by Zoey Dean
Adam sighed. "Yeah. I know."
Shit. There were so many things she wanted to tell him face-to-face that would be ruined by the phone. About the amazing breakfast with her father. And the even more amazing letter from her mother, like a song from the Great Beyond.
"Cam?"
"Yeah?"
"There's something I need to tell you."
Oh no, he was not breaking up with her by cell phone. If he even tried, she was going to press in star seventy-one pound eleven and his cruddy LGX 5200 cell would blow up and take his brain with it. Hey, it might work.
"I'm not breaking up with you," he added quickly.
"Never entered my mind," Cammie lied. She stood and drifted to the open window. Why wasn't Adam outside right now, smiling up at her?
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"Being back in Michigan. It's . . . weird."
"And?" she prompted, because obviously there was more.
"And . . . it's making me kind of . . . nostalgic, I guess. I miss it here."
She was in Los Angeles, and he missed Michigan. It was time to talk some sense into this boy.
"Adam, can you do me a favor?"
"Sure, Cam. Anything."
"Tell me exactly where you are right now."
"I'm on one of the bunk beds in the cabin."
"What'cha wearing?"
"Jeans. T-shirt."
She could picture him perfectly. Tall and on the thin side, with a basketball player's gangly arms and a star tattoo behind one of this ears; spiky, dark brown hair, and a warm smile.
"I can tell you for a fact that the view is a lot better from my bedroom," she declared. "I believe you when you say you're not breaking up with me. But do not bullshit me. Are you having second thoughts about coming back?"
She heard him sigh. That was confirmation enough, no matter what his words would be.
"I wouldn't mind going to U of M," he said softly. "You'd like Ann Arbor. It's a very cool--"
There was a limit. He'd just smacked into it. Not to mention the fact that she didn't have the grades to get into U of M, and she didn't think any amount of money
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or sexual favors could get her in, either. Adam knew that full well, too.
"Adam."
"Yeah?"
"Foreign countries aside, there are only two digits that will ever go at the front of my zip code--9 and 0. I'm allergic to flyover country."
"Yeah. I thought that's what you'd say."
"And yet you asked anyway."
"Sometimes people change, Cammie. You're judging a place you've never been to and don't really know."
They talked for another minute or two, but Cammie felt like a helium balloon five days after a birthday party. And when she hung up, she felt even worse. Not even the thought of retail therapy could make her do anything else but lie on her bed and stare at Fern, Avery, and Wilbur on the wall. They didn't move, so she didn't either.
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Midnight Special
"Isn't this a little Mission Impossible?" Caine asked, as Anna took out the set of keys that Sam had given her. She was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt, which seemed appropriate for a stealthy operation.
"I'm doing Sam a huge favor," Anna reminded him. "She said not to come until midnight. She wanted to be sure the office was deserted. It's midnight, almost. Here we are."
She said these things matter-of-factly, but honestly-- she was nervous.
"I think we woke up the guard at the front desk," Caine said. "What's the point of having a guard if he sleeps on duty?"
"So that desperate criminals like you and me can sneak in."
Anna chuckled as she turned keys in both locks. The door to the offices of Action Jackson Productions, on the second floor of a nondescript building at the low-slung Culver City movie studio complex that housed Transnational Pictures, swung open.
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Once again, Anna asked herself what the hell was she doing. Yet the answer was clear: she was doing something huge for Sam that Sam dared not do herself.
At the end of the toga party, Sam had corralled her and told her all about her encounter with Norman Shnorman, aka Jonah Jacobson, whose mother held the purse strings at Transnational. There were enormous budget problems on BenHur, and it simply wouldn't do for Andrea, aka Bigfoot, to see negative coverage on her son's Burnt Toast from an Action Jackson Productions script reader. Someone had to change the coverage in a hurry. But Sam didn't dare do it, because it could so easily get back to her father that she'd been at his production offices at midnight. Someone would surely mention it to him, even if just by way of making conversation, and she'd have to concoct some elaborate lie. If Anna went . . . well, no one knew her, so everyone would just assume she was some assistant doing something. And surely that wouldn't be worth mentioning to anyone.
