Vixen by Jillian Larkin Page B

Clara said. The girls murmured and shook their curls. “You girls must be the ones selected to compete in the Chicago beauty pageant that Gloria told me about.”
    Clara worried she was laying it on too thick, but the pink one tittered and asked, “Why would you say that?”
    “Why, because you are all such
beauties
!” And by beauties, Clara really meant:
Have you ever heard of this revolutionary product called lipstick? Because you might want to try it out
.
    But no matter: Each girl beamed as if Clara had offered the compliment just to her. In New York, Clara would’ve crushed them under the heels of her Mary Janes like the sugary rainbow Necco wafers they resembled.
    This was way too easy.
    “Believe it or not, we are just her friends from Laurelton Prep,” one of the girls said, hiccuping. No girl with that unfortunate sallow complexion should be caught dead near the color yellow.
    “Oh, Gloria has told me
so
much about you!” Clara said. “You must be—”
    “I’m Virginia—but you can call me Ginnie—and this is Helen, Betty, and Dorothy—but you can call her Dot, or even Dottie.” Ginnie made these introductions as she must have learned in etiquette class, leaving a two-second pause between names so each girl had time for a short curtsy. “Will you be joining us in school?”
    “I graduated last year”—a lie, since Clara had skipped most of her senior year—“from high school in Pennsylvania.”
    “Oh, I have a cousin who goes to Macy Plains School!” Betty (the blue one) chirped.
    “I have one who goes to the Grier School!” Helen (the peach one) exclaimed.
    “My family all goes to school … here!” Dorothy/Dot/Dottie added. “Not everyone has the grades for prep school!”
    Helen turned to her. “Dot, what are you talking about? You go to Laurelton Prep with us!”
    Dottie laughed. “Oh, of course! Silly me!”
    Clara had to bite her cheek to prevent herself from laughing at this round of boarding school name-dropping. Theyall blinked at her expectantly. “I went to public school in Mount Lebanon,” she admitted. “But during my freshman year, Scott and Zelda rented a cottage right down the road from my house.”
    This was true—only, Clara had been on Martha’s Vineyard for the summer, not in a suburb of Pittsburgh. Why would the Fitzgeralds bother with Pittsburgh? But she figured if she was going to lie, she had to lie big.
    “Wait! The Fitzgeralds?” Ginnie exclaimed, clasping her hands together. “You mean Scott
F
.? He’s the cat’s whiskers!”
    “Pos-i-lute-ly!” Clara said.
Though it is F. Scott, you dimwit
. She beckoned the girls closer. “They threw such outrageous, loud parties! One night, my father called the cops on them. And guess what the cops found?” The girls waited in eager anticipation. “Oh, I don’t know if I should tell you this—”
    “Tell us! Tell us!” they squealed.
    “They found an
orgy
. Right on the back lawn! And Zelda was only twenty!” The girls all gasped at hearing such a dirty secret about the most notorious debutante of all. The deb who’d gone completely flapper.
    Clara knew exactly who these girls were: Their version of rebellion was hearing the word
orgy
—whether they knew what it meant or not—right under the noses of their mothers.
    “Did you actually meet them?” Ginnie whispered.
    Clara was about to dive into some made-up details when the noise in the room dropped to a hiss.
    Lorraine had entered the salon.
    And oh, what an entrance it was! With her dark, smudged eyes and black false lashes, she looked like a scary sorceress. She was wearing a sleeveless white frock, decorated at the bottom with a wild red geometric pattern that called attention to its knee-baring length. Atop her head was a sparkly black cloche hat, a thick fringe of stick-straight bangs peeking out, and draped carelessly around her shoulders was a shiny black mink stole.
    It was obvious she was tipsy. Lorraine pushed past Archibald at the