Poseur (18 page)

As further evidence, she grabbed her new 9502 Caramella bag by LeSportsac, unzipped the front pocket, and slipped out the
tag. Carly and Juliet passed it between them, their mouths hanging open. They both looked a little like Nikki’s grandmother
after the stroke.

“I like ‘Shotgun,’ don’t you?” Nikki asked. Her label choice referred to the day she sat shotgun with Jake at the wheel. She
licked the foil lid of her peach yogurt and sighed. “I hope I win.”

Carly pitched the tag into Nikki’s lap. “
How
were you invited to this?!” It was less a question than an accusation.

“MySpace. Charlotte’s one of my friends.”

Carly stared at Juliet, like,
how is that possible?

“How is that possible?” Juliet asked. Her grilled tofu wrap levitated at her lips.

“Um . . . I asked her?”

“B-but,” Carly sputtered. “She just accepted?!”

“Obvie,”
Nikki replied, exasperated.

As if on cue, Charlotte and Kate Joliet emerged from the breezeway. Kate was wearing a butterfly-print thermal, a distressed
denim mini, and tan Frye harness boots. Charlotte was wearing an emerald green camisole, “Ava” skinny jeans, and silver eyelet
Twelfth Street flats. “He is
not
my boyfriend!” She giggled, smacking Kate’s bony excuse for an arm.

“O-ow!” Kate whined, raising her arm to her lips. She gave herself a get-well kiss. “If he’s not your boyfriend,” Kate said,
returning her attention to Charlotte, “then what is he?”

“My
friend,
” Charlotte answered. “Who happens to be . . . a boy.” At
boy,
she closed her eyes, savoring the word like candy.

“You are so full of it.” Kate grinned.

Charlotte clapped her hands in delight. “I know!”

As they waltzed by her, Nikki tried to smile, but she felt slightly stunned, like a baby in the presence of two larger-than-life
dogs. Charlotte seemed to barely register her presence.

“Wow, Nikki.” Juliet smirked once the two older girls were gone. “You guys seem
pretty
tight.”

“Aka — she has no idea who you are,” Carly snorted in triumph.

“I look really
different
in person,” Nikki protested, hoping it was true.

“Omigod!” Juliet gasped, slapping her hand across her mouth. She looked over at Carly. Her eyes bulged.

“What?”
Carly snapped.

“Remember seventh grade?” Juliet asked, removing her hand. “When Molly Berger came to my bat mitzvah?”

“Ew-uh . . . yeah.” Carly cringed. “Why did you invite her? That was so
awk.
”

“Because . . .” Juliet paused for effect. “I told my mom to invite everyone on my MySpace list. But I completely forgot I’d
accepted Molly Berger as one of my friends. And then, once I remembered, it was too late.”

“Wait.” Carly frowned. “You accepted her as a friend?”

Juliet executed her best Sad Face. “I felt
bad.
”

“That’s the problem with the Internet,” Carly sighed. “It makes you too nice.”

“Totally,” Juliet agreed. She turned to Nikki. “You, like,
get
the moral of this story, right?”

“I guess.” Nikki frowned. Carly and Juliet shared a knowing glance. They could tell she didn’t have a clue.

“The moral of the story is” — Juliet touched Nikki on the knee — “Charlotte looked at her MySpace list and invited you by
mistake.”

“And she only accepted you in the first place because she was being nice,” Carly added.

“Aka — she pitied you.”

“You’re, like, a random.”

“A Pity Project.”

“A Charity Chum.”

“If you go to this party?” Juliet shook her head. “Everyone’s gonna look at you and be like . . .”

“What is
she
doing here?” Carly groaned.

“Just like Molly Berger,”
Juliet finished in her best ghost-story tone.

Nikki frowned into her lap. Her friends had a point. She probably
had
been invited by mistake. But was that any reason not to go? What was “mistake” but another word for “incredible stroke of
good luck?” What was “incredible stroke of good luck” but another five words for Fate? How could she pass up an opportunity
to be near Jake Farrish? And what’s more, be near him in a pretty dress, on a warm September night, at a glamorous party in
Beverly Hills? And besides. Maybe she
wasn’t
invited by mistake. Maybe Charlotte actually wanted her to go!

“I don’t care,” Nikki declared. “I’m going.”

“Fine,” Carly shot back with unadulterated contempt. “I would so not go if I were you but that’s just me so whatever.”

Nikki turned to Juliet. “Do you wanna come? I’m allowed a plus one.”

Juliet gasped like Miss America. “Are you
kidding
me?!” she cried, throwing her arms around Nikki’s neck. Carly croaked like she’d swallowed a fly.

“You asked
her
?”

“You said you didn’t want to go,” Nikki reminded her with a tiny smile.

“Well, I don’t!” Carly huffed, crushing her paper lunch bag into a tiny ball. She tossed it toward a trash can.

She missed by a mile.

According to local Valley lore, the tiny shop on the corner of Colfax Street and Riverside Avenue was cursed. It had started
out as a shoe repair called “Cinderella’s Shoe Repair.” The elderly shoemaker wore tiny spectacles and a leather apron. Then
the shoemaker died and his store got snapped up by a yogurt vender. Within days, the only evidence of the shoemaker’s eighty-eight-year
life was the small glass slipper decal on the old glass entrance door. Despite repeated applications of steel wool and nail
polish remover by the new owner — the decal survived. His yogurt store did not. Neither did the the B-grade sushi restaurant,
the gourmet dog treat bakery, the Boba tea lounge, the tapioca bar, the hammock hut, or the “happy” hookah parlor. Every business
failed within three months.

