Poseur #2: The Good, the Fab and the Ugly (16 page)

“You want to make this bag out of stained silk.” Melissa bugged her eyes in disbelief. “
Stained.
For real.”

“I don’t see the problem.” Charlotte folded her arms and knit her porcelain brow.

Melissa flew her hands to the crown of her head and began to pace, stomping to an abrupt stop. The spiky heel of her silver Isabella Fiore boot ground into the gray-blue rug. “Who in their
right
mind is going to want to buy a handbag — a
new
handbag — that
already has stains on it
?!”

Charlotte inhaled, bracing herself for combat, but just as she opened her acid mouth, Petra joined them at the board and interjected.

“I can’t
believe
this,” she reprimanded, fixing Melissa with a reproving stare. “You’re seriously upset about a little stain?”

“
Thank
you,” Charlotte exhaled, but Petra rewarded her gratitude with a scathing glance.

“Do you have any idea” — she trembled — “where silk even
comes
from?”

Charlotte fluttered her eyes shut and sighed — already bored.

“For every gram of silk . . .” Petra pinched her fingers and squinted her eyes like a jeweler. “For every single
gram,
fifteen silkworms are killed!” She paused for effect.
“Boiled alive in their cocoons.”

“Petra.” Charlotte couldn’t hide a bemused smile. “Forgive me, but . . . they’re
worms.
”

“Seriously, Petra.” Melissa folded her arms and shook her head. “What are you gonna do if you get a tapeworm? Give it a name and throw it a Frisbee?”

“That’s different.” Petra glowered. “Silkworms aren’t hurting anyone.”

“Hey, look.” Melissa raised her hands in surrender. “I’m on your side, alright? You don’t want silk. I sure as hell don’t want stains. Charlotte?” She removed Charlotte’s sketch from the bulletin board and, in her best Heidi Klum accent, pronounced:
“Yer owt.”

“
I’m
out,” Charlotte ruffled like a tiny owl. “What about you?”

“Well,
my
bag is canvas. So unless there’s some
canvas
worm I haven’t heard about . . .”

“Mm . . . no.” Charlotte smiled with wincing contempt. “But there’s something called a tasteless,
tacky
worm? And by the looks of this bag” — she gazed at Melissa’s design, pressing her fingers to her throat — “no life was spared.”

“Did you . . .” Melissa held up a hand and squeezed her eyes shut. “Did you just call my Trick-or-Treater
tacky
?” Charlotte clasped her hands into a steeple and pressed them to her chin.

“Yes.”

“I can’t
believe
this!”

“Oh come
on,
Melissa.” Charlotte planted her hands on her hips. “It’s one thing to put ‘
POSEUR
’ on every available inch of space,
and
in more colors than a Benetton ad — but on top of that,” she added, perusing the drawing a second time, “
gold
zippers,
gold
chains,
studding,
charms,
and
that hideous
gold clasp
?” She paused. “It’s like 50 Cent’s
chest
with a
shoulder
strap!”

This time, Petra stifled the laugh, and Melissa whirled around, setting her jaw. “You
agree
with her?” Petra hesitated as, behind her, Charlotte discreetly removed the tacks from Melissa’s drawing. The paper curled, flopped forward . . .

“It
is
a little much,” she admitted.

The paper slipped along the wall and smacked to the floor.
“Whoops!”
Charlotte smirked, still pinching the final tack between her fingers.

Melissa swept her design from the floor and pressed it to her hip. “Just so you know” — her dark eyes flashed — “you’re siding with someone who decorated
her
bag with
gravel
!”

“Oh, she did not,” Charlotte laughed, sidestepping to examine Petra’s design. Within half a second, the laughter died on her lips. “Oh.”

“What?” Petra defensively folded her arms.

“What do you mean ‘what’?” Melissa scoffed. “You realize there’s a difference between
runway
and
driveway,
right?”

“She’s kind of got a point, JLo.” Charlotte locked eyes with Petra and cringed. “The rocks that you got? They’re kind of just
rocks.
”

“I
know
they’re
kind of just rocks,
” Petra imitated her. “That’s the whole
point.
”

“Okay,
that
point? Is crazy,” Melissa informed her.

