Poseur #4: All That Glitters Is Not Gucci (3 page)

The Getup: White bedazzled bandanna, white Dereon Peek-a-Boo skinny jeans, white wife beater, strappy platinum Giuseppe Zanotti
jeweled heels, manicure in Chanel’s “Paparazzi,” obvi

“
Très gentille
of you to show up, darling,” Charlotte cooed as Petra traipsed into the weekly Poseur meeting, saluting her colleagues with
a sloshing bottle of Kombucha tea.

“I know, right?” she replied, chucking her ratty hemp hobo onto the carpet and sprawling out beside it. She was wearing vintage
jean overall cutoffs with a black Speedo racer bikini top underneath an oversize green-checked flannel, and slouchy knit boots.
The ensemble was decidedly Ugg
,
but with her tumultuous golden mane and wide-set tea-green eyes, both shining with Visine and imperceptibly bloodshot, Petra
could have made a garbage bag—sorry, an ecoconscious biodegradable
compost
bag—look like Oscar (the Grouch) de la Renta. For real, y’all.

She put the
reek
in
très chic.

Melissa was not impressed. “I was just checkin’ the agenda for today’s meeting?” she announced blithely, and flapped open
her white-glitter binder like someone gutting a fish. “And nowhere does it say, ‘arrive late, smelling like a marijuana joint.’”
She arched a ferociously gelled eyebrow at the offending hippie. “You get me?”

“I
think
so.” Petra repressed a smile. Who the hell said
marijuana joint
? Could she seriously be more uptight? “But, um, I’m not really hip to your lingo.”

From her station at the teacher’s desk, the demanding diva’s head-to-toe white ensemble complemented her glaring, white-hot
rage. With her white linen pleat-pants, body-skimming wife beater, light-reflecting running jacket, and interlocking G-print
carré scarf, Melissa’s look was pure JLo—back in the good ol’ Diddy days, of course. Melissa hardly counted Jennifer Lopez’s
“regular girl” Bennifer phase (not to mention her current “dead-in-the-eyes, Marc Anthony–keeps-my-soul-in-jelly-jar” phase)
as fashion inspiration. “Regular” was just another word for “boring,” which she was anything but. From her swinging, diamond
dollar-sign necklace to her sickly high stiletto heels, Melissa could take the blah out of Blahnik.

“How’s this for lingo?” Charlotte chirped from her perch on the sunny windowsill, extended her long leg to point the toe of
her fuchsia suede Delman ballerina flat and addressed Petra. “If you’re so much as a
minute
late to the
Nylon
shoot?” The shoe slipped from her heel, dropping like a jaw. “We stuff you into a hacky sack and feed you to the narcs.”

“Okay.” Petra laughed, raising her ink-stained hands in surrender. “Not to point out the obvious here? But
I
am not the last one here.”

And then, as if on cue, Janie rushed through the open
door, cheeks flushed and light brown hair askew. Melissa and Charlotte shared a glance. It was totally out of character for
Janie to be late. That said: Petra had a point.

“Where were you?” Melissa puffed up, fully prepared to unleash her wrath.

“Um…” Janie finger-combed her hair and commenced digging through her bag, as if somewhere within its chaotic depths she’d
unearth an answer. Sadly, in the course of kissing Evan, her brain had died, and as coming up with good excuses was a completely
brain-based activity, she was pretty much screwed. Maybe she should just tell them the truth? She looked up from her bag,
catching Charlotte’s cool, unreadable glance. Exactly when was the right time to tell Winston’s resident ice queen you’d just
spent all of lunch in a small, criminally unlit space with her totally out-of-bounds older brother? When do you tell Poseur’s
seamstress her brother had clutched her proverbial DO NOT CROSS sash and ripped it apart at the seams? When do you tell her
you were late because you couldn’t kiss him good-bye without starting the whole damn cycle over again? She cleared her throat.

