Poseur #3: Petty in Pink: A Trend Set Novel (5 page)

Something about saying “DustBustered” to your ex-girlfriend. It seriously just… cripples the will.

Rather than risk running into her again, Jake had decided to hole up in underground parking.
You
know. Bruce Wayne–style. Imagine his surprise when, after four minutes of perfect solitude, the black Volvo door cracked
open and there she was, slipping into the front seat, all smiles, sweet perfume, and things to say. Imagine his surprise when
he just
said things back
. Like, they’d both just decided, at the exact same time,
not
to be awkward.

That is, until she brought
him
up.

“Jules told me you guys are playing basketball later?” Charlotte propped her death heel on the duct-taped dash. “You know,
it’s really important to him that he improve his game.”

“Oh yeah?” Jake replied, still staring at her foot. The fact that Jules “told” her stuff—the fact that she
listened
—it was all so horribly graphic. Seriously, he could handle the fact that they were dating. But that they
talked
to each other? That they “shared”? He frowned.
Some of this shit she should keep to herself.

“So,” she pressed on. “Why don’t you guys pass him the ball?”

“What?” Jake pushed out an uneasy laugh, crumpling his forehead. “We… pass him the ball.”
When they felt like throwing the game.

“Jake,” she admonished him, folding her arms across her chest, and her silk skirt shifted, sliding a good two inches up her
thigh.
It’s fun to lose,
Kurt Cobain buzzed inside the shitty speakers, drowning in subterranean static.
And to-oo pretend
…

“It isn’t nice,” she sighed. “Just because he’s my boyfriend, you…”

Boyfriend?!!

“Fine!” he blurted, punching the radio off. “I’ll tell the guys to pass him the ball… I mean, more than we have been. Which
is a lot. Relatively.”

“Good!” Charlotte breathed. “Then I agree to study for Ms. McGovern’s vocab quiz with you.”

Jake lifted an eyebrow and slid his dark brown eyes sideways. They hadn’t discussed studying together. So why was she was
smiling at him like they’d had a long-standing plan?

“Monday night?” she chimed, as if to remind him.

“I don’t know.” He glanced away and frowned, picking some duct tape on the dash. He was all for being friends, but
studying
together? For
vocab
? Was he seriously supposed to
not
touch her as she sat there oh-so-enticingly asking him to define obfuscate? Pernicious?
Disseminate?

“Come on, Jake.” Charlotte sounded almost plaintive. “I made flash cards.”

“Oh man,
flash cards
.” He looked up and sighed, regarding the manipulative and yet painfully adorable baby-in-a-poopy-diaper expression on her
face.
“Okay,”
he laughed, and pushed her shoulder, making it go away. “We’ll study.”

And so he jolted back to the present, just seven hours after their chum-fest, passing the ball to his rival, hurling it with
all his might. Marco Duvall groaned with despair as the orange sphere arced through the air, out of his capable grasp, and
into Jules’s outstretched hands. The ponytailed exchange student gripped the ball, facing him with childlike triumph.

“Shoot the ball!”
Marco yelled in strangled disbelief.

But it was too late. Leon Gorlach roared in like an uncensored episode of National Geographic, swiping the ball into his possession
and carrying it off like a good-as-dead baby hippo. Twisting high into the air, the wiry ninth-grader cranked his arm back,
tongue lolling, and tore that hoop a new hoop-hole.

“Ee-YEAH, baybee!!!” He pounded the pavement, swung his clenched, raw-knuckled fist, and thumped his pigeon chest.
“Posterized.”

“He is good, no?” Jules sidled up to Jake, addressing him in a confidential tone.

“Yeah.” Jake squinted through his dripping dark brown hair. Seemed Gorlach had moved on from thumping his chest to sniffing
his armpits. “Poetry in motion.”

“I would not go so far as that!” Jules laughed, missing Jake’s sarcasm by about a mile and a half. Marco observed their interaction
under a disapproving yet sympathetic brow. He knew what Farrish was thinking:
So my girlfriend dumped me. Did she
have
to move on to
this
clown?
Marco made a mental note to educate his scrawny ass: “Listen,” he’d say—maybe put his hand on his shoulder or some shit like
that—“smokin’ hot girls be hookin’ up with clowns since the
dawn of time
. Just the way it
is.
Have it hardwired into their smokin’ hot
DNA
.”

Well, except for
his
girlfriend, of course.

“Marco, do not
even
touch me!” Melissa shrieked as he approached her with wide-open arms, ready to reel her into a sweaty-ass bear hug. Her chicken-head
friends got all quiet, gathering around the platinum Lexus convertible, like,
Oh no you didn’t
. “I told you,” Melissa reminded him, ducking behind her annoying friend Deena. “You play b-ball and you forfeit all rights
to touch me.”

“Thought maybe you’d change your mind,” he grinned, lifting his
I’m a Rock Star in Jamaica
t-shirt to wipe his face. (’Cause, yeah.
Someone
brought the six-pack to the barbecue.) His white-hot girlfriend grimaced, yanking his shirt down.

“Change my mind?” Her black eyes snapped. “I have the most important meeting of my
life
in less than an hour.”

Looking wounded, he smoothed his mauled t-shirt over his unappreciated abs. “So?”

“Deena.” Melissa fluttered her dark eyes shut, spanking the air. “Will you explain this to him?”

“Boy,” her horse-faced best friend began, fanning her tiny, pinched nose with her French-manicured hand. “You think she want
to show up at Ted Pelligan with your
man
-stink all over her?”

