The Good, the Fab and the Ugly

by Compai

  Charlotte gasped with laughter. “What are you suggesting? That it was moi?”

  Melissa folded her arms across her daunting cleavage, lowered her chin, and pointedly cocked an expertly tweezed eye-brow. “Well?”

  “Melissa.” As a longtime pot addict, Petra felt it was in her authority to say: “You’re being paranoid.”

  “Oh, am I?” Melissa scoffed, recollecting Petra’s behavior that morning: the startled gasp, the brutal hand-grab . . . the compliment of that woman’s purse? Petra was animal-rights obsessed, and that was a Nancy Gonzales shiny croc tote. You know: croc as in croc-o-dile? The whole thing had been without-a-doubt weird, she thought, savagely redirecting her eyebrow for Petra’s benefit.

  “Listen.” Janie cringingly eased her way into the building tension. “We all need to just chill. I mean, if you think about it, we all want the same thing. Melissa wants to find the vandalizer, and the rest of us want to design something.”

  “How is that the same thing?” Melissa snapped.

  “Remember in Town Meeting you said the contest winner should ‘step forward and claim their prize’? Well, if it was me who did it,” she hypothesized, studiously avoiding Melissa’s accusing crazy eye. “Not that it was me, but if it was . . . I’d be way more likely to come forward if I knew what the prize actually was, you know?”

  “And you’re saying the prize should be one of our designs,” Petra clarified.

  “Yeah, but something super cool,” Janie rejoined. “It’s easy to resist a prize in theory. But when it’s right there, like, dangling in front of your face . . .”

  “Dangly!” Charlotte brightly chimed, clapping her well-manicured hands.

  Melissa sighed, frowned into her white glitter notebook, and made a quick note. “Janie” — she looked up at last, smiling — “I like the cut of your jiggy.”

  “Yeah, Janie,” Charlotte agreed, not without an edge of competitiveness. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Oh.” She blushed in her seat, turning her yellow Puma–clad foot toward her ankle. “I . . . I really didn’t get that far.”

  “Well, I have an idea!” Charlotte virtually spilled from the windowsill, approaching the teacher’s desk in light dancing steps. “Melissa, do you mind?” She unfolded a small square of antique yellow paper and smiled, facing the so-called class. “I prepared a little speech,” she began. “Or as I like to call it . . . ‘The Prettysburg Address.’”

  “Oh my God.” Melissa rolled her eyes, then joined Petra on the floor.

  “So,” Charlotte glanced once at her pristine paper and dropped it on the desk. “Kate and Laila and I were talking about what we were going to do for Halloween, and Jules — so cute — was confused, because Halloween’s done a little differently in Europe. Anyway, I started telling him about all my favorite Halloweens growing up. Like when I was eight, and I was Marie Antoinette, and Daddy hired a beautiful horse-drawn carriage to take us all trick-or-treating —”

  “Charlotte,” Melissa interrupted, glancing at her watch.

  “Okay, fine.” She rolled her pool-green eyes. “Short version. Remember when we were kids, and we went around with those horrid little pumpkin buckets?”

  “Not me,” Melissa cackled. “I had a Ralph Lauren pillowcase, hey-ya!”

  “Precisely my point,” Charlotte pertly replied. “Pumpkins, pillowcases — all that makes perfect sense . . . for a child. But Halloween is increasingly a holiday for adults, and hello — we have outgrown the plastic bucket. So, assuming we want to celebrate in style . . . what is there to turn to?”

  “A new designer tote by POSEUR!” Melissa lit up.

  “But,” Janie timidly intruded, “isn’t it a bad idea to design a bag that functions only once a year?”

  “That’s why we make sure the design is versatile,” Charlotte arched a delicate eyebrow. “All we have to do is create something with non-season-specific appeal. That way, after Halloween, people will still want to use it.”

  “Okay.” Janie nodded. “So then, the Halloween thing is just . . .”

  “A marketing gimmick!” Melissa busted out, and her eyes actually glinted. Of all the M words in the English language, marketing had to be her favorite.

  Well, that and Melissa.

  “Just a little idea that popped into my head. I even came up with a slogan.” Charlotte tipped her rosy mouth into a winning smile. “The Trick-or-Treater: a Piece of Candy Couture.”

  “Brought to you by POSEUR,” Melissa added as Charlotte bobbed into a mock curtsy.

  “So, we like?”

