All That Glitters Is Not Gucci

by Compai

  Instead of going out to dinner, like they’d planned, Charlotte and Jake decided to just drive up the coast and park outside Moon Shadows, “to talk.” They then relocated to the musty backseat of the Volvo and got to work steaming up the windows. Which was A-OK with Jake. After all, what dude in his right mind preferred the taste of duck a l’orange to the taste of Charlotte a l’optimal hotness?

  She was wearing this weird thing that looked like a skirt but was actually shorts, and her legs were bare and smooth and very recently shaved, he hoped, for him. Gently, he squeezed Charlotte’s smooth calf and then ran his hand all the way up to her thigh, slipping beneath the silky hem of her shorts. And she let him.

  Until she didn’t.

  “Stop!” she squeaked, loud and sudden like he’d stepped on her toe.

  “What?” Jake jumped back. As somebody with very (very) little experience in the make-out department, he was perpetually petrified of screwing up. And now, it seemed, he had. Jake ran though a series of options for what he could have done wrong. Maybe he was supposed to ask before he touched her under that skirty shorts thing? Or maybe he was not supposed to touch her under that skirty shorts thing at all? Ugh… he could really use a manual for this hook-up stuff. A man-ual. He smirked, briefly amused by his lame inner joke.

  “I can’t do this,” Charlotte announced, a bit dramatically, in his opinion. “I need air!” She scrambled away from him, and after a failed attempt to roll down the sticky car window, popped the door open and leaped from the car. Jake watched Charlotte stomp away and plant her tiny butt on the hood of his Volvo. He followed her. That much he knew he was supposed to do, even without a man-ual.

  The whispering black sea stretched out before them. In the faraway distance, the Santa Monica pier sparkled against the night sky like an old Lite-Brite toy. Jake sighed.

  “What?” he asked, finally. “What’d I do now?”

  “You know what you did, Jake Farrish.” Charlotte looked straight forward, refusing to meet his pleading brown eyes. “You did… Nikki Pellegrini.”

  He was in shock. So, this had nothing to do with him groping her thigh after all? She was seriously still peeved at him for getting way too drunk at her hoity-toity fashion party and accidentally macking on that eighth-grader, Nikki Pepperoni? God, of all the dumb and totally not worth it mistakes he’d made in his life—and he could count a few—the whole Nikki fiasco took the cake. Which would be one thing if the cake had been good. But it wasn’t! It was seriously like musty old, special-dietary-needs, nursing home cake.

  Couldn’t she see that by now?

  “I did not ‘do’ her, okay?” Jake clarified, pushing himself away from the misty-damp wooden rail. “God, I told you everything you wanted to know. Apologized… a thousand times. What more can I do? What do you want?”

  Charlotte folded her arms, pouting, while Jake sighed, vigorously rubbing his face. “I’m sorry. I’m just sick of having the same conversation.”

  “Maybe you should have thought about that before you so eagerly sampled Prostitutti pâté in front of, like, everybody I have ever known.”

  “I know,” Jake insisted, reaching for her arm. “Pâté is torture. I understand that now. So, can we please just get back together?”

  “No way,” she huffed, shrugging away from his touch. “Can’t you see how disgustingly desperate I would look?”

  “So this is about how you look?” Jake fumed, beginning to pace. “Wait,” he realized, stopping in his tracks. “You already knew there’s no restaurant that takes the French franc, right? That’s why you came up with the rule! So we wouldn’t be able to go out. So we wouldn’t be able to, like, be in public!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Charlotte tossed her hair back and set her dainty jaw.

  “Oh, I’m being ridiculous?” He lowered his voice, pointing accusingly. “Why were you so weird on the phone today? Why’d you call me Evan? Huh?”

  “Oh!” she tsked, dismissing him with an airy laugh. “I just… I ran into Janie at Ted Pelligan’s, that’s all.”

  “I don’t get it.” Jake shook his head. “What does Janie have to do with this?”

  “Nothing! Except… the whole time we were talking on the phone, I’m pretty sure she was, like, listening in the fitting room next to mine. I just thought if I called you Evan, then she’d wouldn’t realize I wasn’t talking about, you know, what I was talking about.”