“Whoa, whoa, Dino, hold up.” Marco forked a hand into his springing brown curls, looking puzzled. “You mean to say you can
smell
outta that nose job?”

“For the last time!” Deena squawked, flushing an angry shade of puce while her traitor friends hid their smiles. “I had a
deviated septum
. Without necessary surgical intervention, I could have
died,
Marco!”

Just as a crowd began to gather, a nasal beeping filled the air, grinding the performance to a sudden halt. A dozen girls
turned to face their intruder, their exfoliated foreheads in various stages of rumpled disapproval.

“So sorry to interrupt your
turf
wars,” Charlotte Beverwil chimed, fluttering a wave from the depths of her lumbering vintage Jag. Janie Farrish sat half-slumped
in the driver’s seat, her bobbed light-brown hair delicately mussed, and a pretty fair imitation of Charlotte’s
ennui
smacked across her face. “Just wanted to bid y’all adieu,” Charlotte called, focusing in on Melissa. “That’s French, by the
way. For
outie.
”

In a burst of panic, Melissa scampered to the side of the vehicle. No
way
was she letting Charlotte and her paraffin-pampered paws get to Ted Pelligan first. She could just
see
it: the two of them, chillin’ in the corner office, chuckling over some private joke. How
dare
they have a private joke? She hadn’t even
introduced
herself yet!

“No!” She gripped the lip of the window, forcing Charlotte to a sudden brake.

“What do you mean,
no
?” Her raven head jerked forward.

“We have to wait for Petra,” Melissa warned, gripping the window tighter.

“Um, no.” Charlotte frowned, cranking the volume on her longtime obsesh: Beirut. “Petra’s
your
car, remember?”

“Well, we need to caravan,”
she insisted, raising her voice above what sounded like dueling accordions. “What if one of us gets lost?”

Charlotte arched an icy cool eyebrow. Melissa knew as well as she did—one just didn’t “get lost” on the way to Ted Pelligan.
Winston girls were like newly hatched baby turtles, and Ted Pelligan?
Was the sea
. Were baby turtles afraid of getting lost? Did baby turtles quote-unquote
caravan
?

No. The baby turtles just
knew
.

Charlotte narrowed her glittering green eyes in suspicion. Melissa wanted to get to Ted Pelligan first. The question was
pour-quoi
? So she could convince him
butt
pearls were the wave of the future?

Without another moment’s hesitation, she sank her heel to the gas.

“No, you did
not
!” Melissa called after her screeching wheels, flapping her impossibly toned arms.

“Oh yes, she did,” a throaty voice piped up behind her. Melissa whirled around.
Well,
she scowled.
If it isn’t my belated bohemian friend.

“Get in the car,” she barked, snapping her fingers in the direction of the gleaming Lexus.

“Relax, El Snapitan,” Petra quipped, raising her blue-ink-stained hands in surrender. Melissa balled up her fists, pulsing
like a nuclear flash.

“Now!”

Miss Dillydally darted toward the car.

“I still don’t understand,” Charlotte sighed, flattening her ballerina back against her butter-tan leather seat. The winding
canyon was behind them now, and the Jaguar coasted onto a wide and smoothly paved avenue bordered by majestic sun-filled pines.
For the last five minutes, Janie had been staring out the window, dreaming up surfer tattoos: winding seaweed vines, and shark
teeth, electric eels, and mermaids. At the sound of Charlotte’s voice they blew away like dust.

“What?” she turned from the window, blinking.
Please, God. Let her
not
have just read my mind.
Seriously, weren’t telepathic powers supposed to be limited to, like, kooky great-aunts and glittering vampires? The former
always had your best interests at heart. And the latter only threatened to suck your blood—not your very last drop of dignity.

“Nothing.” The witch at the wheel eyed her up and down. “It’s just… I liked the other outfit better, that’s all.”

“Yeah.” Janie gazed at her leopard-print cardigan cuffs, smoothing the faux fur over her wrists. “I just… this outfit just
feels more
me
, or something.”

With a delicate bob of her eyebrows, Charlotte adjusted her pearl gray Hermès driver’s glove. For the life of her she would
never understand girls who thought
comfort
was, like, a legitimate style choice. When would they realize “me” marked the halfway point to
mess
?

She resolved to change the subject.

“So, what did my
brother
say to you?”

“Oh,” Janie blushed. “Nothing, he—he wanted to know if I could design him a tattoo.”

“Are you kidding me?” Charlotte rolled her eyes. “You’re not going to, are you?”

Janie chewed her thumbnail.

“Janie!” she spanked the wheel in disbelief. “Don’t waste your talent on such folderol. Your time is precious!”

“It shouldn’t take that long.” She shrugged, smiling into her lap. That Charlotte thought she was talented! That she’d deigned
to say so!

“Uchh…” The driver regarded her pleased profile with suspicion. “Do you have a crush on my brother?”

“What?” Janie wheezed out a laugh and blushed. “Um,
no
.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Charlotte fluttered her eyelashes, not bothering to hide her smile. “I didn’t mean to make you…
uncomfortable
.”

“I’m
not
,” Janie gaped, tucking her bob behind her ear, “
uncomfortable
. It’s just… I mean… we’re just…”

“Friends?”
offered the pretty brunette, flipping the turn signal to an appallingly boner-like angle. Janie glanced away.

“Yeah,” she exhaled.

“Too bad I don’t believe in male-female friendships,” Charlotte rejoined, pleased by her trap’s success. She slid Janie a
knowing look. “Call me
old-fashioned
, but someone’s
always
hiding an attraction.”