Free Poseur #3: Petty in Pink: A Trend Set Novel by Rachel Maude

(from now on,
I’m
the one she carries. You
feel
me, punk?), and tore off in a crazed streak. His mistress was
excited
. Which meant—wait, did it? Yes, it did!—
he
was excited! Good, ’cause he
totally
had this awesome new routine worked out. First, he’d bark holy rabies. Then he’d spin around really fast, collide into a
     wall, and finally? He’d bite the crazy fluff-wand sticking out of his butt.
    For some reason, that was a major crowd pleaser.
    “Omigod, Emilio, calm
down
!” Melissa laughed, scooping her favorite tan-and-white fur ball into her arms and hugging him to her pillowy double D’s.
     “You are so crazy!” she squealed, tickling his belly.
    “Melissa, you are
working
him
up
.” Vivien Ho, her father’s six-foot-tall biatch of a fiancée, grimaced from across the light gray marble-topped kitchen island.
     As usual, her top—a flimsy sapphire blue silk Akiko number, which she’d no doubt chosen to make her violet contacts pop—provided
     a way-more-than-necessary glimpse of the bronzered canyon between her jutting breasts (or as Melissa preferred to call it:
     Silicone Valley). Her mouth (which, let’s be honest, was less a mouth than a pink-frosted collagen donut) gaped wide open.
     She looked like one of those low-rent carnival amusements, you know:
Throw a ball into the clown’s mouth! Win a prize!
Of course, in this case, the ball was an eighteen-carat diamond. The prize was Vivien herself. And Melissa’s father?
The lucky winner
.
    Yeah. The irony wasn’t lost on Melissa, either.
    “Yvette!” Vivien refocused her attention to her buzzing Black-Berry, snatching it to her diamond-dribbling ear. “Yeah. Uh-huh.
     Oh, you’re in the master bathroom?”
    Seedy Moon and his falling-apart grayish Bugs Bunny slippers shuffled into the kitchen, and Melissa skipped a circle around
     the kitchen island (no easy feat in five-inch Louboutins) and shrieked, clapping her manicured hands. “Sure, I can come upstairs,”
     Vivien scowled, pressing a dragon-red fingernail to her ear. “I’ll be there in a second.”
    “Whattup?” Seedy braced himself as his fiancée clapped her phone shut, fluttered her false lashes shut, and set her jaw in
     a way that meant one thing:
drama
.
    “Seedy, I swear to God.” She scooted her bar stool back and clacked her gold metallic jeweled thong sandals to the polished
     slate floor. “That dog
better
be out of here by the time I get back. I am on my
last nerve
.”
    As Melissa and Emilio joyfully joint-freaked her abandoned bar stool, she threw her gleaming shoulders back, click-clacked
     across the floor, and exited in a righteous huff. Seedy followed her apoplectic apple-butt with a mingled look of concern
     and (he couldn’t help himself) admiration, pushing some air between his full lips.
    “Daddy!” his daughter’s cheerful voice rose behind him. “I
have
to talk to you!”
    “Yeah, baby.” He turned around, attempting a smile. He’d been dreading this conversation all afternoon, holing up like a coward
     in his soundproof glass meditation room. For two hours he did nothing but contemplate his meditation moat—watching the koi
     fish do their thing and listening to Chopin’s nocturnes. Yeah, that’s right:
classical music
. Ever since he’d hired Melissa’s Special Studies adviser, Lena, to play piano for the Pink Party, he found himself programming
     Mozart into his iPod instead of Mos Def.
Some of this powdered wig shit ain’t so bad,
he admitted to himself in semishock.
    But he couldn’t stay in the glass room forever.
    “Listen…” Seedy sighed, reeling his only daughter in for a big hug and pancaking poor Emilio in the process. The little Pomeranian
     squirmed, crazier than a squirrel in a bag of nuts. “I know how much you were looking forward to this day, and… I wish I didn’t
     have to tell you this, but…” He sighed again, released her from the hug, and took a small step backward. Emilio plopped in
     a heap to the