Petty in Pink

by Compai

  “I meant to ask you,” he stopped her. She turned around again, more alert than ever to the surrounding rabble—the wheezing hydraulics, the car trunk kuh-klunks, the shrieking laughter. “Weren’t you wearing something different before?”

  “Oh,” she flushed. Would he realize her clothes belonged to Charlotte’s friends? Would he think she stole them from a coat check, Lindsay Lohan–style? “Um, yeah,” she confessed miserably.

  “I thought so,” he pursed his lips, upwardly tilting his chin. “I was going to tell you, like, cool shoes. But then you changed, so…”

  She frowned, hugging the plastic bag to her chest. It made a sound like dead leaves.

  “Not that what you’re wearing now isn’t cool,” he quickly backtracked. “But…”

  “But…?” she prompted, squeezing out a terrible laugh. She could only imagine his response: but you’re too tall for high heels. But you’re too tomboyish for dresses. But you’re too sponge-faced to live.

  But what?

  “Nothing, it’s just”—his chlorine green eyes locked into middle distance, the pupils furling into small points—“it’s just what you were wearing before was more, like, you. You know?”

  Janie’s heart rose in her throat. She swallowed, daring to meet his half-moon-shaped pool green eyes. She’d never heard “you” said in quite that way. Like “you” was something good. Something complimentary, even.

  Like “you” was something she didn’t need to change.

  The Girl: Miss Paletsky

  The Getup: Beige pleated linen-blend pants, white polyester chiffon wraparound blouse, nude nylon trouser socks, and white strappy sandals, all from Marshalls. Watermelon-shaped shoulder purse from Russian street market

  “Do you see the earrings on that one?” gasped Ms. DeWitt, pant-suited fossil of Winston’s Earth and Sciences Department and proud proprietress of the wondrously wide and fantastically flat posterior Winston students had nicknamed the Tundra. Ms. DeWitt ritualistically scanned the babbling horde on the brushed-concrete Assembly Hall floor, picking one face out of hundreds for critique. “They’re enormous,” she continued, clucking under her dinosaur breath. “I’m surprised she can hold her head up, poor thing!”

  Miss Paletsky, the young Russian Director of Special Studies, blinked behind her octagon-shaped LensCrafters, noting the “poor thing” in question. The flaxen-haired eighth-grader’s fist-size golden bamboo hoops swayed below her ears and bumped against her canary yellow cardigan-clad shoulders, causing the surrounding girls to collectively gasp in… dismay? No—she revised her judgment, regarding their ecstatic expressions—admiration. During the past month, Nikki Pellegrini’s social standing had swung dramatically—she was popular one minute, persecuted the next—for reasons no teacher could fathom. Now, it seemed, she was popular again—and Miss Paletsky surmised it had something to do with Poseur. Nikki had just been recruited as their new intern, replacing a devastated Venice Whitney-Wang. (Upon her dismissal, Venice had flailed into her office wailing like a war widow; evidently, Poseur was the class to be in, and (even as she folded the sobbing girl into her arms) Miss Paletsky had to admit—she was the teensiest bit proud. After all, without her urging and foresight? It would have never existed.)

  “Did you see Charlotte Beverwil?” Mrs. Dang worried aloud, interrupting the younger teacher’s rumination. Despite the screaming volume, the geometry instructor lowered her voice to a whisper. “Those shoes, I mean… what if the poor dear falls?”

  Miss Paletsky shifted her focus to the west wall, the designated domain of Charlotte Beverwil and her venerated überwealthy indie set: pouty girls in black eyeliner, angled bangs, and knotted silk scarves, bored boys in rumpled shirts, stove-pipe pants, and tousled pompadours. The Bardots and Belmondos of Beverly Hills, she mused, referring, of course, to the icons of the French New Wave. Kate Joliet, Laila Pikser, Bronwyn Spencer, Tim Beckerman, Luke Christie, Emma Raub, Adelaide Dallas, Jules Maxwell-Langeais, and (recently added to their ranks and not quite blending in) twin scholarshipniks Janie and Jake Farrish; all sat on the floor, backs against the brick wall, except, of course, the stunning chlorine-eyed brunette, who’d remained standing, one controversial shoe kicked up behind her—an imperious flamingo among a flock of pigeons.

  “I’m sure one of those shoes costs a month’s salary,” sighed the incredulous Mrs. Dang, shaking her head. Imagine.

