Starstruck

by Lauren Conrad

  “By five minutes,” she retorted. “That’s not actually late.”

  “Ten,” he said.

  Madison ignored this. The truth was, it hurt her pride to be late. She used lateness—rarely—as a way of building tension. But in today’s case, she was late because she’d been packing up the rest of her shoes, clothes, and toiletries (there was so much of everything!) in order to officially move back into her Park Towers apartment that night.

  By dinnertime, the little bungalow she’d found for Charlie would be empty of everything that had made it feel homey and welcoming. Nick, her agent, had sent an intern over to wait for the Designer8 people, who were coming to pick up the rented beds, couches, tables, and lamps. (Saving Madison this particular hassle was about the only thing Nick had done for her lately.)

  She sighed, thinking about another day spent vacuuming up dog hair or scrubbing down painted cinderblock walls at Lost Paws. Why couldn’t someone get her out of this?

  Ryan cleared his throat. “Well?” he said.

  “I’ll stay late,” she said.

  “Great,” he answered. “More time for us to spend together.”

  She had to bite her tongue to keep from making a sassy retort. Ryan hadn’t moved out of her way yet, so she was still on the step beneath him, gazing up at him from below. It wasn’t a good angle for most people, but Ryan didn’t seem to have a bad one. Madison noticed how his skin was paler beneath his chin. How he had one single freckle near his clavicle. How his Adam’s apple cast the faintest shadow on his neck. How—Oh, please stop, Madison, she thought. But it wasn’t fair that he was so good-looking. He was such an asshole, and not in a charming way.

  Ryan turned around and pushed hard on the door. As it swung open, Madison caught the unmistakable whiff of caged animal. It smelled like urine and fear. She fought the urge to dry heave. Even after a week of coming here, she wasn’t used to it. She was glad Trevor had stopped sending the Fame Game cameras along. She didn’t want to have to relive these days when she saw them on TV.

  Hazel (or was it Ivy?) sat at the front desk, helping Glory figure out how to print on the new printer. She sneered at Madison.

  Ryan faced her with his hands on his hips. “Time’s wasting,” he said. “Come on.”

  Madison ducked her head, ignoring the glare from whichever twin it was, and silently followed after Ryan. She had never been this meek in her entire life! But even in this moment of uncharacteristic humility, she couldn’t help it: She admired the breadth of his shoulders and the way his jeans hugged his slim hips. She knew she should ignore him completely, but still, she took in the tan, muscled length of his arms, the soft waves of hair that barely brushed his collar. Why did he have to be so hot?

  Of course Ryan would choose that very moment to turn around. His eyes met hers and narrowed. “You going to critique my outfit?” he asked. The expression on his face said he knew exactly what she’d been thinking.

  Madison flushed and looked away. “That’s professional advice. I don’t just give it away for free,” she said.

  “Well, can’t say I’m surprised by that,” Ryan muttered, turning back around.

  “You know what I mean,” she called out.

  Ryan didn’t look back this time; he just shrugged his broad, beautiful shoulders. “Whatever.”

  Madison vowed never to make eye-to-eye contact with him again. Or eye-to-shoulder, or eye-to-pecs …

  When Ryan got to the supply closet he reached in and retrieved a familiar pair of plastic gloves.

  “Seriously with the gloves again?” Madison asked. “Am I back on cage duty?”

  “No cages, princess. Today you’re in the laundry room.” He gestured toward a damp, cinderblock room with two industrial-strength washers and dryers, each the size of a Mini Cooper. Blankets and towels lay in heaps on the floor. Here the air smelled a little different. Like urine and bleach, Madison thought grimly.

  “You know how to do laundry, right?” Ryan asked. “I mean, besides putting it in a heap and waiting for your cleaning lady to take care of it?”

  Madison glowered at the piles. “I know how,” she said. What Ryan didn’t know—and what she certainly wasn’t going to tell him—was that she’d started doing laundry at the tender age of seven. Since Sue Beth Wardell had generally neglected laundry, vacuuming, and cooking (or anything else that didn’t involve a remote control and a bottle of cheap whiskey), Madison had learned that if she wanted clean clothes each day, or dinner each night, she had to take care of it herself. (And, to make things more difficult, Madison hadn’t even had a washing machine in her cozy double-wide in Briar Rose Trailer Park in Armpit Falls, NY. It was the public Laundromat or the sink for little Madelyn Wardell.)

