by Zoey Dean
Girls on Film (A-List Novel #2)
Zoey Dean
"Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell."
--Joan Crawford
Prologue
Susan Cabot Percy was reasonably sure there was a time when she'd been as innocent and virginal as her younger sister, Anna. But that time seemed long ago and far away. So long ago that it felt like a life that belonged to someone else.
"Whoa! Awesome!"
This from the male body next to her.
Susan tried to recall his name. Blue? Red? It was a color, that much she remembered. And the name was also associated with some old folk-rock musician, because when he'd checked in that morning and introduced himself, he'd made a lame joke to her about it.
Brown. Like the color. That was it. His name was Brown. Neither his hair, eyes, nor skin was remotely close to the color he was named after, so his parents couldn't have chosen it based on looks. Not that she cared why Brown was called Brown. Susan didn't really know him, didn't want to know him, and planned never to know him, except in the biblical sense. Granted, sex with strangers was risky (even with the proper precautions), but a girl had to do something with her free time.
Copious free time, actually. Because Susan was finding
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alcohol and drug rehabilitation at Minneapolis's famous Hazelden clinic to be excruciatingly boring. She always skipped group therapy because she had zero desire to share her personal life with the flotsam and jetsam who happened to be at the facility with her. And supervised outings weren't exactly her idea of fun. They reminded her of her preschool days at the 92nd Street Y in New York City (a place impossible to get into unless your last name was Vanderbilt or Lodge. Or Percy).
"Damn, I got a mean-ass crick in my neck," Brown complained, rubbing a spot just above his collarbone. He rolled over onto a stack of towels that had fallen during their tryst.
Susan knew that the linen closet wasn't exactly conducive to a relaxing encounter. But she'd picked it for privacy, not comfort. It was after midnight. The housekeepers were all gone for the day. Towels and sheets for residents had long been distributed and counted, so no one was going to come looking for extras. And the linen closet was more comfortable than the basement bathroom, which had been her other option for this rendezvous.
"You want a hit?" Brown asked. His eyes were such a vibrant shade of green, the color was even discernable in the dim light of the closet.
"Hit" could refer to either the hash-filled bong by his side or the half-pint of Jose Cuervo that he was nursing. How he'd managed to sneak in the contraband was another thing Susan didn't care about.
"No thanks." Something about Hazelden must be
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working because Susan had been clean and sober since her arrival. There was no reason to ruin her record for Brown. Candy and cigarettes, however, only filled so much of the void left by the alcohol and pills she'd banished from her life. And while it was prohibited, at least sex didn't make you fat or give you cancer.
Susan rolled over and regarded Brown as he torched the bong and launched into some navel-gazing story about how his overbearing parents had forced him into rehab. He was a few years younger than her--maybe even still in high school--and very cute, in a blond, surfer dude sort of way. But they were strangers in the night and she planned to keep it that way. She could have launched into her own tale of woe, of course. Poor little rich girl and the uptight, Social Register parents who had done her wrong. Been there, whined that.
Susan checked her watch and realized it was only around 10:30 P.M. in Beverly Hills, California, where her sister, Anna, was now living. Anna was the only person she felt like talking to. Anna was the only person she could talk to, about anything remotely important. But all day long she'd left endless messages on her sister's cell. Anna hadn't called her back. Susan didn't want to admit how much that hurt.
"... So I decided to head to Maui with my buddy, and I go to take some cash out of my account, and check this out: My parents had the account frozen, if you can believe that shit," Brown droned.
God, he was excruciating. Either she had to shut him
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up or go back to her room. But her middle-aged roommate, Vanessa, had insomnia and stayed up all night obsessing over her stock portfolio, eschewing both laptop and PalmPilot to do complex calculations by hand in a ledger book with a fountain pen. If that wasn't freaky enough, Vanessa was one of those born-again rehabbers who felt it was her personal mission to report any infraction of the rules. The day that Susan had been assigned to clean their bathroom after Vanessa's ablutions, Vanessa had evaluated her work with a ten-point checklist. Susan had told Vanessa where she could stuff her ledgers. They weren't exactly bestest friends.