“I…”

No. She couldn’t do it. She
wouldn’t.
Even that word, which was barely a word—that
letter
—which constituted exactly one-twelfth the weight of her full confession—
I was with Evan—
had proved too treacherous. For the second
time that day, she recalled the Pink Party, the flustered way she’d flung off Evan’s hand, her instinct (and possibly his?)
to keep things private. On a gut level, she just knew:

Charlotte would have Janie’s kiss-happy head on a stick.

“Omigod,
qu’est-ce que c’est
is it?” The endlessly curious Francophile tilted forward, and the corner of her beautiful and vicious mouth twitched with
bemusement. From her position on the floor, a wide-eyed Petra quietly and painstakingly unwrapped a cherry-flavored Ricola,
loath to break the suspense.

“I…”

Melissa could not be more bored. “Just sit down,” she groaned, rescuing her discombobulated coworker with a startlingly loud
rap of her silver Tiffany hammer. Janie wobblingly exhaled like a discharged prisoner.
Unbelievable
, she thought, obediently taking her seat. On any other day, she’d have been ruthlessly questioned (as Nikki Pellegrini could
testify: interrogation was Melissa’s forte), but today, on the
one
day it would have led to some serious drama, she’d been pardoned.
Seriously, what was going on?

What was going on was this: for some endlessly mysterious reason, Janie’s life had been, like,
not
sucking
.
In addition to the miraculous development of a love life, Poseur, the upstart fashion label for which she was one-fourth
responsible, was actually taking off. Ted Pelligan, the eccentric yet omnipotent fashion luminary, was
head-over-Hermès in lust with Poseur’s premier designer handbag, the Trick-or-Treater. “It’s heaven on a handle!” he’d assured
them over Skype, while Daphne, his scowling Vietnamese manicurist, tugged his small hand and repeatedly squawked, “
Re-lax-uh!
”

“Shangri-la with a shoulder strap!”

“RE-LAX-UH!!!”

Come Thursday, Janie and her colleagues’ “guardians” (to think they used to be parents!) would congregate in Mr. Pelligan’s
vast and polished office and sign on the dotted line, granting Pelligan Enterprises exclusive rights to produce
one thousand
Trick-or-Treaters for the small fee of (wait for it) $15,000.
To each of them
.

They were millionaires!

And then, just when she thought things could not get more awesome, the universe, like a drunk-on-the-job car salesman, went
ahead and sweetened the deal.
With a freaking
Nylon
shoot
. The super-hot glossy advised them to “just, you know, come dressed like you normally dress,” which everyone knew meant “dress
better than you’ve ever dressed in your entire life.” And while only last week Janie would have had to reduce herself to borrowing
one of Charlotte’s mother’s designer castoffs, or worse, do battle with the homeless at Jet Rag’s infamous Dollar Sale, today
getting dressed was easy as pie. Why? Because today
she’d got her slice.

She decided to set her budget at one thousand, which, okay,
sounds
like a lot, but Winston girls shell out that kind of cash
all the time.
Plus, she’d
earned
it. Plus, she was actually being super frugal with her choices.
Par exemple:
instead of the $620 “cleavage guarantee” La Perla set she really wanted, she settled for the
much
more reasonable $145 Cosabella. See? She’d just saved $475 that could be donated to a philanthropic cause.

Like shoes.

“
Girl
,” Melissa huffed, startling the vaguely smiling Valley girl from her daydream. “Are you going to pay attention? Or do I need
to send you a Mother McMuffin
bill
…?”

“Sorry,” she blushed, stooping to retrieve her pencil, which—in what may have been an attempt to escape the mounting tension—had
rolled off the desk and dramatically thwacked the floor.

“As I was saying.”
The Director of Public Relations arched a reproving eyebrow and slowly turned, flicking on her latest PowerPoint presentation.
In an instant, three words marched across the screen, POSEUR’S TOP THREATS, subjecting her colleagues to mild trepidation.
Somehow, Melissa’s handwriting succeeded in being both bubbly and menacing, like a Murakami cartoon or Willy Wonka’s man-dicing
“fizzy drink” machine. Of course, Melissa was impervious to its effects; she clicked a tiny gray remote with her acrylic-armored
thumb, an absolute pillar of badass.

