“Hello,”
the scandalized redhead squeezed out in a hiss. “We are at
school
?”
“Well, I’m having a total meltdown,” Charlotte explained with a shrug, the twin surfaces of her chlorine irises unruffled
as indoor pools. “Isn’t that obvie?”
“Maybe you should try deep breathing,” suggested Kate, standing between the culprit and her smoking gun.
“Les ha-ha,”
she scoffed, turning the beaten gold bangle on her delicate wrist. “I might as well
smoke air
.”
“Maybe you could just ask them to change?” Laila ventured.
“No,” Charlotte scowled. Last time she calmly suggested Melissa “might want to cover up a little,” the ghetto diva flashed,
“Cover up? As in the cover-up you’ll need when I go Chris Brown on your ass?” Last time she told Petra to take a shower (the
girl had
honey
in her hair), the hippie goddess only smiled.
Ugh!
They were insufferable. “What I need to do,” she resumed, pressing her manicured fingers to her temples. Her greenish blue
eyes fluttered shut. “Is think.”
Kate and Laila nibbled their Nars-lacquered nails and shared a fretful glance. They really, really hated it when Charlotte
thought; on the list of activities to which they could
not
relate, “thinking” topped the list. Of course, a close second arrived in that other incomprehensible commitment.
Poseur
. If she’d wanted to start a fashion label, then why hadn’t she started one with
them
? Charlotte explained it hadn’t been her choice; Miss Paletsky, Winston’s sweet-tempered if Dracula-voiced Special Studies
adviser, had all but forced her to join, and now it was
way
too late to drop—that is, not without a gaping hole in her record.
Fine,
they granted. But if that was the
whole
reason, then why take the label so
seriously
? Why care so deeply how her associates dressed, if indeed “associate” remained the accurate term? Janie Farrish, that pathetic
pimple, seemed suspiciously close to “friend.” “Oh, puh-lease,” Charlotte had retorted. “She’s not a
friend
, she’s a
project
—like a dilapidated Tuscan villa you fix up for fun and sell when you’re bored.” Except (and this is what kept them up at
night), what if Charlotte never
got
bored? What if she decided she
liked
her Tuscan villa? What if she moved the hell
in
? The preliminary signs were there: she’d asked Janie to sit with them at Town Meeting, Winston’s
very
public school assembly; she found
totally
random ways to drop her name into conversation; once, she’d even invited her to
lunch
. At
Kate Mantellini
. With them! “Well, we’d had work to discuss,” she’d explained, exasperated.
Yeah, right,
they’d thought, bobbing their well-groomed eyebrows. Like a raggedy red rag thrown into pure white laundry, “work” had slowly
but effectively bled into “life,” turning it an unsightly and
deeply
icky shade of pink.
Did Charlotte seriously expect them to
wear
that color?
“True or false,” she said suddenly, opening her eyes. “If one outfit’s success is inversely proportional to another outfit’s
failure, then those two outfits cancel each other out, equaling zero.”
“Can you repeat that?” Laila asked, hovering a finger above her cameo pink–suited iPhone. “I lost you after ‘if.’ ”
“She means,” Kate oozed, clapping shut her frost-white iPod Touch, “does her fashion fab’ness cancel out Petra and Melissa’s
fashion fugly? Perhaps,” she told Charlotte, dropping the glossy gadget into her signature Gucci Hysteria tote. “But at one
against two, the odds aren’t
exactly
in your favor.”
“
Two
against two,” Charlotte reminded her with a frown. “You’re forgetting Janie.”
“Janie,” Kate snorted, rolling her eyes. “Sorry, but… what makes you think she’ll dress any better than
they
did?”
For a moment, Charlotte’s frown deepened, but then she smiled. “Oh, you know,” she breathed, her chlorine eyes bright with
cunning. “A little bird told me.”
“I don’t think birds are known for their fashion sense,” Laila wisely observed, perching on Charlotte’s trunk and squinting
into the willow leaves.
“Trust me,” she said, eyeing her friend’s black lace over ivory satin Chanel headband. Her smile deepened. “She wouldn’t wear
a
thing
you wouldn’t.”
The Girl: Janie Farrish
The Getup: Black-and-white swish dress by Anna Sui (size two), dark red patent pumps by Miu Miu (size nines), and self-respect
(size zero)
“So then he texts me. And he’s all, Have you seen
Transformers
? And I’m like, um, you
ignore
me at my own party,
totally
get wasted,
barf
on the hood of my dad’s Maybach, and you want to know if I’ve seen
Transformers
? Whatever! So I text him back, like,
No. Why?
