American Beauty (19 page)
“You know, the calls and the dinner and the phones were just the start,” she told him, reaching out and taking his arm. “Tomorrow, I’ve got a thousand geishas prepared to storm the consulate wearing masks of my face. On Friday, ten thousand carrier pigeons will home in on your condo, all with my profile tattooed on their fat little bellies. Saturday, NASA—”
Eduardo laughed. “I believe you actually would have done all that.”
“Defeat isn’t in my DNA.” She stopped and looked into his eyes. “But evidently, stupidity is.”
He put a finger to her lips, implying that he knew exactly how she felt; that she didn’t need to say it. “Your friend Parker came to the consulate yesterday. Not for a visa. To see me.”
“Parker?” Sam’s heart quickened. “What did he say?”
“He showed me film from your prom. He explained some things to me, about how you were feeling that night.” He stopped and ran his knuckles tenderly over her cheek. “Samantha, I wish I could have been there to see you win your crown.”
Sam blinked back tears, of joy this time.
His arms went around her. “No more kissing anyone else. Drunk, sober, lonely, angry—it doesn’t matter. We don’t do that. Do we have a deal?”
She nodded, afraid that if she opened her mouth at that moment, the tears would begin and she wouldn’t be able to stop them. She swallowed hard and smiled. “I could have my dad’s attorney write up a deal memo if you want. It’s legally binding, you know.”
“I like this kind of binding better.” He pulled her close and kissed her softly, then sealed that kiss with the sizzling kind.
“Yep, that pretty much does it for me,” she laughed.
“Me too.”
As he kissed her again, an important thought somehow formulated itself in Sam’s insanely happy and endorphin-flooded mind:
I owe Parker Pinelli one big-ass graduation present
.
C
ammie looked around aghast as Sam pulled her Hummer into the massive parking lot at the MegaMart in Panorama City, on the northern outskirts of the San Fernando Valley. The vehicles in the lot were scary—an ungodly mix of Fords, Chevys, and the occasional Pontiac. Not a Beemer or Lexus in sight.
“Wow, this is kind of like a sociological experiment,” Dee mused, staring out the window at the customers with overflowing carts heading toward their cars.
“You’re sure this is the best place to go?” Anna, who sat in the front seat next to Sam, looked to her friend for confirmation.
“Here’s everything I know,” Sam began. “Stefanie called this morning and laid it down, after she waxed poetic about her vacation last month in Antigua. Beyotch. Anyway, the theme for the party tomorrow night is “cheap.” Not cheap chic, either. Just plain cheap. No one can spend more than forty bucks on her outfit. Winning outfit gets to pick a girl from the opposing school to be her slave for a day. She said to bring price tags and receipts as proof. If cheap is the goal, MegaMart is the place.”
“Fair enough,” Anna acknowledged. Meanwhile, Cammie slipped on her Versace N86 H sunglasses as they got out of the Hummer, unwilling to face this experience without something between her eyes and reality.
Penetrating MegaMart was like entering Fort Knox. The girls walked past a phalanx of uniformed security officers, a bank of cameras just above the door recording their faces for posterity. Then they passed three more guards who were checking the receipts of everyone against their purchases before they were allowed out of the store. A stoic cluster of customers with screaming kids waited to be checked out.
“That’s terrible,” Anna muttered as an old lady with a cane fumbled for her paperwork. “They act like the customers are criminals.”
“Hey, if I just got released from San Quentin, this is where I’d shop,” Cammie countered.
“It’s a class thing,” Dee decided. “Less fortunate people don’t get treated very well.”
Cammie shot her a look. “How would you know, Dee? You’ve been painfully overfortunate your entire life.”
“I’ve watched TV.” Dee sniffed self-righteously. “Which way is the women’s department?”
Sam pointed and grabbed a shopping cart. “There it is. Come on.”
Cammie put a restraining hand on her arm. “Sam, those clothes will be the size of pup tents. Even you don’t need a pup tent. Don’t these people do Juniors?”
“‘These people’ is kind of an insulting thing to say,” Anna pointed out.
“Thank you, Miss Politically Correct,” Cammie countered, not in the mood to deal with Anna Percy’s righteousness. Not that she ever was.
“Just think, Cammie,” Dee chirped, fingering a small chartreuse handbag with beads and rhinestones glued to it as they walked past. “If you do decide to design handbags, stores like this will be knocking you off. No wonder they say that imitation is an affront to flattery.”
