by Melody Mayer
One day, Michelle didn’t come to school. Kiley couldn’t understand why, until their fourth-grade teacher explained that Michelle’s parents weren’t taking care of her, so Michelle would be going away to a place where other grown-ups would act responsibly.
Kiley never saw Michelle again.
At the time, Kiley had just been sorry to lose a friend, especially one who had so much freedom. Now, she understood exactly what had happened: the Wisconsin Department of Social Services had taken Michelle away because her parents had been unfit.
With her fingers still manipulating the controller, and her action figure kicking and spinning and flipping on the monitor, Kiley realized that what she’d just witnessed had been criminal. Maybe not at the level of Michelle’s parents, but Michelle’s parents weren’t Platinum. The rock star wasn’t just a bad mother, she was a dangerous mother. The kind of dangerous where, if the California Department of Social Services found out, she could lose her kids. Kiley would be out of a job, out of California, and out of her dream of attending Scripps, just like that.
That would be bad, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. However, Kiley suspected that if Serenity got taken away from her mom, it would be the end of that little girl’s world. Kiley vowed to make sure that it didn’t happen.
12
“¿Esme? ¿Soy guapa?”
Esme gave Easton a careful appraisal from head to toe. The smaller of the twins was seated on a stool in front of a portable mirror; hair and makeup people swirled around her. Weston was on the stool to her right, leafing through a fashion magazine and gawking at the pictures. Brown mascara, blush, and cherry lip gloss had already been applied to Easton’s and Weston’s faces. Their hair had been curled into long, inky ringlets. At the moment, their FAB stylist, a pale-skinned girl named Ivy who wore bloodred matte lipstick and black-framed geek glasses, was threading tiny red rosebuds through the curls to match the red Emily Steele embroidered silk kimono in which Easton would be photographed. As for Weston, her hair had already been adorned with tiny gold stars to match her gold kimono.
All this work was for a family photo. Then the kids would come back, take off the dresses and the makeup, and go home for a nap. Their runway show wasn’t until that evening, when they’d be wearing the exact same dresses. Of course, the dresses would be dry-cleaned in the interim.
“Tú eres muy bonita,” Esme told her. “Como una estrella de cinema.”
Easton beamed, which made Esme happy, because at first the girl had been too petrified even to step inside the trailer. But a half hour into the beauty treatment, she and her sister were primping as if they’d done it their whole lives.
FAB was just getting under way. The fashion bash took place in the parking lot of the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, the arena where the Lakers and the Clippers played basketball, simply because it had a large-enough expanse of space to house the many tents, trailers, and other facilities needed for the event. There were four small tents (relatively speaking, of course, since they easily could seat a thousand people) for shows by less famous designers, and a large main tent that had been borrowed from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus for the biggest-name designers—Ralph Lauren, Givenchy, Chanel.
The big designers, though, were not really the essence of FAB, not why hordes of the most beautiful and famous people flocked to the prestigious event as if it was a rock concert. Everyone who was anyone knew that the FAB place to be was in one of the smaller tents, Tents B and C. That was where the unknown or newly discovered designers would show their stuff. For example, last year’s FAB phenomenon had been Marco Devito, formerly an abstract painter who worked in watercolors. Marco had done a show where he had applied his art to raw-silk saris. The show had received a five-minute standing ovation. Immediately thereafter, there had been an auction of the same saris. Each sold for at least five thousand dollars, the proceeds going to the charity du jour. When the Devito line went into production, the entire stock was presold at Barneys before they ever actually made it to the store. Now there was a waiting list of six months for a Devito sari, and Marco had gone from talented but unknown painter to sought-after multimillionaire.
“Who are you interested in?” Ivy asked Esme.
“Huh?” The question caught Esme off guard. She hadn’t realized that the stylist had even noticed her.
“Which young designer?”
“I . . .” Esme barely knew the names of the big designers, let alone the young ones. “I don’t know.”
