Petty in Pink

by Compai

“Well, good.” She reached to twist her long damp hair into a bun, but her arms were so heavy all of a sudden; she dropped them, falling back on her hands. “I have to admit,” she sighed, offering Paul a sloppy grin. “As a smere… as a mere vegetarian, I’m impressed. I mean, I couldn’t do it.”

  “Oh yeah?” he cocked a silver-hoop-pierced eyebrow, allowing the words “do it” to echo between them like a playground taunt. Petra blushed, averting her wide-set tea green eyes. She had a feeling Paul thought she was more experienced than she was, and didn’t know how to correct him exactly; that is—not without ruining the moment. And with Paul—with whom every moment was a perfect, encapsulated eternity—“ruining the moment” was fairly high risk. It meant ruining a lifetime. It meant ruining everything.

  But she couldn’t think about that now. Willing away her worries, she looked up and met his gaze. He crept toward her, blocking the lamplight, his shadow casting over her like a net, and she trembled—caught—waiting to be dragged in.

  “Wait…,” she exhaled as he traced her collarbone toward her shoulder, a thrill of goose bumps trailing in the wake of his finger. The pattern of freckles across his finely chiseled nose seemed to shift, floating off his face, and she closed her eyes. They were kissing. Hungry, sighing, delicious kisses. Behind her the floor tilted, rose up, and yielded under her weight. She fell into a fog of chlorine, lust, and whiskey-tainted breath.

  “Wait,” she gasped, wriggling out from under him, and wrested herself into a seated position. From under his mop of lusciously dyed blue-black hair, Paul watched her, confused, but also concerned.

  Okay, mostly confused.

  “What’s wrong?” he ventured, his already husky voice catching in the back of his throat.

  Tucking her bare feet under her black cotton underwear–clad butt, she placed her hands on her knees and brooded at the floor. It wasn’t the first time he’d asked that question, and every time she chose a new answer, a fresh confession. Tuesday night: My father’s cheating on my mother. Thursday: My pill-popping mother’s back in rehab. Friday: My little sisters are being raised by their nanny. Night after night, as she bemoaned her sad existence, Paul held and consoled her. “So what?” he’d say. “You were raised by your nanny, and you’re the sickest girl I know.” Or, “It’s not your fault your mom’s psycho.” Or, “Just give me the word, I’ll fu—ing curb your old man’s face.” Maybe it wasn’t every girl’s idea of romance.

  But it was Petra’s.

  Still, family—problematic though they were—didn’t answer his question. What was wrong was something else—something she didn’t have the courage to tell him.

  What was wrong… was Paul.

  It had only recently felt that way. For the last couple weeks, she’d seriously thought she’d found nirvana or something. It wasn’t that she’d never made out with guys before, just with the others—Joaquin, Jamal, that one bakery dude, Rocco, in Italy—making out seemed like something she was supposed to do, which was to say, she always felt a little removed, as if she was hovering from ten feet above or crouching behind a tree taking notes like Jane Goodall. Not to imply they’d pressured her. Like a do-it-yourself frat boy, she pressured herself, sexually harassing her own mind: Come on! You’re sixteen. Christina’s already had sex, and you’re getting uptight about a grade-school-level hookup? You’re cool, and it’s a party, and you’re stoned, so get over it. Just do it! Yeah, baby! DO IT!!!

  Then, one early December night, as a driving rain rattled the real-glass playhouse windows, she peeled off her pool-soaked underwear, shimmying them down to her ankles until they plastered her foot like a damp leaf. Just as Paul leaned in to assist her, she kicked them free—almost kicking his face in the process—and he flinched. She gasped, but then he cracked his eyes open and laughed. And she laughed too. For the first time ever, she was completely naked with a boy, and he was completely naked with her, and they were laughing, and she was just… there. She didn’t have to push herself; she didn’t have to hover from a height. Instead, she was inside herself, watching him—and everything was easy. So easy, in fact, they’d come this close to…

  You know.

  And that’s when she started to freak.

  Looking up from the floor, she met his mismatched gaze and swallowed a hard knot of dread. If he liked her, like, truly liked her, shouldn’t he have asked her out by now? And by out, she didn’t mean something cheesy, like dinner and a movie or whatever. She just mean out. Like, outside the playhouse. Like, in daylight. Like, in public. It was weird—not feeling comfortable telling anyone about them yet. If what they had was real, then—whatever happened to the real world?

