The Good, the Fab and the Ugly

by Compai

  But Jake was like a Stasi officer in 1960s East Berlin, asking her the same day-old questions — over and over, again and again — until at last she’d cracked. She’d been faced with a choice: either confess to Jake and hurt his feelings, or peel her own face off. As the latter hadn’t really been an option (she was almost convinced her face was starting to get pretty), she’d surrendered, confessing one teeny-tiny illicit detail:

  “She said you never really challenged her and she’s in love with someone else; the end.”

  Okay. Maybe “one” and “teeny-tiny” weren’t the best word choices.

  “And she didn’t say who?” Jake asked her now, slouching in his tan weathered vinyl seat. His faded red-and-black-plaid cowboy shirt wrinkled around his narrow hips, and the scuffed toe of his black Converse eased on the brake. “Come on, Janie. Does he go to our school?”

  “I already told you. . . .” She looked out the window. “I don’t know.”

  Jake eyed her with suspicion. “Is it Luke?” he asked. “Is it Theo? Is it, oh God . . .” His boyish face crumpled in disgust. “It’s not that little Emo tool, Tim Beckerman, is it?”

  Janie tightened her mouth like a disapproving nun.

  “I can just see it,” Jake continued, undeterred. “You guys are sitting there. On swively little bar stools. Drinking your girlie Cosmos, or whatever.” He scowled, slouching deep into his seat. “Giggling.”

  Janie looked at her twin brother in disbelief. He’d seriously said “giggling” as though it described the act of pooping on a breakfast plate.

  “You’re insane,” she realized out loud.

  “Yeah.” Jake nodded, as if taking her diagnosis into serious consideration. “But you know who I bet’s not insane? Tim Beckerman.”

  Janie groaned. “Jake.”

  “And I bet he’s challenging, too. In fact, that’s all he does . . . just goes around . . . challenging people.” He swiped the turn signal, which flipped to attention like a middle finger. “Well, good for you, Tim. Good. For. You.”

  “Okay, would you please stop?” Janie groaned. “I promise it isn’t Tim Beckerman. He doesn’t even go to our school, okay?”

  “Awesome,” Jake replied, even though he sounded anything but. The last time she saw him look so haggard was two years ago, when he came home to discover Dog-Breath, their goldfish of nine years, floating belly up in his fish tank.

  “Hey . . .” She jabbed the side of his faded gray corduroy–clad leg with the corner of her textbook. “If it makes you feel any better . . .”

  “If it makes me feel any better?” Jake cut her off. “Feeling better implies I feel bad, okay? And I don’t feel bad. I’m fine.”

  “Okay.” Janie lifted her hands in surrender. She couldn’t believe this. It was like he and Charlotte had lifted the same lines from their How to Live in Denial handbooks.

  As she lowered her hands, a mass of gray and white clouds parted, and the sun poured out like liquid gold. The dismal California landscape revived like a black-and-white movie gone Technicolor: magenta bougainvillea blossoms tumbled from the vine, glowing ripe oranges dangled from trees, and hedges of white Oleander burst like popcorn. As the Spanish-tiled roof of Winston Prep’s assembly hall appeared on the lush horizon, Jake slowly shook his dark tousled head.

  “Stupid weather.”

  The Girl: Charlotte Beverwil

  The Getup: Are you jealous yet?

  Charlotte opened the heavy door of her cream-colored mint-condition 1969 Jaguar and swung her delicate ankles into the sparkling, post-rain sunshine. She emerged from the car and stretched her long neck, shaking her chaotic mane to the small of her ballerina back. Having shut the door, she circled the car, her eyes fixed to the depths of her black vinyl Chanel shopper, and pretended to rummage, smiling a secret, self-satisfied smile. Every single guy in the Winston Prep parking lot had his eyes on her right now — she could just feel it. Their gazes warmed her face like rays of a distant nuclear blast.

  She was wearing a body-skimming, low-cut slip dress in midnight-blue silk, black appliqué tights, and pearl gray mid-calf Barbara Bui button-up-the-side boots. A very thin silvery scarf looped about her neck, plummeted the length of her five-foot-two frame and unraveled into loose, swinging fringe. Soft coal pencil lined her pool-green eyes, smudging around the lids to create a smoldering bedroom look, and her cheeks were stained tuber-culosis pink. Most remarkable of all, her glossy french roast hair reflected a new subtle red hue — the result of an organic henna rinse Don John had applied the night before. In Victorian paintings, prostitutes were often depicted as women with red hair, and Charlotte thought: why not follow suit? Not to say she wanted to look like a whore (puh-lease), but merely meant to suggest, in her own secret way, that yes . . .

