Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 65643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 328(@200wpm)___ 263(@250wpm)___ 219(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 328(@200wpm)___ 263(@250wpm)___ 219(@300wpm)
I tried one last time to convince Andrew to come back to the west coast so that he could go to the Halloween party with me, but he absolutely could not get out of filming. He drove me to JFK and gave me a smacking kiss for the paparazzi. We both tried not to laugh afterward.
“Have fun at the party,” he said, pulling my small rollaboard suitcase out of the trunk and setting it on the curb for me.
“If anything changes, get on the next flight to LAX,” I ordered.
Andrew smiled at me curiously. “I will. But I’m sure you’ll have fun without me.”
I wasn’t as sure. Noemi wasn’t going because she was finalizing her wedding preparations in Turks and Caicos. I wasn’t hanging out with The Socialite Squad anymore, and only a couple of them were invited anyway. None of that really bothered me. There were always people I could talk to. But Garrett was going to be there, and that made me more nervous than I wanted to admit.
Although, honestly, since I’d realized how badly I’d misconstrued things between Andrew and I, I couldn’t help wondering if I’d done the same with Garrett.
But the kiss, I kept reminding myself.
The kiss.
The kiss had taken on almost mythic proportions in my mind, especially now that I compared it to the kiss with Andrew. I couldn’t discount the electricity I’d felt between us anymore.
Even though I knew I should.
I was a cat for Halloween. The costume was simple but luxurious. A velvet bodysuit with an animatronic tail that swished of its own accord. It was the hair and makeup that took hours. My hair was teased into a sixties style fall of loose curls that disguised the glue holding the cat ears to my skull. I had a special shampoo to wash it out later, but I still wondered if I might have bald spots going into November. I also had two sets of false eyelashes layered over my real ones. Tonight, my eyes looked huge and spooky in the setting of the cat eye makeup. The tip of my nose and my top lip had been painted black, and delicate black brush strokes to imitate the whiskers.
I looked strange and sexy and not very much like myself, which I liked. That was the point of Halloween, wasn’t it? To escape yourself for a while.
When I got to the party, my fears about not having fun were immediately put to rest. Almost everyone from the movie was there, and they called me over enthusiastically. I joined them, grateful I’d ended up on such a nice set.
“What a setup, right?” the lead actress, a newcomer named Danielle, exclaimed, craning her head around to see everything. Julian’s theme was zombie apocalypse, and as always, it looked amazing. Fog was rolling through the streets. Graveyards had been set up between the buildings with zombies in various states of pulling themselves out of the dirt. Realistic zombies shambled around with trays of drinks and appetizers. Eerie music that I recognized from the Night of the Living Dead soundtrack echoed all around us. Even though I was used to discerning between fact and fantasy, I felt the same mix of anticipation and recoil that I felt at the beginning of a scary movie.
Right away, Danielle and I agreed to be each other’s safety buddy. It was a joke, and it wasn’t a joke. We stuck close together because both of us were overwhelmed by the sheer force of the industry at this party. You didn’t usually see so many career-makers gathered in one place, unless it was an award show where there really weren’t many opportunities to make a fool of yourself. But the other reason was because it was genuinely unsettling to get caught without a face you recognized in this crowd of myth and monster.
Danielle didn’t understand why I was overwhelmed. Hadn’t I grown up in Hollywood? I mean, I’d had my own show. I’d been on the posters in her mall when she was growing up. I didn’t want to explain to this bright-eyed newcomer that, until you reached a Noemi-level of success, you were only as important as your latest box office in this town. She was coming out of the gate strong, so I hoped she would never find out.
Our group found its way to the dance floor when the world-famous DJ, Cicero, replaced the zombie music with a fast-paced soundtrack that somehow made the zombie-infested horror scape even more surreal. The red lights strobed so that people moved in freeze frame motion. You didn’t see them move, but every flash brought them closer or farther. I didn’t realize there were zombies on the dance floor until I heard Danielle scream. Instantly, the world flickered to black, and I had to wait for the lights to strobe red again before I could get to where she was.