Petty in Pink

by Compai

  She was alone.

  Stretching to her full five feet and ten inches, she tucked her silky brown bob behind one ear, and lifted a Tiffany & Co. shopping bag from the polished metal hook fixed to the door. She glanced inside: black leggings, vintage forest-green cardigan with faux leopard cuffs and collar, the oversize Pixies t-shirt she’d spent two hours fashioning into a rad halter dress, black-and-white-checked Vans. She glanced away, queasy with guilt. They’re just clothes, she lectured herself. It’s not like they care whether you wear them or not. Clattering the latch under her hand, she headed toward the wall-to-wall mirror above the automatic chrome sinks. As the maraschino Miu Miu patent pumps clacked brightly on the tile, her scorned old Vans gave a tumble, kicking the inside of the bag.

  Traitor.

  But it wasn’t her fault! Charlotte had all but forced the glossy red shoes into her arms, accosting her at the Showroom’s periphery just minutes before first bell. “You’re a nine, aren’t you?” she’d asked in lieu of hello. “These are eight-and-a-half’s but they run small. I mean large”—Charlotte huffed—“you know what I mean. And here.” She shook the Tiffany & Co. bag by its white satin rope handles. “Wear this.”

  “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” Janie had ventured, daring to meet her mentor’s glittering gaze. Hadn’t she and Amelia Hernandez, her non-Winston-attending best friend, spent the last seven days coordinating her current ensemble? “The t-shirt halter dress is hot,” Amelia had insisted. “Plus it shows creativity. Plus it shows you’re different than those other label-dropping whores.”

  Since when did two pluses make a negative?

  “Nothing’s wrong,” the more popular girl assured her—but only after a painful moment’s hesitation. “It’s just… I thought for our first meeting you’d want to wear clothes they actually sell at Ted Pelligan.…” She trailed off, subjecting Janie’s outfit to swift evaluation. The safety pin at her hem, the tiny moth hole at her sleeve, the dangling button at her collar: no flaw escaped her flitting, pool-green eye. But it’s vintage! Janie wanted to cry out in protest. As if that’s any excuse, she imagined Charlotte’s reply. The popular brunette had a completely different idea of “vintage” than she did. She’d once shown up at school in a mint-condition 1960s Courrèges trapeze dress, like, “Isn’t this hilarious?” As if boundary-breaking couture dresses in perfect condition were funny! Then again, humor came in different forms; perhaps Charlotte’s was a more exclusive type? That special sort of humor supposedly found at Barneys, you know—along with “taste” and “luxury.” It’s not that I’ve lost my sense of humor, Janie realized, stunned; I can’t afford the right brand.

  “At least try it on?” Charlotte barged into her mind-blowing epiphany. “You can always change back into whatevs.”

  Hugging the bulging robin’s egg blue bag to her stunted chest, Janie sighed her surrender. “Fine.”

  “Oh, good!” The tiny hands clapped as luxury cars continued to sail by. “But don’t do it yet, okay? Wait till lunch so I can see.”

  Despite herself, Janie cracked a small smile. Last year, Charlotte had barely spoken to her (unless you count the occasional soul-crushing insult), and yet here she was, dressing her up like a favorite doll. Not that Janie had any illusions. She’d had favorite dolls of her own, and most of them ended up bald, dismembered, and abandoned under her bed. No doubt Charlotte was on a mission to “improve” her, to increase her value in Winston’s social stock market and thereby justify their otherwise mystifying relationship. “She is so full of herself!” Amelia would later fume, incensed. But privately, Janie was grateful. More and more she’d catch girls (Farrah Frick, Bethany Snee, Nikki Pelligrini) eyeing her with a hungry, envious look—a look she recognized, having perfected it herself on Charlotte.

  Of course, maybe she was overthinking? Maybe, just maybe, Charlotte genuinely liked her? It seemed unlikely (the girl had made Janie’s ninth grade a living hell) and yet… stranger things were possible. She’d dated Janie’s brother, forgodsake. True, they’d broken up, but they’d both moved on, and if Charlotte could befriend Jake, a former dorkatron who’d cheated on her, then what should be so bizarre about befriending Janie, a former dorkatron who… who nothing?