  “Well, have at it, then,” Ryan said. “There’s a radio in the corner there. You can turn on music if you want.”

  Madison could have strangled him. Was listening to Katy Perry on Kiss FM going to make this task any more tolerable? She could have a live performance in front of her and she would still be in her own personal hell.

  She spent the next five hours in that room, washing, drying, and folding the animals’ laundry: the dog-bed covers, the cat blankets, the towels soaked with who knows what. (She was suddenly thankful for her hazardous-waste gloves.) Again, no one came to ask if she was hungry, or if she would like five minutes of fresh air.

  She felt like Cinderella, except without the ball and the lost shoe. Or the prince.

  She thought about her other castmates, who were doing things like writing songs and starring in movies and making out with guys they met in bars, and she felt, for the first time, that she would trade places with any of them.

  And she thought, too, about Charlie, even though she tried not to. How she had no idea where he was, or if he was okay, or why he had done what he’d done. How she was just going to have to wait for him to reach out to her. (And considering he’d failed to call her for a decade, what could she reasonably expect? A collect call sometime around her birthday next year?)

  As furious as she was at Charlie, Madison still missed him; she couldn’t help it. And she couldn’t explain it, either—not even to Sophie. Her sister had been so young when Charlie left that she barely remembered him; the fact that he was gone again didn’t seem to mean that much to her.

  Or else, Madison thought, Sophie was simply too self-involved to notice that they were once again fatherless. Too busy practicing tree pose, or laughing-cow pose, or whatever. Honestly, Madison would never understand yoga. Why stretch, she used to say, when you can shop?

  But of course she couldn’t shop anymore, because every spare nickel was going to Luxe, to pay them back for the necklace, which was—Madison prayed—still in her father’s possession or handed over as some kind of barter to someone he owed money to. Because you couldn’t just take something like that to a pawnshop, unless you wanted a free ride to the nearest police station.

  Try as she might, Madison couldn’t shake a tiny glimmer of hope that Charlie would understand how badly he had screwed her over (again! said the little voice in her head) and would come back to make things right. But how that was going to work out, she had no idea. She hoped he knew what he was doing. But taking past experience into consideration … well, it didn’t make her feel very confident.

  “I just wanna throw my phone away / Find out who is really there for me,” Katy Perry sang on the radio.

  Madison almost laughed. You and me both, she thought.

  At the end of a long and exhausting day of laundry, Madison was in the lobby, finishing off a bottle of hand sanitizer, when a woman brought in a skinny, shivering animal with dirty, matted hair and one paw wrapped in a filthy bandage.

  “Oh dear,” whispered Glory. “That poor …” She shuddered.

  “I found it tied up in the backyard of a house no one lives in,” said the woman. “I can’t keep it—or him, or her, or whatever it is—but I couldn’t just leave it there, right?” She shifted nervously from foot to foot, as if
the good people of Lost Paws weren’t going to take this thing off her hands. “I mean, it would starve.”

  “It looks starving already,” said the twin.

  It was maybe the ugliest animal Madison had ever seen. If a wolverine had mated with a dirty yarn mop, and the resulting baby had mated with a giant rat—well, this dog would be the end result.

  No one wanted to touch it. Not even Stan, aka Forearms, who was the person Ryan called to pull plastic bags out of Tootsie the poodle’s behind after she got into the trash.

  The skinny, trembling little dog gazed up at Madison. One sad, cloudy eye met hers; the other looked off to the side. As she watched, it whined, lay down at her feet, and licked, ever so hesitantly, the tip of her shoe.

  And Madison burst into tears.

  “What the—” breathed Ryan. “Are you kidding me? It’s just a little dog saliva. Your shoes will survive.”

  But she was already running out the door.