“Oh, is it?” Petra flushed, leaping to her feet. Inside the recycling bin, a glass bottle shifted with a fragile-sounding
chink.
“How is decorating my bag with stones any less crazy than decorating yours with gold? Who’s to say gold is any more valuable or . . . or
worthy
than any other random rock you happen to pick up?” Her tea-green eyes filled to the brim and wavered, glassy and bright. “What
idiot
decided that gold, or diamonds, or
pearls,
or any of that crap is worth
anything at all
?!”

At that, she stormed from the room, nearly colliding with a stunned Janie, who stood clutching an assortment of candy bars, a bottle of iced Peach Oolong tea, and a half-eaten bag of Potato Flyers. She staggered backward as Petra squeezed past her, tearing down the corridor, the cheerful jingle of her gypsy belt in contrast to the dramatic sound of sobbing.

“What
happened?
” Janie gasped, spewing potato flecks.

“Nothing!” Charlotte and Melissa chanted in unison.

“But . . .” Janie’s eyes darted toward the door.

“Look,” Melissa snapped. “None of the designs work, okay? End of story.”

“
None
of them?” Janie’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “What do you mean?”

“Apparently,” Melissa huffed, as if never in her life had she had to say something so absurd: “My Trick-or-Treater is
tacky.
”

“And mine” — Charlotte bobbed into a sarcastic curtsy — “is
worm genocide.
”

“Right.” Janie swallowed, sucking the salt off her finger. She noticed neither of them so much as
considered
her design, which remained on her desk exactly where she’d left it — ignored. She figured now was not the time to bring it up. The tension in the room was so thick, you could cut it with a knife. Or maybe dip it with a chip? (Her mouth watered at the thought.)

“The Hallow-Winston Carnival is now in
two
days.” Melissa expanded her hands on either side of her frustrated face. “And I have worked very hard to have promotion ready. I do not want to promote something that’s just not going to happen, you hear me?”

“Okay, listen,” Janie attempted to calm her down. “I’m sure if we just take a moment to think this over, we can come up with a . . .”

The bell rang its hysterical interruption, and all along the hall, doors swung open, striking the walls in a succession of hollow thuds:
boom-boom-boom-boom-ba-ba-boom.
After a second of silence, a clamor of voices rose up and swelled, surging the corridor like water.

And so before Janie could say “compromise,” Melissa and Charlotte were swept up by the tide.

Hallow-Winston Thursday had arrived at last, and — thanks to the united efforts of the Student Council — the Showroom had completed its transformation from a glossy parking lot to a hay-choked, peanut shell–infested, soon-to-be bass-thumping carnival ground. Among other things, this meant those popular students whose daily right it was to park in the Showroom were forced to park underground, with — as they so charitably phrased it — “the rest of the cave dwellers.” Their exodus forced a certain segment of said cave dwellers from their allotted spots, which in turn forced a
second
segment of cave dwellers from
their
allotted spots, until, at last, there came that pathetic last segment of cave dwellers with no place to park at all. Among this sad sector, yellow parking passes were distributed, entitling them to reserved spaces at the Yum-Yum Donuts down the street. As they lugged their bulging backpacks the three-and-a-half blocks from Yum-Yum to campus, their superiors zipped by in Audis, Porsches, Range Rovers, and BMWs, and assailed their poor sensitive ears with explosive honks, cackling laughter, and howlingly expressive
WhoooOOOOO
’s.

If you’d asked him last year, Jake would have said his future on Donut Trail was guaranteed, and perhaps it would have been, if not for Charlotte’s sudden and frankly discomfiting interest in his sister. To his and Janie’s mutual relief, they got a spot underground, on the
top
level even, their banged-up sedan sweetly slotted between Bronwyn Spencer’s dark red Porsche Cayenne and Marco Duvall’s ridiculously tricked-out black Escalade. Their SUVs were ginormous, bulging well over their respective double yellow lines, and forced him and Janie to
squeeze
from their cracked car doors, suck in their stomachs, and shimmy their respective ways to freedom.

It had been a small price to pay.

“Jake,” Janie called after her brother, who, as usual, refused to wait for her. “Elevator’s this way?” She gestured to the stainless steel double-doors, only a few feet away from the car.

“I’ll take the stairs,” he explained as the elevator clicked into place, sounding its customary
bing!
Janie watched her brother steam ahead and sighed. He’d been taking the stairs all week, and she had yet to understand why.

