TWENTY-TWO

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Three of them. Together. That certainly wasn’t what Doug had expected when he ventured over to Katie’s condo, hat in hand, intending to offer her a heartfelt apology that, with luck, she would accept.

It had given him a surge of hope when she agreed to see him, although there was still the possibility that she’d let him in only to ambush him with a baseball bat. Or that she’d hired some big thug to beat the life out of him, then tie him up in a corner so she could spent the next couple of days telling him what a complete waste of space and air he was.

Instead, she’d brought in Ellery and Dana.

And there they were, a united force.

It was plain what was on their minds.

“Go ahead,” he told the three women, wondering how far he could manage to run before they caught up with him. Ellery was too tiny to be much of a runner, and Dana had always seemed too relaxed. But Katie? She’d grown up in a mountain town, hiking with her three brothers.

Yup, he was pretty much doomed, so he told them, “Hit me with your best shot. I’ve got it coming.”

“You sure do,” Dana told him.

They didn’t beat him up. They didn’t even yell at him. They put him in a chair opposite the sofa, then sat down side by side and took turns telling him they’d been here in Katie’s condo since the day before, talking about what had happened to each of them since the day they were hired as the three trendy, funny roommates who shared an apartment near the beach.

A little at a time, they made him understand what they’d been through. What their ambitions were. Some of it, he had known—or had guessed—already. Some of it took him completely by surprise.

What they wanted, most of all, was respect.

To be heard.

He couldn’t claim he didn’t understand, because he wanted the same thing. He wanted to succeed in his chosen profession, sure, but what was that worth if you lost sight of yourself as a human being? Someone who valued the people he worked with, not as commodities, but as people?

Something Amanda didn’t seem to care about.

There was a note of pain in everything they told him, and with each new revelation, he felt worse and worse for ever having thought, “That’s just how things work.” His protests to Amanda no longer felt like enough, if indeed he’d ever felt like they were. How could they be enough, when Ellery had been humiliated in the eyes of her friends and family?

She was in love now, she told him, with a good man. A man who was startled and upset about the way she’d been used. A man who’d held her in his arms as she cried, then had wiped her tears and told her he would do whatever it took to make sure that that sort of thing never happened again.

And Dana…

Dana, the smart, quiet one of the three Roomies, had once been cornered by a producer who seemed to think actresses existed for him to choose from. For him to abuse and discard.

And Katie.

They’d set Katie up to be wooed by five strangers, men who’d compete over her as if she were a new car, or tickets to the Super Bowl, all of it filmed to be shown to a nationwide audience as entertainment.

Periodically, the three women held each other’s hands. Showed support for each other in that small way. There’d been a lot of hugging before he showed up, Doug was sure, but they weren’t hugging now. They were talking about themselves, about the awful things they’d been through, quietly and solemnly, their voices trembling now and then but never losing their composure more than a little.

Distantly, Doug realized that Katie hadn’t offered him anything to drink this time. That she wasn’t playing hostess now.

After almost an hour had gone by, they finished telling their stories.

“We’d like you to help us,” Katie said then. “Stand with us. We understand your position—that doing this might mean you’ll lose your job. Or that you might have no luck at all helping us get this done. That’s all right. If you can’t help us, or you don’t want to, we’ll do it ourselves.”

She sounded tired. They all did.

But it seemed to Doug that they were determined to keep going.

And if these three women, who hadn’t even seen the worst Hollywood had to offer, were willing to try to put things right for themselves, shouldn’t he try to do the same? Not just for Katie, but for all of them? And for everyone else who was (or would be) in the same position they were in?

“You have a plan?” he asked.

Katie nodded. “We want a chance to talk. Not where we’re supposed to be stylish and entertaining, but where people will listen. We’re not things, Doug. You don’t wind us up so we can amuse you, then put us back on a shelf until the next time you’re bored. I think people lose track of that. They forget that every time they say something awful about us on the internet, or in some cheesy tabloid, there’s a real person here. That we get hurt. I think—”

She stopped for a moment, clearly running out of steam, but she recovered after Dana squeezed her hand.

“It’s bullying. No, it’s abuse. Pure and simple.”

“I agree.”

“And do you agree that you had a hand in it? That you helped it happen?”

I objected, he thought. But every time, he’d let Amanda overrule him. He’d looked at those tabloids at the store and done nothing about them but sigh and roll his eyes. He’d missed almost every opportunity to say hello to sweet, quiet Dana. And he’d walked Katie into the taping of that hideous reality show.

“I did,” he admitted.

“We want to share our story,” Dana said. “To people who’ll listen. People who have an audience.”

“And we want to sit down with the writers of our show,” Katie said. “In fact, the whole production team. They’ve had two seasons to set up a following. They’re smart people. Good writers. We want to see them address this problem. They can do that and make it funny. No anvils involved. Just the message that this isn’t all right. None of it is all right.”

“We want to talk to Oprah,” Ellery blurted. “And Ellen. Or both. We could start with Ellen.”

They were so earnest, so energized once again, that it made Doug smile.

In a way, they reminded him of himself at 6 or 7, the small boy who’d told himself that if you wished hard enough, the Dust King would give you what you wanted. There was no Dust King here, for sure, but these three women were as good at heart, as resilient and hopeful as he’d been back then.

“We have to go through Amanda,” he reminded them.

For a moment, the three of them looked at each other, and he understood that they’d covered that subject already. That they’d figured out all the pitfalls and were determined to get past them.

“Amanda needs to take off her stilettos and remember where she came from,” Katie said with an edge in her voice. “She needs to remember that she started out from pretty much nowhere, and she’d probably still be nowhere if Karner Reign hadn’t loved her so much that he was willing to give her everything she wanted.”

Again, Doug broke into a smile.

He was almost positive that if he relayed any of this, let alone all of it, Amanda would either dismiss him outright or grind him up and feed him to a pack of stray dogs. He couldn’t imagine any scenario in which she would actually cooperate.

Nope, there was no Dust King here.

But maybe you could make your wish come true.

“Let’s do it,” he said. “And if Amanda won’t listen, we’ll go to someone else.”