by Zoey Dean
“I see. I’m forbidden fruit.”
“Please, I live in New York.” Anna laughed. “Still, Jane Percy would not approve.”
“Do we care?” Ben asked.
“We do not.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “I remember in seventh grade when I came across the phrase ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’ for the first time—”
“Whoa. Time out. You read Socrates in seventh grade?”
“New York prep schools do that sort of thing. Anyway, the words jumped off the page. I felt like running home and screaming it in my mother’s face.”
“Pretty dramatic.”
Anna chuckled. “Well, I didn’t actually do it. No one screams in my house. Ever. It simply ‘isn’t done.’ But it was one of those lightbulb moments, you know? I knew I didn’t want to lead an unexamined life.”
“Soul searching isn’t exactly on the to-do list at my house, either.”
Anna thought for a moment. “We probably sound like two overprivileged brats who don’t appreciate what we have.”
“Hey, I appreciate what I have. I also appreciate what I don’t have—a father I can respect.”
A sudden breeze blew some loose hair onto Anna’s cheek; she pushed it behind one ear. “Why can’t you respect him?”
“Gee, where to begin?” Ben asked bitterly. “Let’s see. He cheats on his wife. He cheats on his taxes. And he wastes his surgical skills on bullshit rich vanity cases.” He gripped the boat’s metal rail. “I’ll tell you the kind of guy he really is, Anna. When I turned fourteen, he took me out for what he called ‘guys’ night.’ We had dinner at Spago. Then we went to this apartment on the beach that he and his cronies keep—my mom doesn’t know this place exists, mind you. About fifteen minutes later there’s a knock on the door. In walks this drop-dead gorgeous blonde. She was my birthday present.”
Anna was shocked. “You mean, he got you a prostitute?”
“Those chicks charge way too much to be called ‘prostitutes.’ They’re ‘companions.’ And they’ll ‘companion’ you wherever five hundred bucks will go, including into bed with a fourteen-year-old boy.”
Anna’s stomach turned over. “That’s disgusting.”
“I didn’t exactly do dear old dad proud when I refused.”
“Good for you.”
“Don’t give me any credit for being noble, Anna. The truth is, I was scared shitless. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this—”
“I hope it’s because you trust me,” Anna said. “And I hope I can trust you, too.”
“Does that mean you’re about to share your how-I-almost-lost-my-virginity story?” he teased.
“Uh … I don’t have one, really.”
“Come on.” He chuckled, then realized she wasn’t joking. “You mean you’re—?”
Anna nodded. “To get to ‘almost,’ I would’ve had to feel like I felt with you on the plane,” she confessed, her voice low. She was blushing and glad Ben couldn’t see it in the dark. “I never really felt like that before.”
“I’m flattered.”
“You should be.” The breeze freshened; Anna crossed her arms and tucked her hands beneath the armpits of Ben’s tux jacket to keep them warm.
“Back in a sec,” Ben said. “I’ll get you a vest.”
“Ben. You can warm me up without that.”
She lifted her lips to his. He kissed her. Then he really kissed her. Then he really, really kissed her. After which he did things that made her forget there was a mind attached to her body. As powerful as her feelings for him had been on the plane, they were nothing compared to what she was feeling now. It was wonderful. It was incendiary. It was dangerous.
Ever so gently, Ben’s hand snaked under the thin silk of her camisole.
She knew she really shouldn’t …
And decided she didn’t give a shit. Because in the This Is How We Do Things Big Book, East Coast WASP edition, what she was contemplating didn’t have a chapter. Sure, some girls who carried the book around did It: girls who were rich, WASPy, and wild for about a nanosecond. Then they graduated from the right school, married the right man, and joined the Junior League to live uneventfully ever after.
To think that only that morning, she’d been on her way to the airport with Cynthia, wondering if moving to Los Angeles would be the biggest mistake she’d ever made in her life, worrying that she’d never be able to stop loving Scott Spencer. And now here she was, on a yacht just before midnight, kissing a boy who made her feel as if pygmies were high diving in her stomach. And south of her stomach, too.
