by Compai
“Cool,” Evan replied, scrawling the title on the back of his hand with a black razor-point pen. Jake rolled his eyes. No way was he going to read that shit. He’d have to be in love with Janie to get halfway through it. “Thanks,” Evan murmured, click-closing his pen. “I appreciate it.”
“No problem,” Jake muttered, bumping Evan’s fist. The student body dissolved into another round of applause.
Town Meeting was officially dismissed.
Just as it’s near impossible to spot the one missing bead on a Swarovski crystal-beaded Christian Lacroix couture gown, student absences at Town Meeting typically passed by undetected. The most focused glance, for example, would not reveal the non-appearance of seventh grader Teddy Raisin (home in bed, glued to General Hospital, and stealthily tapping a thermometer to a lightbulb) or junior Bronwyn Spencer (locked in a bathroom stall, wailing into her cell, because anything less than an A in Chem and she could kiss her chances at Princeton — not to mention life — goodbye), or sophomore Tyler Brock (deep in the musty depths of the gym-equipment closet, plundering Coach Hollander’s cherished stash of Haribo gummy bears). And then, of course, there was eighth grader Nikki Pellegrini, home sick in bed, because unlike oblivious little Teddy Raisin, she didn’t have to watch soap operas for her daily dose of drama . . .
All she had to do was wake up.
The weekend before last, she’d kissed the love of her life, Jake Farrish, which should have been heaven, except he had a girlfriend, and that girlfriend happened to be Charlotte Beverwil, which meant heaven really had nothing to do with her situation. To put it simply:
She was in hell.
Charlotte was one of, if not the most, popular girls at Winston Prep — the kind of girl other girls looked to for inspiration: a style icon, a muse, a tastemaker. When she reinterpreted a pink leather crystal-studded Louis Vuitton dog collar as a bracelet, one in seven Winston Girls imitated the same look by the following week. When she dismissed Wayfarers (the retro-eighties sunglasses favored by sulky Starbucks-toting starlets) as “Wayovers,” she practically precipitated a schoolwide “Ban on Ray-Ban.”
Charlotte decided what was in. Charlotte decided what was out. And (as poor Nikki was soon to discover) her influence hardly stopped at accessories.
Nikki logged on to her MySpace account to assess the ongoing collateral damage. As of yesterday, she’d suffered a few deleted friendships, a bitchy comment or two. But they’d proved mere foreshocks to the massive quake to come. In less than thirteen hours, a total of one hundred and ninety-four friends had dropped from her four hundred and fifty-one-person network. Far worse, someone had hacked into her account and edited her actual profile. Goodbye, Nikki Pellegrini, fourteen years old, from Hancock Park, California. She was now “Icki Prostitutti,” general interests: “macking on your boyfriend,” “spreading herpes,” and “being a big-ass bitch.”
No doubt about it, Nikki realized, baby-pink fingernails trembling above her Apple wireless Mighty Mouse. I’m out.
Unable to wrest her cornflower-blue gaze from the laptop screen, she’d reached for her pearl-pink Nokia flip-phone, and clumsily uprooted it, charger and all, from its Winnie the Pooh outlet. She had to contact Jake. Not just because she’d kissed him, but because he’d kissed her too.
Which meant they were in this together.
To: Jake Farrish
From: Nikki Pellegrini
Are you ok?
She went outside and paced the gentle slopes of the private tree-lined lawn, eyes fixed to her phone, waiting for him to respond. The hours passed: shadows grew longer; sprinklers spattered and hissed; and then, terrifyingly, a black Bugatti sports car verroomed over the curb, barreling down the brick-paved drive toward their six-car garage. She gasped and staggered backward, her flimsy pink floral knee-length skirt aflutter in its wake, as the Bugatti came to a screeching halt. The gleaming doors opened, unfolding into the air like insect wings, and revealed, at long last, the dreaded driver.
“You are trying to kill me?” Her father squawked, clutching the glistening gray curls on his Banana Tropic–tanned cave of a chest. With his scrawny neck, beaked nose, and shock of white hair, seventy-one-year-old Giovanni Pellegrini brought to mind a newly hatched chicken, a resemblance not lost on Lucia, his twenty-seven-year-old Brazilian girlfriend, who liked to call him “Clucky.” He emerged from the ticking car, took one swipe at the lapel of his deep purple silk Valentino suit, and locked Nikki into his dark-circled gaze. “You are trying to give me an attack?!”
