She giggled. “Oh, there are actually five total Altoonas: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Alabama, Iowa, and Kansas, in descending order of size.”
“Let me guess. You’re really good at trivia, aren’t you?” I asked her. Between the red wine stains and all the Altoonas, I bet Cindy could kill at a pub quiz.
She grinned. “I’m pretty decent. I’m a big reader and I like crossword puzzles a lot.”
“I’m pretty decent too, but you might have me beat.” Which was impressive. Between me and my three brothers, none of whom were dummies (maybe Derek), I was the only one who actually liked reading or going to college. My career had prevented me from graduating, but I wanted to go back one day.
“Well, you’re probably too busy, what with being in every movie ever,” she teased. “Not that it’s an excuse to not knowing about the five Altoonas.”
I laughed. “Yes, the whole acting thing does tend to cut into my personal crossword puzzling time.”
“The high price of fame?” she teased.
“Something like that.”
She had no idea. But I got the feeling she wouldn’t mind listening. I also got the feeling that I wouldn’t mind telling her either, which was especially weird. I was usually a very private person. Why was she so easy to talk to?
…Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons. Wise men never try…
“How long have you been in LA?” I asked. I knew I’d never seen her before at one of these. I would have remembered.
“About a year.” She looked around the lavish ballroom. When her eyes returned to mine, they looked almost sad. “But I don’t think I’ve seen enough of the city yet.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Oh, just that I ought to get out of my comfort zone more often.” Her voice was wistful.
I could fix that. The intrusive thought came out of nowhere, but I couldn’t resist it. I could only imagine that a child of high society like Cindy spent a lot of time in expensive boredom. Stuck in a bubble of privilege and expectation. I knew the feeling all too well. I also knew how to break free, when necessary. Maybe I could teach her.
“Well, maybe you need to stop attending charity balls,” I told her.
She blinked. “What makes you think I do this a lot?”
I have eyes. “Well, you’re here. That means you’re a socialite.”
“You’re here,” she told me. “You aren’t a socialite.”
I laughed. “Fair enough. I’m here because my father wants me to marry one. I’ve been tasked with improving the family pedigree.”
She raised an eyebrow. “And how’s that going?”
I smiled at her. “You tell me.”
…Some enchanted evening, when you find your true love. When you feel her call you across a crowded room. Then fly to her side and make her your own. Or all through your life you may dream all alone…
3
Cindy
I danced with a prince. Thomas Prince, no less. The most famous of the whole super-famous family that dominated Hollywood like it belonged to them. And he was handsome, and charming, and he seemed to like me. How utterly ridiculous.
This was not my life. My life was oil stains and letting out hems. My life was standing stage right while my sisters competed in pageants so I could help with their dress changes. My life was as a supporting character to someone else’s leading lady. I thought I was okay with that. But now, I wasn’t so sure.
I was clearly in over my head though. Part of me wondered if I hadn’t actually hit my head sometime during the day and gone on a “Wizard of Oz” coma dream odyssey. If this was an elaborate mental illusion, at least it was a very nice one. It made a nice change.
At this event, nobody knew who I was. In my “borrowed” Zac Posen dress and late mother’s pearl earrings, I was fooling them all. They thought I belonged there. After all, I showed up with a ticket. Apparently, all it takes is a change of clothes and some waterproof mascara and I could pretend to be rich and connected. That was neat.
So, when the charity auction started and a girl came up to me and asked if I was participating, I said yes. Why not? Everything else was entirely surreal. Might as well play along. I’d get to be on the stage instead of waiting in the wings. After years of watching my sisters get the limelight, I was suddenly eager for my shot. Even if it was only pretend.
I was herded up on stage with the other young women participating, and it was at that point that I realized what was happening. We weren’t participating in the auction per se. We weren’t helping people fill out bid cards for art or modeling jewelry. We were the merchandise. This was a charity date auction. As in, some rich dude out in the audience was going to bid on a date with me. For the whales.
“Ready?” The girl behind me asked, pointing ahead. The emcee was waiting.