Then came Bippity Boppity Beads.

Maybe there’d been a sudden boom in the bead industry, or maybe the store-name’s reference to Cinderella appeased the shoemaker’s
ghost; whatever the reason, Bippity Boppity Beads broke the corner store curse. It passed the three-month mark in July and
by September was still going strong. Which was very good news.

Because Janie was obsessed with Bippity Boppity Beads.

“Aren’t those beautiful?” Elsa, the owner of Bippity Boppity Beads, had asked. Elsa weighed in at two hundred pounds and had
the exact same haircut as Richard Gere. She wore a fringed black leather motorcycle jacket and called herself the Bead Baron.
“They’re from Moreno,” she added, peering over Janie’s shoulder. The beads in her hand were the murky blue of sea glass.

“I love them.”

“They’re ninety-five cents each.” Elsa smiled, showing off her silver caps. “We got them in yesterday.”

Janie had already made her purchase — fifty red beads from Morocco, fifty black beads from Egypt — but she didn’t let that
stop her. She stuck her hand into her canvas tote to scrounge for a few free-floating bills. She couldn’t find any. She scrounged
for a few quarters. She couldn’t find any. In the end, she found four pennies, a Magic Castle token, two bobby pins, and a
piece of blue lint.

Janie’s stomach fell into her shoes.

“I’ll be right back,” she squeaked. She headed for the door, stepped outside, and took a deep breath. If that piece of blue
lint meant what she thought it did, then Janie had spent every dime of Charlotte’s five hundred dollars in a matter of
two and a half hours.
How was that even possible?!

“Of course it’s possible,” Jake now scoffed. “This is, like, old-school Galileo shit.”

Whenever he chilled in his sister’s room, Jake leaned against her closet. Leaning against the closet was the best way to avoid
looking
at the closet, which (let’s be honest) wasn’t so much a closet than a semi-fanatical shrine to Nick Valensi, the guitarist
of the Strokes. Nick Valensi’s “achingly perfect” face and “kill me now” forearms graced every inch of the door’s surface,
including the brass knob (Jake could only assume it was brass; the knob hadn’t been Valensi-free for years).

Janie pushed aside her black star-shaped pillows and dumped her afternoon purchases on her bed. “What does Galileo have to
do with this?” she asked, staring down at her loot.

“Well, you know about the theory of gravity, right?”

“Sort of,” she replied, immediately resenting Jake’s scientific prowess. It was like, how could her brother be so smart and
yet so dumb?

“In the absence of resisting forces,” he explained, “everything falls at the same rate. Same goes with money. In the absence
of resisting force, you spend it. It doesn’t matter if it’s, like, two bucks or two thousand — it all goes at the same rate.”

“Yeah, except — there’s no force that stops people from spending,” Janie pointed out.

“Yeah, there is. I’m a force.”

“Omigod.” She peeled with laughter. “Sorry, but you are
so
not a force.”

Jake made a sound like a hyena flying around on a broomstick.

“I do not sound like that!” Janie pitched a bag of red beads at his head. He collapsed into the fetal position.

“I would’ve been, like:
don’t do it,
Janie.” Jake shook his head, his voice muffled. “Don’t buy those little red bead things. They’re dumb. And you would have
been, like, wow, Jake. Indeed, you are a
force.
A force . . . of
reason.
”

Janie snatched her bag of beads and scowled. “They are
not
dumb, okay? They’re a necessary component of my design.”

He considered her point with a solemn nod. “Dumb.”

“Get out,” she ordered.

Jake got to his feet and shuffled for the exit. He paused at his sister’s door and shook his head. “Dumb,” he whispered.

“JAKE!”

In a flash, he escaped down the hall.

Janie shut her door and collapsed against it. She gazed at the mess of material, beads, buttons, safety pins, and thread on
her red and black twin bed. Over the last year, she’d made sure everything in her bedroom was either white, red, black, or
a combination of the three. Jake kept asking her if she’d invited the White Stripes over for a slumber party (he thought that
was super-hilarious), but Janie didn’t care. She thought it looked cool.

She slid open the top drawer of her white bureau (she’d painted the handles fire-engine red) and looked inside. The enormous
vintage British flag she’d bought on eBay was folded inside. It was about twenty times more expensive than a brand-new one
— but it was worth it. New flags were made of stiff, synthetic fibers like nylon and polyester. New flags had no history or
romance. The vintage flag was made from hand-stitched, 100 percent silk. The vintage flag belonged to a World War II veteran
named Perry McCloud. Perry McCloud wrote Janie a personal congratulations upon the date of her purchase.

Janie sat down on her fluffy sheepskin throw rug and grabbed a pair of shears. She fixed them to a corner of the flag, right
at the diagonal of the Union Jack stripe. She sucked in her breath and sliced into the fabric. The scissors stuttered with
effort. Her heart beat like a drum.
There’s no going back now,
she thought, splitting the silk at a faster clip. Suddenly, her vision was clear, so clear she could almost touch it.