Petty in Pink

by Compai

  “It’s not like that,” Charlotte assured him in the blasé tone of a girl whose own actor/director/producer dad, Hollywood icon Bud Beverwil, all but out-famoused the world. She widened her pool green eyes and tried to sound impressed. “Her dad is Seedy Moon.”

  “No.” Mr. Pelligan melted into a smile. “You mean that angry-looking chap with the tattoos and the gold chains—Giddy, what do they call these newfangled urban bards?”

  “Rap stars, sir.”

  “Rap stars,” he rhapsodized, once again trilling his r’s. “You mean to say,” he addressed Melissa, “in addition to profane and rudimentary verse, these ‘rrrrap stars’ produce daughters? And one of these daughters is you?”

  “That’s right,” she happily confirmed, crossing her legs.

  “Tut-tut, my sweet,” he stopped her, reached into a file, and retrieved a perfectly trimmed newspaper clipping. Holding it as far away from his face as possible, he blinked behind his rimless rectangular eyewear and gazed down his small, rounded nose. “ ‘In honor of his fiancée’s favorite color, hip-hop mogul Seedy Moon will host an all-night Pink Party at his Bel Air estate, scheduled for the first Saturday of December. The budget, rumored to have surpassed the two-million-dollar mark, has divided fans into two camps. “It’s the American Dream, right?” laughs Benita Baker, a grocery clerk in Echo Park. “He came from nothing, just like me.” “Pathetic,” argues Duck Meaney, a self-described Columbia dropout sipping a four-dollar cappuccino outside Mäni’s Bakery in Venice Beach. “This is a country humbled by economic crisis. The people should rise up and storm his Bel Air estate with torches.” Mr. Moon, however, makes no apologies. “What can I say,” he grinned at reporters. “I’m in love. I out-Diddy’d myself.” ’ ”

  “That was the L.A. Times.” Melissa beamed, uncrossing and recrossing her long, legging-clad legs. “Did you see the write-up in Vanity Fair? They mention me in that one.”

  “Of all the most delightful coincidences.” Mr. Pelligan lowered the clipping to his polished mahogany desk and removed his glasses. “You must know… I keep a file for ideal stages, and your father’s engagement party made the top five.”

  “I already asked,” Birdie blurted in a panic, her left eye lolling toward her nose. If her father found out she’d forgotten to make the call, he’d take away her riding privileges! “Four times,” she elaborated her lie. “Mr. Moon’s assistant told me if I called again he’d have me arrested!”

  “Jerome told you that?” Melissa gaped. That cornrowed clown declined a call from Ted Pelligan? Was he looking to get fired? Darting worried black eyes toward Mr. Pelligan, Melissa quickly shook her head. “Please, don’t listen to that fool, Mr. Pelligan. My dad would be honored to work with you. For real.”

  “Hear that, Buttercup?” Mr. Pelligan arced an eyebrow at his deceitful daughter, pointedly evoking her pony’s name. “Mr. Moon would be… honored.”

  As Birdie retired to her chair to glumly fold another piece of pink paper, Mr. Pelligan escorted the four girls to the door. “Well, my fashionista fledglings, I did have several stages swimming about, but if the Moon fete is what you want, the Moon fete is what you get. In the meantime, if you’ll just allow me to put on my chapeau à penser, I’ll choose the perfect celebriteaser. And she must be perfect! You are official protégées Pelligan, my lovelies, and if I get the best, you get the best. Bon!” The silver-haired tycoon clapped his hands together, tipping into a brisk bow. “I hope this meeting was as gorgeous a pleasure for you as it was for me.”

  “Completely,” Charlotte assured him, extending her small hand. “We cannot wait until Friday, Mr.… um…” She repressed a smile. “Mr.…”

  “Oh!” Petra leapt to her friend’s assistance, only to cover her mouth and frown. “You know.” She tapped her foot. “Agh, it’s totally on the tip of my tongue.”

  “Something with a P?” Melissa suggested.

  “I think it was a D,” Janie contradicted.

  “Oh, Mr. Dunderplotzer!” Charlotte blurted, daring to meet Mr. Pelligan’s eye; to her relief, it twinkled back—so proud!

  “My dear little understudies,” he declared, hoarse with emotion. “Together we will go so far!”

