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Trevor laughed. “After you, do you really think the network can afford it?”
She took another sip of her coconut water and then, ever so slowly, extended her hand. “Then I think,” she said, the corners of her mouth pulling up into a brilliant, ten-thousand-dollar smile, “we may have a deal.”
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Kate Hayes tore off her Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf apron and pulled her strawberry-blond hair from its elastic as she raced to her car. This was her final interview for the new Trevor Lord show and she didn’t want to be late. She’d met with Dana twice already, and apparently she’d done well, because Trevor’s assistant had called that morning, telling Kate to come at two. And make sure to bring your guitar, she’d said, her voice syrupy but firm.
When Dana first approached her at the Coffee Bean, Kate didn’t know what to think. She’d noticed the tall, tired-looking woman staring at her from behind the food case long after she’d paid for her sugar-free Soy Vanilla Blended. Blank-faced, Kate had gone about grinding beans and pulling shots, pretending that nothing was unusual about having a stranger ogle her like she was some misplaced exotic animal. Finally, when Kate was beginning to feel slightly freaked out by the attention, Dana had introduced herself. She was a TV producer, she said, and she wondered if Kate was the girl who’d done that YouTube cover of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”
“Who hasn’t done a cover of ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’?” Kate had asked, still not trusting that Dana was the real deal. “It’s like the number-one karaoke song ever.”
Dana had run her fingers through her frazzled hair and sighed. No, she’d said, she meant the one that took Cyndi Lauper’s 1980s party anthem and transformed it into a slow, quiet, nearly heartbreaking look at class anxiety and a young girl’s longing for independence. “That was you, wasn’t it?” Dana asked, narrowing her brown eyes.
Kate was taken aback. It was one thing to be recognized in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, but in L.A.? Sure, her YouTube video had gone viral, ever since Courtney Love had tweeted something barely comprehensible about it (whos this brillient chica I found bymistake loveher!), the girls over at HelloGiggles.com had made her a pick of the day, and Rolling Stone had done a small profile of her on its website. Kate still had no idea how all that had happened, but it had made her, briefly, just a little bit famous.
But hey, this was Los Angeles, land of a thousand people who were just a little bit famous. It was a sea of Where do I know you from? faces where nearly everyone had had a brief encounter with celebrity only to have it taken away just as swiftly.
Dana had asked her to come in for a screen test, and Kate had surprised herself by agreeing. But as she sat in a small, sparely decorated room with Dana and a single camera, Kate had to fight the urge to downplay the video, which she’d made on a lark last year with her ex-boyfriend. She’d had no idea Ethan was going to upload it to the web, and they’d gotten into a huge fight once she found out he had. But then people started commenting on the video, liking it and sharing it and reposting it. Everyone had agreed that her voice was incredible, unusual. Like Lucinda Williams meets Joni Mitchell, watched over by the ghost of Nina Simone, someone wrote. (And it hadn’t hurt that as she’d strummed the last chords of the song, Ethan’s Bernese mountain dog had flat-out howled, as if he couldn’t bear to live in a world in which Kate Hayes was no longer singing. That got all the dog lovers on her team faster than you could say Purina Brand Puppy Chow.)
The problem with the video was that it wasn’t her music, which Kate had been writing obsessively ever since she was eleven years old and started teaching herself to play her dad’s old guitar. It was someone else’s. Which meant that the video was, in a way, just a glorified version of karaoke.
But it was enough to make you pack up your things and move to L.A., Kate reminded herself. It was enough to make you think you might be able to make it.
Yes, she could admit it: She’d thought her video would be the beginning of something. But ever since she’d arrived in L.A. it had seemed like more of a dead end.
