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She reached up and took off her sunglasses. Let them see exactly how strong she was.
A girl—a freckled, redheaded teenager—came running toward her. “I still love you,” she called. “I still do!” And before Madison’s driver stepped in front of the girl and cut her off, she tossed a single red tulip at Madison’s feet.
Madison gazed at it for a moment, lying there on the pavement, and then looked up. Down but not out. And then the unblinking eye of the PopTV camera caught a tiny but resolute smile flickering around the edges of her perfect red lips.
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Kate stretched out her legs on the chaise longue by the Park Towers pool and wriggled her toes, admiring the blue polish she’d picked out at Brentwood Nail Garden.
“I always thought blue would make a person look like they had poor circulation,” Natalie said. “Or frostbite. But you actually pull it off.”
Kate grinned at her former roommate. “Wow, thanks. You really know how to pay a girl a compliment.”
Natalie shrugged and popped a grape into her mouth. “What can I say,” she said, chewing. “I was raised by wolves.”
“At least they were wolves with a sense of fashion,” Kate said, noting Natalie’s colorful ensemble, which consisted of a leopard-spotted crop sweater paired with a royal-blue chiffon dress, a wristful of gold bangles, and a pair of navy Oxford-style flats. (Kate had, with some effort, convinced Natalie to ditch her opaque black tights; the girl needed a little vitamin D.)
“I found this sweater at a church rummage sale,” Natalie said. “Awesome, right?”
“It looks designer,” Kate agreed.
“It’s very Marc Jacobs,” Natalie said. (As a student at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, she knew the names of every designer.) “But it cost five bucks.” Then she poked Kate with an unmanicured toe. “Speaking of designer, are you getting free clothes now that you’re a superstar?”
Kate laughed. “I wouldn’t say superstar. But I have been getting some things sent to me.” She thought about the box that ShopAddict, an L.A.-based PR firm that repped some of the hottest designers, had messengered to her apartment and which she hadn’t even had time to open yet. It sat next to a Rebecca Minkoff handbag, several dresses from Alice + Olivia, and a pile of shoe boxes from Kate Spade. And they were all for her. To keep. Simply because they hoped she’d be photographed or filmed wearing them.
“Good-bye, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf apron; hello, fashion plate!” Natalie said. “I’m so incredibly jealous that I don’t even know if I can be friends with you anymore.”
“Oh, please,” Kate said. “For one thing, you have a huge wardrobe of amazing clothes. And for another, I haven’t worked at Coffee Bean in ages.” She took a sip of Evian and reapplied a bit of sunblock to her nose. All this L.A. sunshine was threatening to bring out her freckles. “You’ll probably always be better dressed than me. I have the fashion sense of a teenage boy.”
“Just promise to give me whatever you don’t like,” Natalie said. “I’m begging you.”
“Sure,” Kate agreed. “Come to think of it, I did get this jumpsuit that might be right up your alley… .”
Natalie clapped her hands in excitement. “Only the truly fashion-forward are bold enough to rock the jump-suit. Gimme, gimme, gimme.”
“It’s all yours,” Kate said.
“Brilliant. So tell me everything else,” Natalie said. “I saw you on D-lish.com yesterday. There was a picture of you walking down Rodeo Drive.”
Kate’s stomach still did tiny somersaults when she heard things like this. Really? she couldn’t help thinking. A paparazzo followed me? (And did he get a decent photo?) “Oh, that’s funny,” she said, as if she weren’t dying to Google the picture immediately. She had spent three hours in front of the mirror the other day, practicing smiles and poses after seeing a few extremely unflattering photos of herself on Popsugar.com.
Natalie nodded. “Yep. You were drinking a Starbucks and wearing those cute new brown platforms. Can I just say, it is so weird to have a famous friend!”
Kate laughed. It was weird, weird, weird to be so suddenly well known. It seemed like only yesterday she’d been a Midwestern nobody, working two jobs and living in a run-down Los Feliz two-bedroom, fantasizing about making it in the music industry. And now here she was after three episodes of The Fame Game had aired, lounging beside a beautiful pool, freshly manicured, pedicured, and waxed, and looking at her picture splashed across the pages of Life & Style.
