Today in particular, she wasn’t feeling too hot. While eating a forbidden Twix bar at lunch, all the more delicious now that its chocolate-and-caramelly goodness was banned by her orthodontist, Louise had felt the metal wire on her upper left brace snap. Her mouth was currently of chipmunk proportions, swollen and crammed full of wax, until she could make her emergency appointment after school.
So it was pretty much a given that she would run into Todd Berkowitz at that moment. Something peculiar had happened since she came back from being Miss Baxter. She kind of… well, cared. Todd had not exactly been transformed from a shaggy-haired frog into a skateboard-riding, baggy-pants-wearing prince, but Louise’s consciousness had shifted. She hated to admit it, even to herself, but she now wanted to look good if he was around. Louise had spent the first half of middle school literally running away from him. It took a voyage back to 1912 and meeting a totally hot, rich creep named Benjamin Guggenheim for her to realize that Todd may not have been the man of her dreams, but he was actually pretty cool.
She thought back to slow dancing with him at the semi-formal shortly after she got back from her Titanic adventure. At first, she had been scared to put on the Lucile dress again, afraid she would open her eyes and find herself back on the ship, but all was okay. In some way it must have already served its purpose. She and Todd hadn’t really been dancing, just kind of swaying to the music and shuffling their feet a little. Without realizing it until later, Louise had pretty much held her breath through the entire three-minute song. She’d then had to discreetly wipe her sweaty hands on the flowing silk skirt of the pink vintage Lucile dress when she and Todd had awkwardly unhooked themselves after the DJ abruptly transitioned into a Beyoncé song. Todd Berkowitz had turned into someone who could make her nervous! It was infuriating and unexpected.
Even though they technically went to the dance together because Todd had asked her earlier that week, Louise spent most of the night hanging out by the punch bowl with Brooke and some other girls in their grade who went alone or had also abandoned their dates, because that was still more fun. Louise and Todd had supposedly gone to the dance as a couple, but that didn’t stop Todd from slow dancing with Tiff Freedman while Louise was helping herself to another glass of overly sweetened fruit punch. She had assumed going to the dance with someone meant not slow dancing with other girls. Apparently, she’d been wrong.
Since that night, she and Todd had hung out a bit more in school, but it wasn’t like in the old movies Louise watched, when a boy would give you his letter jacket or class ring and then you and everyone else would know that things were different. They were kind of just a little different.
The sound of Todd’s snorting laughter in the hallway snapped her back to reality. Louise and her swollen cheek hid behind her flimsy beige metal locker door as he walked by with his eyes partially covered by his floppy auburn hair, wearing his gray hooded sweatshirt and New Balance sneakers, laughing and joking around with Tiff Freedman. He held his beaten-up skateboard in one hand and some textbooks in the other. Tiff’s books?
Tiff Freedman was a transfer student from California who wore peasant blouses and bell-bottom jeans with Birkenstocks every day. Even in the winter, but with wool socks. She probably loved camping and jam bands, and she had long, straight, frizz-free honey blonde hair that, unlike Louise’s overfried split ends, had never seen the hot end of a straightening iron. She was undeniably, naturally beautiful. Like a modern-day Joni Mitchell, one of Louise’s mother’s favorite folksingers from the seventies. In Louise’s mind, Tiff was everything she wasn’t, and in this moment she was pretty unhappy about it.
Louise grabbed her own brown-paper-bag-covered math book, which was now almost completely filled with colored-pencil fashion sketches, and hastily shoved it into her beat-up purple backpack before rushing off in the other direction to her last class.
CHAPTER 3
When her father was home in time for dinner, she knew something was wrong. Her mother was always anxious, but Louise sensed that tonight Mrs. Lambert was particularly nervous, banging around the cavernous kitchen trying to get her bland, boiled, overcooked concoction on the table. She seemed incredibly flustered to see Mr. Lambert home so early. The Lamberts’ Tudor-style home was a great big sprawling and creaky house much too large for a family of three. But it was the perfect place for a game of hide-and-seek, as the extra bedrooms and the back staircase (which at one point was probably used by the servants) made for plenty of excellent hiding spots. Most of Louise’s playdates when she was younger ended up turning into some version of hide-and-seek.
