The Good, the Fab and the Ugly

by Compai

  “Never.” he frowned. “Marguerite, my ex . . . we were together for five years, and she betrayed me with a man like this.” He indicated Petra’s father, and spewed. “She is too young! You despicable pig.”

  At the word “pig” Charlotte could no longer restrain herself. Gripping the edge of the bar, she tilted forward on her high stool, touched his flushed, chiseled cheek with her hand, and kissed him.

  “I am so sorry,” she gasped moments later, settling into her seat and smoothing her glass-smooth brown hair. She fluttered her eyelashes and smiled. “Are you traumatized?”

  “Of course, no!” Jules clutched her knee, locking her into a look of grave concern. “Why do you apologize?”

  Charlotte took a breath. Okay, so the guy had no sense of humor. You know who had a sense of humor? Jake. And look how well he turned out. What if, instead of judging Jules, she decided to join him? It could be a relief: to be serious, to be treated seriously, and not (as Jake had treated her) like a joke.

  “You’re right,” she observed with a serious nod. “It’s so silly to apologize.” As if to reward her decision, the bartender slid two martinis in her direction and she smiled, lifting her glass by its delicate stem. Clear liquid sloshed about the rim of the glass, spilling a drop to her lap, which bled into her satin dress and transformed the brilliant emerald green into something darker, like the color of mold. With Jake, she would have incorporated the spill into a toast. “To dry-cleaning,” she’d joke. “To wetting my pants.” But she wasn’t here with Jake. She was here with Jules. Good, loyal, serious Jules.

  “To new beginnings,” she offered, clinking his glass. He smiled.

  If only everyone spent Tuesday night dining at Campanile, but they didn’t. Janie Farrish, in particular, dined at an establishment so exclusive, only four people (and, occasionally, a disobedient cat) ever ate there.

  Her kitchen.

  “Mom.” Janie swept the pink and gray eraser boogers from her open sketchbook, and glared — for maybe the umpteenth time — at the kitchen wall. “When are we going to get that fixed?”

  “Get what fixed, honey?” Mrs. Farrish murmured, removing the lid from a large pot of boiling pasta, and tilting her tired face toward the steam.

  “That.” Janie pointed to the kitchen wall by the fridge, or, more accurately, the utter lack of wall by the fridge, a vestige of Tyler Brock’s new puppy, a French bulldog named Beluga, whom they’d babysat last year. At night, they’d made a bed of towels and confined her to the kitchen, blocking the door with a baby gate. She’d whimpered the whole night, and come morning Janie discovered her passed out in the corner — a saucer-sized hole in the wall, incriminating flecks of plaster still clinging to her rubbery, black lips.

  “Janie.” Her mother lifted the heavy pot from the stove and furrowed her damp brow. “Your father plastered it over months ago.”

  “Yeah, but haven’t you noticed? It’s a completely different color than the rest of the wall.”

  “You want to repaint the whole kitchen?” her mother scoffed, dumping the pot’s steaming contents into a large dented strainer. “Be my guest.”

  A sour bubble surfaced inside Janie’s stomach and threatened to burst. Weird, but certain words, which before Charlotte’s friendship had meant nothing, now meant everything — to the point where they made her physically ill. Take her mother’s word, “guest,” for instance. What if Charlotte came over? Janie looked around, seeing her whole house with a brand-new set of eyes — her eyes — and all the details she’d never noticed before — the tear in the screen door; the old, matted carpet; the boxy smallness of the kitchen; the sagging, pet-haired arms of the living room couch — pulsed outward in vivid Technicolor. It wasn’t merely that the furniture was falling apart, but that it had never been that great to begin with. What would Charlotte, whose bedroom was lit by not one but three antique chandeliers, think of Janie’s square ceiling light fixture, complete with tiny, fried moth corpses by the bulb? What would Charlotte, who spent her nights sweetly tucked into a four-poster mahogany bed, think of Janie’s standard IKEA fiberboard single?

  What would Charlotte think of fiberboard?

  And then, on top of all of that, there was the weirdness factor. Like the potted cactus her mom decorated with red chili-pepper lights. Or the collection of dried wishbones on the kitchen windowsill. Or the eighteen PROPERTY OF JAKE stickers stuck at random on the front door, a vestige of his Dymo label maker days in the fourth grade.

  How had she not noticed this before? How had she not cared?