The Fame Game’s producers had warned her that her life was going to change overnight, but it had never seemed real. Even though PopTV cameras had followed her around for weeks and she’d done a photo shoot and talked to reporters … the fact that she was actually going to be on TV and millions of people would watch her seemed unbelievable. And in a way, it still didn’t seem real. The attention was all around her, but it hadn’t completely sunk in that this was her life now. She didn’t even feel that different. Not yet, anyway.
And there were even better perks of fame than good pedis and free clothes. Her single, which Trevor had chosen to be the theme song for The Fame Game, had been in the top ten on iTunes for two whole weeks. She’d gotten calls from three different record labels, all of them expressing interest in her music. (They also wanted to know if she had any shows coming up. Ugh.) Trevor said she wasn’t ready for all that, though; in the world of The Fame Game, her getting a recording contract was more of a second-season story line. Meanwhile, Courtney Love—whose barely comprehensible tweet about Kate’s YouTube video had first brought Kate into the spotlight—seemed to be watching over her like some crazy fairy godmother (O gawd, gurl iss makin it! hitthe top sister, and sned me a postcard!!!! she’d recently tweeted). If Kate ever met the former lead singer of Hole, she was going to give her a big, fat kiss.
Kate reached down to brush a dragonfly away from her ankle. Yes, she was really, really lucky. There was no doubt about it.
But it wasn’t as if life was all sunshine and roses. For one, she had—against her castmates’ advice—read some of the comments about her on the internet. People were brutal. Who is this random chick who thinks she can sing? asked NeNe67. Bru43ski wrote, Why would they cast this girl? She is sooooo boring. Kate, horrified, had stopped right there. Lesson learned. Quickly.
Then there was Luke Kelly, the drop-dead gorgeous Australian actor she’d fallen for at the beginning of the summer. Even though Kate knew she’d been right to break up with him—if a guy wouldn’t own up to dating you, you had to give him the boot, right?—the decision still hurt. She’d thought they had something. Something real.
For a while, Luke had seemed to feel that way, too. But then his attention turned to something fake: his manufactured-for-the-cameras relationship with Carmen Curtis. As costars of The End of Love, Luke and Carmen were the new Hollywood It couple. Kate saw pictures of them everywhere she turned. She couldn’t even buy her over-priced salad at Whole Foods without them smiling at her from the cover of a magazine.
Then, to add insult to injury, she’d learned that Luke and Carmen had hooked up—for real—in the spring. Nothing had come of it, and it was before she’d met either of them, but still. If it didn’t mean anything, why had they both kept it a secret from her?
Kate thought she’d found a true friend in Carmen, but now she felt like an idiot. Carmen had been texting her— at first acting like there was nothing wrong, and then wanting to talk—but Kate wasn’t interested in anything she had to say off-camera.
“Life is different, all right,” Kate said, rolling over onto her stomach and letting the sun warm her back. “It’s mostly great, though.” She felt like she was reminding herself of it as much as she was telling Natalie.
“Oh, hey, you guys,” chirped a voice. “What’s up?”
Kate turned back over and saw her costar Gaby Garcia approaching them, wearing a pair of six-inch strappy sandals and clutching one of her trademark spirulina smoothies.
“What is that?” Natalie asked. “It looks like you put Oscar the Grouch into a blender.”
Kate laughed, but Gaby only looked confused. “Gaby,” Kate said, “you remember Natalie. She was my roommate before I moved here. Natalie, you remember Gaby, my fellow Fame Gamer.”
“Hi,” Gaby said. She sat down on a chaise longue and sighed. Her brow twitched almost imperceptibly, which was—thanks to all the Botox injected into her forehead— her best version of a frown.
“What’s the matter?” Kate asked. “You look upset … I think.”
