Poseur #3: Petty in Pink: A Trend Set Novel (13 page)

You know.

And
that’s
when she started to freak.

Looking up from the floor, she met his mismatched gaze and swallowed a hard knot of dread. If he liked her, like,
truly
liked her, shouldn’t he have asked her out by now? And by out, she didn’t mean something cheesy, like dinner and a movie
or whatever. She just mean
out
. Like, outside the playhouse. Like, in daylight. Like, in public. It was weird—not feeling comfortable telling anyone about
them yet. If what they had was real, then—whatever happened to the real world?

“What is it?” He wrenched her from her thoughts, toying with the silver-hoop piercing on his eyebrow. He was still sitting
next to her on the kitchen floor, looking at her, but all she could do was stare at the space between her naked thighs, unable
to look back.

“Nothing, it’s just…” Her voice trembled.
Say it,
she chanted.
Say it
. “Poseur’s kind of blowing up,” she crumbled. “I don’t know.”

“Oh…” He puckered his mouth in thought, drawing attention to the hairline scar on his full upper lip. “That’s what you’re
thinking about?”

“It’s just we might sign a contract,” she blurted, attempting to snuff the memory of her cowardice. “And it’s a lot more work
than I signed up for, you know? Like, this was supposed to be a
class
, okay? Not a
career
choice. And now there’s this, like, promotion thing we have to do at Melissa’s dad’s engagement party. I mean, the dude wears
eight
kinds of fur
per
music video, refers to women as
bitches
and
hos
, raps about
murdering
his ex-wife,
and
he’s making everyone who comes to his party?
Wear pink
.”

“Ugh.” Paul widened his eyes. “Fascist.”

“You don’t even know,” she continued to lament. “Melissa told me Vivien, her dad’s fiancée? Is dying her
pubes
pink.” She sniffed with scorn. “What’s left of them, anyway.”

“So.” Paul looked up from his foot and traced a small circle on her inner wrist. “We going?”

“I mean,” she continued to rant. “Do you even realize how backward and evil and, and…” She halted, registered his question,
and blinked, startled. “What?”

He shrugged. “I just think you should go.”

“But,” she backpedaled. Was he saying what she thought he was saying? In the corner of the window, the crescent moon resembled
a glowing chewed-off fingernail. “You… you want to go with me?”

“Oh.” He hesitated, sucking the piercing in his lower lip. “Yeah, I mean… unless you think that’d be…”

“No,” she interrupted, flushing with pleasure. “I mean… no.”

“It could be like, anthropological.” He looked down, rubbing his hands together. “We’ll observe the natives in their natural
habitat. You know, like…”

She shut him up with a kiss. “What?”

“Nothing,” he whispered, pulling her back for another. He wasn’t sure why they’d stopped kissing, and he wasn’t sure why they’d
started up again. But he guessed it had something to do with saying
anthropological.

As far as words went, it was pretty kickass.

The Girl: Nikki Pellegrini

The Getup: White skinny jeans by J-Brand, bright blue spandex tube top by Baby Phat, bronze leather brass-studded platform
sandals by D&G, and spanking brand-new identity by Melissa Moon

“Nicoletta!” Nikki Pellegrini’s ancient Italian grandmother, Nikki the First, gripped the stippled white-leather wheel of
her metallic gold 1981 Cadillac DeVille, her withered powder-crumbling face contorted with concentration. “Remember,” she
warned, adjusting her oversize rose-tinted Sophia Lauren sunglasses. “You are my eyes—you are watching the road?”

“Uh-huh.” Glancing up from the Sanrio Chococat organizer on her lap (her first official purchase as the Poseur intern), her
fourteen-year-old flaxen-haired granddaughter focused on the morning-sunlit palm tree–lined boulevard. In the past four minutes,
they’d traveled at most three city blocks, putting their speed at roughly seven miles per hour. Judging by Nonna’s ecstatic
expression, however, you’d think they were going a hundred seventeen off the edge of the Grand Canyon.

“Stop sign,” sighed Nikki.

“What?” Her tiny grandmother craned above the Cadillac’s expansive dash and squinted.