Which is how it was that Anna and Caine had presented their credentials to the guard on the ground floor of the studio offices, gotten themselves cleared, and were letting themselves into the deserted production offices. Just as Anna got the door open, Caine's watch beeped twice. He pushed the sleeve of his black hooded sweatshirt up his tattooed arm and glanced at his wrist.
"Midnight," he declared in a doom-filled voice. "The witching hour."
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"Very funny."
Anna snapped on the lights. Though she was officially an Action Jackson employee, she hadn't yet been inside the offices. They were surprisingly spare.
They went into Kiki's utilitarian office--there wasn't even a window--and Anna quickly found the script in the drawer where Sam had said the covered scripts would be.
Caine pushed his hair off his forehead. "Hot in here. Don't they believe in air conditioning?"
"Oh, that's just me," Anna quipped, proud of herself for being lighthearted in the midst of this unusual midnight outing. Anna dug out the script to Burnt Toast and was pleased to see Sam's coverage still stapled to the upper righthand corner.
"So, what now?" Caine asked.
"Can you boot up that computer?"
"Yes, ma'am. Love taking orders from a high school graduate." Fortunately, Caine was grinning.
"Let's redo it from the top," she decided.
"Fine with me."
"How are you on the keyboard?"
"I bring new meaning to the word fast."
"Great. I'm not an expert at this, but I'll dictate and you type."
"I await your brilliance."
"Hmm . . ." Anna looked at Sam's coverage. It was scathing.
"Okay, let's start like this, as an overall summary:
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'Use script to paper the walls of Versailles. It's magnificent.' Or is that overkill?"
"Is there such a thing as overkill here in Tinseltown?" Caine asked.
"Right. 'Norman Shnorman deserves to be amongst the pantheon of top film industry writers for life.'"
"I could weep," Caine deadpanned.
"In this case, weeping is good," Anna mused. "Just type at the same time."
She dictated a few more paragraphs, described the plot as "original, thoughtful, funny, and highly moving all at once," and the characters as "fresh, clever, highly castable, and relatable by young and old alike."
"My mother couldn't write a recommendation that good," Caine noted when he was finished. "Want me to read it back to you?"
"Just print it." Anna felt a little sick to her stomach.
Caine pressed the print button; Anna heard a printer hum behind her in the receptionist's office.
She hurried to the receptionist's desk with the script, tore off Sam's original coverage and ran it through the paper shredder, stapled the new coverage to the script as soon as it was fully printed, and then brought it back to the filing cabinet and stuffed it--as best she could figure out--back where she'd originally found it.
No one would be the wiser, she decided. And Sam was off the hook.
"Anna?"
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She turned. Caine was standing a few feet
behind her. "Yes?"
"Really no ethical qualms about doing this?"
"Honestly? A ton," she admitted. Frankly, she was surprised--and touched--that Caine even thought to ask her.
By way of response, he wrapped his arms around her. Anna flushed and leaned her forehead against his chest. She could feel her heartbeat speed up under her simple black Calvin Klein T-shirt.
"I just don't feel comfortable lying," she murmured. "And this feels like lying."
"I love that about you, Anna. I really do. But you're going to find out that there are worse things than lying."
She wasn't sure she liked the sound of that, and edged back far enough to see his face.
"Really? Like what?"
"Like . . . some lies can be told for a good cause. Like, saying a bride is beautiful when she's not. Like that. So . . ." He kissed her softly. "We done here, Madame Criminal Mastermind?"
"Maybe," she teased, and kissed him back. There was something really strange about kissing Caine in Jackson Sharpe's production company office. But maybe it could be ... good strange.
She kissed him again.
The next thing she knew, they were on the couch, one of his hands tangled in her hair, the other holding her T-shirt. He slipped one strap of her camisole off a
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shoulder and kissed the soft skin of her neck. The other strap fell. Her pulse raced between her collarbones. When he went to tug the camisole over her head, Anna pulled away.
