Bulletproof Mascara: A Novel

by Bethany Maines

“More embarrassing than throwing up in front of the entire judging panel and my high-school crush?” Jenny demanded, and Nikki paused, trying to balance out the relative weights of their shame.

  “Good point,” she said, opening the door to their room.

  “Hold on,” Ellen said, digging through one of her dresser drawers. “I want to hear more about the boy from Canada. You never finished your story about him.”

  “What brought that up?” asked Nikki, amazed by Ellen’s elephantine memory.

  “I’m not getting my daily soap opera, so I’ve got to fill it in with something, and you girls are it. Besides, I’ve been thinking about that guy; he doesn’t sound very trustworthy. I want to know what happened.”

  “She’s right,” said Jenny, laughing. “That is kind of sketchy behavior, but I want to hear about getting arrested first.”

  “So, what happened?” pursued Ellen.

  “I told you. We went to lunch. And besides, he’s not at all related to the getting arrested thing.” Or was he? Canada and Carrie Mae were all sort of bundled together in her memory, and it was hard to say that they weren’t related.

  “Right,” said Jenny. “And there is no way that lunch is going to be more interesting than getting arrested. So I want to hear about that. You can finish up the Canada story after the ‘getting arrested’ story.”

  “I think I bought some Girl Scout cookies last time we went to the store,” Ellen muttered, still rummaging. “OK, jail it is then. Like sand through the hourglass, these are the days of Nikki’s life.” She pulled out the box and offered the opened end to the other two girls. Nikki accepted her cookie and thought about where to start her story.

  CANADA (WELL, WA)

  The Lipstick Incident

  Nikki looked at her hands. The handcuffs were very shiny, just like the remains of her nail polish. She regarded her three torn nails with sorrow—now she would have to clip all the nails to make them even. She looked up and caught sight of herself in the presumably two-way mirror. Her hair was in complete disarray and had grass and a twig sticking out of it. She reached up and removed the twig and grass with her left hand; the handcuffs dragged her right hand across her face in a tangled display of uncoordination. She laid the grass and twig neatly on the table in front of her. She made an ineffectual pat at her hair, but gave up in indifference. She sighed and studied the blade of grass. It was green with a slight vein down the middle. The police detective came back into the room, and Nikki straightened up in her chair.

  “So, Miss Lanier,” he said, pronouncing it like LANE-e-er.

  “Lanier,” she corrected automatically, and then regretted it instantly.

  “What?” he said.

  “Lan-yay,” she said miserably. “It’s pronounced Lan-yay.”

  “It would be,” he responded enigmatically. Nikki tried a smile, but knew it was a miserable attempt. “I don’t suppose you would care to explain this whole affair?” He flipped open a manila file folder and looked over the contents.

  “Temporary insanity?” Nikki suggested with another half-smile.

  “Well, yes, that does seem likely,” said the detective, clearly examining her disheveled appearance. “But I assume you didn’t go to that house intending to assault anyone.”

  “Well, no,” said Nikki hesitantly. “I think maybe I . . . I just sort of snapped.”

  The house had been all red brick and white paint. Four structurally useless “Grecian” pillars had adorned the front porch and lent an impressive air to the semicircular drive that took up most of the front lawn. Nikki had a sinking feeling when she had seen that house, but Toni, her mother’s friend, had exclaimed in admiration, “Isn’t that cute?” Toni thought a lot of things were cute. Toni sold candles and knickknacks that Nikki wouldn’t have kept in her closet. Nikki had sighed and agreed. Toni was being nice. Toni was doing Nikki—well, really Nikki’s mother—a favor by bringing her along.

  “Now, remember, Nikki, just let them try everything and agree with whatever they say and you’ll sell a bundle. These women like personal treatment.”

  “I went to sell Carrie Mae with Toni,” Nikki told the detective. The words were not coming readily to her tongue. “My mother won a starter kit,” she explained. She didn’t want the detective to think she sold Carrie Mae for real. “And I haven’t been able to find a job, and my mother kept saying I could make money with it, and her friend Toni said she’d take me along on one of her trips. She said it would be easy.”

  “I see,” said the detective in a bored tone. “So you went to the house to sell makeup with Toni?”