  “Oh, at least.” The Tundra narrowed her eyes and quaked.

  “Stop,” lisped Señor Smith. The ginger-haired, baby-faced Spanish instructor clutched his heart, darted his pale eyes between them. He affected a scandalized expression. “You people make that much?”

  “All right, people!” Glen Morrison, the self-elected moderator of Winston Prep’s biweekly Town Meeting danced along the north wall and halted their banter, clapping his hands. “Let’s get this party started!” Like a well-trained mime troupe, the collected faculty snapped into character and dispersed through the boisterous crowd. Every three seconds, one stopped to loom above a cheerfully unaware chatterer, until, sensing a creeping chill, the offender glanced up and immediately withered into silence. Inevitably, the faculty reconvened at the Back Wall, aka “Stonehedge,” a ruined country of cackling, semicollapsed potheads who could not, no matter how urgently and repeatedly they were hushed, shut the hell up. Trudging into this unruly mass, teachers often became mired, unable to emerge until Town Meeting was dismissed. They just stood there, trapped, like cows in a swamp.

  “Theo, Christina, Petra!” bellowed the bullnecked Coach Hollander, squeezing his fists until his ’84 garnet class ring just about popped. “I mean it!” he sputtered as Joaquin Whitman stuffed his iPod headphones into his nose and emphatically sneezed them onto Theo’s shoulder. “Joaquin!”

  “So, I have a very exciting announcement to make,” continued Glen. Once the volume decreased to his satisfaction, he gripped the podium and turned around. “Regarding one of our newest teachers.” Sitting on one of the metal folding chairs reserved for faculty along the North Wall, Miss Paletsky smiled blandly, then froze, realizing herself to be the subject of Glen’s twinkly-eyed attention. He extended his left arm, sleeved in wide-grooved, olive-brown corduroy, and beckoned her forward. “Miss Paletsky?”

  Squeezing a sheath of papers to her chest, she nervously approached, aided by the encouraging, if sporadic, claps from the student body. What could he possibly want with her? Reaching the podium, she tipped into a tiny bow, spilling her octagon-shaped LensCrafters down her nose. As she fumbled to correct them, Glen dropped his hand on her shoulder, disarranging her shoulder pad.

  His smile was menacingly gentle.

  “Because she’s too shy to tell you herself,” he reported, offering the crowd a teasing wink, “I’m just going to have to announce the happy news for her.” The young Russian teacher’s face paled—it was only too clear what Glen was up to—and she tried to shake her head. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. She closed her eyes, clutching her papers like a life raft. “Miss Paletsky’s engaged!”

  Predictably, all three hundred students erupted into deafening, shrieking applause. Miss Paletsky struggled to smile. She couldn’t imagine they cared—not really. More like they needed an excuse to scream and Glen gave them one (they’d expressed similar mania when he’d announced the availability of raisin-free cinnamon bagels). Under different circumstances, of course, she might have enjoyed their overly enthusiastic outburst, but circumstances being what they were, she could only stand there and endure. If only you knew, she mentally addressed them, struggling to smile. You’re rejoicing the end of all ch’appiness. You’re cheering the death of my ch’eart!

  Miss Paletsky had finally agreed to marry Yuri Grigorovich, the stocky, stained-wife-beater-wearing owner of the Copy & Print store on Fairfax, not for love—ch’a!—but for green card. Her worker’s visa was about to expire, and unless she took action, it was (in the words of her fetid fiancé) “back to Russia like a dog.” She had deliberated her answ
er as long as possible, fretting in her doll-size bungalow apartment, staring through her one window at the avocado trees on North Vista Street. She may loathe Yuri, but at least she trusted him—and how could she go back to Moscow? It was a city of ghosts: her parents, grandparents, temperamental, laughing Masha, and Otar—beautiful Otar in his Kobe Bryant jersey! All of them dead. And then, the terrible night she was robbed at gunpoint walking home from the conservatory—she’d been practicing until two a.m., transported, as usual, by Beethoven. That winter had been breathtakingly cold. At home, with only a thin blanket for warmth, she slept under a pile of laundry, clean and dirty mixed together. Her landlady gave her a space heater, but she never used it—the wiring was faulty, and there were fires.

  That, she would never forget.