“No.” Nikki cowered, hoping to appease his tyrannical heart. He ignored her, turning instead to address Lucia, who remained inside the gleaming black car, staring into the rearview mirror.
“Oh, Looocia!” he sang. “Perhaps you did not know my daughter has murdered me? Lucia, I am speaking to you from beyond the grave!”
Lucia picked the inside corner of her bored, mascara-encrusted eye. As founder and CEO of the legendary Italian lingerie line La Mela, Mr. Pellegrini thrived on a diet of non-stop attention, but if you desired his attention, it was better to pretend he didn’t exist. Simpler said than done — not one of his previous wives or girlfriends (including Nikki’s own mother, God rest her soul) managed to do it. Until, of course, reptile-hearted Lucia, who had the skill down pat. The curvy black-rooted blonde exited the car — her dark eyes and spidery lashes now concealed by enormous black Fendi sun-glasses — and headed slowly, tick-tock, to the main house.
“Never have I known such a sow!” Mr. Pellegrini cried to her retreating, Versace-clad, apathetic ass. Lucia didn’t so much as twitch. She planned to ignore him all the way to the altar.
Unable to cope with her father’s ridiculous antics on top of her far more serious stresses, Nikki fled to the secluded orange-tree grove along the west wall of their estate. Within the dense, citrus-scented shade, she listened to the noisy bustle at the main entrance: the jangle of jewelry and dog leashes, the rise and fall of her father’s Italian-accented voice, the icy click of Lucia’s stilettos, the door’s resounding slam. Nikki sighed, twisting her hands. It was already dusk. The world was spinning, whether she wanted it to or not, and bringing her closer to all she dreaded most.
Monday morning.
“Nicoletta!” A weary old voice leaked into the twilight, croaking like a bog creature. “What are you doing out there? Digging like a gypsy in the leaves. You make me pazzesco.”
“Sorry, Nonna,” Nikki addressed the last in a long row of windows on the estate’s ground floor. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“What is wrong?” Her grandmother coughed behind the antique lace curtains. “Are you sique?”
“No,” Nikki squeaked. If only I were sick, she thought. I wouldn’t have to go to school.
Wait a second.
“I-I mean yes,” she stammered, cringing with guilt. She never, ever lied. “I . . . I threw up.”
“Il mio povero bambino!” her grandmother cried. (Nikki wondered if nothing thrilled her grandmother so much as illness.) “Let me see you, cara. Come inside!”
She obliged, finding her Nonna exactly where she always found her: in bed, propped into place by plump virgin-white lace-trimmed pillows. Her four poodles — Belinda, Bambi, Fausto, and Spot — were curled into motionless balls, pinned like fur buttons on the four corners of her mattress. “What happened?” She lifted a thin, pale hand, beckoning her closer. “Why are you sique?”
Nikki perched on the mattress’s outermost edge (she was only half-convinced old age wasn’t contagious) and stared into her wrinkled cotton lap. “I have a sore throat,” she ventured, amazed how easy it was to lie once you got started. “And, um, my stomach hurts.”
“Terrible, terrible . . .” Her grandmother reached for a forbidden pack of Capri cigarettes. “Perhaps you went to another party last night like the one last weekend?” She stuck a cigarette in her mouth, squinting.
“No.” Nikki flushed, still embarrassed by the memory. To her grandmother’s concern, and her
father’s outrage, she’d come home drunk. Mr. Pellegini had threatened to send her to a nunnery, but her grandmother had intervened. “When I was her age I was pregnant . . . with you. If I learn from my mistake, so will Nicoletta.”
“I promised I’d never do that again,” Nikki reminded her, staring at the plush beige carpet.
“I know, cara,” her grandmother consoled her with a gravelly laugh. “I only ask to get your mind on other things. Because you are so sique.”
“I am,” Nikki emphasized, sounding more defensive than she would have liked. She sighed, looking at her lap.
“What is it?” Nikki the First exhaled, careful to direct the smoke away from her precious granddaughter’s face. She smiled, settling back into her pillows. “Tell me.”
“It’s just . . .” She hesitated. “Something happened at that party. Something I didn’t tell you.” She confessed the final words in a whisper. “Something bad.”