Ivy lifted some of Easton’s curls and did a little work on them with her comb. “Well, don’t miss Ty’s show.”
“Who?”
“Ty Ahavarata. From Honolulu. He does this batik thing where he invents new colors. A friend of mine is modeling one—it’s like a muumuu, but short and tight with the midriff cut out.”
Suddenly, Esme remembered that Diane had been talking about this same designer at breakfast. The previous December, she and Steven had gone to the Grand Wailea Resort on Maui. Ty had been selling his traditionally cut muumuus—long and loose—at a kiosk just outside the hotel gates. It had been Diane’s idea to take Ty’s incredible fabric and turn it into sexy, Southern California–friendly designs.
Esme nodded. “I know who you’re talking about. My boss is Diane Goldhagen. I think she discovered him. Those are her kids you’re working on now.”
Ivy nearly dropped her comb. “These are Diane Goldhagen’s kids? The Diane Goldhagen? But they’re . . .”
“Adopted,” Esme filled in. “From Colombia.”
“Your boss is . . . well, she’s like a goddess to me,” Ivy gushed. “I don’t think there’s anything she can’t do. Anyway, have a great time. The kids are ready. They’ll be fabulous.”
A few minutes later, Esme was walking the twins out of the silver Airstream trailer. All of them had official FAB identification badges around their necks—Esme also carried a packet of passes and information about all the shows. Their next stop was Tent B, directly across the parking lot, for the family photo.
The parking lot was already crowded, though the first fashion shows didn’t begin for another couple of hours. Still, hundreds of people bustled about—vendors, models, sightseers, even a few people Esme recognized from the Brentwood Hills Country Club, who acknowledged her presence with a distracted nod. They hadn’t gotten more than twenty feet when Weston squealed with delight, her face lighting up.
“Yon-o-tin!” she shouted.
The twins adored their new big brother; he was very good with them. The problem was that their nanny adored him too. And she was about to see him at the family photo shoot, the first time she’d be with both him and his family since he’d started sleeping with her. But this time it was a case of mistaken identity—just another tall, rangy, handsome guy who looked similar from behind.
“No, it’s not Jonathan,” Esme told the twins. “We’ll see him later.”
“¿Cuándo?” Weston asked with anticipation as they dodged around a rolling cart selling New York City–style hot dogs with sauerkraut.
“Más tarde,” Esme reported. “ En la tienda siguiente. At the next tent.”
“¡Vámonos rápido!” Easton tugged at Esme, so anxious was she to see her brother.
They reached the backstage entrance to Tent B. Esme flashed her pass at the burly security guard, who ushered her and the twins inside.
The backstage area was a madcap scene of designers and assistants and dressers already in frantic mode. People were yelling for shoes to match certain outfits, someone was screeching that a zipper had broken, two people were arguing about which of them would be dressing which model.
For a time, Esme stood frozen with the girls, watching this chaos. She worried that the twins would have a meltdown from overstimulation, but saw that their expressions were pure wonder at it all. Then Esme spotted the Emily Steele sign, off to her right. She walked the twins there, found their dressers—two college girls, one tall and one short—and watc
hed as they helped the girls into their kimonos.
“Have you seen Diane Goldhagen?” Esme asked the dressers. “I thought she would meet us here.”
“She’s in the press area, near Gate D of the Staples Center,” the taller dresser reported. “That’s the only place the photographers are permitted. No pictures back here. New policy.”
“Okay.”
Esme told the twins that they would have to take another walk, to meet their mother and brother. They didn’t protest, only repeated how much they wanted to see Jonathan, and for him to see them looking like pequeñas princesas japonesas—little Japanese princesses.
Esme did not share their enthusiasm. She really, truly, desperately did not want to see Jonathan, not now, not like this. There were too many “what-ifs” over which she had no control. It had been difficult enough spending time with him and the twins at the modeling agency. Esme had yet to be with him in Diane’s presence since they’d started . . . whatever it was that they’d started. What if Diane picked up on some look between the two of them? She’d seen Jonathan flirting with Esme; it wouldn’t take a huge mental leap for her to fill in the blanks. Or what if Jonathan treated her like she was nothing more than the nanny, someone he barely knew? That would protect their secret, yes, but in some ways, it would be worse.