  The Girl: Vivien Ho

  The Getup: Sapphire blue Akiko silk top, Hudson shiny black skinny jeans, metallic-gold jeweled thong sandals by Manolo Blahnik, white patent tassled hobo by Ho Bag

  By the time Melissa dropped Petra off at her pillared peach Beverly Hills estate on Lexington Road, filled her tank with premium gas, told the gas attendant to “get that squeegee outta my face,” and made it back to her glass-glinting cliff-side Bel Air estate, it was already after seven o’clock. Spotless white vans and black town cars crowded the circular drive, declaring their intentions in various calligraphic fonts: Wolfgang Puck Catering, Paradise Gardens Landscaping Design, Rex Covington Ice Sculpture, Ben Stanton Lighting Design, Rita Flora Flower Arrangements, Fireworks by Orlando Special Effects. Melissa wasn’t impressed. Not only did navigating the Lexus through this pre-party obstacle course add an extra five minutes to her commute, but one of these four-wheeled jokers—a bright pink Mini-Pooper, of course—had the nerve to jack her spot. Yvette—the white adhesive letters pranced across the back windshield—Professional Romantician. Melissa crinkled her nose. Romantician? What the eff was that? And did “Yvette” not see the polished brass Reserved for M. M. plaque on the wall, or was “Yvette” plain blind?

  But, no—deep breath—she was too happy to be mad. The meeting with Ted Pelligan had actually surpassed her high expectations. True, he was kind of a freak, but wasn’t that precisely the point? This was fashion! All the major players were freaks: Karl Lagerfeld with his untakeoffable black terminator shades, Donatella Versace with her trout mouth and radioactive blond Barbie hair, Marc Jacobs with his on-and-off addictions to cocaine and Scottish plaid skorts, Naomi Campbell, um… hello?

  Crazy was, like, a freakin’ credential.

  “I’m home!” She danced into the Moons’ ultramodern kitchen, dropping her bulging fuchsia Marc Jacobs Stam satchel on the polished slate floor. Her ever-pursuant Pomeranian, Emilio Poochie, skidded to a halt, told the bag off in two barks (from now on, I’m the one she carries. You feel me, punk?), and tore off in a crazed streak. His mistress was excited. Which meant—wait, did it? Yes, it did!—he was excited! Good, ’cause he totally had this awesome new routine worked out. First, he’d bark holy rabies. Then he’d spin around really fast, collide into a wall, and finally? He’d bite the crazy fluff-wand sticking out of his butt.

  For some reason, that was a major crowd pleaser.

  “Omigod, Emilio, calm down!” Melissa laughed, scooping her favorite tan-and-white fur ball into her arms and hugging him to her pillowy double D’s. “You are so crazy!” she squealed, tickling his belly.

  “Melissa, you are working him up.” Vivien Ho, her father’s six-foot-tall biatch of a fiancée, grimaced from across the light gray marble-topped kitchen island. As usual, her top—a flimsy sapphire blue silk Akiko number, which she’d no doubt chosen to make her violet contacts pop—provided a way-more-than-necessary glimpse of the bronzered canyon between her jutting breasts (or as Melissa preferred to call it: Silicone Valley). Her mouth (which, let’s be honest, was less a mouth than a pink-frosted collagen donut) gaped wide open. She looked like one of those low-rent carnival amusements, you know: Throw a ball into the clown’s mouth! Win a prize! Of course, in this case, the ball was an eighteen-carat diamond. The prize was Vivien herself. And Melissa’s father? The lucky winner.

  Yeah. The irony wasn’t lost on Melissa, either.

  “Yvette!” Vivien refocused her attention to her buzzing Black-Berry, snatching it to her diamond-dribbling ear. “Yeah. Uh-huh. Oh, you’re in the master bathroom?”

  Seedy Moon and his falling-apart grayish Bugs Bunny slippers shuffled into the kitchen, and Melissa skipped a circle around the kitchen island (no easy feat in five-inch Louboutins) and shrieked, clapping her manicured hands.
“Sure, I can come upstairs,” Vivien scowled, pressing a dragon-red fingernail to her ear. “I’ll be there in a second.”

  “Whattup?” Seedy braced himself as his fiancée clapped her phone shut, fluttered her false lashes shut, and set her jaw in a way that meant one thing: drama.

  “Seedy, I swear to God.” She scooted her bar stool back and clacked her gold metallic jeweled thong sandals to the polished slate floor. “That dog better be out of here by the time I get back. I am on my last nerve.”

  As Melissa and Emilio joyfully joint-freaked her abandoned bar stool, she threw her gleaming shoulders back, click-clacked across the floor, and exited in a righteous huff. Seedy followed her apoplectic apple-butt with a mingled look of concern and (he couldn’t help himself) admiration, pushing some air between his full lips.

