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

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