by Compai
Petra laughed, allowing the insult to slide. “I even had a name for you,” she confessed with a tiny shiver. The pot had made her skin hot and the night air liquid and cold, like forgotten bathwater. “I called you the Naked Moon God.”
“The Naked Moon God?” He curdled with scorn. “Wait.” He paused, plastering himself against the side of the pool. “Are you saying you saw me naked?”
“Well, yeah,” Petra answered, bewildered. “I mean, you’re naked now, right?”
He didn’t respond, and was so firmly stuck to the side of the pool that he resembled one of those figurines, suction-cupped to a car window.
“Omigod,” Petra realized. “Are you, like . . . embarrassed?”
“No!” he scoffed, venturing a few inches from the wall, as if to prove his point.
“Okay,” she challenged. “If you’re not embarrassed, then get out of the pool.”
“No way.”
“Come on,” she urged him. “I’ll roll you a joint that’ll last you ’til January.”
Naked Moon God cocked his head in interest, drifting farther from the wall. “February,” he countered, treading water.
“January and a half,” she countered back.
“Deal.”
Before she could respond, he ducked beneath the surface, pushed off the wall, and propelled through the glowing green water, sleek and quiet as a seal. He rose with a gasp, drifted into the shadow of the diving board, and grabbed hold of the stair railing. He glanced up at Petra in the crow’s nest, stalling for time, and her heart rose in her throat. She opened her mouth to call out — forget it, never mind — but his foot found a step she couldn’t see, and he hoisted himself up and out of the pool. A pause passed between them, filled with sounds quieter than no sound: the crack of a twig inside a tree, a howling dog in the distance, and all that water kissing the walls of the two pools, the bobbing underbelly of the plastic duck, and dripping off the edges of this boy’s perfect, perfect body.
“So, what’s your name?” he asked, wrapping a white towel around his trim torso.
“Petra,” she called, wrapping her chilled body with her arms.
“Petra.” He frowned, squinting up at her. “Is that one of those fruity New Age made-up names? Like Shaleelo or whatever?”
“No.” She frowned, fumblingly rescrewing the telescope. She could feel him watching as she descended the taut white rope ladder and leaped to the roof. “It’s actually been around forever.” She brushed her hands and turned to face him, but she was too low, and all she could see was the high woodplanked wall and its lush ramble of ivy. She missed the sight of him, she realized, but wouldn’t dare return to the crow’s nest and live up to her “spy pervert” reputation. Jumping from the low roof to the soft earth, she casually approached the fence. “Petra means stone,” she explained. “In Latin.”
“Stone?” He snickered behind the ivy. “Man, your parents had you figured out at birth.”
“My parents have their own assholes figured out, and that’s about it,” Petra ruffled.
“Whoa,” he laughed, impressed. “You got a streak of anger in you, Miss Stone?”
Petra blinked into the dark, stunned. Wasn’t she the girl who floated around in mud-stained ankle-length cotton skirts, a dreamy, sad smile on her face, bifurcating blades of green grass with her thumbnail and answering basic questions with befuddled, but well-meaning, “Whats?” She loved petting zoos, naps outdoors, and harp music. Joaquin called her the Mistress of Mellow, and Theo, Queen Serene. No one in her sixteen years had ever called her angry, meaning no one (she now realized) had ever truly known her. Until this boy, who’d seen right through the fence, past the dark cascading ivy, and straight into her raging, smoldering soul.
“You should be angry,” he proclaimed, his gravelly voice clearer somehow, as if he’d moved closer to the fence.
“I should?” Her heart throbbed.
“We all should,” he affirmed.
“Listen” — she cleared her throat — “I can’t roll a joint right now, so I’m just going to throw the bag over the fence, okay?” She pitched the baggie into the air, watching it rise into the night sky like a jellyfish, and then strained to hear it land. “Did you get it?”
“Yeah . . .” He groaned over a manic rustle of leaves. “Ow! Okay . . .”
She smiled as the rustle died down, and drew closer to the fence. A weighty silence passed. “Hello?” she called, her heart beating in her ears.
“What?” he replied, his voice even more thrillingly close. He had to be right up against the fence, now. Just like she was.
“It’s just . . .” She laughed, brushed aside a tangle of ivy, and flattened her palm against the exposed plank. Under the ivy, the wood was cool, moist with dew and rot, and as it warmed against her hand, she worked up the nerve to ask.