  “They were everywhere!” said Nikki, her voice coming out in a whisper.

  “They?” asked the detective.

  Nikki swayed a little in her seat, remembering.

  The white double doors had swung open. The two women were ushered into the foyer by a woman with an expensive-looking blond bob and Nordstrom slacks. Nikki thought the woman was exactly what Nikki’s mother wanted to be, from her perfectly streaked hair to her “sensible” $250 shoes. Nikki and Toni followed “Mrs. Doctor” across the foyer and into the living room. Blondes in a variety of ages and tints covered the room, and not one of them, Nikki realized as she surveyed the spectrum of dye jobs, could claim it was natural.

  The Exquisite Cook lady was there already, ensconced at a table next to the door to the kitchen and handing out samples fresh from the oven. Toni had set up in one corner and had gestured Nikki to another. Nikki had arranged her table into a neat array of sample cards and nail polish colors. She looked around the room. No one was looking in her direction. Toni was laughing heartily, as if she were everyone’s old friend. Someone came by with a glass of wine, which Nikki accepted with gratitude. There were reasons alcohol was a legal drug.

  “So there were a lot of blondes and they gave you wine?” The detective wasn’t really appreciating the horror of the story.

  “Yes,” Nikki said. “But just a little bit. I was trying to be careful. I do dumb things when I drink.”

  The detective made a grunting noise that Nikki took to be a form of agreement. She ran her fingers over the scarred laminate top of the table in front of her. Someone had carved COPS SUCK ASS into the lower lefthand corner.

  “What happened next?” the detective asked.

  His harsh tone yanked Nikki from her Zen-like contemplation of the carving. She stared at him, trying to remember what they had been talking about.

  “I did makeovers,” she said, forcing her mind back to the horror.

  The blondes had passed before her in some sort of predetermined order that Nikki had never been able to fathom. They clucked and ogled and tested her samples. Cornstalk blondes had torn the packets open, bleach blondes had passed the lipsticks around. Blush powder was everywhere—the debris of twenty makeovers strewn at her feet. She had tried to steer a few people toward certain products, but the women seemed so set on particular colors, and Toni had said to just agree with them, so she had.

  And the women had been nice. At least, they’d said nice things. Although, perhaps there was an undertone of insult in that comment about her hair. And the way they called her “honey,” it was as if they couldn’t remember her name.

  “So, they tried your samples and called you honey?” The detective just wasn’t getting it.

  “They didn’t just try my samples. They tried all of them. They used all the samples. If I want more, I have to buy them from the company.”

  “I see,” said the detective, and he made a note. “OK. Then what happened?”

  “Well, then it was ordering time.”

  “So, they ordered your makeup.”

  Nikki shook her head. Unbidden tears welled up in her eyes at the mere thought of her humiliation.

  “No-oo,” she said tremulously. “They didn’t. They all ordered Exquisite Cook or Star Lite Candles. And this woman came up and said . . .” Nikki sniffed ferociously, and the detective handed her a tissue from a pack in his pocket. “Than
k you. She said if I’d been more agreeable they would have ordered from me. Agreeable! I complimented her hair! I said that she looked good in green! I said that no one could see those lines! I, I . . .” Nikki trailed off, gasping in outrage.

  “Is that when you tackled her?”

  “I didn’t tackle her,” Nikki denied hotly. “I merely suggested that she keep one of the mascara brushes she had used.”

  The detective flipped a few pages in the file. “I believe your exact words were: ‘It will make a nice change for the stick up your ass.’” Nikki blushed, color flooding her face, making her cheeks burn. “And then you tackled her?”

  “She slapped me!” she answered hotly, remembering the stinging impact of the woman’s ringed fingers against her cheek. “And then I . . . helped her apply the eye shadow she had admired so much,” Nikki finished lamely.

  “You tackled her,” translated the detective.

  Nikki nodded dumbly.

  “And the other three women? You helped them with their makeup as well?”

  Nikki remembered Mrs. Doctor running across the drive and onto the front lawn. She remembered screaming “agreeable” like a battle cry. Mrs. Doctor had gone down like Nancy Kerrigan—skating across the grass on her butt, wailing.

