by Compai
“I understand,” Miss Paletsky surrendered, nodding. “You ch’ave said no.”
“Yes, yes, for now,” he replied, tugging again at his assistant’s starched sleeve. “Giddy,” he instructed, “take this poor woman into my store, give her a blowout, find her a dress—something that won’t devastate my eardrums—and then return her here.”
“But,” the young teacher began to fret, “I can’t…”
“If she must wear pink,” Mr. Pelligan blithely ignored her, instructing Gideon, “then… ah! The strapless Charles Chang Lima with the lovely little pleats and sweetheart neckline. Yes, that will work wonders for her. With the fuchsia lizard-embossed platform Dior pumps, don’t forget. And chisel off that kabuki paint while you’re at it. Make her up in something subtle. Chanel Luminous Satin Lip Color in Darling should do. Or perhaps Voluptuous. Oh, try them both and see what works. Use your judgment, Giddy. Maybe then I’ll know what she’s blabbing on about.”
“You don’t understand,” the increasingly anxious Miss Paletsky seized her window. “I cannot afford…”
“No, no, I can’t hear you!” Mr. Pelligan interrupted, cupping his hand to his ear. Only then did she catch the merry light in his eyes. Only then did she know.
It was on him.
“Now go change your dress before I go deaf!” he blustered, fishing another ice cube from his tumbler of Pimm’s.
Giddy offered his arm with a gallant smile.
The Girl: Janie Farrish
The Getup: To be determined…
In addition to sunshine, Ted Pelligan’s rooftop garden provided spectacular views of the Hollywood Hills. From a distance, the winding canyon roads appeared veinlike or invisible, hidden as they were behind eruptive plant-life; sprawling cliff-side homes were no larger than birdhouses, their daunting gates and wall-to-wall windows reduced to dewlike glints. One of these birdhouses belonged to the Beverwils, one of those glints to Charlotte’s bedroom window, and behind that glint, microscopic as a speck of dust, Janie Farrish regarded her reflection in an ornately gilded, full-length mirror. From her perspective, of course, the Beverwil Estate was more than lifesize—it was larger than life—and Ted Pelligan’s rooftop was the negligible smudge, just one of thousands in the broad city landscape below.
“What do you think?” she asked in a hesitating voice, shaking the pink gossamer skirt of one of eight cocktail affairs Charlotte suggested she try on. The dresses belonged to Georgina Malta, Charlotte’s knockout of a mother, who (if little else) shared Janie’s willowy, slender build. Most of the dresses were two, three decades old, relics of her Paris runway days, “wearable memories,” she’d sigh, pressing a deep red velvet hanger to her collarbone, smoothing the dangling gown against her waist, and gazing into the mirror. Around the time Charlotte turned fourteen, Georgina gave her permission to borrow them: “Whenever you like, darling.” Yeah, right. Charlotte was far too runty to wear those clothes, and her two-faced mother knew it; her generosity somehow required it—always extended to those bound to say no.
She once fixed a salad for the cat.
C’est la vie. Charlotte made do with what meager pleasures there were to be had dressing Janie, who, as it happened, was waiting on her all-important opinion.
“I don’t know…” she trailed off, reclining into her mint green velvet chaise longue and wrinkling her nose. Janie glanced back at her reflection and hoped her warming cheeks wouldn’t betray her wounded pride (Charlotte’s “I don’t know” carried all the punch and sting of “You look hideous”). The dress, a foamy confection of polka-dotted petal pink chiffon, gathered at the waist and held up by whispery halter straps, was gorgeous. More than gorgeous: it was Valentino. If Charlotte had a problem, Janie decided, it wasn’t the dress.
It was her in it.
“Dojo?” piped the pretty piranha, fluffing the ruffled tulle of her new pale pink-and-black slip. “What do you think?”
Don John, busy pressing Charlotte’s choice for the evening—a rather modest belted Madonne dress by Dior—turned toward Janie and sighed, momentarily dispersing a cloud of vapor. With his handheld steamer, gelled streaky-blond pompadour, and exaggeratedly bored expression, he resembled the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. Of course, Janie hardly imagined Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar wore Elizabeth Arden bronzer and MARC by Marc Jacobs heart flip-flops. She also doubted he said things like…
“Oh, please. Can we say Valenti… no?”