“What’s your name?”
That night, as she lay in bed, it became an incantation. Should her parents return to haunt her head, all she had to do was say Paul Elliot Miller, and, in the wake of a deep, happy blush, they’d disappear, like vapors.
The Girl: Melissa Moon
The Getup: Black velour yoga pants by Juicy Couture, jasmine blue tank by C&C, gold icon charm anklet by Dolce & Gabbana, white silk push-up bra by La Perla.
It was Sunday morning, and Melissa had yet to come up with a solid design for the Trick-or-Treater, which was seriously not okay, especially since Charlotte, Janie, and Petra had already turned in theirs, which meant Janie would start their drawings first, which meant — by the time she got to Melissa’s — she might just skimp for time. That her design might receive unequal treatment! It was too unfair to think about. She tried to calm down with a brutal round of crunches, but even that didn’t work. She’d had to keep fighting the disturbing urge to bite her own knees.
Vivien, of course, had cracked that Melissa needed medication. But her father rearranged a few letters and suggested something nicer: meditation.
“Always begin with om,” he reminded her, stabbing into a plate of quivering egg whites, while Vivien plunked down a companion plate of two strips of Facon Bacon, a slice of gluten-free toast, and a glistening pink blob of antioxidant-fortified pomegranate jelly. “Om is the sound of infinity and immortality, which serves to focus the mind.” He picked up a strip of Facon and raised his eyebrows, pointing. “After that, you say namo — to honor and appreciate. For example, when I say, ‘Om namo Shivaya,’ I am giving praise to the deity Shiva, gaining tranquil insight and destroying negative qualities.”
With that, he bit into his Facon, chewing with the ambivalent, glazed expression cats get when they eat grass.
Melissa tried her father’s mantra for a while, but as far as deities went, Shiva left her cold. She wasn’t interested in tranquil insight. She wasn’t interested in tranquil anything. She was interested in chaos, commotion, and craziness. Besides. Since her father went all “peace and love,” hadn’t his work paid a price? His latest single, “Buddha Be My Boo,” completely and totally tanked.
Melissa wasn’t about to make that mistake.
She stared hard at the smooth sheet of gold monogrammed paper on her desk, her crème brûlée Dior reading glasses glinting impressively on the bridge of her nose. Emilio Poochie lay sprawled across a sheepskin throw beneath her massive white-and-gold executive desk, and Marco Duvall, her boyfriend of four months, sat on her overstuffed pink floral Princess bed, staring slack-jawed at a digital dribbling posse of three-inch-tall Lakers. Melissa jiggled her foot until the moon-and-star charms on her anklet chimed. She fluttered her eyes shut and inhaled.
“Om . . . namo . . . Kimora . . .” She exhaled. “Om . . . namo . . . Kimoraaa . . .”
Marco muted the volume on the Lakers and flinched. “Excuse me?”
“Would you please chill out?” Melissa scowled, and rested her hands, palms up, on her folded knees. “It’s my mantra. And don’t eat those!” she snapped. “They’re for POSEUR promotion.”
“POSEUR
promotion.” Marco repeated with mock gravitas, and dropped the bulging multicolored pack of Starburst to the floor. He gazed over at his meditating girlfriend and frowned. “What are you, now . . . some kind of Ninja?”
Melissa’s mahogany brown eyes flicked open like a jackknife. “Marco, I am trying to communicate with a divine being. And in case you’re wondering? That does not mean you.”
Her boyfriend pushed a short burst of air through his lips and faced the TV. “Fine.” He raised his hand. “Do your thing, Jackie Chan.”
Melissa fluttered her eyes shut, inhaled, and prepared to allow whatever thoughts popped into her mind to pass by without resistance. “Om . . . namo . . . Kimoraaaa . . .”
“Wait a second,” Marco barked a sudden, comprehending laugh. “You’re not . . . ’Lissa, are you praying to Kimora? As in Kimora Lee -Simmons?”
“I’m not praying.” She leaned back in her velvet upholstered office chair and avoided the question, but after a suspicious length of silence, opened her eyes. Marco was curled into a ball in the center of her bed, convulsing with mute laughter. “Marco.” She folded her arms across her daunting double-D chest and frowned. At that, he positively wailed with laughter, tears of mirth streaming down his ecstatic, tanned face.