  Jake knowingly chortled as she explained her issue, his eyes bolted to their boxy black TV. He was deeply entrenched in a crucial game of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, his sole respite from thoughts of Charlotte, and therefore his current addiction.

  “You’re wearing Winston goggles,” he explained, blasting a parked white car with his machine gun.

  “Winston goggles?” Janie winced as her brother rattled another vicious round of bullets into a hapless palm tree. “You mean, like, beer goggles?”

  “Yeah.” He paused to wrestle with his controls, punching buttons like a lab rat on crack. On the screen, a shrieking blonde ran down the street. “Except instead of everything looking better, everything looks worse.”

  “But Jake” — Janie ripped a cuticle from her thumb — “things look, like, way worse.”

  “Yeah, but whatever.” He lowered his controls to his lap while his character, C.J., bench-pressed at the gym. “I mean, imagine you grew up in a shantytown.” He raised his eyebrows for effect. “In, like, Honduras. You’d probably think our house was some kind of paradise.”

  “Very nice!” Mrs. Farrish clattered in the kitchen, and Jake and Janie shared a glance, bracing themselves. “Honduras” — she stomped into the living room, wiping her hands on her green checked dishcloth — “is one of the most destitute and impoverished regions in the world. Is picturing yourself there really necessary for you two to appreciate life in this house?”

  “I guess Honduras is a little extreme,” Jake deadpanned. “What about . . . Rwanda. One of the nice parts?”

  “What?” His mother gaped, eyeing the TV with sudden suspicion. “Is that that terrible video game again?”

  Jake glanced at the TV, where C.J. sat flexing his 50 Cent–caliber biceps in a warehouse of deathly rocket launchers. “Uh . . . no?” He grinned, attempting to block the TV with his scrawny body. “I mean, it is a video game. But not the one you’re thinking. It’s Mrs. Pac-Man.”

  His mother narrowed her eyes.

  “The next generation,” he added.

  “You,” she said, pointing her finger. “Turn that off and take out the trash. You,” she addressed Janie. “Set the table.”

  Janie was far too busy thinking about Winston Goggles, and all that it implied, to eat, and went to bed without dinner. What if, she wondered, flipping through her sketches, Winston Goggles also applied to her designs? She’d worked far into the night interpreting and reinterpreting the Trick-or-Treater proposals, brewing enough Yogi Stomach Ease tea to steep a blue whale, and yet, come Wednesday morning, doubt continued to weigh on her mind. She blinked into the not-quite-morning dark, hugged her blankets to her chin, and shivered.

  With its lush lawns, evergreen hedges, and brimming pools, you could forget Los Angeles is a desert — but then, nothing quite reminds you like the morning. At night, the temperature plummets, and by dawn, the lawns and hedges are gray with frost, and the pools are sharp as mirrors. For Janie, getting out of bed was more than “a challenge”; getting out of bed was, like, a total aberration of nature. Her limbs grew stiff, her movements slow, her breathing labored — almost like she was part reptile — and every bodily cell begged her to find a nice sun-warmed rock, somewhere to flatten her chilly lizard belly and gape.

  Working up her will, Janie whipped aside her bedding, and thought better of it, snatching her red-and-black-checked comforter and wrapping herself inside. Grabbing her sketchbook, she shuff
led out of her bedroom, the tail end of her makeshift robe trailing along the linoleum, and headed toward the kitchen. Her brother sat at the table, staring grimly into a bowl of Peanut Butter Bumpers, and so thoroughly swaddled inside his comforter he resembled a gigantic larva.

  “Ha.” The gigantic larva pivoted in its chair. “You look like a gigantic larva.”

  “And you look like a bee-yoo-ti-full princess,” Janie rejoined, slapping her sketchbook to the linoleum table.

  “Seriously,” Jake scoffed, hugging his gray T-shirt cotton comforter close. “Can we not put on the heat for five minutes?”

  “Go for it.” Janie raised her eyebrows. “If you want to die by the hands of Mom.”

  “Why do we have heat if we can never use it?” he moaned, withering into his cocoon. Janie sighed, blinking into the glowing depths of the fridge. Her dad had remembered to bring home her favorite Stonyfield low-fat lemon yogurt, and yet, the sight of it made her sick. She shut the door, surrendering to another wave of queasiness.

  She plopped down next to her brother, slid her sketchbook across the table, and flipped it open. “Can you tell me what you think of these?” she asked, locating the drawings in question. “They’re designs for the POSEUR bag,” she explained, biting her nail.