“Fine,” she laughed in defeat, impressed by his seemingly endless store of shock and outrage. She also laughed because she was beginning to like him (unlike some people, he seemed to blame the badness on the dress, not her) and wanted him to like her too. “I’ll take it off.” She schlumped off to the bathroom to change. Even though Janie envied girls who could strip down in a locker room and keep talking to their friends like their boobs weren’t, you know, right there (and isn’t that the curse of the flat-chested? It’s impossible to act like your boobs aren’t “right there” when they really aren’t?), she wasn’t about to pretend she was one of them. Which brings us to the second reason she liked Don John: he gave her a good excuse to change in private.
He was a boy, after all.
“Ooo… try on the Escada!” his Texas twang enthusiastically commanded from behind the cracked bathroom door. “That thing is so eighties, it makes its own Michael Jackson noises.”
“Omigod, I know,” Janie cackled in delight. A minute later, she bounded outside in a beaded fuchsia shoulder-padded sheath.
“Check. It. Out.”
“Oh honey… ” Don John clapped his hand to his mouth and briskly shook his head. “How many Corys were killed to make that dress?”
“It’s nice to see you two still have your sense of humor,” Charlotte scowled, flouncing from her velvet seat as the two collapsed into giggles. “Considering we’re in a crisis.”
At that, the tittering duo fell into cowed silence. Dressing up had been so fun they’d forgotten all about the Ted Pelligan debacle. Last night, Nikki set up an emergency conference call, and Melissa broke the devastating news. Pelligan was out—no contract, no celebriteaser, and—adding insult to injury—no explanation. But, their Director of Public Relations had assured them, she was on the case. Obviously, there’d been some kind of misunderstanding. All she had to do was get to the bottom of it to build them back up to the top. Janie, who’d been waiting to hang up the phone so she could dissolve in a flood of tears, had taken a breath, instantly fortified. If Melissa could sound so calm and confident, then things definitely weren’t as bad as they sounded.
Unless she’d been bluffing?
“Maybe we should call Melissa,” Janie blurted, a flutter of panic returning to her heart.
“No…” Charlotte frowned, smoothed her frothy slip, and floated like a blossom across her polished maple-and-walnut-checkered floor. “She said she’d call us, remember?”
“But it’s already three forty,” Janie noted as, with the efficiency of an army general, Charlotte scanned her marbled-topped Art Nouveau vanity and, from the artfully arranged assortment of gleaming perfumes, plucked an amber bottle of Serge Lutens A La Nuit. She really wasn’t one to brood on a crisis—she’d only mentioned the debacle to disrupt the disconcerting bond brewing between her two friends (would they discover they had more in common with each other than they did with her? The idea bruised Charlotte’s heart). But now, with Don John’s focus returned to steaming her heavy crepe dress and Janie’s returned to her, she felt she could return to the subject at hand.
“You’re not really going to wear that, are you?” she frowned, eyeing Janie’s glittering sheath. “You look like the Ghost of Miss Americas Past.”
“Um, exactly!” Don John implored the dainty damsel. “Could she be more faboosh?”
“It is pretty hilarious,” Janie hesitatingly smiled.
“Janie.” The petite brunette arched an ebony eyebrow. “You want this boy to think about sleeping with you. Not putting you to slee
p.”
“Boy?” young Don John perked up like a nipple in January. “What boy?”
“Oh,” Janie stammered, searching for a way out of the subject. “I…”
“His name is Paul,” Charlotte informed him. “He’s in a band, and apparently…” Janie watched in horror as she skipped to the open MacBook on her bed, clattered a few keys, and brought up the Creatures of Habit website. “He”—she grinned, triumphantly pointing to the screen—“is into Janie.”
“ ‘Paul Elliott Miller…,’ ” Don John read out loud as Janie, mortified, darted back into the bathroom. “Lovin’ those L’s, Lady Farrish!” he called after her. “La la love them.”
“I’m not going with him, actually!” Janie informed them, feeling braver behind the bathroom door. “We, um, broke up.”
“Oh no…,” she could hear him groan in contempt, closing the laptop. “La la loser!”
