Poseur #2: The Good, the Fab and the Ugly (12 page)

Relief died like a bug on Raid.

“Are you Nikki?” Melissa Moon slid her Juicy Couture denim-skirted butt from the edge of the fold-out table on which she was perched, and folded her arms across her epic chest.

“Yeah . . . ,” Nikki answered after a moment’s hesitation.

“I’m Melissa,” she unnecessarily introduced herself. “You and I have some important things to discuss.”

Nikki glanced to a corner of the faded blue carpet, where Carly and Juliet sat together, surrounded by markers, glue, glitter, stencils, and long narrow tubes of butcher’s paper. Juliet stared deep into the depths of her freshly lobotomized pumpkin, extracted an impressive glob of oozing orange guts, and dropped it onto the spread-out newspaper with a loud
splap.
Carly smoothed a black-cat decal on a piece of poster board, pushing three stiff fingers around in concentric circles. Nikki waited for either of them to meet her eyes, but neither of them did.

“Sorry, I’m late!” gasped a voice directly behind her. Nikki clutched her notebook to her chest and turned around, locking eyes with, of all people, Venice Whitney Wang. “I brought you a double-skim, one-pump vanilla latte,” she panted, redirecting her gaze toward Melissa, to whom she offered a steaming Venti cup of Starbucks. As the cup exchanged hands, Nikki noticed their fingernails were painted the exact same shade of Chanel Paparazzi pink.

“Do you people know Venice?” Melissa asked, sliding her gaze between the three younger girls. Nikki observed Juliet and Carly share a glance. Of
course
they knew Venice; she’d practically been salivating to insert herself into their clique since the first day of seventh grade. To be honest, Nikki had considered her a good candidate, but Carly and Juliet eventually wore her down. “No
way
is she in,” Carly had repeatedly sniffed. “She wears cartoon Band-Aids, and her name rhymes with ‘penis.’”

“
Almost
rhymes with penis,” the more careful Juliet had pointed out. “But
still.
”

“Venice is my new fashion intern,” Melissa continued, tipping some Starbucks into her glistening MAC’ed-out mouth. “And I expect y’all to treat her with the same respect you’d treat Miss Paletsky, who assigned her to this position. Venice has been working very hard to answer some difficult questions about what happened at my party the night of September thirtieth.”

Venice swished her straight-ironed jet-black hair behind her body-shimmered shoulder and pouted her lips.

“Nikki,” Melissa sighed. “Do you know why you’re here?”

Nikki automatically glanced at her friends, who continued to ignore her. Weren’t they all here to decorate? “I . . . I’m not sure,” she offered at last.

“You’re being indicted,” Melissa calmly explained. Nikki took a moment, repeating the word in her head: indicted.
In-die-dead.
She willed a definition to come to her, but nothing rang a bell. Melissa sighed, squeezing a dollop of L’Occitane hand crème into her smooth palms, and rubbed her hands together. The air blossomed the unlikely mingled scent of lavender and pumpkin. “Venice” — Melissa rescrewed the cap and cleared her throat — “can you please explain Nikki’s situation in terms she can understand?”

“Definitely!” Venice beamed, and proudly extracted a tube of white parchment from her colorful Murakami Louis Vuitton canvas tote. “I drew up an affidavit.”

Affa-david. In-die-dead. Seriously,
Nikki fretted.
Is this even English?

Venice shimmied a Goodie No Snags rubber band down the length of the tube in one swift motion, and with a snap of her bangled wrist, unfurled the paper with a flourish.

“It’s in calligraphy,” she pointed out for Melissa’s approval.

“Would you mind reading it out loud?” Melissa folded her arms across her bountiful chest. Venice nodded, clearing her throat.

“ ‘I, Nikki Pellegrini, hereby confess to the deliberate sabotage of the contest organized on the thirtieth of September by the . . .’ ”

“Wait —
what?
” Nikki burst out without thinking.

“Please, don’t interrupt,” Melissa sternly advised. “Venice, go on.”

“ ‘I, Nikki Pellegrini,’ ” Venice repeated the first line with restored authority, “ ‘hereby confess to the deliberate sabotage of the contest organized on the thirtieth of September by the Fashion Label currently known as
POSEUR
.’ ”

“But I didn’t!” Nikki gasped, clasping her hands and retreating a step toward the back wall.

“Really?” Melissa asked, unfolding her toffee-toned arms. “Because Venice has been working on this all week, and she swears you did.”