She could have another go at Brown Boy, she supposed. Or watch a DVD. Or try to figure out how a girl as smart and cute and rich as she knew herself to be had, at the ripe old age of twenty, gone utterly wrong. Or--
The door swung open. There stood Vanessa, blue-tinged sheets in hand, one arm covered in blue ink. She took in the sight of Brown and Susan in what was an extremely compromising position.
"I spilled ink," she said by way of explanation.
"Yeah, fine, we're cool, right?" Brown asked, trying for a casual cover-up of the tequila bottle, the bong, and himself with a stray pillowcase. It failed miserably.
Vanessa might be a lot of things--some of which required antipsychotic medication--but cool was not one of them. She had never been cool, and she never would be cool. She had pimples on her back and bad hair and breasts the size of raisins and a midlevel management
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job at a Fortune 500 company. Susan, on the other hand, was blond, curvaceous, and wealthy enough never to work unless she wanted to.
In other words, she was everything that Vanessa was not. In other words, defender-of-the-Hazelden-flame Vanessa was sure to blow the whistle; the Hazelden administration would know about Susan's transgressions before sunrise. That she had not indulged in the contraband would be no defense. Susan knew the rules. She was there. The drugs and alcohol were there, too. Which meant, Susan knew only too well, she'd soon be outta there on her ass.
And to make matters worse, Brown Boy was so not worth it.
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Daisy Buchanan Meets Daisy Duke
B en who? This was Anna Percy's mantra to get her through her first day at Beverly Hills High School. Just seventy-two hours earlier--New Year's Eve, in fact--she'd met Ben Birnbaum on a flight from New York to Los Angeles. She'd been on her way west to live with her father for the last semester of her senior year of high school. Ben was a freshman at Princeton coming home for a wedding. Also, he was hot, funny, and smart. The kind of guy you dream exists, if you're a dreamy sort of girl.
Anna was many things: tall, blond, well educated, and very wealthy, with a passion for literature and the poems of Emily Dickinson. What she was not, by anyone's standards (least of all her own), was dreamy. Or impetuous. That was why it had felt like an out-of-body experience when, merely an hour after encountering Ben in the first-class cabin of their transcontinental flight, she'd found herself making out with him in the lavatory, dangerously close to flying United.
Anna had come to Los Angeles in the hopes of
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reinventing herself, and Ben had seemed the perfect boy with whom to debut the new and daring her. But now, when she considered everything that had happened with Ben between the heavenly plane flight and the hellish conclusion, Anna was convinced, more than ever, that her usually impeccable taste did not extend to guys.
There was no pretty
way to put it: Ben had dumped her at 3:00 A.M. on New Year's Day. Disappeared without a trace, only to show up two days later begging for forgiveness. He'd had to go rescue some mystery celebrity friend. Female, of course. He wouldn't share her name.
That was his excuse. The more Anna thought about it, the more pissed off she got. It was true that Ben knew a lot of celebrities--she'd seen dozens of them at the wedding they'd attended together. But still. It was all just so ridiculous, such an insult to her intelligence. She'd been a fool for Ben. And Anna Percy was nobody's fool.
"Anna! Cool! I was hoping we'd have at least one class together."
Samantha Sharpe smiled broadly at Anna from the next row of seats, showing off ten thousand dollars' worth of pearly crowned perfection. Her brown hair glistened in a way that's only possible with a professional blowout.
"Sam. Hi." Anna had been raised well by her patrician mother back in New York City--she was an expert at looking pleased while her insides were registering
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anything but pleasure. So she returned Sam's smile. They'd met at the New Year's Eve wedding--Sam's father, Jackson Sharpe, America's best-loved movie star, had been the groom. That night she'd also met Sam's two best friends, Dee Young, the daughter of a big-time record exec, and Cammie Sheppard, the daughter of a feared and revered Hollywood üb er-agent. They were oh-so-friendly at first. But it hadn't taken long for them to show their true colors.