“Set the table, dahling. Your father is home,” Mrs. Lambert ordered, stating the obvious. Louise pulled three white Wedgwood china plates out of the buffet and placed them carefully on one corner of the long mahogany dining room table. Her father always worked late hours at his law firm in New York City. The times he did make it home early, he would call from Grand Central Terminal before he got on the Metro-North commuter train, and they would wait for him and go out for Thai food, his and Louise’s favorite. He was as much a fan of his wife’s cooking as Louise was, meaning: not at all. Mrs. Lambert grew up in England with maids, nannies, and a private cook and therefore never had to learn how to turn on the stove; she was infamous for turning even the most basic recipe into an unrecognizable and inedible concoction.
“Hi, chicken,” Mr. Lambert greeted his daughter, absentmindedly placing a kiss on the top of her damp, frizzy head. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
Louise looked at him curiously—same wire-rimmed glasses, cropped gray hair, Brooks Brothers suit—and tried to figure out what was different as she set up the silverware, forks on the left, knives and spoons on the right.
Her mom, with her perfectly coiffed ash blonde hair and cream-colored cashmere sweater set, precariously carried a steaming casserole dish of something (the smell didn’t help decode that mystery) to the table in her right hand, a glass of white wine in her left hand. She rarely drank during the week, so this was either a special occasion or her parents were about to drop a big bombshell on her. Like they were getting divorced or moving to Australia? Louise said a quick silent prayer for the second option.
Her dad walked back into the Venetian red formal dining room, gloomily lined with ornately framed oil portraits of their family’s dusty ancestors, including an old painting of her great-aunt Alice Baxter, who was completely unrecognizable from the gorgeous young woman Louise had embodied on the Titanic. Her dad was wearing an old gray-and-purple NYU T-shirt (since when were they allowed to dress down for dinner?) and carrying a glass tumbler of golden liquid clinking with ice.
“Let’s get this out of the way,” Mr. Lambert announced, taking a large gulp of his cocktail. “There were layoffs today; the firm is now about half as big as it was yesterday. And let’s just say I’ll be seeing my two favorite girls a lot more this summer.”
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Lambert replied, twisting the pearls around her neck so tautly Louise thought they would break and ricochet all over the dining room. “Well, I suppose you’ll simply find a new job, right, dahling?” she asked in her very drawn-out English accent, shakily sitting down in her high-back mahogany chair.
“If you can point me to a firm that’s actually taking on lawyers in this economy, then I will gladly show up with my briefcase and résumé. But until then I’m looking forward to a little vacation. So what’s for dinner?” he asked in a tone that seemed to announce this particular conversation was over.
Mrs. Lambert delicately placed her linen napkin on her lap. “But we need to repair the roof, and we just bought the new Volvo….”
“Not now, please, dear. Well, what do we have here? Tuna noodle surprise? Another English classic!” Louise’s father exchanged a secret bemused look with his daughter as he scooped out a lump of grayish noodles that landed on his plate with a surprising thunk. His wife instinctively passed him a bottle of malt vinegar, her go-to condiment for absolutely everything. “You kno
w what? Maybe I’ll take a cooking class in my downtime. I can be Mr. Mom.” Mrs. Lambert’s eyes widened in horror.
“Awesome!” Louise exclaimed. She felt bad for her dad but also kind of excited that she would finally get some quality time with him and, quite possibly, a decent meal out of this situation. They’d never had a problem with money before. Her parents must have some savings, right?
“What about Mr. Patterson?” she asked, remembering that Brooke’s dad worked for the same firm. “Was he laid off, too?”