“Stop sign,” she repeated. “Stop sign
stop
!”

Her grandmother slammed on the brakes, jutting the Cadillac’s gigantic chrome grill a good four feet into the busy Beverly
Hills intersection. An angry platinum BMW sailed by, horn blaring. “Yes, yes.” Nonna shook her head. “He has to honk, so what
does he do? He honks.”

“Uh-huh,” agreed Nikki, returning her cornflower blue eyes to her vinyl planner. With a Paparazzi Pink fingernail pinned to
the lower left-hand corner of the page, she dug her pink metallic Nokia phone out of her papier print LeSportsac handbag,
flipped it open, and dialed. “Beverly Hills,” she chirped, holding the phone horizontally to her mouth and then quickly lifting
it to her ear—the way she’d seen Melissa do it. Feeling Nonna’s eyes on her, she cleared her throat. “Mariposa Restaurant,”
she requested, attempting a more professional tone. “Hello, yes, I’d like to make a reservation, please? The name?” She smiled
with pride. “Melissa Moon.”

Nonna bobbed her painted copper eyebrows. “What kind of name is this? Melissa Moon. Is she a person, or a thing hanging in
the sky?”

Nikki raised her hand, indicating her grandmother should wait a moment. “Sorry, what?” she spoke into the phone. “Oh, twelve
thirty. Yes. Table for five?”

Narrowing her watery blue eyes and sinking a size five powder blue suede Ferragamo bootie into the gas, Nonna slowly, slowly
cranked the wheel. Over the past few weeks, this Melissa Moon had become the center of her Nikki’s universe, replacing all
other passions: the boys, the friends, the schoolwork… even the My Space. At first, of course, she had been relieved—not so
long ago, her dearest granddaughter had been shunned at school—much like Agostina Maria Bagni, the quiet, long-faced daughter
of Pupi, the village goatherd, had been shunned, now many years ago. Agostina was rumored to stuff her pockets with goats’
droppings;
if you talk to her,
her classmates had warned,
she will throw them at your face and curse you
. In the end, the only thing Agostina ever threw,
la bambina tragica,
was herself; it was Nonna’s young friend, the dashing and wild-haired Innocenzo Spallanzani, who found her, dashed upon the
cold, wet rocks in the misty ravine. At the funeral he whisperingly confessed to Nonna that he’d looked into the dead girl’s
pockets.

They had been filled with rosaries.

If Nicoletta should suffer such a fate,
she confided to her friends on the long-distance telephone, dabbing her watery blue eyes with a crumpled Kleenex,
I will not go on. I will not.
After all,
she
was responsible. What was her granddaughter’s suffering if not
a message from God
, the inevitable reprisal for Agostina’s suicide, a sin in which Nonna and her classmates had played their part? Every morning
and night, she prays to Maria to intervene. The sin is
hers
, not little Nikki’s. And then,
blessed be the mother of God,
her granddaughter discovers evidence of her innocence in an art project, is exonerated, the Moon girl gives her a job, and
she is happy again, full of purpose, and up,
up
.

If only the change had ended there. Unfortunately, in addition to a transformation in Nicoletta’s
mood
came a transformation in her
moda
. Or, as her granddaughter liked to put it, her
fashion sense
.

What could be more ridiculous?
the old woman pondered, braking for a cat (a green plastic bag) darting across the road. A round of frustrated honks exploded
at her rear, followed by a series of whip-whipping cars, drivers glaring out their windows like rabid raccoons. She ignored
them, preferring to appraise her granddaughter’s current outfit.
If this is what young people call fashion—
she allowed a meditative, arthritic shrug—
then it is the
end
of sense
.