Well , Anna thought , if I have to be in a class with one of them, Sam is certainly the least offensive --
At that moment Dee and Cammie sashayed through the door of Anna's last class of the day, English. All three snouts of Cerebus present and accounted for. Damn.
"Hi, Anna. How was day one?" diminutive Dee chirped as she took a seat directly behind Sam's.
"Fine."
"You know, I looked for you at lunch," Sam told Anna. "We went to Westside Pavilion for sushi and I wanted to invite you." Evidently the girls were in friendly mode.
"I went for a walk," Anna explained.
Cammie took a seat in front of Sam, swept her strawberry blond curls over her shoulder, and eyed Anna coolly. "Just out of idle curiosity, why are you dressed like that?"
Anna felt the prickly heat of a blush on the back of her neck. Back in Manhattan, torn and decrepit were considered hip. For her first day at Beverly Hills High
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School she'd put on a "normal" school outfit: a white T-shirt, a camel cashmere cardigan with a moth hole on the sleeve, and battered jeans. She'd pulled her long, silky blond hair into a simple ponytail and dabbed on a little Burt's Bees cherry-flavored lip balm. That Anna could make this look terrific had everything to do with genetics and upbringing.
The three girls, though, were walking examples of Anna's observation that in Beverly Hills, when it came to cosmetics, more was more, and when it came to square inches of flesh covered by designer fabric, more was less. Each of them sported so much lip gloss it looked as if one could skate across their lips. They each wore very small, very expensive sweaters with their extremely low slung pants and stiletto-heeled boots.
Of the three, pear-shaped Sam tried the hardest but had the least to work with. Dee got by on her big-eyed, shaggy blond, tiny preciousness. And Cammie ... well, Cammie looked like the kind of girl who'd be featured in a men's magazine with a staple in her navel. Her white sweater stopped more than four inches short of her cargo pants. Somehow she'd acquired a tan since Anna had first met her, which set off her lush I-just-had-insane-sex curls to perfection. Anna had learned on New Year's Eve that Ben Birnbaum and Cammie had been a couple last year; Cammie had made it more than clear that she wanted Ben back.
Anna willed away her blush. "I wasn't aware that I had to run my clothes by you for approval."
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"Just a tidbit of advice," Cammie said, unfazed. "Don't drink coffee from a paper cup. Someone might drop a quarter into it."
"Give it a rest, Cammie," Sam suggested.
Anna was surprised. Sam hadn't struck her as secure enough to stand up to Cammie. But then, being the famous Jackson Sharpe's daughter had to count for something. There were times when Anna had thought maybe Sam could be a friend. But since Anna could never be sure if Sam was moving in for a hug or a mugging, it made friendship a bit dicey.
Sam turned back to Anna. "We really do have to go shopping. We can hit the boutiques on Rodeo, but it has to be sometime when the tourists aren't out. I so cannot deal with the primates at fashion feeding time."
"I don't need clothes, Sam," Anna said. "Thanks anyway."
The bell rang. Their English teacher, Mrs. Breckner, a middle-aged woman in an unfortunate floral pants ensemble, closed the door. "I'm sure you all read The Great Gatsby over winter break," she began, "between gin-and-tonics in Aruba and powder runs at Mammoth."
A few kids chuckled at the teacher's dry wit. Others rolled their eyes or just looked bored. Mrs. Breckner launched into a lecture on the major themes in Gatsby , stopping every so often to pose a question. Anna didn't volunteer any answers, though she certainly knew them all--she'd first read the Fitzgerald classic when she was thirteen.
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"Rather than having you write the usual papers," Mrs. Breckner went on, "let's try something new and different. I'm going to have you pair up and create a presentation project on the book. Write a short play, make a sculpture, do a performance piece, whatever speaks to you.
"Don't take the text literally, people," she added. "We're dealing with broad themes there--old wealth versus new wealth, individualism and self-discovery versus easy money and group-think. Okay, everyone in row one choose someone from row two; same thing for rows three and four."
"How about it, Anna?" Sam asked. "Partners?"
