Poseur #2: The Good, the Fab and the Ugly (3 page)

As painful as the Daniel episode had been, the Jake Farrish fallout was a million times worse. She actually had to
see
him, five
excruciating
days a week, with his obnoxiously caressable dark brown hair, and his heartbreakingly familiar laugh.
Uccchh!
That he
dared
to laugh
at all
! Did he
not
realize he had cheated on her and they were living in a post-laughter world? Unless, of course, you counted the fact that she, the revered and ravishing daughter of Hollywood Royalty, had ever
deigned
to date him, the lowly and (until
very
recently) pimpled, pony-tailed spawn of Valley Village Peasantage. Even in a post-laughter world,
that
remained hilarious.

She attempted to recover in the usual ways — spa days at Pore House, shopping sprees at Ted Pelligan, fizzy peach cocktails at Chateau Marmont — but then she’d spot Jake in line at the food truck (that he
dared
to have an appetite!), and a week’s worth of pampering — down the drain. By the time Monday rolled around, there was only one sensible, mature way to proceed . . .

Revenge.

She could give him a taste of his own medicine, she decided. Let him stew in his own rancid juices. As her bosom friend and neighbor, Don John, advised in his cheerful Texas twang: “nothing goes down harder than a good, old-fashioned Jealousy Julep. No sugar, straight up . . . and honey, make sure that cup is
chilled.
”

“Enfin,”
she gasped in French, springing her back from the West Wall. Having fixed her chlorine-green eyes on her target, she clutched Kate’s bony knee with one hand, and shot the other into the air. “Jules!” she sang, fluttering her pearlescent fingertips. “Jules, over here!”

“Oh my God.” Kate lowered her powder puff in shock and smoothed the immaculate fingerwaves in her platinum pixie cut behind her Jo Malone orange blossom-scented ear. “You
know
him?”

“Not yet,” Charlotte trilled, as Jules, with a confused-yet-pleased expression on his face, carved a path through the floor-seated crowd, heading toward her while tying his wavy-ish black hair into a neat ponytail at the nape of his deeply tanned neck. Charlotte decided he was the spitting image of Orlando Bloom in
Pirates of the Caribbean
—
if
you could ignore the Eurotrash-tight Rock & Republic jeans. She smiled. With his transcontinental accent, moneyed lineage, acid-green Ferrari, and guy-in-a-Folgers-ad stubble, Jules exuded everything Jake did not. And nothing rankles an ex more than moving on to his or her direct opposite. It’s like saying: all those things I found oh-so-attractive about you?
Turns out I was lying.

“Charlotte!” Laila cheeped in high alarm. A swooping wave of copper hair concealed her right blue eye, leaving the other to bug out for the both of them. “He’s a
senior.
”

“
Mon dieu,
you have to be kidding.” Charlotte beamed through her dear friend’s complete idiocy. “Wasn’t the guy you hooked up with at Villa, like, twenty-three?”

“Yeah, but he didn’t go to this school!”

“Um . . . congratulations.” Charlotte crumpled her porcelain brow. “You made zero dollars and no sense.”

“Seriously, Lie.” Kate clapped her compact shut, dropped it into her Tory Burch floral-print ballet tote, and sighed. “Don’t be a leotard.”

Charlotte giggled, rewarding her friend with a quick kiss on her freshly powdered cheek. “Listen” — she lingered, whispering into her tiny silver Me&Ro hoops — “do me
une petit faveur
and tell Janie Farrish she should sit with us.”

“What?” Kate wrenched away with abject disbelief, her NARS lip-lacquered mouth agog.
“Why?”

“Just do it,”
she hissed, before quickly tilting her face, fixing the full light of her attention on Jules; he had arrived, finally, in the grand tradition of most Winston boys . . .

At her feet.

“Okay, everyone!” Glen Morrison gently leaned his buttercup-yellow guitar against the North Wall, tucked his wiry gray bangs behind his ears, and surveyed the boisterous student audience at his Jesus-sandaled feet. In addition to chairing Winston’s estimable Social Studies Department and founding their bongo-therapy elective, Glen also found the energy to conduct the bi-weekly Town Meeting. As the babbling horde continued to ignore him, he clasped his hands and chuckled, shaking his shaggy head — the absolute image of parental indulgence. But behind his mild-mannered smile and crinkly brown eyes, there was a glow, a near-imperceptible pinpoint of hellfire.

Unless they shut up soon, he’d seriously lose his mind.