With great reluctance, she told the twins it was time to go. As they were about to leave, her cell phone sounded, playing the refrain to “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” Esme smiled; last time she’d been with Jorge, he’d programmed in the new ring. It was to fit her new life, he said. She flipped it open.
“Hello?”
“Hola,” came Junior’s deep, sexy voice. “What you know good, mamacita?”
Esme flushed, as if Junior had just caught her in bed with Jonathan as opposed to merely thinking about him. She rarely got calls from Junior. Now that she was living in Bel Air, he preferred that she call him.
“Hi,” Esme said, careful to keep her voice low. “I’m working.”
“That’s cool,” Junior assured her. “Me too. Had to fill in for some guy who ran off to Vegas with his best friend’s old lady. Loco, eh? They put me in Alhambra this morning. No one else wanted the territory. Can’t blame them, there’s been a lot of shit going down. But I’ve got the night off; Possum is with Manuel on the graveyard. Thought we could get into a little somethin’somethin’, eh?”
Sex, he meant. But unlike Jonathan, Junior would take her out, to a restaurant in Pasadena, maybe make her feel beautiful and wanted and special before he took her to his bed. And all the pretty girls who wanted her man would give her the evil eye, jealous and respectful at the same time. In Echo Park, Junior was the man. He was her man.
“I can’t. I have to work.”
“Esme.” Easton tugged on her hand. “Yo tengo mucha hambre.”
“Uno momento, Junior,” Esme told him, then looked at the girl. “Vamos a tu hermano y tu mama. Después vamos a comer. Bueno?”
Easton nodded.
“Okay. And okay, Junior,” she told her boyfriend from the Echo. “I wish I could, but I have to work.”
“A’ight,” Junior grunted. “That’s cool. I’ll catch you later, chiquita.”
Esme hung up, thinking how Jorge was right. It really was la vida loca.
The FAB press area was the size of a football field, covered by a simple blue awning supported by dozens of metal pipes. As they approached it, there was the same kind of bedlam as backstage in the tent, only on a greater scale. There had to be a dozen or more photographers, each with several assistants, working away to take the photographs that would appear in the next few weeks in newspapers and magazines around the world.
“Klieg lights on the south side brighter!”
“Change the angle of the backdrop!”
“More flowers. Not those flowers, you idiot, the orchids!”
Esme steered the girls through this chaos, and finally spotted Diane and Steven. Diane was chatting with a reporter—Esme guessed she was a reporter, because the tall, willowy woman was furiously taking notes. Steven, meanwhile, was wrapped up in a cell phone call, looking very unhappy about whatever was being said. No Jonathan. Esme exhaled gratefully. Maybe he couldn’t make it after all.
“Easton! Weston!”
Esme realized she’d spoken too soon. There was Jonathan, two bottles of water in his hands, looking impossibly hot in a black T-shirt, Givenchy jacket, and jeans.
As soon as the girls spotted him, they screamed his name and ran to him.
“Careful, please be careful!” Ivy cried, hands fluttering. The taller dresser from the tent was on hand, still wearing her black apron with the giant pockets full of makeup and hair tools. Evidently she was there to make sure all the Goldhagens looked spiffy for the photo shoot.
As the girls were embracing Jonathan, Esme saw two workmen carrying a sofa from the less formal of the Goldhagens’ two living rooms.
“A little to the left!” shouted the head of the moving crew.
In fact, one entire corner of the living room had been perfectly re-created in the press pavilion. The forest green and gold Moorish sofa that had been handmade in Fez was being carefully moved to its exact position at the Goldhagen home. This scene didn’t surprise Esme; the movers had come that morning. Some design magazine had thought it would be a cute idea to move the living room to FAB and take a family portrait there. That magazine had sprung for the movers.
