The Good, the Fab and the Ugly

by Compai

  “Evan,” she sighed. “You and your pull-ups can go now.”

  Golden-haired Evan remained in his seat and scowled. “They’re board shorts.”

  “Yeah, board as in we’re bored,” Charlotte sighed, fluttering her ink black eyelashes. “Of you.”

  To Janie’s surprise he glanced her way, a flash of wounded pride on his otherwise self-assured, handsome face, his blue-green eyes beseeching (there was no mistaking the question): do you really think I’m boring? Janie looked at the paved ground and blushed. Of course she didn’t think he was boring (that he should even care!), but she wasn’t exactly in a position to say so, either. Didn’t he get that? Didn’t he understand the position she was in?

  Charlotte observed her brother storm across the terrace, and sighed. “Thank God.” She returned her green-eyed attention to Janie. “I really need to talk to you.”

  “You do?” Janie perched on the edge of Evan’s vacated white wing chair.

  “I have something huge to confess.” She lowered her voice, leaning forward. Her tumultuous ebony curls, which she’d tied into a low, side ponytail, tumbled over her left shoulder and bounced along her collarbone. “I haven’t told anyone.”

  “Really?” Janie trilled. Of course, flattered as she was to be taken into Charlotte’s confidence, she couldn’t repress a small flicker of suspicion. If she hadn’t told anyone, why in the world tell her?

  “You look a little tense,” Charlotte observed. “You like mojitos, don’t you?”

  “They’re pretty good,” Janie ventured, guessing Mojitos were a high-end brand of chips, perhaps the gourmet cousin of Doritos, Fritos, and Cheetos. Charlotte reached across the table, clutched a slender frosted glass, and pushed it into Janie’s hand. “What is it?” She blinked, sniffing the mysterious contents, a refreshing combination of what looked like crushed ice, lawn clippings, and pee.

  “It’s a mojito,” Charlotte replied slowly, knitting her delicate eyebrows. Her glossy pink lips twitched with mirth. “What did you think a mojito was?”

  “No, it . . . it’s just . . .” Janie stammered, the back of her knees pricking with sweat. Unlike the majority of her Winston peers, she had yet to procure a fake ID, and she couldn’t bear the humiliation of explaining as much to Charlotte, who most likely received hers at birth, along with her baby ID bracelet.

  “Janie,” Charlotte sighed, “is this going to be a problem? Because there’s still time to change it to a Sunny-D.”

  “It’s not that,” she insisted. “It’s just, um . . . I’m on this medication.”

  “Oh right.” Charlotte leaned back into her wing chair with a delicate frown. “That’s the same medication Jake’s taking, right?”

  “Accutane,” Janie conceded with a hot blush, instantly regretting she’d brought it up. At times, admitting to taking acne medication was more embarrassing than having the acne to begin with. “I’m on a very small dose,” she stressed. “But still . . . I’m not supposed to drink.”

  “I know all about it.” Charlotte offered her a wry smile. “Here.” She wrested the mojito glass from Janie’s nervous grasp and returned it to the table with a hollow plunk. “I wouldn’t want you to do anything stupid.”

  Janie tried to laugh and failed. Charlotte’s acid comment was in reference to Jake, after all, who blamed and continued to blame Accutane for his out-of-control drunkenness at their launch party — a bout of bad behavior that included, as they were all too aware, tongue-banging a random eighth grader. Only now, in the wake of Charlotte’s wry aside, did Janie realize they’d never openly discussed it. Not directly, anyway.

  Is that why Charlotte asked her here?

  “How is he, anyway?” Charlotte popped open an exquisite black beaded clutch.

  “He’s good,” she lied. Jake had been pretty much nonstop miserable for the past several days — Janie once caught him crying into his bowl of Cheetah Chomps — but she didn’t think he’d appreciate it if she told Charlotte. “He hasn’t even talked to that girl Nikki since that night,” she offered. “If it makes you feel any better.”

  “Janie, ‘feeling better’ implies I feel bad.” Charlotte tilted her head, affecting the confused expression of a professionally adorable dog. She snapped open a polished rectangular silver case, revealing a tidy packed row of cigarettes. “And I don’t feel bad, I mean . . . isn’t that obvious?”

