by Compai
Janie squared her shoulders and faced the mirror. God, she thought, fingering the safety pin in her bra strap. She could not wait to buy a new bra.
“Liar,” the girl next door giggled, her voice gradually mounting in volume. “No, she did not. She did not drool. You are so full of… what?” She gasped, pealing with melodious laughter. “She kisses like a dogfish, what? What in the hell is a dogfish?”
That laugh, Janie realized, staring at the partition a second time, sounded all too familiar. But was it really her? If so, who was she interrogating?
“Ja-nie-kins!” Amelia’s voice rose above the pulsing music, bubbling brightly into the room. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours!”
“One sec!” Janie yanked the silky green tank over her head, quickly smoothed her hair, and exited the fitting room. Amelia turned from a triple-angle outside mirror, where she’d been admiring her butt cleavage in its hideous Ed Hardy–exposed splendor, and narrowed her liquid eyelinered eyes. “Well?” her best friend inquired. “What’s the verdict?”
“I don’t know,” Amelia admitted. Which wasn’t to say she didn’t think Janie looked hot. She did. But she also looked rich. And, like, mean. Like the popular girl in an eighties movie with better hair. “Maybe it’s just a little generic,” she exhaled.
“Generic?” An incredulous salesgirl looked up from a “rejects” clothes rack and abruptly ceased sifting. Her huge, star-lashed amber eyes perfectly matched her blond Balayaged afro. “Sweetie,” she sighed, and emphatically impaled her hair with a purple pick. “That tank is not generic, it’s versatile. For day, you dress it down with some cute little high-waisted shorts and fun wedges. For night, you throw on a statement necklace, a shrunken blazer, and walla! Instant glamour.”
“Totally,” agreed Janie, ignoring Amelia’s contorted ew face in favor of making mental inventory of the things she’d now need to purchase along with her “versatile” tank: cute little high-waisted shorts, fun wedges, statement necklace, shrunken blazer….
“I have it in every color,” gushed the salesgirl, “but that blue-green’s definitely my favorite.”
“I know, mine, too.” Janie almost blushed, briefly fantasizing an imaginary friendship with this way older, way hipper woman. They’d share silky tank tops, paint each other’s nails black, sashay down Melrose in bug-eyed sunglasses and, scowling at those less awesome than they….
“As soon as I get my paycheck,” she addressed her soon-to-be BFF, “I’m so coming back and buying it.”
“You don’t have a platinum Pellicard?” The salesgirl wrinkled her gleaming brow in concern.
“Oh.” Janie’s face fell, loath to disappoint her new muse so soon.
“Don’t worry,” she beamed, fluttering her light, cool fingers to Janie’s bare shoulder, “I can hook you up right now. Seriously, it’s super easy to sign up, and you get a free gift with every thousand dollars you spend.”
“Cool.”
“Excuse me?” Amelia, freshly freed from her Ed Hardy grossness, clatteringly burst out of the fitting room. “Janie, you cannot be serious. A credit card?”
“Pellicard,” the salesgirl corrected, ushering a hypnotized Janie out of the fitting room. Amelia watched them sail away with gaping disbelief.
Then she came to her senses.
“No, your mom will seriously kill you,” she warned, catching up with them at the register. “She’s probably, like, beached out on your couch, watching a 20/20 special on the dangers of credit as we speak.”
“You guys are too cute. I love how you take care of each other,” the salesgirl murmured, inputting Janie’s info into the computer. Then she glanced up and smiled, amber eyes aglow. “Name?” she chirped.
“Jane, um, Farrish,” Janie stammered, glancing at the gaping Amelia. “It’ll be fine,” she half assured her, half assured herself. “Relax, okay?”
But before Amelia could respond, a whirling storm of spray tan, sun-in, and in-your-face sass migrated from a Balenciaga bikini display, gathered force behind a rack of See by Chloé short-shorts, and exploded on the scene. “Zanie?” Charlotte Beverwil’s next-door neighbor and aspiring Oscar presenter gasped aloud. “You disgusting, fat whore, is dat ju?”
Janie beamed, internalizing her somewhat rattled nerves as Don John propelled Mort, his wheelchair-bound and possibly unconscious charge (not to mention his impromptu shopping cart) toward the register. In exchange for assisting the retired and ailing Hollywood producer, Don John got to live in his pool house for free. Of course, “assistant” seemed a scandalously loose term for the flip-flopping fop’s primary activity: languishing poolside whilst telling Charlotte how “fierce” she looked. But whatever. With an array of candy-colored Bermuda shorts heaped on his lap and a dreamy-soft smile on his wrinkled, pink face, Mort seemed more than content.
