped and stamped her satiny foot. Laila cackled with delight. “Shut
up,
Laila!”

“Seriously,” Charlotte agreed. The girls grew quiet, flexing their toes. Occasionally they needed a moment to hate each other.
This was one of those moments. To make it less obvious, they watched Mr. Hans push the upright piano from one end of the room
to the other. The piano’s tiny wheels chirped like crickets and the wood floor creaked from the strain. From the looks of
things, the three girls found the goings-on of Mr. Hans positively gripping.

“You know what?” Charlotte said, ending their sixteen-second silence.

“What?” Kate asked, her relief palpable (she hated it when they weren’t talking).

“I don’t buy it.”

“What don’t you buy?” Laila paid
very close attention
to what Charlotte did and did not buy.

“Awkward stages,” she sniffed. “I don’t believe in them.”

And seriously, why should she? It’s not like
she’d
ever experienced one. Not personally. Neither, for that matter, had any of her friends. In terms of stages, they’d graduated
from
Gerber Baby
to
Adorable Toddler
to
Beautiful Child
to
Stunning Young Woman.
And Charlotte fully expected to stay in
Stunning Young Woman
for another 35 years
at least.

She was sure of it: awkward stages were a myth of some kind. Kind of like unicorns. Except unicorns were pretty.

“That girl
wishes
she was going through an awkward stage,” she observed, arranging her arms into a halo. “Even if the pimples
did
go away, she’d still be attractively challenged.”

“I know,” Kate agreed. “Unfortunately for her, she’s just — awkward.”

“A total pompidou,” Charlotte confirmed.

“Pompi
don’t,
” Kate tittered in reply.

Anyone who grew up in L.A. knows something about the La Brea Tar Pits, and this is what they know: The pits are gigantic swamps
of disgusting black goo called “tar.” Every day blobs of tar rise through the earth’s crust, gurgle into ancient cracks and
crannies until — at long last — they break the surface, creating a swamp or “pit.” When water collects on the surface of the
pit, some species, such as elephants, confuse them for drinking holes.

Long ago, as the elephants wandered around to cool off, they became lodged in the goo. The goo — like quicksand — swallowed
them up. Over time, their elephant bones turned into objects called fossils. These fossils stayed inside the tar for thousands
of years — like pineapple chunks in a Jell-O mold.

Janie, like most Angelinos, learned about the tar pits during a second-grade field trip. Her tour guide had a ponytail and
addressed her as “ma’am” — even though she was eight. He led her class to the edge of a tar pit, which was fenced off. There
was a life-size statue of an elephant in the middle of the swamp. “Here we see the nature of tar
in action.
” The guide gestured to the statue. “This poor guy is trapped!”

“But he’s not
real,
” second-grade Janie pointed out.

“Yes, ma’am, he is,” the guide informed her. The class pressed their faces to the fence and murmured. They were unconvinced.

“If he’s real, why doesn’t he move?” Janie asked.

“Because he’s a smart elephant,” the guide went on. “He knows that if he tried to escape, the tar would pull him down even
farther. So he decided to stay completely still. No wonder he’s survived so long!”

As she got older, Janie realized the guide was just playing around. But she took his lesson to heart. Which is why — seven
years later, on the first day of her sophomore year at Winston Prep — Janie stayed inside the Volvo. She decided to stay completely
still. As long as she was a statue, she was safe from disaster.

A few minutes into her vow never to move again, Janie’s cell phone rang. She’d programmed the ring to
The Virgin Suicides
theme by Air. Janie let the phone ring long enough to imagine herself as Kirsten Dunst — so miserable, so blond. Keeping
the rest of her body frozen in place, she moved her hand toward the phone. She wondered how many inches into the tar that
would cost her.

“Hello?”

“Janiekins!” Amelia squealed on the other line. Janie flinched at her best friend’s intonation of cheer. Way too
Bring It On
Kirsten for her current mood.

“Hey.” Janie pushed one finger to her vintage heart-shaped Lolita sunglasses.

“How’s the first day?” Amelia asked in an exaggerated whisper.

“Well . . . I don’t exactly know yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“I haven’t left the car.”

“O-migod.”

“Amelia,” Janie confessed. “I think I’m, like, an elephant.”

“What?”
The voice on the other line scoffed. “You’re the skinniest person I know.”

“No, you don’t understand. Remember that field trip we took in second grade? Well, I
realized.
Winston is a tar pit. Which makes
me
the elephant. Which
means
. . .”

“Okay, stop right there,” Amelia ordered. “You officially sound insane.”

“I’m not insane,” Janie replied in a calm tone. “I’m trying to
survive.
” She heard the sound of Amelia slapping her forehead.

“I’m really sorry,” Amelia groaned. “But this kind of behavior calls for drastic measures.” And then, before Janie could tell
her best friend she was
just kidding
, Amelia screamed at the top of her lungs.

“Paul!”

As the sound of that name filled her ear, Janie gasped into the phone. “Amelia, no!”

“Paul!”
she called out again.