“No, he’s part of the other half,” her dad replied, a flicker of emotion crossing his otherwise calm face. “The dark side,” he added with a fake wicked cackle. Louise laughed as she poked around at the strange gelatinous noodles in front of her, but inside she was also starting to feel a little nervous about this change that had suddenly descended on their family. She turned toward her mom for some reassurance that they would be fine. Mrs. Lambert was looking straight ahead into the distance; it seemed as though her worries had already carried her a million miles away.
CHAPTER 4
“What’s this?” Brooke asked the next day after school, holding out a colorful jewel-toned silk scarf, Louise’s latest Salvation Army purchase, between her fingertips as though it were contagious. As much as she was trying to feign an interest in Louise’s vintage collection, it was so clearly not in her nature. Brooke must have realized that in some small way her best friend had a passion that they didn’t share together.
“It’s great, no? Like sixties Pucci or something? I bought it for three dollars last week,” Louise gushed, proud of her find. Generally, at the two local thrift stores, otherwise known as Goodwill and Salvation Army, the only labels you were likely to come across were preppy mom ones like Ann Taylor and Talbots. This time she totally lucked out.
“It’s… interesting,” Brooke finally said, carelessly tossing it over the back of Louise’s mahogany rolling desk chair. Her giant orange goldfish, Marlon, swam in lazy circles around his bowl on top of her desk. The furniture in her room was a mismatch of antiques and Ikea, with a newly acquired six-foot-tall bookcase already overflowing with classic novels like Little Women and A Wrinkle in Time, as well as a bunch of fashion books she’d read but wasn’t ready to give away yet. Louise’s clothing was strewn inside out on most available surfaces. It took her a few tries to figure out what she was going to wear the next day, and often the pieces that didn’t make the cut wound up on the furniture or Oriental rug.
“Thanks, that almost sounds like a compliment,” Louise teased as she watched Brooke attempt to check herself out in the full-length mirror, which was challenging, as most of the reflective surface was covered in glossy magazine tear-outs and black-and-white prints of Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and other black-and-white-movie Hollywood stars of bygone eras.
Sometimes Louise wished she had someone to talk to about her vintage obsession, someone else who worshipped at the altar of Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent. Someone who knew that Emilio Pucci was an Italian fashion designer who created colorful, geometric-patterned dresses and scarves rather than being a breed of lapdog or something.
Unfortunately the likelihood of finding someone at her suburban middle school with an appreciation for vintage designers was about as probable as finding Justin Bieber in her eighth-period English lit class. Totally not going to happen in this universe. At least she had discovered some good blogs about vintage and fashion that she checked religiously, like What I Wore and Style Rookie, so Louise didn’t feel totally alone. There were other girls like her out there somewhere….
Brooke sat down at the edge of the canopy bed. “I’m sorry to hear about your dad,” she said quietly in that tone reserved for really awful things like when Brooke told her she spotted Todd and Tiff slow dancing at the semiformal. Like if she didn’t say it in a loud voice it wouldn’t hurt so much. This only resulted in Louise thinking she had misheard, so Brooke had to deliver the devastating blow three times before her best friend finally got the message. And yes, it still hurt. A lot.
“Thanks,” Louise answered defensively. She was stretched out across her full-size bed, flipping through the latest issue of Teen Vogue. “But he’s not dead, just temporarily unemployed. He’ll find another job.” The magazine had recently started running a new column following one girl on a cross-country road trip as she stopped at every thrift store she passed and did a photo shoot in her new/old outfits. Louise would give anything to be on a similar odyssey. Would the magazine ever believe she had traveled on the Titanic and had an old black-and-white photo on her computer as proof?
“Of course,” Brooke replied quickly, playing with a loose thread on Louise’s patchwork quilt. “I just meant that it sucks to lose your job in this economy, but he’s one of the best lawyers in the tristate area. I’m sure he’ll find a new firm.” Brooke sounded like she was repeating something her parents must have said at dinner the night before. Was everyone talking about her family now? Like they were a charity case? God, her mother would be mortified.