Gaby took a sip of her smoothie and sighed again. “It’s Madison,” she said. “I’m worried about her.” She slipped off her high heels and contemplatively rubbed at her toes. “I mean—wow. Like, I’m really worried? I just … like …”
Kate waited for Gaby to finish her sentence, but then realized that nothing more was forthcoming. “It’s pretty crazy,” Kate said.
Gaby turned her brown eyes to Kate. She bit her over-plumped lip. “I tried to talk to her about what happened with the necklace, but she totally shut me down. And I tried to ask her about my diamond earrings, too. I mean, those were totally on my dresser until her dad came over. And then he leaves, and suddenly they’re gone. I was all, Like that’s really a coincidence! But then after the whole necklace thing, I’m thinking maybe Madison took them. I mean, it was obviously one of them, right? And of course she didn’t want to talk about that, either.”
Gaby stopped and took a deep breath. It was a long monologue for her.
Kate nodded. “Yeah, well, I’m sure it’s a hard thing to talk about.”
She had tried to talk to Madison, too. In the first days after the Fame Game premiere, when it seemed like their whole world was exploding in flashbulbs, Madison had been practically invisible. She’d been a no-show at the morning-after brunch, and she’d spent ten minutes at the informal cocktail party for cast and crew before making a French exit out the back. And no one had seen her since.
Kate had figured she was just taking a break from things, lying low in Charlie’s bungalow, and ringing up quite the LAbite.com bill. But then things had gotten weird: Suddenly Madison was nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Her photo was on every celebrity website and on the cover of every gossip magazine. And they all accused her of the same thing: theft.
It was so unlike Madison to avoid attention—they’d all thought something was up. Sophia had said Madison was upset because their dad had to leave town unexpectedly. Kate could tell how much Madison adored Charlie, so that explanation made sense. But Kate, for one, certainly hadn’t expected the headlines: STARLET STEALS STONES; MADISON MAKES OFF WITH MILLIONS. Kate’s reaction had been shock, quickly followed by confusion. Really? Madison had stolen and sold her loaner necklace? Really? One could argue that Madison was a lot of things: cruel, sly, manipulative, and selfish. But an honest-to-goodness thief? It didn’t sound right. The girl had a collection of Birkins that rivaled Victoria Beckham’s. Why would she steal a diamond necklace when she had a wardrobe worth double that in value?
Gaby set her drink down on the concrete. “Between Madison and her father … well, you know what they say: The apple doesn’t fall far from the pie.”
“I think the saying is ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,’” Natalie suggested.
“Whatever,” Gaby said. “Same thing.”
“I find it all really hard to believe,” Kate said. “I don’t get why she’d steal a necklace and then sell it. Did she actually think she wouldn’t get caught?”
“Who knows with that girl,” Natalie said. “She lied, slept, and cheated her way to the top in the first place. Is this really so out of character for her?”
Kate looked up at the big windows of Madison’s and Gaby’s apartment. She could see the passing clouds reflected on their shiny surface. Madison hadn’t been living there for a while now, but she still thought of it as Madison’s and Gaby’s place. Maybe she hadn’t known Madison as well as she thought she had. It wasn’t like they were good friends or anything, but she’d started to like her. She’d thought everything was cool with them. So the more Madison avoided her, the more Kate began to think she really was guilty. Maybe it didn’t make sense that Madison would have stolen the necklace, but it made even less sense that she would say she’d stolen it when she hadn’t.
Kate leaned back and rearranged the Egyptian-cotton towel she was using for a pillow. She didn’t want to think about Madison anymore. Obviously the girl didn’t want to talk, and maybe she never would. “Mad’ll be fine,” Kate said. “It will do her some good to see things from the bottom for a change.”
Gaby shot her a look of surprise. “Ouch,” she said.
Kate shrugged. She knew that didn’t sound like something that the nice girl from Columbus, Ohio—the one who couldn’t bear to pack her old teddy bear in a moving box because she was afraid she’d hurt its feelings—would say. (Instead she’d carried Paddington to her new apartment in her purse, with his legs sticking out like some furry kidnapping victim.) But she had reached out to Madison and got a whole lot of nothing in return. So, moving on.