“Anna?” His muffled voice was hoarse against her neck.
The way he said her name, she knew exactly what he wanted. It was exactly what she wanted, too. With him. Right now.
Before she could open her mouth to say yes, the shore-line erupted with fireworks. Streamers of light arched skyward, splitting the night sky with silver starbursts and golden galaxies. It was the stroke of midnight.
Anna asked herself: Do you want to talk about leading an examined life, or do you want to actually do it?
“Is there a cabin?” she whispered to Ben.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Anna took Ben’s hand and led him to the fire down below.
Seventeen
2:51 A.M., PST
Camilla Birnbaum. Camilla Babette Birnbaum. Mrs. Ben Birnbaum.
Cammie remembered how just last year, she’d sat cross-legged on her bed like a fifth grader and doodled variations of her fantasy future with Ben on the back of her science notebook, then crossed them all out lest anyone see. Because if anyone had seen, she would have had to kill them.
Most people thought her relationship with Ben had been just this physical thing. They’d been right. But it had been more, too. Cammie knew him, she was sure, in a way that no other girl had. She knew all his dark and nasty secrets. She knew how to make his fantasies come true. From what she heard, many a Beverly Hills marriage had been built on less.
That he’d gotten to her heart was a secret she kept from everyone, often even from herself. But she’d been so sure—was still so sure—that on some level Ben felt the same way she did. So why did he want to fight it?
Except there she was, offering herself to Ben on a goddamn plate, for chrissake. And he’d rejected her.
Rejected her. She was easily the hottest girl her age in 90210 and 90211 and probably even 90402. But when she’d kissed him in the fun house, Ben had barely blinked. He must really care about that upper-crust Upper East Side New York bitch on his arm.
Excuse me, but the girl is practically flat. And hello, a little makeup would help. Or are cosmetics too gauche for a girl with her breeding? She probably has permanent chafe marks on her thighs from keeping them squeezed together.
A New Year’s Eve fending off assholes at a back-lot Warners party hadn’t been what Cammie’d had in mind for the night of Jackson Sharpe’s wedding. Yet there she was, still at the party with the dregs of humanity, long after her friends had left. She’d danced, drunk too much champagne, spurned three guys who invited her to their cars to do some blow and two others who’d invited her home to do them. It wasn’t that she didn’t like blow, and one of the guys was actually quite tasty. But she had something important, private, and very personal to do this evening, and it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to drive back to Beverly Hills and then return to this side of the hill to accomplish it.
Cammie sighed and downed the last few sips of champagne in her glass. Her plan had been to invite Ben to share this mission with her. What a joke. She blinked in the direction of the band. She was seeing double of the lead singer of … what the hell was the name of the band again? Something that started with a D, one syllable. Dick, maybe? Right. Dick. She was seeing double Dicks. Not good. Too much champagne. She had zero desire to risk a DWI. If Ben had been with her, he could have driven. But fucking Ben was fucking someone else, somewhere else. Cammie decided she would walk.
“Hey, don’t leave, baby!” some guy was calling, but Cammie gave him the finger as she walked out of the party. And kept walking. Out of the Warner Brothers lot, then east on deserted Riverside Drive. Past Disney’s fucking Mickey Mouse-eared fence and the building crowned by seven gigantic stone dwarfs.
When she reached NBC Studios, Cammie removed her shoes—you’d think you’d be able to walk in twelve-hundred-dollar Blahniks—and carried the stiletto heels.
Fifteen minutes later she reached the high fence that surrounded the huge Forest Lawn Cemetery complex. Obviously the place was officially closed at this hour. Not that such a minor detail would dissuade her. It had been closed every New Year’s Eve. Every New Year’s Eve, she’d found a way inside.
She followed the fence up the steep hill, searching for a certain spot where the fence was in minor disrepair. When she found it, she pushed hard on the chain links until they separated from the retaining pole. The fence gave way just a few inches, enough for Cammie to slither inside.
Shit. She’d dropped one Blahnik on the far side of the fence. To hell with it. She hurled the other one over the fence in the general direction from which she had come. If the shoes were there when she came back, fine. If not, whatever.