“I guess so.” I wasn’t, but I walked forward anyway. My heartbeat thrummed in my ears and I felt hot and flushed. I shuffled into the white puddle of the spotlight and stared out into the crowd. I reminded myself not to lock my knees, lest I faint.
Damn. There are a lot of people out there.
The bad news was that it was too late to back out. The good news was that I didn’t have to wait very long. The emcee read a short, hastily put together bio for me and I attempted not to squirm.
“Cindy is five foot two and twenty-three years old. She enjoys puzzles, crafts, and craft brews. Her favorite color is millennial pink, her favorite animal is a tie between the ostrich and the cassowary, and her favorite cheese is Wisconsin Colby. She can hula hoop for five solid minutes. Bidding starts at two thousand for an afternoon with Cindy.”
I sounded like a total weirdo, which at least was an accurate reflection of my true personality. But people started bidding anyway. No, not people. Men. Men started bidding on me.
The rules had been explained to me in advance. It was all meant to be entirely innocent and G-rated. The date would take place in a public place and I was under no obligation to do anything I didn’t want to. I didn’t even strictly have to go through with it, although obviously if I was participating it was expected that I would. Depending on who won me, they might not even want the date. Sometimes women bid on other women, just for fun.
It was for the whales and all, so it wasn’t too degrading. But there’s something pretty bizarre about standing around while people bid on you. Half humiliation and half gratification. Or maybe not half and half. Maybe about eighty-twenty. As the bids rose into the five-thousand-dollar range, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of satisfaction. Especially when I saw who was bidding on me.
Tommy Prince was standing in the front, repeatedly raising his paddle as the bids went up. My silly heart fluttered at the attention, improbable as it was. He was America’s preeminent heartthrob and dramatic actor. Handsome, talented, tall, fit, and affable, why wouldn’t he be? He made more serious films than some of his brothers, exhibiting a chameleon-like ability to inhabit a character. I’d seen some of his movies, although not the more recent ones. It was nearly unbelievable to me that I was in the same room with him.
To me, up close, Tommy Prince looked like an extraordinarily handsome lion that had been transformed into an extraordinarily handsome man. There was something uniquely leonine about him, especially with the beard he’d grown. His hair was light brown, his eyes were a vivid blue-green, and his skin was sun kissed. He filled out his tux like the garment had been designed for him by someone far more talented at pattern making than me, which I was certain that it had been. He was the undisputed king of this jungle. I stared at him in bemused disbelief.
He raised his paddle again, beating out whoever else had been attempting to win me, looking back at me with that same smile he’d been wearing earlier. I didn’t know what that expression meant exactly, but it made my heart pound.
There was no way he was genuinely into me, right?
I mean, there couldn’t be.
And yet…
“Sold.
”
Tommy grinned in satisfaction and I felt my mouth curving up into a smile, too. Then the emcee was nodding pleasantly to me, grabbing my hand and helping me step off the podium. I wandered off the stage in a daze. Then reality hit me.
What the fuck just happened?
4
Cindy
“You look like you’ve got a case of the Mondays,” my Garfield-loving co-worker Connie said to me the next morning. We were working through the alterations backlog, so we had plenty of time to chat.
I rolled my eyes at her and fiddled with the button I’d just attached to a crisp, blue, lady’s blazer. “It’s a Saturday, Connie.”
“Pssh. You know what I mean.”
I did. I was mildly hungover, extremely tired, and genuinely not sure if anything that happened last night was even real. The blisters I had on my feet from wearing my one pair of high heels felt real enough, but the rest? I’d woken up this morning and seen a text from Tommy Prince asking to set up our date and nearly passed out.
“I went out last night,” I said to Connie conversationally.
“You did?” She was staring at me with interest.
I nodded. Her shock was not unfounded. It wasn’t exactly in character for me to go out. My Friday nights were usually spent watching Buffy reruns or reading. I didn’t have a lot of friends except for Connie, and she was thirty years older than me and responsible for both her mom, teenage daughter, and infant granddaughter. So, she wasn’t exactly down to go party with me every weekend.
“Did you finally give in and go clubbing with your sisters?” Connie asked, laughing.