Esme forced herself to look everywhere except at Jonathan, but she could feel his piercing blue eyes on her even as he hugged his little sisters. She could also practically feel his hands on her, remembering how they had—
“Ready to start when you are, Mrs. Goldhagen,” a flunky called out.
The reporter put her hands together in a praying gesture. “Ten more minutes, please?”
“No. Let’s get this show on the road,” Steven barked, snapping his phone shut and slipping it into his pants pocket. “I’ve got to get back to the studio. Diane?” he added impatiently.
Steven Goldhagen, late forties, thin and wiry and fond of wearing baseball caps, moved to his twenty-years-younger blond trophy wife, who pecked him on the cheek.
“Yes, yes, sweetheart, we’re starting,” she assured him. “Esme, keep the kids occupied until we need them, please.”
Esme nodded and then went over to the girls, who were chatting away to Jonathan in Spanish. Esme knew that Jonathan’s Spanish was less than serviceable, but his bright smile kept his sisters engaged.
“Girls, stay with me,” Esme instructed, then translated it into Spanish, as always. She was now so close to Jonathan that she could feel the heat radiating off his body. Or maybe it was her heat, a result of standing so close to him.
“Hi,” Jonathan said, voice low.
“Hello.” Esme was careful to keep her voice neutral.
Easton tugged on Jonathan’s hand. “¡Helado!”
“What’s that?” Jonathan asked Esme.
“Ice cream.”
Jonathan chuckled. “Más . . . how do you say . . . tarde!”
The girls laughed at his mix of English and Spanish. Esme explained that they couldn’t go for ice cream now because they were going to have their picture taken. Easton just kept asking for ice cream. Soon balled fists and a foot stomp were added to the demand for “ice cream now.” She got tears in her eyes; her lower lip trembled, signaling an impending meltdown.
Esme tried to soothe the little girl. “This is too much for them,” she told Jonathan. “I don’t know how they’re going to survive till the fashion show.”
“Why don’t we duck out right after this and take them with us?” he suggested. “They’d like that, don’t you think?”
Her eyes met his. “I don’t know if your mother would like that.” The double meaning there was, she thought, more than obvious. “Plus they’re due back home for a nap.”
“Stepmother,” he corrected. “I know she built in nap time for them. But ice cream first won’t hurt t
hem. Will it?”
His eyes met hers. So. He was finally asking her to do something with him in the light of day (the half-assed offer to hang around at the modeling agency didn’t really count), for the first time since they had started spending almost every night, all night, together. They’d be out with the girls, true. But that made it perfect, because it could appear that the only reason they were together was for the sake of the twins.
Esme could feel her guard slipping as she smiled up at him. He really did want to be with her! She was about to say yes—as long as they took the girls someplace close—when someone called Jonathan’s name. Someone female.
Esme turned to see Jonathan’s supposedly ex-girlfriend, Mackenzie, trotting toward him. What was she doing here? Her hair was a sleek waterfall to her shoulders; aqua beaded chandelier earrings danced from her ears. She wore pink boot-cut pants and a pink and aqua beaded tunic that split just below her bust, revealing her skin down to the how-low-can-you-go rise of her pants. She had the kind of all-American blond beauty that intimidated the hell out of Esme.
“Hey, sweetie, I had so much fun with you yesterday.” She kissed Jonathan’s cheek and then turned to Esme, all fake sweetness and light. “Oh, hi. It’s Esme, right? How’s the nanny thing going?”
Esme narrowed her eyes and nodded her response.
“So, Esme,” Mackenzie went on, snuggling close to Jonathan, “could you be a sweetheart and take the kids away for a minute? There’s something I need to discuss with Jon-Jon and it’s not really appropriate for them.”
“Of course,” Esme said icily. “That’s my job. Isn’t it?”
She summoned the girls in rapid Spanish, her tone so sharp that they actually stopped kicking around an empty Coke can they’d discovered.