  “But…” Jake’s face collapsed in confusion. “She already knows about Nikki, I mean…”

  “Yeah,” Charlotte interrupted, narrowing her eyes into glittering green slits. “I know she knows about Nikki. Everyone ‘knows about Nikki.’ That doesn’t mean I want everyone to know that I, like, still care.”

  She stomped her foot, flouncing toward the car.

  “It’s humiliating, okay?”

  “Fine.” Jake followed after her. “I get it. It’s humiliating. And that’s my fault, okay? But you have got to decide if it’s the kind of humiliating that means we’re over? Or if it’s the kind of humiliating that means we can work it out.”

  “I don’t know,” she confessed, sounding truly miserable. At last, she grabbed his hand, blinking back tears. “I don’t know.”

  Jake sighed, clenching and unclenching his jaw. Seriously? He couldn’t go through this alone. He needed outside assistance. He needed a man-ual. He needed…

  “Counseling.”

  Charlotte’s delicate nostril flexed as though she’d wandered into the presence of something foul. “You’re not serious.”

  “What?” Jake gaped, tapping his heart with two fingers. “I want to get back together, okay? And I think you do, too. And yet, instead of making out in my car, like we should be doing, we’re acting like my parents outside Moon Shadows. I mean, does that make sense to you? Because it sure as hell doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “But I don’t believe in counseling,” Charlotte reminded him, twiddling the glossy amber button on her tailored jacket. “Napoleon and Josephine didn’t dissect their love on some crumbly old therapist’s couch, okay? They believed in destiny. In fate.”

  “Char—” Jake smiled, cupping his slightly cracked ex-girlfriend’s china cup chin in his hands. “This isn’t eighteenth-century France. There are options.” One hand abandoned her face and reached for the back pocket of his faded gray corduroys. “Check it out,” he smiled nervously, presenting a tightly folded printout, otherwise known as his last hope, to the girl of his dreams. “Her name’s Hortense Bonnaire,” he explained. “She combines traditional psychotherapy with French existentialist philosophy. She’s supposed to be really cool.”

  Charlotte took the page and scanned it timidly. In the distance, a wave crashed.

  “First session’s free,” he added.

  “Okay,” she conceded finally, with a shrug of her ballet-toned shoulders. “I guess it can’t hurt.”

  “Great,” Jake exhaled, endlessly relieved. Charlotte smiled.

  Was it just her or was he totally maturing?

  Jake smiled back.

  Who wouldn’t entrust his relationship to a chick whose last name sounded like “boner”?

  The Girl: Petra Greene

  The Getup: Vintage floral halter dress, scuffed white lace-up Keds, dreamcatcher earrings from Venice Boardwalk, crocheted hemp hobo bag

  That same crisp December night, just across town, Petra Greene and Paul Elliot Miller were strolling through the wide, tree-lined streets of Beverly Hills enjoying each other, along with some seriously chronic weed.

  Since they’d first met on either side of the fence of their adjoining backyards, Petra and Paul had been virtually inseparable. Sharing joints through the ivy-entangled fence had soon given way to moonlit swims in Paul’s grandparents’ kidney-shaped pool, which before long turned into surreptitious whiskey sipping in Petra’s little sisters’ backyard playhouse, which soon enough morphed into surreptitious whiskey-fueled makeout sessions in Petra’s little sisters’ backyard playhous
e, which soon enough turned into, well, more….

  They looked a little random and mismatched, but that’s what Petra loved about their coupling. The punk rocker and the flower child. Of course, when Christina Boyd mentioned they “kinda had a Joel Madden–Nicole Richie thing going on,” she’d had to put down her fried shiitake dumpling and quietly gag.

  The unlikely twosome embarked on their first public outing at Seedy Moon’s now infamous Pink Party. No more hiding their love in the looming black shadows of their adjacent Beverly Hills estates: they were finally real. “You’re real?” Joaquin Whitman frowned over his guitar and tightened a string, barely disguising his jealousy. “You mean you’re, like, official?” But no. Petra loathed that word (could anything sound more corporate?). Real was better. Truer. The last time she and Paul kissed—on her balcony, with moonlight sifting through the giant pine in her yard—she chanted it to herself like a blessing: This is real, this is real, this is real, this is real….