Nikki noted a lilt of worry in Melissa’s voice, and for the first time realized how genuinely she wanted to know the truth.

“I swear to God!” Nikki swallowed, emphasizing her innocence by touching the modest gold cross at her neck. Melissa cocked her head toward Venice, raising a beautifully arched you-better-explain-yourself eyebrow.

“Juliet,” Venice quickly addressed Nikki’s dark-haired friend, “didn’t you say Nikki disappeared at 11:30?”

“Yes.” Juliet nodded, glancing at Nikki. “Well, you did.”

“And the crime occurred between eleven and midnight.” Melissa frowned, refocusing on Nikki. “And so far, everybody
else
can be accounted for. Can you explain that?”

“I . . .” Nikki bit her bottom lip, the same bottom lip that had found it’s way so easily into Jake’s mouth, the same bottom lip that he’d tasted with his tongue, sending little pulsing jolts of electricity throughout her entire body. “I was . . .”

“She was kissing Jake Farrish,” Carly impatiently snipped from her position on the floor.
“Gawd.”

Melissa gaped, looking her up and down. “That was
you
?”

“Yeah, but . . .” The panicky Venice tugged Melissa’s bronzed arm for attention. “Juliet said she was gone for practically an
hour.
No
way
were they kissing the entire time.”

“I was
not
gone for an hour!” Nikki insisted, gaping down at her double-crossing friend. “Juliet,
tell
them.”

“All I know is you were the one who invited me to that party and then you totally left me stranded,” she sniffed.

“But I . . .” Nikki flushed as her friend lowered her pumpkin-slathered ice cream scoop to the floor and furrowed her dusky forehead. Omigod, she
had
abandoned Juliet, she realized with a pang of guilt. But it hadn’t been
intentional.

“Juliet,” Melissa addressed her in soothing tones. “Try to put your emotions aside and think. Was Nikki really gone for an
entire
hour?”

“I wasn’t wearing a watch so I don’t know.” She frowned into the lobotomized pumpkin skull and slowly nodded. “All I can say is that’s what it
felt
like.”

“But,” Nikki beseeched her redheaded friend for support, “Carly . . .”

“Don’t look at me.” She raised a marker-stained palm and hotly huffed. “
I
wasn’t even
invited
to that party,
remember
?”

“But . . .” Nikki’s face crumpled. “You
knew
I could only invite one person.”

“And you invited Juliet, so
I’m
staying out of this.” Carly uncapped a blueberry-scented marker with a
pop!
“Sorry.”

“Listen, Nikki,” Melissa interrupted. “We all
want
to believe you, but you have to admit . . . your case does not look good.” She smoothed Venice’s swirling calligraphied affidavit on the wooden fold-out table, and clicked open a ballpoint pen. “Why don’t you just sign this, so we can all move on with our lives?”

“Because I didn’t do it,” she replied weakly.

“Okay.” Melissa unclicked her pen and dropped it into her purse. “I’m going to give you
one
week. If I were you, I’d do everything in my power to locate one of the vandalized tags. If the handwriting doesn’t match yours, then you’re off the hook.”

“But what happens if I don’t find one?”

“That’s not really my problem,” Melissa breathed airily, checking her pink crocodile watch, and shoving her half-drunk latte into Venice’s waiting hands. “All right, ladies. I’m out.”

“Good luck finding those tags.” Venice smirked as Melissa’s sharp footsteps faded down the hall. “I spent every day last week looking up and down Rodeo . . . and nada,
muchacha.
”

“I need VitaminWater,” Carly sighed to her feet, brushing off her denim-clad knees. “Juliet,” she addressed her friend, “Focus, Endurance, or Multi-V?”

“I’ll go with.” Juliet sprung to her feet and joined her at the door.

“Can I go, too?” Venice asked. Carly and Juliet shared a quick glance.

“A’course,” they replied in unison.

As her friends disappeared down the hall, Nikki swallowed a hard lump in her throat, and — against all logic — checked her pink Nokia phone. Had he called her back? Of course he hadn’t. She stared at the blue carpet, noticing for the first time a water stain in the shape of a whale, and her friends disappeared down the hall, Venice in tow, her cornflower-blue eyes stung with tears. The whale-shaped water stain wavered at her feet, expanding and contracting. If only it would expand into the size of a real whale, she thought. A great blue whale, like the one in
Pinocchio,
to swallow her whole. She would live there, surviving on seaweed, krill, and plankton. She would listen to the lonely slosh of ocean waves, text-message by the light of a kerosene lamp . . .