  “Halloween is a cheap excuse for girls with low self-esteem to parade around like total sluts,” Petra sighed, still thinking about that woman. “But yeah.” She attempted a smile. “I like it.”

  “Well, I for one la-la-love it,” Melissa crooned.

  “I want to marry and elope to Belize with it,” Janie added. Melissa laughed, rapping the wall with her Tiffany hammer.

  “We’re on!”

  “Okay.” Janie scribbled a note to herself on her sketchpad. “If you guys want to bring written descriptions of your designs by Friday night, I’m pretty sure I can have the drawings by Monday.”

  “And I’ll manage the buzz!”

  “And I’ll make sure it’s environmentally friendly.”

  “And I’ll sew it!”

  “All we have to do is vote on which Trick-or-Treater we should make!” Melissa concluded with an enthusiastic smile. Charlotte, Petra, and Janie flashed one right back at her. And why wouldn’t they? Wasn’t each of them equally sure her design would be the best?

  It was, as they say, in the bag.

  The Girl: Janie Farrish

  The Getup: To be determined. (Hopefully . . .)

  “I can’t believe this.” A shower-fresh Janie Farrish stood in her mother’s best white terry-cloth bath towel and gaped at the few pathetic articles left hanging in her closet. She stamped her damp bare foot. “I have nothing to wear!”

  “I can’t believe she wants to meet you at a fancy hotel,” Amelia Hernandez snorted, tucking a wing of raven-black hair behind her chunky white plastic hoop. “Could she be more predic?”

  “Are you kidding?” Janie faced her best friend, stunned. “It’s the Viceroy.”

  “Um, exactly.” Amelia pointed to the foot of Janie’s unmade single bed and smirked. “And you just said ‘the Viceroy’ like my grandmother says ‘the Vatican.’”

  “I did not.” Janie batted aside her black polyester-satin, star-shaped pillow, and plunked down. A shaft of afternoon sun filtered through her bedroom window, delicately gilding the chaotic sprawl of jeans and dresses on her creaky hardwood floor. Why, oh why had she so stupidly agreed to meet Charlotte for drinks when everything she owned made her look like Child Welfare Barbie?

  “It’s a cool hotel,” she sighed, eyeing her crumpled rejects with refreshed scorn. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  Shimmying toward Janie on her skinny jean–clad knees, Amelia spun open a bottle of nail polish — NARS in Midnight Express — and wiped the drooling brush on the bottle’s glassy mouth. She looked up. “Hand.”

  Janie dutifully surrendered her fingers. “You know what I don’t get?” she pondered. “Why she even invited me.”

  “Maybe she wants to have an affair,” Amelia deadpanned, widening her black liquid eyeliner–lined eyes. Janie made a face — so not funny — and Amelia sputtered a laugh, the wet wand of dark blue polish trembling in her hand.

  “Meelyuh,” Janie gasped, whipping away her fingertips to examine her half-painted pinkie. “You’re messing it up!”

  “Oh, so sorry, Meece Hanie,” Amelia apologized. “Pleece . . . I do bedder now.”

  “Shut up,” Janie laughed. “Anyway,” she continued, returning her hand, “you can’t blame me for being curious. This is Charlotte Beverwil we’re talking about.”

  “Um . . . Beverwi-wi-what?” Amelia plugged a bottle of nail-polish remover with a cotton ball and shook. “I go t
o LACHSA, remember? An entirely different school? Charlotte Beverwil means nothing to me.”

  “Well, she means nothing to me, too,” Janie reminded her, but with considerably less conviction. Charlotte did mean something — although what remained unclear — beginning with Monday’s Town Meeting and culminating at twelve o’clock earlier that day, with Charlotte’s invitation to join her and her emaciated friends for lunch at the “upscale yet casual” Beverly Hills eatery, Kate Mantellini. And even though Janie had complained to Amelia a million times about how vacuous, how superficial, how just plain boring they all were . . . she’d leaped at the chance. Reduced to ordering a pathetic side of steamed spinach, the cheapest thing on the menu, while the rest of them ordered delectably fresh chopped salads, heaps upon heaps of skinny fries, and citron pressées in slender, sugar-rimmed glasses — all of it scandalously ignored — she’d sat in dumb silence as they debated the virtues of heels versus flats, carbs versus fats, and, climactically, tweezers versus wax. How vacuous, she’d thought. How superficial. And yet. She hadn’t exactly been bored. Okay, not even close. She’d savored their conversation just as she’d savored her sad lump of spinach: leaf by deliciously overpriced leaf.

