Poseur (17 page)

The Dog: Emilio Poochie

The Getup: Blue rhinestone-encrusted Louis Vuitton collar

At three and a half months of dating, Melissa informed Marco she refused to have sex until marriage. Marco respected her decision,
especially since it had to do with Jesus, and Marco respected Jesus. “We can do other stuff though, right?” He had to ask.

“Of course,” she replied, smiling in a way Marco found promising. They were lying in bed and talking. After a few minutes,
talking turned to kissing. And then, just as he got his hands on the piranha-like hooks of Melissa’s double-D bra, she pulled
away.

“Would you just
look
at him?” she gasped. Slowly, reluctantly, Marco turned around. Sure enough, there he was: Melissa’s dog. Emilio Poochie propped
himself up on his hind legs and peeped his head over the edge of the overstuffed mattress. He smacked his lips.

“He misses us!” Melissa crooned with a pouty face.

Before Marco knew what was happening, Emilio Poochie was in bed with them, sandwiched between their bodies like a fuzzy burger.
“Who’s my little badabing?” Melissa gurgled as Emilio pushed his butt into her cooing face. Emilio stared at Marco with his
black button eyes. Marco stared back.

“
I’m
her badabing,” Emilio Poochie gloated, sticking out the tip of his pink tongue. (More and more Marco found he could read Emilio’s
thoughts.)

Marco turned over on his back and blinked at the ceiling. Emilio Poochie’s room was just sixteen feet down the hall. And yet.
His miniature princess bed, with its impossibly tiny floral comforter and candy-striped sheets, had yet to be slept in. The
éclair-shaped, pink-frosted dog treats were still on the pillows. His gold-framed flat HDTV screen, with copies of such dog-friendly
classics as
Homeward Bound
and
Lady and the Tramp
in the built-in shelves, remained unwatched. His Christmas present, a stroller-sized treadmill with a built-in recording
of Melissa’s voice (“Emilio, come! Good
boy,
Emilio!”) remained unwrapped. And yes, he even had his own bathroom. Emilio’s
salle de bain
came with bowl-sized sinks, a ten-gallon porcelain tub with baby claw feet, a mini crystal chandelier, a flushable toy toilet,
and a matching set of pink towels with embroidered gold crests. The two-foot-high vanity (with ruffled skirt and heart-shaped
mirror) was fully stocked with a complete set of travel-sized BIG SEXY HAIR products. It was all a two pound ball of fluff
could ask for, and Emilio had never so much as stepped inside. Why would he? Melissa’s room and his were
exact replicas of each other
— except Melissa’s was, in comparison, huge. Emilio was no fool. He knew the rules. And what’s the number one rule of
livin’ it up
?

BIGGER IS BETTER.

“Baby” — Marco squeezed Melissa’s smooth hand — “I’ve been thinking. Maybe it’s time Emilio slept in his own room.”

“What?” Melissa clutched Emilio close. “Why?”

Marco sighed. What could he say? That Emilio Poochie was slowly but surely ruining their (everything but) sex life? That Emilio
beamed evil dog–thoughts into Marco’s brain twenty-four-seven? Could Marco say he was sick of leaning in for a kiss and coming
up with a mouthful of fur? That he was beginning to wonder if his girlfriend’s virginity had less to do with God, and more
to do with . . . Dog?

“Melissa,” he began, working up his nerve, “it’s just, sometimes I feel . . .”

“Oh baby,” she cut him off. Her phone was alerting her to an Unknown Caller. “Will you see who that is? I don’t want to move
Emilio.”

“It’s Charlotte,” Marco groaned, reaching for the phone.

“Pick it up, pick it up!”

“Melissa!” he repeated. “I am
trying
to communicate!”

She pushed Emilio from her lap and leaped across the bed, snatching the phone from Marco’s hand. “Hello?” she answered. Marco
shook his head in slow disbelief. Melissa rolled her eyes, pressed the phone to her chest and hissed, “It’s
business.
”

“Hey, Melinoma,” sang a melodious voice on the other line.
“Comment allez-vous?”

“Did you ask your mom about Prada?” Melissa burbled in reply. During her blow-out with Vivien, Melissa had behaved as though
Prada was a done deal. In fact, in the heat of the moment, she’d
believed
it was a done deal. Only in recent days had it occurred to her: she’d never had Prada confirmed.