"The guard could come up," she explained, breathless from what they'd started.
"Not to worry. I re-locked the door." Caine pulled her close again.
How did she feel? What did she want? She put a hand on his chest.
"I'm not ready for this," Anna admitted.
"Here?" Caine asked.
"Anywhere."
"To be continued, then," Caine said easily, and hoisted her from the couch. "There's a great new jazz club on Hillside Avenue in Los Feliz. Wanna check it out?"
"Definitely." Huh. He had sure given up on seducing her easily enough. What did that mean? She had no idea.
Five minutes later they were signing themselves out at the guard desk in the lobby. The uniformed guard wasn't sleeping this time. In fact, he gave them both a knowing nod, followed by a lascivious wink at Caine. Anna felt embarrassed. Had he thought they'd made use of the mythical casting couch in Jackson's office?
Caine was right. She had too many scruples. For Hollywood, and for fooling around in a Hollywood producer's office.
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Room 928
"Room 928?" Jack asked the clerk behind the carved wooden counter, who wore a black suit and a name tag identifying himself as Ji Min. "I specifically requested 928."
"Let me check, sir."
As Jack dealt with the clerk, Dee surveyed the hotel lobby. In all the time she'd been in Los Angeles, she'd never been inside the Hotel Roosevelt on Hollywood Boulevard, though she'd driven past it countless times. The lobby itself had an enormous four-story ceiling, marble fixtures, and sleek black furniture. When she looked up, she saw a marvelous crystal chandelier old enough to be the original. Maybe it was the original
-- on the ride over, Jack had told her that the hotel was eighty-five years old. He'd also told her that it was supposedly haunted.
Was she up for an adventure? Always.
Dee had chosen her clothes with a sex-with-ghosts kind of theme. Her Stella McCartney baby doll dress was constructed from translucent ivory silk. At certain
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angles, when the light hit her just so, she almost appeared to glow.
"Okay, here you go." Dee saw the clerk hand over an envelope with a key card. "Room 928 it is. Enjoy. If there's anything we can do to make your time more enjoyable here, let us know."
"I will," Jack assured him.
"What's so special about room 928?" Dee asked
Jack smiled and wriggled his eyebrows mysteriously. "You don't know the story?"
On their way up in an elevator as modern as the hotel was classic, Jack told Dee about the legend of room 928. Supposedly, the actor Montgomery Clift had lived in that room back in the 1950s, back when he was filming From Here to Eternity with Natalie Wood. Soon after the hotel was renovated, people who stayed in 928 began reporting a peculiar presence. One woman swore she had been reading in bed, felt a tap on her shoulder, turned over to say good night to her husband, and realized that it couldn't have been her husband, because he was snoring with his head under the quilt.
Another time, a psychic awoke at five in the morning to see a shadowy apparition that resembled the silhouette of Clift sitting in a chair near the door. But the chair hadn't been anywhere near the door when he went to sleep. The psychic reported that the ghost stood and glided into the bathroom. There it disappeared.
These stories didn't make Dee nervous. Actually, they thrilled her. There'd been a time in her life when
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she'd loved the paranormal and the occult. This visit to the Roosevelt was bringing all that back.
Room 928 was the last one on the right at the end of the hall. Jack opened it with his key card. Then, with no warning, Dee felt herself being swept up in his arms and carried over the threshold of the doorway. She giggled.
Five minutes later, they were "adventuring" all over room 928, kissing on the white-draped bed with the round French-style green bolster pillows, the matching white love seat, and even the window ledge that looked out over Hollywood Boulevard and the hills beyond. Finally, Dee lay cradled in Jack's arms.
"I have news for you," she teased. "Really big news."
"What's that?"
"I'm pregnant. It's either yours on Montgomery Clift's."
Instead of laughing, which is what Dee had expected, Jack got very thoughtful. "Interesting," he admitted. "Minus the Montgomery Clift part, I mean."