  “Yeah,” Janie shrugged, confused. It was true. Charlotte didn’t appear to feel the least bit badly, and Janie couldn’t understand it. If it had been her boyfriend . . .

  She stopped the thought right there. Already the hypothetical was too absurd.

  “No offense but . . .” Charlotte extracted a gold-tipped Gauloise, and pinched it between two long fingers. “Your brother didn’t exactly challenge me. And in a way, I don’t know . . . I was, like, relieved when he cheated on me. I wanted a good reason to break up with him, and he gave me one.”

  Janie played with her twisted twine belt, averting eye contact. She wanted to be polite, but at the same time she wanted to be loyal. “I’m glad it worked out for the best,” she declared, tying her belt into a knot.

  “Yeah,” Charlotte sighed. “It did. I mean, it’d be so inconvenient if we were still together when . . .” She drifted off and smiled, stabbing her swamp-green brew with her stiff black straw.

  “When what?”

  Charlotte lowered her voice to a whisper. “I may have met someone else.”

  Against her better judgment, Janie reached for the stranded mojito and took a sip. She realized she was supposed to ask Charlotte to whom she owed her pangs of amour, but she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. She was on a slippery slope: the more she knew, the more she’d have to tell Jake, and the more she told Jake, the more upset he’d be. Not a day went by that he didn’t regret that stupid kiss, and she genuinely felt bad for him. If he found out about this, he wouldn’t just cry into his Cheetah Chomps — he’d drown in them.

  Time to change the subject.

  “Mmm . . .” She returned the drink to the table. “Minty.”

  “I’m in love with Jules!” Charlotte exploded, clapping her hands, and Janie blinked, horrified. Seriously. Was “minty,” like, Beverwil code for “spill the beans”?

  “That’s great,” she replied dully. Now she knew.

  “Janie.” Charlotte pouted. “You don’t sound happy for me.”

  “What? No.” In fact, she was weirded out. She’d always assumed Charlotte’s feelings for her brother, if completely annoying, had at least been geniune. But, if that was the case, how was she so, like, over it? When Ted Hughes cheated on and abandoned Sylvia Plath, the tortured author of The Bell Jar, did she get all la-di-da about some Aqua de Gio-marinated foreign exchange student? No. She stuck her head in an oven and baked herself to death. Not that Janie was suggesting Charlotte do that, but . . . couldn’t she at least, like, eat too many cookies and cry for a while? “I am so happy for you,” she affirmed with a feeble smile.

  “Eeeee!” Charlotte beamed, tilted forward, and touched her lightly on the knee. “I knew we were friends.”

  Friends. It was the first time the word had actually left her mouth, and Janie had to admit, it didn’t sit right. Weren’t friendships, especially friendships between former mortal enemies, supposed to develop gradually, like, over time? It took no less than four years of traded lunches, borrowed bathing suits, marathon phone calls, and saved bus seats — not to mention sixteen fights followed by sixteen make-up sleepovers — for her and Amelia to get their act together, bite the bullet, and commit to an exclusive best-friendship. But Charlotte hadn’t taken four years — she hadn’t even taken four minutes. Their friendship didn’t blossom so much as just . . . appear. Like one of those big fluffy white mushrooms on her front lawn.

  And weren’t those kinds of mushrooms poisonous?

  The Girl: Petra Green

  The Getup: Auto mechanic cutoffs by Dickies, cotton slippers from Chinatown, Ikat headwrap from Urban Outfitters.<
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  While some people enjoyed themselves at the Viceroy Hotel, Petra was stuck at home. She stared at the sheet of paper on her cluttered desk and sighed. Along the margin, in neat, block script, she’d written poseur: the trick-or-treater. At the tail end of every letter she doodled a delicate vine with wide-open heart-shaped leaves. At the tip of every leaf she drew a dripping dewdrop; around each dewdrop, three stars; and on the points of every star, a tiny peace sign. When the last peace sign was complete (there were one hundred and sixty in total), she planted the nib of her purple pen into the paper and stared into space, chewing the serrated edge of her thumbnail, and willed an idea — any idea — to come to her. She was supposed to have e-mailed Janie a detailed description of her bag concept by seven o’clock. She glanced at the blinking digital timer on her stereo: 12:53 a.m.