  She was back on the market.

  Scanning the Showroom, she spotted Jules, chatting away with frumpy old Ms. Dewitt, Winston’s Geology teacher, and — apparently — wannabe cougar. Charlotte narrowed her eyes. Didn’t Dewitt realize she and Jules had to be flirting when Jake arrived any minute? If she’d learned anything from Janie that stressful night at the Viceroy, it was this: Jake was still not jealous, which meant Charlotte had to move her “little project” from phase flirt to phase date.

  “Jules!” She swooped in the moment Dewitt tottered off smiling her overstuffed chipmunk smile, her black wool stretch pants creasing into smile-lines across her sagging pear-butt. Charlotte smiled, fluttering her inky black eyelashes. “Hi.”

  “Charlotte,” he said, rewarding her boldness with a pleased bob of his thick black man-brows. His amber eyes floated about her face, both bored and alert — like a lion’s.

  “How was your weekend?” she asked, widening her eyes like a baby gazelle.

  “Very educational,” he informed her in his unplaceable accent. “Ms. Dewitt organized a tour of Los Angeles for me and other exchange students from different schools. We went to the La Brea Tar Pits and also to the Hard Rock Café.”

  “Oh?” she replied, swallowing her horror. “I just love restaurants,” she mused. “I wish I went to them more.” She paused, waiting for him to acknowledge her cue, but he just stood there, posture perfect as a coat rack. “Sometimes,” she decided to add for good measure, “I think I’d go to a restaurant with anybody. I mean, if they asked.”

  “Really?” Jules tugged his licorice black ponytail and frowned. “I’m not sure if I have the same passion for restaurants, but . . .”

  “We should go to one and find out!” she trilled, jumping the gun. She couldn’t help it — the Volvo was right there.

  “Charlotte . . .” Jules looked genuinely confused, and for a second she worried he was going to decline. But then he took her hand in his, guided her knuckles to his curving mouth, and brushed them with his lips. “You take the words from my mouth.”

  “Oh.” Charlotte instantly smiled. She glanced around the Showroom, taking quick account of her witnesses: Tim Beckerman, Theo Godfrey, Luke Christie, Joaquin Whitman. Of course, at the moment of her attention, they pretended to be looking at something else; only Kate and Laila, both leaning on the fender of Kate’s pink and white Mini Cooper, gawked directly. Charlotte offered her two best friends a tiny how-does-this-kind-of-stuff-always-happen-to-me shrug, but they just stared, too stunned to respond. Charlotte, meanwhile, continued to scan the Showroom. There was only one person she wanted to catch watching her, one person she wanted to be jealous above all others, one person who would elevate Jules’s hand kiss from “kind of weird, actually” to “paradise on Earth.”

  But he was nowhere to be found.

  He didn’t have a destination, just a motive: get as far away from Winston Prep as possible. Where he was going was beside the point, a dismissible side effect of the real issue: what he had to leave behind. Or, more accurately, what he was escaping: the sight of his girlfriend — okay, ex-girlfriend — subjecting her hand to the probing, possibly oozing lips of Sir Ferrari-pants. Jake’s first impulse had been to laugh (
he was kissing her hand? Who did he think he was, a musketeer?), but then he caught a glimpse of Charlotte’s face, and the laugh curled into a tight black ball and died like a burnt hair. Even from a distance of forty feet (Jake had stationed himself behind an oleander hedge, careful not to be seen), he could see the details of her smile: the sweet dimple in her left cheek, the teasing tilt of her tiny chin. She used to smile at him like that, usually right after they kissed, or right after he made her laugh, or right after he delivered his report on mitochondrion in AP Biology. Okay. Right after he did pretty much anything.

  She hadn’t looked at him like that for a while.

  Before he could think twice, he beelined back to the black Volvo 240 sedan, flung the door open, and hurled himself inside. He started the engine and pulled out of his spot. All he wanted to do was tear out of there. But he couldn’t. There were too many obstacles: Joaquin Whitman and his hackey-sack crew. Melissa Moon and her flip-flopping entourage. Seventh graders bursting from the depths of the Locker Jungle, thumbs wedged under the thick straps of their bulky backpacks, and bobbing about his car like a herd of porpoises. Jake weaved through them, slouched low into his seat, quiet as a shark festering in a stagnant pool of resentment. He could have handled the sight of his ex-girlfriend’s hand in the grip of a guy who wore loafers without socks. He could have handled it! Except for the fact that, minutes before, Janie told him the guy in question didn’t even go to this school.