“Something bad? You?” Her grandmother laughed, bringing on a second fit of coughing. Clutching her heart, she reached for a glass of water. “Go on,” she gasped after a sip. “Please, continue.”
Nikki examined her grandmother’s face. The wrinkled mouth, the rice-paper skin, the floating halo of downy white hair: she is so . . . old, Nikki surmised, resolving to change the subject. But then she looked into her eyes. They were a lively shade of blue, and bright — almost as if fourteen-year-old Nonna was in there, watching — merrily observing life from behind a ninety-two year-old’s mask.
“Nonna.” Nikki cleared her throat, summoning every ounce of her courage. “Do you, um . . . remember your first kiss?”
“Ach!” She collapsed against her pillows, and for a terrified second, Nikki thought the question killed her. “I try to remember,” she roused herself. “I must have been, what. Five years old? Six?”
“Not that kind of kiss,” Nikki clarified. “I mean like a real kiss. Like the way adults do it.”
“Adults!” Her grandmother rasped with laughter. “Adults do not kiss, cara. Only children.”
“You don’t understand,” Nikki sighed, shaking her head. But her grandmother only smiled, patting her white knit blanket until she found her granddaughter’s hand.
“So you kissed someone at this party?”
“Yes,” Nikki confirmed in a whisper.
“This is what you call your bad thing. Why is this bad?”
“He . . . he has a girlfriend,” Nikki stammered, once again unable to meet her eyes. “Had a girlfriend. They broke up because of me. And now she, like, hates me, and everyone else hates me, too, which isn’t even fair because, it’s not like I meant to do it! I just . . . Oh, Nonna. I just like him so much. I swear I’ve never, ever felt this way. Not about anyone ever.” Her grandmother squeezed her hand, and Nikki’s emotions rose in her throat. “It’s like I love him,” she choked. “And he won’t even text me back!”
“Forget about this boy,” her grandmother sniffed, mashing her fuming cigarette into a flowered, porcelain dish. “Men can rot in the ditches. Concentrate on the girl. Try to earn her for-giveness.”
“Okay,” Nikki blotted fresh tears with the backs of her wrists. “But . . . how?”
“You will think of something.” She chuckled softly. Her eyes fluttered shut, and her chin sunk into the hollow at her throat. “I am sorry,” she apologized, cracking her eyes open. “All of a sudden I am tired.”
“Okay.” Nikki nodded, sliding from the edge of her mattress, then hesitated. “I lied to you about being sick,” she confessed in a rush. Her grandmother bobbed her nonexistent eyebrows and smiled.
“Yes . . . you are a bad liar, Nicoletta. You need to learn to fake being sick — like me,” she remarked with another gravelly laugh. Gazing at her prescription bottle–cluttered night table, she sighed. “I am a professional.”
Perhaps it was punishment for her lie, or perhaps reward for confessing it; in any event, Nikki woke up that Monday with the worst sore throat of her life. While three hundred plus Winstonians roused themselves to attend that morning’s Town Meeting, Nikki stayed home. She sipped hot tea and lemon, reread her favorite Sailor Moon manga, and tried her best to recuperate, to gather her strength.
She knew she’d need every ounce of it to return to school.
The Girl: Petra Greene
The Getup: Sapphire blue and parrot green Ella Moss chemise, United States of Apparel black cotton-stretch leggings, and turquoise Havianna flip-flops.
On Rodeo Drive, beautiful sixteen-year-old girls are a dime a dozen, but a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl bending over a gigantic metal trash bin and rummaging through garbage like a beggar — that was worth noticing. Petra gritted her teeth and scowled, ignoring the beeping horns of passing luxury cars, the averted eyes of appalled pedestrians, the stupid catcalls: “Come on baby. Don’t throw yourself away!” Weren’t any of these materialistic bastards even the tiniest bit concerned? Wouldn’t someone like to know how she ended up in such desperate circumstances?
She woke that Tuesday to the sound of her phone. Judging by the cool, bedroom dark, it was early — five in the morning, tops — which meant whoever was calling had to be a nut job, most likely a member of her family (most nut jobs were), which meant one thing: do not pick up. With a dramatic groan, she executed her reliable Human Taco Defense: 1) stuff face into pillow, 2) wrap pillow around ears, 3) pin pillow in place with arm, and 4) enjoy. Within seconds she was fast asleep.