  “What is it?” He wrenched her from her thoughts, toying with the silver-hoop piercing on his eyebrow. He was still sitting next to her on the kitchen floor, looking at her, but all she could do was stare at the space between her naked thighs, unable to look back.

  “Nothing, it’s just…” Her voice trembled. Say it, she chanted. Say it. “Poseur’s kind of blowing up,” she crumbled. “I don’t know.”

  “Oh…” He puckered his mouth in thought, drawing attention to the hairline scar on his full upper lip. “That’s what you’re thinking about?”

  “It’s just we might sign a contract,” she blurted, attempting to snuff the memory of her cowardice. “And it’s a lot more work than I signed up for, you know? Like, this was supposed to be a class, okay? Not a career choice. And now there’s this, like, promotion thing we have to do at Melissa’s dad’s engagement party. I mean, the dude wears eight kinds of fur per music video, refers to women as bitches and hos, raps about murdering his ex-wife, and he’s making everyone who comes to his party? Wear pink.”

  “Ugh.” Paul widened his eyes. “Fascist.”

  “You don’t even know,” she continued to lament. “Melissa told me Vivien, her dad’s fiancée? Is dying her pubes pink.” She sniffed with scorn. “What’s left of them, anyway.”

  “So.” Paul looked up from his foot and traced a small circle on her inner wrist. “We going?”

  “I mean,” she continued to rant. “Do you even realize how backward and evil and, and…” She halted, registered his question, and blinked, startled. “What?”

  He shrugged. “I just think you should go.”

  “But,” she backpedaled. Was he saying what she thought he was saying? In the corner of the window, the crescent moon resembled a glowing chewed-off fingernail. “You… you want to go with me?”

  “Oh.” He hesitated, sucking the piercing in his lower lip. “Yeah, I mean… unless you think that’d be…”

  “No,” she interrupted, flushing with pleasure. “I mean… no.”

  “It could be like, anthropological.” He looked down, rubbing his hands together. “We’ll observe the natives in their natural habitat. You know, like…”

  She shut him up with a kiss. “What?”

  “Nothing,” he whispered, pulling her back for another. He wasn’t sure why they’d stopped kissing, and he wasn’t sure why they’d started up again. But he guessed it had something to do with saying anthropological.

  As far as words went, it was pretty kickass.

  The Girl: Nikki Pellegrini

  The Getup: White skinny jeans by J-Brand, bright blue spandex tube top by Baby Phat, bronze leather brass-studded platform sandals by D&G, and spanking brand-new identity by Melissa Moon

  “Nicoletta!” Nikki Pellegrini’s ancient Italian grandmother, Nikki the First, gripped the stippled white-leather wheel of her metallic gold 1981 Cadillac DeVille, her withered powder-crumbling face contorted with concentration. “Remember,” she warned, adjusting her oversize rose-tinted Sophia Lauren sunglasses. “You are my eyes—you are watching the road?”

  “Uh-huh.” Glancing up from the Sanrio Chococat organizer on her lap (her first official purchase as the Poseur intern), her fourteen-year-old flaxen-haired granddaughter focused on the morning-sunlit palm tree–lined boulevard. In the past four minutes, they’d traveled
at most three city blocks, putting their speed at roughly seven miles per hour. Judging by Nonna’s ecstatic expression, however, you’d think they were going a hundred seventeen off the edge of the Grand Canyon.

  “Stop sign,” sighed Nikki.

  “What?” Her tiny grandmother craned above the Cadillac’s expansive dash and squinted.

  “Stop sign,” she repeated. “Stop sign stop!”

  Her grandmother slammed on the brakes, jutting the Cadillac’s gigantic chrome grill a good four feet into the busy Beverly Hills intersection. An angry platinum BMW sailed by, horn blaring. “Yes, yes.” Nonna shook her head. “He has to honk, so what does he do? He honks.”

  “Uh-huh,” agreed Nikki, returning her cornflower blue eyes to her vinyl planner. With a Paparazzi Pink fingernail pinned to the lower left-hand corner of the page, she dug her pink metallic Nokia phone out of her papier print LeSportsac handbag, flipped it open, and dialed. “Beverly Hills,” she chirped, holding the phone horizontally to her mouth and then quickly lifting it to her ear—the way she’d seen Melissa do it. Feeling Nonna’s eyes on her, she cleared her throat. “Mariposa Restaurant,” she requested, attempting a more professional tone. “Hello, yes, I’d like to make a reservation, please? The name?” She smiled with pride. “Melissa Moon.”