“Kimora Lee Simmons,” he practically howled, causing Emilio to bark in staccato alarm. “That’s your divine being?”
“It’s not funny!” Melissa whipped her Dior glasses from her face and accidentally pitched them across the room. They swooped past Marco like a small skeletal bat, smashing with a cheerful and tragic tinkle against her sliding mirrored closet doors. Her jaw dropped.
“No!”
Pushing back her desk chair, she staggered across the floor and dropped to her velour-clad knees. “My glasses,” she squeaked, cradling the broken frames in her arms. And then, to Marco’s utter shock and sheer delight, she pivoted on her shins and threw her arms around his neck.
“I’m so sorry, Marco,” she shuddered. “I’m just so stressed about the Trick-or-Treater.”
“The what?” he asked, breathing deep the spicy nutmeg scent of her jet black ceramic straight-ironed hair.
“It’s the name of our new couture bag.” She gazed up at him with her best pouty face. “You . . . you think it’s a cute name, right?”
“Oh yeah.” He managed to nod and, at the same time, slip his thumb under the spaghetti-thin strap of her white satin La Mela thong. (Marco was nothing if not a master of multitasking.) “I was just thinking, like . . .” He stalled, having already blanked on the name of her bag (she did say “bag,” right?) “That’s cute.”
“For real?”
“Baby” — he traced a lopsided circle in the small of her back — “you’ve got to stop putting yourself under all this pressure.”
“Putting myself under pressure,” she repeated, stiffening in his embrace. Marco squeezed his eyes shut and bit the inside of his cheek. Had he really messed this up already? “I don’t put myself under pressure, okay? Pressure puts itself on me. Pressure looked around and was like: who here has the strength, who here has the commitment, to take on me?”
“And then Pressure was like, Ho! That fine woman over there. In the blue T-shirt and the tight-ass booty jeans!”
“My shirt is purple,” Melissa sniffed, nevertheless melting back into his arms. Marco exhaled a sigh of relief, especially as her breast (he was pretty sure that’s what that was) seemed to be pushing up under his left armpit. A definite bonus, he thought, fighting off a triumphant smile.
“Um . . .” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “You know one thing I heard that was good for, uh, when you’re tense . . .”
She shifted her posture so that she was practically sitting in his lap. Her boob crushed against him in a way that would have been uncomfortable, except for the fact that, you know . . .
It was a boob.
“What’s good for when you’re tense?” she murmured into his neck.
At this juncture, Marco thought it best not to answer in words. Keeping his hands on her hips, he nuzzled into her fragrant neck, planted tiny kisses from her shoulder to the hollow behind her left ear, and, in a move he’d perfected on a dried apricot in the fifth grade, took her earlobe into his mouth and sucked on it — just a little. He made sure to be gentle, because a) the ladies like it when you’re gentle, and b) he didn’t want to gag on that baby-fist-sized diamond in her ear. Running his hand over the spiny bump of her back bra clasp, he pushed up under her cotton-stretch T-shirt and pinched the sturdy triple-hook clasp between his thumb and finger. He expected Melissa to protest, and when she didn’t, he had to admit he didn’t know how to proceed. Should he ask her if it was okay, or should he just go for it? On the plasma screen, a few key black and yellow uniform-sporting players gathered around their coach, hands on their knees, beads of sweat on their brows, the crowd behind them like a blur of pastel confetti. If only Marco could just . . . call a time-out, you know? Consult Phil Jackson for a few pointers?
As if he’d read Marco’s thoughts, Phil Jackson peered through his wire-rim glasses, tugged his white Kentucky Fried Chicken goatee, and made direct eye contact with the camera. It was a sign! From the coach of the Lakers himself. Refusing to waste another second of precious time, Marco squeezed his eyes shut in concentration, pinched the three-hook contraption between his thumb and finger, and pushed the two sides together. The stretchy satin strap grew taut across her back, almost stubborn, and then — as if by magic — the clasp popped apart. He’d never, in his life, gotten this far before. “Oh my goodness!” Melissa cried in what he had to assume was unbridled ecstasy. “Marco, you’re a genius!”