  Compared to such things, what was it to marry Yuri? Nothing, and yet…

  One night, walking home after a particularly grueling commute on the L.A. Metro bus, she’d misread N. Vista as No Visa. Twilight had obscured her eyesight, the street sign was old and faded, she was dead tired: all good excuses, all wrong. It was either to make decision, she realized, lying awake at night. Or slowly to go mad.

  In the end, a man named Christopher Duane Moon made up her mind. He breezed into her office last month, smiled, and the whole world… opened up. Just like that, she could breathe again. She felt free. But feelings are feelings, reality is reality. My fiancée, he’d said, casual as anything—and the world squeezed tighter than ever before. He was engaged.

  Of course he was.

  She moved into the smallest and beigest of Yuri’s three bedrooms—the “Mankiev room,” named after Russian wrestler and Olympic gold-medalist Nazyr Mankiev, whose imposing five-by-six-foot poster, lovingly hung on the windowless east wall, constituted the room’s sole decoration. Upon her arrival, her pungent prince presented her with a pair of bride and groom stuffed bears, two polished brass keys, and an engagement band of roughly the same color. The bears she placed on her Ikea Billy bookcase alongside the framed photograph of her grandparents, a potted philodendron, her lock-and-key diary, and a small plaster bust of Beethoven. With the exception of her old Emerson upright piano, which she’d had to leave in the living room opposite Yuri’s gigantic plasma screen TV, these meager tokens served as the only evidence of her former existence. She’d sold her pale green flower dishes, donated her birch-wood futon, and bought a new toothbrush that—for the first time ever—wasn’t blue, but yellow. Her yellow toothbrush said: I am starting a new life.

  Her yellow toothbrush said: I am dead.

  The town meeting applause had yet to die down, and so Lena Paletsky hid her pale face behind her hands, masking her despair as modesty. Through the bright slats of her fingers she witnessed Charlotte Beverwil spring to her heels, clapping daintily, and Janie Farrish follow suit, bouncing on her toes. Nikki Pellegrini hammered her knees—earrings aquiver—and a dancing Petra Greene floated her arms into the air, twirling like a wind sprite. Such exuberance! But (she couldn’t help but wonder) where was the most exuberant girl of all? Where was the daughter of the man who so casually opened and closed the world?

  Melissa Moon remained seated, nudged against the East Wall, her defined chin planted firmly on her knees. A soft, resigned sadness darkened her lovely face, and recognizing it, the Russian teacher lowered her hands from her face.

  They locked eyes and almost smiled.

  The Guy: Jake Farrish

  The Getup: Navy blue Dickies, gray low-top Converse All-Stars, black-and-white-checked vintage button-down, dark green American Apparel hoodie

  “Girl, I’ll be there in a second.” Marco Duvall tore his focus from his pickup half-court game just long enough to catch his girlfriend’s indignant you-cannot-be-serious eye. At times like this he really resented the court’s center Showroom placement. Whatever, he grimaced, glancing away. Could she not see Farrish had the ball palmed (for a skinny dude, hands were big), and ticktocked above that crazy rooster hairdo of his? Did she seriously want him to miss this opportunity?

  “Yo!” Marco shouldered his way through the sweat-stained, sneaker-squeaking dude mass, envisioning himself a pinnacle of masculine prowess. Jake spotted him, readied the ball, and—

  “No, no, please!” A formal transatlantic male voice pierced through the grunting cacophony. Jules Maxwell-Langeais, all GQ’ed out in charcoal chinos, a body-hugging white Henley, and powder blue boaters, raised a deeply tanned arm. “I yam open!” he called, squinting like a man saluting from his yacht.

  Marco’s eyes bulged in their sockets. Had he not made himself clear?

  “YO!!!”

  But Jake had made a promise and was, for the time being, a dude of his word—especially where Charlotte was concerned. She’d come to see him that morning, braving the dismal descent underground, a surprise move in two respects: 1) Charlotte was strictly upper level, a purebred “Showroom pony,” and underground parking was, literally and figuratively, beneath her, and 2) they’d just emerged from a pretty epic breakup. Yes, at his twin sister’s insistence, they’d agreed to cut out the dramatics, but without dramatics, what had they been left with? “Hey.” “Hey.” “So…” “How was your weekend?” “Oh. Um. It was good. Yours?” “Good! I DustBustered my car.”

  Something about saying “DustBustered” to your ex-girlfriend. It seriously just… cripples the will.