Speaking of dead ends, Kate was now stuck in traffic. Again. Even though she’d been in the city for a year, she still hadn’t figured out how to get anywhere on time. She checked the clock—she had twenty minutes to get to Trevor Lord’s office, which was probably thirty minutes away at this rate. She glanced next at the little brass chime that hung from her rearview mirror, something her mother called “the bell of safe travel.” Marlene Hayes said it would protect against accidents on the crowded L.A. freeways. But as Kate sat in the exhaust cloud of a Cadillac Escalade, stopped at yet another red light, she wished her mother had given her a bell of speedy travel. That she could have used.
She figured she might as well multitask and felt around for an eyeliner in the bottom of her purse. Obviously she hoped Trevor would appreciate her talent, but it couldn’t hurt to put on some makeup. As she finished smudging the black kohl a touch, her phone buzzed beside her on the passenger seat. She picked up. “I’m late,” she said into the mouthpiece, not even caring to whom she was talking.
“Well, that’s certainly a surprise,” said the cheerful voice on the other end of the line.
“Oh, hey, Jess,” Kate said. Jessica was her sister, older by fifteen months and taller by five inches. She was calling from Durham, North Carolina, where she played center on the Duke women’s basketball team. “What’s up?”
“Just calling to check in on my favorite chanteuse. That’s French for singer, you know.”
Kate snorted. “Just because I didn’t go straight to college doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.”
“I know, I’m just kidding. How are you?”
Kate thought about this for a moment before answering. She hardly talked to her sister these days (Jess was so busy with classes and basketball practice), and Kate didn’t want to sound like a bummer. On the other hand, they were best friends and blood relations, and there was no reason to lie. “Well, I’m stuck in traffic. I’m late for an interview. There are termites in my apartment building. And I went to an open mic last night and couldn’t even get on stage.”
“Oh, Katie,” Jessica said, her tone sympathetic.
“Yeah, I know. I drove all the way to Glendale for some singer-songwriter thing, and then fifteen minutes before I was supposed to get on stage my hands started to tingle and my stomach, like, grew a bowling ball inside of it. I took two tequila shots at the bar, but it only made me feel worse. So I turned around and drove home.”
Kate sighed as she finished her story. Not for the first time, she pondered the irony of a person with major stage fright hoping to make it in the entertainment business. No doubt her sister was thinking the same thing, but Jess was too nice to state the obvious. She would never, for example, bring up Kate’s sophomore year in high school, when she waited for ten hours to audition for American Idol and made it past the pre-screening round, only to panic and bomb on stage. (You might want to reconsider your career aspirations, Simon Cowell had said, not unkindly.)
“You’re in excellent company,” Jess soothed. “Think about Cat Power. She was so crippled by stage fright, she could only sing in utter darkness. But then she got over it.”
Ahead of Kate, the Escalade started inching forward. She gingerly tapped the gas pedal. “So you think there’s hope for me? Or am I just being crazy?” she asked wistfully.
“Of course there’s hope,” Jess said. “Like my coach says, you just need to keep dribbling.”
An image of herself holding a guitar in one hand and trying to dribble a basketball with the other popped into Kate’s head. She gave a little laugh as she clutched the phone tighter in her hand. (She really needed to get a headset; one of these days some cop was going to bust her.) “The thing is, I’m sort of stalled,” she admitted. “I mean, I’ve been here since graduation. That’s over a year, which means I’ve got another year to make something happen before Mom comes out here, ties me up, drags me back to Columbus, and forces me into college.”
“But you’re trying,” Jess said. “You made more awesome videos. And didn’t you write, like, ten songs in the last few months?”
“Yes, but no one hears them,” Kate wailed. “I just sing and play for myself!”
Thinking about this made Kate want to pull over to the side of the road and curl up in the backseat of her hand-me-down Saab. The thing was, she’d lied to Dana about what she’d been doing to further her music career. Oh sure, she’d told her, I do open mics all the time! And Dana had nodded, looking pleased; an open mic was pretty much a talent show, and who didn’t love a talent show? It’d be like a mini acoustic American Idol. No fancy lights, no celebrity judges, just some would-be musicians with their instruments and their songs. America would love it!