Charlotte flopped across her mint and yellow pastry bed and yawned. She’d just returned from ballet and was dead
fatiguée.

“Do you know the painting,
Le Petit Déjeuner sur l’Herbe
?” she asked.

Melissa frowned. “What?”

“It’s a famous painting of a picnic,” Charlotte explained, fingering a small hole in her tights. “The guys have their clothes
on, but the girl they’re with? Completely naked.” She smiled dreamily. “Don’t you just
love
picnics?”

“Sorry . . .” Melissa looked at her phone and scowled. “What does this have to do with Prada?”

“Oh yeah.
Prada,
” Charlotte said. “My mom put in a call.”

“And?”

“They’re happy to do it.”

“Omigod, YES!” Melissa screamed. Emilio dipped his head and flattened his ears. “Yes, yes, yes, yes,
yes
!”

After the third “yes,” Marco’s jaw dropped. He’d
never
seen Melissa this excited. In fact, up ’til then, he’d pegged his girlfriend as a non-yessing kinda girl. But he was wrong.
Defeated and demoralized, he pointed to the door and mouthed
I’m out.

Melissa didn’t notice. She was too busy taking in a new, less promising piece of news.

“No, no, no, no, no,” she moaned into the phone, sitting on the edge of her bed and switching her phone to a fresh ear. “What
do you mean ‘there’s a catch’?”

“It’s no big thing.” Charlotte pulled her peach nylon-clad knee to her nose and stretched. “You just need one more person’s
approval.”

“Who?”

Charlotte slid her legs apart, fell into a perfect split, and grinned.
“Moi.”

“You?”
Melissa grimaced. “I thought I
had
your okay.”

“And you
do.
Assuming you give me something in return.”

“Okay. What do you want?”

“When I was in Paris,” Charlotte began, “I saw this couple sitting in a park. I forget which one.
Le Jardin des Tuileries
? Anyway. They were having a picnic. Sitting under a tree on a checked blanket. The whole clichéd spread: baguette, brie,
blueberries . . . but the best part had to be the water guns. They filled them with champagne. I’m not joking. I
saw
them do it. They sat there, squirting each other for hours. They were having
so much fun.
I just thought . . . that has to be it. That has to be
love.
I swore one day, when I met the right guy, I’d have a picnic like that. Except better. ’Cause me and my boyfriend would be
cuter.”

“Okay,” Melissa replied, swallowing her frustration. She hated conversations like this — you ask someone what time it was,
and they answer with a detailed explanation of the weather. “So . . . what is this about?”

“Well, according to
Cribs,
your father bid on a case of 1990 Cristal Brut Millennium 2000 at Sotheby’s last year, and I was
thinking
. . .”

“No.” Melissa paced a small circle in the middle of her white Berber carpet. “You want my dad’s
Cristal
?” Melissa shook her head at the impossibility of the request. “Those bottles are worth, like, seven thousand dollars each!”

“Really?” Charlotte tsked with fake sympathy. “The water guns are only a dollar ninety-five.”

Melissa swallowed. Not only were those bottles worth seven thousand dollars each, her father was saving them for his wedding.
I do this and I’m dead,
she realized, a great bubble of panic bursting in her gut. But then, just as suddenly, she imagined launching her label at
the
park
instead of at Prada. She imagined the paper plates, the plastic cups, the stupid bouncing balloons. The horrible, smug look
on Vivien’s face.

Probably her father wouldn’t notice if
one
bottle was missing?

“Fine. I’ll do it.”

“Formidable,”
Charlotte gushed into the phone. “You won’t regret it, Melissa. The Prada store on Rodeo is amazing this time of year.”

Melissa clicked off the phone, sat on the edge of her bed and stared numbly into space. “Marco?” she called. “Marco?”

Whenever she needed him most, Marco was gone. Emilio Poochie bounded into her lap and nuzzled into her stomach. “At least
I have you,” she whispered into his ear. Emilio lapped her nose in agreement.

