Roxy was a little depressed that none of her guesses about what we were making (lie detector, mousetrap, diorama) were right, but she got over it when I bought her a churro and let her choose which shoes we’d buy to get the box. By 7:30 we were back in my suite with everything we needed to make an at-home latent fingerprint fumer, and we hadn’t even had to leave the Venetian.
Little Life Lesson 26: Las Vegas is an EXCELLENT place to engage in amateur crime fighting.
We spread everything out on the desk. I handed Roxy the Diet Coke and said, “Drink this.”
“I thought it was for our project.”
“Drink. I need the can.”
Tom came over and frowned at everything on the desk. “Okay, I get what the shoe box is for, but how does it work?”
I got a piece of thread from Polly’s sewing kit, put Roxy’s new clear plastic four-inch-heel mules on the floor, and centered the box on the desk. “We run the thread across the middle of the box and hang the mint wrapper from it using the paper clip. This second mint I’m doing has my prints on it, so I’ll be able to see if the fuming worked.”
Roxy handed me the empty Diet Coke can. “What’s this for?”
Using the sharp edge of my flower ring, I cut the bottom half-inch off the can and flipped it over. “We drop a little of the superglue here, into this indentation, then place it on the coffee warmer in the box. The coffee warmer heats the glue and makes it fume, and the fumes make hidden fingerprints come up.”
“Cool,” Roxy said.
“Totally Visa,” Tom agreed. “But if we’re putting glue on the coffee warmer, what is the mug for?”
“We need a container of hot water in the box because humidity makes the prints come up better.” I put the mug in, made sure everything was in place, plugged the coffee warmer in, then put the lid on the shoe box.
“How long does it take?” Roxy asked.
“Ten minutes.”
“Can we peek?”
“No, the lid has to stay on.” But in my mind I pictured what happened, the way I’d seen it demonstrated in glass tanks. It was amazing—one minute there’s nothing there, the next you can see all the prints of the people who touched something.
I wished you could do the same thing with people. Fume them and find out who had touched them to make them what they were. Like Jack. If he was evil, probably someone had done something to make him feel bad about himself. Or even Polly. Every guy she dated was like a less cute, less cool version of Tom. It was so clear to everyone but her that she and Tom were made for each other, but she refused to even think of him that way. There were some people, though, like the Thwarter and Alyson, who weren’t influenced by anyone and who just did what they wanted and lived in their own worlds. They would not be so interesting to fume.
But Jack…
Stop thinking about him, I told myself. Bad Jas. But even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t. Because our do-it-yourself fuming chamber worked great, raising a beautiful print on the mint wrapper. It looked like a thumbprint and had a tented arch, which is rare. And it matched the larger of the two partial prints on the note signed by him telling me to meet him at Madame Tussauds. So there was no question that it was his.
HATE HIM, I told myself. Make like the characters in a Fox show and Do It.
I was working really hard on that when Polly and the Evil Fringed Henches returned.
“Fingerprint?” Polly asked right away.
Roxy was beaming. “It’s so cool!”
I, however, was not beaming. I was barely even being. I could have modeled for a porcelain sculpture with the title “I Hate to Love Him.” I was lying on my back on my bed with an arm over my eyes, the internationally recognized position of extreme mental anguish. “The print matches,” I announced, struggling against the dark heaviness trying to engulf my soul. Which really is a lot of work, and possibly harder when you’re lying down.
“So?” Polly asked in a voice not at all sympathetic to my suffering.18
I moved my arm just enough so I could glare at her with one eye. “That means Jack was the one at Madame Tussauds. The one who tried to kill me.”
“Scare you,” she corrected. “And that is all the more reason for us to go and find him. But we have a lot of work to do.”
I propped myself up on my elbows to look with both eyes. “What are you talking about? Do you know where he is?”
“No, but I know where he’ll be in four hours.”
“You should have seen it, Jas,” Veronique said. “Polly told the man in the store that Alyson and I were foreign exchange students who met Jack at a casino and were supposed to go to his room but forgot where it was and did they know who he was and where he was staying and the man was so helpful.”
“Foreign exchange students?” I asked.
“From Belgium,” Veronique said. “Did you know french fries are really from Belgium?”
“She wouldn’t let us talk,” Alyson said.
