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

“Until I find out who is responsible,” Melissa ranted to her father, “how am I supposed to get a decent night’s sleep? Ever since the launch, that crook’s been all up in my
sub
conscious. Invading my dreams! It’s like she, he —
whoever
— has broken into my
head.
”

“Alright, alright, now hold up a minute.” Seedy fixed his daughter with his sternest you-better-calm-yourself stare. “Do you remember why, despite everything that happened, you decided,
contrary to expectation,
to go ahead and name your label
POSEUR
?”

“Because,” Melissa sighed. “It’s a message.”

“You remember that message?” Seedy asked. His daughter only shrugged, gently squeezing Emilio Poochie’s padded foot; hard, moon-shaped nails, painstakingly manicured in Chanel’s Blue Satin, protracted from the fuzzy ends of his toes. Her father believed naming the label
POSEUR
took away the word’s negative power (he called it “appropriating the language of the oppressor”). Still, despite her best efforts, she couldn’t
quite
let it go. “
POSEUR”
was maybe the worst thing someone could call you ever; it meant you weren’t who you were; it meant “you” was just an act. And (this is what
really
nagged) who among them
was
the
POSEUR
? If the perpetrator of this heinous crime meant to implicate all four of them, then he or she would have written
POSEURS
instead of
POSEUR
. . . right? Who among them was the target?

Was it her?

“The message
is,
” Seedy continued to lecture, happily under the impression she was hanging on his every word, “
insults won’t keep me down.
And as long as that message was heard — which
you know it was
— who cares about a little thing like ‘who did it,’ right? ‘Who did it’ is just secondary, unnecessary,
supererogatory
information!”

“Right,” Melissa dutifully replied. “I guess.”

Seedy kissed his daughter on the side of her Phytodefrisant-scented head and got to his feet, rolling his shaved head around his neck so it crackled. But as he shuffled toward the door, he heard her turn under her ironed sheets, releasing an extended, tragic sigh.
Oh man.
He winced.

Did she
have
to sound so sad?

“All that said,” he surrendered, and waited for his daughter to turn under her blankets and blink at him from her downy pink pillow. “If it’s real important to you . . . I could make some calls, you know. Try to figure this whole thing out.”

“Oh, Daddy!” she gasped, causing the ever-dozing Emilio to squinch his eyes open and flatten his ears. “Thank you! Thank you so much!”

The Girl: Janie Farrish

The Getup: Vintage navy-blue welt-pocket pants by Dickies, studded pink hipster belt from Jet Rag, and ladybug girl tank by babyGap.

Janie directed her cranky old black Volvo sedan, which she shared with her sixteen-year-old twin brother, Jake, toward their private high school’s entry, Winston Gate, which wasn’t so much a gate as a breezy peach-stucco Spanish Colonial archway, and tapped the gas, soliciting one of the many mysterious noises in the Volvo’s eclectic junk-heap repertoire: a frenetic clicking.

“Steady there, ol’ Bess,” Jake jokingly cooed, running a soothing hand along the car’s weathered black dashboard. “It’s gonna be
all right.
”

“Okay,
why
are you insane?” Janie bit the insides of her cheeks to keep from laughing, resuming what her mother liked to call “that simply
terrible, sullen
expression.” She shook her silky straight, brown, bobbed hair away from her lash-shadowed, soft gray eyes. “I mean, ol’ Bess? It’s a
car,
Jake. Not a cow.”

“What’s so cowy about ol’ Bess?” Jake asked, widening his dark brown eyes as if he were totally wounded. “Bess is a
beautiful
name,” he insisted, offering the dash a final, loving pat. “Isn’t it, Bessie girl?”

To their mutual shock, the stressed-to-the-max Volvo responded, not with a clicking noise, but with an actual, angry sounding
meeuuurrrrroooo.
One mutually stunned moment later, Jake and Janie turned to face each other, locked eyes, and promptly dissolved into laughter.

“It mooed!” Jake clenched his fists, his dark eyes bright with the miraculousness of it all. “It friggin’
mooed
!”

“Omigod,” Janie squeakingly gasped, her earlier restraint a distant memory. “It’s too perfect!”