  Only now, in the presence of Amelia, the person who knew her best, did she feel the tiniest twinge of shame.

  “Hey.” Amelia pursed her brick red lips, blowing on Janie’s dark blue–polished left hand. She looked up and smiled. “Maybe she wants to talk to you about Evan.”

  “Why would she want to do that?” Janie frowned.

  “I don’t know.” Amelia’s brown eyes sparkled. “Maybe she wants to, like, sniff you out.” She affected a dramatic semi-British accent. “Does the girl from the Valley love my brother for him . . . or for his fortune.”

  “Omigod, ew!” Janie’s face crumpled in disgust. “I do not love him.”

  Amelia grinned into her lap. “Okay.”

  “I don’t,” Janie squawked, regretting ever having told Amelia anything about Evan Beverwil.

  The night of the label launch, at a loss for options, Janie had asked Evan if maybe he could give her a ride to Amelia’s show, “in Silverlake,” she began, “which is only, like, eighteen freeway exits away?” Before that night, she’d talked to him a grand total of three times, each conversation more cringingly awkward than the last. Still, she preferred nervous stammering (hers) and inscrutable pauses (his) to an out-and-out fight, which is exactly what happened in his Porsche on their way back from Spaceland. He’d pretty much treated her like a hypercritical, uptight bitch, which okay, maybe she had been, but only because he’d dismissed guys who wear eyeliner as “gay,” which is a totally lame, closed-minded, and, to borrow one of Charlotte’s words, provincial thing to say! Ugh. The memory still riled her, to the point that she almost forgot what happened next, once Evan pulled over to the side of the road, “to cool off.” Reluctant to remain alone in that parked tomb of chrome and oiled Italian leather, she’d joined him outside by the chain-link fence. It was there, overlooking the La Brea Tar Pits, a famous dinosaur bone-filled swamp, that they . . . whatever. “Made up.” It was there, accompanied by the embarrassingly flatulent sound of stinking tar, that Evan confessed, in so many words, that she looked “pretty.” She’d returned the compliment with a baffled silence, which began at that moment at the fence, and two weeks later, still continued, outlasting all of Evan’s inscrutable pauses combined.

  “Amelia,” she sniffed now, gazing imperiously downward from the rumpled foot of her bed. “Evan and I had one conversation. We haven’t even talked since that night.”

  “Oh, Evan and I!” Amelia teased, protruding her lower lip into an exaggerated pout. She sighed a wistful sigh. “We haven’t even talked.”

  “Ucchh.” Janie gave up, glaring in frustration at the white bedroom wall. And then, to their mutual surprise, her gray eyes smarted.

  “Oh, Janie.” Amelia couldn’t resist an amused little laugh. “Come on . . . I was just joking. Obviously, you don’t like him. I mean . . . he’s a dumb, like, surfer.”

  “I know,” she agreed, still staring at the wall. Her glassy eyes may have been a surprise, but the pang of protectiveness she’d felt for Evan after the word dumb (he wasn’t . . . dumb), was both surprising and inexcusable. She had to recover from this. Now.

  “How’s Paul?” She exhaled, melting into a smile. Yay. All it took was his name in her mouth and Evan, like, evaporated, like bad breath after a mint — an achingly perfect-looking mint she also happened to love. True, with the exception of a few barbed insults, he’d all but ignored her at Amelia’s show. But Janie couldn’t help herself. She liked her mints mean.

  “Paul’s, you know . . . Paul.” Amelia shrugged. To Janie’s continual amazement, Amelia refused to regard Paul Elliott Miller, god of Janie’s idolatry, as anything more than her talented, if annoying, lead guitarist.

  “He dyed his hair Electric Banana,” she offered, dabbing Janie’s cuticle with a Q-tip.

  “Really?” Janie squealed. Because couldn’t you just see it? Bright yellow hair would not only emphasize the blue in his mismatched eyeliner smeared blue-green and green-brown eyes, but also reveal the sunny quality he hid behind his brooding, punk-rock demeanor. Sigh . . .

  Electric Banana was the best.

  “Yeah.” Amelia rolled her eyes. “But then he went swimming and it turned this really weird blue and he freaked out like a girl.”

  If only I’d had the chance to console him, Janie thought with a painful twist of hope. She would have told him Weird Blue not only emphasized the burnt umber in his eyes, but also revealed the bottomless well of sadness he worked so hard to conceal from the outside world. Sigh . . .

  Weird Blue was the best.