  He eased into the dip of the driveway, nosed into traffic, flipped his blinker, and took a deep breath. Behind him the school bell rattled awake, ringing louder than he’d ever heard it ring before.

  He yanked the car into the road, and took off.

  The Spanish tile roof of Winston Assembly Hall bobbed along his rearview mirror, ducked behind a row of Cyprus trees, and disappeared from view. He flipped on the radio — the White Stripes — and punched the dial, changing the station. The White Stripes made him think about black stripes, which made him think about black-and-white stripes, which made him think about prison. And okay, he knew outside of Elvis movies and Looney Tunes prisoners didn’t wear black-and-white stripes. He also knew ditching school wasn’t a criminal offense. But who cared what he quote unquote knew?

  This was about how he felt.

  He slid his eyes from the road to the passenger seat, where his cell vibrated on the vinyl like a Mexican jumping bean. He swallowed. Was it his parents? The dean? He turned the phone over, braved the illuminated screen, and read the name of his caller. With a rueful laugh, he dropped the phone back on the seat.

  Of course.

  The Girl: Nikki Pellegrini

  The Getup: Pale blue cardigan set by Ralph Lauren, knee-length white cotton skirt by Lacoste, white ballerina flats by Tory Burch.

  For her first day back to Winston Prep, Nikki Pellegrini constructed an outfit of angelic whites and palest sky blues. She parted her long, flaxen hair on the side, plaiting it into two simple braids, and but for a dab of cover up on a post-traumatic stress pimple between her eyebrows, wore no makeup. The plan was to look chaste, innocent, and pure . . . that is, the opposite of a “two-faced slut,” the exact phrase she’d just discovered scrawled in bright red lip liner across her light green locker door. It was 7:53 a.m., and a predictable rush of pre-school activity filled the labyrinthine locker rows with noise: the click and whir of combination locks, the rattle-clang-slam of locker doors, the zip-unzip-zip of backpacks, the low, burbling rabble of conversation . . . and laughter. Nikki winced at a particularly explosive shriek (was it Anna Santos?) followed by an appreciative cackle (Zoey Bloch?) followed by a hyperventilation-style titter (Olivia Lu?). What were they laughing at?

  Were they laughing at her?

  “Excuse me.”

  Nikki glanced over her shoulder, where tiny Sunrise Roche, eighth-grade gymnastics freak and proud owner of the bottom locker to Nikki’s top, cocked an impatient, overplucked brown eyebrow. Her tight-bunned head cocked firmly to one side, and her terrifyingly cut forearms braided across her convex chest. “Can you move?”

  “Hey, Sunrise!” Nikki ignored the request, plastering herself against her locker like a human censor strip. The toe of Sunrise’s gold Adidas Y-3 ballet flat tapped in perfect time to the beat of Nikki’s own panicked heart. “Wow.” She grinned. “I really like your shoes. Where’d you get them?”

  “Um . . . a whore?” Sunrise replied with an exaggerated roll of her green-gray eyes. Nikki’s heart shriveled inside her chest like a snail in a bucket of salt.

  “At a . . . at a what?”

  “At a store, at a store!” She stamped her gilded foot in irritation. Nikki bit her lower lip in disbelief. True, Sunrise had a reputation for being hostile (rumor had it she was on steroids), but this was the first she’d been rude to Nikki. She watched in fear as the gymnastics queen took a step back and went completely rigid, her hands stiff at her sides, as if at any moment she might launch into the air, execute a triple-twist back flip, and land smack in the middle of Nikki’s terrified face. Before she could think better of it, Nikki spun on her heel, balled the sleeves of her cardigan into her hands, and rubbed vigorously at the door of her locker, smearing the lip-linered epithet into the luxurious soft blue fabric, and ruining her best cashmere sweater forever.