But then her phone rang again.
Kicking aside her tangled sheets, she embarked on the angry pursuit of her Nokia, a task you might compare to finding a needle in a haystack, except that gave haystacks way too much credit. When it came to concealing the whereabouts of tiny objects, Petra’s bed had haystack’s butt kicked. In addition to the rumpled green-and-purple-paisley patchwork bedspread, her lofted futon boasted a lopsided mound of dirty laundry, a toppled pile of clean laundry, her crocheted hemp hobo, a scatter of loose change, two mechanical pencils, and a random peppering of grayish-pink eraser boogers. (There was also a half-eaten brownie encased in tinfoil, but she would not learn of its existence for another two weeks, when her sheets hacked it up like an old metallic hairball.) Despite the increasing chaos of her room, Petra refused to allow Imelda, the Greenes’ cheerful Guatemalan housekeeper, to clean it up. When her exasperated mother claimed she didn’t hire Imelda to sit around and do nothing (Imelda was almost always within earshot, bent over an ironing board, or crouched by a dryer door), Petra would retort: “I can clean up after myself!” And she could.
In theory.
She found her phone at last, bleating like a lost lamb in the narrow crevice between her futon and bedroom wall. “Hello?”
“Finally!” crowed the bright voice on the other line.
Petra sighed with mind-altering exasperation, belly-flopping across her mattress. “Hey, Melissa.”
“Alright, listen up. Emilio Poochie, down! I was talking to my dad, right? And he was saying all we have to do is bring him one vandalized tag and he’d take it to his guy in K-town to have the handwriting professionally analyzed. Apparently, the man can tell your shoe size from, like, the way you cross your Ts!”
At the goatish staccato of her friend’s laughter, Petra winced, rolling onto her back. “Melissa,” she yawned, blinking her bleary eyes at the ceiling. She’d have to choose her next words carefully. “What?”
“What do you mean what?” Melissa sputtered in disbelief. “Do you not recall that ridiculous launch party we hosted?”
“Of course, but . . .”
“Remember the contest we held to name our new label, only to have some raggedy-ass riffraff rifle through our raffle?”
Petra furrowed her pretty brow. “Okay, was that even English?”
“We need to revisit the scene of the crime,” Melissa pressed on. “All we need to do is find one tag and then . . . Emilio, I swear to . . . In the back! In the back, now!”
“Melissa” — Petra covered her aching e
yes with one hand — “we left those tags in the gutter, remember?”
“So?” her comrade in fashion bristled.
“So . . . do you really think they’re going to be just, like, sitting there? Exactly where we left them?”
“No,” Melissa chortled at the sheer absurdity of that statement. “I mean, they’re probably blowing down the street or something.”
Petra’s perfect jaw dropped. “They’ve been blowing around for over a week. They’re probably halfway to Borneo by now.”
“Okay,” Melissa announced. “I am outside your house.”
“What?”
“I know, right? Janie and Charlotte are so out of the way, but you’re right on my way to school. Oooo . . . !”
Petra grimaced as her ear filled with what had to be a thudding hip-hop base, but through the cell sounded like a tortured black fly. “This song is so old-school!” Melissa sang.
She grimaced again, holding the phone from her ear, and crawled across the futon, pushing aside her hand-painted Balinese wood-beaded curtain. She peered outside, scanning the quiet Beverly Hills residential street, where, through luscious green hedges and imposing wrought-iron gates, she could just make out an all-too-familiar platinum Lexus convertible, parked illegally at the curb. The female driver, unidentifiable at this distance, bopped about in the breezy front seat, one long, bronzed arm extended. Light refracted from her wrist as her hand flapped around: first up and down, then side to side. Petra frowned.
Was she . . . spanking the wheel?
“ . . . an’ if I hit da switch, I can make the aaaaass drop!” her tinny voice crooned in perfect time to Mystery Driver’s enthusiastic wheel-spanks. Petra shook her tangled honey-blond head.
It had to be her.
“Okay,” Petra intruded into her friend’s buoyant rap rhapsody. She released the curtain so that the swinging strands of beads clattered. “I actually don’t think I feel up to . . .”
Melissa yelled over the music. “What?”
Petra cleared her throat and raised her voice. “Um . . . I’m kind of not at my house right now?”
