Poseur #4: All That Glitters Is Not Gucci (17 page)

Janie sighed. That was fun!

She idled at the crosswalk on Ocean Avenue and San Vicente Boulevard, waiting for a pair of joggers to pass. Her cell phone
beeped. It was him… it had to be him! Janie took a deep breath and exhaled, relishing the sweet moment before her love story
began in earnest. She rolled down her window and smiled, prolonging the agony that preceded the soon-to-be-glorious moment
when she read what was sure to be Evan’s text. Okay, so he hadn’t shown up on her doorstep. Wasn’t texting really the doorstep
of 2010 anyway? Janie turned on the radio. Natasha Bedingfield. Cheesy, yet oddly apropos.
Feel the rain on your skin no one else can feel it for you only you can let it in no one else no one else…

When Janie could not take the suspense any longer, she reached for her scuffed navy Samsung and popped it open.

It was Jake.

Charlotte and I got back together!

The dam broke.

And once it did there was no turning back. It felt so good to cry. Hot salty tears came streaming out of Janie’s eyes, leaving
trails down her dry blotchy cheeks and splattering on her bare arms and stained bustier. Snot or something like
it came flooding from her nose; it was as if somebody had turned on a faucet in Janie’s face and everything just came gushing
out. It felt so fitting. After all, Janie was filthy. Had not even brushed her teeth that morning and still in those horrid
clothes from the night before. Why not be covered in snot and tears to complete the look? Janie wanted to rip her own hair
out too, rip her clothing to shreds, rip the steering wheel clear out of the car.

She kept driving, taking side streets home instead of the far more expedient freeway. Janie wanted to prolong her misery;
to wallow in it; to drown in it. She did not want to go home yet. What was waiting for her at home? Just her brother maybe,
all glowing and giddy after reuniting with the midget bitch who had ruined Janie’s life; and Janie’s mess of a room, still
chaotic from her excruciatingly involved primping session the night before; and her mom. Oh God. Janie really could not handle
seeing her mom right now. The sorry state of her room would be enough to invoke the Wrath of Mom; look what she was wearing!

How had Janie’s life gone from so good to so irrevocably wrecked in just a few short days? Janie cried and gulped and cried
and gulped, her weeping wails only interrupted by her occasional need to gasp for air so she could wail anew. It felt good
to wail. Amazing. Janie wailed louder. And then she rolled up the windows and screamed. She gripped the
steering wheel and screamed again, as loud as she could, loud enough to tear her eardrums tear her lungs tear her heart. And
as she inched down San Vicente behind a shiny black Hummer, Janie watched a stream of spandex-clad bikers pass her in the
bicycle lane, and a mother pushing a Bugaboo stroller down the sidewalk. It blew her mind. How could all these people just
bike around, stroll around, and otherwise continue living their lives as though everything was normal, when as far as Janie
was concerned, this day was good as Armageddon?

The sky opened up then, no joke. They’d been predicting rain for days, and now here it was. Pelting her windshield and giving
the Volvo its first wash in months. Janie turned on the windshield wiper and it made a horrible scraping sound as it swung
back and forth across the glass. The rubber squeegee part had slid back in its track like it always did, leaving the metal
wiper tip to scrape the windshield repeatedly, like nails on a chalkboard. Janie turned the wiper to a slower speed, and the
sound improved slightly, but rain was pelting the windshield so hard then that she couldn’t see a thing with the wiper on
low. Plus, the tears streaming from her slate gray eyes—still, and with no signs of abating—did nothing to aid her already
obstructed view. Janie pulled into a gas station to slide the rubber blade back up the wiper. And to gather her sorts somewhat,
before she mowed down a baby carriage or a pair of bikers. She leaped from her car
and slid the rubber blade back up the wiper like she had so many times before, and quickly got soaked in the process. Janie
could not help but laugh. It was so bad it was funny.
What else you got? Lay it on me!
she felt like screaming to the man upstairs.

Janie got back into the car, slammed the door, and checked her phone. One text message. She inhaled, exhaled, pressed the
read now button.

Jake again.

!!!

Janie started the Volvo and headed home.

The problem with driving is, no matter how many red lights you hit, no matter how many miles below the speed limit you drive,
no matter how many ill-advised side streets you take, eventually, inevitably, you reach your destination. And so it was that
Janie pulled into the driveway of her boxy one-story house in the pouring rain that Saturday at 7 p.m. She’d stretched the
drive home from its usual forty-five minutes to an hour and a half. Now there was no place else to go. It was time to go in
and face the music. Tear the Band-Aid off. Confront the Wrath of Mom.

Janie opened the door and found her mother waiting for her at the kitchen table, turquoise cat’s-eye glasses down
over her nose.

“We need to talk,” Wendy Farrish announced.

Janie settled into the cracked vinyl chair across from her mother with peaceful resignation. “I know,” she surrendered, “my
room is a mess and I look like a waterlogged tranny.”

“Your room is a mess?” Wendy inquired. “I haven’t been in there. Please clean it up before the Patchetts arrive for dinner.”

Shoot
. She didn’t even know about the room.

“So, if you haven’t been into my room, then what did you want to talk to me about?”

Wendy paused. “I feel like Dad should be here for this conversation, but I don’t think it can wait till Monday. Do you have
anything you’d like to tell me?”

Hmmm,
mused Janie.
That I have ruined the only wonderful thing that has ever happened to me? That I puked all over the bathroom last night? That
I have not brushed my teeth in twenty-four hours and am starting to think there is nothing more foul in the entire universe
than the taste in my mouth right now?

“No,” Janie replied. “Why?”