Quickly, Janie shimmied free of the sheath, tripping in the fabric gathered at her feet. The silence on the other side of the door worried her. She didn’t want them whispering about how tragic and pitiful she was. Or worse, suspecting she’d invented the date to begin with.
“Look!” She laughed, waving her hand even though no one could see her, and her laughter echoed back, mocking her. “It’s not a big deal.”
“But now you’re going alone,” Charlotte reminded her—and Janie detected a trace of smugness.
“I’m taking Jake,” she shot back, scowling at the closed door. Clearly, it wasn’t the coolest thing to take your brother as a date, but at least her brother happened to be Charlotte’s ex-boyfriend.
“Dress is pressed!” Don John eyed his handiwork as Janie emerged from the bathroom in a sexy midthigh-length coral-pink Alaïa stretch dress. He looked up and instantly stepped back, gazing at her in approval. “Hot.”
She turned, attempting to study the mirror and at the same time avoid Charlotte’s reflected green-eyed gaze. “Really?”
“And a half,” he assured her, gently surrendering the crisp Dior frock to Charlotte. “Next time?” He eyed Janie a second time, brushing his hands. “I’m using you to steam that dress.”
The petite brunette bit her lower lip.
“I’m not wearing this,” she blurted, pushing the dress back into Don John’s arms.
“What?” Don John gaped between her and the impeccably pressed fruits of his labor. “What do you want me to do? Inject it with Botox?”
“Hilaires,” she breathed, disappeared into her walk-in closet, and emerged moments later with a candy-pink strapless jacquard dress. “Now,” she asked, holding it up like a freshly caught trout. “What do we think of this?”
The dress, strapless, slinky, was infinitely sexier than the Dior—but hadn’t Charlotte been dead set against sexy? (“I want classy,” she’d insisted. “Not assy.”) So, what had happened in the last two minutes to make her flip?
Don John and Janie shared a glance.
“Just out of curiosity,” the Valley girl ventured, fairly sure of the answer. “Why’d you change your mind?”
The question had barely left Janie’s lips when Charlotte’s cell phone rang. Merci bien, she breathed, dissolving with relief. But then she read the caller ID. “It’s Melissa,” she gulped, clutching her white iPhone like a cross and catching Janie’s eye. All this time, they realized, the drama of dress-up had been a distraction. Now the moment of reckoning had arrived, and their hearts were spiked with dread. No, that wasn’t right. The dread had been there the entire time; they’d merely managed to look past it, like you do with spots on a mirror. But the ringing phone shifted their focus, and now—spots were all they saw. What if the celebriteaser really did fall through? What if, despite her repeated assurances, Melissa couldn’t just “fix this”?
What if they were dressing up for nothing?
“Hey,” Charlotte answered the phone as Janie ravaged an already severely handicapped thumbnail. “Okay. Okay. Right. Yes, I’ll let him know. Bye.”
With a heavy sigh, she clapped her cell shut and resettled into the chaise longue.
“All right, bitch,” her Texan sidekick clucked after a full beat of silence. “The suspense thing is getting old.”
“Please?” Janie added. “I’m seriously dying.”
“Good,” Charlotte replied, cool as a cucumber face mask. Janie’s lower lip trembled.
“Isn’t what happened bad enough?” she warbled, feeling a little unhinged. “Do you have to be so…”
“Gabrielle Good,” Charlotte interrupted, melting into a radiant grin.
Janie crumpled her brow, utterly confused. “What?”
“By Jonas, I think I’ve got it,” Don John realized out loud. “Gabrielle Good is your celebriteaser?”
“What?” Janie gasped. “How is that possible? What about the contract?”
“Back on the table, bébé!” Charlotte laughed, clapping her small hands. “Melissa totally got Miss Paletsky to talk to Mr. Pelligan, and apparently it was all a misunderstanding!”
“But what was the misunderstanding?!” Janie sputtered.
“Melissa said she’d explain later, and besides, Janie, who cares? I swear, your obsession with every little detail is seriously, like, autistic.”
“Just because I’m curious,” the slender, tall girl bravely defended herself. “Doesn’t mean…”
“Shh.” Charlotte serenely glided to her bed and pried her laptop open. “I have to Skype Evan.”
