Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck (16 page)

MARLO LEAFED THROUGH
the shimmering pages of
Statusphere
that were currently fanning from her forearm. It took her mind off the fact that the epitome of all-evil was somewhere down the hall and that Madame Pompadour was coiled up in her office, looking for any reason to pounce.

Most magazines, as Farzana had lectured to Marlo, were passé the second their perfume inserts were gutted. Not so with
Statusphere
. The fact that its pages were perpetually updated wirelessly to stay on top of the latest fads meant that it was always one step ahead of your look, leading you forever along, trend over trend.

Marlo found that her mind grew fuzzier with every flip of the page. It was like wading in a stream, losing yourself to the water and letting the current decide where to take you. Marlo arrived at what should have
been the end of the magazine but was instead the beginning of a new one:
VaniTeen
. On the cover were five flawless cheerleaders forming a human pyramid of perfection.

Marlo gasped. “Give me a flippin’ break,” she groused.

At the top of the heap, as always, was Lyon Sheraton: a girl who had stuck to Marlo in the afterlife with the humiliating tenacity of toilet paper to a shoe. She had met Lyon and her vacuous friend Bordeaux Radisson—whose IQ, weight, and shoe size shared the same number—in Limbo; then they had all been transferred to Rapacia.

If you took every snooty, popular, effortlessly cruel, and faultless-and-she-knows-it girl up on the Surface and put them in a big pot simmering over a low flame for a few weeks … well, that would be pretty fun, Marlo thought. More to the point, though, the condensed result would be Lyon Sheraton. A girl who had been given everything and only wanted more, especially if that meant that everyone around her had
less
as a result.

Meet the Nyah Nyah Narcissisters … Coming to a Circle Near You!

Marlo, despite herself, obliged, flipping to the page out of a weird mixture of curiosity, boredom, and the knowledge that she was about to be profoundly irritated. She wasn’t disappointed.

Marlo’s phone rang. It was that weird VTV line again. Farzana was on her own phone planning …
something
. It was hard to follow. She hadn’t had her Beauty Cream since this morning, so her sentences came out like a jumble of frazzled words riding a short-circuiting escalator. Marlo could make out something about a trip, which was ridiculous … where would she possibly—

“Are you going to g-get that?!” Farzana mouthed, stuttering while even
pretending
to talk. Marlo sighed, slipped her arm out of her copy of
Statusphere
, and punched the line. Perhaps she’d pick up some more dirt on Madame Sour Puss-in-Boots.

“Hello, Madame Sour … um,
Pompadour’s
office,” Marlo said, her tone an unbalanced load of professionalism and facetiousness. “How may I deflect your call?”

“Oh … my … gawd!”
said the all-too-familiar-yet-somehow-unsurprising-to-hear-on-the-other-end-of-the-line, considering, voice. “We must have misdialed and accidentally got the set of
Extreme Makeunder: Extra Fugly Edition!”

Yes, currently drilling her peroxide wit into Marlo’s left ear was Lyon herself.

“Is this, like, that Gothicky uggo Marlo Fauster?” said Bordeaux with a designer knockoff version of Lyon’s attitude.

“That gross girl you’re always talking about?” said another voice, dark and aloof. “The one who made a fool of you in Mallvana?”

Marlo snorted as Lyon’s fuming silence blared in her ear.

Back in Mallvana, the Grabbit had used Lyon and Marlo to steal the Hopeless Diamonds. But Marlo had ended up not only duping the Grabbit, but also playing Lyon
big-time:
stealing the diamond that Lyon had thought she had stolen from Marlo, then turning the
whole thing around at the end, emerging—with her brother Milton’s help—as the hero, saving the day.

“That’s old news, anyway, Strasbourg,” Lyon replied after a pause packed as tight with explosive potential as a cannon. “Like your streaked, dimensional shag.”

“Did you call for any particular reason, Lyon?” Marlo asked, keenly cutting into Lyon’s gloat time. “Madame Pompadour is a very important woman … or cat … or snake. I’m still not completely sure. But one thing I
am
sure of is that she doesn’t like anyone wasting her time.”

Lyon seethed.

“While you may have gotten some dumb Infernship answering phones for all eternity, I …
we …
have a shot at something
really
big … even bigger than
Statusphere!
At least that’s what Madame Pompadour—
your boss
—said when she asked we of the coolier-than-cool Nyah Nyah Narcissisterhood to call.”

“Asked
you
to call?”

Suddenly, Madame Pompadour’s voice exploded from the phone’s speaker.

“Is there any reason, Miss Fauster, why I’m not having my 3:33 conference call?” she said, her words flicking like a towel snapped in a locker room.

The girls on the other end of the phone snickered. Marlo sighed. “I was just …
screening
, madame. You know … trying not to waste your time.”

“Too late,” Madame Pompadour hissed. “Put my call through immediately.”

Lyon chuckled. “This is
so
not over,
Thriftstore.”

“You keep saying that,” Marlo replied, recalling the last time she’d seen Lyon, storming away like the spoiled postmortem princess she was, back in Mallvana.

