Poseur #3: Petty in Pink: A Trend Set Novel (11 page)

“Of course not,” scoffed Don John, rolling his bulging blue eyes. “I threw
quinoa
, which is
much
higher in protein.” He collapsed across the bed, jostling the mattress, and Janie clutched a bedpost, hanging on to her seat.
“I knew this day would come,” he moaned, burying his face in the voluminous silk bedclothes. “You’re off to your big fabulous
future as a fashion designer, while I stay behind, waving my Hermès and/or Lanvin handkerchief at the dock… just a
person
you once knew.…”

“Oh, Juanita,
no
…” Charlotte joined him on the bed, smoothing his stormy, highlighted head. Janie slipped off the bed completely, preferring
the less crowded floor.

“
Who is that mysterious figure in black,
they’ll whisper,” Don John continued his scenario, refusing to be soothed. “Miserable town gossips!” he wailed. “Why can’t
you leave me
alone
?!”

“Um, you guys?” Janie interrupted. They glanced her way, twin masks of bewilderment, seemingly amazed to see her there at
all. “I’m going to…”

“No!” Charlotte cried, noticing her hand on the wrought-iron door handle. Don John sat up and gaped in dismay.

“You’re
going
?”

“No, I just need to make a phone call,” Janie explained, relishing their concern. That they cared whether she left or stayed!
It suddenly felt like the highest form of flattery.

“Well, hurry back!” Charlotte chimed, cuing Don John to reswoon across the bed. Janie smiled as the door swung behind her,
blocking her view. Not to say she didn’t
enjoy
theater, but when it came to
Don John: A Tragedy in Infinite Acts
? Let’s just say she preferred to wait in the lobby.

She headed down the hall, ignoring the immaculate Capri Coast–colored walls (not to mention the series of tastefully framed
black-and-white portraits of a seminude and fully preggers Georgina Beverwil) in favor of finding her navy Samsung cell, which
she unearthed from her disorganized crocheted hobo shoulder bag. Four missed texts! She smiled, eagerly scrolling down the
screen.

Janie half-smiled, half-frowned, scrolling up to Amelia’s second text. Paul Elliot Miller, a vegan? Really? But he, like,
subsisted
on the spicy-style hot dogs from Carney’s. The only vegetable she’d ever seen him eat was, like,
relish
(ketchup he considered a fruit).
And
he wore a pin that said “Flesh Eaters.”
Then again,
she mused, punching
SEND
and lifting the phone to her ear,
that’s typical Paul
. The boy could do nothing unless it was to the absolute extreme.

“Oh…” A male voice filled her ear, and she sipped a breath, glancing to the end of the hall.

Evan Beverwil, in all his board-shorted glory, had just finished mounting the stairs.

“Janie?” burbled a second, excited voice.

“Hey!” She clapped the phone shut and greeted Evan with a strained smile.
Great
. She dropped her phone into her bag and privately condemned herself.
Hanging up on your best friend
equals
awesome.

Evan studied the floor and headed toward her, forking his fingers into his thickly tousled gold-flecked hair. Janie focused
on the frosty glass of ice in his hand, his softly slapping flip-flops, but then there he was—
right there
—and she no longer knew where to look. He was too tall, too gorgeous, too terrifying—like a tree that had suddenly pushed
up through the floor and shattered the roof, cracking all the walls. It took all her remaining willpower to look up. As their
eyes met, he swayed an inch closer, almost daring her to step back. She couldn’t move. His eyes were too startling, too blue—like
sky through a tangle of branches.

“You’re um…,” he confessed in a low, apologetic voice, glancing toward his left hand, which, she now noticed, gripped a doorknob.
“You’re kind of blocking the door.”

“Oh,”
she realized, taking a flustered step backward (mental note to self:
die
). Flattening her back against the opposite wall, she drew her eyebrows together, and in a desperately casual tone asked,
“Is that your room?”

“Yeah,” he admitted, slowly turning the handle, half-hoping she’d disappear.
There’s no way around it,
he acknowledged with quiet horror. Unless he decided to just, like,
stand there
, Janie Farrish was about to see his room: the chamber of lame, the bib crib—
where players took their game to die
. He closed his eyes, trying to make his peace with fate. Not possible. Pushing the door open caused him near-physical pain.