I wrinkled up my nose at her. “No.”
Although difficult, Quincy and Greenlee were not terrible people like Marigold. But they’d been in my stepmother’s web their entire lives and it had left a deep and indelible mark on the way they viewed themselves and others. Another person’s value was directly correlated to what they could do for them. Because I couldn’t do all that much, my value wasn’t high. They didn’t treat me as bad as Marigold did, but that wasn’t saying much.
And yet they wanted me to go clubbing with them. Presumably, what they wanted was for someone to drive them around, babysit them, and selflessly help them climb the ladder of success. After a year of not instantly getting cast in a major Hollywood film, both my sisters had come to accept that their next move in the ‘get famous quick’ game might need to be a bit unconventional. Marigold was still holding out for a film role to walk through the front door of the dry cleaners, but my sisters had been plotting.
Plus, Greenlee wasn’t twenty-one yet and Quincy was chronically broke, spending every dime she made on clothes, makeup, and jewelry. They wanted me to supply them with alcohol. I might be a pushover in every other way, but I wasn’t catching a felony for supplying alcohol to my underage sister.
“Does Quincy still think if she makes a sex tape with Ryan Reynolds, she’ll be the next Kim Kardashian?” Connie asked. She looked as grossed out about it as I felt.
I giggled into my cringe. “Yeah. That’s her plan.”
She had it all mapped out, too. In detail. She’d even written it down and asked me and Greenlee to review it. It read like bad, horny middle school fan fiction. I’d told her it was great.
“Isn’t he married?” She asked.
I nodded. “Yeah. To Blake Lively.”
Like that would stop Quincy? Ha. Nothing would stop Quincy. She was determined to be famous. Or if not famous, infamous.
Connie looked around before answering. “Hmm. Quincy’s cute and all, but she’s not that cute. She’s not Blake Lively cute.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed. Quincy and Greenlee were very beautiful. Tall, blonde, skinny, and blue-eyed, they were both pretty enough to be actresses. It was the whole lack of talent thing that held them back. They’d killed it on the pageant scene back in Wisconsin. But here in Hollywood, tall, model-esque blondes were everywhere. Much to Marigold’s dismay, this town was drowning in hot blondes in their late teens. My sisters went from being big fish in tiny ponds to krill in the Pacific Ocean. But there were plain little blondes all over, so I was in good company.
“Don’t let Marigold hear you say that,” I told her.
“Since when does Marigold come in on Saturday mornings?” Connie replied.
She had a point. Marigold, Quincy, and Greenlee usually spent Saturday mornings at the nail salon next door. They were on the clock, but they weren’t here. It was reasons like this that the dry cleaners was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
“Well,” Connie asked, “if you didn’t go out with your sisters, what did you do?”
I shrugged. How could I explain it?
“I went to a party one of our clients invited me to,” I hedged. “And I met someone there.”
Connie’s facial expression went from ‘mild interest’ to ‘extreme interest.’ She dropped the dress she was hemming. Her mouth dropped open.
“A male someone?” she asked when she recovered her muscle control. Connie had been telling me for the better part of a year that I needed to get laid. She seemed to think it was the key to my happiness. She even bought me a vibrator for my birthday to try and entice me to be more ‘normal.’ According to Connie, I was criminally withdrawn and undersexed. She wasn’t wrong.
“Yes. A male someone.” I picked up the dress and handed it back, but she was still staring at me in disbelief.
“And?” she asked. “What happened?”
I looked anywhere but at Connie’s disbelieving, eager face. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Did you two…” she trailed off significantly.
I shook my head. “No!” I squealed. “We only just met.”
Connie patted my hand comfortingly. Connie thought it was hilarious that I was a twenty-three-year-old virgin. Apparently, that was very old (although, considering that her sixteen-year-old daughter had a daughter, perhaps a bit more restraint wasn’t the worst thing in the world). “Okay, Sandra Dee,” she told me. “Did you at least get his number?”
“We’re going on a date tomorrow afternoon.”
