Pride & Princesses (29 page)

    
‘Out with the old and in with the new,’ Mrs Mouche always said.

    
Once she had left for the airport we were safely on our way.

   
‘I hope this works out better for you than it did for me,’ I tell Wednesday.
 

   
The casting was in Santa Monica.

    
After we sat with Wednesday for the morning while they took her photo and listened to her say a few cute words, we had the whole afternoon to ourselves and we went to Third Street Promenade for lunch. Then we drove to Venice again and checked out the market stalls all afternoon.

    
‘This is fun,’ Wednesday said, in full sentence. Mouche wiped ice-cream off her baby sister’s face and smiled.

    
At home that evening, Wednesday slept deeply.

    
‘She’s exhausted,’ I said to Mouche.

    
‘I know,’ Mouche said, ‘I hope we did the right thing.’

    
‘Of course we did,’ I told her.

     
‘I can’t wait to have children one day. Well, I mean, I’d like to get married first, and of course, I wouldn’t plan on kids until I’m at least twenty or thirty.’

     
I smiled. I knew Mouche would make a great mother.

     
‘But not yet,’ I told her.

     
‘No, not yet,’ Mouche joked.

    
‘Now, getting back to the
Boy-Rating Diary
,’ I continued...

    
Of course I had to re-capture the story of the previous date as well as update the encounters section with the brief but slightly beautiful moment between Joel and me.

     
Mouche said she was too emotionally exhausted to re-live the episode with the Princesses or my speed date with Joel. Besides, she said, ‘I have a meeting to prepare for tomorrow...I have the best idea, the funniest idea in the whole world....we’ll beat those skanks at their own game and get our dates sorted out in the process...’

     
I must admit, I was not one hundred percent sure what Mouche was up to, but she promised to brief me at 8am the next morning before school.
 

     
‘Oh, and I have news to tell you regarding Jack Adams, film school tragic.’ Mouche said, brushing her teeth. ‘We’ve developed a mutual love for
All About Eve
and things have progressed. We may even decide to go skating together if I can drag him away from his blue screen,’ Mouche said.

     
‘I’ve only got my one interlude with Joel to write up and now he’s skipped town just when we were on the verge of becoming epic.’

     
We both laughed as I continued writing in the original Boy-Rating Diary.

     
‘This should have come at the end,’
I wrote. ‘
I don’t care about gathering stupid treasure chest items anyway, I never really did.’

      
When it was Mouche’s turn to write up her chapter, she scribbled next to mine in pink fluoro;
‘big mistake Pheebs, always keep your eyes on the prize and remember the rules of the game.’

     
But what were they?

     
Mouche seemed to be changing them as we went along and sometimes I wondered if she was telling the whole truth. I saw her flirting with Ethan Mandel whole days before she ever mentioned it in the boy rating notes under ‘
Mouche’s Boys: (sub-heading) Boys I’ve kissed this year.
’ It was getting a little bit confusing, for sure.
  

    
Then I stuck in the note with Joel’s name on it and when I looked on the other side, where the tape met the paper, I noticed Joel had scrawled his number and his email,
just in case
, he wrote,
you’re in New York
.
 

Chapter 17

Perfume
    

   
We’d all arranged to gather the day after we received Teegan’s note. The Princesses waited for us in the park next to the mall near the picnic alcove opposite Sunrise High. It was as good a place as any, with a picturesque view of the town, not far from the lakes. In the distance you could see the gated community where Jet and Mark and the Princesses lived. The house of Mark’s relatives (he resided with his aunt and uncle) was famous for its secluded opulence; its tall, winding security fence. Instead of a duck pond, it was rumored his uncle, who was a wealthy businessman, had even installed a moat.

    
‘A moat, like in one of those old fairytales?’ Brooke asked Jet.

   
‘I guess,’ Jet told Brooke who told Teegan who told me.

   
‘I heard there are two swans that swim around in it all day and sometimes they disappear for minutes at a time under the drawbridge!’

    
‘The drawbridge?’

    
‘It hides the dark and eerie swampland that inhabits the backyard! It’s even rumoured that the actual house is haunted,’ Brooke said.

   
‘I bet it’s for security purposes,’ Freya added.

   
‘The rumor?’

   
‘No, the moat.’