With a final, offended
huff,
the abused Volvo crested the top of the drive, and Winston Prep’s campus, with its Spanish-tile rooftops, spiraling staircases, terracotta courtyards, and tiered fountains, glinted dauntingly into view. Janie eased on the brake, allowing the Volvo to coast downhill, so by the time they rolled into the student parking lot, it percolated contentedly as a coffeepot, barely audible above the outside racket. Teeming snarls of students in their Monday bests laughed and shrieked, hollering greetings above the heavy slam of luxury car trunks and doors, the buzzing thump of state-of-the-art speakers, and the staccato
pang-pang-pang!
of Marco Duvall’s league-regulation basketball — just a final few hoops before the bell,
a’ight
? Jake and Janie grew quiet, their former exuberance squelched by a painful, if familiar, self-consciousness. According to an unspoken rule (at Winston, there were many) this particular lot, “the Showroom,” was reserved for the most popular students. As Jake and Janie puttered toward lesser, underground parking — aka “the Cave” — they couldn’t resist a wistful backward glance at a particular parking space, currently unoccupied, under the dappled shade of a Winston willow. Hard to believe, but as early as the week before last, that spot had belonged to them.

“I hate myself,” Jake muttered, and squeezed his dark brown eyes shut, blocking the spectacle of his squandered past. Due to some epically drunk behavior at his sister’s Prada fashion thing the weekend before last, he’d somehow cheated on his supremely hot, now ex-girlfriend, Charlotte Beverwil, with a whatever eighth grader named Nikki Pepperoni (or something). The kiss was meaningless, as accidental as tripping — not that Charlotte cared. She’d dumped his ass like diarrhea.

“Don’t hate yourself,” Janie sighed as she cranked the wheel, winding the car into now the
third
level of this dank, subterranean wasteland.
I’ll do the hating for both of us.
Okay,
not
that she hated her brother (she could never
hate
him), but could she seriously pretend she wasn’t a
little
annoyed he’d so royally screwed things up? Breaking up with Charlotte meant so much more than just “breaking up with Charlotte”; it meant breaking up with
an entire Winston lifestyle.
Goodbye long lunches at Kate Mantellini, and lounging poolside at Charlotte’s sprawling Hollywood Hills estate; goodbye romantic rides down Sunset Boulevard in her mint-condition cream-colored 1969 Jaguar, and prestigious West Wall seats at Town Meetings; goodbye to Cartier clocks ticking! But of all her brother’s revoked privileges, Janie found his Showroom parking spot the most difficult to suck up and accept. After all, however indirectly, that parking place had belonged to
her.

They crammed into the elevator with a handful of fellow Nomanlanders, and one rumpled, coffee-reeking Winston faculty member, and pressed the glow-white button with the five-point star. Thirteen eternal seconds and one
bing!
later, they spilled into the terra-cotta-paved courtyard, blinking mole-ishly into the bleach white California glare. Jake and Janie were both on Accutane, a strong acne medication with bizarre side effects, for instance, trouble adjusting to changes in light. Janie re-squinted at their old parking space, now occupied by a glinting fire-engine red 911 Porsche, and sighed. That particular Porsche belonged to Evan Beverwil, Charlotte’s brutally handsome older brother, who Janie had disdainfully rechristened “Alan,” a term coined by her non Winston–attending best friend, Amelia Hernandez. “I mean,
Phantom Planet
?” she’d scoffed, referring to a sort of trendy band to which Amelia’s own band, the up-and-coming Creatures of Habit, had been recently compared in
LA Weekly.
“Those guys are total ALANS.” Off Janie’s blank look, she’d impatiently clarified: “All Looks And No Substance?”

Janie secretly disagreed with her best friend’s harsh take on Phantom Planet (they were good, okay?), but in the case of Evan Beverwil, she decided, the term totally applied.