  But then this got weird.

  Maybe it was the pot. Even seasoned stoners like Petra endured the occasional bout of marijuana-induced paranoia. Then again, maybe it wasn’t the pot. Four days after that magical balcony night, as they strolled down one of the pristine, hedge-bordered blocks of their Beverly Hills neighborhood, taking what they jokingly referred to as “one of their nature walks,” Paul noticed a dead sparrow in the gutter, his little eyes all squinched, his tiny wings wet with dew, and promptly began to freak out. And, not to say she wasn’t pro sensitivity (the more people show their feelings the better), but there was something about Paul’s particular display: it seemed a little put on. As soon as the thought nudged into her mind, however, she pushed it out, her heart skittering in panic. Had she really just suspected Paul Elliot Miller, her first love, her partner in the real, of being phony? She had to be wrong! And yet, as he stretched out and panted on the pavement, tears squeezing from the corners of his eyeliner-free eyes, she couldn’t help but notice.

  Things had changed.

  Gone were the bicycle chains that had once slung seductively from his narrow hips; in their place, a macramé belt with swirly blue Fimo beads had appeared. He’d removed every last piercing—the silver hoop on his left brow, the pretty spike in his full lower lip—and had stopped dyeing his hair, the electric blue she’d fallen in love with slowly washing out, leaving his hair a murky grayish-brown that was really no color at all; a color like dishwater.

  But no, Petra refused to dwell on the negative, and so she changed her mental channel, a trick she’d made up as a kid to keep her from obsessing over her screwed-up family. When her mom got so zonked on pills the nanny had to take over car pool; when her father bailed after dinner to “pick up a magazine,” only to return hours later, rumpled and empty-handed (if he returned at all, that is); when someone kept calling the house, hanging up when Petra answered, she fluttered her tea green eyes shut, took a deep breath, and changed the channel. Ten years later, it still worked.

  “Come on.” She smiled serenely, helping him off the ground and slinging a long arm across his shoulders. “We can go get a shoe box and bury it.”

  Paul exhaled a shuddering breath and quietly gulped, consoled. They walked on in silence. Sun filtered through the pines and stroked their faces. At the corner, a sleek black Bentley purred to a stop.

  “You know what would be so cool?” Petra ventured as they approached a dusty peach Spanish villa with a small replica of the Statue of Liberty in the middle of the lawn. “If there was, like, an iPod you could just play, like, through your skin or something? It’d be, like, wherever you went, you’d have this theme song, you know? Like you’d be approaching this group of people and they’d just know you were coming and, like, what you were about, not ‘cause they saw you or anything, but because they, like, heard you.”

  Paul stopped dead in his tracks, pulling Petra toward him by her slender waist. His mismatched eyes—one bluish-green, the other greenish-brown—pierced hers with intensity.

  “What?” she laughed, both a little turned on and a little weirded out.

  “That,” Paul began, “is seriously the most genius thing I have ever heard. Petra, like, how did you just think of that? How the hell did you just think of that?”

  “Um, I don’t know.” She glanced at him quizzically—was he joking?—and flushed. “I guess I just, like, thought of it.”

  “Seriously,” he proclaimed, shaking his head. “We should go home and patent that shit, like, right now.” He stared at her, his eyes slightly bloodshot (he’s just stoned, Petra reminded herself), his face melting into that syrupy-lovesick expression that’s so enthralling on a guy you adore and so repugnant on a guy you don’t. “Petra,” he marveled. “You’re amazing.”

  “Awww,” Petra replied, encouraging him to continue walking.

  “A human iPod,” he mused through the intermittent slap of his new Teva Bowen Stitch flip-flops. “An iHuman…”

  “Speaking of music,” Petra blurted, valiantly pushing through the static. “I seriously cannot wait till Friday night. I mean, the Troubadour. You know Janis, like, practically died there, right? Oh,” she gasped, and grabbed her boyfriend’s thermal-clad arm, eyes alight. “Is it true Facehumpers might do a surprise set?”

