Scarlet Wakefield 02 - Kisses and Lies

by Lauren Henderson

  My nerves, however, were screaming in protest. The idea of going clubbing—me! clubbing!—in any kind of venue that was a regular hangout for girls like Plum and Nadia filled me with complete and utter dread and fear. This was miles out of my league. I swallowed hard, telling my nerves to shut up.

  “Will Taylor be okay with that?” Nadia said doubtfully, turning to look over at Taylor, who was eyeing us carefully from the coffee pickup line.

  “Taylor,” I said to Nadia, turning back to look her directly in the face, “wants to be a PI.”

  “A what?”

  “A private investigator. She takes it really seriously. She’ll do anything she needs to do to get the job done.”

  “If you get that video back, so I can delete it,” Nadia said, clasping her hands together in a kind of prayer, “I’ll do anything I can to help you, Scarlett. Anything.” Her big dark eyes were wide and imploring. “I helped you already, didn’t I?” she reminded me. “I got Lizzie to leave you that note, because I felt guilty everyone was still blaming you. Please, Scarlett. Get that video for me. And I’ll tell you everything I know about that evening. I promise.”

  I believed her. Because I was sure that video existed—Nadia wouldn’t make up something that embarrassing. So I was sure she’d do whatever she could to help us out. And even after we’d helped her, I was equally sure we’d get the truth from her about the night Dan died, because if she broke her promise, we’d go to Plum and tell her it was Nadia who arranged for us to steal her phone and delete that video. And I wouldn’t want to be Nadia if Plum knew that. Her wrath would be terrifying.

  Of course, Nadia could try to lie to us. But I trusted myself and Taylor to sense if she was lying, and pressure her for the truth. Taylor, as she herself says, has a built-in bullshit detector. While I was drumming my fingers, I was thinking this all through. I tested it now, in my mind, and it hung together. I nodded to myself, satisfied with my calculations.

  After all, it wasn’t as if Nadia had asked us to do anything bad. We’d take the phone, and if Nadia was telling the truth, we’d find that video, delete it for her, and make sure Plum got her phone back ASAP. That was it.

  How could that possibly go wrong?

  three

  “WHO WANTS TO SEE MY KNICKERS?”

  It’s just as dark in Coco Rouge as I imagined it would be. And even louder. For the first time in my life, I fully understand the expression “I can’t hear myself think.” If this place were drawn in a cartoon, it would have “Boom! Boom! Boom!” written above it, and wiggly lines around to show the whole building shaking with the force of the music they’re playing.

  The bass line is throbbing all around us, as if we just stepped into a gigantic heart. And the decor’s like being inside a heart too—the walls are red and shiny, the upholstery crimson and plush, the carpet dark purple. Inasmuch as I can see the decor, that is, because the club’s already heaving with rich young people a bit older than us, dressed to kill and gripping fancy glasses filled with expensive cocktails.

  Taylor and I snatch a glance at each other, and I don’t know which one of us looks more intimidated. Tell us to climb a rope or jump out of a window or smuggle ourselves into a penthouse, and we’ll grab at the chance. But dress up and act like a cool clubber . . . that’s a real challenge. I feel like everyone we pass is staring at me and laughing, because I look all wrong. And, from the way Taylor is setting her jaw and slouching awkwardly, she feels exactly the same.

  I look around, though, and with the sensible, reasoning part of my brain, the part that isn’t panicking, I can see that what we’re wearing does fit in here quite well. Taylor, in her embroidered T-shirt and low-cut jeans and DIY shaggy haircut, looks a bit too indie for this crowd, like she should be carrying a guitar. But she’s slouching in such a cool way that she makes everyone else look overdressed.

  And my miniskirt and long layered top are exactly right—I can see a girl across the room wearing a dress that’s very like my top, falling off one of her shoulders just the way mine does. I always feel self-conscious going out with what seems to me like a lot of makeup on—mascara, lipstick, blusher—but you get into a place like this and you realize how under-made-up you are by comparison. I like my red lipstick, but I wish I’d put on more eyeliner now. There are a lot of girls here wearing more makeup than clothes.