He grinned. He was aware some brothers had trouble undoing a bra, but Marco wouldn’t say his finesse qualified him as a genius. Then again, he thought, why undermine his talents? “Thank you,” he replied, wondering if now would be a good time to get a condom. But before he could say Durex Maximum Love, Melissa sprung out of his lap and onto her feet.
“It’s so simple,” she declared, pacing the bedroom in a fit of excitement. “All I have to do is design a signature clasp. I mean, once you figure that out, the rest of the handbag is just sort of secondary.”
At the word handbag, Marco experienced what he could only describe as an out-of-body experience. “Baby.” His face crumpled in confusion. “What?”
“In order for POSEUR to become a major, like, iconic brand, the Trick-or-Treater needs instant brand recognition. And how does that happen? With a logo. And what do all the best logos look like?” She locked her hands together and raised her professionally tweezed eyebrows.
“A clasp?” Marco sighed, cheerful as a broken umbrella.
“Eggs-zactly!” Melissa kicked the air with excitement. “Like Gucci has those little interlocking G’s and everybody’s just like . . . Gucci. And Chanel has the interlocking C’s. And Louis Vuitton has interlocking L’s and V’s, and . . .”
She widened her almond-shaped eyes and held up a Bliss high intensity hand-creamed hand — milking the drama of the moment. “What does POSEUR have?”
A beleaguered Marco stared into middle distance. “Interlocking P’s?”
“That come together like a bra strap.” She squealed and clapped her hands, bouncing on her bare pedicured toes. “Oh, Marco. How hot is that?”
Marco watched her unclasped bra straps droop apart beneath her purple T-shirt and sighed. If only bras fastened in some other, completely un-purse-like way, like with duct tape, then she never would have had her “big idea.” She’d still be stumped, tense, vulnerable . . . and utterly under his sway.
Melissa plopped into her custom-made office chair (a champagne-velvet upholstered throne — on wheels with adjustable seating and lumber support) and got to work, which, as far as Marco could tell, meant scribbling on a piece of paper, shaking her head, and chanting the word “buh-zilliant.” He sighed, faced the silver-lined plasma screen, and grabbed the remote.
“You know who should
get into fashion design?” he muttered, punching a rubbery blue button to unmute the TV. “Me.”
But the game was already over.
The Guy: Jake Farrish
The Getup: Faded red-and-black-plaid flannel shirt, used gray cords from Wasteland, and black Converse All-stars.
Monday morning and here they were again: inching uphill on Laurel Canyon in their black 240 Volvo sedan, stuck in morning traffic. Behind them, the San Fernando Valley stretched out, gray as the ocean and with only the occasional palm tree to break the flatness, rising up like SOS flares. Jake, for one, appreciated the metaphor.
He was, after all, a sinking ship.
A heavy sky hung over the horizon, clouding the canyon view, and he was grateful. For once, the weather matched his mood. Rain swept the slick road in gusts and muddied the hills; tall mustard grasses leaned together, bobbing and tipping their heads, and rivers of brown water gurgled by, skipping over rocks and upsetting orange construction cones. Jake leaned forward and squinted, wiping the windshield with the back of his plaid flannel sleeve. The Volvo’s trusty defroster roared with the force of forty Boeing jets, and yet had managed to clear no more than a butt-print patch of glass.
God, he hated this car.
“Why’d you turn it off?” his sister asked as Jake withdrew his hand from the round plastic knob on the dash and returned it to the wheel. “We just had it fixed.”
“Oh really?” Jake tugged his invisible beard in contemplation. “We just had it fixed, you say?” Thrusting his indignant finger to the misted windshield, he wrote in squeaky, wet script: my sister says you’re fixed. As his words fogged over, Janie frowned, straining against her seat belt. She wrote: you are ridic.
“No, you’re ridic,” came Jake’s pithy reply.
“How am I ridic?”
Jake fixed his eyes on the black Audi directly ahead. The cold heat of brake lights glowed red in the rain, and he muttered, “I can’t believe she said she was in love.”
Janie hid her face in her hands and moaned. She couldn’t believe she’d told her brother. Then again, had it really been her fault? From the moment she’d returned from the Viceroy, Jake had done nothing but relentlessly demand she recap everything Charlotte said. He insisted there was something she wasn’t telling him, even though she swore there wasn’t, and fed him the same line every time: “We talked about our periods.”