   
The house (‘more like a mansion’, Mouche commented, the first time she saw it) was quite the most opulent in Sunrise. It was built high in the Sunrise Hills, about a half-hour drive from the cul-de-sac Mouche and I inhabited. Of course, Jet lived next door to Mark but his house wasn’t quite as lavish. Jet only had a pool and a tennis court but it was huge and grand and garish because his mother was a fashion designer and his dad a major shareholder of Sunrise Bank.

    
This possibly accounted for Jet’s elevated status in his own mind, according to Teegan.

    
The first meeting had begun.

    
It was the second last day of the week and we didn’t have rehearsals for
Rocco and Julie
so nobody was actively squabbling. Mouche arrived with the hem of a costume hanging out of her tote;
Teegan
was not far behind, talking on her cell with her notes jutting out of her antique jeans. Freya paused by the gate to check her lip gloss. Brooke turned up a few minutes later painting her fingernails and
 
Tory arrived...help us...with an open guide: the one we had discarded, the one Mouche and I loathed,
 
The Good Girl’s Guide to Behaving like a Man and Getting what you want.

    
Mouche looked worried, ‘Tory is not supposed to be seeking out her own subversive dating literature,’ she whispered to me under her breath.

    
Tory just smiled pleasantly and said, ‘I’m re-educating myself. I’ve seen what’s happening with you two and I want to be knowledgeable as well...’

   
Mouche leant over and said, ‘well, there’s no need for that, Tory. We’ve done the reading and we can tell you everything you need to know about our system...’

   
Teegan and Freya and Brooke and Tory all smiled and looked very relieved as we nibbled the delicious food in front of us.

    
A truce had been grudgingly entered into and we were all acting sisterly.

Freya even offered to help with the costumes and passed a skirt to Brooke who was attempting to gather a ruffle. Brooke held the hem and waited with baited breath on every word Mouche said. Mouche really had a way with monologues. When she spoke, people listened.

    
If we’d been of the generation that went to Girl Scouts when they were little, I’d say it was kind of like what I imagine a Girl Scout meeting to be like. Everyone brought something extra, apart from the obvious attitude; we brought extra food and extra smiles and extra humility to make the late afternoon seem more like a suburban picnic than a gossipy teenage girl fest.

    
Mouche brought cookies she’d baked the previous night; I offered muffins in a pink cake tin that I’d made with pink frosting and white chocolate; Teegan brought a bag of non-fat chips (‘because I don’t cook, my mother says it’s a waste of time, a woman needs to develop ‘real skills’) Tory laughed as she placed her basket of fruit on the table because she knew ‘real skills’ meant ‘other skills’ which meant ‘bedroom skills’.

   
Mouche
rolled her eyes because she was the chair of the meeting and it took a while for everyone to stop chatting.

   
Mouche began:

   
‘I’d like to announce that Tory (who raised her hand) will be taking the minutes of this official meeting between us; a group of girls now to be known officially as The ex-HSYLs. Freya will be responsible for passing out snacks. And I would ask everyone to be as polite as possible whilst attending our official meeting. After that, I guess, all bets are off.’

   
Brooke giggled. Tory chewed gum. Teegan rolled her eyes and Brooke searched for her misplaced contact lense and Bible just in case she needed to swear on something (in a good way). I’d noticed Brooke had become way more religious this week.

  
‘Firstly, I’d just like to say, Mouche and I have been forced to unleash upon our small society,
The Plan
. And since we’ve had more secret dates this month than you all have had hot dinners, the plan obviously works.

   
But we are not evil girls and since we are all pre-women the time has come to declare a truce and forget past wrongs all of us may have caused each other...’

    
Teegan and Brooke looked magnanimously at me and Mouche, but Mouche understood the importance of straight-talking in the sales pitch and continued on...

   
‘
The Plan
is essentially a secret and if you (
you
meaning Phoebe, Teegan, Freya, Brooke and Tory) tell anyone else, it will be less of a girls club and all out war. Besides, I have to warn you, our plan for dangerous dating is
so good
that if you tell anyone else, everyone will want to do it and there will be anarchy...’

    
Freya looked quite alarmed and Teegan mouthed,
‘what’s anarchy?
’

    
Brooke mouthed back with her cupie doll mouth,
‘chaos, famine, destruction, the end of the world, dummy...’