It wouldn’t be so bad.

For their first date, Charlotte recommended dinner at Campanile, the ultra-sleek see-and-be-seen restaurant on La Brea Boulevard (a far cry from the see-and-be-
shot
Hard Rock Café, thank you very much). The breezy interior of the ivy-covered building boasted such historical details as terra-cotta tile floors and elegant abbey-like walls of exposed grayish brown brick. Sage green rafters supported a peaked glass roof through which one could glimpse a square bell tower with secret-looking windows, a wraparound balcony, and a glinting silver sundial. Charlotte had been seven years old the first time she’d come to Campanile; her father had taken her to celebrate her first ballet lesson. They’d ordered Russian tea with dark cherry preserves, raspberry financiers, flaky ginger scones, and while Charlotte ate, her actor father gesticulated dramatically to all corners of the room, narrating the history of the place. The building, he’d told her, was built
all the way back
in nineteen twenty-nine by none other than Charlie Chaplin, who planned to use it as an office. He never got to work there, however; just as the structure neared completion, he lost it in a scandalous divorce from his wife, Lita Grey, whom Chaplin had married at sixteen. Which was to say,
she’d
been sixteen. Chaplin, Bud Beverwil informed his daughter with a chuckle, had been thirty-five.

And now it was Charlotte who was sixteen, catwalking the Campanile restaurant floor like she owned it. She shrugged out of her high-collared butterscotch-brown Milly faux-fur coat, allowing four dozen sets of eyes, both male and female, to linger wistfully on the confident jerk of her hips, the elegant angle of her neck, and the tumble of glossy black curls between her ivory shoulder blades. As usual, Charlotte ignored her audience, pausing only once to measure the gaze of someone she recognized, or thought she recognized — a middle-aged man with amused hazel eyes, a closely cropped salt-and-pepper haircut, and a deeply lined smile. He was so familiar, Charlotte turned as she passed him, rubbernecking like a motorist at the scene of a gruesome accident, and, noting her attention, the middle-aged man cocked a groomed eyebrow and smirked. She turned away, realizing at once who he was.

Never mind; there was Jules, waiting at the polished bar just half a room away. He slid off his barstool, eyeing her with rapt appreciation, and Charlotte batted her soot-black eyelashes in thanks (the only time she’d seen Jake get to his feet out of respect was during the National Anthem at Dodgers Stadium).
Nice to be dating someone with manners,
she thought as he hung her coat next to his.

“You look beautiful,” he whispered into her ear, sending a thrill to the base of her spine. “And you smell like a fig.”

“Thank you,” she replied, affecting a modest blush. Following the advice of her bosom friend and fashion confidant, Don John, she’d chosen to wear something in keeping with the restaurant’s Roaring Twenties history: a vintage Lanvin drop-waist emerald-green satin frock with draping sleeves that fluttered as she moved. Jules, she noted, wore fitted dark gray chinos and a black cotton V-neck — all very fine — but it wasn’t until he sat on the barstool and wedged the heel of his polished black Ferragamo on the horizontal bar below his seat, cinching his pant cuff ever-so-slightly, that she gasped with final approval.

“Your socks!” she exclaimed, and fixed her chlorine-green eyes to the article in question. Jules lifted his right foot to examine his ankle, frowning in confusion, and Charlotte’s little heart skipped a beat. Here was a definite,
definite
sign, she thought, mingling Jules’s amber gaze with her own. “They match my dress,” she informed him. “Like, perfectly.”

“Oh,”
he laughed with relief. “I thought there was something wrong.”

Charlotte smiled. How could anything be wrong when everything was right? What were the chances of arriving in two outfits that not only didn’t clash, but coordinated
perfectly
? She had no head for percentages, but the chances had to be slim.
Like being struck by lightning,
which was, incidentally, exactly how it felt, staring into Jules’s electric amber eyes. Charlotte decided his socks and her dress knew something they didn’t, but soon would:

They belonged together.

And so, as he divulged the details of his life before Los Angeles, she listened with rapt attention. He attended
L’Ecole Internationale de Genève,
a French-speaking boarding school in Switzerland, where he cultivated interests in everything from skiing to birding to fine wine to Italian opera. But so wide-ranging and eclectic were his tastes, he feared he would never focus on
just one thing.
Yet
focus,
he told her, was a necessary and important step toward adulthood. Not just any adulthood, of course, but the kind of adulthood to which he aspired:
a necessary and important adulthood.