Wendy sighed, clearly disappointed to have to pull the information out of Janie instead of having her offer it up voluntarily.
But Janie wasn’t sure which information Wendy was even digging for. And she was not going to make the messy room mistake again.
Janie peeled a bubble of Mod
Podge off of the kitchen table she had decoupaged with her mom years before. It was covered in pictures from
Teen Vogue
and
CosmoGirl
, along with words they’d cut out:
Rockstar, Flirt, Fearless, Daisy
….

“Your credit card statement arrived today,” Wendy announced, handing a folded sheet of paper to Janie. Janie did not bother
unfolding the page. She knew what it said.

“Three thousand, four hundred eighty dollars,” Wendy intoned. “Please tell me this was an accounting error.”

“Nope, no error,” Janie replied. “That’s what clothes cost these days, Mom. Unless you want to shop at Walmart or something.”

Wendy cocked her head, disbelieving. “I may not be the most fashionable mother in Los Angeles, but even I know there is no
reason to spend that kind of money on clothing. What did you buy?”

“This,” Janie answered. Wendy scanned her daughter’s hot mess of an outfit.

“What else?”

“Nothing. Just this.”

“Janie, what were you thinking?” Wendy fumed. “You know we don’t have that kind of money!”

“
I
have that kind of money, Mom. From the Ted Pelligan deal. And so now, finally, I do not have to walk through the halls of
Winston dressed like some kind of street urchin.”

“Street urchin?” Wendy gasped. “Janie, what
happened to all those clothes we bought you at Old Navy right before school started?”

“Mom! You should never have even sent me to Winston Prep if you expected me to show up at school wearing Old Navy! That’s
like sending your kid to Iraq with a squirt gun!”

Wendy looked down at a well-shellacked Kate Moss cutout and shook her head. “Those clothes are going back,” she announced.
“Today.”

Janie couldn’t help but laugh at that one. “Um, Mom, it’s sort of a you-break-it-you-buy-it situation. I’m pretty sure they
don’t want these clothes back.”

“Fine,” nodded Wendy, “but I hope you really enjoyed your shopping spree, because that is the first and last time you will
get to pull a stunt like that. From here on out, I will be placing all of your Poseur income in a trust until you are eighteen.”

“You can’t do that!” cried Janie. “That’s completely unfair!”

“Yes I can, and no it’s not.”

“One day ago, you were telling me what a creep Petra’s dad was for wanting to manage her money, and now you’re doing the exact
same thing! You’re just as bad as he is! No, you’re worse than he is, because you’re being a phony about it, when all along
you just wanted to control my share!”

“Are you done, Janie?”

No, she was not done! Janie was seething. What was
this, some kind of cruel joke played on her by some bitter god with a vendetta? What had she ever done to him? Or was he just
bored up there in heaven and toying with her increasingly fragile emotions for sport? If so, she hoped he was getting a kick
out of this. Janie’s life had always sort of sucked and she was fine with that. She was
used to that.
But what she seriously could not handle was having the illusion of the perfect life—kissing Evan, the Teddy P. deal—and then
having it all taken away from her as quickly as it had been given.

“Do whatever you want, Lady Farrish,” Janie mocked. “Any other parts of my life you’d like to ruin while you’re at it?”

“I would check your tone, young lady,” Wendy snapped. “And this probably goes without saying, but just to be clear here, you
are grounded.”

The first thing Janie did when she entered her catastrophically messy, red-white-and-black-themed room was strip. She unhooked
the suffocating bustier, shimmied out of the skintight mini, and then crouched down on her itchy red carpet in her day-old
undies to survey the wreckage. There was no way in hell Ted Pelligan would take these clothes back. The bustier was stained
with beer, the telltale red
soles of the Louboutins were beyond scuffed, and the miniskirt was unraveling at the seams. Not to mention singed with a cigarette
burn.
Eew
, shuddered Janie. Was the cigarette burn from that slimy horndog she’d let grope her at the bar? And why had she let him
do that anyway? Part of it was Amelia’s fault, Janie decided, for encouraging the whole get-over-Evan-by-getting-under-someone-else
approach, but Janie was pretty sure she could not blame the
entire
thing on Amelia. As much as she would have loved to.

Janie balled the garments together, as if mashing them into a tiny pellet could make them disappear, along with all the humiliation
of the previous evening.

Her Samsung vibrated.
Oh great
, she thought;
now Jake and Charlotte are engaged
. Janie checked the caller ID:
Melissa Moon Calling
.

No thank you. In terms of people Janie could not handle talking to right now, Melissa ranked high on the list. Top five at
least. Janie could just hear her stupid tinny voice:
Hay-ayyyyyy! It’s Melissa calling to remind you how perfect my life is! My clothes are better than yours and my house is bigger
than yours and my boyfriend is hotter than—what?—you don’t even have a boyfriend? Ah-hahahah!

The cell beeped with a voice mail.

Janie crawled onto her matted sheepskin rug, curled up in the fetal position, and dialed her voice mail.

“Hay-ayyyyyy!” called Melissa. “Janie, this is Melissa
Ebony Moon calling. Are you ready for tomorrow? Are you just so giddy you can barely walk? Me too! So, the shoot begins at
two p.m. at the Standard Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. You cannot be late. Repeat: Can. Not. Be. Late. Y’all got me? And I know
this goes without saying, but you must dress to kill, ma’ bibble. That means no denim, no shoes involving laces and/or rubber
soles, and obviously no t-shirts. Also, nothing that could possibly be construed as ‘beachy.’ Think Carrie Bradshaw on crack.
Can’t wait to see what you come up with! ’Kay, I am going to call Petra now and remind her not to show up in a burlap sack.
Toodles! Oh—and Janie, if you have time, you might want to practice walking in heels in front of a mirror, ’cause, well, I’ve
seen you wear heels before and… well, whatever. Just a thought. See you tomorrow! Hasta la pizza!”