“Is Charlotte here?” Janie asked, glancing back to the fitting room after he and Amelia were introduced.
“Well, she is in body but not in spirit,” he clucked, already absorbed in a nearby mirror and sucking in his cheeks. “Oh, Looocccie!” he sang toward the fitting rooms. “Would you please stop this interminable conversation with that silly, silly boy? We got company.”
The door to the mystery dressing room finally opened then, and Charlotte emerged in a painfully chic camel-colored Chloé suit. The expertly tailored jacket and playfully scalloped shorts exuded the perfect balance between classic beauty and flirty sex appeal. It was seriously so envy-inducing Janie almost clutched Amelia’s arm for support.
“I’ll call you back,” the petite brunette bombshell murmured into her iPhone, immediately laying eyes on Janie. She dropped her cell into her glossy black Chanel shopper and released an airy laugh. “Janie!”
“Hey!” Janie tossed her hair and attempted to act natural. She hated to admit it, but she was one person with Amelia, and another with Charlotte. Was she really supposed to be both at the same time? “Quel is up?” she chirped, before catching Amelia’s horrified eye. “Ha!” she laughed thinly.
“What’d you think?” The salesgirl, who’d completed Janie’s app in record time, swept away from the register and beamed.
“Hids,” Charlotte sniffed, and stuffed a lacy wad of discarded lingerie into her outstretched hands. “Cut for a drag queen.”
“I’m so sorry,” she gasped, as Don John peered over her shoulder, examining the rejects with new interest.
“Hello,” the pretty ice queen smiled at Amelia, magnanimously extending her hand as Don John disappeared with the salesgirl. “Charlotte Beverwil.”
“Charlotte’s the head seamstress for Poseur,” Janie babbled inanely as they limply shook hands. “Amelia goes to LACHSA. She’s in a band. Creatures of Habit, actually, you know them! They’re playing Friday and you should totally come, I mean, obvi.”
“Oh, obvi.” Amelia eyed her friend in thinly masked disbelief.
“Trés cool,” Charlotte oozed. “Well, great to see you two, but I have got to return this call.” Fishing her iPhone from her shopper, she confided, “Don’t want to be rude.”
The two girls followed her tiny, ticktocking hips with their eyes as she confidently headed for the all-glass double door exit. And then, just as she’d turned to Amelia with an apologetic little sigh, the French wench’s melodious voice rang brightly in her ear.
“Evan?”
The blood drained from Janie’s face. Wait, so, she’d been talking to Evan? That entire time? About kissing? Wait a minute….
Paranoia donkey-kicked her heart.
Did that mean she was Dogfish?
“Wait for me, you mangy minx!” Don John cried, sweeping Mort free of garments and wheeling him toward the exit. The salesgirl flashed Janie’s freshly used platinum Pellicard and sang.
“Enjoy your top!”
The Guy: Seedy Moon
The Getup: Mourning garb: coffee-stained gray sweats, Bugs Bunny slippers, black silk Korean flag bathrobe, no shirt, gold chains, gold rings, ink for days
Melissa returned to her über-modern glinting glass Bel Air estate to find her father exactly where she’d left him at eight in the morning: holed up in his second-floor studio, tinkering away at yet another sad and pensive, soon-to-be-voice-modulated (his voice was terrible) song about Vivien.
This one, from what she could gather from the obsessively repeated chorus, was titled “Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Vee.” Melissa sighed with concern. Not to say she wasn’t super down with Daddy dumping that bitchass Botoxed barracuda like he did (she was down to the can-I-kiss-it ground). And not to say she didn’t fully support his soaring rise to worldwide chart domination (she was the wind beneath his bling). But, still. Him moping around in those raggedy-ass gray sweats day after day? Subsisting on nothing but Mountain Dew, melba toast, and misery?
Nuh-uh. Not cool.
And so, in what some might deem a rare burst of selflessness and domesticity, Melissa pitched her Juicy Couture Cheetah Day Dreamer to the immaculate white Berber carpet and padded with purpose to their ultramodern kitchen. After the requisite blowout with Mr. Thang, their nasty, totalitarian cook, she whipped her daddy up some personalized macaroni and cheese. It was the best mac on the planet, which was a good thing, seeing as it was the only thing she knew how to make herself.