“I just wanted him to focus on how great you looked,” Polly told her with a smile that frightened me.19
Alyson nodded. “I guess it worked. I mean, he fully believed Jack would want to see us again.”
“Of course he did! We’re bacon,” Veronique said. “That’s why he told us Jack had mentioned going to this party tonight.”
“The Play Nice winter line private launch party,” Polly said. “Invitation only, tight guest list.”
“And my dad is on an airplane so he can’t help,” Veronique said sadly.
I was glad to know that Jack could take time out of his busy Reign of Terror and Kidnapping schedule for something important like an invitation-only VIP fashion show. He was a man with his priorities straight, that was clear.
“I have an idea.” I sat up. “We could sneak in as caterers.”
Polly looked at me pityingly. “You’ve been watching Hogan’s Heroes late at night again, haven’t you? Your television habits frighten me.”
“Okay, then what if we wait outside and waylay him? In the parking lot?”
“That would be one way to do it,” Polly said in a tone that implied, “if we’d all had operations where our brains had been removed and replaced with Peeps marshmallow snacks.”
While she was mentally comparing me to a marshmallow, she’d set two full-looking Walgreen’s bags on the bed and was now digging around in her backpack. Using as little of my precious energy reserves as possible, I slithered on my stomach toward one of the Walgreen’s bags and tilted it toward me. I glimpsed something that looked alive, but before I could get a better view, Polly’s hand came down like a barrier.
“Get back,” she hissed.
I got back. Polly can be scary when she’s planning. And she was definitely planning.
Any doubts about that were extinguished when she stood up from her backpack, held up not one but two BeDazzlers in different sizes, and said, “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
Little Life Lesson 27: When picking a best friend, make sure she is not insane. One good warning sign to look for: if she says, “We have everything we need to get into that VIP party right here,” while pointing at a BeDazzler, a cell phone earpiece, six stuffed bunnies left over from Easter, two Blow Pops, and a large canister of Aqua Net.20
Little Life Lesson 28: Actually, traveling with a BeDazzler is a good warning sign all by itself.
Little Life Lesson 29: And/or anything having to do with remaindered stuffed animals.
“You’re going to get us into a private party with this?” Alyson asked, sneering at the items on the bed. “No-slash-way.”
Polly laughed. “Never underestimate the power of the BeDazzler. It’s totally American Express.”
“American Express?” Veronique said.
“Don’t leave home without it,” Polly explained.
Score one for the Braille-speaking crowd. “That,” I told my insane friend, “was way MasterCard.”
“We do our best,” Polly said humbly. Then she reached for the hem of the dress I was wearing and started cutting. “This is about two years out of date and three inches too long. But we’ll have it fixed in no time.”
Little Life Lesson 30: Insane people should not have scissors.
(Little Life Lesson 30!!! Halfway there!)
By eleven thirty that night, we were all ready to go. The Henches were still in their Little Big Boobs outfits, but the rest of us had been restyled. Roxy was wearing the purple cat collar, a fur vest made out of the Easter bunnies, and an astonishingly short version of one of my skirts which now had INTEL INSIDE BeDazzled across the butt. Tom had on a pair of dark pants and a white T-shirt that made it really clear that he’d spent a lot of time at the gym this summer working out his love for Polly. Polly herself was wearing a pink fringed bustier that made her ta-tas very TA, jeans, and a dragonfly-shaped choker that I think was made from bunny innards. I couldn’t even see what I was wearing, partially because Polly had made my emerald green Betsey Johnson dress so short it was nearly invisible, and partially because she’d made my hair so large it was impossible to see through. It was like a hair nest, with a green flower over my ear courtesy of the former hem of my dress and the BeDazzler.
Nor was my vision helped by the fact that it was night and I was wearing sunglasses. We all were. It was part of the plan.
As we got out of the elevators and walked through the lobby of the hotel, people stopped to stare at us in what I sincerely hoped was a good way. Most people anyway. Polly had been in front, leading us, but she turned around to see how we looked as a group and did a double take when she got to me.
“I swear you’re not wearing Ray-Ban Wayfarers, Jas. You aren’t, are you? And don’t say they’re so out they’re in.”
Ha! I had her. “These sunglasses? They’re the beef.” I looked over the top of the glasses to wink at her. “They’re what’s for dinner.”
“Oh, no no no,” she said. “They are not the beef.”
I nodded. “Prime rib.”
“Not even Grade-D ground chuck.”