“Omigod!” she gasped, and he braced himself for what was coming—the ultimate four-letter word, the death to every dude’s dudeness.
“Cute!”

“Yeah…,” he granted, beckoning her inside and fighting off the sting. “My mom’s decorator kind of went ape-shit.” He could
still
remember the gleam in Heidi’s eye.
Isn’t it a wipeout?!
she’d gushed, ushering him inside.
Um, more like a butt wipe,
he’d frowned. The first thing he’d noticed? The knobs on his solid oak bureau had been replaced by
seashells
. It only got worse from there. The entire bedroom had been, like,
surfolested
—from the fringed hula-dancer lamp to the weathered boardwalk floors, from the antique hibiscus-print curtains to the anchor-and-chain
“shipwreck chandelier.” And then, most shameful of all, the brand-new Al Merrick surfboard mounted on the wall. In another
stroke of brilliance, Heidi thought it’d be a good idea to have the board detailed with his name.
Evan
—coming at you in a burst of flame. Man, it was a full-on
tragedy
. He knew dudes—like,
seriously
talented surfers with nothing to spend but the sand in their pockets—who’d
kill
for an Al Merrick board. And here he was… using one as a “decorative element.”

More like dickorative
.

Janie didn’t seem to notice though. She wandered over to his built-in bookshelf, picked up a 1940 Ford station-wagon model
car, and began playing with the wheels. He plunked down his glass of ice, gently kicked his empty ice-water bong under his
desk, and lifted his chin. “That’s a woody,” he informed her.

She looked up at him and froze. “What?”

“The
car
,” he clarified, resisting the impulse to wince.
Awesome,
he thought.
Now, on top of everything else, she thinks I’m a perv
. “That’s just what they’re called,” he explained. “ ’Cause the doors are, uh, made out of… uh…”

No. No
way
was he saying it again.

She laughed weakly, returning the wooden car to the shelf. “It’s really cool,” she offered, discreetly wiping her hand on
her hip.

“I guess.” He shrugged, eyeing the petrified starfish glued around his mirror. “It’s kind of a surf thing,” he added, kicked
a foot over his ankle, and leaned against the desk. “Like everything
else
in this stupid room.”

“Stupid?” she repeated, darkening those ocean-gray eyes of hers. “Sorry, I—I thought you were all
about
surfing…”

“Nah, I am,” he assured her. “It’s just… people tend to latch on to that
one thing
like that’s all I’m about, you know? It’s like, okay—I love to
surf.
Does that really mean I need white sharks on my
light
switches?”

Janie laughed—a real laugh this time, he was pretty sure—and he grinned. “You know what I
mean
, though?” he beseeched her, loosening up a little. “It’s like I can’t
escape
.”

“Uch…,” she groaned, covering her left eye with her hand and watching him with the other. “I feel bad now.”

“Why?” He laughed, looming at the foot of his bed. “It’s not your fault.”

She moved to sit on his bed, then swiftly swayed back, repelled like a magnet, and frowned at her shoe. He noticed she was
back to wearing the ones he liked.

The checkerboard Vans.

“So, um…” She hesitated, shaking her silky bob. “I actually came up with a few tattoo ideas, like… over lunch?”

“You did?” he said, grinning like a total Beavis.

“Yeah, but…” She looked up with an apologetic cringe. “They’re all surf themed.”

“Oh
.
”
He pushed some air from between his lips, dismissing her concern. “That’s cool!” he assured her, plopping on the foot of
the bed. The frame creaked, and he bounced up again, inanely dusting off his shirt. “I mean, it’s different with a tattoo.”

“Really?” she asked, looking doubtful. Before he could respond, she swiveled her bag against her hip and twisted, presenting
one side of her long, slender waist. Her black-and-gray dress came together in a crazy row of bright red stitches, like dashes
on a map—marking the path to treasure. “Here.” She pulled out a marred black sketchbook, flipped it open against her hip,
and pointed to the corner of a page. “It’s kind of based on this, um, Magritte painting?” She surrendered the book and bit
her thumbnail, waiting for his response.
“I don’t know,”
she blurted after a 2.8 second-long eternity. “It was just an idea.”