  “Wait a minute, you heard that?” Paul’s brow wrinkled with concern. “Oh, man. They approached us last week, but I was, like, no. No goddamn way.” He frowned. “Amelia better not be going behind my back, man.”

  “Okay,” Petra pressed two fingers to her temple and closed her eyes. “Um, I thought they were, like, your favorite band of all time?”

  “Well, yeah,” he admitted. “I used to like them. But now, it’s, like, I listen to their music and it’s just so…” He paused to glance skyward. “Angry. It’s, like, why, you know? Why put that energy into the universe? It’s not helping anyone. It’s not helping me. It’s just… I want Creatures of Habit to be couriers of beauty, you know? Couriers of peace.”

  You’re kind of being a courier of nausea right now, Petra thought, heat prickling along her hairline like Malibu brush fire. Okay, she was code-red wigging out, and it wasn’t just the chronic. She could deal with Paul’s new wardrobe—that was just superficial stuff—but denouncing the Facehumpers, a staggeringly awesome band he turned her on to, because they were suddenly too angry? He had to be joking! It was one thing for Paul to give up studded belts and chipped black nail polish. But to give up on anger? What about the afternoon they spent smashing her parents’ wedding china in an alley? Or that night they ran screaming along the beach, hurling rocks at the moon, cursing the names of those who’d dared to cross them? Was he planning to give that up, too?

  Thankfully, Petra’s cataclysmic thoughts were cut short by a deep buzzing in her crocheted hemp hobo bag. “Just a sec,” she told Paul, sifting through a sea of rolling papers, gum wrappers, loose beads, and dollar bills to unearth her scuffed purple Nokia. A text from Queen Moon (she’d entered her own name in Petra’s cell, and Petra didn’t care enough to change it):

  CHECK EMAIL.

  NYLON COVER NO GO.

  WTF WTF WTF.

  “What is it?” Paul inquired, noticing Petra’s solemn face. She sighed, showing him the tragic text. “Ah, man…”

  “I know,” she agreed. Seriously? Melissa had sent Nylon the most persuasive e-mail of all time! “Poor Melissa,” she thought out loud. “She must be seriously buggin’.”

  “Yeah, well,” Paul laughed. “That girl pretty much invented buggin’, so…”

  “Don’t be mean.” Petra pushed his shoulder and beamed. That he still had it in him! She was endlessly relieved. “I know she comes off, like, intense or whatever. But that’s what’s so awesome about her. She’s passionate.”

  “Well,” Paul responded in a gravelly voice, a promisingly naughty smile creeping across his gorgeous face. He gripped her by the shoulders, pushed her up against somebody’s bougainvillea-covered four-car garage, locking her into his mismatched gaze. “I g
uess I can identify.”

  She smiled, a jolt of electricity surging through her entire body. “You can?” she almost whispered, lacing her voice with sweetness.

  He pressed his long and perfect body against hers, answering the way she hoped he would. More and more relief wrapped her in its warm embrace, cocooning her from fear. His kiss was deep, exhilarating, and pure.

  His kiss was real.

  To my wretched and most wrong’d wrens:

  It is with shock in my heart and outrage in my loins that I write to you of NYLON’S regrettable decision.

  In a masterstroke of sartorial injustice, this GAG-azine has selected Schizo Montana to grace the cover of their 20 Under 20 issue.

  Before this fateful day, I’d remained blissfully unaware of Schizo Montana and their nefarious misdoings. Fortunately, Mr. Gideon Peck, my faithful and formidable assistant, is a highly accomplished computer operator. Employing something called “Goggle,” he revealed to me the following exclusive facts:

  1. When not colluding with the NYLON heretics, Schizo Montana “designs and manufactures t-shirts.”

  2. A t-shirt is a lightweight pullover shirt, close fitting, with a round neckline and short sleeves.

  Still, my cheated chickens, my unhappiest hatchlings, we must not despair. Before the kingdom, Valentino was bankrupt. Before she was a legend, Chanel was a steel welder. True stars are not always immediately recognized, my lovelies. And the greatest stars burn brighter with time.

  To standing on the shoulder pads of giants!

  Teddy

  The Girl: Miss Paletsky

  The Getup: What difference does it make anymore?