“Beef stroganoff. Man-size.”
“Precious, they couldn’t get near Lean Cuisine Salisbury steak. In fact—what’s that I hear?—they just failed their audition for the other white meat.”
I decided to try reason. “Look, fashion tyrant, a famous person would wear them. Famous people like taking fashion risks.”
“There’s a difference between a fashion risk and a toxic fashion disaster,” she said as we reached the door to the valet area. “But I guess unique taste is in your DNA. Speaking of which, where are Pocahontas’s Muggers? Oh, there you two are. Coming?”
Veronique and Alyson came up behind us, looking confused. “What are we doing here in the parking lot? Aren’t we going in the limo again?” Veronique asked.
Had she had a lobotomy? I looked at the Henches over the top of my 2-kool-4-school Wayfarers. “Uh, no. I don’t think that would be advisable.”
Alyson put her hands on her hips. “Then how are we getting there?”
It got sort of quiet then in the valet area like it always did when the Pink Pearl pulled up.
The Pink Pearl is Polly’s van and it makes quite an impression. The exterior is painted in hot-pink glitter paint and the windows are framed with big fake diamonds. Inside, it’s like what I Dream of Jeannie’s van would have been like if she’d had one. The dashboard is pink metallic leather, and the whole rest of the interior except the floor is done in pink satin with big cushions and cool lanterns hanging from the ceiling. The floor has a puffy white carpet, and off to one side is a table that is made of Lucite and filled with Barbie shoes. Polly did the entire interior herself, except the table, which Roxy, Tom, and I made and gave her for her birthday. I still had the scars from the glue gun to prove it.
No one has ever seen a car like the Pink Pearl.
“I am so not riding in that thing,” Alyson declared. “No-slash-way.”
“Bye-slash-bye!” Polly said, climbing into the driver’s seat and waving happily.
Roxy is always the navigator and gets to sit in the passenger seat, so Tom and I got into the back through the sliding door. “Catch you later, squaws,” I said, but before the valet parker could put away the zebra carpet–covered retractable steps and slam the door shut, Alyson was climbing in with Veronique behind her.
“Fine,” she pouted. “But drop us off a block before the party entrance.”
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just because she was talking to some of her good buddies on the CB—her handle is Princess P—that Polly acted like she hadn’t heard what Alyson said. Instead, Polly not only pulled up right in front of the place but came in so fast the brakes screeched in order to ensure we’d get the most attention possible. She looked at Roxy and said, “How are we on time?”
“Thirty seconds and counting.”
“Are you ready, cupcakes?” Polly called into the back of the van. “Costumes in place? Sunglasses on?”
“Ten-four,” Tom answered.
“Let’s go. Places, everyone.”
We’d worked out the choreography at the hotel, but I was still really ambivalent.
I crawled toward the front of the van and tapped Polly on the shoulder. “There is no way this is going to work. I think we should drop it. No one is going to believe I’m a famous person.”
“Want to bet?”
“Yes.”
“If they do, if it works, I can drive over those sunglasses, and you will never replace them.”
“And if I win?”
“You won’t.”
Ha ha ha. Funny.
What happened after that was kind of a blur. Polly got out of the driver’s seat and pushed open the van door all sexy-girl chauffeur, and I saw that the sidewalk was jammed with people. There had to be at least a hundred of them there, all facing the van expectantly.
I decided my job should be to concentrate on not letting my stomach come out of my body. It was harder than it looked.
Tom got out and stood next to the van with one hand on his telephone earpiece, legs apart, like he was a bodyguard. Roxy came around the other side and, clutching her cell phone, marched through the line to the three doormen standing by the velvet rope. Alyson and Veronique walked out next, holding hands and sucking on the Blow Pops, and paused to do what I swear was a move from a Sweatin’ to the Oldies video. Then Roxy waved at me, which was my cue.
All I could think about as I stepped to the ground was I must not trip and fall because then Polly will say it was because of my sunglasses.
Suddenly there were shouts and cheering and flashbulbs flashing like I was a real celebrity and we were being moved through the crowd and boom! like that! we were inside the party with the chic and beautiful of Las Vegas.
At least, I assumed we were.
Little Life Lesson 31: Ray-Bans are not the best glasses to wear when you’re doing the sunglasses-at-night thing. Not if you want to be able to see where you’re going.21