  “So now he’s going to dye it again.” Amelia rolled her eyes again. “I swear, if he spent as much time at band practice as he did primping, we’d be, like, legendary by now. And speaking of primping,” she sighed, eager to change the subject.

  “Don’t,” Janie whimpered, still clutching her white towel around her lanky frame. “Please, don’t say it.”

  Amelia dropped the nail polish into her purse and smirked. “What are you going to wear?”

  The Girl: Janie Farrish

  The Getup: White terry tube dress by Juicy Couture (that is, if anyone asks . . .)

  She hurried down the hotel’s lamp-lit cobblestone drive, along a long, lumbering line of gleaming luxury cars, and breathed a sigh of gratitude: thank God I had the foresight to park the Volvo down the street. With a quick, cringing smile at the humorless doorman, whom she half-expected to take her down by Taser, she swept through the ivy-draped glass entrance, beelined for the nearest gilded mirror, and smoothed the plush contours of her white terry dress around her narrow hips and skinny waist, examining her lanky, flat-chested frame from every possible perspective. The dress was less than two hours old — the product of a panicked whirl of scissors, needles, and thread — but she had to make sure it didn’t look it. Sucking in her empty and fluttering stomach, she re-cinched the belt — an extra-long length of cotton twine, obligingly braided by Amelia — and slowly exhaled. She had to admit, the dress looked good, as good here as it had at home. Better even. She met her reflection with a co-conspiratorial smile. After all . . .

  Who would have thought she’d make her grand appearance at the Viceroy in her mother’s best bath towel?

  She crossed through the moodily lit, pulsing hotel bar, where a burbling crowd of Hollywood types sucked down cocktails — the men in tailored suit jackets, distressed jeans, and candy-colored sneakers, the women in sheer cotton blouses over minuscule trouser shorts and four-inch designer heels. Janie observed them from the corners of her lash-shadowed gray eyes, squared her thin shoulders, and tilted her chin to a haughty degree. Was she pulling it off? Did she look like she belonged?

  “No!” A platinum-haired girl in an equally platinum silk halter gasped as her spilled martini dribbled over the edge of the bar.

  Janie
slipped from the room and into the lantern-lit terrace, where Charlotte had suggested they meet. As instructed, she cut a path around the pool toward the white-and-black-tented cabana near the hedge. As she ducked behind a curtain and into the secluded lounge, her heart wobbled. Charlotte was there, as promised, but so was her entire family, all four of them languidly arranged around a crisply dressed table, like an Annie Leibowitz spread in Vanity Fair.

  There was Evan.

  Janie tried to smile.

  “Janie!” Charlotte clasped her hands, and commenced her eager introductions: there was “Daddy,” aka the Academy Award–-winning actor, director, and producer Bud Beverwil; “Mother,” aka the statuesque, chlorine-eyed ex-model Georgina Malta-Beverwil . . . “And you already know Evan,” she added with an obligatory roll of her pool-green eyes. He glanced up, closing his latest paperback around his thumb.

  “Whattup.”

  “We’ve heard a lot about you, Janie,” Bud Beverwil boomed from his white wing chair. “From Charlotte and Evan both.”

  Janie glanced at Evan — that he had anything to say about her, let alone “a lot” was a mystery. Ignoring her inquisitive stare, Evan returned to his book and grimaced.

  “Yes, it’s a pleasure,” Georgina smiled, her pool-green eyes aflicker. A sheer black silk Pringle of Scotland top gathered into delicate ruches at her pale collarbone. “But we’ll leave you three alone. Charlotte” — she turned to her daughter, offering her cool cheek for a kiss — “you know where we’ll be.”

  Janie watched the glamorous older couple glide away from the tent, their nearly matching wide-legged white linen pants flapping like sails about their tall, lean legs. An intoxicating fog of gardenia musk drifted in their wake, and it was all she could do not to close her eyes and surrender to it, like Dorothy in the poppy field.

  While Janie lamely ogled her parents, Charlotte stabbed her icy drink with a stiff black straw and narrowed her eyes at her underdressed brother. As the aloof and beautiful daughter of two distinguished celebrities, she tried to dress the part (she was wearing a breezy, floor-length Moroccan tunic dress in swirling saffrons and indigo blues, and gold sandals that fastened around the toe with tiny, jeweled straps), but, as usual, her efforts were ruined by her beach sloth of a brother. In his little blue surf pants and flip-flops, Evan looked about as famous as a Celebrity Cruise bartender.