  “Where’s your brother?” Charlotte inquired lightly. Janie stared, baffled. The girl had an uncanny ability to invade her mind, but like, selectively—pocketing the one thought that interested her and casting the rest aside. Pretty crazy Jake interested her at all, at this point, considering their now legendary breakup and subsequent post-breakup drama. Janie smiled, relieved. Maybe they really were making an effort to be friends?

  “Still in the car, I think,” she recovered, gray eyes flitting to the underground parking elevator. “They’re doing some kind of KROQ acoustic countdown. He was all, if Nirvana isn’t number one, I’m chaining myself to Courtney Love in protest.”

  Charlotte’s laughter was cut short by the growling sound of an encroaching sports car; Jules Maxwell-Langeais, Winston’s imported half-English, half-French boy candy had just cruised through the black metal gate in his acid-green Ferrari. His petite girlfriend must not have realized, however, because instead of making a big show of greeting him, she kissed Janie’s cheek—“Ciao!”—and bounded toward the elevator. If not for the orange-blossom fog lingering in her wake, you’d never have known she was there.

  By lunch, of course, the fog had faded. But the kiss remained. With Lauren gone and Janie free to peruse her reflection, she finally noticed it: a just perceptible pink smear along her left cheekbone. She made a mental note to clean it off, but first: she turned in front of the spotless mirror. Somehow, despite Charlotte being a full foot shorter, her black-and-ivory silk dress fit perfectly, nipping her long wisp of a waist, skimming her narrow hips, and halting just below the knee. True, the dainty cap sleeves, ruffled skirt, and chaste mandarin collar were a little on the girlie-princess side, but the dark red four-inch stilettos more than compensated. The dress was Snow White, she decided.

  But the shoes were poison apples.

  A second whine of hinges urged her attention to the bathroom door. “Charlotte wants to know what’s taking you so long,” Laila informed her, a scornful eye riveted to the rounded toes of the glossy dark red pumps. The eye narrowed. “Uch,” she gargled in contempt, slithering her retreat through the cracked door like an eel.

  “I’ll be right out,” Janie called to the closing door, presenting her profile to the mirror. As she lifted a crumpled corner of paper towel to her cheek, the kiss caught the light and shimmered. Was it a mark of protection, she wondered, like in The Wizard of Oz? Or a seal of death, like in The Godfather.…

  It’s lipstick, she scowled, rubbing the paper roughly against her cheek. When would she stop making everything so complicated?

  She exited the bathroom, her cheek throbbing pink. No longer the effect of lipstick, of course—but friction.

  “Just one more thing,” Charlotte advised, beckoning her forward with a backward flap of pale pink polished fingers. The signature Chanel cachalong camellia ring above her middle knuckle, along with the small hand under it, disappeared into her black satin tote, emerging later with a beautiful fabric headband.

  Behind her oversize Dior sunglasses, the gorgeous brunette blinked. “Kneel?”

  Janie hesitated, but did as she as she was asked: she sank to the grass and tilted her face upward. Above her, Charlotte bit her lip, clamping the hair ornament to her angled head.

  “We hereby crown thee the Duchess of Doucheberry!” Theo Godfrey’s thin voice warbled in the near distance. Janie thought she heard Petra’s voice tell him Shut the hell up, but couldn’t bear to turn and check. Her pale cheeks pulsed. Could Charlotte have chosen a more public place to officiate her totally embarrassing accessorizing ceremony?

  “Magnifique!” she exclaimed, springing her fingers from Janie’s temples. The Winston Willows framed the scene in feathery branches, slicing ribbons of light across the heaping plate of grape
s and oozing triangle of Brie the three ballerinas called lunch. Having rejoined her friends on their cashmere Burberry blanket, Charlotte smiled, finding a grape with a polished finger and thumb. “Turn around?”

  Janie turned and the green grape turned with her, snapping at the stem.

  “You do have the legs for those shoes,” Charlotte breathed, popping the grape into her mouth. Next to her, Laila paled as though she’d been pinched.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she squeaked, and swiftly tucked her legs under her butt, hiding what no diet, exercise, or prayer on Oprah’s great earth could conquer. Her thick lower calves were the bane of her existence, her greatest weakness… her Achilles cankle. “Are you saying I don’t have the legs for those shoes?” Laila gaped at Charlotte’s insensitivity.

  “And, Janie, the dress!” Charlotte tuned her out, preferring to rhapsodize. “Not everyone can pull off that ivory color.”