  “Daddy!” his daughter’s cheerful voice rose behind him. “I have to talk to you!”

  “Yeah, baby.” He turned around, attempting a smile. He’d been dreading this conversation all afternoon, holing up like a coward in his soundproof glass meditation room. For two hours he did nothing but contemplate his meditation moat—watching the koi fish do their thing and listening to Chopin’s nocturnes. Yeah, that’s right: classical music. Ever since he’d hired Melissa’s Special Studies adviser, Lena, to play piano for the Pink Party, he found himself programming Mozart into his iPod instead of Mos Def. Some of this powdered wig shit ain’t so bad, he admitted to himself in semishock.

  But he couldn’t stay in the glass room forever.

  “Listen…” Seedy sighed, reeling his only daughter in for a big hug and pancaking poor Emilio in the process. The little Pomeranian squirmed, crazier than a squirrel in a bag of nuts. “I know how much you were looking forward to this day, and… I wish I didn’t have to tell you this, but…” He sighed again, released her from the hug, and took a small step backward. Emilio plopped in a heap to the gleaming floor. “The results are inconclusive,” he informed her gently but firmly, gripping the backs of her arms.

  Melissa blinked. Results? What was he talking about? Moments later, her mind reoriented like a Magic 8 Ball after a firm shake, and the answer floated to the surface. Oh…

  He was talking about the tag.

  Back in September, as part of their now notorious launch party, she, Petra, Charlotte, and Janie had hosted a Name Our Label contest. They’d collected over a hundred suggestions from an equal number of guests, all of them written on two-by-one-inch white clothing tags. The tags had been locked into a custom-made clear globe safe—but “safe” they most definitely were not. Someone had broken into the globe. Someone had tagged the tags, defacing each one with a single word.

  Poseur.

  As a personal message to the vandal, they named their label in honor of the insult. Seedy called this “appropriating the language of the oppressor,” but his daughter wasn’t going to stop. “My business has been violated,” she’d protested, startling him awake from a nap. “And it’s gonna take a lot more than the I’m-Rubber-You’re-Glue defense for me to get over that. Until I know who the vandal is—until I bring that fool to justice—I will not, nay, I cannot move on.”

  Her father, who’d been hiding behind his Relax the Back Swedish neck cushion, agreed to see what he could do.

  Unfortunately, lack of evidence worked against them; it wasn’t until eighth-grader Nikki Pellegrini miraculously discovered one of the vandalized tags in a garbage-art installation that Melissa could finally kick off two major orders of business. First, immediately appoint Nikki Poseur’s new intern (she’d need to keep that eagle eye close). Second, give the treasured tag to her father, who would in turn give it to the Man in K-Town. Melissa didn’t know much about the Man in K-Town, except, a) he was number 9 on her dad’s speed-dial, and b) he took care of business, all kinds of business. “No man better than my Man at graffiti interpretation,” her father assured her. “One week with that tag a yours? Culprit’s good as cuffed.”

  All of which brings us back to the Moons’ ultramodern kitchen, where tasteful ambient lighting illuminated the cool stainless steel appliances, the dark slate floors, the spotless glass cabinets, the light gray marble countertops… and Melissa’s beautiful yet dismayed face.

  “Inconclusive?” she squawked, braiding her body-buttered arms across her voluptuous chest. “What does that mean, ‘the results are inconclusive’?”

  Seedy threw up his hands, equally incredulous. “It means he couldn’t figure it out!”

  “But the Man in K-Town has a zero percent fail rate,” Melissa reminded him, stomping her stiletto. “You said.”

  “I know!” Seedy admitted, shaking his head, clearly perplexed.

  “Okay.” Melissa steepled her hands under her chin, fluttering her Dior Iconic-coated lashes shut. “Just tell me what he said. Like, exactly what he said.”

  Seedy stuttered a zebra-upholstered bar stool under his Adidas tracksuited butt and sat. “He said he couldn’t tell much from the handwriting. The perpetrator purposely wrote in block letters, the pen was a generic Sharpie… nothing distinctive. No finger-prints. He sent the tag to a lab for chemical analysis. Nothing there either…” He trailed off, losing himself in thought. “Except… ”

  “Except what?” Melissa gripped the gray marble countertop. “Daddy!”

  Squeezing the back of his neck, Seedy gazed at the floor, still shaking his head. His deep brown eyes flicked upward.

  “He said he found traces of sea kelp.”