The Girl: Barney’s mannequin

The Getup: “Carcass Fantasia”

Rodeo Drive begins at the world famous Beverly Wilshire Hotel and extends to Santa Monica Boulevard at a gentle incline, like
the first half of a bridge. The sidewalks are bleach white and dinner-plate clean. Well-groomed camellias and elegant palms
divide the street. Hundred-thousand-dollar cars glide by like floats in a parade: Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini, Aston Martin,
Bentley. People stare at them and they stare back — except the Rolls Royce Phantom, which sneers with perceptible contempt
(if you think the grill’s resemblance to an upturned nose is accidental, think again). Men sport deep tans and designer active
wear. Women flash white teeth and four-inch heels. They emerge from plush leather drivers’ seats, frown into cell phones,
and slam doors behind them. They take off down the street at the vigorous pace of the treadmill-trained. And they never stop
to feed the meters, preferring to dangle handicap placards from their rearview mirrors instead.

After Melissa’s relentless petition, Miss Paletsky granted The Trend Set leave for an “educational field trip” to Beverly
Hills’ most famous street. The girls had a ton of ground to cover in a short amount of time, and — to Melissa’s endless frustration
— Petra kept slowing them down. At the first sign of silicone, saline, Botox, or collagen, she stopped and stared — not because
the sight surprised her, but because she had a
duty.
A duty to communicate disgust.

“Petra!” Melissa stamped her foot. “Sometime today, puh-lease!”

At the moment, Petra could not take her eyes off the white mannequin in the Barney’s department store window. The mannequin
wore a camel-hair skirt with darts at the hips, glossy alligator skin knee-high boots, a wide patent-leather belt with gold
buckle of interlocking Cs, and a black cashmere sweater with fox fur collar and cuffs. The collar was so huge it resembled
a platter — like a serving plate for decapitated heads.

In Petra’s humble opinion, decapitation was exactly what this mannequin deserved.

“I refuse to go in there,” she informed the other girls.

“What?” Melissa snapped. For Melissa, the world was pretty much divided between two drives: sex and Rodeo. But while
sex drive
referred to the overriding impulse to bonk (an urge Melissa couldn’t, for the life of her, understand),
Rodeo Drive
referred to the overriding impulse to
spend
(an urge Melissa lived for.) So far, Petra’s low-level Rodeo was serious cause for concern. Melissa wondered if she was some
kind of pervert.

Petra paused to do a quick tally in her head. “Do you realize that mannequin is wearing a total of FIVE animals on her body?”

“Pet, darling,” Charlotte rolled her eyes. “
That’s
why they call it the Rodeo.”

“It’s disgusting and it’s cruel!”

“You wanna know disgusting and cruel?” Melissa slapped her notebook to her knee. “Keeping us out in eight-hundred-degree heat,
when we could be enjoying ourselves in something called air-conditioning.” In addition to air-conditioning, Barneys carried
a wrap-around Ella Moss dress in a purple and black leopard print that Melissa
had to have.
She’d seen it in her fall issue of
Teen Vogue:
“Forget About Prince Charming,” read the headline. “Fall in Love with Charming Prints!”

“I’m goin’ in,” she announced.

“Go ahead,” Petra folded her arms. “Shop until you drop dead. Like one of those poor, innocent animals.”

“I can not believe you just said that.” Melissa cringed, her hand on the brass door handle. “We are not
shopping.
We’re
researching.
”

“Oh please.”

“When I bought my Dolce & Gabbana heels, did I
not
find out they have a better marketing strategy than Lanvin? Whose heels I did
not
buy?”

“Yes.” Charlotte lit up her second Gauloise of the afternoon. “And I found out
certain
consumers prefer trashy trends to plain good taste.”

“See?” Melissa agreed, oblivious to the insult.
“Research.”

“Well, I’m with Petra,” Janie interrupted from her seat on a nearby marble fountain.

“Sorry” — Melissa knit her eyebrows together — “was someone talkin’ to you?” Under normal circumstances, Melissa’s knit eyebrows
were Janie’s cue to mumble an apology and move on. But today Janie had greater concerns than Melissa’s fluctuating mood, like
the fact that she and Amelia hadn’t talked for a record
three days.
While the other girls tried on sunglasses and sucked down smoothies, Janie walked around in a stupor of sorrow and regret.
She hadn’t said a single word all day, not that anybody had noticed. They’d long grown accustomed to her quiet. What Melissa,
Petra, and Charlotte didn’t know was, outside the world of The Trend Set, Janie wasn’t shy at all. Imagine their surprise
when, instead of the repentant whisper, Janie launched into a full-fledged rant.