Once she found her bearings in the dark cemetery, it was only a five-minute trek to her destination. The grounds were well manicured; the close-cropped grass tickled her soles as she walked. Almost before she knew it, she was standing at the burial plot.
“Hey, Mom,” Cammie said. “Happy New Year.”
Cammie took her keys from her purse and shone the attached miniflashlight on the headstone. All it bore was her mother’s name, Jeanne Reit Sheppard, followed by the year of her birth and death. No inscription, no Bible passage, no “beloved mother, wife, and teacher.” Nothing. Nada. Zip.
Cammie trained the flashlight on the rest of the plot, saw a bit of crabgrass that had sprouted near her feet, and cleared it away. There was a dirty straw wrapper, too, which she stuffed in her purse. Would it kill the ghouls who worked these grounds to keep them up the way they were getting paid to do?
She crouched down by the headstone, lost her balance, and stumbled to the ground. Sufficiently inebriated not to feel the cold earth under her ass, she just brought her knees to her chin and circled them with her arms. This alcohol-soaked pilgrimage had been an annual event for her since she’d turned fourteen. But she’d never been quite as wasted as she was this time. Which, she would later muse, was probably why she asked what she asked. Aloud, that is.
“Was it really an accident, Mom?”
She waited, as if she actually expected her mother to psychically contact her from beyond to tell her the truth.
“It’s the part about Daddy not calling the police until the next morning that’s always bugged me,” Cammie went on. “He said he’d taken a sleeping pill. Is that really what happened? Or maybe you jumped overboard. Maybe you wanted to die. I’d just really, really like to know once and for all, Mom. Now would be a good time to tell me.”
Nothing.
“I could use a little help here!” Cammie called into the darkness. “Hey, John-psychic-what’s-your-face-with-the-TV-show, where are you when I really need you?”
More silence.
“Shit,” Cammie mumbled. “Oh, sorry for saying shit, Mom. I curse a lot, which is really fucked up. It’s just … there’s this boy, Ben Birnbaum. He was my boyfriend—remember I told you about him last year? Well, he broke up with me before he went away to college. Right before he dumped me, I was planning to bring him here to meet you. Dumb idea.”
Cammie sighed and rummaged through her purse. “Anyway, I brought you something from the party.” She took out a small square of Belgian chocolate, wrapped in a Happy New Year! napkin, and placed it on the headstone.
“Perks of being dead: You don’t have to diet anymore.” She picked absentmindedly at the dirt that was now embedded in the pale green leather of her dress. “Tonight I tried to get Ben back. What a joke. I thought he really cared about me. Only he doesn’t. Maybe it’s genetic. You know what would really suck, Mom? If it turns out that my taste in men is as bad as yours.”
Cammie wobbled onto the plot itself and lay down on her back, arms splayed. She stared up into the starry, starry night. “It’s so beautiful out, Mom. I wish you could see it.” Tears leaked out of Cammie’s eyes and ran into her ears. “Happy fucking New Year.”
Eighteen
2:51 A.M., PST
“Hey, Sam!”
Sam heard Parker calling to her, but she really didn’t want to answer him. She was facedown on the buttery Italian leather massage table in the meditation room (right off the Sharpes’ football-field-size home gym), getting what was possibly the world’s best massage from a hunk o’ burning love named Giovanni. (“Only one name is needed; I am Giovanni. Now I do the massage work. But I wish to be de film star, yes?”)
Sam had spotted Giovanni’s studly form on the dance floor at the Warner Brothers party, dancing with some pathetic case whose bad boob job looked like two igloos molded onto her concave chest. Sam had sidled over and, after one mention of the fact that she was Jackson Sharpe’s daughter, “I am Giovanni” was hers. He had masterful hands, made all the more delicious by Sam’s fantasy that they were attached to Ben. And the last thing she wanted was to be interrupted.
“Sam? Seriously, I need to ask you something,” Parker insisted.
Well, that was what she got for inviting a group of people (some of whom she didn’t even know) from the lame-ass party to come home and party with her. Since her father and the new Mrs. had gone straight from the reception to their honeymoon in Barbados, Sam knew there would be no parental objections.