  The guys are in jeans and shirts, looking a bit boring by comparison. I don’t think this is my kind of place—I’m not that keen on the music, which is loud and thumping and all sounds exactly the same, and the boys are too posh to be sexy. They’re all really pink-faced and chinless.

  It was ridiculously easy to get in here. Lizzie led us up to the velvet rope, bypassing the line, and a man dressed in black from head to toe lifted the rope and beckoned us forward. It was that simple. Lizzie walked through as if she’d been doing this all her life—which she probably has, considering her dad co-owns this place—and we followed, trying to pretend that we had, too, and probably failing dismally.

  But I’d spent so much time at St. Tabby’s watching the nasty games that Plum’s coterie played that part of me still believed that this was a setup, in revenge for us luring Nadia to the coffee shop this morning, and that Plum and Nadia would be waiting when we showed up, having schemed with Lizzie to humiliate us, laughing at us for even thinking that we might get in somewhere as cool as Coco Rouge.

  Well, it wasn’t a setup. Operation Video-Puke Deletion is well and truly on.

  Grimly, we follow Lizzie through the packed club, a series of rooms that open onto each other, full of playful screams and loud, pounding, drivingly sexy lyrics. Girls are backing up and shoving their bottoms into boys’ crotches in imitation of the dancers in hip-hop videos, the boys roaring with laughter.

  “If they could see themselves,” Taylor yells in my ear.

  I pull a face in response. No one’s getting me to dance, I swear to myself. I’ll die before I become one of those white girls trying to pretend they’re black. It’s completely and utterly embarrassing. Oh yeah—did I mention that everyone in here is white? Literally everyone. The only black people here are the bouncers. But the music’s all sexy black R&B. Very odd.

  We’re held up by a particularly raucous group of girls with long shiny hair, sloshing colored martinis and dangling earrings around with equal abandon. As we maneuver past them, doing our best not to get drenched in flying orange liquid, I can’t help staring at them in envy. They do look fake: they’ve got tons of makeup on, and they’re dressed very tartily—though expensively, Versace rather than the knockoff high street version—but they’re all undeniably, fantastically beautiful, tipsy and staggering as they are. I remember something I read once which said that if you call someone plastic, what you really mean is that they’re prettier than you are. This is the moment when I realize how true that statement is.

  Distracted, I lose sight of Lizzie, and I’m struck with panic. Suddenly this dark red club feels like hell on earth. Without Lizzie, without our mission, we don’t fit in here at all. Taylor and I are just a pair of average girls, not half as pretty—or plastic—as the ones here. I spin around, desperately trying to spot Lizzie, and then someone grabs me by the shoulder and pushes me. It’s Taylor.

  “Round the corner!” she shouts.

  Sure enough, Lizzie’s in the next room, standing in front of another velvet rope as another bouncer checks another list. Honestly, there’s more security here than there is at some airports. She turns round and beckons to me and Taylor as the bouncer reaches over to unclip the rope. A girl to my right, one who’s not getting in, eyes me up and down; I see her doing that glance where she checks out my entire outfit. Thank God I’m comfortable wearing short skirts—short anything, really. You can’t do gymnastics for years without being totally comfortable hanging out for large amounts of time in a leotard.

  The girl’s looking at me really enviously now as we walk through, and the awful thing is, it feels really, really good. Not only are we
in a club that people are still queuing to enter, but now we’re in the inner sanctum, the VIP area. Nadia and Plum are hot, young, and in Plum’s case, titled (she’s an Honorable, because her dad’s a peer). They get photographed at parties for W and Tatler and tons of other glossy gossip mags. They’re It-girls about town. So they get in free, and they bring their crowd, and the club is even more cool because they’re here. The VIP section isn’t hidden away—it’s on a raised platform, up a couple of shallow stairs, so everyone can see that Plum and her set are here, and feel cool to be in their company.

  Even though they’re not allowed into where they are.

  It’s a very weird system.

  But I understand it. Sort of. Because although I know I shouldn’t, I can’t help feeling cool that I’m in the VIP area. And if it has that effect on me—someone who doesn’t study those magazines as if they were a bible of information on how to dress and where to go and who to be seen with—it must be even more powerful on someone who does.