But some say tomato, some say to-
ghetto
—and when it came to the latter pronunciation, Nikki was
all about it
. Gone were the knee-length pleated skirts, matching pastel cashmere sweater sets, and Capezio ballet flats selected with
loving authority by her grandmother, and in their place, a pair of white-hot J Brand skinny jeans, a bright blue spandex tube
top, and a pair of brass-studded, bronze leather platform sandals. Her customary gold cross, inherited from her late mother,
God rest her soul, glinted desperately behind a barricade of gold chain necklaces. Her flaxen blond hair, once accustomed
to freshly washed ponies and braids, had been plastered down with Bumble and Bumble Sumo Wax, scraped back into a swirling,
braided “side bun” and set with Frédéric Fekkai spray-on hair crystals. Across Nikki’s head, like the tracks of a tiny, precise
skier, a pale white part zigzagged to her blond hairline. Melissa was contemplating the hairstyle for herself, but before
she
committed
, she explained, the look had to be “tasted.” “You heard of a royal food taster, right? Well, as Poseur’s intern, you get
to be our royal
taste
taster. If the look sizzles
, I
get the credit. But if it
fizzles
, girl… you got to down that poison by
yourself
. Take one for the Queen, know what I’m sayin’?”

Another girl might have thought Melissa Moon was full-on full of herself. But not Nikki. When everyone in school—including
Carly and Juliette, Nikki’s very best friends—blamed her for breaking into the Poseur contest, only Melissa withheld judgment,
giving her the chance to prove her innocence. And when she
did
prove her innocence, Melissa rewarded her with the most coveted job in school. With the casual ease of a boomerang, everything
Nikki had lost—her friends, her moderate popularity, her
life
—came smoothly, serenely sailing back. Before this internship, Nikki had
nothing.
After it, she had everything.

Which was to say, she had Melissa Moon.

“Oh, and if we could get the corner table?” she continued into her tiny cell, snapped open her Juicy Loves Sephora bedazzled
heart ring, and rubbed her manicured pinky into the tiny pot of lip gloss.
“Excuse me?”
Her pink gloss-stained pinky levitated under her gaping lower lip. “Uhm… did you say
taken
or
bacon
? Because if you said
taken
I’m going to have to tell Melissa Moon—as in the
daughter of Seedy Moon
—that you are unwilling to accommodate her. But if you said
bacon
, I… oh, you
did
say bacon? Oh, I’m sorry, in that case she likes it extra crispy. Uh-huh. Okay, then.
Ciao!
”

With a triumphant crack of cinnamon gum, Nikki dropped her phone into her purse and brushed her hands. “Sorry, Nonna,” she
breathed, settling back into the white leather upholstered seat. “I just had to take care of some…
aaaahh!
”

“What?”
Alarmed by her granddaughter’s sudden scream, the old woman jerked the Cadillac to a halt. “Oh, I can’t take it,” she panted,
clutching her bony, spotted chest. The car lumbered in place, rumbling like a stinking barge. “My heart, Nicoletta. I can’t
take it.”

Nikki slumped even farther into the depths of her white leather–upholstered seat and tried to breathe. Her grandmother had
driven straight into the middle of the Showroom, a total violation of Winston law (lower classmen were supposed to be dropped
off in the alley behind Locker Jungle). As if that wasn’t bad enough, Nonna’s Cadillac seriously looked like it ate BMWs for
breakfast, i.e., it was
the
most enormous car in the world, i.e.,
everyone was looking at them right now.

“Nonna,” she panted, noticing a nearby gaggle of senior girls glance from the car to one another, Chanel glossimer-frosted
lips twitching with mirth. “We can’t be here.”

“We can’t be here,” her grandmother repeated for her invisible audience. “And yet,
un miracolo!
Here we are.” She coughed into her balled fist, then pointed a coral fingernail to her withered cheek. “A kiss, Nicoletta.
And then I go.”

One kiss and two excruciating seconds later, the mortified girl got out of the car, eyes glued to the pavement, and beelined
for Locker Jungle. The Showroom was in full swing, bustling with the usual Monday morning madness, and yet she could still
hear her voice… slicing through the congestion like vocal Drano.

“Oh, Nikki, dear!”

Leaning against the hood of her cream-colored ’69 Jaguar and flanked by her two viperous best friends, Charlotte Beverwil
flashed a nuclear smile. In a deep red Abaeté minidress and knee-high taupe faux leather Stella McCartney boots, she brought
to mind a long-stemmed hothouse rose. Of course, in the words of the immortal Bret Michaels: