“So, what do you want?” Sophie asked in a tone that made her mother immediately tense up again. Sophie watched as Melissa crossed her long legs encased in dark denim that fit snugly to her lithe body.
“I want to talk about what happened at your party.” Melissa took a deep breath, leaning forward slightly in her seat, the collection of gold bangles on her wrist jangling like her own personal movie soundtrack. The closer she got, the more Sophie found it difficult to look away from her mother’s face. It wasn’t just that Melissa Von Norton had a face that had lit up millions of silver screens around the world, it was that looking at Melissa was like looking into some kind of strange funhouse mirror where all the best parts of herself were reflected back at her—the finely sloped nose, the high cheekbones and long, tapered fingers. Looking at her mother was like looking at some computer-generated representation of her ideal self. It made Sophie feel weirdly connected to Melissa, but also a bit dejected. Melissa Von Norton represented a kind of perfection that Sophie, with her mottled collection of paper-thin, white-and-freshly-red scars marring the smooth surface of her arms, could never hope to attain. Sophie looked down, her stomach jumping in her lap, and was relieved to see that the ivory cuffs of her coat completely covered her marred wrists.
“I never meant to use you for publicity, Sophie.” Melissa stopped and cleared her throat, then swallowed hard before continuing. “Things just got out of control.”
“That’s an understatement, don’t you think?” Sophie snapped, turning to gaze out the window at a homeless man who was bent all the way over, digging at the bottom of a metal trash can. Her sweet sixteen party should’ve been the best night of her life—a night she should’ve remembered forever. She’d remember it all right—but because it had been a complete disaster. She’d ended up running out into the street, dodging passing cars, tears burring her vision, just to get away from the hordes of reporters, the flashes of light, and a mother who was more than happy to use her as a photo op, who thought she could buy the affection of a daughter she’d never laid eyes on with something as tacky as a new car.
“Okay, look,” Melissa said exasperatedly, pushing the curtain of blond hair from her face, raking the silky strands back with splayed fingers. “I did invite some press to the event, but I thought I could control things. I thought we’d have plenty of time to ourselves. But I guess I was wrong.” Melissa sat back with a sigh, her expression suddenly weary.
“Do you have any idea how excited I was to meet you?” Sophie said quietly, her eyes still locked on the window. “How much I looked forward to it? For weeks it was all I could think about.”
“Weeks?” Melissa gave a short laugh and bit her bottom lip. Her beautiful, angular face contorted in pain. “I’ve thought about you every day since the moment you left my arms,” she said quietly. “Every day.”
“Really?” Sophie said in a voice so small it was barely audible—even in the close confines of the backseat. She turned to face her mother, her anger and sadness melting away when she saw the pain in Melissa’s eyes, the emotion clouding the clear green of her gaze.
“Yes, really,” Melissa said, the corners of her lips curling up in her trademark smile, her full pink lips parting.
“The why did you wait so long to find me?” Sophie wondered aloud, leaning forward slightly.
“Your mother and I had an agreement,” Melissa said simply, shrugging her slim, cashmere-swaddled shoulders. “And the last thing I wanted to do was complicate your life.”
“But you’re here now,” Sophie said slowly, watching as Melissa reached into her black Hermès Birkin bag on the seat next to her for a tissue, the glossy leather gleaming in the morning light. Melissa dabbed at the corners of her eyes, carefully navigating the subtle streaks of aubergine liner that made her green eyes pop.
“I am,” she agreed. “And I’m sorry that we got off on the wrong foot. I want to try to make things up to you.” Melissa threw the tissue back in her bag and leaned forward, taking Sophie’s hands in her own. “If you’ll let me.”
At the touch of her mother’s hands, Sophie felt as helpless as a kitten to refuse, or stay angry. Like it or not, this woman was a part of her—a part she didn’t know anything about. Sophie didn’t know if they were going to ever have any kind of traditional mother/daughter relationship—whatever that was—but she did know that she wanted to try. After all, what did she have to lose? Your heart, maybe, she thought as Melissa’s fingers tightened around her own. After all, if she broke it once . . .
Sophie tried to push the thought out of her mind as she shook her head briskly, her honey blond hair swinging around her face. “So, how are you going to do that? Make it up to me, I mean,” she said with a wry smile.
“Well,” her mother began excitedly, dropping Sophie’s hands and waving her own long finger expansively in the air, “I thought you might come out for Christmas this year—that way we could spend some real time getting to know one another, just you and me.”
“Come out . . .” Sophie began slowly, “to California?”
“That’s where I live, you know,” Melissa said wryly, one side of her mouth tilted into a small smile. “I’m starting work on a film in early January, but I thought you could hang out with me on set in between takes. In any case, we’ll have a lot of time before the shoot begins to get to know one another.”
“But . . . I always spend the holidays with my family,” Sophie said quickly, the words leaving her lips before she could think about how they might sound. There was a pause as Melissa looked down at her denim-clad knees and began to pick at a stray thread.
“R ight,” she said woodenly, her voice expressionless. “Your family. Of course.”
“I’m sorry,” Sophie said, reaching across and placing her hand on top of her mother’s cold fingers. “I’m not used to all of this,” she said helplessly. “I feel like I’m always saying all the wrong things.”
Melissa looked up, relief washing over her features. “Me, too,” she admitted, the small lines around her eyes crinkling with her change of expression. “What do you say we start over?”
“Okay,” Sophie said, smiling. “How do we do that?”
“Think about coming to visit me over Christmas,” Melissa answered, sitting back and sliding her sunglasses over her eyes again. “Why don’t you have your parents call me and we’ll discuss it. After all,” she added with a grin, “they’ve had you for sixteen Christmases already—maybe they wouldn’t mind giving up just one.”
Sophie stared at her mother, visions of palm trees, winter sunshine, and movie sets dancing in her brain like sugar-coated celluloid flickering across the darkened screen of her mind. If she thought hard enough, she could smell the Bain de Soleil, the warm salt air drifting across the crystal-blue water . . .
“By the way.” Melissa’s voice cut into her thoughts, suddenly breaking her reverie. “Pulse called last week,” Melissa said carefully. “They asked me to be on an episode of De-Luxe with you.”
Sophie’s eyes narrowed, her arms crossing over her chest again in a defensive reflex. I knew it was too good to be true, she told herself dejectedly, the excitement draining from her body in a rush of sadness. She’s an actress—of course she fooled me. That’s her job, isn’t it?
“But, of course I said no,” Melissa said, her voice as calm and flippant as if they were discussing something as innocuous as the weather. “I told them that my relationship with my daughter was private, and that I wouldn’t dream of exploiting it.”
“You did?” Sophie said aloud, her expression dazed. She felt like she’d just woken up from a bad dream that had dragged on for weeks on end. Melissa removed the shades again, and stared hard at her daughter, her gaze suddenly fierce.
“Sophie, you’re not a photo op or publicity stunt for me—you’re my daughter and I think it’s about time we got to know one another, don’t you?”
Sophie nodded, the beginnings of a smile spreading over her face, which she knew must look
as flushed and happy as she felt. Tingles ran up and down her arms as she closed her eyes, picturing the bright California sunlight warming her cold, winterized skin, palm fronds waving in the breeze. She could almost see herself walking arm in arm with Melissa down Rodeo Drive, driving to Venice Beach, the top down on the black convertible BMW Melissa would surely have, the surf crashing at the shore, the golden sand sparkling in the tangy, salt-scented air. Of course there would be parties and premieres at night, and more stars in front of her face than in the smog-drenched sky. As she closed her eyes to see it all the more perfectly, Sophie couldn’t help but let her once-tentative smile widen into a full-out grin.
uncomfortable silences
“Winter break in Bel Air!” Sophie waved her hands in the air excitedly, deep violet nail polish winking in the light, her normally cream-colored complexion tinged with rose. “Melissa says she wants to have an old-fashioned family Christmas—whatever that means.”
“I’m sure there’ll be enough plastic trees and tits to go around.” Madison took a careful sip of the steaming skinny mocha she was balancing on one palm—hold the whipped cream, thank you very much—and tried not to imagine stabbing Sophie in the eye with a spork, or some other semi-sharp object. She looked around at the stainless steel kiosks, the comforting, slightly sterile sameness of the Dining Hall, her green eyes searching out anything to pull her away from Sophie’s endless rambling about lunches at Spago, getting a tattoo from Kat Von D and other random Californicated, fake-baked madness.
But as she paid less and less attention, the thing Madison wanted to avoid most of all kept popping up—last night. After all, how many times could she lose her virginity to just one guy? Madison wasn’t sure she wanted to keep pondering, much less actually attempting to answer that very sticky question. It was terrifying on way too many levels. If you had asked her the year before, she would’ve shot you a withering glare, dismissing such stupid questions with a heat-seeking missile of an insult—something about the person being a virgin and poorly dressed and a total fucking idiot—but cool and calculated, totally effortless, and thus completely effective. Still, your first time was your first time was your first time and, for a girl like Madison, it could never, ever be anything short of perfection. Yet here she was having had a first-first and a second-first and both had been unmitigated disasters. Was she sexually doomed? Would she spend the rest of high school losing her virginity to Drew over and over again in one terrible, embarrassing night after another? Proper usage of the word unmitigated, Mad thought, smiling slightly despite suddenly feeling like she was going to cry right there in the stupid Dining Hall, in front of the entire world. At least the half-hearted prepping she’d done in anticipation of the SATs was definitely starting to pay off.
“It’ll be just like an episode of The Hills,” Phoebe said dreamily. “You’ll probably spend break sitting on verandas drinking twelve-dollar bottles of mineral water, and eating goat cheese and sun-dried tomato pizzas with Brody Jenner all day long.” Phoebe pushed up the sleeves of her Tracey Ross sage green mohair sweater, her nearly jet-black hair swinging to her shoulders like an outtake from a shampoo commercial.
“Well, if that’s the case, I guess your nail polish will start magically changing from pink to black—in all of ten minutes,” Madison snapped, referring to the show’s obvious continuity errors.
Casey laughed, draining the last of her bottle of Evian and capping it with a twist of her wrist. Madison couldn’t help but notice that, first off, Evian just happened to be the word naïve spelled backward, and, secondly, that Casey looked happy—not to mention almost fashionable in a white Calvin Klein sweater dress and a pair of Etienne Aigner black riding boots—courtesy of Pulse, of course. It wasn’t like Casey, financial neophyte that she was, could actually afford the thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes currently swathing her traitorous, almost-boyfriend-stealing body. That being said, every time Madison looked at the formerly psychotically curly-haired ex-Midwesternite lately, her growing wardrobe was a bit of a shock. Putting Casey in designer clothes was kind of like sticking a pony in a tutu—totally bizarre. Madison didn’t know what annoyed her more: the fact that Casey was rapidly approaching pretty, the weirdness of seeing her all done up in designer labels notwithstanding, or her obvious happiness. Every option made her want to run screaming from the room. Was it Darin who was putting that high-pro glow into those corn-fed cheeks of hers? I guess stranger things have definitely happened, Madison mused, as she watched Casey pull a large chocolate-chocolate-chunk cookie from a white paper bag.
“My mom did a talk at USC once, something about gender roles in medieval texts. One of her typically feminist rants. Anyway, I was supposed to go with her, but I had to play in a violin recital the same day, so I never went. You’re so lucky, Sophs—you’ll be able to go to the Getty and everything.”
Madison watched as Casey broke apart the cookie with her fingers, and popped a piece in her mouth, closing her eyes and chewing rapturously. Madison pushed her salmon salad around on her plate resentfully, the way she did during every lunch hour. She couldn’t even so much as look at a cookie without gaining ten pounds, and sometimes it really annoyed her. She wondered for the millionth time what it would be like to throw caution to the wind and just eat every fucking thing she wanted—regardless of calorie count and fat gram content. Sometimes being a teen icon is totally exhausting, she thought, bringing her mocha up to her lips and sipping slowly, pretending it was a cheeseburger.
“What’s the Getty?” Phoebe said, scrunching up her forehead and looking at Casey like she’d just suggested eating bugs for breakfast. “Is that the nouvelle fusion place on Robertson with the totally weird lighting? They have the best Niçoise salad there!”
