The Good, the Fab and the Ugly Read online

  Text copyright © 2008 by Rachel Maude

  Illustrations copyright © 2008 by Rachel Maude and Compai

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Poppy

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.lb-teens.com

  First eBook Edition: October 2008

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-03994-9

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  For Gabe and Jess

  The Girl: Charlotte Beverwil

  The Getup: Crimson satin sheath by Narcisco Rodriguez, diamond briolette necklace by Chopard, and black patent slingbacks with matching black patent bow clutch by Christian Louboutin.

  The Girl: Janie Farrish

  The Getup: Backless gunmetal silk gown by Dries Van Noten, stacked diamond cuffs by Van Cleef & Arpels, silver mirrored leather peep-toe pumps by Chloe Eloise Ricoperto, and silver/gold tone lizard clutch by Bottega Veneta.

  The Girl: Petra Greene

  The Getup: Organic tulle toga by Behnaz Sarafpour, diamante platform sandals by Stella McCartney, and narcissus flower coronet by Nature.

  The Girl: Melissa Moon

  The Getup: Oh No She Didn’t.

  “Thank you! Thank you so much!” Melissa Moon cried to her adoring audience. Except she hadn’t quite reached the microphone, so from their point of view she was mute as a puppet — a brightly glossed mouth flapping a series of silent O’s punctuated by the unexpectedly loud “. . . uch!” Melissa refused to fret. Of course, they’d assume she’d expressed her thanks, and hadn’t, for example, told them they were “Too ugly! Too ugly to touch!” This was the Academy Awards, after all, and her audience knew as well as she did: No Ugly People Allowed.

  Well . . . at least not in the first two rows.

  Melissa hugged the small gold man-trophy to her chest, wedging him deep into her jutting shelf of cleavage, while directly behind her, her esteemed colleagues gathered into a giddy half-moon. POSEUR, their new fashion label, had just won the Oscar for Best New Fashion Label — a category invented just for them. For the occasion, esteemed colleague number one, Janie Farrish, wore a stunning bias-cut gown in gunmetal satin, perfectly complimenting her elastic height and willowy limbs (and successfully disguising her somewhat wimpy personality). The petite and porcelain Charlotte Beverwil chose a strapless floor-length sheath in deepest crimson, a color as fiery and dramatic as she was (behind her cool and placid demeanor, that is). And Petra Greene, the reluctant Goddess of the group, donned an ethereal, one-shouldered toga dress in shimmering champagne tulle, her honey-hued locks crowned by a fragrant coronet of white narcissus, the flower symbolizing vanity (which Petra was anything but). Not that anybody noticed the flowers, the satin, or the crimson. Tonight, all eyes were on Melissa, who — for reasons she could not recall — had appeared in her underwear. She toyed with feeling embarrassed, and then brushed off the impulse. After all, she had worn her Agent Provocateur leopard-print stretch chiffon pushup bra with the matching low-rise bikini. And really . . .

  Could you get more red carpet than that?

  “This is just too amazing!” She gushed (into the mic this time) while the other three girls dutifully retreated from the limelight. As director of public relations, Melissa handled allPOSEUR communication — including (she’d hissingly reminded them as they mounted the polished ivory stage stairs) Oscar speeches. “When I was a little girl” — she cleared her throat, assuming a serious tone — “growing up in the dog-eat-dog streets of South Central Los Angeles, I would not have dared to dream that I would one day wind up here, behind this podium, accepting this . . .” She held the small-yet-weighty Oscar aloft, and her dark almond eyes, which flaunted real fox-fur eyelashes, batted away her sparkling tears. “This incredible award!”

  The star-studded audience churned into an exuberant round of applause, and diamonds, like sea spray, glittered on their wrists: clearly they were moved by her tale of woe. So many obstacles. Such struggle! Of course, Melissa was more born in South Central than she actually grew up there (she’d boasted one uber-exclusive Bel Air address or another since the age of three). But, seriously. Why bore them with technicalities?