“Daddy!” she sang, softly clunking upstairs in her Dolce & Gabbana denim platform wedges and the hideous hippie smock Petra designed for her to wear to Poseur’s launch party (she’d taken to using it as a makeshift apron). She leaned against the airtight, opaque black glass door of Seedy’s studio, balancing the mac on her hip. “Daddy! Open up. I brought you a present.”
“Is it a gun?” he inquired, a note of hope in his voice. He sounded like gravel and rusty chains.
“Um, no…” Melissa smiled at the door, straining with cheer. “But I’ll give you a hint, okay? It starts with m.”
“Machete?”
“Daddy,” his daughter huffed, shifting the mac on her hip. “Just open the door, okay? Tray’s getting heavy!”
She heard something like a shuffle, and stepped back. Seedy cracked open the door and peeked out. Melissa pressed her lips together in disapproval. Here he was—the Kimchi Killa, the Lord of the Blings, the illest hip-hop artist in history—and what? He looked like butt. Gone was the fun-loving sparkle in his eyes. Gone the cleanly shaved head, fragrant and gleaming with coconut oil. His eyes were now bloodshot, sunken, and dull. And as for his head, Lord.
Looked like he was wearing George Clooney’s face for a cap.
“Delivery!” Melissa chimed, as if she could combat the foul rankness of the airless studio through sheer force of pep. She floated her simmering tray (along with the mac, she’d added an origami napkin swan, a novelty silver spoon, and a bottle of VitaminWater (Rescue flavor)) into the dark, keyboard-stuffed room. “Ta-da!”
“No!” Her father waved aside a Gruyère-scented puff of steam. “Melissa, I told you I cannot eat.”
“I know what you told me,” Melissa assured him, landing the tray on top of a high-end Yamaha amp and brushing her hands. “You can’t eat. You can’t sleep. You can’t move….” She regarded her father with steely-eyed reserve, and then—quick like a Band-Aid—threw open the velvet blackout curtains.
“Aaagh!” Seedy flinched, and attempted to combat a sunbeam with a hapkido hand strike. “The light.”
“That’s right.” Melissa bobbed her eyebrows. “That light is full of the vitamin D you need for such D-related activities as bein’ top dawg, not to mention bein’ my daddy. So stop with the woe-is-me whining, and bake it till you make it, a’ight? Damn.”
Plopping down on the plush white leather couch, she folded her arms, bolting her father with her very sternest, do-not-mess-with-me stare. Seedy sulked his way around the room, listless as a neglected goldfish, and then surrendered, flopping into his ergonomic seat. He stared at his synthesizer, pushing some air between his lips. “D,” he murmured, poking the corresponding key. Squeezing his dark eyes shut, he poked it again, singing with pained passion: Duck all those kisses, they didn’t mean jack. Duck you, you ho. I don’t want you ba-a-ack.”
“Okay, Daddy?” Melissa blurted in interruption, unable to take it anymore. “Not to be a killjoy, but that’s an Eamon song.”
Seedy slowly nodded, still gazing at his keyboard, and then his face crumpled. Ho no, thought Melissa. Was he going to cry?
She’d have to kick it up a notch.
“Christopher Duane Moon!” she screeched in perfect imitation of his late mother’s terrifying Korean accent. “Stop feeling so bad or I make you feel so very, very bad you cry like gye jip ae!”
Seedy sucked in his breath, stunned, and Melissa pursed her lips, triumphant. “Look, Daddy,” she continued in a gentler tone. “Whenever something bad happens, all you got to do is think, This makes room for something good.” She leaned forward, reaching for his knee. “You remember who said that?”
The mournful rap mogul gazed at his daughter, timid. “Eckhart Tolle?”
“No, Daddy. You did.”
He whispered. “I did?”
“Yeah, Daddy. And you know what else you said? That no matter how bad things get, there’re always people much worse off. I mean, just look at Miss P, for example.”
