Clinique Ladies

You know, I've been thinking: it's coming

What?

Oh, we just don't know when

Uh-huh

We drive our cars, we speculate. Cups in hands, we gesticulate

What?

No, it's "when?" And it's when we least expect it. Where? The battlefields of the beautiful

What are you talking about?

The raging war that's been coming honey. The battle between the Clinique ladies and the Body Shop girls

Why? Why do you think? Because the Body Shop girls hate the Clinique ladies with a passion. With a passion fruit. With a cassaba melon mint. With a tangerine ice zucchini eggplant medley. Or any of the luxurient lip balms that they this year offer

These girls are young. The old ones are nineteen. Cigarettes in hands, they proliferate. Their navel rings, they rotate. They hand out fake phone numbers, but never date. These girls are bad. Good bad. Bad bad. Bouncey, flouncey and cute as steel. They're an army. An army that takes cabs. And they will tell anyone who will listen: "Oh, we're gonna fuck up those Clinique ladies, like, bad."

The Clinique ladies say nothing. These game show nurses are calm. Teeth-filled smiles. White lab coats stretched taut over hungry hips. But do not be fooled. They are animals. Animals that waste no energy

After their daily two-hour shifts, they return without incident to their monochromatic high-rise apartments. And, in silence, they eat their day's food: a single, simple, elegant pear, peeled with a spoon. The only sound that radiates: the vaporizer that rehydrates their skin, their sub-skin and their hearts. Then they do their nails, nail hardener and lacquered sixty coats, eighty coats, a hundred coats, 'til they become weapons. Although they don't say it, they're looking forward to ripping the T-zones off those garish half-shirt Body Shop girls

The mall had been aflutter that an incident so mall had opened up the pores a little too deep. Apparently, Body Shop's Cassandra, the eighteen-year-old early night manager, had cut in front of Clinique's Charlene at the Orange Julius and she saw red. At the time, Charlene had smiled like a politician's wife, but, now, now, it was payback time

Foot Locker Ron said "Something's going on." Gape mouthed, like a referee that could not interfere, he looked up as the Body Shop girls approached from the Eden's wing, Clinique ladies from the Bay. They sweep past the Knife Shack, past the Lotto kiosk. Both groups move toward Ground Zero: the food court

Predictably, the Body Shop girls pounce first, weilding eye definers, eyebrow pencils, three shades, fold-away brushes in their over-tanned hands, bath beads in sacks churning above their heads. The right blow can break a forearm. Ha! They're against animal cruelty, but when it comes to people, ha-ha-ha, it's a different pamphlet!

The Clinique ladies did not hesitate with advanced cream that infiltrates the ears and eyes of those they hate: the Body Shop girls. Their two-step plan: clean, exfoliate

It took three minutes and the smells of pineapple, panic and piss filled the food court that Two Dollar Tuesday. But, little did they realize, that down in Mrs. Field's, a bevy of part-timers was planning