  “My hope,” she breathed, clenching her paraffin-pampered fist, “is that our success with POSEUR serves to inspire young girls all over the world. No matter who you are, or where you come from — if you believe in yourself, if you work hard — you can rise above your circumstances, and . . .”

  But before she could say become a star, her attention diverted to the opposite end of the pavilion, where two great doors had just swung open, thudding dramatically against the adjacent wall. With a swell of creaking hinges and rustling fabric, the illustrious members of her audience craned around in their deep red velvet upholstered seats, murmuring loudly. There, on the crest of the long, unfurled red carpet, a mysterious figure emerged from the gaping theater entrance. Melissa shielded her eyes and tried to make out his or her identity, but the blinding white glare of the spotlights rendered this effort futile.

  “Um, excuse me,” she huffed, continuing to squint behind the visor of her hand. “I happen to be in the middle of a history-making Oscar speech?”

  She glanced commiseratively to her audience, inviting them to share her incredulity, and found the rows of velvet seats empty. Her audience had disappeared! With a startled gasp, she whirled around. Janie, Charlotte, and Petra remained huddled together, smiling and clutching their awards, but Melissa could tell at once: something was wrong. Their clothes hung without movement, and their eyes stared, unblinking, and dull as stone.

  “Why are y’all just standing there like a bunch of mannequins?” As if to answer, Charlotte’s arm creakingly dislodged at the shoulder, and clattered — pure plastic — to the floor. A sound like a moth wing fluttered inside Melissa’s ear and, fighting off a paralyzing twist of dread, she turned around again. The faceless intruder loomed only a few feet away, shadowy hands gripping the corners of a large sack, the gaping sack-mouth moving toward her like a toothless shark. In a spasm of self-defense, Melissa threw her Oscar with all her might, realizing only too late what she had done. As the sack’s mouth closed around her prize, she choked out a noise of regret. Warm breath filled her ear like a soupy fog, and a cool voice whispered:

  “Trick or treat . . .”

  Melissa startled awake with a long and terrified scream. She looked around, palm pressed to her wildly bucking heart, and took a moment to orient herself. She was in an absurdly opulent bedroom, in a palatial cliffside house, in exclusive Bel Air, California: nothing out of the ordinary here, right?

  Exhaling her relief, she collapsed against some of the sixteen rose-and-cream-silk boudoir pillows piled high against her ornate, cream-and-go
ld Louis XVI headboard, and patiently waited for her father to come console her. She strained to hear the distant rumble of his footsteps, the low drone of his concerned voice, but the only sound to break the Saturday 2 a.m. quiet came from Emilio Poochie. Her somewhat asthmatic cream-and-tan Pomer-anian lay sprawled at the foot of her bed, snoring like a micro-machine truck.

  This was seriously not okay.

  Whipping aside her hibiscus pink silk Frette sheets, she padded a quick path across her hand-knotted ivory Indian silk rug, cracked open her solid oak bedroom door, positioned her Strawberry Rosebud Salve-slathered mouth inside the two-inch gap of space, and (oh yes she did) she screamed again. Eleven seconds later, her half-asleep dad appeared at her door, wavering above his half-dead Bugs Bunny slippers, and fumbling for the hall switch.

  “What happened?” Seedy Moon’s distinct nasal voice, one of the most renowned in rap music today, cracked thickly with sleep. He found the switch and winced into the light. “You okay?”

  “It’s nothing, Daddy,” Melissa reassured him from the bed, having perfectly rearranged herself into a position of dreamy repose. Her down-stuffed rose-bouquet duvet muffled her words. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  Seedy’s eyebrows tied into a knot of suspicion, and his dark eyes slid about her high-ceilinged, birdcage-shaped room. “Cafeteria Lady in here?” he asked, referring to Melissa’s boyfriend of four months, Marco Duvall. Upon first meeting Melissa’s father, Marco made the grave mistake of wearing a hairnet, hoping to impress Seedy as a fellow reformed thug — maybe earn his respect. Sadly for him, the only thing earned was his not-so-thuggish nickname.

  “No, Cafeteria La . . . Marco is not here,” Melissa scoffed. “And just ’cause he snuck in my room that one time . . .”