Marlo knew that Madame Pompadour was up to no good. But the fact that she had enlisted Lyon and Bordeaux as her pampered partners in crime made the whole thing
personal
. Farzana stared at Marlo suspiciously as she whispered into her phone.

Marlo gritted her teeth and transferred the call to Madame Pompadour’s vanity. With Farzana’s googly eyes scanning Marlo like shifty searchlights, scrutinizing her every move, how would she ever find out what Madame Pompadour and Lyon were up—?

As she reached over her issue of
Statusphere
to hang up the receiver, Marlo saw from the corner of her eye a weird flicker on one of the pages. She saw five young, privileged faces—untouched by need, want, or a moment’s deprivation—staring back at her. Two of the faces belonged to Lyon and Bordeaux. Another snooty, older face joined the haughty fray.
Madame Pompadour
.

“Miss Fauster, is something …”

Madame Pompadour’s image tapped the page before flickering out.

“… wrong? My connection seems somehow … off.”

“Umm, no, I think we’re good. I’ll be hanging up now. This is me hanging up.”

Marlo quickly unscrewed the phone’s mouthpiece, plopped out the little microphone, screwed it back, and placed it inside the cylindrical spine of her magazine. The magazine’s pages glimmered and flashed, melting from a high-fashion exposé on the latest designer belly buttons, belly clasps, and belly zippers to a two-page spread of Madame Pompadour’s conference call.

Marlo waved her hand in front of the page. None of the perfect faces seemed to see her. Madame Pompadour’s expression, though, was furrowed with suspicion.

“One moment, girls,” she said before pitching herself out of her chair. “I smell a rat.” She padded swiftly across her office to the door. Madame Pompadour peered out of her office with one piercing cat’s eye. Marlo was hunched over her desk, leafing through her magazine. She looked up.

“What?
I’m just reading your dumb old
Statusphere rag
, trying to distinguish the difference between ‘hot’ and ‘cool.’”

Madame Pompadour shot Marlo a skeptical look, turned sharply on her well-heeled heels, and sealed shut her office door. Marlo sighed with relief and
smoothed out the pages of her magazine, just in time to see Madame Pompadour set herself primly in her chair and flatter her vanity.

“We look lovely, Narcissisters,” Madame Pompadour said solemnly into the mirror as she hugged herself with unabashed self-affection. The girls in the mirror repeated the gesture.

“And now,” Madame Pompadour continued, “as the longest-standing Narcissister—”

“You mean the oldest?” commented Lyon.

“Ouch,”
Marlo snorted, still snooping through her glossy
Statusphere
magazine portal.

The Narcissisters looked at one another nervously as Madame Pompadour, flawless to a fault, gave her delicate hand a quick lick, smoothed out her gleaming blond coif, and collected herself (her favorite hobby).

“Forgive me, Lyon,” Madame Pompadour said. “Did you say that you wanted to stay in Rapacia as a greedy little nobody?”

Lyon swallowed.

“Um, no, ma’am.
Madame!”

“Good. Then without further ado, I officially welcome you girls to the Narcissisterhood.”

She dangled her charm bracelet in front of the mirror.

“To commemorate your passages from Nowheresville to the Statusphere, I have each of you on my charm bracelet. Now you’ll all be, if not quite next to
my heart, at least always near my grasp. I trust you received your complimentary Narcissister Compacts?”

The girls nodded.

“They are, like, totally awesome!” Bordeaux replied, her cornflower-blue eyes nearly popping out of their sockets. “But,
wow
, I thought I had a flawless complexion until I looked into my compact. I think I actually saw …
a pore
!”

The girls cooed and clucked in commiseration and pretended to pat her reflected image consolingly on the back.

Madame Pompadour smiled. The charm labeled
BORDEAUX
glowed and tinkled. Simultaneously, a fine crow’s foot along Madame Pompadour’s right eye faded.

“Yes, beauty isn’t always pretty,” she explained. “But the more you face the facts of your face, the more you can do to keep the imperfections of nature at bay. After all, knowledge is powder … and foundation.”

She flipped a page of her Vilofax.

“So, I assume you are preparing for the very first Nyah Nyah Narcissister Underworld
In Your Face
Tour?”

Lyon smiled the only way she knew how: smugly.

“I’ve choreographed a number of awesome routines—”

“We’ve
choreographed,” interrupted Marseille.

Lyon rolled her eyes, which were as fiercely, uncompromisingly blue as a desert sky at high noon.

“Whatever
. The point is we are so ready to bring it on in a big bad way. Where’s our first stop? Lost Vegas? The Hellywood Hole?”

Madame Pompadour twitched her whiskers.

“Blimpo, actually.”

“Blimpo?!”
Lyon whined. “The circle for loser fatties?!
That’s
our big debut? I
so
don’t think so.”

The fine fur on the back of Madame Pompadour’s neck rose.

“I can’t think of a better place to begin spreading our perky, polished message of unattainable perfection than Blimpo. Besides, all of the big shows have off-Broadway rehearsal runs.”

Lyon coiled her tanned, thin arms together in petulant defiance. “I’m not doing it,” she said flatly. “It’s beneath me.”

The other girls glanced nervously between Lyon and Madame Pompadour, as if watching two gun-fighters squaring off in the Old West and wondering who would draw first.