“That’s ‘imitation is the
sincerest form
of flattery,’” Sam corrected.
They passed the MegaMart lingerie department, which featured thin polyester granny gowns with Halloween pumpkins on them on sale for eight dollars, ultrasheer baby doll nightgowns in jewel tones with matching G-strings with some sort of fake marabou crap around the neckline, and a delightful selection of white cotton industrial-strength bras large enough to house a small island nation. There were granny pants and fuzzy lime-green socks and more ugly intimate wear than Cammie would have believed possible.
How could anyone actually feel desirable in this stuff?
“Okay, this must be it,” Sam announced. They’d reached an area where the mannequins had been made to look like teenagers clad in low-cut jeans and wide pleather belts. They were surrounded by racks of clothing that imitated various hip looks of “the moment,” if said moment had passed in the previous millennium.
“How about this?” Dee displaced a black lace miniskirt approximately the size and shape of a postage stamp. The material was rough, but not in a hip meant-to-be-unfinished way. “It’s kind of cute, don’t you think?” She fingered the price tag. “Eighteen dollars. This could work.”
“What about a top and shoes and underwear?” Sam asked. “You’d go way over the limit.”
Cammie shuddered. “Please don’t tell me we have to buy the underwear here, too.”
“You do if you want to make Stefanie your slave for a day.”
Cammie gave a long-suffering sigh. Fine. She’d get through this somehow, and it had better be quick. She was supposed to meet Adam for dinner; she hadn’t seen him since her confrontation with her father, though she’d told him a little about it on the phone. Even that had felt too raw to share. It was as if she was too drained from what was going on with her father to muster the energy to discuss it with him. What she’d said to Sam in the hot tub also stayed with her. What was that again? What was the point? She and Adam would break up eventually.
For the next ten minutes, all four of them pawed through endless six-dollar tops: kelly green and beige striped terry cloth, purple with Mickey Mouse dancing with Minnie Mouse, and endless printed T-shirts—
YOUR BOYFRIEND WANTS ME
, 100%
HOTTIE
!, and
SUPERSTAR
in gold glitter on a red baby tee.
Dee nabbed the SUPERSTAR shirt. “What about this?”
“Maybe,” Sam mused, holding a shirt printed with a giant
HELLO MY NAME
IS label with
SEXY
written on it in script.
“What if we all get them?” Dee suggested. “It’ll only cost us twenty-four dollars out of our total.”
“If we dress alike, none of us will win,” Cammie declared.
Anna frowned at a low-cut brown-an-aqua print shirt made of some shiny slippery material. “You know, winning isn’t such a big thing,”
“You’re right,” Cammie corrected. “It’s the
only
thing. Stefanie is going to be my slave. She deserves it. You guys just choose what’s least horrible, okay? I’ll be right back.”
This was not going to do. Cammie knew she’d never find what she wanted in this assortment of dreck. But at least she had something in mind as she strode through the store to the boys’ department. Bingo—plain white cotton T-shirts. A large should fit her nice and tight. Price? Six-fifty. Take that, Stefanie. Now for bottoms. She found some Winnie the Pooh boxer shorts—if she cut the legs apart and had one of her housekeepers resew the pieces into a miniskirt, it would be quirky enough to be cute. Stefanie had made no dictates about alterations.
Ready to go with everything but shoes, Cammie returned to the juniors’ department to see how her friends—and Anna—had fared. Not too badly, actually. Sam had come up with black boot-cut stretch pants and a fuzzy red off-the-shoulders sweater that would show off her pretty shoulders. Dee had chosen a pair of Daisy Dukes (evidently they hadn’t sold well after that execrable film with Jessica Simpson) and a sleeveless white polyester shirt. Washed once, the shirt would undoubtedly fall apart, but for one party it would be fine.
Then there was Anna, who had found an oyster-toned polyester satin bias-cut slip with spaghetti straps; perfectly plain, perfectly simple, in which she looked perfectly fabulous.
So Cammie wasn’t the only one who’d come up with the creative-shopping concept. Damn.
Last stop—shoes. Cammie had the most money left, and found a pair of sky-high clear plastic heels for eighteen dollars. She knew that her legs would look a mile long in those heels with her soon-to-be-created miniskirt. Dee, whose feet were tiny, dug out some girls’ red plastic cowboy boots. Twelve bucks. Sam went for black wedge espadrilles, which would help elongate her legs. Which left only Anna. Cammie felt smug. No way was the girl going to find shoes for under seven dollars, and that was all she had left to spend.