"Come on, I was joking," Dee told him, as she nuzzled against his neck.
"Yeah, I got that. But think about it. My sister Margie--you know about her, she has brain damage--is never going to have children. That leaves me. My parents have always talked about how cool it would be to have grandchildren. The more the merrier, actually."
Whoa. Dee remembered how early in the school year, she'd tried to fake a pregnancy. She was so ashamed of that now. But at that time she'd been
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halfway to the Ojai Institute but hadn't even known it. Now, she realized she'd had a biochemical imbalance back then. Between her meds and excellent therapy, she was a completely different person now.
Jack, however, had no such imbalance. Which meant that he was serious. Which was really, really weird.
"That idea doesn't totally freak you out?" Dee asked.
Jack swung his head back and forth like a bobble-head toy. "Once upon a time, yeah. But now ... I could see being a father sometime. Not just with anyone, though. With you."
"You mean like ... a decade down the road or something. Right?"
"Maybe," Jack agreed, nuzzling her neck. "Or maybe we'll be on our third or fourth kid by then."
"I validate your feelings," she said seriously, just as she'd been taught at Ojai. "But . . . I'm so not ready for anything like that."
"I didn't mean tomorrow, Dee. I meant . . . sometime."
"Oh." Dee tried to smile, but it didn't feel right on her face. Were they seriously talking about babies? She hadn't even officially finished high school yet!
"You ever thought about where you wanted to live?" he asked.
"You mean like now or what?"
"What." Jack pressed his lips to her forehead.
"Umm, my parents' house in Beverly Hills? After they retire and go to their place on Oahu?"
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"Yeah. But you've been back east, though. Ben told me you visited him at Princeton. What'd you think of New Jersey?"
Ben had mentioned she'd been to Princeton? She wondered what else he'd told Jack. Surely not that they'd slept together. After all, it was only one time
. Ben wouldn't tell Jack. Or would he? She had a feeling now that it would upset Jack. A lot.
"Princeton was nice."
There. That seemed neutral enough.
He smoothed the wispy blond bangs from her face. "I like the shore. Belmar, Asbury Park. It's not all the fake shit you find out here. Back there, people build things and get their fingernails dirty. People with real jobs, fixing cars, building houses, driving buses, working for the phone company. Like that."
Okay, this was entirely too bizarre. Dee stretched her toes into the high-thread-count white Egyptian cotton sheets. She slept on similar ones every night, and, not to sound terrible, she expected that state of affairs to last forever. She wondered what kind of thread-count sheets one might find at the MegaMart in Belmar, New Jersey? Could thread count veer into negative numbers?
"But . . . you go to Princeton! You're at Fox for the summer. You want to make a lot of money! You told me so!" Dee found herself really upset.
"Yeah," he admitted. "But there's so much--the bullshit out here is just so thick. Maybe I can play the
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game for a while. But after that, I'm thinking about returning to the real world."
"In New Jersey," Dee clarified, just to be sure. "Like after you make money to help your sister?"
"I figure she can live with me. Or you know, when the time comes . . . us."
Holy shit. He was serious. Dee did some deep, meditative breathing. This didn't make any sense. She was the one who always seemed to be pulling him closer. He was the cool college guy who wasn't interested in commitment. Back in her bipolar days, she might have thought that she was in a science-fiction movie and aliens had eaten Jack's brain.
"Jack?"
"Yeah?"
"I'd rather screw the ghost of Montgomery Clift than live in Belmar, New Jersey."
Silence. She felt Jack's arms tense.
"Oh man!" He laughed a little louder than was necessary. "You think I was serious?"
"Yeah," she admitted, though she felt uncomfortable doing it. "Kinda."
She still wasn't sure, frankly.
"Didn't know I could act, did ya?" Jack wrapped his arms around her; soon they were kissing again.
From Dee's point of view, kissing Jack was vastly superior to talking at the moment. So she made sure his lips were well occupied.