On second thought, maybe fame had made Kate feel different. But just a tiny bit—and anyway, she didn’t have much of a choice. In this business, it was kill or be killed. A girl needed to develop a thick skin or she wouldn’t get anywhere.
“I miss her,” Gaby said softly.
Kate reached out and patted her knee. “She’ll be back, Gaby,” she said. “Madison Parker will always be back.”
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“Roll that rack over to the wall, will you? And the other one can go by the doorway. You don’t need to get to your dining room anytime soon, do you, Carmen?” But Alexis Ritter, lead costume designer for The End of Love, which Carmen was due to start filming in a matter of days, didn’t wait for Carmen to answer. “Well, whatever,” she said. “Shouldn’t eat during a fitting anyway.”
Alexis clapped her hands briskly, startling her poor assistant, who nearly tripped over a pair of thigh-high leather boots decorated with fringes, buckles, and spurs. Carmen eyed them with trepidation. Was she going to have to wear those?
“Just put the rack right there,” Alexis said. “For God’s sakes, there! Come on. We’ve got a lot to do and not very much time to do it in.”
Carmen couldn’t believe the number of tunics, dresses, gowns, leggings, scarves, and capes being wheeled into her house. (Her dad was out of town, so her mom had agreed to let the PopTV cameras film for a few hours. Carmen was glad her parents didn’t see eye to eye on this whole Fame Game thing.) The costume budget for The End of Love alone must be three times what it cost to make The Long and Winding Road, the arty, indie movie that had been her first big-screen experience.
Alexis glanced at Carmen, giving her figure a once-over. “So this is you,” Alexis said. “Your size, which you plan on staying for the entire movie. No juice cleanses or carb binges, do you hear? It’s important that your weight doesn’t fluctuate, because there’s a lot of boning and corsets involved here, and they need to fit perfectly.” She ran her fingers through the white streak in her ebony hair.
“Uh, no, I mean, yes. I’m staying this size,” Carmen said, glad that the PopTV crew, which had set up in the far corner of the room, had not begun filming yet. “No crash diets in my immediate future,” she joked.
Alexis nodded, unamused. “Good. I want to get you into the ball gown from the opening scene first, because that has some complicated stitching going on. Boning, laces, whatnot. A sort of futuristic corset, with a busk front, so that your costar can tear it open in that first moment of passion… .”
Carmen blushed slightly. A moment of passion with Luke Kelly, in front of who knew how many cameras, while wearing one of these insane garments. It was going to be … interesting. But she didn’t doubt that she was up to the challenge.
Then Alexis made a series of angry-sounding phone calls as Carmen stood around, shifting her weight from foot to foot and feeling like a trespasser in her own space. Eventually Carmen plucked her own phone from its place on the mantel and tried, for what felt like the millionth time, to get Kate to text her back.
It had been over two weeks since the Fame Game premiere, and Kate and Carmen had barely spoken. It was starting to bum Carmen out. She didn’t know how she was supposed to act around Kate. Were they still friends? She’d thought everything was going to be okay, but then came the night of the premiere. Kate had been friendly when they were all on the red carpet, but by the end of the evening she was acting as if she couldn’t stand the sight of Carmen.
At first Carmen was totally confused, but then Fawn had come rushing up. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell Kate about your hookup with Luke,” she’d said breathlessly.
Carmen paled. “What?”
Fawn had put her arm around Carmen’s shoulders. “I assumed you’d told her already, so I just sort of mentioned it in passing. You know, about how cool it was of her not to mind you guys fake-dating, when you practically almost did date…. Oops!”
Carmen had wanted to ask Fawn what the hell she was thinking, but she wasn’t surprised. Fawn loved gossip of any kind and wasn’t always careful with it. She didn’t mean any harm, though, and Carmen knew that.
Remembering that night, Carmen shuddered. What a terrible way for Kate to find out. No wonder she was angry.
But what did it mean for them now? Was their conflict a problem for Trevor’s planned story line, or was this the exact sort of drama he wanted for his show? There hadn’t been a fight, exactly—but obviously there was a lot unsaid between the two of them.