  Kate reddened, gagging on a grape.

  “I’m sure these shoes would look amazing on you,” Janie returned to Laila, aware of the redhead’s bruised feelings, if completely mystified by them. Laila answered with a sarcastic smile.

  “Oh, they would look amazing?”

  “I can totally pull off that color!” spewed Kate, choking down her grape and pounding the cool grass with her palm. Janie frowned with worry. Why were they taking Charlotte’s comments so personally? Her gray eyes darted from girl to girl: Laila, clad in pink ballet slippers, and Kate, in her black camisole leotard and pink wraparound skirt. She pushed a nervous hand into her hair, forgetting the headband, which leaped from her head and flopped to the grass, coiling like a snake. A black lace over ivory satin Chanel snake.

  Wait. Hadn’t she seen that headband earlier today?

  “Oh God.” She whirled around to face Charlotte, her throat parched with dread. “These aren’t… am I wearing their clothes?”

  “What did you think?” muttered Kate as Laila sniffed beside her, eviscerating a small wedge of cheese. Between the two dance-clothed girls, Charlotte beamed.

  “I explained how important this meeting was, and they insisted on lending them to you. Isn’t that nice?” From opposite corners of the plush picnic blanket, her henchmen stiffened, and Janie broke into a sudden sweat. The black-and-ivory silk dress clung to her skin, sticking like cellophane, sealing off her pores. Just when she wondered if she really might faint, a heavenly voice echoed in her ear. I’m dead, she realized with relief, her gray eyes fluttering shut. And this is the voice of an angel.

  “Whattup.”

  Okay, so he wasn’t an angel, but with his tanned, sea salt–scrubbed skin, sun-filled, beach-sand brownish gold hair and limpid beach-glass gaze, he was the closest thing to it—well, assuming you have clichéd Renaissance notions about heaven, and looking at Evan Beverwil, just admit it: you do.

  “Um… ew.” His little sister glowered, impervious (for obvious reasons) to his brooding surfer charms. “Could you and your ghetto verbal contractions puh-lease take yourselves elsewhere?”

  He frowned, scratching the back of his tan ankle with the toe of his navy blue Havaianas flip-flop. “Isn’t ‘whattup,’ like, a compound word?”

  “Get. Out!” Charlotte squawked, while Kate and Laila clapped their hands to their mouths, stifling their giggles. As usual, Evan had completely changed their personalities. It was like he’d taken the sticks out of their asses and returned them dipped in Pop Rocks. Janie turned away, repelled. Crushing on Evan Beverwil was so, like, obvious. Like saying, “Hawaii is beautiful.” Or “French fries taste good.” She, for one, resisted convention; she obsessed outside the box. And, yeah, maybe Paul Elliot Miller, the painfully hot bassist in Amelia’s neopunk band Creatures of Habit, qualified as obvious. But at least he wore eyeliner, his lip ring was almost always infected, and he smelled—as Max, his best friend and drummer, once informed him—“like a Tequila worm, except rancid, and like, floating in a bottle of butt sweat.” Janie smiled at the memory. It was weird, but liking Paul in spite of—no, because of—his repulsive traits, made her feel interesting. Like the kind of person who said, “Belarus is beautiful.” Or “Deep-fried dung beetles taste good.”

  Of course, there was another, simpler reason not to lust after Evan Beverwil. He was utterly, like, laughably out of her league. But she preferred her complicated explanation to the more straightforward one (far better to cast yourself as a beguiling Belarusian beetle-eater than a flat-chested freak with no chance in hell).

  Evan tapped the side of her wrist, snapping her from her thoughts, and trained his clear pool-green gaze on hers. “Can I talk to you for a sec?” he asked in a low voice. He tilted his head and ticked his eyes to the left, adding the unspoken, “Alone?”

  “Um… okay.” Janie shrugged, affecting a couldn’t-care-less attitude. And she couldn’t. The stomach spasms she attributed to gastrointestinal disorder, the light flutter in her heart to early onset angina, and as for her slightly tripped-out color-saturated vision, she blamed her mother, who had no doubt spiked her breakfast lemon yogurt with LSD. “I’ll be right back,” she assured Charlotte, who bobbed her delicate eyebrows and flashed Evan an evil warning look. Kate and Laila froze in disgust, two letter W’s etched between their eyebrows, a clue (as if Janie needed one) to what they both were thinking.