“We have a
lot
to take care of today, people! So please, settle down and take it down a notch, or two . . . or
three.
” The hot light in his eye dimmed at the same rate the volume decreased. At long last: peace. “Thank you!” he exhaled. “Welcome to the first Town Meeting of October. As you know, October culminates with one of Winston’s oldest and most anticipated events of the year: The Happy Hallow-Winston Carnival!”

The student body erupted into a round of whoops and hollers, and Glen straightened his posture, beaming. (He didn’t mind outbursts of enthusiasm when he was directly responsible.) The Hallow-Winston Carnival served as a “fun way” to raise funds for ongoing Winston improvements: last year the board agreed to establish Doggie Day Care (Melissa Moon being their most impassioned and vocal advocate), and this year they hoped to install state-of-the-art cedar wood saunas for the respective boys’ and girls’ locker rooms. Not to say the piffling two-thousand-something dollars raised from an annual sale of pumpkin cookies, carnival rides, and raffle tickets could possibly cover one of their extravagant construction projects. But they could pretend, right? The Monday following the festival, Bronwyn Spencer would stand up at Town Meeting and say,
thanks to everyone’s participation, our saunas are a go!
She’d clap her hands like a bored flamenco dancer while the good people of Winston hollered and cheered, congratulating each other for a
job well done.

The following day their parents would mail in their checks.

But back to the present. While Glen blathered on about carnivals past and pending, Evan Beverwil seized his moment. Abandoning his seat at the Back Wall, he boldly clambered forward into the great uncharted masses. He tapped a few unsuspecting shoulders, muttering his polite excuse-me’s, but all they could do was turn around and stare, identical masks of confusion on their faces. Peering eyes followed his journey into the crowd with wonder and vague concern. What was he doing? Who in their right minds left a coveted seat along the wall to sit here, with
them,
in No Man’s Land?

He was like one of those poor whales that become disoriented and, like, beach themselves.

Oblivious to the silent tumult he’d caused, Evan planted his manly palm on a square vacancy of floor and settled into his new seat. Jake Farrish held his breath, the color draining from his boyish face, and forced a sideways glance. Evan trained his blue-green eyes on Glen, of course, but of his purpose Jake had little doubt: the day of reckoning had arrived. Jake had broken his little sister’s heart, and Evan was here to kick some ass.

“Halloween may be about terror,” Glen pontificated. “But it’s also about
togetherness.
About ghosts . . . but also about spirit.
School
spirit!”

He braced for a second round of applause, but was met with a wall of silence. Jake watched Evan’s strong tanned fingers drum the brushed concrete floor.

“Alright,” Glen surrendered. “More on that later. Our special studies director, Miss Paletsky, has a few quick announcements . . . Miss Paletsky?”

As their cute (but in desperate need of a makeover) twenty-eight-year-old teacher shyly approached the mic, Evan flexed his mighty hand, releasing a series of menacing crackles and snaps. Jake clamped his eyes shut. He wasn’t seriously supposed to just sit here and, like,
take
this, was he?

“Listen dude,” he muttered under his breath. “Do you wanna say something? Or did you just come here to show off your knuckle-cracking skills?”

Evan faced him with a blank stare.

“Because if it’s the latter, man, I give you a ten. Okay?”

Evan scratched the sandy, golden stubble at his jaw, waiting out a wave of mild applause as Miss Paletsky bobbed into a little bow, heading back to her seat. He cleared his throat, frowning at the rubbery toe of his navy flip-flop. “Um” — his blue-green eyes flicked up to meet Jake’s — “is it true Janie’s into that book, um . . .
The Bug Jar,
or whatever?”

“What?” Jake crumpled with relief. Then again, he really wasn’t in the mood to talk about Janie. She’d totally abandoned him to sit at the West Wall, which practically declared to the whole world that, yes,
she’d taken sides:
Charlotte was right and he, Jake, was wrong. In other words, she’d
publicly denounced
him — and for what? The cheap and ephemeral thrill of vicarious popularity? Could anyone be so pathetic?

Never mind he’d done the exact same thing to her last month.

And now, to make matters a million times worse, here was Evan Beverwil, politely inquiring into her reading habits. The dude could probably justify scalping Jake with a math compass, and yet he’d elected to just
sit
here, like, “being nice.” Jake’s relief subsided, making room for a slew of unsettling questions. Had his social status so dramatically nose-dived as to disqualify him from even the
smallest
act of vengeance? Or, perhaps, was Evan’s present indifference an act of revenge in and of itself, as if to say: “Dude, I
hardly
need to punish you. Just
being
you is punishment enough.”