  “Oh yeah.” Jake nodded, and promptly returned to his Bumpers. “They’re good.”

  “Jake.” Janie’s tongue clucked in dismay. “You didn’t even look.”

  “Dude.” He winced. “They’re purses, alright?”

  “I’m just,” she sighed, removing her nail from her mouth. “Do you think Winston Goggles apply?”

  “How do you mean?” Jake frowned, examining the cereal box for new fun facts.

  “I mean . . .” Janie leaned on her elbow, tucking her sleep-tousled bob behind her left ear. “Do you think the girls at school . . . I mean, they’re so used to wearing, like, designer stuff. Maybe they’ll think these purses look . . .”

  “Poor?” Jake suggested.

  “No, not poor.” Janie drew her eyebrows together. It was ridiculous to think of themselves as poor — they bought organic yogurt, for god’s sake. “But just like, not . . .”

  “Rich,” he offered, causing her to cringe. “Rich” was one of those déclassé words, right? That poor people used?

  “Okay, well, for the sake of argument,” she surrendered in a rush. “Do you think they’ll think that?”

  Jake returned his attention to her sketches, frowned for a long second, and shook his head. “Dude.” He scooted his chair from the table. “I’m sorry, but they all look the same to me.”

  By the time she got to school, all she wanted to do was find a quiet place in the shade to lie down and vomit. But such luxuries weren’t available to her. “Janie!” Charlotte cried the moment she emerged from the underground elevator, and broke free from her Jaguar orbit. She scampered excitedly to Janie’s side, pinning her chlorine gaze to the sketchpad tucked underneath her long and lanky arm. “Are those them?” She squealed, clapping her little hands. Janie hugged the sketchpad to her chest, attempting a smile. “Can I see? Can I see, puh-lease?”

  “Um . . .” Janie lowered the sketchbook to waist level and slipped her thumb under the first page. Her stomach dropped. “Actually,” she croaked, retreating a step, “they’re kind of not ready.”

  “Come on,” Charlotte begged, and teasingly reached for the sketchbook. “Can’t I just see what you have so far?”

  “No,” Janie squawked, whipping the book from Charlotte’s light grasp. Charlotte retreated a tiny step, fluttering her soot-black eyelashes — stunned. At some distance, Kate and Laila, who’d remained wilted across Charlotte’s shining Jaguar hood, shared a bemused glance. “I’m sorry.” Janie flushed, sweat prickling her armpit. “It’s just . . .”

  “Charlotte!” Jules called from the opposite end of the Showroom, diverting her attention. Janie seized her window and escaped, her sketchpad flapping against her flat chest, Pumas pounding the pavement. A basketball rolled by and she stumbled into it, kicking it clear across the Showroom and under Evan Beverwil’s forest green Range Rover. “Yo!” Marco Duvall bellowed in dismay. But she had no time to apologize, let alone retrieve the ball and risk running into Evan, whom she’d been avoiding since their totally awkward “moment” together at the Viceroy.

  She felt sick.

  “What are your symptoms?” the school nurse inquired in a cereal-crisp voice, subjecting Janie to a calculating once-over. Nurse Jackie wore her silver hair in a short, angular bob that never seemed to grow out or be cut, and appeared to subsist on a strict diet of Pepsi One and York Peppermint patties, nibbling around the edges like a rat at a wheel of cheese. Her fake-baked rail of a body, with its galaxy of sunspots across the arms and chest, earned her the nickname “Nurse Crackie,” which everybody used, including some teachers. She was in her sixties, but still dressed sixteen — a cause of major distress for Winston’s more fashion-forward females. Nothing quite compared to the trauma of arriving to school in the same outfit as their sour-faced school nurse, an experience collectively referred to as “crack,” as in, “ew-uh . . . my pink Burberry driver’s cap is totally on crack!”

  But Nurse Crackie restricted her purchases to luxury retailers like Barneys, Saks, and Ted Pelligan, so the chances of Janie appearing in her clothes were slimmer than Crackie herself. Today, for example, the school medic wore light blue high-waisted jeans (Stella McCartney) with a wide fruit-roll-up-red belt (Marc Jacobs), a patterned navy blue blouse with puffed sleeves (Nanette Lepore), cherry patent-and-cork pumps (Tapeet), and plastic bangles (Jessica Kagan) that clacked when she extended her bony arm to slide the thermometer from Janie’s waiting pursed lips.