“No, no, no!” Janie panicked. “Don’t do this — I
hate
you!”

“What?” Paul Elliot Miller’s gravelly voice surfaced on the other line. He sounded confused.

He also sounded gorgeous.

Paul’s nose was delicate, lightly freckled. His nostrils, ever-so-slightly flared, gave him the haughty-yet-vulnerable quality
of an English Lord — a
cute
English Lord, not one of those pasty, chinless ones. Paul had one bluish green eye and one greenish-brown eye, just like Kate
Bosworth (a comparison Paul did not enjoy). He also had a small silver piercing in his left eyebrow and another one on the
right side of his lower lip. His hair, like his moods, forever changed color, from silvery white to electric green to ink-stain
blue. And still. No amount of piercings, eyeliner, bad posture, or Manic Panic could disguise the obvious truth: Paul Elliot
Miller was a pretty boy. He could not, despite his efforts, look any other way. He even paid his friend Max to punch him in
the face — right there in the parking lot of the Whole Foods in Brentwood — and despite a broken nose and a black eye, Paul’s
face healed without a trace of permanent damage. Yes, there was the hairline scar across his upper lip — but that was (embarrassingly)
from chicken pox.

Besides, the scar only drew attention to his luscious swollen mouth, which was (despite the nonstop profanity it spewed) the
prettiest thing about him.

For a long time, Amelia kept the undeniable fact of Paul’s beauty a secret. Whenever he entered conversation, she kept the
details strictly business. “Paul thinks he’s God’s gift to the guitar,” Amelia would say with a roll of her eyes. Or, “Paul’s
work ethic totally sucks.” Or, “Paul has this new obsession with the Pixies, which is doing really cool things for our sound.”

Not until the two girls had run into him on Melrose did Janie finally discover the truth. “Why didn’t you tell me he was so
cute
?” she gasped, once she and Amelia were alone.

Amelia made a face, like
are you kidding me
? “I can’t look at the guys like that,” she stuck out her tongue. “They’re like my
family.
Besides,” she added after a considered pause, “I wouldn’t want to do anything. You know. To risk the band.”

Janie shook her head in slow disbelief. Sometimes it was hard to believe Amelia’s discipline. It really was.

Since the Melrose encounter, she’d seen Paul only twice: once when he swung by Amelia’s house to look for his keys, which
he found behind her nightstand, and once when Janie sat in on band practice. Of course, she asked to sit in again, but Amelia
demurred. A few days later, when Janie asked again, her best friend sighed. “It’s kinda hard to focus with other people around.”
Amelia’s confession came as something of a shock (since when was Janie “other people”?). At the same time, she understood
(what did she know about being in a band?). So Janie made do with what she had. She rationed her memories of Paul the way
Pilgrims rationed corn to last the winter. Every night, as she gazed at the moon and star glow-stickers on her ceiling, she’d
choose
just one detail
to think about. Monday: the way he hooked his lost keys to the silver chain at his narrow hips. Tuesday: the way he sucked
the small hoop piercing on his full lower lip. Friday: the way he lifted his threadbare black t-shirt to scratch the taut
stretch of skin above his square-studded leather belt. Just when she was down to her last two or three memories, just when
she thought she was about to starve to death, Amelia put him on the phone.

“Hello?”
he growled a second time. Janie could hardly breathe. After her period of depravation, the mere sound of Paul’s voice was
serious sensory overload.

“Hey, Paw!” she croaked, before literally biting her fist. Hey, Paw?
What?
“How’s art school? Do you guys, like, wear berets?”

“Who
is
this?” he asked, sounding confused.

“Uh . . .” For the life of her, Janie could not remember.

“Hey,” Amelia grabbed the phone back. “It’s me.”

“OhmygodIhateyou!”
Janie exhaled, covering her eyes with her free hand.

“Whatev,” Amelia replied. Janie practically
heard
her roll her eyes. “That was to remind you. Life outside of Winston. It exists!”

“What a relief.” Janie scowled.

“You can do one of two things right now,” Amelia continued. “You can remain in the vehicle like a good law-abiding elephant.
Or you can take a risk. You can walk across the Showroom like you
own
it. Which you
will
because you have
changed
. In the words of William H. Shakespeare —
all the world’s a runway,
and it’s about time you, Janie Mae Farrish, took your part and freakin’
played
it! Yeah! Are you
with
me?!”

“Okay. That seriously grossed me out,” Janie replied.

“Tell me you’ll walk across the Showroom like you own it!”

“Fine.”

“Like you mean it!”

“Fine. Yay! I own it!”

“That’s the spirit!”

Janie smiled. As deeply annoying as Bring-It-On Kirsten was, she kind of did the trick. Janie hung up the phone with a strange
feeling. And the feeling propelled her fingers to the door, her feet to the ground, and all five feet ten inches of her out
of the black Volvo and into the world. She looked around: the leaves drenched in sun, the cars smooth as glaciers, the banners
—
WELCOME BACK FALCONS!
— bobbing blue balloons, glinting green glitter.