  A few hours later, Madison was standing in the living room of Charlie’s former bungalow, with the last suitcase of toiletries by her feet. The furniture, the rugs, the throw pillows, the lamps: All of it was gone, and the rooms suddenly looked small and dark and cold. Madison’s footsteps echoed on the gleaming oak floor as she made one final check around the house. There was no trace of her now, and none of Charlie, either. She’d looked hard, but there was nothing—not even a single button or cuff link that had rolled into a corner and been forgotten.

  Before she left, she sat one last time on the porch swing. The bright blooms of the bougainvillea were fading, turning brown, and dropping to the sidewalk. She picked at a fleck of paint that was peeling from the railing.

  She was exhausted from her day at Lost Paws: by the laundry duties, by tension with Ryan, and by her bizarre emotional outburst. The embarrassment of being a janitor (and—ugh—having to dress like one) wasn’t getting any easier to take. She was bitter that she had to crawl back to the apartment she’d shared with Gaby in order to get airtime, save money, and get Trevor off her back. And she was mad at herself for getting into a mess like this—a mess so big that, for the first time, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to dig her way out of it.

  She flung the paint chip into the yard. (Three thousand a month and they couldn’t even paint the damn porch?) But … what if she were to come clean? What if Madison decided that it wasn’t worth it to protect Charlie, and she just up and told the truth?

  For a moment, her spirits lifted. Life would return to normal!

  But she quickly realized that if she did tell the truth, there was no way anyone would believe her. She’d have to convince Luxe to release the security footage of Charlie taking the earrings, and then she’d have to explain that Charlie took the necklace, too. And then Luxe would have to admit they lied to get publicity. And then Madison would probably be prosecuted for perjury. And then she’d get more community service—or maybe they’d send her to jail this time.

  No, it would never work. Oh God, what an incredible mess she’d created....

  She shook her head fiercely. Enough of the pity party. She stood up, checked the lock one last time, then strode down toward her car. She gave a final look into the mailbox and there, along with a cable bill and a mass mailing from a roofing company, was a postcard. The front was a picture of a tree silhouetted in the setting sun. The back was addressed to her.

  Maddy, I never meant to hurt you. I will make it right, okay? Just give me a little time. Love, Dad.

  Madison almost crumpled it up and tossed it into the street. But then, her heart softening, she picked it up and slipped it into her purse. She had no idea how Charlie planned to make it right, and in a way, she doubted that he could. But just seeing his handwritten promise made her feel a little less alone.

  10

  ON-SCREEN AND OFF

  The silhouette of a man, high atop the stone wall, looked small against the blue sky. A woman’s voice cried out, “No! Noooo!” as the man, teetering on the wall’s edge, lost his balance and plunged down to the ground.

  Smack. Carmen winced at the impact, and then watched as the man got up from the inflatable mat that had broken his fall and brushed his light brown hair back from his face.

  “Oh for God’s sake,” Colum McEntire said. “That blasted pigeon got into the shot. It flew right in front of him. Can someone handle that? Or is that too much to ask?”

  Carmen and Luke exchanged a nervous glance. Colum McEntire had a legendary temper—he’d once fired Rio Lockhart, his starring, A-list actress in Far from Her, midway through production for some tiny infraction that neither would discuss. (That had required some serious script rewriting!) Some days were worse than others, and today was looking like one of the bad ones. He’d already brought three different PAs to tears. And, as Luke had noted, “two of them were dudes.”

  Carmen watched as Luke’s stunt double drank from a bottle of Gatorade and had his nose powdered by the makeup lady. He did not look particularly like Luke. But they shared that tanned, Hollywood handsomeness—which, if Carmen was honest, was just a little bit generic. It seemed like everyone looked like a Hemsworth these days. Was there some sort of farm that grew guys like this? Maybe somewhere down in Australia, a mad scientist was breeding a new crop of leading men.

  Luke scooted his chair closer to Carmen’s. “Do you know my double did all the stunts in Deadman’s Driveby? He broke his leg in one of the crash scenes and cracked a rib in another.”

  “Impressive. If only there were two of you in real life,” Carmen mused, “then maybe Kate wouldn’t be mad at me, because there would be enough yous to go around.”

  “Let’s not talk about that,” he said.

  “Does the heart heal so quickly?” she asked, smiling. It was one of her lines from the movie.