  “You don’t have a fever,” she remarked, shaking the thermometer with a decisive flap of loose underarm flesh. She observed Janie with an appraising look. “Would you like to lie down?”

  “Okay,” Janie nodded weakly, crawling across the crackling butcher-papered cot. She sent Nurse Crackie her bravest smile. “Is it okay if I call my mom?”

  “Of course,” she replied, and swiveled in her seat, returning to her gray computer. Janie unearthed her cell phone from her crocheted bag and pressed 1.

  “Hello,” answered a breathless voice on the first ring. Janie smiled into the phone.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m at the nurse’s office,” Janie explained, lowering her voice.

  “Oh!” Amelia cackled with comprehension. “Faker.”

  “I’m actually not.” Janie frowned, peeling the lid of a mini Kozy Shack rice pudding. “I actually feel really nauseous.”

  “Oh no.” Amelia mulled this new information over. “Have you immaculately conceived Paul’s love child? Are you Juno?”

  “Amelia!” Janie yelped, almost dropping her Nokia. She glanced in the direction of Nurse Crackie’s workstation, expecting a hard and reproving stare, but the nurse was plugged into her Nano and engrossed in her MySpace profile, oblivious to every word. “Amelia” — she lowered her voice a harsh whisper — “tell me he did not hear you say that.”

  “Omigod, Janie,” Amelia laughed. “He’s a million miles away, I swear. And you’ll never guess what he’s doing.”

  “What?” Janie licked her floppy foil pudding lid with great melancholy.

  “Making a daisy chain.”

  “He is?” Janie smiled. She knew Paul had a sensitive side.

  “Puh-lease don’t sound like that,” Amelia chastised. “This is seriously disturbing shit. Like, the other day? He was listening to Devendra Banhart.”

  “Um . . . Amelia?” Janie lowered the foil lid to her lap and clutched her stomach.

  “I just hope his weird hippie phase doesn’t affect Creatures of Habit,” she blathered on. “It’s, like, you are the lead guitarist of a punk band. There are no daisies in punk.”

  “Amelia,” Janie whimpered, “you think my drawings are good, right?”

  “Omigod,�
�� Amelia slowly replied. “I was just talking about Paul Elliot Miller, and you changed the subject.” She paused, letting it sink in. “You’re, like, dying, aren’t you.”

  “It’s just it occurred to me, you know? Maybe I’m not that good. . . .”

  “Janie,” Amelia scoffed, “part of being talented is feeling like a fake. If you walked around, like, I’m so great all the time, you’d be that girl. You know. From the Art Fair?”

  Janie smiled, knowing exactly to whom her scornful friend referred. Despite a severe case of tone-deafness (or perhaps because of it) Deena Yazdi genuinely considered herself the next Christina Aguilera. The Showroom, the girls’ bathroom, the end of the Breezeway, the back of the school bus — no place was safe. Without warning, she’d cup a manicured hand to one ear, flutter her brown eyes shut, and unleash her atonal howlings upon the world. As for the Art Fair to which Amelia was referring, she’d performed Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” to an audience of five hundred. At the most dramatic moment in the song (the part where Celine thumps her chest), Theo Godfrey unleashed a warbling dying-dog yowl, and the entire auditorium dissolved into laughter. But Deena remained onstage, completely unfazed.

  “Ugh,” Amelia groaned at the memory. “I actually think confidence goes hand in hand with utter lack of talent.”

  “Yeah, except . . . you’re the most confident person I know.”

  “And I’m talented,” Amelia agreed, stunned. “Okay, so my theory doesn’t work. But who cares? You’re still the best artist I know.”

  “Yep.” Janie gulped and lurched, clapping her hand to her mouth. Glancing about the room in a panic, she dropped her phone, leaned over the edge of the cot, and — in the spirit of Deena herself — began to spew.

  The Guy: Evan Beverwil

  The Getup: Forest-green board shorts from Val-Surf, black cotton J.Crew t-shirt, black havianna flip-flops, and pewter “Celtic Knot” dog-tag necklace.

  The only place where he truly felt, like, good was the beach. Yeah, yeah . . . his little sister was always correcting him on that. “You’re supposed to say you feel well, Evan, not good. Don’t you even know basic grammar?” Not that he dignified her stupid-ass comments with an actual response, but: he meant what he said. Something about the SoCal beaches — the air, the sand, the gloomy gray Pacific — he actually felt like a better person. Purified on a spiritual level. He didn’t feel well. He felt good.