  “One time is one time too many,” Seedy cut her off, whipping aside the sliding mirror door of his daughter’s wall-to-wall closet. He frowned, prodding the dark hanging clothes with his bunny-clad foot.

  “Daddy, would you stop?” Melissa reached to drag the still-slumbering Emilio Poochie into her lap. She hugged him close, diminishing her voice to a plaintive squeak. “I had a real bad dream.”

  “You did?” Seedy plopped on the edge of her featherbed-topped mattress and she instantly relaxed into a smile; the tug of her father’s weight on the end of her bed never failed to comfort her. Seedy smiled, too, squeezing the blanketed lump that was her foot. “What about?”

  “Well . . .” She rubbed the furry point of Emilio’s ear between her forefinger and thumb. “It started with I won the Oscar . . .”

  “Oh no . . .” Seedy laughed. “That dream again?”

  “Okay, would you please listen?” She scowled, waiting a punitive beat before she resumed. She recounted the whole dream-turned-nightmare, taking care to omit nothing, not even the most seemingly insignificant detail (well, except that bit about the underwear). “And after that” — she widened her almond-shaped brown eyes for dramatic effect — “I woke up screaming.”

  “Huh.” Her compact-yet-muscular father squeezed his interlocked fingers, free of their customary jewel-encrusted rings, between his soft gray sweatpant-clad knees, and frowned. “Seems pretty obvious to me. I mean, we’re getting into October now, right? It’s a spooky time . . . Halloween around the corner . . .”

  “Daddy!” Melissa grimaced with disapproval. “Halloween hasn’t been ‘spooky’ since, like, the Middle Ages. And besides, that is the obvious interpretation. You got to get beneath all that. Crack the surface!”

  “Okay, okay, lemme think.” He closed his eyes, pushing his fingers deep into the sockets. After a moment, he removed his fingers and blinked.

  “I got nothing.”

  Melissa smacked her overstuffed down comforter, launching a light-as-breath feather into the air. “It’s about the person who broke into my contest. Obvie!”

  By contest, of course, she was referring to the raffle POSEUR had organized for their now infamous label launch (also known as the “Tag — You’re It!” party) one week ago, last Saturday. They’d been having major trouble picking out the perfect name for their new label, but (a few cat fights and one silent treatment later) Charlotte Beverwil proposed a simple solution: instead of naming it themselves, why not leave it up to their guests? It was, as Miss Frenchie-pants Charlotte herself might say, un bon idée. They mailed pink-and-black-lacquered invitations with small white tags attached, as well as instructions for the invitee to fill out the tag with the label idea of their choice. As their guests arrived to their swank-a-dank venue (the Prada Store on Rodeo), they dropped their completed tags into a clear globe-shaped safe (Melissa had chosen the globe to best convey her modest goal: to take over the world).

  But “safe” their tags most definitely were not. Someone had busted the globe wide open — someone had tagged the tags — and scrawled one word, POSEUR, across each one.

  “Until I find out who is responsible,” Melissa ranted to her father, “how am I supposed to get a decent night’s sleep? Ever since the launch, that crook’s been all up in my subconscious. Invading my dreams! It’s like she, he — whoever — has broken into my head.”

  “Alright, alright, now hold up a minute.” Seedy fixed his daughter with his sternest you-better-calm-yourself stare. “Do you remember why, despite everything that happened, you decided, contrary to expectation, to go ahead and name your label POSEUR?”

  “Because,” Melissa sighed. “It’s a message.”

  “You remember that message?” Seedy asked. His daughter only shrugged, gently squeezing Emilio Poochie’s padded foot; hard, moon-shaped nails, painstakingly manicured in Chanel’s Blue Satin, protracted from the fuzzy ends of his toes. Her father believed naming the label POSEUR took away the word’s negative power (he called it “appropriating the language of the oppressor”). Still, despite her best efforts, she couldn’t quite let it go. “POSEUR” was maybe the worst thing someone could call you ever; it meant you weren’t who you were; it meant “you” was just an act. And (this is what really nagged) who among them was the POSEUR? If the perpetrator of this heinous crime meant to implicate all four of them, then he or she would have written POSEURS instead of POSEUR . . . right? Who among them was the target?