But of course Kate’s real attempts at furthering her music career consisted of playing her guitar, scribbling down lyrics and chord progressions, and recording bits of songs on her old-school four-track. And that didn’t seem like it would make for exciting TV.
“Well, you’re just going to have to get out there more,” Jess said matter-of-factly. “Like I said, keep dribbling. What about that show you emailed me about?”
“That’s the interview I’m late for,” Kate admitted. She craned her neck out the window, trying to see past the Escalade. Was there construction? An accident? “I don’t know why people insist on driving SUVs in L.A. It isn’t exactly known for its rough terrain,” she huffed.
“Stay focused,” Jess said. “Tell me about this show.”
“It’s about four girls trying to make it in Los Angeles,” Kate said. “It’s by the people who did that show L.A. Candy,” she added, slightly embarrassed. (But also kind of thrilled.)
Jess hooted. “Shut up! You didn’t tell me that.”
“Hey, you loved that show as much as I did,” Kate laughed. “So don’t pretend like you didn’t.”
“Guilty as charged,” Jess said. “I always had a soft spot for Scarlett.”
“Yeah, me too.” Kate had loved Jane Roberts, of course, but Scarlett Harp was her favorite. Scarlett was smart, sassy, and down-to-earth, and she didn’t care about hair or makeup or fame. Or so it had seemed, anyway. But in an interview after she left the show, Scarlett had complained that the producers had edited her life into something that it wasn’t. The real me got left somewhere on the cutting room floor, she’d said.
That line had stuck with Kate, especially after her first meeting with Dana, in which the seemingly perpetually stressed-out woman had grilled her about her dating life (“um, a little slow these days since I’m holding down two jobs—you know, to afford my rock ’n’ roll lifestyle”—that got a smile out of Dana at least), her exercise routine (“I wouldn’t call it a routine, exactly”), her family (“single mom, normal, nice, and almost two thousand miles away”—she hadn’t felt like bringing up her father, who had died when she was ten, but figured she might have to eventually if she made it onto the show), and a hundred other things. If the PopTV people offered her the part, would she be able to be herself in front of a camera? And if by some miracle she could, would they edit that real self into something different? It was a worrisome thought.
“But being on a TV show—that’s totally amazing,” Jess went on. “I mean, you could be a star!”
“Yeah, right,” Kate said, applying a little lip gloss touch-up in her rearview mirror. “Let’s not set our hopes too high.”
“Well, at the very least you’ll get paid well,” Jess pointed out.
Kate’s ears pricked up at this. “Paid well?”
Jess laughed. “Yes, dummy. What, you think it’s like some kind of extended open mic, where you do it for free?”
“Oh, uh, no, of course not,” Kate stammered. The truth was she hadn’t even considered the fact that she might get paid. Weren’t there millions of girls across the U.S. who’d give anything to be on a PopTV show? Trevor Lord could sell his spots to the highest bidder if he wanted to.
Suddenly she felt even more grateful that Dana had stumbled into her branch of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. What if she actually nailed the audition? Money meant being able to quit at least one of her two jobs. Money meant being able to afford an eight-track digital recorder or a new MacBook with a functioning version of GarageBand—or, even better, time in an actual studio. Money meant her mom couldn’t drag her back to Columbus.
“You’re such a nerd,” Jess said affectionately.
“I know,” Kate said. “Believe me, I know.”
Ahead of her, the Escalade began to pick up speed, and Kate was able to shift into second gear for the first time in ten minutes.
“You’re going to do great,” Jess assured her.
Kate felt her heart flutter lightly in her chest. If she could just keep moving, she’d be only five minutes late to meet Trevor Lord. She had made up her mind: Forget stage fright. She was going to rock this interview.
“I should go, Jess,” she said. “Love you. Call you later.”
