Crazy was, like, a freakin’
credential
.
“I’m home!” She danced into the Moons’ ultramodern kitchen, dropping her bulging fuchsia Marc Jacobs Stam satchel on the polished
slate floor. Her ever-pursuant Pomeranian, Emilio Poochie, skidded to a halt, told the bag off in two barks (from now on,
I’m
the one she carries. You
feel
me, punk?), and tore off in a crazed streak. His mistress was
excited
. Which meant—wait, did it? Yes, it did!—
he
was excited! Good, ’cause he
totally
had this awesome new routine worked out. First, he’d bark holy rabies. Then he’d spin around really fast, collide into a
wall, and finally? He’d bite the crazy fluff-wand sticking out of his butt.
For some reason, that was a major crowd pleaser.
“Omigod, Emilio, calm
down
!” Melissa laughed, scooping her favorite tan-and-white fur ball into her arms and hugging him to her pillowy double D’s.
“You are so crazy!” she squealed, tickling his belly.
“Melissa, you are
working
him
up
.” Vivien Ho, her father’s six-foot-tall biatch of a fiancée, grimaced from across the light gray marble-topped kitchen island.
As usual, her top—a flimsy sapphire blue silk Akiko number, which she’d no doubt chosen to make her violet contacts pop—provided
a way-more-than-necessary glimpse of the bronzered canyon between her jutting breasts (or as Melissa preferred to call it:
Silicone Valley). Her mouth (which, let’s be honest, was less a mouth than a pink-frosted collagen donut) gaped wide open.
She looked like one of those low-rent carnival amusements, you know:
Throw a ball into the clown’s mouth! Win a prize!
Of course, in this case, the ball was an eighteen-carat diamond. The prize was Vivien herself. And Melissa’s father?
The lucky winner
.
Yeah. The irony wasn’t lost on Melissa, either.
“Yvette!” Vivien refocused her attention to her buzzing Black-Berry, snatching it to her diamond-dribbling ear. “Yeah. Uh-huh.
Oh, you’re in the master bathroom?”
Seedy Moon and his falling-apart grayish Bugs Bunny slippers shuffled into the kitchen, and Melissa skipped a circle around
the kitchen island (no easy feat in five-inch Louboutins) and shrieked, clapping her manicured hands. “Sure, I can come upstairs,”
Vivien scowled, pressing a dragon-red fingernail to her ear. “I’ll be there in a second.”
“Whattup?” Seedy braced himself as his fiancée clapped her phone shut, fluttered her false lashes shut, and set her jaw in
a way that meant one thing:
drama
.
“Seedy, I swear to God.” She scooted her bar stool back and clacked her gold metallic jeweled thong sandals to the polished
slate floor. “That dog
better
be out of here by the time I get back. I am on my
last nerve
.”
As Melissa and Emilio joyfully joint-freaked her abandoned bar stool, she threw her gleaming shoulders back, click-clacked
across the floor, and exited in a righteous huff. Seedy followed her apoplectic apple-butt with a mingled look of concern
and (he couldn’t help himself) admiration, pushing some air between his full lips.
“Daddy!” his daughter’s cheerful voice rose behind him. “I
have
to talk to you!”
“Yeah, baby.” He turned around, attempting a smile. He’d been dreading this conversation all afternoon, holing up like a coward
in his soundproof glass meditation room. For two hours he did nothing but contemplate his meditation moat—watching the koi
fish do their thing and listening to Chopin’s nocturnes. Yeah, that’s right:
classical music
. Ever since he’d hired Melissa’s Special Studies adviser, Lena, to play piano for the Pink Party, he found himself programming
Mozart into his iPod instead of Mos Def.
Some of this powdered wig shit ain’t so bad,
he admitted to himself in semishock.
But he couldn’t stay in the glass room forever.
“Listen…” Seedy sighed, reeling his only daughter in for a big hug and pancaking poor Emilio in the process. The little Pomeranian
squirmed, crazier than a squirrel in a bag of nuts. “I know how much you were looking forward to this day, and… I wish I didn’t
have to tell you this, but…” He sighed again, released her from the hug, and took a small step backward. Emilio plopped in
a heap to the gleaming floor. “The results are inconclusive,” he informed her gently but firmly, gripping the backs of her
arms.
Melissa blinked.
Results?