“We’re about to throw some huge launch party for a label that exists
why
?” she bounded to her feet. “Because we
say
it does? Do you realize how incredibly lame that is?! It’s like NASA announcing the launch of a space shuttle and then everyone
shows up and they like,
fly a paper airplane
! Except, wait. We don’t even have a paper airplane. We don’t have
anything
!”

The three girls stared at Janie with a mixture of awe and disbelief. She was like a magic lamp, ignorable until you rubbed
her the wrong way. By then a genie was released: an explosive, unpredictable,
step-back-before-I-beat-your-ass
genie. Charlotte glowed with admiration. Crazy Genie Janie was a major improvement to Mousy Suck-up Janie. Crazy Genie Janie
was someone she could actually learn to respect. Which was convenient because, since she and Jake had gotten back together,
Charlotte had renewed her vow to be nice.

“Janie has a point,” Charlotte nodded.

“
Yeah,
I have a point!”

“Okay, fine,” huffed Melissa. “But what are we supposed to do? The party is this Saturday and don’t
even
ask me to reschedule. You have no idea how much work I put into this.” She narrowed her eyes at Charlotte. “Not to mention
champagne.”

Charlotte raised an invisible glass. “Chin Chin!”

“Okay . . .” Janie took a deep, calming breath. “How much are you guys planning to spend on new outfits for the party?”

“Do we have to discuss money?” Charlotte asked with wincing sweetness. “It’s a little
gauche.
”

“You wear Chanel sunglasses and drive a
Jag,
” Petra scoffed. “If that’s not ‘discussing money’ I don’t know what is.”

“Sorry, what was that?” Charlotte feigned incomprehension. “I don’t speak
hippie.
”

“Okay, stop!” Janie flared. She tore through her army green canvas tote and fished out the crumpled twenty she made babysitting
the Longarzos. “This is what I plan on spending.”

“That’s
it
?” Melissa gasped. “What are you planning on wearing? A gumball?”

“This is what we’re going to do, okay?” Janie smiled through clenched teeth. “We are
not
going to spend money on new clothes with
no personality.
We are going to hire
each other
to design something
unique.
”

“But . . . ,” Charlotte began.

“It doesn’t have to be the most amazing thing ever!” Janie cut her off. “Just
something.
Something that shows our potential. Assuming we even
have
potential.”

She kneeled to the ground and scribbled their names on four small squares of notebook paper. Then crumpled the squares into
tiny spitballs, cupped the paper wads in her palms, and shook. “Okay. Whoever’s name you get, that’s your design partner.”

She uncupped her hands, and the girls picked one spitball each. After a moment of uncrinkling, Melissa began the reading of
names.

“I’m supposed to trust
her
with my outfit?” She pointed at Petra in horror. “No! No way!”

“Oh, just deal with it, Melissa.” Charlotte tsked, unclasping her pink Chanel coin-purse. She pulled out a few crisp hundred-dollar
bills and handed them to Janie. Janie accepted the money, counted the bills, and promptly lost her ability to breathe.
Five hundred dollars?
Was she
serious
? Janie glanced at Charlotte for signs of trickery.

“Just make me something good,” Charlotte requested.

“Of course,” Janie replied. But she could barely contain her excitement. She folded the bills into tight squares, and tucked
them into her dad’s old wallet. When she dropped the bloated billfold into her bag, it tugged with new weight, heavy as a
sack of gold.

“Thanks.”

Charlotte pinched Janie’s twenty between her fingers like a used Kleenex. “No . . . ,” she smiled. “Thank
you
!”

“Fine!” Melissa stormed off. “If that’s how it’s gonna be!”

“Where are you going?!” Petra called.

Charlotte checked her platinum Bvlgari wristwatch. “Barneys closes in twenty minutes.”

“I’m returning my shoes!” Melissa hollered from the curb.

The remaining ladies looked at each other in surprise. Melissa had just spent the last hour and a half gabbing about the “fabuliciousness”
of her latest “necessary” purchase: a pair of black, brass-studded Dolce & Gabbana wedge platform heels — the very last pair
in the store.

“Why?!” Charlotte yelled after her.