  “Sea kelp,” Melissa repeated after a beat of baffled silence. She crumpled her brow. “You mean, like… seaweed?”

  “Man, I’m starting to wonder…” Her father cringed, squeezing the back of neck. “Maybe K-Town’s losing his touch?”

  An unsympathetic Melissa shrugged, sucking the insides of her cheeks.

  “I mean,” he continued pensively. “Who are we supposed to believe broke into your contest?” Bugging out his eyes, he stuck out his tongue and splayed his bejeweled fingers. “Swamp thing?”

  Despite herself, Melissa giggled. “Stupid,” she chastised him, pushing his powerful shoulder. He captured her lemon-and-sage-moisturized hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.

  “It’s gonna be okay.”

  “It is?” “No doubt,” he assured her. “When something bad happens, you just got to think—this is going to make some room for something good.”

  Melissa gently smiled. Sometimes her dad’s Buddha-bytes actually made sense. “I guess I can see that.”

  “You can?” Seedy bobbed his eyebrows, impressed with himself. “Oh, wait a minute,” he remembered, slapped his knees, and grinned. “You had your big meeting today, right? How’d it go?”

  “Well…” Melissa bit her Smashbox-lacquered lower lip, her early excitement returning in a throb. From his collapsed position on the floor, Emilio Poochie lifted his head, perking up his ears. “Ted Pelligan is really serious about us, Daddy. I mean… he’s even arranging a celebriteaser.”

  Before Seedy had a chance to respond, Vivien materialized at the kitchen entrance, poised like a cobra above her jeweled metallic sandals. “He’s giving you a what?”

  Melissa arced her perfectly gelled eyebrow. “You heard me.”

  “Melissa,” Seedy frowned as Vivien clattered to his side. “Watch your—”

  “I don’t believe you,” his fiancée huffed at his daughter before he could finish, narrowing her violet eyes. Planting a hand on her hip, she pursed her pink-frosted collagen donut into an impressive-looking twist pastry. “What could you have possibly done to deserve a celebriteaser?”

  “What could I have done?” Melissa rasped with laughter. As if Vivien’s totally tacky designer handbag company, Ho Bag, had anything to do with hard work. Melissa was the one who toiled to get her business off the ground, pulling herself up by her own Manolo Blahnik bootstraps, while Vivien just kicked up her heels, coasting by on the Moon name. Contrary to the claims of her sham memoir, The Audacity of Ho, the woman did not do an ounce of work�
��unless you counted X’ing a few forms once a month.

  Melissa was this close to X’ing Vivien’s freeloading face.

  “I’d just like to say,” she began.

  “YO!” her father boomed, rattling the china in the nearest glass cabinet and shutting her up in an instant. Emilio ejected through the archway exit like a piece of shrapnel. “Thank you for your attention!” he boomed again, obliterating the sound of the tiny dog clattering down the hall. “Will one of you please be so kind as to tell me what a celebriteaser mother-McMuffin is before I lose my mother-McMuffin mind?”

  “A celebriteaser,” Melissa and Vivien began together. After a strained pause, the fake-baked fiancée continued.

  “Baby, remember last month? When A-Rod was spotted on Madison drinking MoonWater?”

  At MoonWater, Seedy relaxed into a smile. He couldn’t help himself. After languishing on the Whole Foods shelves for more than three months, sales for his bottled mineral water—the latest effort to diversify and expand the Moon brand—had finally started to pick up.

  “That’s a celebriteaser,” Melissa explained, happy to show off her new knowledge. “As soon as people saw A-Rod drinking it, it was like, buh-ham! They started buying.”

  “Uh, excuse me,” protested Seedy, pointing a bejeweled finger. “People started buying because we are the only water that uses a patented moon rock filtration process.” He waited for them to argue, crumpling his brow like an accordion. “Thank you,” he nodded, interpreting their cowed silence as victory. “Now”—he returned to his daughter—“you tellin’ me A-Rod agreed to walk down Madison holdin’ a purse?”

  “Daddy, no!” Melissa leaned against the kitchen island and laughed. “A girl celebrity’s gonna to do it, obvie.”

  “Who?” Vivien ventured, trying to sound casual, but clearly dying to know. Melissa smirked, triumphant.

  “We find out in a week. And, I was thinking, because the timing’s so perfect…” She clasped her hands, squinched her nose, and turned in her ankle, achieving the pinnacle of pigeon-toed cuteness. “Daddy? We can we do it at the Pink Party, right?”