What was he talking about? Moments later, her mind reoriented like a Magic 8 Ball after a firm shake, and the answer floated
to the surface.
Oh
…
He was talking about
the tag.
Back in September, as part of their now notorious launch party, she, Petra, Charlotte, and Janie had hosted a Name Our Label
contest. They’d collected over a hundred suggestions from an equal number of guests, all of them written on two-by-one-inch
white clothing tags. The tags had been locked into a custom-made clear globe safe—but “safe” they most definitely were not.
Someone had broken into the globe. Someone had
tagged
the
tags
, defacing each one with a single word.
Poseur.
As a personal message to the vandal, they named their label in honor of the insult. Seedy called this “appropriating the language
of the oppressor,” but his daughter wasn’t going to stop. “My business has been
violated
,” she’d protested, startling him awake from a nap. “And it’s gonna take a lot more than the I’m-Rubber-You’re-Glue defense
for me to get over that. Until I know
who
the vandal is—until I
bring
that fool to
justice
—I will not, nay, I
cannot
move on.”
Her father, who’d been hiding behind his Relax the Back Swedish neck cushion, agreed to see what he could do.
Unfortunately, lack of evidence worked against them; it wasn’t until eighth-grader Nikki Pellegrini miraculously discovered
one of the vandalized tags in a garbage-art installation that Melissa could finally kick off two major orders of business.
First, immediately appoint Nikki Poseur’s new intern (she’d need to keep that eagle eye close). Second, give the treasured
tag to her father, who would in turn give it to
the Man in K-Town
. Melissa didn’t know much about
the Man in K-Town
, except, a) he was number 9 on her dad’s speed-dial, and b) he took care of business, all
kinds
of business. “No man better than
my
Man at graffiti interpretation,” her father assured her. “One week with that tag a yours? Culprit’s good as
cuffed.
”
All of which brings us back to the Moons’ ultramodern kitchen, where tasteful ambient lighting illuminated the cool stainless
steel appliances, the dark slate floors, the spotless glass cabinets, the light gray marble countertops… and Melissa’s beautiful
yet dismayed face.
“Inconclusive?”
she squawked, braiding her body-buttered arms across her voluptuous chest. “What does that mean, ‘the results are
inconclusive
’?”
Seedy threw up his hands, equally incredulous. “It means he couldn’t figure it out!”
“But the Man in K-Town has a
zero percent fail rate
,” Melissa reminded him, stomping her stiletto. “You
said.
”
“I know!” Seedy admitted, shaking his head, clearly perplexed.
“Okay.” Melissa steepled her hands under her chin, fluttering her Dior Iconic-coated lashes shut. “Just tell me what he said.
Like,
exactly
what he said.”
Seedy stuttered a zebra-upholstered bar stool under his Adidas tracksuited butt and sat. “He said he couldn’t tell much from
the handwriting. The perpetrator purposely wrote in block letters, the pen was a generic Sharpie… nothing distinctive. No
finger-prints. He sent the tag to a lab for chemical analysis. Nothing there either…” He trailed off, losing himself in thought.
“Except… ”
“Except
what
?” Melissa gripped the gray marble countertop. “Daddy!”
Squeezing the back of his neck, Seedy gazed at the floor, still shaking his head. His deep brown eyes flicked upward.
“He said he found traces of
sea kelp
.”
“
Sea
kelp,” Melissa repeated after a beat of baffled silence. She crumpled her brow. “You mean, like… seaweed?”
“Man, I’m starting to wonder…” Her father cringed, squeezing the back of neck. “Maybe K-Town’s losing his
touch
?”
An unsympathetic Melissa shrugged, sucking the insides of her cheeks.
“I mean,” he continued pensively. “Who are we supposed to believe broke into your contest?” Bugging out his eyes, he stuck
out his tongue and splayed his bejeweled fingers. “
Swamp
thing?”
Despite herself, Melissa giggled.
“Stupid,”
she chastised him, pushing his powerful shoulder. He captured her lemon-and-sage-moisturized hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.
“It’s gonna be okay.”
“It is?” “No doubt,” he assured her. “When something bad happens, you just got to think—this is going to make some room for
something good.”
Melissa gently smiled. Sometimes her dad’s Buddha-bytes actually made sense. “I guess I can see that.”
“You can?” Seedy bobbed his eyebrows, impressed with himself. “Oh, wait a minute,” he remembered, slapped his knees, and grinned.