  Maybe if she decorated each of her peace signs with a row of daisy petals, something would come to her.

  Her bedroom window filled with a brilliant light, flashed, and then returned to pitch-black. Petra lowered her pen at the familiar purr of a polished black Audi pulling into the drive. There was a crunch of gravel, the slow crick of car brakes. . . .

  They were home.

  Date night (or “Hate Night” as Petra called it) was an idea introduced to her parents by their marriage counselor, Lisa, who suggested they “invigorate their marriage with a romantic ritual.” Every other Thursday or Friday night, her father took her mother out to dinner in Malibu. The idea of them sitting across from each other at a cozy corner table — their faces imbued with candlelight and softened by smiles, a dwindling bottle of wine — was so surreal it was laughable. Petra could not imagine her parents sitting across from each other at all, that is, unless it involved a wall of bulletproof glass and a tattooed security guard with a nickname like Bones or Crazy-Eye.

  The front door thudded shut. The shallow Waterford crystal dish by the door rang with the sound of dropped keys, and the marble hallway popped and echoed under her mother’s stiletto heels. Petra could hear her father’s voice, so low it was a vibration, and her mother’s weaving through it, like a teakettle nearing a boil. After a while, her father stopped talking, and her mother’s voice grew more and more fevered. Petra crept toward her bedroom door and pushed it open. She’d always had this perverse need to listen to their fights, and never more so than tonight. Had her father told her mother what he’d done? What he was probably still doing?

  If only they were functional enough to get divorced, she thought. Lydia Whitman, Joaquin’s mother, had been divorced twice, and she was probably the most emotionally balanced person Petra knew. She practiced yoga every day, set an egg timer for her daily Camel light, and had a different gorgeous boyfriend every four to six months, all of them younger than her, and all of them tall and lean with strong veins in their forearms, tribal tattoos, black plastic bracelets, and silver rings. They padded around the kitchen in their bare feet. Drank her orange juice straight out of the carton. And then they were gone. Sometimes Lydia referred back to them, but never with malice or anger. Smiling from the corner of her sun-drenched living room couch with the Peruvian blanket draped across the back, she’d muse out loud: “Olivier was nice,” or, “Cody was a sweetheart.” She’d hook a lock of Petra’s honeyed hair behind her ear, and push a playful finger into her chin: “You would have liked Raphael.” She’d exhale a steady stream of smoke and smile a sleepy smile. “He was a dreamer.”

  Unlike her own mother, Lydia was at peace.

  Petra emerged from her bedroom, tiptoed past her little adopted sisters Sofia and Isabel’s bedroom, and continued down the oatmeal Berber-carpeted hallway, beckoned by the all-too-familiar sound of weeping. As she approached the top of the stairs, however, the sound became more clear, the change as subtle as a siren which, speeding past, changes from major to minor key. Petra strained her ears, struck by a startling revelation.

  Her mother wasn’t crying.

  “Robert!” Heather Greene shrieked, sounding disconcertingly similar to one of the giggling idiot girls in her class. Petra crept down another few stairs, sliding and bumping along on her butt, until her parents came into partial view. Heather sat on their marble floor in a simple red shift dress, a black patent Manolo Blahnik stiletto on her right foot The other shoe hung from her father’s fingers. “Give it back!” she gasped with laughter, swiping the air.

  “Why don’t you ask nice?” her father joked, dangling the gleaming black sling-back like stolen candy. He was wearing acid-wash Diesel jeans with distressed pockets and cuffs, and red-and-cream Prada sneakers. Across the chest of his Raw 7 T-shirt, in an ornate Biblical font, were the words: LIVE FREE.

  “What are you guys doing?” Petra cried, immediately clapping a hand over her mouth, as shocked by the sound of her voice as her parents were. She stood up to flee, but it was too late. They were already staring up at her, stunned.

  “Young lady,” Robert intoned while Heather rose to her feet, tugging the skirt of her dress to cover her exposed lacy cream slip. She pressed her cabernet-stained lips together and stifled a laugh, burying her face in Robert’s shoulder while Petra looked on with horror. That she thought this was funny. It was just so, like, pathetic.

  “Go to bed, Petra,” her father ordered while her mother snorted into his armpit. “Now.”