  “Actually, no,” Luke said. “That’s the problem—I think about her a lot. And I start missing her. But then I stop myself, because I know I need to be focused on this role.” He gestured to the set before them, a futuristic-looking fortress pockmarked with holes and craters from the explosives that had supposedly struck it. There was a puddle of fake blood near a fake dead tree. (It seemed like only the roses under Julia’s window were real.)

  “My Romeo, on-screen and off-,” Carmen said lightly.

  “Romeo is traditionally unlucky in love,” Luke noted. “I don’t know if you’ve read the whole script, but … it doesn’t end well.”

  Carmen clasped her hands to her heart. “‘Love is never easy—love destroys things. It breaks hearts. It tears apart families. But it is the one thing that makes everything better. Love itself is perfect—it’s just that those of us who feel it aren’t.’”

  Luke laughed and put his arm around her. “If you don’t stop quoting your lines at me, I’m going to poison you.”

  “Like Roman poisons himself! How perfectly in character of you,” Carmen said, laughing, too.

  It wasn’t so hard to pretend to love Luke.

  But Laurel, meanwhile, was contemplating candidates for Carmen’s next fake love interest—one who’d let himself be filmed for The Fame Game. She wanted to set Carmen up with Cayden Taylor, lead singer of The Silver Moons. Carmen had never met him, but he’d been in Laurel’s class at Palisades Charter High. He’d recently broken up with his model girlfriend and was—for the moment, anyway—still on the lower rungs of the ladder to fame. “He’s hilarious. You’ll love him,” Laurel had said. “And so will Kate.”

  “And so will the camera, presumably?” Carmen had asked. “And he’ll love it right back, I’m sure.”

  Laurel had shrugged noncommittally, but Carmen knew the deal. “No thanks,” she’d said. “I’m happy in my current fake relationship.”

  Laurel had been undeterred. (Tenacity was important in a producer.) “Okay, well, I’ll keep thinking on it,” she’d said. “We want someone who’ll film. Do you think I should get a Venti, or will a Grande suffice?”

  “Venti with an extra shot,” Carmen had said,
joking. But Laurel had nodded and ordered it.

  “Hey,” Luke said now, squinting toward the edge of the set. “Is that—Fawn?”

  Carmen turned to follow his gaze. It was Fawn. What was she doing here? Catching sight of them, Fawn waved and hurried toward their perch on the sidelines of the set, nearly turning an ankle in her Rochas platform sandals.

  “Hey, you guys,” she said, slightly out of breath.

  Her cheeks were rosy. And, Carmen noted, she’d gone a little overboard with those Kate Somerville tanning towels she liked so much.

  “Hey yourself,” Carmen said, hearing the surprise in her voice. “How’d you get in?”

  Fawn grinned. “Like a locked set is any sort of challenge for me? I told them I was your new assistant. And look, see, I brought you a coffee! Your favorite: dry half-caf cappuccino from Joan’s on Third.” She held it out.

  “Thanks,” Carmen said, touched. “That’s so sweet.” But then she took it and noted that it felt a little on the light side. “Uh, did you drink half of it?”

  “I had like two sips!” Fawn said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Oh! Um, no, of course not,” Carmen said. “Here, have a seat.”

  Suddenly the air was filled with yelling, as Colum McEntire read the riot act to one of the extras for screwing up his blocking.

  “Wow, he’s … intense,” Fawn noted.

  “Ya think?” Carmen asked drily.

  “His bark is worse than his bite,” Luke said mildly.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Carmen said. She took a sip of the coffee Fawn had brought her and then made a face. It wasn’t even that warm.

  “I also brought you the latest issue of Gossip,” Fawn said, having lost interest in Colum’s temper tantrum. “Aren’t I thoughtful? You should check out page thirty-nine.”

  “Why?” Carmen asked, already flipping to it.

  Fawn smiled mysteriously. “You’ll see.”

  Fawn had folded down the corner of the page—and, it seemed, spilled coffee on it. A FAMILY AFFAIR, read the large black headline. In the middle of the spread was a picture from the other night, when Carmen and Luke had walked off the movie set holding hands. They were smiling brightly, and they looked, Carmen thought, like an actual couple. Good for them! No one would ever guess they weren’t totally in love.