Girls on Film
Copyright © 2004 by 17th Street Productions, an Alloy company
All rights reserved.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group, USA
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at
HachetteBookGroupUSA.com
First eBook Edition: July 2008
With the exception of the mention of some celebrities, the characters in this book are fictitious, and any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. All events in this book are fictitious, including all events involving celebrities.
ISBN: 978-0-316-04164-5
Contents
Daisy Buchanan Meets Daisy Duke
High School for the Highly Overprivileged
Why Turn a Comedy Into a Tragedy?
If you have to ask, you’ll never be on …
Be sure to read all the novels in the
New York Times
bestselling A-LIST series
THE A-LIST
GIRLS ON FILM
BLONDE AMBITION
TALL COOL ONE
BACK IN BLACK
SOME LIKE IT HOT
And keep your eye out for AMERICAN BEAUTY, coming September 2006.
Be sure to read all the novels in the #1
New York Times
bestselling GOSSIP GIRL series
Gossip Girl
You Know You Love Me
All I Want Is Everything
Because I’m Worth It
I Like It Like That
You’re The One That I Want
Nobody Does It Better
Nothing Can Keep Us Together
Only In Your Dreams
And keep your eye out for
Would I Lie To You
, coming October 2006.
A-List novels by Zoey Dean:
THE A-LIST
GIRLS ON FILM
BLONDE AMBITION
TALL COOL ONE
BACK IN BLACK
SOME LIKE IT HOT
If you like
The A-List
, you may also enjoy:
Bass Ackwards and Belly Up
by Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain
Secrets of My Hollywood Life
by Jen Calonita
“Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.”
—Joan Crawford
S
usan 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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
über
-agent. They were oh-so-friendly at first. But it hadn’t taken long for them to show their true colors.