“Oona Berlin,” she gravely announced as a photograph snapped on the screen. A raven-haired Zooey Deschanel–type looked up
from a table of fabric swatches, her slightly parted cherry lips and big blue eyes conspiring to project the essence of indie
innocence. “Clothing designer from New York. Nineteen years old.” Melissa narrowed her eyes until they sparked.

Click.

Oona and her whimsical face were taken over by an exuberant boy wearing red footy-pajamas and what looked like a deconstructed
Easter bonnet. He bounded joyously through an open field. “Algernon Getty,” the charm-immune diva pronounced. “Seventeen years
old. A self-described ‘fab hatter’ from New Orleans, Louisiana.”

She zoomed up to his grinning, gleeful face.
Click.

A bespectacled, race-and-gender-neutral baby face with bejeweled skull rings affixed to the five points of his or her bright
green Mohawk glared menacingly at the screen.

“Yumi Mendez,” Melissa explained. “Jewelry designer from Berkeley, California. Thirteen years old.”

The projector lingered on Yumi for another two seconds and then clicked to black. Melissa lowered the remote to the desk and
faced her colleagues, clasping her hands into a steeple under her chin. “Twenty designers chosen to appear in the March issue,
but only
one
”—she paused for dramatic effect—“wins the cover. The question is, Will it be us? Or
one of these three jokers?”

“I guess we’ll find out!” brightly chirped Janie, eager to make up for her earlier lack of participation.

“No.” Melissa slapped the desk. “We will
not
‘find out,’ okay? Because finding out gives
them
the power.
They
need to find out from
us
, ya hear? The winner,” she exhaled, “is Poseur.”

“So…” Charlotte smirked. “Do we text them?”

“Close!” Melissa clapped her hands together and pranced toward the board, missing Charlotte’s sarcasm by a mile. “Okay now.”
She grinned, picked up a piece of pale pink chalk, and proceeded to scrawl
Dear Nylon
in her trademark terrifying cursive. “I need y’all to channel your inner Omarosas and help me draft the
most
persuasive letter of all—”

Before she could say
time
, the chalk snapped in half. “Shoot,” she muttered, scowling at the floor and regarding the two pieces with disgust. Was she
really supposed to draft what would go down in history as her
most powerful missive to date
with this pathetic weakling, this
cripple
? Ha! Not a chance. With a disdainful brush of her hands, she bent toward the teacher’s desk, pulled open a drawer, and…

Let out a loud and bloodcurdling scream.

“What the hell, Melissa!” Petra flinched against the recycling bin and covered her ears with her ink-stained hands. But the
dismayed diva could only point into the open drawer, covering her mouth with her hand. After a shared
glance, the three remaining girls abandoned their respective posts and ventured slowly toward the desk. Charlotte saw it first,
and finding no French words worthy, resorted instead to an English classic:

“Ew.”

Nesting on top of a lumpy pillow and pill-ridden blanket, a frayed yellow toothbrush, dented travel-size toothpaste, purple
plastic hairbrush, and can of Suave hairspray jumbled together like bugs under a rock. A pineapple-shaped clip-on earring
gleamed.

“Gold plated.” Melissa shuddered, slamming the drawer shut.

“Double ew.” Charlotte waved her hands in revulsion, flouncing from the scene. “Is someone, like,
living
here?”

“Ch’ello Poh-czars!” A Russian accent floated from down the hall. A second later Miss Paletsky, their sickly sweet if criminally
unfashionable twenty-eight-year-old Special Studies adviser, popped her face into the room, her feathery bangs lacquered into
a nightmarish halo around her otherwise dreamy heart-shaped face. Thanks to a pair of overstuffed shoulder pads, her navy
knit sweater hung from her shoulders like a large
FOR RENT
sign, its ugliness challenged only by the matching navy L’eggs under her pleated beige skort.
Where do people even
find
skorts in this day and age?
wondered Melissa, almost in awe.

“Ch’ow
are
you?” Miss Paletsky cheerfully asked. Pushing
an unpolished finger under the left lens of her octagon-shaped glasses, she carefully picked away some sleep.