  Nonna bobbed her painted copper eyebrows. “What kind of name is this? Melissa Moon. Is she a person, or a thing hanging in the sky?”

  Nikki raised her hand, indicating her grandmother should wait a moment. “Sorry, what?” she spoke into the phone. “Oh, twelve thirty. Yes. Table for five?”

  Narrowing her watery blue eyes and sinking a size five powder blue suede Ferragamo bootie into the gas, Nonna slowly, slowly cranked the wheel. Over the past few weeks, this Melissa Moon had become the center of her Nikki’s universe, replacing all other passions: the boys, the friends, the schoolwork… even the My Space. At first, of course, she had been relieved—not so long ago, her dearest granddaughter had been shunned at school—much like Agostina Maria Bagni, the quiet, long-faced daughter of Pupi, the village goatherd, had been shunned, now many years ago. Agostina was rumored to stuff her pockets with goats’ droppings; if you talk to her, her classmates had warned, she will throw them at your face and curse you. In the end, the only thing Agostina ever threw, la bambina tragica, was herself; it was Nonna’s young friend, the dashing and wild-haired Innocenzo Spallanzani, who found her, dashed upon the cold, wet rocks in the misty ravine. At the funeral he whisperingly confessed to Nonna that he’d looked into the dead girl’s pockets.

  They had been filled with rosaries.

  If Nicoletta should suffer such a fate, she confided to her friends on the long-distance telephone, dabbing her watery blue eyes with a crumpled Kleenex, I will not go on. I will not. After all, she was responsible. What was her granddaughter’s suffering if not a message from God, the inevitable reprisal for Agostina’s suicide, a sin in which Nonna and her classmates had played their part? Every morning and night, she prays to Maria to intervene. The sin is hers, not little Nikki’s. And then, blessed be the mother of God, her granddaughter discovers evidence of her innocence in an art project, is exonerated, the Moon girl gives her a job, and she is happy again, full of purpose, and up, up.

  If only the change had ended there. Unfortunately, in addition to a transformation in Nicoletta’s mood came a transformation in her moda. Or, as her granddaughter liked to put it, her fashion sense.

  What could be more ridiculous? the old woman pondered, braking for a cat (a green plastic bag) darting across the road. A round of frustrated honks exploded at her rear, followed by a series of whip-whipping cars, drivers glaring out their windows like rabid raccoons. She ignored them, preferring to appraise her granddaughter’s current outfit. If this is what young people call fashion— she allowed a meditative, arthritic shrug—then it is the end of sense.

  But some say tomato, some say to-ghetto—and when it came to the latter pronunciation, Nikki was all about it. Gone were the knee-length pleated skirts, matching pastel cashmere sweater sets, and Capezio ballet flats selected with loving authority by her grandmother, and in their place, a pair of white-hot J Brand skinny jeans, a bright blue spandex tube top, and a pair of brass-studded, bronze leather platform sandals. Her customary gold cross, inherited from her late mother, God rest her soul, glinted desperately behind a barricade of gold chain necklaces. Her flaxen blond hair, once accustomed to freshly washed ponies and braids, had been plastered down with Bumble and Bumble Sumo Wax, scraped back into a swirling, braided “side bun” and set with Frédéric Fekkai spray-on hair crystals. Across Nikki’s head, like the tracks of a tiny, precise skier, a pale white part zigzagged to her blond hairline. Melissa was contemplating the hairstyle for herself, but before she committed, she explained, the look had to be “tasted.” “You heard of a royal food taster, right? Well, as Poseur’s intern, you get to be our royal taste taster. If the look sizzles, I get the credit. But if it fizzles, girl… you got to down that poison by yourself. Take one for the Queen, know what I’m sayin’?”

  Another girl might have thought Melissa Moon was full-on full of herself. But not Nikki. When everyone in school—including Carly and Juliette, Nikki’s very best friends—blamed her for breaking into the Poseur contest, only Melissa withheld judgment, giving her the chance to prove her innocence. And when she did prove her innocence, Melissa rewarded her with the most coveted job in school. With the casual ease of a boomerang, everything Nikki had lost—her friends, her moderate popularity, her life—came smoothly, serenely sailing back. Before this internship, Nikki had nothing. After it, she had everything.

  Which was to say, she had Melissa Moon.

