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Informationen zum Autor Melissa de la Cruz is the #1 bestselling author of books for readers of all ages, including the Witches of East End, Blue Bloods, and Descendants series. Klappentext Ashley Spencer considers her birthday party to be "the" most important event ever. She intends to prove that there's a reason she's been at the top of the social food chain her entire life. Will all her birthday wishes come true? Birthday Vicious 1 ASHLEY FINDS OUT WHAT’S BLACK AND WHITE AND GREEN ALL OVER ASHLEY SPENCER SMOOTHED THE SOFT folds of her Proenza Schouler black-and-white-striped skirt, crossed her spray-tanned, power-yoga-toned legs, and told herself everything was going to be okay. Even though it was exactly a month until her Super-Sweet Thirteen, and her mother was only now getting around to a meeting with the party planner, everything was going to work out just fine. The planner in question was Mona Mazur, the most chic, imaginative, and—of course—expensive planner on the West Coast; she’d done parties for the children of everyone who was anyone, from the Chadwick triplets (daughters of the famous singing star) to the various adopted multiracial progeny of the movie stars Barton Flick and Organza Belle, not to mention a Super-Duper Seventh in Vegas for a notorious magician’s little boy. In other words, Mona was worth waiting for (and Ashley and her mother had been waiting for the better part of an hour already), even if it meant doing everything at the last minute. Another reason Ashley had a good feeling about waiting for Mona: Her office had style oozing out of its davenports. Mona’s HQ was a pale green Victorian mansion in Nob Hill, with a terraced French-style front garden and a real gaslight glowing outside the front door. Inside, sitting with her mother on a Toile de Jouy sofa, Ashley couldn’t believe her eyes. Everything, from the floor tiles to the furniture to the silk drapes to the plush sheepskin rug under their feet to the embossed wallpaper, was black and white. Even Mona’s dogs, two miniature poodles named Dorothy and Draper, matched the theme: Dorothy was snowy white, Draper was a glossy black, and both wore houndstooth collars. Ashley was glad she had changed out of her uniform after a long, hard day—well, a short, ordinary kind of day, really, if she was completely honest—at Miss Gamble’s, the exclusive girls’ school where she and her cabal, the Ashleys, ruled the polished-wood halls and reigned over the seventh grade. She’d chosen her new skirt and a plush black cashmere sweater, deciding at the last moment on a pair of Miu Miu jeweled ballerina flats—black satin with large trapezoid crystals. And now it seemed like fate, or karma, or one of those hippie things that her father liked to muse about after he came back from yet another ashram, that her clothes reflected the party planner’s living-room color scheme. It was inevitable: Ashley Spencer and Mona Mazur were going to be a match made in heaven. “Do you think she’s for real?” whispered Matilda, Ashley’s mother, when Mona finally welcomed them, click-clacking across the sweeping expanse of black-and-white tiles to fetch one of her parties-of-the-rich-and-fabulous albums to show them what she could do. Ashley nodded, entranced, twirling a strand of her long golden hair between two fingers. Mona was very glamorous in a fifties-pinup sort of way, her jet-black hair worn in a lacy snood, her pale skin almost translucent. She looked like a femme fatale in a black-and-white movie, the kind of dame who packed a pistol in her crocodile handbag. “You should wear a snood,” Ashley suggested, but Matilda just laughed. What was up with her mother this week? Like Mona, Matilda was pale...