  There was a knock on the door. It opened a crack, and a policewoman jerked her head at the detective. The detective left the room, but returned a few minutes later. He walked over to Nikki and unlocked her handcuffs.

  “You’re free to go, Miss Lan-yair.” There was a slight mocking in his voice as he pronounced her name.

  “I don’t understand,” said Nikki.

  “The charges have been dropped. Your lawyer is waiting for you out front.”

  “I don’t have a lawyer,” Nikki said in a daze.

  “Well, you do now, so up you get.” He jerked a thumb in an upward direction. Nikki stood numbly and stumbled toward the door.

  “I have just one more question,” the detective said as Nikki’s hand touched the doorknob. “Did you really make that woman eat a lipstick?”

  Nikki looked at him. He displayed only a kind of bored curiosity. Nikki nodded solemnly.

  “She opened a tube without asking and tried it. And once someone tries it, you can’t sell it to anyone else, and she practically promised to buy it. And then she didn’t.”

  “You’d better get going,” he said, shaking his head, but kind of laughing. “The policewoman outside will show you the way.”

  The lawyer had pronounced her name correctly on the first try, and that was worrying Nikki. She was a heavyset woman in an impeccable cream linen suit. She had a silk scarf draped just so and pinned in place with a gold butterfly brooch. Her earrings were gold, and her hair was cut close to her head and done in an expensive finger wave. Her makeup was a perfectly golden hue that no white woman could have gotten away with, and her skin glowed with an even chocolate tone. Nikki knew that she was looking her most splotchy and trailer park at the moment, and she found herself envying the other woman’s cool poise. She watched as the lawyer traded jokes with the cops, collected paperwork, and ignored Nikki entirely.

  Nikki looked at the business card that had been thrust into her hands. AISHA LEWIS, ATTORNEY AT LAW was printed on very heavy cream paper in green and gold. The letters had been pressed into the paper so that Nikki could feel a slightly raised version of the letters on the back of the card. It was a very expensive card, and Nikki knew that neither she nor her mother could afford a lawyer who could afford expensive cards.

  The lawyer placed a stack of paperwork in front of Nikki and spread the pages out with a practiced hand so that each page beneath the first showed only the signature section. Nikki fumbled gracelessly for a pen, and the lawyer produced one like a magic trick and handed it to her with a motherly “There you go.” Nikki took the pen and signed on the lines without reading any of it. Aisha swept up the papers and handed them to one of the cops. Nikki rose to her feet, sensing that signed paperwork meant that things were coming to a close. Aisha nodded generally to everyone and then took Nikki by the elbow and began to shepherd her through the series of doors that led to the outside.

  “Are you my lawyer? I mean—” Nikki fumbled for words, knowing that the woman hadn’t asked what she meant—“did someone call you for me?” That still wasn’t quite right, but it would have to do.

  “Those are two separate questions. To answer your second question, someone did engage me to represent you in this matter. In answer to the first, no, I’m not your lawyer. I do not represent what is in your best interest. I am looking out for the best interest of the hiring body. Fortunately for you, their interests and yours appear to coincide. For the moment.” Nikki turned a bewildered face to the lawyer as they stepped through the front doors of the police station.

  “I’m sorry,” Nikki said. “I suppose I’m being slow, but it’s been a very long night. I don’t understand.”

  “I’m sure it will all be explained,” Aisha said soothingly. “Now, if you will excuse me, I really have got somewhere else I’d rather be.” The lawyer lifted her wrist and checked her watch with a businesslike eye, then glanced out into the street. “Ah, right on time.”

  Nikki followed the lawyer’s gaze to the street, where a modest-size limousine was pulling up. The limo parked. The driver got out and walked around briskly to Nikki’s side of the car. He opened the door and then looked significantly in Nikki’s direction.

  “A word of advice, Miss Lanier,” said Aisha with a smile. “Don’t sign anything without reading it, and always ask for more than is being offered.”

  “Just on principle?” asked Nikki with a small laugh, uncertain if the lawyer was making a joke.

  “Just on principle,” Aisha affirmed with a wink, and she turned on her heel, walking toward the parking lot.

