Cherries In The Snow Read Free

and I were out of the party and so we were out of the photo. I minded, just a little bit. I had spent a long time on my spangly red corset and on getting my hair the right shade of wash-in wash-out red. It didn’t really wash out and I was left with cotton-candy-pink clumps for a month. It looked nice with my red mouth.
    â€˜It’s so hard,’ went on Vicki, ‘a red mouth.’
    â€˜Not if you know how to do it properly,’ I tut.
    â€˜I meant …’
    â€˜I know what you meant.’
    For the record, here’s how to do it properly: To start, pick the right shade. Blue-reds make your teeth look whiter, but they also make your skin paler too. Browny brick-reds flatter olive and black skin, but bear in mind that the darker your lipstick, the more sparingly you should apply it. My favorites: Earnest by Delux, Cranberry Lemonade by Fresh, Black Honey by Clinique, Cherries in the Snow by Revlon, and, of course, Grrrl’s own Literary Lolita. Absolutely avoid lip liner – it never fails to bleed until you’re left with a circle and no lipstick. So just use lipstick, but not with a lip brush and certainly, most certainly, not from a tube. You dab it onto your finger, then dab it onto your mouth, blot twice, and do it again. Then you use the lip brush just to get the corners, to get the Cupid’s bow exactly right.
    When you wear red lipstick, especially red lipstick that’s taken ten minutes to apply, you don’t want to kiss lest you rub it off. I swear to God, I think I sabotage my relationshipsbecause I miss the red mouth so much. Without it, I feel like I am losing me. There are those kiss-proof lipsticks, but they make your mouth feel so dry that you wouldn’t want to kiss. They feather around the middle and bleed in the corners. That’s what they look like: dried blood. In my goth phase I would have loved those, but they weren’t on the market then and I haven’t listened to the Cure since I was fifteen.
    Ah, Robert Smith, with his black mascara and squiggly red slash. How I loved him. I shake myself from my reverie and resolve to screw the Grrrl democracy and come back to the landgirl line with Holly in private.
    Vicki is stretching to stay awake, still flicking through
Allure
. ‘ “A war rages,” ’ she reads aloud. ‘ “Does black mascara make your eyes look smaller or bigger?” ’
    â€˜Oh,’ I say with a sigh, ‘
that
war.’
    Sometimes I long to be back in college, trapped in an unwinnable discussion about Sartre. I used to lie awake at night and cry because I didn’t write ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allan Poe. Now I catch myself holding back tears because I didn’t think of Piglet by Hard Candy. Of course I know the answer, so I raise my hand.
    â€˜Here’s the deal: With a light touch it makes them bigger, but you can only do one layer. Green and blue are excellent, aubergine too. Avoid brown, a mistake I made for years, which rather than making them look natural, brings out all the red in the whites of your eyes.’
    â€˜I thought brown mascara was our big push for fall,’ says Ivy. It’s true, I couldn’t understand why we were bothering with a brown mascara, but I was thrilled with the name I came up with: Sexy Rabbi. Ivy rolls the tube back and forth in front of her. ‘Where does that leave us?’
    â€˜With a bunch of piggy-eyed followers.’ Holly snorts.
    Holly can be callous about our devoted customers. Shethinks they’re all crazy to use our jaundicing products. She only uses Nars herself. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom although I don’t need to go. I just need to stand in front of the mirror and be alone with my makeup for a few minutes. I reach into my hand-me-down black Gucci bag with its bamboo handle (Holly left it on my doorstep with a note that said ‘Its life with me is done. Have it if you want.’) and pull out my little