  Was it her?

  “The message is,” Seedy continued to lecture, happily under the impression she was hanging on his every word, “insults won’t keep me down. And as long as that message was heard — which you know it was — who cares about a little thing like ‘who did it,’ right? ‘Who did it’ is just secondary, unnecessary, supererogatory information!”

  “Right,” Melissa dutifully replied. “I guess.”

  Seedy kissed his daughter on the side of her Phytodefrisant-scented head and got to his feet, rolling his shaved head around his neck so it crackled. But as he shuffled toward the door, he heard her turn under her ironed sheets, releasing an extended, tragic sigh. Oh man. He winced.

  Did she have to sound so sad?

  “All that said,” he surrendered, and waited for his daughter to turn under her blankets and blink at him from her downy pink pillow. “If it’s real important to you . . . I could make some calls, you know. Try to figure this whole thing out.”

  “Oh, Daddy!” she gasped, causing the ever-dozing Emilio to squinch his eyes open and flatten his ears. “Thank you! Thank you so much!”

  The Girl: Janie Farrish

  The Getup: Vintage navy-blue welt-pocket pants by Dickies, studded pink hipster belt from Jet Rag, and ladybug girl tank by babyGap.

  Janie directed her cranky old black Volvo sedan, which she shared with her sixteen-year-old twin brother, Jake, toward their private high school’s entry, Winston Gate, which wasn’t so much a gate as a breezy peach-stucco Spanish Colonial archway, and tapped the gas, soliciting one of the many mysterious noises in the Volvo’s eclectic junk-heap repertoire: a frenetic clicking.

  “Steady there, ol’ Bess,” Jake jokingly cooed, running a soothing hand along the car’s weathered black dashboard.
“It’s gonna be all right.”

  “Okay, why are you insane?” Janie bit the insides of her cheeks to keep from laughing, resuming what her mother liked to call “that simply terrible, sullen expression.” She shook her silky straight, brown, bobbed hair away from her lash-shadowed, soft gray eyes. “I mean, ol’ Bess? It’s a car, Jake. Not a cow.”

  “What’s so cowy about ol’ Bess?” Jake asked, widening his dark brown eyes as if he were totally wounded. “Bess is a beautiful name,” he insisted, offering the dash a final, loving pat. “Isn’t it, Bessie girl?”

  To their mutual shock, the stressed-to-the-max Volvo responded, not with a clicking noise, but with an actual, angry sounding meeuuurrrrroooo. One mutually stunned moment later, Jake and Janie turned to face each other, locked eyes, and promptly dissolved into laughter.

  “It mooed!” Jake clenched his fists, his dark eyes bright with the miraculousness of it all. “It friggin’ mooed!”

  “Omigod,” Janie squeakingly gasped, her earlier restraint a distant memory. “It’s too perfect!”

  With a final, offended huff, the abused Volvo crested the top of the drive, and Winston Prep’s campus, with its Spanish-tile rooftops, spiraling staircases, terracotta courtyards, and tiered fountains, glinted dauntingly into view. Janie eased on the brake, allowing the Volvo to coast downhill, so by the time they rolled into the student parking lot, it percolated contentedly as a coffeepot, barely audible above the outside racket. Teeming snarls of students in their Monday bests laughed and shrieked, hollering greetings above the heavy slam of luxury car trunks and doors, the buzzing thump of state-of-the-art speakers, and the staccato pang-pang-pang! of Marco Duvall’s league-regulation basketball — just a final few hoops before the bell, a’ight? Jake and Janie grew quiet, their former exuberance squelched by a painful, if familiar, self-consciousness. According to an unspoken rule (at Winston, there were many) this particular lot, “the Showroom,” was reserved for the most popular students. As Jake and Janie puttered toward lesser, underground parking — aka “the Cave” — they couldn’t resist a wistful backward glance at a particular parking space, currently unoccupied, under the dappled shade of a Winston willow. Hard to believe, but as early as the week before last, that spot had belonged to them.