  Rather than risk running into her again, Jake had decided to hole up in underground parking. You know. Bruce Wayne–style. Imagine his surprise when, after four minutes of perfect solitude, the black Volvo door cracked open and there she was, slipping into the front seat, all smiles, sweet perfume, and things to say. Imagine his surprise when he just said things back. Like, they’d both just decided, at the exact same time, not to be awkward.

  That is, until she brought him up.

  “Jules told me you guys are playing basketball later?” Charlotte propped her death heel on the duct-taped dash. “You know, it’s really important to him that he improve his game.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jake replied, still staring at her foot. The fact that Jules “told” her stuff—the fact that she listened—it was all so horribly graphic. Seriously, he could handle the fact that they were dating. But that they talked to each other? That they “shared”? He frowned. Some of this shit she should keep to herself.

  “So,” she pressed on. “Why don’t you guys pass him the ball?”

  “What?” Jake pushed out an uneasy laugh, crumpling his forehead. “We… pass him the ball.” When they felt like throwing the game.

  “Jake,” she admonished him, folding her arms across her chest, and her silk skirt shifted, sliding a good two inches up her thigh. It’s fun to lose, Kurt Cobain buzzed inside the shitty speakers, drowning in subterranean static. And to-oo pretend…

  “It isn’t nice,” she sighed. “Just because he’s my boyfriend, you…”

  Boyfriend?!!

  “Fine!” he blurted, punching the radio off. “I’ll tell the guys to pass him the ball… I mean, more than we have been. Which is a lot. Relatively.”

  “Good!” Charlotte breathed. “Then I agree to study for Ms. McGovern’s vocab quiz with you.”

  Jake lifted an eyebrow and slid his dark brown eyes sideways. They hadn’t discussed studying together. So why was she was smiling at him like they’d had a long-standing plan?

  “Monday night?” she chimed, as if to remind him.

  “I don’t know.” He glanced away and frowned, picking some duct tape on the dash. He was all for being friends, but studying together? For vocab? Was he seriously supposed to not touch her as she sat there oh-so-enticingly asking him to define obfuscate? Pernicious? Disseminate?

  “Come on, Jake.” Charlotte sounded almost plaintive. “I made flash cards.”

  “Oh man, flash cards.” He looked up and sighed, regarding the manipulative and yet painfully adorable baby-in-a-poopy-diaper expression on her face. “Okay,” he laughed, and pushed her shoulder, making it go away. “We
’ll study.”

  And so he jolted back to the present, just seven hours after their chum-fest, passing the ball to his rival, hurling it with all his might. Marco Duvall groaned with despair as the orange sphere arced through the air, out of his capable grasp, and into Jules’s outstretched hands. The ponytailed exchange student gripped the ball, facing him with childlike triumph.

  “Shoot the ball!” Marco yelled in strangled disbelief.

  But it was too late. Leon Gorlach roared in like an uncensored episode of National Geographic, swiping the ball into his possession and carrying it off like a good-as-dead baby hippo. Twisting high into the air, the wiry ninth-grader cranked his arm back, tongue lolling, and tore that hoop a new hoop-hole.

  “Ee-YEAH, baybee!!!” He pounded the pavement, swung his clenched, raw-knuckled fist, and thumped his pigeon chest. “Posterized.”

  “He is good, no?” Jules sidled up to Jake, addressing him in a confidential tone.

  “Yeah.” Jake squinted through his dripping dark brown hair. Seemed Gorlach had moved on from thumping his chest to sniffing his armpits. “Poetry in motion.”

  “I would not go so far as that!” Jules laughed, missing Jake’s sarcasm by about a mile and a half. Marco observed their interaction under a disapproving yet sympathetic brow. He knew what Farrish was thinking: So my girlfriend dumped me. Did she have to move on to this clown? Marco made a mental note to educate his scrawny ass: “Listen,” he’d say—maybe put his hand on his shoulder or some shit like that—“smokin’ hot girls be hookin’ up with clowns since the dawn of time. Just the way it is. Have it hardwired into their smokin’ hot DNA.”

  Well, except for his girlfriend, of course.

  “Marco, do not even touch me!” Melissa shrieked as he approached her with wide-open arms, ready to reel her into a sweaty-ass bear hug. Her chicken-head friends got all quiet, gathering around the platinum Lexus convertible, like, Oh no you didn’t. “I told you,” Melissa reminded him, ducking behind her annoying friend Deena. “You play b-ball and you forfeit all rights to touch me.”