  “Thank you,” Sunrise groused, squatting to her knees as Nikki stepped aside. As Sunrise yanked the combination lock toward her broad chest, her face grim with concentration, Nikki returned her frightened gaze to the illegible red streak on her locker door. Wasn’t it possible, even probable, that her locker had been confused with someone else’s? Perhaps her locker (top row, second from the right, aisle seven) had been mistaken for, let’s say, Amanda Bishop’s locker (top row, second from the right, aisle eight). Nikki slid her eyes to the locker in question, where Amanda Bishop herself unloaded her textbooks, tipping them into an over-pinned black canvas backpack with all the enthusiasm of a gravedigger. Her limp almond-brown bangs veiled her sleep-deprived mascara-smudged eyes, grazing the bridge of her freckled farmer’s daughter nose, and a wine-red bra strap slipped down her right shoulder. All it took was one glance at Amanda’s exposed butt crack, stuck like a soda straw above the waist of her too-tight low-rise Joe’s jeans, and Nikki was convinced. Whoever wrote “two-faced slut” wrote it for Amanda, not her.

  Cheered by her theory, Nikki quickened her pace, the heels of her white ballet flats slapping the pavement, and made a beeline for the Kronenberg Theater, where she and her two best friends, Carly and Juliet, were to spend first period making posters for the annual Hallow-Winston Carnival. The pumpkin fest was just around the corner, and it was up to them, the Student Decorating Committee, to drum up proper enthusiasm. She swept through the theater doors, and at the warm sound of her friends’ voices burbling at the end of the hall practically cried with relief. But then she pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  Relief died like a bug on Raid.

  “Are you Nikki?” Melissa Moon slid her Juicy Couture denim-skirted butt from the edge of the fold-out table on which she was perched, and folded her arms across her epic chest.

  “Yeah . . . ,” Nikki answered after a moment’s hesitation.

  “I’m Melissa,” she unnecessarily introduced herself. “You and I have some important things to discuss.”

  Nikki glanced to a corner of the faded blue carpet, where Carly and Juliet sat together, surrounded by markers, glue, glitter, stencils, and long narrow tubes of butcher’s paper. Juliet stared deep into the depths of her freshly lobotomized pumpkin, extracted an impressive glob of oozing orange guts, and dropped it onto the spread-out newspaper with a loud splap. Carly smoothed a black-cat decal on a piece of poster board, pushing three stiff fingers around in concentric circles. Nikki waited for either of them to meet her eyes, but neither of them did.

  “Sorry, I’m late!” gasped a voice directly behind her. Nikki clutched her notebook to her chest and turned around, locking eyes with, of all people, Venice Whitney Wang. �
�I brought you a double-skim, one-pump vanilla latte,” she panted, redirecting her gaze toward Melissa, to whom she offered a steaming Venti cup of Starbucks. As the cup exchanged hands, Nikki noticed their fingernails were painted the exact same shade of Chanel Paparazzi pink.

  “Do you people know Venice?” Melissa asked, sliding her gaze between the three younger girls. Nikki observed Juliet and Carly share a glance. Of course they knew Venice; she’d practically been salivating to insert herself into their clique since the first day of seventh grade. To be honest, Nikki had considered her a good candidate, but Carly and Juliet eventually wore her down. “No way is she in,” Carly had repeatedly sniffed. “She wears cartoon Band-Aids, and her name rhymes with ‘penis.’”

  “Almost rhymes with penis,” the more careful Juliet had pointed out. “But still.”

  “Venice is my new fashion intern,” Melissa continued, tipping some Starbucks into her glistening MAC’ed-out mouth. “And I expect y’all to treat her with the same respect you’d treat Miss Paletsky, who assigned her to this position. Venice has been working very hard to answer some difficult questions about what happened at my party the night of September thirtieth.”

  Venice swished her straight-ironed jet-black hair behind her body-shimmered shoulder and pouted her lips.

  “Nikki,” Melissa sighed. “Do you know why you’re here?”

  Nikki automatically glanced at her friends, who continued to ignore her. Weren’t they all here to decorate? “I . . . I’m not sure,” she offered at last.

  “You’re being indicted,” Melissa calmly explained. Nikki took a moment, repeating the word in her head: indicted. In-die-dead. She willed a definition to come to her, but nothing rang a bell. Melissa sighed, squeezing a dollop of L’Occitane hand crème into her smooth palms, and rubbed her hands together. The air blossomed the unlikely mingled scent of lavender and pumpkin. “Venice” — Melissa rescrewed the cap and cleared her throat — “can you please explain Nikki’s situation in terms she can understand?”