Chapter 9
Laine
Every year I managed to avoid photographing the Breakfront Autumn Gala. The guys with the press cards stood in the front to shoot what they were told, and the paps stood in the back, getting the gritty shit at night’s end.
I didn’t avoid conflict; I ran headlong into it. But Breakfront? Photographing the comers and goers was some aggravation I didn’t need, because not everyone there would be a celebrity, and at my old school, that could be a problem. Actors tended to look at the camera as a partner, even when they weren’t working. Non-celebs had a way of looking at the person holding the rig, not the lens, and if someone—say, model-turned-agency-head Lucy Betencourt—saw me in a crowd of paparazzi… well, I might as well be wearing a G-string with dollar bills taped to it.
“No,” I said to my girlfriend Phoebe, who sat at my dining room table with a Starbucks and an open copy of YOU BRIDAL magazine. “I’m not going. I have a bad feeling.”
“I can’t believe you’re going to miss the gala.” She snapped the brakes off on her wheelchair and put the magazine on her lap before she rolled out. “Everyone goes.”
Everyone. What a loaded word. Everyone to the exclusion of anyone. But Phoebe had spent her whole childhood in doctors’ offices, flipping through celebrity magazines. Eventually she became an entertainment lawyer with plenty of access to the people in those magazines, yet she never lost her girlish fascination with them. I loved her.
“You should go and get my camera. That’s the answer. You go.”
“Me?” She pointed at herself then opened her magazine again. “What’s the point of that? Why are you pushing this off? Why can’t you just go have fun?”
I paced the concrete, the sound of my boots echoing against the high ceilings. “I love that you think everything’s about fun. I really do. But I have a bad feeling.”
Phoebe snapped the bridal magazine pages with intent. “You always have bad feelings when things might change.”
“I like the way things are.”
“Mm-hm. What are you wearing?”
I sighed. “Help me pick, would you?”
She rolled toward the bedroom as if she was in a race. “I thought you’d never ask.”
We went through my clothes and shoes and chose a simple thing from the back of my closet. I ignored the gut instinct that something was going to go wrong.
Usually, I listened to my gut. Until the night at Club NV, it had been a rule. If I had a feeling something would go wrong, I just stopped doing whatever it was, and the feeling went away. So all I had to do to be safe was not go. I blamed Phoebe for my willingness. She had everything I lacked—a good family and a fiancé who loved her—and I had legs and an invitation to a hot Hollywood party.
“You need to shut your phone,” Phoebe said, choosing just the right bracelet and slipping it on my wrist. “It’s nothing but temptation to split.”
As if on cue, my phone lit up. It was my contact at Sequoia.
I answered. “Yeah?”
“Britt Ravenor’s being released in an hour.”
“Thanks,” I said, but she’d already hung up.
I’d get a nice take for that shot. I could make it to Sequoia in forty minutes, more than enough time to find out which exit they were using, and get very, very close. I could dig up my spare rig, go get the shot in my good clothes, and go to Breakfront late. Maybe then the bad feeling would pass. Or more likely, night would come, and my phone would rattle, and I’d use money as a reason to avoid the gala.
I was all right with that. I didn’t need to go to a fancy party. Though it had been a pricey camera, I could still get Tom to dig deep into his pockets and replace it.
I talked myself out of going to the party as I helped Phoebe into her car, then I went back upstairs to my huge, empty loft. All I had to do was text Michael my apologies.
—Hey, sorry I can’t make it. We can either forget the camera or do the Merv’s thing—
The bad feeling went away as soon as I hit send. Even as I yanked off the dress, I found myself hoping that he’d text back that he wanted to see me anyway. I didn’t have a chance to question my girlish desire, because three seconds after I hit send, the text was bounced.
Of course. He was a superstar. He couldn’t get incoming calls from numbers outside his little goddamn list. I wanted to throw the phone out the window.
Not counting the bedroom, which was separated by a wall of shelves, my loft was a huge open space with fifteen-foot ceilings, a few exposed brick walls, and one huge wall that was smooth and plastered. On it, I’d put a custom mural of a map of Los Angeles. Even though the street names were so small I had to get nose-close to see them, the map took up the entire wall. It stretched from the Pacific to the easternmost points of the San Gabriel Valley, from Flintridge, which was only visible with a ladder, to San Pedro, touching the floor.
I cursed it, claiming ownership of every street, and stopped on the west side, just south of Brentwood. In a tiny green patch behind a hedge was a school for the specialest snowflakes money could raise.
The tennis courts were the size of memory chips and just as green.
Why was I so enraged? Why did that make me wrestle myself back into the fancy black dress with the lace trim? Why did I poke the dangling silver earrings into my ears as if I was stabbing myself, and why did the feeling that something was going to go wrong just get stronger and stronger when I jammed my feet into red-soled pumps?
Because I didn’t want to go to a stupid party. I wanted to see the guy with the serve again, and there was a pretty good chance that if I didn’t go tonight, I’d never see Michael again without a lens between us.
To hell with it.
Let it all go wrong.