Free Poseur #2: The Good, the Fab and the Ugly by Rachel Maude

at
least,
like, eat too many cookies and
cry
for a while? “I am
so
happy for you,” she affirmed with a feeble smile.
    “Eeeee!” Charlotte beamed, tilted forward, and touched her lightly on the knee. “I
knew
we were friends.”
    Friends.
It was the first time the word had actually left her mouth, and Janie had to admit, it didn’t sit right. Weren’t friendships, especially friendships between former mortal enemies, supposed to develop gradually, like, over time? It took no less than four
years
of traded lunches, borrowed bathing suits, marathon phone calls, and saved bus seats — not to mention sixteen fights followed by sixteen make-up sleepovers — for her and Amelia to get their act together, bite the bullet, and commit to an exclusive best-friendship. But Charlotte hadn’t taken four years — she hadn’t even taken four
minutes
. Their friendship didn’t blossom so much as just . . .
appear.
Like one of those big fluffy white mushrooms on her front lawn.
    And weren’t those kinds of mushrooms poisonous?

The Girl: Petra Green
    The Getup: Auto mechanic cutoffs by Dickies, cotton slippers from Chinatown, Ikat headwrap from Urban Outfitters.
    While
some
people enjoyed themselves at the Viceroy Hotel, Petra was stuck at home. She stared at the sheet of paper on her cluttered desk and sighed. Along the margin, in neat, block script, she’d written poseur: the trick-or-treater. At the tail end of every letter she doodled a delicate vine with wide-open heart-shaped leaves. At the tip of every leaf she drew a dripping dewdrop; around each dewdrop, three stars; and on the points of every star, a tiny peace sign. When the last peace sign was complete (there were one hundred and sixty in total), she planted the nib of her purple pen into the paper and stared into space, chewing the serrated edge of her thumbnail, and willed an idea —
any
idea — to come to her. She was supposed to have e-mailed Janie a detailed description of her bag concept by seven o’clock. She glanced at the blinking digital timer on her stereo: 12:53 a.m.
    Maybe if she decorated each of her peace signs with a row of daisy petals, something would come to her.
    Her bedroom window filled with a brilliant light, flashed, and then returned to pitch-black. Petra lowered her pen at the familiar purr of a polished black Audi pulling into the drive. There was a crunch of gravel, the slow crick of car brakes. . . .
    They were home.
    Date night (or “Hate Night” as Petra called it) was an idea introduced to her parents by their marriage counselor, Lisa, who suggested they “invigorate their marriage with a romantic ritual.” Every other Thursday or Friday night, her father took her mother out to dinner in Malibu. The idea of them sitting across from each other at a cozy corner table — their faces imbued with candlelight and softened by smiles, a dwindling bottle of wine — was so surreal it was laughable. Petra could not imagine her parents sitting across from each other
at all,
that is, unless it involved a wall of bulletproof glass and a tattooed security guard with a nickname like Bones or Crazy-Eye.
    The front door thudded shut. The shallow Waterford crystal dish by the door rang with the sound of dropped keys, and the marble hallway popped and echoed under her mother’s stiletto heels. Petra could hear her father’s voice, so low it was a vibration, and her mother’s weaving through it, like a teakettle nearing a boil. After a while, her father stopped talking, and her mother’s voice grew more and more fevered. Petra crept toward her bedroom door and pushed it open. She’d always had this perverse need to listen to their fights, and never more so than tonight. Had her father told her mother what he’d done? What he was
probably still doing
?
    If only they were functional enough to get divorced,
she thought. Lydia Whitman, Joaquin’s mother, had been divorced
twice
, and she was probably the most emotionally balanced person Petra