Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [110]
I obviously cannot afford such ostentatious generosity, so I’ve turned down all of Cinthia’s previous invitations. I only agreed to go because she had called me personally and told me not to worry about the tax-deductible door fee because she really wanted me to be there. In this age of easy avoidance through digital accessibility, the implications of such a gesture cannot be underrated. I had a feeling that there was an ulterior motive to the invitation, but I couldn’t imagine what Cinthia could possibly need from me.
She had reserved spots for me and Dexy at her table. Dexy led the way, barreling through the crush of bodies, providing loud and sordid commentary the whole time. We finally found Cinthia standing at the front and center table, right by the stage, forehead to forehead with the aforementioned DJ Booty Bump, in front of a table occupied by a cross section of contemporary urban hipster clichés. The group looked like they had been handpicked by an advertising agency designing the “urban market” ads for Valtrex: Genital herpes can happen to anyone…especially hipsters like you!
“She’s tiny!” Dexy was swooning over Cinthia. “But she’s Reese Witherspoon cute and healthy tiny, not Nicole Richie needs-a-feeding-tube tiny!” She hugged herself passionately. “And I’m in love with her dress! I am so in love with her dress that I want to marry her dress and have its stylish babies!”
It wasn’t until Dexy said that that I realized that I had totally neglected to mention your proposal. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind, so caught up was I in Dexy’s cyclone of drama.
Cinthia was rocking a silk, one-shouldered, drop-waist minidress, mostly magenta and splattered with black Rorschach blobs, worn over black leggings with pointy ankle boots. It sounds ridiculous, and it was ridiculous, but she pulled it off with panache.
Dexy turned to me, in my secondhand polyester. “I told you you’d fit right in!”
But seeing Cinthia (and Dexy, and everyone else in the room, for that matter) wear that outfit so brilliantly only made me feel clumsy and self-conscious in my own throwbacks.
“I still can’t believe you’re friends with Cinthia Wallace!”
“It is sort of strange,” I admitted. “We’re on opposite ends of the Social Register, that’s for sure.”
“And you really didn’t recognize her when she arrived at your school to write that book? What was it called again?”
“Bubble-gum Bimbos—”
“I would have called her out in a second,” Dexy interrupted. “She was the jailbait socialite of the nineties! She was on Page Six like every day! She scandalized her whole family….”
“I wasn’t up on that kind of stuff,” I said. “I’m still not.”
“But no one in your school knew?”
“She picked Pineville High because we were so clueless.”
“Well, obvs.”
Dexy sashayed toward Cinthia, and in doing so passed right in front of the stage, briefly blocking the audience’s view of the Eastern European model apparently too fatigued with malnourishment to carry a tune. As the runway favorite strained to coax out the words to “Edge of Seventeen,” she gorgeously illustrated the fundamental problem with karaoke parties thrown and attended by Beautiful People, with or without the philanthropic angle. Beautiful People singing badly is fun to watch only if you are a Beautiful Person yourself. Because if you are not a Beautiful Person, all you can see is how in love these Beautiful People are