  Like Lizzie, who’s positively radiating pride and excitement as she runs up the steps to the booth where Plum is holding court. Taylor and I immediately duck down at a side table, much less conspicuous than Plum’s, which of course is the most central on the entire dais area.

  “That’s her,” I say, nodding over at Plum. My back’s mostly turned to her, and I doubt she’ll spot me—the place is rammed, and by the brief glance I had of her, she’s very merry already.

  Ugh, how I hate that girl. When I was at St. Tabby’s, Plum either ignored me or laughed at me and my lack of fashion sense. She mocked my boobs when they suddenly sprouted, and she only took any notice of me when Simon fancied me and she wanted to do him a favor by telling Nadia to invite me to her party. I was just so much girl-meat to Plum, to be thrown at a boy she wanted to keep happy, because apparently Simon has more money than God. And after Dan died, Plum screamed that I was a killer, claimed to have been his girlfriend, and led her entire court at St. Tabby’s in a systematic campaign to send me hate e-mails and texts and generally try to drive me into hating myself even more than I already did.

  I’m really glad that Nadia’s given me the opportunity to thwart Plum in some way. Even if it’s a minor revenge for all the pain she’s caused me.

  “The one in the middle with the sequins?” Taylor confirms.

  I nod.

  “Wow,” Taylor says. “They always say that English girls are scruffy, but these ones all look totally Upper East Side.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Princesses,” Taylor says concisely.

  “There’s a countess up there, actually,” I tell her. “The blond one. Sophia Von und Zu Unpronounceable.”

  Taylor raises her eyebrows. “I never saw a countess before,” she says. “I must tell my folks, they’ll get a kick out of that.”

  “Ross! Simon!” Plum screeches, loud enough for me to hear her even over the roar of chatter and the boom of the music. I am horribly familiar with Plum’s voice, though. In my nightmares, I sometimes hear her screaming “You killed him!” at me.

  I twist around further, so the two boys coming up the stairs don’t see my face.

  “That’s Simon, the blond one,” I hiss at Taylor, leaning far over the table.

  She’s quick to rememeber. “The one who liked you—you were invited to the party so he could try to get off with you?”

  I nod.

  “And the other one, Ross, thinks the world revolves around him,” I add. “Is he still spotty?”

  “Like he’s got measles.”

  Her head swivels as she watches their progress.

  “Okay, they’re at Plum’s table now,” she says. “No one’s looking over here.”

  “Cool so far,” I hiss back. “Now we have to work out a way to get Plum’s phone—”

  But just then, a crash of breaking glass behind me makes us both jump. I chance a look round and see Plum climbing up onto the table. The sequins turn out to be a minidress which I have to admit, due to her extreme thinness and her elegant face, she actually manages to make look elegant. On me, with my figure that goes in and out a lot more, I’d look as tarty as if I was trying to snag a footballer for a night and then sell my story to the tabloids. Her chestnut hair is styled in a fringe cut, her greenish eyes are darkly rimmed with eyeliner, and her lips are glossy and pale. She looks sort of sixties: it really suits her. But then, everything seems to suit Plum. I can’t help being envious.

  Everyone around her is yelping with excitement and cheering her on.

  “Go, Plum! Go, Plum!” Ross is shouting, in a beery voice that suggests he’s already trashed.

  “Who wants to see my knickers?” Plum screams, fiddling provocatively with the hem of her minidress.

  “No way,” Taylor says, looking at me incredulously.

  “I bloody do!” Ross yells, his face now completely red, which means that his skin has flushed the same color as his spots.

  Everyone’s looking over at Plum now. She’s dancing, which is no mean feat considering her heels must be four inches high, and there are still quite a few glasses left on the table. Shimmying back and forth, she does a couple of squats, sticking out her bottom, which would work better if she had one worthy of the name, and pops her hips back and forth. Taylor totally cracks up.

  “Ohmigod,” she says between sobs of laughter, “that’s the worst booty dancing I have ever seen in my life—”

  But I interrupt her, because I have suddenly had a brilliant idea.

  “Taylor!” I say urgently. “Get under the table!”