“You had your big
meeting
today, right? How’d it go?”
“Well…” Melissa bit her Smashbox-lacquered lower lip, her early excitement returning in a throb. From his collapsed position
on the floor, Emilio Poochie lifted his head, perking up his ears. “Ted Pelligan is really serious about us, Daddy. I mean…
he’s even arranging a celebriteaser.”
Before Seedy had a chance to respond, Vivien materialized at the kitchen entrance, poised like a cobra above her jeweled metallic
sandals. “He’s giving you a
what
?”
Melissa arced her perfectly gelled eyebrow. “You heard me.”
“Melissa,”
Seedy frowned as Vivien clattered to his side. “
Watch
your—”
“I don’t believe you,” his fiancée huffed at his daughter before he could finish, narrowing her violet eyes. Planting a hand
on her hip, she pursed her pink-frosted collagen donut into an impressive-looking twist pastry. “What could you have possibly
done to deserve a celebriteaser?”
“What could
I
have done?” Melissa rasped with laughter. As if Vivien’s totally tacky designer handbag company, Ho Bag, had anything to
do with hard work.
Melissa
was the one who toiled to get her business off the ground, pulling herself up by her own Manolo Blahnik
bootstraps
, while Vivien just kicked up her heels, coasting by on the Moon name. Contrary to the claims of her sham memoir,
The Audacity of Ho
, the woman did not do an
ounce
of work—unless you counted X’ing a few forms once a month.
Melissa was
this close
to X’ing Vivien’s freeloading face.
“I’d just like to say,” she began.
“YO!” her father boomed, rattling the china in the nearest glass cabinet and shutting her up in an instant. Emilio ejected
through the archway exit like a piece of shrapnel. “Thank you for your attention!” he boomed again, obliterating the sound
of the tiny dog clattering down the hall. “Will one of you please be so kind as to tell me what a celebriteaser mother-McMuffin
is
before I lose my mother-McMuffin
mind
?”
“A celebriteaser,”
Melissa and Vivien began together. After a strained pause, the fake-baked fiancée continued.
“Baby, remember last month? When A-Rod was spotted on Madison drinking MoonWater?”
At MoonWater, Seedy relaxed into a smile. He couldn’t help himself. After languishing on the Whole Foods shelves for more
than three months, sales for his bottled mineral water—the latest effort to diversify and expand the Moon brand—had finally
started to pick up.
“That’s a celebriteaser,” Melissa explained, happy to show off her new knowledge. “As soon as people saw A-Rod drinking it,
it was like,
buh-ham
! They started buying.”
“Uh,
excuse
me,” protested Seedy, pointing a bejeweled finger. “People started
buying
because we are the
only
water that uses a patented
moon rock
filtration
process
.” He waited for them to argue, crumpling his brow like an accordion.
“Thank you,”
he nodded, interpreting their cowed silence as victory. “Now”—he returned to his daughter—“you tellin’ me A-Rod agreed to
walk down Madison holdin’ a
purse
?”
“Daddy, no!” Melissa leaned against the kitchen island and laughed. “A
girl
celebrity’s gonna to do it, obvie.”
“Who?” Vivien ventured, trying to sound casual, but clearly
dying
to know. Melissa smirked, triumphant.
“We find out in a week. And, I was thinking, because the timing’s so perfect…” She clasped her hands, squinched her nose,
and turned in her ankle, achieving the pinnacle of pigeon-toed cuteness. “Daddy? We can we do it at the Pink Party, right?”
Her father had this habit: right before he gave her what he wanted, he winked his left eye. Melissa could see it happening,
but—just as his left cheek began cinching into its corresponding eyelid—Vivien landed her hand on his knee.
“No,” she said, grinding the wink to a halt, and punctuated her coup with a pert toss of her spiraling, waist-length jet-black
extensions. A resulting
whoosh
of
Frédéric Fekkai
Sheer Hold hair-spray hovered in the air, hypnotizing her fiancé. “This party is an
intimate affair
,” she continued, giving his knee a squeeze. “Between our family and
closest
friends.”
“Wait—what?” Melissa began to panic. Her father was puckering his mouth in that she-has-a-good-point way, which was completely
not
okay. “We invited over five hundred people,” she reminded him, returning to Vivien in a flash. “And don’t
even
try to tell me
Tila Tequila
counts as a ‘close friend.’ ”