Except . . .
she got to thinking, having advantageously positioned herself at the Showroom’s bustling periphery, the edge of her painted-black thumbnail firmly lodged between her teeth.
What if I’m wrong?
Evan leaned against his buffed Porsche fender, his almost-too-hot surfer-boy body aglow in the morning light, and frowned deeply into a beat-up paperback edition of
The Bell Jar,
one of Janie’s absolute favorite books.
Alans didn’t read books by suicidal feminist poets, did they?
She sighed, liberating her mutilated thumbnail as he dipped his godly chin, ran his hand through his longish dirty blond hair and absently licked his middle finger. He pushed the moistened digit to the lower right-hand corner of the page, so that it (along with Janie’s poor, baffled heart) arced up and flipped.

“Ironic,” Jake remarked, and she blushed, paranoid he’d somehow divined her innermost thoughts. As the blush subsided, she realized his comment didn’t refer to Evan, but to his car — or, more specifically, the classic Porsche emblem on the end of its glossy, sloping red hood. Against a shield backdrop, a silhouetted stallion kicked into the air, its sprightly mane like a flame.

“How is that ironic?” she asked.

“You know” — Jake shrugged with a tiny, defeated grin — “just that it’s a horse. And not a cow.”

“Oh,” Janie forced a laugh. “Yeah . . . how embarrassing for him.”

And then, as if to charitably save them from their lame joke, which only thinly masked their paralyzing envy, the bell rang.

The Girl: Charlotte Beverwil

The Getup: White fringed tweed strapless dress and black skinny-bow belt by Chanel, black suede ankle boots by Christian Louboutin, and aquamarine-white-and-black block print silk scarf by Lanvin.

Charlotte Beverwil pinched her aquamarine silk scarf at both ends, snapped it open, and guided its fluttering, floating descent to the assembly hall’s cool, brushed concrete floor. For this Monday’s school assembly, known to Winstonians as “Town Meeting,” she’d worn her brand-new fringed white tweed dress — emphasis on the
white
— and planned to keep it
pristine
(emphasis on the
priss
). Her two best friends, Kate Joliet and Laila Pikser, chattered on either side of her, brainstorming sexy Halloween costumes, their bright eyes all but bolted to identical MAC compacts. Charlotte planted her ballet-butt on the square of designer silk, her long legs folded and modestly angled to one side, and propped her posture-perfect back against the West Wall. At the cool yet rough touch of brick, a pleasurable shiver of triumph ran up and down her spine. A West Wall seat not only broadcasted popularity, but also popularity of the very best (in Charlotte’s humble opinion) type. West Wallers exuded elegance, culture, sophistication; they were classically beautiful, they were beautifully bored; and among these refined urbanites it was she, five-feet-two-inch-tall Charlotte Beverwil, who reigned supreme.

(Okay, technically Adelaide Dallas reigned supreme. But
only
because she was a senior.)

Two hundred and fifty plus students, grades seven through twelve, were already seated on the brushed concrete floor, buzz-ing like worker bees on a slab of honeycomb. Charlotte fluttered her starry black eyelashes and scanned the expanding swarm, her chlorine-green eyes alert for signs of her latest little project: Jules Maxwell-Langeais. Illegitimate son to French playboy racecar driver Marcel-Antoine Langeais and eccentric British socialite Minnie Maxwell, founder of luxury candle and fragrance chain “Minnie Maxwell, London,” Jules’s arrival to Winston had been the hot topic of Showroom gossip for weeks. Sadly, Charlotte had been far too wrapped up in Jake Farrish to pay attention.

Good thing
that
was over.

Okay, not that it
was
over. Not completely. Jake had been the first boy to weasel his way into her heart since Daniel Todd, the Australian fashion photographer to whom she’d lost her sacred virginity in Paris last spring. She’d feared her return to L.A. might tear them apart, but passionate Daniel had calmed her anxiety, dismissing their rupture as “mere geography.” He promised to call, to write . . . or else throw his camera into the sea and never take photographs again (their
adieus
had been thrillingly tortured). But to Charlotte’s anguished disbelief, he never contacted her again. As for throwing his camera into the Atlantic, well . . . a recent photo spread in French
Vogue
suggested otherwise. Unless the subject of his shoot — a vacant eyed, pucker-mouthed, floaty-looking model named Kinga — was
actually
a rare species of fish, Charlotte could safely assume Daniel Todd’s Nikon D300 was
not
underwater.