She literally jumped for joy on my behalf. I wished I could feel half as enthused. Tommy thought I was someone I wasn’t. Someone I could never be. Once he learned that I was nobody, I was sure he’d lose interest. But that wouldn’t stop me from seeing him again. Nothing could.
5
Tommy
Tommy Prince [10:00 a.m.]: Hi. This is Tommy Prince. I got this number from the Humpback Whale Foundation. Is this Cindy?
Cindy Brown [10:15 a.m.]: Hi. Yes. This is Cindy.
Tommy Prince [10:20 a.m.]: This is almost weirder than online dating.
Cindy Brown [10:25 a.m.]: You do online dating? That’s really a surprise.
Tommy Prince [10:30 a.m.]: No. It would be a bad idea for someone like me. But it seems weirder than online dating. Is it?
Cindy Brown [10:35 a.m.]: I don’t do online dating either. Too many weirdos.
Tommy Prince [10:40 a.m.]: Yeah. Haha. Not like the standup guys who bid on you at charity auctions.
Cindy Brown [10:45 a.m.]: I think the chances of me getting murdered by an A-list actor are relatively small.
Tommy Prince [10:46 a.m.]: If I had an online dating profile, that would be my tagline. “The chances of being murdered by me are relatively small.”
Cindy Brown [10:47 a.m.]: Oh yeah, that’s not creepy at all.
Tommy Prince [10:50 a.m.]: Would you swipe right?
Cindy Brown [10:55 a.m.]: I would call the police. But you’d still get some swipes. It depends on how hot your pictures were.
Tommy Prince [11:00 a.m.]: That’s a refreshingly honest and terrifying answer.
Cindy Brown [11:04 a.m.]: Which is why I don’t online date.
Tommy Prince [11:08 a.m.]: You’ve never done it? I thought all girls your age were on dating apps? Isn’t that how your generation dates?
Cindy Brown [11:30 a.m.]: Girls my age? Oh please. Still go
ing on about how young I am? You realize you’re the one that’s making it weird. I’m not making it weird.
Tommy Prince [11:33 a.m.]: I’m just saying you’re much younger than me.
Cindy Brown [11:45 a.m.]: How old was your last costar?
Tommy Prince [11:46 a.m.]: Is it bad that I don’t remember?
Cindy Brown [11:47 a.m.]: You tell me. Are women just that interchangeable to you?
Tommy Prince [11:48 a.m.]: No, but we were just acting. I’m sure she was too young. But that’s Hollywood. The old half your age and then add seven adage hardly applies to films.
Cindy Brown [11:49 a.m.]: I’ve never heard of that. How does it work?
Tommy Prince [11:50 a.m.]: I’m thirty-three. So, if I cut my age in half and add seven, I get 23.5. That’s the minimum age I should be dating. But movies never adhere to it.
Cindy Brown [11:51 a.m.]: By that logic I could date a teenager. That’s gross. I didn’t like teenage boys when I was a teenage girl.
Tommy Prince [11:52 a.m.]: It isn’t a perfect method.
Cindy Brown [11:53 a.m.]: But you’re still concerned I’m too young. So, why’d you bid on me at the charity auction then? Whale-based altruism and a desire to raise as much money as possible for their care and preservation?
Tommy Prince [11:54 a.m.]: No. No altruism was involved. Fuck the whales.
Cindy Brown [11:54 a.m.]: Oh, no thank you. That’s obscene. But then why’d you do it?
Tommy Prince [11:55 a.m.]: Bid on you? Curiosity.
Cindy Brown [11:55 a.m.]: About?
Tommy Prince [11:56 a.m.]: About you.
6
Tommy
“You seem weird today.”
My twin brother Derek was always very direct. Sometimes too direct.
“Do I?” I asked. “Because you always seem weird to me.”
Derek rolled his eyes at me and I ignored it. We were running—racing—back from my uncle’s mailbox up the long driveway to his house. If I wanted to win, I couldn’t let him get to me. I pressed forward. My extra half inch of height on my fraternal twin wasn’t much, but it did give me a slight stride advantage.
Auctioned to the A-Lister Page 2