And he hasn’t texted me back! No, yeah, I
know.
It’s been, like, an hour and a half…”
Janie scoured the back of the latched bathroom stall door—
anything
to distract her from Lauren Taylor’s insufferably whiny cell-phone voice. Lauren had installed herself at the sinks over
five minutes ago,
and from the sound of her
fascinating
conversation, she wasn’t leaving anytime soon. Janie gazed down at the toilet seat (she was such a cliché, hiding in the
stall) and stifled a sigh. How she
pined
for the bathroom stalls at her old public middle school, where endlessly entertaining graffiti (the Gandhi quotes! the R.I.P.
Tupacs! all the people who were apparently sluts, lesbians, or whores!) cluttered every square inch of space; but Winston
stalls were made from high-tech, vandalism-repellent Kryptonite, or whatever, so she had no choice but to stare in space and
just… listen.
“I was like, oohhh my God. You are soooo rude-uh!”
Of course, Janie reasoned, her captivity
was
self-imposed; she could always step down from the porcelain god, unlatch the stall door, and leave. And yet… no. No way would
she have the will-power to exit the restroom without looking at the mirror, and she absolutely
hated
looking in mirrors in front of other girls,
especially
girls like Lauren, because they almost always made it into this, like,
thing
.
Was Janie the only person who found staring at herself while some other girl stared at her staring at herself seriously nerve-racking?
Okay, probably.
“It’s just, like, if he doesn’t have the common decency to—oh my God. Katy-Katy-Katy-Katy-I-have-to-go-he’s-on-the-other-line-I-know-no-I-know-I’ll-call-you-back-okay-bye.”
A sudden whine of door hinges wrested Janie from her stall stupor, along with a fraction of Lauren’s chirpy, “Hey, baby!”
The heavy door swung back, lopping the rest of her greeting with a merciful
whoosh. At last,
Janie smiled, stepping to the floor.
She was alone.
Stretching to her full five feet and ten inches, she tucked her silky brown bob behind one ear, and lifted a Tiffany & Co.
shopping bag from the polished metal hook fixed to the door. She glanced inside: black leggings, vintage forest-green cardigan
with faux leopard cuffs and collar, the oversize Pixies t-shirt she’d spent two hours fashioning into a rad halter dress,
black-and-white-checked Vans. She glanced away, queasy with guilt.
They’re just clothes,
she lectured herself.
It’s not like they care whether you wear them or not.
Clattering the latch under her hand, she headed toward the wall-to-wall mirror above the automatic chrome sinks. As the maraschino
Miu Miu patent pumps clacked brightly on the tile, her scorned old Vans gave a tumble, kicking the inside of the bag.
Traitor.
But it wasn’t her fault! Charlotte had all but forced the glossy red shoes into her arms, accosting her at the Showroom’s
periphery just minutes before first bell. “You’re a nine, aren’t you?” she’d asked in lieu of hello. “These are eight-and-a-half’s
but they run small. I mean large”—Charlotte huffed—“you know what I mean. And here.” She shook the Tiffany & Co. bag by its
white satin rope handles. “Wear this.”
“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” Janie had ventured, daring to meet her mentor’s glittering gaze. Hadn’t she and Amelia
Hernandez, her non-Winston-attending best friend, spent the last seven days coordinating her current ensemble? “The t-shirt
halter dress is hot,” Amelia had insisted. “Plus it shows creativity.
Plus
it shows you’re different than those other label-dropping whores.”
Since when did two pluses make a negative?
“Nothing’s
wrong
,” the more popular girl assured her—but only after a painful moment’s hesitation. “It’s just… I thought for our first meeting
you’d want to wear clothes they actually
sell
at Ted Pelligan.…” She trailed off, subjecting Janie’s outfit to swift evaluation. The safety pin at her hem, the tiny moth
hole at her sleeve, the dangling button at her collar: no flaw escaped her flitting, pool-green eye.
But it’s vintage!
Janie wanted to cry out in protest.