“I guess she likes that book, okay,” Jake begrudgingly replied at last. “Why?”

Evan shrugged, looking briefly pensive. “It’s just, I was wondering if there was another book she liked? Because that one is kind of, like, weird.”

“I don’t get it.” Jake’s eyebrows collided. “You only read books my sister likes?”

“Uh
. . .
” Evan’s pool-blue eyes stared, fixed on nothing, the black pupils afloat like tiny bobbing tops. “It’s for an assignment,” he replied, blinking at last.

“
Holler,
people!” Glen obligingly stepped aside as a white-glitter-tanked Melissa Moon leaned into the microphone, whipping her audience into insta-frenzy. She raised her toasted-almond brown arm and swiveled her platinum belly-chained hips, grooving to the beat of their applause. “Thank you. Just wanted y’all to know that our mystery label winner has yet to step forward and claim his or her prize. So, if any of y’all know
anything . . .
”

“You know what book she
really
likes?” Jake blurted under his breath, deciding to reward Evan’s insultingly nice behavior with the most intensely vagina book he could think of, something that would make the feministy
Bell Jar
read like an issue of
Sports Illustrated.
He repressed a triumphant smile.
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
In fourth grade, he’d picked it up, mistaking it for a companion piece to
Super Fudge
(both books are by Judy Blume, okay?), and got about ten pages in when the word
period
blazed from the page, and blinded him like a nuclear flash.

“Cool,” Evan replied, scrawling the title on the back of his hand with a black razor-point pen. Jake rolled his eyes. No
way
was he going to read that shit. He’d have to be in love with Janie to get halfway through it. “Thanks,” Evan murmured, click-closing his pen. “I appreciate it.”

“No problem,” Jake muttered, bumping Evan’s fist. The student body dissolved into another round of applause.

Town Meeting was officially dismissed.

Just as it’s near impossible to spot the one missing bead on a Swarovski crystal-beaded Christian Lacroix couture gown, student absences at Town Meeting typically passed by undetected. The most focused glance, for example, would not reveal the non-appearance of seventh grader Teddy Raisin (home in bed, glued to
General Hospital,
and stealthily tapping a thermometer to a lightbulb) or junior Bronwyn Spencer (locked in a bathroom stall, wailing into her cell, because anything less than an A in Chem and she could kiss her chances at Princeton — not to mention life — goodbye), or sophomore Tyler Brock (deep in the musty depths of the gym-equipment closet, plundering Coach Hollander’s cherished stash of Haribo gummy bears). And then, of course, there was eighth grader Nikki Pellegrini, home sick in bed, because unlike oblivious little Teddy Raisin,
she
didn’t have to
watch
soap operas for
her
daily dose of drama . . .

All
she
had to do was wake up.

The weekend before last, she’d kissed the love of her life, Jake Farrish, which
should
have been heaven, except he had a girlfriend, and that girlfriend happened to be Charlotte Beverwil, which meant heaven really had nothing to do with her situation. To put it simply:

She was in hell.

Charlotte was one of, if not
the
most, popular girls at Winston Prep — the kind of girl other girls looked to for inspiration: a style icon, a muse, a
tastemaker.
When she reinterpreted a pink leather crystal-studded Louis Vuitton dog collar as a bracelet, one in seven Winston Girls imitated the same look by the following week. When she dismissed Wayfarers (the retro-eighties sunglasses favored by sulky Starbucks-toting starlets) as “Way
overs,
” she practically precipitated a schoolwide “Ban on Ray-Ban.”

Charlotte decided what was in. Charlotte decided what was out. And (as poor Nikki was soon to discover) her influence hardly stopped at accessories.

Nikki logged on to her MySpace account to assess the ongoing collateral damage. As of yesterday, she’d suffered a few deleted friendships, a bitchy comment or two. But they’d proved mere foreshocks to the massive quake to come. In less than thirteen hours, a total of one hundred and ninety-four friends had dropped from her four hundred and fifty-one-person network. Far worse, someone had hacked into her account and
edited her actual profile.
Goodbye, Nikki Pellegrini, fourteen years old, from Hancock Park, California. She was now “Icki Prostitutti,” general interests: “macking on your boyfriend,” “spreading herpes,” and “being a big-ass bitch.”