  “Why?” She stops laughing, baffled. “Nobody knows my face but Lizzie and Nadia, and they’re not going to say anything! It’s you that—”

  “No, not to hide! Not this table!” I correct her impatiently. “To get Plum’s phone! Grab it out of her bag!”

  Most girls would freak out on the spot at that proposition. Not Taylor. She sizes up the situation and sees instantly what I mean:

  1) Plum is on the table.

  2) Everyone else has jumped up to stand around it, clapping and cheering her on.

  3) They’re all drunk and collapsing with laughter.

  4) Their entire attention is focused on Plum.

  Therefore, no one should notice Taylor sneaking through their midst—or hopefully, if they do, they’ll be too hammered to realize what they’re seeing.

  “Marc Jacobs bag, chestnut, big limited-edition buckle with MJ on it, barrel-shaped, two big side straps,” she recites with utter seriousness.

  I bite my lip so I don’t crack up and offend her. Taylor is so fashion-illiterate she might as well be running over the combination of the safe she’s about to open surreptitiously. We had to look up a picture of the bag online today, to make sure she recognized it. She pored over that photo like she was committing a secret formula to memory—and in a way, she has.

  “That’s it,” I assure her. “Nadia says Plum takes it with her everywhere, because it’s a limited edition.”

  Taylor briefly rolls her eyes: she has no time for people who care whether a bag is a limited edition. But then, she doesn’t own a single handbag.

  “Okay, here I go,” she says, standing up. “Watch my back.”

  “If it looks dodgy, I’ll create a diversion,” I promise, and I mean it, though all I can think of is waving to catch Plum’s attention and yelling that her dancing is worse than a four-year-old’s. That should do it.

  But it’s very much a worst-case scenario, because if Plum sees me here, and then her phone goes missing, she’s bound to connect the two incidents, and then she’ll come after me. Which is the last thing we want to have to deal with. So we’re both hoping a diversion won’t be necessary. My fingers are crossed so tightly I’m almost cutting off my circulation.

  I turn to watch Taylor slipping through the crowd. She bends down, as if she’s dropped something, and then she’s simply gone, disappeared. Though she’s big-shouldered and packed with muscle, Taylor moves surprisi
ngly smoothly, and there doesn’t seem to be a ripple in the crowd around where she ducked down.

  Meanwhile, Plum is still giving the table-dancing everything she has, wiggling and shaking, her long hair flying from side to side as she tosses her head around in a way that I’m sure would make me want to puke my guts out if I had a few colored martinis inside me. Her skinny legs flash up and down, and when she does that squatting move again, which makes all the boys whoop, I’m pretty sure that everyone in front of her is definitely, as promised, seeing her knickers. I don’t get why it’s sexy to look like you’re about to go to the loo—even her face is all twisted up like she’s constipated—but clearly there’s a lot about being sexy I’m just not aware of, because it’s going down fantastically with the crowd.

  Plum’s halfway through popping out her bum again when it happens. Up till now, the situation’s been fairly contained: Plum’s lot are crowding round the table to watch her, people are looking up from the pleb section to see what’s going on, but no one else seems that bothered—though I do notice the bouncers guarding the VIP area are looking over at the booth and talking into their headsets.

  Then it all goes to hell in a handbasket.

  It looks like the table’s tipping under Plum’s feet. She falters. The expression on her face changes from constipated to alarmed. She wobbles, and then she sits down heavily on the table, her legs shooting up in the air. The table tilts drastically. The drinks on it go flying, and everyone screams and jumps back.

  Oh my God, what if Taylor’s underneath it? Forget getting caught, she could be badly hurt! I’m on my feet, running toward the table, all concerns about getting spotted by Plum forgotten in my concern for Taylor. As I push into the crowd I see Nadia right by the table, her hands outstretched. It looks like she’s trying to steady it. Ross is reaching out to help Plum, who’s trying to stand up, but just then the table does a huge heave, and her heels slip on the surface, probably from all the spilled sticky alcohol. She does a spectacular half spin, her arms flailing, looking like nothing so much as a figure skater on drugs. Despite the gravity of Taylor’s situation, I start giggling—I can’t help it—and someone next to me starts giggling too, and swiftly the entire group is howling with laughter.