“Anyway, aren’t you so excited for the Paris trip?” Brooke asked cheerfully, trying to change the subject. Every June, the seventh-grade AP French class went on a trip to France led by their overly enthusiastic French teacher, Madame Truffant. How she had managed to persuade the school board to let her escort a group of undersupervised, overstimulated seventh graders with a less-than-firm grasp on basic French vocab across the Atlantic Ocean was anyone’s guess. But it was by far the highlight of the school year and the main reason French class was way more popular at their school than Spanish or, God forbid, Latin.
“I don’t know if I’m even going anymore. We’re supposed to have a family meeting about it tonight,” Louise replied.
When you’re an only child and your parents call for a “family meeting,” then you know something is up in a bad way. The chances of them meeting to talk about how much fun Louise would have in France were pretty much nonexistent.
“Lou, you have to go. For my sake. And what about Todd? You can’t have him crossing international borders alone with Tiff!” Brooke trilled, jumping up from the bed. On the bus ride home, Louise had completely filled her in on what she had seen that afternoon in the hallway. This was a disturbing development, particularly after Tiff had been slow dancing and flirting with Todd at the semiformal even though she must have known that Louise and Todd were… well, she wasn’t exactly sure what they were, so she definitely didn’t need any competition at this point. For now, Tiff Freedman was the enemy.
“Don’t you think I know that?” Louise asked dramatically. Paris was the city she had been dreaming of since she saw her first Hermès Birkin bag in the pages of her mother’s British Vogue. Her French was pas mal thanks to endless hours of foreign films she watched trying to emulate the styles of Brigitte Bardot and Anna Karina, two of her favorite French actresses from the sixties. Très chic.
But now, thanks to the recession, her chances of shopping in the City of Light were slim to nonexistent. The universe and the national Treasury were obviously conspiring against her.
“Good luck. I’ve got to get home for dinner, but remember you have to go to Paris,” Brooke repeated as if Louise had a choice in the matter. “Call me after and tell me everything.”
“I will,” Louise sighed, getting up and wrapping her new faux-Pucci scarf around her head like an exotic turban. She gave her best friend two air kisses. That’s how they said good-bye in foreign countries, or at least in foreign films.
CHAPTER 5
The Lambert family meetings were held in the formal living room, a place that Louise typically was not even allowed to step foot in because of the pristine ivory Belgian linen upholstery, invaluable antique vases, and decorative glass bowls displayed on every available surface. It was like a weird museum that no one visited except for the times when her parents hosted cocktail parties for her father’s law firm. She guessed that wouldn’t be happening anymore.
Louise had been
forced to attend these meetings twice before: once when her grandfather died, and once when her gray cat, Bogart (named after Humphrey Bogart, who starred in one of her and her mom’s favorite classic films, Casablanca, from the forties), got run over by a mail truck. It was no wonder that her stomach sank down to her Converse sneakers when another was scheduled. Why couldn’t they just break the bad news at breakfast like normal parents instead of having her anticipate it all day long? They took this meeting thing way too seriously. She was surprised not to see her mother in her neutral-toned cashmere sweater set and pearls, perched on the edge of her overstuffed armchair with a yellow legal notepad recording the minutes. Seven thirty PM. Louise Lambert promptly enters the living room.
“You don’t have enough money to send me to Paris with the class,” Louise predicted as she plopped down on the uncomfortable white sofa, defiantly eating a half-melted bowl of Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream. “Let’s get this out of the way.”
Her parents were caught off guard—she seemed to have ruined their scripted performance. Her mother eyed the soupy brown bowl with trepidation. Louise half expected her to excuse herself to grab a preemptive bottle of club soda.
“Ummm, yes. Unfortunately that appears to be the case,” her father stuttered, running his hand through his cropped silver hair. “You know we’ve always been supportive of your extracurricular activities, but in all honesty, we can’t afford the additional expense, thanks to Gladstone, Braden LLP.” He raised his glass tumbler in a sarcastic gesture and took a swig of his now ever-present cocktail.
Time-traveling Fashionista at the Palace of Marie Antoinette (9780316202961) Page 2