As Kate sailed through the intersection, she glanced up and saw Madison Parker, probably thirty feet tall, smiling down at her from a giant billboard. It was an ad for Madison’s Makeovers. Beauty’s a bitch read the tagline.
Kate smiled in return. Madison hovered over the corner of Venice and Sepulveda like some guardian angel of reality TV.
Surely that was a good sign.
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Carmen Curtis rushed around her bedroom, madly searching for her new brown leather ankle boots. Shoe boxes and shopping bags were littered across her floor, testament to an outrageous (even by Carmen’s standards) shopping extravaganza that had taken place earlier that day. Three nine-hundred-dollar sweaters dangled off the edge of her bed, and a ridiculously expensive silk dress lay, already crumpled, in a corner. Even though the amount of free clothing and accessories that were sent to her mother could fill a room in their very large, but not obscene, house, the two always spent a day demolishing Barneys before Cassandra left on tour. Cassandra would soon be leaving for ten sold-out concerts in Japan and Australia, so they had practically emptied the place out.
Plus, they were celebrating Carmen’s news: She was going to be on The Fame Game, Trevor Lord’s newest reality series. Filming began in two weeks, and now Carm had a pile of cute things to wear.
She had been worried that her mom might not want her working in “reality” TV (after all, there was nothing real about it), especially since the whole family had been the subject of a documentary about Cassandra’s comeback tour nearly a decade earlier. Cassandra had had extremely mixed feelings about Cassandra’s Back, but she said that The Fame Game sounded cute. She also agreed with their publicist, Sam, who argued that it was the perfect thing to help Carmen out of the shoplifting mess she’d gotten herself into a few months earlier.
Carmen tossed a new lacy La Perla bra on top of her dresser and flung a pretty little Lanvin handbag onto the chaise longue. Where were those damn ankle boots?
For the record, she hadn’t actually shoplifted anything. But it had been a crazy time in her life, full of ups and downs. Ups: She’d just graduated high school and was free from the tyranny of textbooks. Her role in an indie movie about estranged sisters who go on a road trip to find their mom, which she’d filmed the summer before her senior year, was getting great reviews. (She only wished the critics didn’t sound so shocked, as if they’d assumed she got the part only because of who her parents were. Which, okay, hadn’t hurt—her dad was a producer on the film, after all—but the director wouldn’t have cast her if she couldn’t act.) But there were downs, too: She’d deferred her acceptance to Sarah Lawrence because she wasn’t convinced college was for her, and her dad wasn’t thrilled about it. She’d broken up with her boyfriend of six months when she saw pictures of him on D-lish.com getting a lap dance. (Somehow “liar” and “cheater” had not been included in his photo caption when the jerk made it into People’s Most Beautiful issue; even worse, he’d managed to spin it so that Carmen was perceived as “needy” and he was oppressed in the relationship.) And she’d taken the blame for shoplifting a Phillip Lim top because her friend Fawn was still on probation from her last failed attempt at a five-finger discount, and she was afraid the judge wouldn’t be so lenient this time. Naturally the tabloids ran with it.
That particular incident had pissed off her dad even more—at first because he’d thought she’d done it (thanks for the vote of confidence, Dad!), and then because she’d taken the blame for someone he’d never really liked that much in the first place. Ever since Carmen had started hanging out with Fawn after they’d met at an acting workshop, her dad had grumbled about how he wished she’d find friends her own age. (Fawn was only two years older—no biggie.) But all of this meant that Philip Curtis was not exactly keen on his daughter’s judgment as of late, which was going to make it somewhat difficult to persuade him that a role on The Fame Game would not exploit her, goad her into getting breast implants, or otherwise ruin her life.
She had to make him understand that she knew exactly what she was getting into. She’d grown up in L.A.—around actors, writers, singers, directors, producers—and she knew how the game was played; now she wanted to officially get into it. She’d spent the past few years dabbling, taking acting classes and working hard, yeah, but dabbling nonetheless. She’d never committed to auditioning, hadn’t much cared about her “image,” and had been content to coast along as mini-Cassandra. Now she was ready to take what could so easily be hers.