He stared down at the book. “It’s awesome.”

“Oh.” She flushed, not quite buying it. “You don’t have to…”

“No, listen.” He looked up, watching her. “I love it.” At which point she stopped talking and watched him right back.
You’re amazing,
he mentally added, clenching his jaw; for some reason, he imagined jaw clenches assisted telepathy, not that he
believed
in telepathy, but still.
Something
was happening. The color slowly blooming in her cheeks, the near-reflective sheen in her eyes, the barely perceptible heat
radiating off her body: a definite conspiracy of signs. Sun streamed in through a crack in the curtain, illuminating the downy
hairs around her perfectly curved ear; they were like the microscopic feelers of some glowing, deep-sea creature, something
so delicate you barely believed it existed. He clenched his hand and slowly released it. His fingers thrummed like something
electric, jolting painfully at the tips.
This was it.

He
had
to touch her.

“I should have known!” Charlotte cried, bursting into the room. With a start, Evan and Janie turned away from each other and
parted, sliding like pads of butter to opposite sides of a pan. “Melissa just called,” the indignant brunette informed the
terrified, taller girl, cornering her by the seashell bureau. “And
apparently
, the Pink Party?”

“
Stink
Party!” Don John sang, sailing into the room.

“Is friends and family only,”
Charlotte pushed on, ignoring his quip. “Can you
believe
it?”

“No,”
Janie replied hoarsely, still attempting to recover from the world’s craziest spike of adrenaline. She took a deep breath,
not quite believing Charlotte wasn’t there to bust her.
Not
that there’d been anything to
bust
—well, besides incredibly strange, incomprehensible eye contact with her older brother—
which hadn’t meant anything!
she reprimanded the storming butterflies in her stomach. Did they
not
realize? Evan gave
everything
inscrutable come-hither stares. He seriously gave that look to toasters!

“I know,”
Charlotte moaned in sympathy, attributing Janie’s fainting effect to her terrible,
terrible
news. “And the only other high-profile event that week?” She paused to milk the horror. “A Save the Whales benefit hosted
by
Hayden Panettiere
.”

“Snooze!”
yawned Don John.

“Oh…,” Charlotte whimpered, wringing her hands and beginning to pace. “Whatever will we
do
?”

“Well,” Janie hesitated, resisting the urge to look at Evan. “If it’s friends and family only,” she reasoned, “we could
probably
get Jake an invitation. I mean, we’re all Melissa’s friends, so we’re invited. And Jake’s my
twin
. I could claim some hysterical codependent we-speak-a-secret-language thing. ”

“Yes!” Charlotte brightly cut in, endlessly pleased by the idea. Don John loudly exhaled through his perpetually flared nostrils.

“But how does that
solve
anything?” he asked.

“Oh yeah,” Charlotte’s delicate face collapsed. “How
does
that solve anything?”

“Well,” Janie explained. “He’d be allowed a plus one, right? So
maybe
he could take the celebriteaser as his
date
. You know, like… sneak her in under the radar.”

“Omigod,” Don John clenched his fists by his face and crooned.
“Buh-riiiillllls!”

“No.” Charlotte pursed her lips at the floor. The idea of Jake traipsing around with some beautiful celebrity was
not
sitting well with her. “Not brills.”

“Really?” Janie knit her eyebrows into a plaintive knot.

“You’re jealous,” Don John addressed Charlotte, and then sharply gasped.
“Omigod, you still like him.”

“Oh, Don John!” Charlotte trilled with laughter, making a mental note to revoke his wardrobe and makeup-borrowing privileges—permanently.
“No, no. It’s just that I don’t think it’s
realistic
, that’s all.” Her eyelashes fluttered as she arranged the bright topaz bangle on her wrist. “I mean,
Jake Farrish
going out with a
celebrity
?” Fighting a wave of queasiness, she managed to sniff, “Who’d believe
that
?”