“Isn’t he, like, next door?” Don John reminded her, crowding her at the computer. Janie melted to the floor. Not to imply she’d forgotten, exactly—she could practically feel Evan’s presence pulsing through the walls.
“He’s at Joaquin’s,” Charlotte replied, lightly clacking the keys.
Janie flushed. Oh.
And then he appeared on screen—not that she could see him through the Charlotte–Don John fortress.
“You’re going on a date with Gabrielle Good!” his sister burbled, clapping her hands at the pristine white screen.
“Who?” the laconic surfer replied, decidedly unenthused.
“You know,” she groaned, rolling her greenish blue eyes. “She’s on that reality show, The Good Life? Garrett R. Good’s illegitimate daughter?”
“Illegitimate then adopted,” clarified Don John, shouldering Charlotte aside and hogging the Evan-filled screen. “She used to be kinda fug. But then she got all waify and fab, you know, with the hipbones and the bug glasses and the Starbucks? She’s totally, like, this fashion icon now.”
“Uch!” Charlotte pushed him aside and resumed her place, smacking the feather-topped mattress (she could see Evan had no idea who they were talking about). “Ev-van…,” she enunciated, “the blond girl in that one SNL video. Remember? The one who spanked Andy Samberg?”
“Oh yeah…” Her older brother smiled, his memory successfully jogged. “She’s hot.”
Janie fluttered her gray eyes shut. It’s nothing, she reminded herself. He’d already diced up her heart and skewered it like chicken satay. “Hot,” was just like… the dipping sauce.
“She’s at the Mondrian,” Charlotte went on, referring to the sleek, trendy hotel on Sunset. “You’re supposed to pick her up at eight.”
“Word.”
Charlotte closed her laptop with a snap.
The Guy: Jake Farrish
The Getup: Um… more like the upchuck
Charlotte devoted an entire floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcase to her cherished fashion magazine collection—organized in alphabetical order by month—and from these hallowed shelves discovered one Nylon, one W, and two Teen Vogues with Gabrielle Good on the cover (of course, the reality starlet dominated countless copies of Us and People, but Charlotte deemed those publications “too common” for permanent library placement). With Don John departed for acting class, she and Janie dressed, and Jules and Jake not due to pick them up for another two hours, there was nothing else to do but pore over every page, scrutinize each photog
raph, and to her delight (and Janie’s private horror), pronounce Miss Good “gorgeous” in every single one. “She’s so perfect for the Treater I could scream,” Charlotte remarked in a tone meant to convey she’d never be so uncool as to scream: it was just an expression. After all, she wasn’t exactly in awe of Gabrielle Good—merely grateful that other, potential Treater-buyers were. “She could carry a bucket and people would snap them up like Birkins,” she sighed. Janie had no choice but to agree. To do otherwise would look like lack of support for Poseur, or worse, jealousy, and it’d take Charlotte two seconds to put together why. And then God knows what humiliations she’d endure.
“Don’t you just love her emerald eyeliner?” Charlotte pointed her Pink Satin polished finger to a photograph. Of course, she would have restricted the liner to the upper lid only. Around the entire eye was a little vulgar.
“Yeah,” Janie murmured, as if the eyeliner mattered, and not the brown eye itself, alive with a sparkle that said “I’m fun, fearless, and seriously not a virgin.” She wanted nothing more than to stab that sparkle with a sharp object—Charlotte’s antique ivory-and-gold chopstick hair ornament would do—and two hours of resisting the impulse completely wore Janie out. By the time Jake rumbled up in their black Volvo sedan, she almost whimpered with gratitude. At last! For at least one car ride, I can relax.
But, of course, she was wrong.
“You are not wearing that!” she gasped as soon as she carefully placed herself in the car seat.
“Um, okay,” he agreed, just to piss her off. The Beverwils’ combed gravel drive crunched under their wheels as they pulled through the automatic wrought-iron gates and turned onto Mulholland Drive. Predictably, her brother sat up, both hands gripping the wheel. Most of the time on the road he spent slumped into his seat, one hand on twelve o’clock, and nodding mindlessly to the radio. But Janie saw through his Wu-Tang ways. Every time they got on a canyon road at night he’d freak out, straighten up in his seat, and drive like Grandma Firestein. Under normal circumstances, she found this endearing.