But convincing Philip Curtis of anything that he didn’t think up himself—well, that could be a challenge. As he was fond of saying, I didn’t get to be the founder and president of Rock It! Records by doing what people told me to do or thinking what people wanted me to think.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Carmen thought. Anyway, the point was, she was trying not to do what people told her to do. Her dad wanted her to go to college? Well, she had a better idea. She adored him, she really did, but she could do without his stubbornness sometimes. Whenever she tried to turn it around and tell him that she agreed wholeheartedly with his “think for yourself” philosophy, that it was exactly what she was trying to do, he refused to engage. He’d just look at her calmly and then wander away, as if the conversation had been a competition and he had already won it. The only person he could never pull that with was Cassandra.
“Carm,” her mother called from downstairs. “Drew is here. And dinner’s almost ready.”
“Coming,” Carmen called back. Too bad: She was going to have to eat dinner sans her fantastic new ankle boots.
Just as it was a tradition for Carmen and her mom to shop before Cassandra went on tour, it was a longstanding tradition for her family to have a big meal at home on Friday nights. Drew Scott being invited was now tradition, too. He was her best friend, and he’d been at the table at least every other week since Carmen was in tenth grade and he was in eleventh. Drew’s mom, an entertainment lawyer, and his dad, a dermatologist to the stars, had been in the midst of an ugly divorce back then, and Drew liked to avoid them as much as possible. Even now that peace (aka total avoidance) reigned between his parents and he lived on campus at UCLA during the school year, Drew still showed up at the Curtis family’s dinner table. Often he’d even wear an Oxford over his tattooed arms and his hair nicely combed.
Carmen slipped on her pink custom-made Chopard watch—her graduation present from her parents when she finished at Archer—and ran downstairs to the living room, where her dad had cornered Drew to chat him up about some band he’d just signed. (Drew was studying composing and music production at UCLA, so he liked talking shop.) Just as Carmen headed toward them, her mom floated into the room. Seriously, Cassandra Curtis never did anything as pedestrian as walk. Even in jeans and a plain white sweater, she looked amazing, her dark hair in perfect waves and her light olive skin perfectly dewy, as if she’d stepped off the cover of Vogue—which, incidentally, she had actually been on three times and counting.
“The salmon is ready, everyone,” Cassandra said. Her voice was smooth and sultry, even when she was talking about dinner. “Carm, hon, you look fabulous—I love those L’Wren Scott skinnies on you.” She leaned closer to her daughter and whispered, smilingly, “Just don’t tell your father how much they cost.” Philip Curtis didn’t actually care what they spent on clothes, but it was a running joke at their house: How many pairs of shoes and jeans could two women possibly own? Then, at a normal volume, her mom mused, “What I wouldn’t give to be able to get away with white jeans.”
Carmen rolled her eyes. “Yeah, Mom, you’re huge. Better skip dinner. It’s lemon juice and cayenne pepper for you tonight.”
Drew detached himself from Carmen’s dad and walked over to plant a kiss on her cheek. “Curtis,” he said.
“Scott,” Carmen returned, then punched him gently on the arm.
“No hitting before dinner,” Drew said, laughing.
“That’s right,” Cassandra said. “We save violence for dessert.”
In the huge, French-blue dining room, Philip took his usual spot at the head of the table and Cassandra sat at hers on the other end. Carmen and Drew sat across from each other, a gigantic spray of hot-pink lilies between them. Philip cleared his throat and lifted his wineglass. “A toast to my amazing wife and daughter. May they remain forever beautiful and never grow tired of me.”
Carmen giggled—it was the same thing he said every Friday night. She raised her glass of Perrier. “And to Philip Alan Curtis, beloved husband and father. May he one day manage to come up with a new toast.”