It was weird. Jake used to confide in her about everything.

“Where is he?” the bespectacled Tyler Brock asked as she squeezed into the crammed six-by-six-foot cube of space. She shrugged, and he tilted outside, stopping the doors jarring
kuh-klunk. “Dude,”
he called to Jake’s retreating flannel-clad back. “Elevator!”

Jake’s already hunched shoulders tensed, but he ignored his friend and continued to walk.

“Come on, dude!” Tyler persisted while his fellow passengers groaned with impatience. “Don’t deprive me of my one pleasure in life.
Please
?”

“Man,” Jake sighed a few seconds later as the elevator doors glided shut. He glanced at Tyler and shook his head. “Aren’t you sick of this yet?”

The grinning Tyler caressed his scraggly excuse for a goatee, and shook his head while a thoroughly mystified Janie looked on. “
What
are you guys talking about?”

“Dude feeds off my misery,” Jake ruefully explained under his breath. The doors sighed to a stop and shuddered open, depositing its passengers into the thick of Locker Jungle. Because upper classmen stored their stuff in their cars, Locker Jungle was a seventh, eighth, and ninth-grade stomping ground. They buzzed around and cackled, oblivious to outsiders — that is, until they spotted her brother. In that moment, Janie noticed, their eyes, like,
glinted
— like yellow-eyed bats in a dimly lit attic.

“Get ready,” Tyler warned as a redheaded eighth grader stepped boldly forward.

“Hijake!” she cheeped, alerting the rest of her glittery-eyed comrades. Jake lifted his hand in greeting, and they dissolved into fits of shrieks and chirping:

“Hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!hijake!”

“Make it stop!” Tyler swiped the air around his head and shrunk to his knees, screaming, while Janie spun around, hiding her laughter in her hands. “For the love of all that is holy, make it
stop
!”

Jake smiled, always happy to amuse — even at the expense of his own dignity. Ever since he’d made out with that girl Nikki, he’d become something of a cult figure among seventh- and eighth-grade girls, most of whom were desperate kissing virgins, and
all
of whom seemed to be thinking,
if he did it with her, would he do it with me?
Jake took the stairs to avoid them, but mostly to avoid Nikki, who — even though he hadn’t responded once — had continued to text-stalk him for, like,
two weeks.
The first thing he did when she came back to school was take her aside and explain, in as kind a manner as possible, she needed to
back the hell off.
The thing was, she
did,
and, after an initial wave of relief, he felt guilty.
Really
guilty. More and more, he let Tyler bully him into these trips to Locker Jungle in hopes that he’d run into her, and, if not apologize, at least, you know. Say hey.

Just so she wouldn’t think he hated her.

“You’re going to the carnival, right?” Janie asked him, once Tyler and the cheeping bats dispersed for the rafters.

“Where else would I be?” Jake frowned, rising on the scuffed toes of his Converse. He glanced around, scanning the aisles.

“I don’t know,” Janie mused. “Ditching?”

Jake scowled, falling back on his heels. “Would you just, like, let that die?”

Janie cocked an eyebrow. “Just promise you’ll come to the
POSEUR
booth.” She shifted her brown canvas Manhattan Portage tote to her hip, digging through it. “My shift is two ’til three.”

“Sure,” Jake absently replied, back to scanning the lockers. Of course, now that he was looking for her, Nikki was never around.

Where could she be hiding?

The Girl: Molly Berger

The Getup: Oversized black-and-white MC Escher T-shirt from the MOMA gift shop, purple cotton leggings from the Gap, and orange Crocs (with nifty frog-charm gibbets).

Some people could disappear and nobody ever noticed. Eighth grader Molly Berger was one of these people. She was the kind of person who blessed herself when she sneezed. She walked on the balls of her feet, her posture disconcertingly erect, craning her long neck like a leaf-seeking dinosaur. Her vocabulary gravitated toward old lady words, like “prudent,” “sensitive,” and “fragile,” which may have explained her devotion to delicate and useless things, like sea dollars, decorative bath soaps, antique thimbles, and maple-syrup candies shaped like Amish women. Choosing one of her crushable collections to bring to school, she’d arrange the items about her during lunch, sitting on the desolate cement stoop outside the computer lab. In keeping with Longstanding Dork Tradition, she always ate alone.