  “Oh, and if we could get the corner table?” she continued into her tiny cell, snapped open her Juicy Loves Sephora bedazzled heart ring, and rubbed her manicured pinky into the tiny pot of lip gloss. “Excuse me?” Her pink gloss-stained pinky levitated under her gaping lower lip. “Uhm… did you say taken or bacon? Because if you said taken I’m going to have to tell Melissa Moon—as in the daughter of Seedy Moon—that you are unwilling to accommodate her. But if you said bacon, I… oh, you did say bacon? Oh, I’m sorry, in that case she likes it extra crispy. Uh-huh. Okay, then. Ciao!”

  With a triumphant crack of cinnamon gum, Nikki dropped her phone into her purse and brushed her hands. “Sorry, Nonna,” she breathed, settling back into the white leather upholstered seat. “I just had to take care of some… aaaahh!”

  “What?” Alarmed by her granddaughter’s sudden scream, the old woman jerked the Cadillac to a halt. “Oh, I can’t take it,” she panted, clutching her bony, spotted chest. The car lumbered in place, rumbling like a stinking barge. “My heart, Nicoletta. I can’t take it.”

  Nikki slumped even farther into the depths of her white leather–upholstered seat and tried to breathe. Her grandmother had driven straight into the middle of the Showroom, a total violation of Winston law (lower classmen were supposed to be dropped off in the alley behind Locker Jungle). As if that wasn’t bad enough, Nonna’s Cadillac seriously looked like it ate BMWs for breakfast, i.e., it was the most enormous car in the world, i.e., everyone was looking at them right now.

  “Nonna,” she panted, noticing a nearby gaggle of senior girls glance from the car to one another, Chanel glossimer-frosted lips twitching with mirth. “We can’t be here.”

  “We can’t be here,” her grandmother repeated for her invisible audience. “And yet, un miracolo! Here we are.” She coughed into her balled fist, then pointed a coral fingernail to her withered cheek. “A kiss, Nicoletta. And then I go.”

  One kiss and two excruciating seconds later, the mortified girl got out of the car, eyes glued to the pavement, and beelined for Locker Jungle. The Showroom was in full swing, bustling with the usual Monday morning madness, and yet she could still hear her voice… slicing through the congestion like vocal Drano.

  “Oh, Nikki, dear!”

  Leaning against the hood of her cream-
colored ’69 Jaguar and flanked by her two viperous best friends, Charlotte Beverwil flashed a nuclear smile. In a deep red Abaeté minidress and knee-high taupe faux leather Stella McCartney boots, she brought to mind a long-stemmed hothouse rose. Of course, in the words of the immortal Bret Michaels:

  Every rose has its thorn.

  “Who was that?” the popular brunette pricked, eyeing the retreating Cadillac. “Your pimp?”

  Laila Pikser and Kate Joliet dissolved into rapturous laughter, clapping their manicured hands to their cawing mouths. Behind her bronzer, Nikki blushed. Every nerve begged her to flee. But no, she commanded them. Stand your ground. True, she’d accidentally kissed Jake Farrish while he and Charlotte were still together. But she’d paid her penance and enough was enough. Gritting her teeth, she propelled her bronze metallic platforms toward the Jaguar — an act of bravado that caused Kate and Laila to a) look at each other in numb surprise, and b) sputter a second round of laughter.

  Charlotte, however, remained unamused.

  “Can I help you?” she snipped as her gorgeous international boyfriend sidled in next to her, folded her into his lavender cashmere-clad arms, and pressed his curving lips to her temple.

  “Um, yes, actually.” The younger girl struggled to keep the tremble out of her voice. “Can you tell me why you haven’t rsvp’d to the Poseur power lunch?”

  “Um, yes, actually.” Charlotte mimicked, pursing her lips into a poisonous pink bud. “Because this is the first I’ve heard about it.”

  “B-b-but…,” Nikki stammered, incredulous. “That’s impossible. I left you, like, six messages.”

  Charlotte reached into her black patent Chanel shopper and took out her glossy white iPhone. “Hm… the only missed calls I have are from Icki Prositutti,” she observed, arching her eyebrow like a weapon. Presenting the screen, she added: “And I never take her calls.”

  Before Nikki could respond, Jake Farrish, in all his grinning, boyish glory, loped up to the Jaguar. He was wearing a faded redand-black-plaid shirt, old Levis, beat-up black Converse, and his gray United States of Apparel hoodie with the Amnesiac pin; he pretty much wore the same thing every day, which Nikki now realized was a smart thing to do, considering if she’d been wearing what she pretty much wore every day, he might have recognized her sometime before standing two feet away from her.