As if that’s any excuse,
she imagined Charlotte’s reply. The popular brunette had a completely different idea of “vintage” than she did. She’d once
shown up at school in a mint-condition 1960s Courrèges trapeze dress, like, “Isn’t this hilarious?” As if boundary-breaking
couture dresses
in perfect condition
were funny! Then again, humor came in different forms; perhaps Charlotte’s was a more exclusive type? That
special
sort of humor supposedly found at Barneys,
you
know—along with “taste” and “luxury.”
It’s not that I’ve lost my sense of humor,
Janie realized, stunned;
I can’t afford the right brand.
“At least try it on?” Charlotte barged into her mind-blowing epiphany. “You can always change back into whatevs.”
Hugging the bulging robin’s egg blue bag to her stunted chest, Janie sighed her surrender. “Fine.”
“Oh, good!” The tiny hands clapped as luxury cars continued to sail by. “But don’t do it yet, okay? Wait till lunch so I can
see.”
Despite herself, Janie cracked a small smile. Last year, Charlotte had barely spoken to her (unless you count the occasional
soul-crushing insult), and yet here she was, dressing her up like a favorite doll. Not that Janie had any illusions. She’d
had favorite dolls of her own, and most of them ended up bald, dismembered, and abandoned under her bed. No doubt Charlotte
was on a mission to “improve” her, to increase her value in Winston’s social stock market and thereby justify their otherwise
mystifying relationship. “She is so full of herself!” Amelia would later fume, incensed. But privately, Janie was grateful.
More and more she’d catch girls (Farrah Frick, Bethany Snee, Nikki Pelligrini) eyeing her with a hungry, envious look—a look
she recognized, having perfected it herself on Charlotte.
Of course, maybe she was overthinking? Maybe, just maybe, Charlotte
genuinely
liked her? It seemed unlikely (the girl had made Janie’s ninth grade a living hell) and yet… stranger things were possible.
She’d dated Janie’s
brother
, forgodsake. True, they’d broken up, but they’d both moved on, and if Charlotte could befriend Jake, a former dorkatron who’d
cheated
on her, then what should be so bizarre about befriending Janie, a former dorkatron who… who
nothing
?
“Where’s your brother?” Charlotte inquired lightly. Janie stared, baffled. The girl had an uncanny ability to invade her mind,
but like, selectively—pocketing the one thought that interested her and casting the rest aside. Pretty crazy Jake interested
her at
all
, at this point, considering their now legendary breakup and subsequent post-breakup drama. Janie smiled, relieved. Maybe
they really were making an effort to be friends?
“Still in the car, I think,” she recovered, gray eyes flitting to the underground parking elevator. “They’re doing some kind
of KROQ acoustic countdown. He was all,
if Nirvana isn’t number one, I’m chaining myself to Courtney Love in protest
.”
Charlotte’s laughter was cut short by the growling sound of an encroaching sports car; Jules Maxwell-Langeais, Winston’s imported
half-English, half-French boy candy had just cruised through the black metal gate in his acid-green Ferrari. His petite girlfriend
must not have realized, however, because instead of making a big show of greeting him, she kissed Janie’s cheek—“Ciao!”—and
bounded toward the elevator. If not for the orange-blossom fog lingering in her wake, you’d never have known she was there.
By lunch, of course, the fog had faded. But the kiss remained. With Lauren gone and Janie free to peruse her reflection, she
finally noticed it: a just perceptible pink smear along her left cheekbone. She made a mental note to clean it off, but first:
she turned in front of the spotless mirror. Somehow, despite Charlotte being a full foot shorter, her black-and-ivory silk
dress fit perfectly, nipping her long wisp of a waist, skimming her narrow hips, and halting just below the knee. True, the
dainty cap sleeves, ruffled skirt, and chaste mandarin collar were a
little
on the girlie-princess side, but the dark red four-inch stilettos more than compensated.
The dress was Snow White,
she decided.
But the shoes were poison apples.
A second whine of hinges urged her attention to the bathroom door. “Charlotte wants to know what’s taking you so long,” Laila
informed her, a scornful eye riveted to the rounded toes of the glossy dark red pumps. The eye narrowed. “Uch,” she gargled
in contempt, slithering her retreat through the cracked door like an eel.
“I’ll be right out,” Janie called to the closing door, presenting her profile to the mirror. As she lifted a crumpled corner
of paper towel to her cheek, the kiss caught the light and shimmered.
Was it a mark of protection,
she wondered,
like in
The Wizard of Oz?
Or a seal of death, like in
The Godfather.…