As they ate, they bantered lightly about music (what exactly was the difference between speed metal and grindcore?) and sports (were the Lakers going to take the championship this year?). But Carmen, uncharacteristically, said little. She was waiting for the right moment to talk to her dad again about The Fame Game. The last time she’d brought it up, the conversation hadn’t gone well, and back then it was only a possibility. Now it was a done deal. Her mother had made her promise to tell him at dinner.
What her dad didn’t seem to fully comprehend for some reason was that Carmen’s life had always been in the spotlight. Heck, she’d been on the cover of Us Weekly when she was in utero (Crooner Cassandra’s Baby Bump!), and her toddler outfits had been the subject of gallons of tabloid ink (Baby CC: The World’s Littlest Fashionista?). The way Carmen saw it, the PopTV show was an opportunity to step into the limelight on her own terms. The cameras would film her because she wanted them to, not because they were manned by guys from TMZ who were itching to catch her stumbling drunkenly out of a nightclub or flashing her thong, or lack thereof, as she exited a car. Her entire life had been narrated by the media and she had had so little say. This was a chance for her to show people who she really was.
Trevor Lord’s reality series would prove to the world that Carmen wasn’t just another celebuspawn. She was a real person with real feelings, and she was an actress—and she’d have been an actress no matter who her parents were.
Carmen cleared her throat. It probably wasn’t the right moment, but maybe there was no such thing as a right moment for a conversation like this. She took a careful sip of her water. “So, remember that thing I told you about, Daddy?” she asked. “The opportunity my agent got approached with?”
Drew stifled a laugh, and Carmen kicked him under the table. Drew thought that Carmen was “above” reality TV and that “opportunity” was a euphemism for “bad idea.” She’d never been able to get him to watch L.A. Candy, so maybe it was understandable that he didn’t see the appeal of The Fame Game. Still, he’d come around to the idea eventually, though he knew her dad wouldn’t be on board.
“Tell me it wasn’t another Playboy request,” Philip half hollered. “I’ll kill Hef with my bare hands if they ask you to be naked in that magazine one more time.”
Carmen flushed. “Ick!” she said. “No, the offer from PopTV.”
“You mean PopTV Films,” Philip said.
Carmen’s stomach fluttered. Had he really forgotten the conversation they had had about it just last week? Or was he trying to pretend that it hadn’t happened? “No, Daddy,” she said. “PopTV. You know, Trevor Lord’s new show?”
Philip’s brows furrowed gently. “Trevor Lord? Why does that name sound familiar?” he asked.
“He produced L.A. Candy,” Carmen told him. (For the second time.)
“The reality show?” He said “reality show” as if they were dirty words. Kind of like Drew had when she’d first told him.
Carmen glanced through the spray of lilies at Drew. His green eyes were full of sympathy already. He just wanted what was best for her. (And sometimes Carmen couldn’t help but wonder if he simply wanted her. There had been a few moments in the last month or so—some extra-long hugs, a bit of hand holding, and one awkward, sweet kiss . . . But now wasn’t the time to think about that.) She smiled at Drew and looked back at her father.
Before Carm could respond to him, though, Philip’s cell phone buzzed and he slipped it from his pocket. He glanced at the screen and looked apologetically at Cassandra. “I have to take this.”
“The music business is twenty-four/seven.” Cassandra rolled her eyes toward the ceiling and smiled.
“Well,” Carmen said when her dad had left the room, “so far so good.”
“You think?” her mother replied.
“I was being sarcastic.”
“Give him a chance,” Cassandra said gently. “Believe it or not, he does trust you.”
Drew reached out and moved the flowers to the antique credenza behind him. “There,” he said, “now I can see the future star of The Fame Game.”
“Seriously, you guys,” Carmen said. “You have to help me out on this one. Be, like, supportive.” Help me show the world I’m not Little CC anymore, she thought but didn’t say.