  “Don’t” — Petra gritted her teeth, balling her ink-stained hand into a tight fist — “talk to me like a child.”

  “Petra!” her mother gasped in genuine shock. “How dare you?”

  “How dare I?” Petra seethed, her tea-green eyes welling up with tears. “God, Mom. You don’t know anything.”

  “I know you’re in deep trouble.” Robert stepped forward, hardening his tone.

  “I’m in trouble.” Petra returned his threat with a menacingly contemptuous smile, and an expression of genuine concern flashed across his face. Not for her, her mind raced. But for him. His lips parted.

  “Pet . . .”

  But she’d already whirled on her heel and escaped down the hall. Rounding the corner that led to the maid’s quarters, she thudded downstairs and within moments was in the backyard, streaking across their perfectly manicured lawn, the wet grass pushing up between her toes and sticking to her ankles in itchy thatches. She pushed through the thick Cyprus hedge and rounded the edges of their glowing green swimming pool, avoiding the painted grin on the duck decoy which bobbed on the surface, slowly dispensing chlorine. She had to get to her playhouse — not that it was hers, not anymore. Sofia and Isabel had captured it long ago, replacing Petra’s green flag with their own pink one, and, for mysterious reasons all their own, rechristening it Mooyaka Baka.

  Petra stooped at the tiny red door, with its heart-shaped window and real brass knocker, punched in Isabel and Sofia’s top-secret code (P-R-I-N-C-E-S-S), and pushed into the castle’s miniature interior. After a moment’s fumbling, she flicked on the track lighting, mounted the spiraling stairs to the roof, and clambered up the silky rope ladder fixed to the castle’s right turret, spilling into the crow’s nest. Above a battery-operated lantern and a mini-arsenal of water balloons, an antique-looking toy telescope dangled on a hook. Petra took the instrument into her lap, twisting it counterclockwise until it fell into two parts. In one, she kept a blue Bic lighter and a small blue and green glass pipe. In the other, a baggie of weed.

  She lit up and exhaled, watching the smoke slowly swirl, turn inside of itself, and disperse. She searched the night sky for the North Star and imagined she was at sea, where nobody judged you for drifting.

  “Hey.”

  Petra ducked low into the crow’s nest, sucking in her breath. Did somebody just say “hey,” or had she imagined it? Above her, the pink castle flag whipped around in the wind, the nylon rubbing into itself, sounding small whirs of friction. She exhaled. Just the wind, she reasoned. Playing tricks.

  “Dude!”

  Okay. She swallowed hard. Had the wind just called her “dude”?

  “Come on, man.
I know you’re up there. I can smell you from here.”

  With all the courage she could muster, Petra lifted her tousled head and peered over the edge of the crow’s nest, scanning her night-cloaked backyard. “Over here,” the voice instructed, punctuating his command with a splash of water. Petra redirected her gaze to a corner of her neighbors’ Olympic-sized swimming pool, where a boy around her age grinned up at her, his finely chiseled face pale in the moonlight. He pulled right up to the pool’s edge, the muscles in his arm tensing as he pushed a dripping mop of dark blue hair from his eyes. Petra couldn’t believe it. She’d seen this guy before, months ago, from the corner of her bedroom balcony, and had looked for him every night for a week, but he’d never showed again. After a while, she filed him away under “vivid dream.” It was either that or “hallucination.”

  She wasn’t hallucinating now, was she?

  “Oh shit!” He floated a little ways from the wall before yanking himself back again. “Are you, like, a girl up there?”

  Petra forked her fingers through her tangled honey-blond mane and gave it a little tug, grabbing her brain by the reins. If he was a hallucination and she answered, wouldn’t she technically be talking to herself? “Hey,” she began slowly. “You weren’t here before, were you? Like in July?”

  “Probably,” he replied, still gripping the wall. “My grandparents live here. What are you, some kind of spy pervert?”

  “No!” she cried, appalled at the accusation. “I was just on my balcony, and I, like, happened to see you. It’s not like I . . . I mean, I seriously didn’t even think you were real.”

  “Man,” he snorted after a pointed pause. “It’s a good thing I know you’re stoned. Otherwise I’d think you were retarded.”