“So I have enough money!” Melissa cried bitterly. “To give to Miss Animal Rights over there!”

“That’s perfect.” Petra plopped down by the fountain. But Janie smiled, proud of herself.

Her plan had totally worked.

Nikki Pellegrini was one of those girls everybody liked. She was the Amanda Bynes of the eighth grade — pretty (but not
too
pretty), smart (but not
too
smart). And she was
sooooo
sweet. As her chain-smoking grandmother, Nikki the First, concluded in a frog-like rasp: nicotine’s the world’s most addictive
substance, but Nikki’s a close second.

But the addiction people had to Nikki was no match for the addiction Nikki had to people. From cool kids to wannabes, jocks
to jokesters, brainiacs to hacky-sacks, suck-ups to stuck-ups — no one escaped the click of her mouse. A hefty 384 friends
belonged to her MySpace account alone. (Of course, her tally excluded bands, celebrities, and MySpace Tom.)

Having virtually recruited every member of the seventh and eighth grades, Nikki realized it was high time she conquered the
ninth. She figured out a shortcut: she would befriend one supremely popular person in the
tenth grade.
Once Supremely Popular Tenth Grader was in place, Nikki would place her in the Top Eight, where she would serve as indisputable
evidence of Nikki’s coolness. Curious freshman would have to wonder: who
was
this Nikki? And if Supremely Popular Tenth Grader was her friend, why then, weren’t they?

Nikki logged onto MySpace.com and entered her Supremely Popular Tenth Grader of choice. She scrolled down the list of inevitable
Loser-Charlottes (there was
Charlotteandkey,
a forty-two-year-old swinger from Austin,
CharlotteKisses,
a thirteen-year-old cheerleader from Boise, and
“ShootingChars,”
a fifteen-year-old Scientologist from Tampa), until she found her target:
Charlotte_Beaucoup
, a ninety-nine-year-old “Other” from Los Angeles. In her thumbnail pic, Charlotte held her cat, a scowling Burmese named
Monkey, to her cheek. Charlotte was dressed as a French maid. Monkey was dressed as a feather duster.

Ever since Jake kissed her in the Showroom, Charlotte had become Nikki’s new obsession. Charlotte had beauty, brains, style,
and wit. But most of all she had
experience.
Behind that sly half-smile was a world Nikki could only dream about — a secret world of jets, Jaguars, and (most of all)
Jake. Nikki scrutinized Charlotte’s pic for some kind of clue, analyzing her face like a tarot card. She outlined Charlotte’s
features with the point of her cursor. If Nikki couldn’t be close to Jake, then at the very least, she would be close to the
girl he loved.

Do you really want to add Charlotte_Beaucoup as a friend?

Click “Add” only if you really wish to add Charlotte_Beaucoup as a friend.

Nikki moved her cursor across the screen and held her breath. She vowed not to exhale until she clicked. She used this technique
whenever she had to do something that scared her.

After twenty-one seconds, Nikki clicked
ADD.
And then she gasped for air.

The next day, Charlotte_Beaucoup accepted her as a friend. Within a week the entire ninth grade class and a quarter of the
tenth joined Nikki’s network. She now had a staggering 451 friends to her name, including — to her unparalleled joy — Charlotte
Beverwil herself. Things couldn’t get better.

And then things did.

“You are so lying!” Carly gasped once she shared the news. Nikki, Carly, and Juliet (aka “The Nicarettes”) had spread their
bagged lunches on the steps outside the breezeway. The breezeway attracted a lot of foot traffic, which gave Nikki ample opportunity
to greet friends should they happen to walk by.

“She’s not lying,” Juliet sighed, staring into her Smart Water. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

It
referred to nothing less than Nikki’s personal invite to The Trend Set’s highly anticipated “Tag — You’re It!” Party. As
far as Nikki knew, she was the only eighth grader to have received one (she chalked it up to the Pellegrini charm). The stiff
white envelope had arrived sealed with a dollop of pink wax stamped in the shape of a rose. The card inside was a matching
shade of pink with a lacquered black border. Nikki ran her fingertip across the raised calligraphy letters. So accustomed
was she to evites, an actual invitation was an event in and of itself.

“What did it say?” Carly asked. Nikki cleared her throat. She’d committed every word to memory.