“Lena?” Seedy perked up at the sound of her name. Although he’d met Melissa’s mysterious teacher for a teacher-parent conference, they’d ended up bonding a bit over music. Not that they shared similar tastes in any respect—he was hard-core into hip-hop, while she was committed to classical—but still. Then, when Vivien wanted a classical pianist for their engagement party, he invited Lena to audition. Imagine his surprise when she waltzed into their living room and performed a perfectly delicate, classical rendition of his early nineties megahit “Bi Bim Bitches.” Man, it damn near blew his mind. After that, he found himself listening more and more to classical tracks. Yeah, like, voluntarily. He had to admit some of those puffy-haired white dudes were all right.
Of course, it helped that Lena made him a mix.
Wondered what she thought of his?
“That’s right,” Melissa eagerly continued, encouraged by her father’s sudden alertness. “Miss Paletsky broke up with her fiancé, too, remember? But unlike you, gettin’ your Phantom on in a Bel Air mansion, she’s got no place.” Ruefully, she shook her head. “Unless you count Room 201B.”
Seedy nodded in sympathy. “You mean that new hotel on Melrose with the live white tiger in the lobby?”
“No,” she groaned in despair. “It’s one of the rooms at Winston. Like, she’s sleeping at school?”
“Come on,” Seedy cracked a smile, refusing to buy his daughter’s dramatics. “Where’d you come up with that idea?”
“Um… because I found all her funky toiletries in my desk drawer while conducting the Poseur meeting today?” She gaped, daring him to refute her. “For real, Daddy. Woman is homeless, as in without a home.”
Seedy frowned at the floor, slowly shaking his unkempt head. “I was homeless for a while,” he admitted. “Back in eighty-four. Man, those were tough times. Real tough.”
He looked around his roomful of twinklingly expensive equipment and sighed, his black eyes growing glassy. “Lissa!” He smacked the arm of his seat so suddenly his daughter jumped. “We have got to help her.”
“Who?” Melissa paused. “Miss P?”
“Yes, Miss P!” Seedy leaped to his feet. “I refuse to let that good and, and beautiful soul sleep in a drafty old classroom. It’s not right!”
“She can come live in our second guesthouse!” blurted Melissa. The Moons’ second guesthouse was not only completely gorgeous, but also perfectly untouched—unless you count the time MTV shot that episode of Cribs. She clapped her hands, giddy. Not only would they be helping her out, but, you know, it might be kind of fun having her around. At times, Miss Paletsky reminded Melissa of her own mom, you know, before she got cracked-out and crazy.
“Perfect!” Seedy agreed.
But then his face fell. “Except.”
“No!” Melissa gasped, crumpling her face like a milk carton. “No except!”
“Baby, calm down.” Seedy laughed, the old warmth returning to his voice. “I think Lena living here is a great idea. But, you know… we’ve got to think of a good reason.”
“So, um…” Melissa picked a dried splatter of mac from her smock. “Having to brush her teeth in the chem lab: not a good enough reason for you?”
“Lena has too much dignity to accept charity,” he explained. “If we’re gonna do this, we have to make it look like it’s not some kind of handout.”
“Oh,” Melissa nodded, finally comprehending. She and Seedy slumped into their respective seats, frowning with thought. The studio hummed. She was at a loss.
Until, for the first time in days, her father cracked a blinding megawatt smile. She looked up, hopeful.
“Pass the mac ’n’ cheese,” he commanded. “I’ve got an idea.”
The Girl: Charlotte Beverwil
The Getup: Camel-colored scalloped Chloé shorts with matching jacket, beige buffalo leather Miu Miu wedges, crème and black patent Chanel shopper
Jake and Charlotte had dinner plans Wednesday night: platonic dinner plans, she’d reminded him over a shared plate of shoestring fries at Kate Mantilini, earlier that day at lunch. Whatever you say, Jake thought, printing out a comprehensive list of froufrou French restaurants, restricting his choices to four-star Romance ratings. French ambience, plus French wine, plus French food… French kissing had to figure in somewhere, right? Besides, Jake knew what Charlotte liked. She was his ex-girlfriend, after all. He steered his ancient black Volvo 240 DL down the Beverwils’ sparkling gravel drive and parked, happily drumming the wheel.
At the foot of the Beverwils’ 8,000-square-foot Spanish colonial estate, his pint-sized ex informed him she was “only eating at restaurants that dealt in francs.” Right, thought Jake, retreating to the car to scan the “payment options” tab on the list he’d printed out. Only after a mortifying phone call to JiRaffe did he discover no restaurant in the area accepted the currency. In fact, no restaurant in the world accepted that currency, not even in France, as it had been completely obsolete for the last decade.