Sam finally opened one bloodshot eye. “What is it, Parker?”
“Know the aquarium in the den? Well, Nude Dude just ate one of the fish. Now he says he feels sick. So he wants to know if any of ’em are poisonous.”
Nude Dude, a pretentious jerk who’d been a second unit assistant director (read glorified flunky—Sam knew all the code titles) on Jackson Sharpe’s latest film, had earned his name an hour ago when he’d walked into the Sharpe mansion, shed all his clothes, and declared, “Let the games begin!”
“If he turns blue, call 911,” Sam decreed, and closed her eyes again.
“You must to let all de tension go,” Giovanni urged Sam in his sexy Italian accent.
Oh, yeah. Going, going, gone. As Giovanni worked Sam’s upper back, each stroke wiped away another memory of this misbegotten evening. It was a good thing, too. Once Ben had departed with Anna, the night had gone rapidly downhill. Sam had drowned her sorrows with a few whiskey and waters and sobbed awhile on Adam Flood’s shoulder. She’d blamed her morose mood on the wedding; he’d believed her. At midnight he’d kissed her. Then she’d met Giovanni and remembered the massage tables in the home gym. That was when she’d decided it was time to change venues. He’d been working on her for over an hour. It was pure bliss.
“You want I do more personal massage?” Giovanni asked.
Sam didn’t even want to think about what “more personal” meant.
“No thanks. That was heavenly, though.” Sam grabbed her robe and managed to put it on without getting up, after which she dropped the towel that had covered her and hopped off the table. “I should go join my friends. You coming?”
“Of course. Giovanni is yours.”
Yuh. Giovanni was starting to creep her out.
Sam found her guests in the game room, playing drunk and stoned American Idol with her father’s million-dollar video equipment.
“Where’s Nude Dude?” Sam asked.
“Passed out in the family room,” Dee said.
“Did anyone check to make sure he’s still breathing?”
“Gee, I don’t know,” Dee realized.
Sam turned to Giovanni. “Could you go check on the guy in the family room, down that hall?”
“Giovanni knows, how you say, de CV
R.”
“CPR,” Sam corrected. “Good to know. Thanks.”
Giovanni took off. Dee watched appreciatively. “He’s hot.”
And dumb as a box of rocks, Sam thought, which might just make him perfect for Dee. “He’s all yours,” Sam said.
“Thanks!” Dee hesitated. “Is he … hetero? Because you know what they say about Greek guys.”
“He’s Italian, Dee.”
“Oh. Good. I’ll just go see if he needs any help, then.” She trotted down the hall after Giovanni.
“Let’s make apple martinis!” Skye suggested, popping up from her seat and almost falling over from whatever it was she’d already ingested.
“God, they are so last century,” Damian whined. He reeled his way over to Sam. “We are in need of more alcohol.”
Doubtful, but Sam pointed the way to the bar off the indoor pool, anyway. What the hell. It was New Year’s Eve. Her father was totally unaware of how much alcohol he had on hand. And even if Poppy knew, she probably couldn’t count that high.
The crowd tumbled into the bar, which was surrounded by glass, giving them a 360-degree view of the glittering lights of Los Angeles. Someone turned on the sound system. The Dave Matthews Band filled the air. Sam winced; that CD had to belong to Poppy—Sam wouldn’t have been caught dead with it. She replaced it with a hip-hop party mix—much better.
With Damian serving as bartender, an apple-martini-versus-banana-daiquiri contest ensued. Taste-testing was done on six inches of naked flesh between where Skye’s sheer Galliano shirt ended and her low-slung sequined D&G camouflage pants began.
Sam watched the crowd egging on the two guys who were licking alcohol off Skye’s stomach and felt removed from the whole scene. As far as she was concerned, this was just a variation on a film she’d seen too many times. They were young, rich Beverly Hills brats who loved to party. Like that was fresh. Why was she here pretending to have a good time instead of with the boy she loved? Why did she have to have such a big heart and have it be full of love for a guy who didn’t love her back?