  With nothing else to do, Nikki walked slowly toward the limo. The chauffeur seemed to be trying to hurry her along with his eyes, and Nikki had the uncomfortable feeling that she was holding up his schedule.

  Nikki leaned down and looked through the door. Miranda Merrivel, National Sales Director for Carrie Mae Cosmetics, sat with one ear to a cell phone and one hand on a champagne glass. The grandmotherly aura that Mrs. Merrivel had worn when they first met had completely disappeared. Instead, she had resumed her “sleek scion of sales” persona that Nikki found indefinably irritating, and intimidating. When she saw Nikki, Mrs. Merrivel set the glass down and beckoned her to enter. Nikki did as she was asked, and the chauffeur shut the door behind her with a brisk thump. A few seconds later the engine started and the limo oozed back onto the roadway.

  Mrs. Merrivel was dressed in sage green slacks and a lavender blouse. A matching suit jacket was tossed on the opposite seat, and twinkling from the lapel was a gold butterfly pin. A pin that was nearly identical to the one Aisha had been wearing on her scarf. Nikki frowned as she considered what this meant. The Carrie Mae logo was a butterfly, but why would Carrie Mae have sent a lawyer for her?

  Mrs. Merrivel was making “get on with it” gestures at her phone, but her voice was calm and understanding.

  “Yes, of course, we can take care of that. I understand perfectly. Now, I’m afraid I have to go.” She listened for a few more minutes. “No, I don’t want to cut you off, but I have a consultation in a few minutes and my guest has just arrived.” That seemed to satisfy the person at the other end of the line, because the conversation was wrapped up very shortly. Mrs. Merrivel sighed as she hung up the phone.

  “It’s a small lie,” she said to Nikki, “but Connie does tend to ramble on a bit if you don’t cut her off.” Mrs. Merrivel smiled suddenly. “But you know, in a way you are here for a consultation. Not the ordinary kind, I suppose. We won’t be trying on makeup, but we will be trying on ideas.” Mrs. Merrivel smiled a shiny, plasticine smile, and Nikki became aware that she was in the presence of Carrie Mae. Not the actual person, but Carrie Mae—the company.

  “Mrs. Merrivel,” Nikki said, trying
to forestall whatever speech was coming, “why are you here?”

  “I was doing a recruiting speech down at the La Quinta Inn. I was just finishing up when I heard about your predicament.” Mrs. Merrivel wore her smile like armor, and Nikki envied that invulnerability.

  “But, I mean, you don’t do this for everyone, do you? How did you even know where I was? I mean . . .” Nikki trailed off. She wanted to ask how Mrs. Merrivel even remembered her, but she was too embarrassed.

  Mrs. Merrivel laughed, and with some hesitancy Nikki smiled back.

  “No, of course not. But I told you in Vancouver that I’d be keeping an eye on your progress.” She patted Nikki’s knee. “Why don’t you just sit back and let me tell you about things?”

  Nikki gave in and sat back against the limo cushions, feeling immensely tired. She wondered how long this would take.

  The conversation meandered. Mrs. Merrivel talked about the need for an organization that put women first. She used words such as clandestine and skill set. Nikki wondered if Mrs. Merrivel’s skills were color coordinated and came in a matching box. It was all leading up to something. Was she being offered a job? Nikki was too tired to believe that.

  “Would you be interested in a job like that, Nikki?” Mrs. Merrivel asked directly. There was something formidable about her, as if whatever goal she sank her teeth into would be accomplished or demolished like a dog’s chew toy.

  “Uh, I’m not sure. What would it involve?” Nikki started to worry that Mrs. Merrivel was looking at her as if she were a really good bone.

  “Travel, research, a little bit of adventure.”

  “Sounds like the Marines,” said Nikki, and Mrs. Merrivel laughed.

  “We have better clothes.”

  Nikki looked at Mrs. Merrivel, and somewhere under the layers of dirt, fatigue, and lint there stirred a small flame of rebellion. The embers of that fire had been burning since the day she moved back in with her mother.

  “How much would it pay?” asked Nikki, trying to focus.

  “Thirty-six thousand a year to start, plus training and living quarters while you’re training. Of course, the training is down in California.”