Sally poked Margot in the ribs before she lit another cigarette. “And I told her it was stupid. She’s playing with fire. Why not just put the handcuffs on and lock herself in a jail cell for them?”
“Yeaaah. Fire,” Margot drawled. “You, on the other hand, darlin’, are behavin’ like a cat cornered in a crawl space. I can’t believe you let her get away with what she did, Sally. Did you tell the police what she did to you?”
So, of course, you know I have to know what Mitzy did to Sally, right? I think it had to do with her eyeshadow, but I wanted to make sure.
“May I ask what happened to you, Sally?” I inquired softly.
“It was a couple of years ago. Long since over with, and I did tell the police, Margot. I was truthful,” she accused with a lift of her pointy chin.
“You wanna know what Mitzy did to Sally, Trixie? I’ll tell you what she did,” she spat with an angry turn of her lips. “Because she was angry that Sally got a deal with Taylor Cosmetics and they’d taken a big ol’ pass on Mitzy’s idea, she gave Sally’s eyeshadow palette a poor review. But that’s not all she did. Oh, no. She somehow—I don’t know how—managed to make her eye swell up to the size of a watermelon, and she claimed it happened after using Sally’s palette. She tanked her sales because no one wanted whatever the gunk was that she claimed happened to her eye. Now, no one will touch Sally, and she can’t afford to finance her own palette.”
But Sally was quick to defend Mitzy. “We don’t know that didn’t happen, Margot. Maybe she did get an eye infection from the palette. It could have been a bad batch.”
Why was Sally so eager to defend Mitzy? Was it because she had something to hide, or was it simply because she didn’t want to create waves in the community where Mitzy appeared to run the show?
When your every move depended on how many likes and subscribers you earned, I’d imagine it made you quite cautious. When they involved the ultra-popular, very cunning Mitzy, who was at the top of her game and very influential in the community, you didn’t want that kind of rage to turn on you.
Margot made a face and rolled her eyes. “If it was a bad batch, everyone else who got the same batch would have gotten the same eye infection, wouldn’t they, Sally? But suspiciously, she was the only one who had a bad reaction. She sabotaged you. She played it to her subs like she hated hurtin’ Sally’s palette, but I know the truth. She was underhanded and sneaky, and I don’t know how she did it, but she did that to her eye herself. I know she did. I feel it in my gut. And who would know better than me—the person who slaved over a hot makeup palette day and night for just enough to squeeze out a living in Phony-Town LA—what Mitzy was capable of?”
Sally bit her lip and looked at Julie. Yeah. She was definitely afraid this would get out in the makeup community. So Mitzy was so powerful, she had Sally afraid to challenge her? And her next response cinched the deal for me.
“But you were never able to prove it, is the point, Margot. I can’t have you going around—”
“What?” Margot yelled with a sharp clap of her hands, her face red. “Tellin’ the truth? You’d rather keep your membership with the fabulous people at the expense of your own reputation? I can’t anymore with you bunch of phonies!”
Sally cringed, but she didn’t say anything else.
Julie, who’d been very quiet almost the entire time we talked, finally spoke up. “She was really mean to Margot. I can tell you that from experience.”
“She was also very cruel to you, Julie,” Margot said, her voice softer now.
“Ye-yeah,” Julie stuttered on a long exhale. “She was pretty mean the whole time we were volunteering. She was really mean to Nikki. Said her makeup looked like a sad clown’s makeup after a hard day at the circus.”
Yikes. All I kept thinking during this whole truth-letting ceremony was…why? Why would they let someone, anyone, treat them like that?
So I asked. “Why did you allow Mitzy to treat you that way, Julie? I understand why Margot had no choice with her contract, but all of you volunteers weren’t even being paid. Why stick around for the abuse?”
“I’m so ashamed to admit this, but I guess it was my brush with fame. Being so close to someone so admired—someone I admired—was kinda cool. For a little while, anyway. I kept thinking she was just nervous or stressed because so many people bought tickets, but really, she was just mean.”
“But wasn’t she worried you’d tell people how cruel she was?”
Julie’s full lips thinned. “We all signed NDAs. She said if we didn’t, we’d have to go home, on our dime, mind you. I live in New York. I’m a full-time student in college. I can’t afford to buy a ticket back home. They cost a fortune. But I kinda figured it was a lesson in sticking things out, which is what my mom would have said, and I’d take my hits because that’s life.”
Boy, Mitzy had this all sewn up, didn’t she? She’d thought of everything.
But maybe she wasn’t so horrible. “So she did pay for you to come to Portland?”
Julie gave a sheepish glance to Margot, but then she looked down at her fashionable black work boots. “I won the trip—just like the others did. She had a contest on her channel. She paid for our tickets to fly here to Portland, where the tour was scheduled to start, and then we were going to fly privately with her the rest of the tour,