“I think I got it!” Anna stepped around the edge of the last shoe aisle, displaying a pair of red velvet flip-flops. “They were in a bin in the bedroom slippers section. On sale, four ninety-nine.”
“Do they fit?” Dee asked.
Cammie already knew they would fit perfectly, because Anna was fucking Cinderella.
“Kind of small,” Anna pronounced.
Cool. Cammie peered at Anna’s feet—her sheer oyster OPI-polished toenails hung over the edges of the flip-flops. The sight cheered Cammie considerably. “Oh well, too bad.”
Sam fiddled with the Carl Blackburn gold earring in her right ear and contemplated the situation. “Look, Anna. Just try to walk in them. If you can, then all you have to do is to make an entrance. After that, go barefoot.”
Anna stood up and took a step. And another. “Well, I can sort of walk. It’s not very comfortable—”
“Comfort is not the issue,” Sam reminded her. “One of us winning
is
. So?”
“So …” Anna took a couple more steps, then laughed. “What the hell, I can handle it.”
Okay. Fine. Anna Percy was willing to take one for the team. Cammie had to give her that much.
Shopping completed and outfits assembled, they dumped everything in their cart and pushed it toward an endless checkout line. The girl who rang up their items—her name tag indicated that she should be called Jolene—wore a pink shirt so lowcut it that her massive bosom strained to plop out onto the conveyer belt. This was no shocker—Cammie had noticed that almost all the girls and women in the MegaMart were curvy-fat. Didn’t they want to be thin? Didn’t they feel the pressure?
Sam asked for separate receipts for each item they bought, pissing off everyone in line behind them. Meanwhile, Cammie watched in fascination as a heavily tattooed, grossly overweight guy with an exceptionally hairy chest and an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips charged up to Jolene.
“When you getting off work?”
“Regular time, honey,”
“I’m goin’ to Bud’s tonight. Play pool.”
Obviously, there was some sort of romantic relationship between Jolene and the hairy behemoth, who also apparently had not showered in a number of weeks. His body odor was rankling.
“Aww.” Jolene turned to him. “You’re never home! How you gonna show me that you love me?”
“Hey, I told you I’ll be at Bud’s. That’s love!” He belched loudly; Cammie stepped back another few feet from this loathsome representative of the species.
Then she stopped and congratulated herself on her genius.
Oh yeah. I’ve got it
, she marveled. Revenge, payback, retaliation, counterattack, reciprocation, reprisal, anti-pardon, vengeance, petty spiteful behavior that made a person feel great. In other words, how to make Stefanie sorry that she ever,
ever
messed with Cammie’s best friend.
I
t took a lot to impress Anna. Not because she was a snob, but simply because of the many and varied experiences that had been a part of her life since … well, since forever. She’d attended parties at the White House, Buckingham Palace, and the Palais de l’Elysee, not to mention nine of the ten top hotels in the world. (Yes, she had stayed at the Hotel Caruso in Ravello, Italy, but not after the recent renovation.)
Still, after Anna and Ben had ridden together through the warm, dry night on the double-decker London-style shuttle bus ferrying passengers up through the hills of the Pacific Palisades (the seats were covered in faux-mink slipcovers embroidered in pink thread with Pashima and Stefanie’s names, the date, and the coat-of-arms of Pacific Palisades High School), and then finally onto the long private drive up to Pashima’s estate high above the Pacific, Anna had only one word to describe what she was seeing:
“Wow.”
“I gotta agree.” Ben laughed. “This rivals Sam’s digs. Only better, because it’s right over the ocean.”
“Well then, I’m sure Sam will buy an ocean immediately,” Anna joked snuggling into his shoulder.
“Welcome to the estate of Pashima Nusbaum,” the driver announced over his intercom system as the bus rolled to a stop. He was round and red-cheeked, with a nose almost as big as Adrian Brody’s. “Please feel free to take the fun-fur seat covers with you as a souvenir. Watch your step climbing down, please.”
He opened the front and rear double doors; happy partygoers spilled down into the night. The boys looked normal, Anna noted, since the cheap clothing contest was girls only. Parker Pinelli’s date—he’d introduced her as Raisin, something like that—had on a Day-Glo orange polyester backless minidress so short that her lack of underwear would be displayed anytime she bent over.