“Seriously?” Sophie asked excitedly, pulling her honey blond hair back and securing it with a tortoiseshell barrette so that her heart-shaped face was fully exposed, her naturally pale skin gleaming softly. “I think I read about that place in W. I’m definitely going!”
Casey laughed, her cheeks flushing a deep rose, her straight yellow hair shining under the scarily fluorescent lights of the Dining Hall.
God, they had fucking Thomas Keller designing their lunch menu—was it impossible to get some decent fucking lighting, Madison thought as Casey composed herself, turning to face Sophie and Phoebe.
“It’s a museum, you guys,” she explained, rolling her eyes in Phoebe’s direction. “Not a restaurant.”
“Oh,” Sophie said with a dismissive wave of one thin, pale hand. “Why would I want to go there?”
“Oh, I don’t know . . .” Casey began, a smile beginning to twitch at the corners of her lightly glossed lips. “For some culture, maybe?”
“Culture?” Sophie shot back with a giggle, waving one pale hand dismissively. “I get enough of that right here in Manhattan.”
“Really,” Phoebe added as she removed a Chantecaille compact from her Cesare Paciotti caramel leather hobo bag and cracked it open to survey her predictably perfect visage in the tiny mirror.
Madison didn’t know what was more annoying—the fact that her recent devirginization was such a disaster . . . again—or listening to Casey, Sophie, and Phoebe yak about meaningless bullshit every chance they got when she had real problems . . . But before she could truly ponder the seriousness of that question, Drew entered the Dining Hall, looking the way he always did lately—depressed. Make that barely conscious, Madison thought as she watched Drew meander his way through the crowded room, barely cracking a smile until he reached the Whole Bean kiosk, where he proceeded to stand in line, staring longingly at the selection of fragrant, slightly oily coffee beans in a series of large plastic containers behind the counter like they contained the answer to his life’s woes.
Drew did not look like a guy who’d had the astonishingly good fortune to have gotten laid just twelve short hours ago. In fact, he looked like a guy who had spent his formative years locked away in a Turkish prison, and about as far away fr
om the inarguably blissful sight of Madison Macallister strategically draped in shreds of satin and lace as he could get. But the completely irritating thing about Drew was that no matter how strenuously he moped along the halls of Meadowlark, no matter how greasy his hair got or how many times he wore the same stupid green Ralph Lauren sweater with the rip in the elbow, he still looked uncomfortably, unbearably hot. Drew paused in front of their table, his eyes meeting hers and then dropping to the floor. He took a sip of his coffee and moved forward, a grim expression clouding his face.
“Hey, guys,” Drew said, his speech a flat monotone. Madison stared back at him with a look she felt to be a close approximation of his voice, but without all that whiny emo bullshit. A look that would turn a fresh, blooming red rose jet-black, but without irony, poetry, or some symptom of the dark and twisted world that tortured his dark and twisted soul. No matter how much Drew’s presence habitually set her unmentionables on fire, Madison was so done with his dark and stormy bullshit. From now on, she’d only go for skulls and crossbones if they happened to be set in platinum and studded in diamonds.
“Mad, Casey,” Drew said, nodding to each corner of his love triangle as Sophie and Phoebe continued to talk about California, discussing the finer points of L.A.-based reality television and wondering why they called it The Hills when Los Angeles was so obviously on the beach, completely oblivious to his presence. Mad just kept on with her whole I am killing plants with my gaze, and I don’t give a shit thing while Casey attempted to look nonplussed, one eye pretending to drift aimlessly around the room while they other quivered around, looking at Drew and looking away again and again and again.
“I see that, uh, we’re drinking coffee,” Drew went on after a moment of silence between the three, his voice pushed and labored, trying too hard to sound safe, funny, and likeable. “I hear that’s, like, totally the new thing to do. This whole coffee thing—the black stuff, the brown stuff, or the white stuff.” Drew sat down next to Casey at the far end of the table, and drummed his fingers on the table while staring at his cup.
Elite 03 Simply Irresistible Page 9