  WTF.

  “You totally saved me,” Janie remarked once she and Evan departed the shade of the willows and were well out of earshot. She’d meant to sound offhand and ironic, and might have succeeded if Joaquin Whitman hadn’t picked up his guitar and floated a quiet, tender melody across the lawn. Melancholy guitar music has a way of making anything you say sound nauseatingly sincere. You totally saved me. “I mean”—she raised her voice, attempting to drown out the Lifetime soundtrack—“Laila and Kate pretty much want me dead right now.”

  “Oh yeah?” Evan appeared to think deeply on the subject. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. What if she explained and he took their side? “Where are we going?”

  “The Brat.” He began walking.

  Janie nodded. And then she smiled. That she’d just known what “the Brat” meant; it seemed significant somehow. Sliding her eyes to the left, she pondered Evan’s serious profile: the sandy brown eyebrows, the long blond-tipped lashes, the barely sunburned bridge of his nose, the soft dent in his rose-wax lower lip. They’d only had five or six conversations, each of them more inept than the last, and yet—actual information must have been exchanged. How else would she know the pet name for his Porsche? Or that he had nightmares about the elephant statues at the La Brea Tar Pits? And his ongoing obsession with Bob Seger, or the very strange fact that he’d read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret? Weren’t these the kind of dorky details dudes like Evan Beverwil kept close to the vest? The kind of details you’d never guess unless, well… you knew them?

  “What?” He paused at the gleaming door of his fire engine red Porsche 911 convertible. Janie blanched, suddenly aware that she’d been staring.

  “Oh,” she shook her head quickly. “Nothing.”

  Pushing some air from between his lips, Evan bobbed his eyebrows—whatever—and grabbed the door handle. Planting one navy blue flip-flop on the ground, he slid into the black leather–upholstered driver’s seat, craned sideways, and popped open the glove compartment. His faded moss green Pintail t-shirt strained across his broad back, inched above the waistline of his navy-silver board shorts, and revealed a tantalizing stretch of taut, tanned torso. Then the glove compartment clapped shut, and the t-shirt closed down like a curtain.

  “Here,” he gestured, getting out of the car. A flimsy Utrecht Art Supplies bag dangled under his hand. He presented it to her, scratching the back of his neck.

  “What is this?” Janie frowned with mock suspicion. Plastic rustled around her wrist as she hesitatingly reached inside, removing a cellophane-sealed tin box. “Oh…,” she breathed. It was a Prismacolor Premier colored pencil set, 132 pencils, the
largest set available. Of course, at $190-something, she’d had to restrict herself to the more modestly priced twelve-pencil set, a familiar array of colors like crimson red, grass green, lemon yellow, black, and white. But here in her hands, so much more: Copenhagen blue, celadon green, dahlia purple, Spanish orange. Colors so beautiful they made her heart ache. Why is he giving this to me? she wondered. And then, inanely, an answer:

  He likes me?

  “So,” his boyish voice echoed behind her dreamlike thoughts. “I was thinking, like, maybe you could help me design something?”

  Briskly, Janie glanced up, attempting to shake off her daze. “Design… what?”

  “A tattoo,” he half smiled, like he’d had to repeat himself. “I’m turning eighteen in a couple months, and like, I want something custom-drawn. Look,” he added, all business, “it’s not like I wouldn’t pay you.”

  “Oh,” she replied, allowing the mists to part. Returning the pencil set to the bag, she happened to glimpse her reflection in his curved, tinted sports car window. Her mutant face smeared across the glass, expanding on one side like a half-wet sponge. That she’d actually allowed herself to think he liked her!

  It was so impossibly pathetic.

  “You know what, I’m sure you’re busy, so don’t worry about—”

  “No, no!” she stopped him, whipping away from the car window. “I’ll do it, I mean”—attempting to mask her sponge face behind her hands, she glanced up—“I’d like to.”

  “Oh,” he nodded slowly. “Cool.”

  The bell rang, signaling the end of lunch. All around them, car doors unlocked, hiccuping mechanical chirps, and kids began to mosey to their cars, glugging the dregs of their bottled Cokes and organic Kombucha teas. Janie gave Evan a nervous smile, I should go, and turned to leave.