Anna was too polite to say no. Besides, Sam seemed like a better option than a completely unknown quantity. "Sure," she said. "That would be great."
"Any brilliant ideas?"
"Not immediately."
"How about a short film?" Sam suggested. "I'm thinking a clash-of-the-classes kinda thing. Daisy Buchanan meets Daisy Duke. At a party."
"That sounds promising," Anna said. "Maybe we could we give this party? Mix actors and real people? And film it?"
Sam tapped a finger on her lips thoughtfully. "Dunno. Haven't thought it through. We should talk later, okay? I'll call you."
"Fine."
Then Anna remembered that she'd chucked her cell
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phone that morning because Ben wouldn't stop calling her.
No. She was not, not, not going to think about Ben. Or rather, Ben who?
"Don't use my cell," Anna added. "I'm ... changing numbers." She quickly scribbled her father's home number on a piece of paper.
Sam slipped the paper into her Chanel purse, then fiddled with the top button of her paisley Stella McCartney sweater. "You know, I've been meaning to ask you: Didn't I see Ben Birnbaum here this morning, talking to you?"
Anna shrugged. She did not want to get into this with Sam.
"He looked awful," Sam went on, undeterred. "Like he'd been up all night partying or something. What's up with that? I'm only asking you because I'm concerned."
"I have no idea," Anna replied, hoping the frost in her voice would dissuade Sam. It didn't.
"Did he tell you why he hasn't gone back to Princeton yet? I know classes started."
"I really don't want to talk about Ben."
"Please," Sam scoffed. "You've known him, what, three days? I've known him my whole life. So you might as well tell me, because I'm going to find out anyway."
"If you and Ben are such good friends, Sam, ask him yourself."
Sam raised her perfectly-shaped-by-Valerie eyebrows. "Touchy, touchy."
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What the hell , Anna thought. "Look, Sam asking me whether Ben and I are seeing each other, the answer is no."
A joy that Anna could not understand suffused Sam's face. "Are you saying that you broke u p with Ben Birnbaum?" Sam aske
d, grabbing Anna's arm.
Anna shrugged off Sam's hand. "We had one date. There wasn't anything to break up."
The bell rang to end the school day; Anna retrieved her books and her purse. As she departed, she saw Sam huddle with Cammie and Dee. Anna refused to care. If they want to obsess over Ben, that was their business. She was over him.
But...
As Anna dodged bodies on her way out of the classroom, a little voice in the back of her brain kept asking the niggling question, If she was so over him, why the hell did she need to keep thinking about how much she was over him?
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High School for the Highly Overprivileged
"Whoa, careful! Planet hopping?" As Anna stepped into the crowded hallway, she nearly collided with Adam Flood, another person she'd met at the Jackson Sharpe nuptials. Anna liked him more than anyone else she'd met so far in Beverly Hills. Maybe it was because, like Anna, he was a transplant, having come to California two years earlier from Michigan. Fortunately, his seven-hundred-odd days of exposure to the rarefied air of Beverly Hills hadn't seemed to affect his refreshing midwestern lack of artifice. He was also tall and lanky, sweet and smart, and allegedly an ace basketball player.
"Sorry, I was thinking," Anna said as Adam fell in beside her. They headed for the door closest to the student parking lot.
"Good thinking, bad thinking, none-of-the-above thinking?"
She smiled up at him. He had a small blue star tattoo behind his left ear that was very cute. "I was thinking about how nice it is to see you, actually."
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" Definitely good thinking," Adam said. "So how was your first day at Beverly Hills High School for the Highly Overprivileged?"
"Mixed reviews. American lit was okay. Chem was good, until my lab mate gave me a blow-by-blow of her seduction of a sitcom star. And I mean that literally."
"Don't tell me. Shakti Carter." Adam held the door open for her and they stepped into the afternoon sun.
She laughed. "How did you know?"
"She's famous for 'oversharing,' if you know what I mean. What do you think of Breckner?"
Anna shrugged. "I like her. I'm working on a Gatsby project with Sam."