Assuming her text would go unanswered like the rest, Carmen decided that she might as well ask Laurel for a bit of advice. The producer was drinking a giant mug of coffee—as usual—and staring at her BlackBerry. Carmen remembered her doing the exact same thing back at Palisades Charter High School, when Laurel was a senior and already interning at PopTV. “Hey,” she said, smiling as Carmen approached. “You ready to get into character?”
“Into the costumes, anyway,” Carmen said. “But that’s a lot of clothing. Am I supposed to try on all of that?”
“Probably not,” Laurel said. “But don’t ask me. Ask Alexis.”
“I’m scared of her,” Carmen whispered. “She has that whole Cruella de Vil thing going on.”
Laurel looked at Alexis thoughtfully. “Yes, I see it,” she said. “Definitely. Trevor will love that.”
“She’s probably going to make me wear a cape made out of puppy fur.”
“Or kittens, maybe. But seriously, you don’t get nominated for three Oscars for costume design without being tough,” Laurel said. “You know just as well as anyone, nice gets you nowhere in Hollywood.” Her phone buzzed, and she glanced down at the screen. She frowned, tapped a few keys, and then met Carmen’s eyes again. “Dana’s always telling me I need to be more of a bitch if I’m ever going to be promoted.”
“Can I talk to you about something?” Carmen blurted.
“God, yes, why am I babbling about myself?” asked Laurel, putting her BlackBerry down and turning the full brightness of her attention to Carmen. “My job is to listen to you.”
Carmen smiled wryly. She knew that Laurel’s job was to listen to her so that she could report it back to Trevor. But whatever—those were the rules of the game. What she needed right now was a sympathetic ear, even if that ear was attached to Trevor’s current protégée. Carmen took a deep breath and began to tell Laurel about the situation with Luke Kelly. But almost before she got to the end of her first sentence, Laurel put a hand on her arm.
“I know,” she said softly. “Kate told me that they were dating. That it was her on the back of that motorcycle in the Gossip magazine photo. Not you.”
Carmen looked at her in surprise. “She did?”
Laurel nodded.
“Well, the thing is, there’s more to the story. I hooked up with Luke,” she said.
Laurel’s eyebrows lifted in surprise.
Carmen hurried on. “It was way before they were dating. We had a little too much wine one night at a party and we made out and it was no big deal. But Kate found out, and now she’s not talking to me.”
“Aha,” Laurel said. “I knew something else was going on between you two.”
“Kate wasn’t even a twinkle in Trevor’s eye back then!” Carmen went on. “How can she blame me for something that happened before she even existed?”
Laurel laughed. “She did in fact exist, Carmen. You just didn’t know her. And I have to say, I understand Kate’s side of things. You didn’t tell her, and you were her friend. She probably feels betrayed. Not by the kiss, but by the fact that you kept it a secret from her. Keeping a secret can turn something into a much bigger deal than it ever should have been.”
“Hello, Dr. Phil,” Carmen said drily. “I didn’t see you come in.”
Laurel smiled. “Hey, I’m a reality-TV producer. Knowing people is part of the job. Trevor knows more about interpersonal psychology than your average PhD.”
Carmen had to agree with that. Trevor did always seem to be one step ahead of them, didn’t he?
Laurel sipped her coffee, then set the cup on the windowsill near the little bonsai tree that had been a gift from Carmen’s best friend, Drew. “Kate wasn’t born into this world the way you were,” she said. “She doesn’t understand all the rules. She doesn’t know that illusion is sometimes more important than truth.”
“You’re getting really metaphysical on me,” Carmen said. “It’s too early in the morning for that.”
Laurel laughed. “It’s eleven a.m. That’s not early. But anyway, I think you should apologize to Kate. Sincerely. I’m telling you this as a friend. Trevor is very interested in what’s up with you two. Your developing friendship was giving the show its heart—he’d mapped out the rest of the season with you two as besties. So, if you can’t fix it, I’m sure that Trevor will try to orchestrate some knock-down, drag-out fight, preferably on camera.”
