Also by Cherie Bennett & Jeff Gottesfeld
Amen, L.A.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2012 by Cherie Bennett
Cover art copyright © 2011 by Veer
Photo retouching by Ericka O’Rourke
eISBN: 978-0-375-98566-9
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ember, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ember and the E colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
About the Authors
PROLOGUE
It’s amazing how quickly things can change in life. And not always for the better.
At the end of May, I—call me Natalie or Nat, whichever makes you happier; I’m not proud—was the seventeen-year-old eldest daughter of Marsha Shelton, leader of the nondenominational Peace Church in Mankato, Minnesota. Our church had about two hundred member families.
At the end of May, my family lived in a modest three-bedroom ranch home on a bluff above southern Minnesota’s Blue Earth River, where I shared a room with my ninth-grade sister, Gemma, while my thirteen-year-old brother, Chad, had a room of his own.
At the end of May, my longtime boyfriend was steady, handsome Sean. Also a member of Peace Church, Sean wrote Christian rock and folk songs and told me he loved me a lot.
At the end of May, Sean and I were both invited to my best friend Shelby’s family cabin on the banks of not-so-mighty Lake Washington, for a going-away party. A lot of kids would be there. Friends of his, friends of mine, and friends of Shelby’s. The party was in my honor. It would be my last night in Minnesota.
At the end of May, I was still a virgin. How quickly things change. And not always for the better.
A month later, at the end of June, my name was still Natalie Shelton, but I was no longer a Minnesotan. I am now a Los Angeleno.
At the end of June, instead of living in our middle-class three-bedroom ranch, my family was installed in a spectacular southwestern-style mansion in the Hollywood Hills, with floor-to-ceiling glass walls and views from downtown to the ocean. The place had been built to order for the now-dead TV star Ricardo Montalban. It listed on Zillow—I looked it up—at well north of three million dollars.
My mother obviously wasn’t at Peace Church anymore. Instead, she was the new minister of the biggest, richest, most star-studded church in Los Angeles, the Church of Beverly Hills. The Church of Beverly Hills had three thousand member families, and every other member seemed to be a movie or television star. My mom had been offered a huge raise to take this job. Huger than huge. My dad, who wrote modestly popular mystery novels for a living, liked that part.
While I still stayed in touch with Shelby by Skype, at the end of June I had made two new Los Angeles friends. The first was Alexis Samuels. Yes, the Alexis Samuels, who’d been named by LA Weekly as Los Angeles’s number one party girl/club kid in the under-eighteen category. (That was before she went to rehab for the third time.) I think one reason Alex wanted to be my friend was that she thought it would help her stay clean and sober.
Alex’s reasoning didn’t exactly work out.
My second new Los Angeles friend was Mia Hunter, the dreadlocked daughter of hip-hop, fashion, and restaurant mogul Big Jam. You may have seen Big Jam featured on the television show In and Out. In addition to his pop culture successes, Big Jam was known for his high-capacity circular bed and the multicultural harem of women who paraded through it.
Mia and I met at the Church of Beverly Hills. Go figure.
At the end of June, there was a guy to compete with Sean—not that this guy had any interest in competing with anyone. Alex was the one who introduced me to Brett Goldstein. He was eighteen and a star on the hit TV drama Working Stiff. Brett was Jewish and had chocolate-colored eyes and hair, the sinewy build of an athlete, and skin turned golden from the California sun. He was as willing to talk about his feelings as Sean was unwilling. His father was one of the driving forces in the early days of Netflix. It suffices to say the Goldsteins were not hurting for money.
Most important of all, at the end of June, I wasn’t a virgin anymore.
I hadn’t had sex with Brett. I’d had sex with my longtime Minnesotan boyfriend, Sean.
That last night in Minnesota, I willingly if ambivalently surrendered said status to Sean on the bedroom floor of one of the guest rooms in Shelby’s cabin. If I recall correctly, it was the room equipped for babies and toddlers. The sex was safe but not great—not that I have any basis for comparison. I’m hoping that a decade from now that night won’t even be memorable.
You might ask how two kids who went to church together every Sunday, who prized the idea of staying virgins until marriage, couldn’t control their impulses. I don’t have a good answer to that question, except to say that an imminent two thousand miles of separation and teenage hormones can combine to cloud one’s judgment. I am not going to make the argument that Sean and I are not the first teenagers in history to have had this happen. True as that might be, it would be an excuse instead of an explanation.
Do I regret what happened with Sean? Absolutely. Not just because I disappointed myself. The fact is afterward I saw Sean in a new light. He was consistent, but not emotionally connected. Every time I tried to start a conversation with him about what had happened, he seemed to dodge it.
At the end of June, we still hadn’t broken up. In fact, he was planning to come to Los Angeles to visit me.
At the end of June—I am not proud of this—I was acting with everyone but Sean like the episode on the floor had never happened. I even told Alex, Mia, and Brett, plus the new girls I met at church, that I was still a virgin.
In Los Angeles, virginity is not necessarily a badge of honor. A few of Alex’s friends from her club-kid days thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. One of them, a grade-A beeyotch named Brooke, even labeled me the Virginator. I didn’t try to dissuade her from her erroneous belief, despite Jesus’s unhappiness with hy
pocrites. Which, by the by, I knew I was being.
New state. New home. New life. New best friend. New other best friend. New guy. New beeyotch enemy. New hypocrite status. All in four weeks.
I had no way of knowing that the next two weeks would make my first month in California seem like an early afternoon of hanging out on Alex’s pool deck, behind the Samuels family manse in the Hollywood Hills overlooking Coldwater Canyon. Which is where those next two weeks began: with me and Brett on that deck, waiting for Alex to come home from Cedars-Sinai hospital.
CHAPTER ONE
Alex was coming home from the hospital. Ten days before, she’d gotten drunk at a party where I was supposed to help keep her sober, gone clubbing with some of the kids from the party, and gotten into a car accident on the way to Hollywood. She’d ended up in Cedars-Sinai with a ruptured spleen, a bruised pancreas, and multiple contusions. Brett had been behind the wheel that night. No, he hadn’t been drinking. Yes, more on all this later.
Brett and I had wanted to go to Cedars-Sinai, but Alex wanted her release to be low-key. Plus, the doctors hadn’t given her an exact time of discharge. Why didn’t we just go to her house and wait for her older brother, Shepard, to bring her home? The deck was a lot more comfortable than the sixth-floor hospital waiting room, and the food was better, too.
We didn’t argue. The day was warm, and the pool deck—it surrounded a guitar-shaped pool, in honor of Shep’s career as a head-banger guitarist—was lovely. The chef, Mrs. Cleveland, and the houseman, Miguel, had put out a wonderful spread of crudités, French bread, and cheese for us.
While we waited for Alex and Shep, I noodled around on my own twelve string and Brett studied a script. He had a day off from Working Stiff, after eight straight days of shooting that had wreaked havoc on our social life.
The show had forced us to reschedule, and reschedule, and re-reschedule our first official date—a fancyville dinner at a fancyville West Hollywood restaurant called Whitehall. Fortunately, Brett knew the maître d’, so there was no problem with the upheaval. Our dinner was to be that evening, and Brett had just instructed me to wear all white.
“Why white?” I asked. At the moment, I was in cutoff jeans and a black bikini top, in case I wanted to swim.
“Dress code,” he said simply. He wore a Dodgers shirt and cargo shorts. No one should look great in a Dodgers shirt and cargo shorts, but Brett did.
I frowned. It sounded crazy. I could see a dress code of black, maybe. Or even gray. But white?
“What if you spill tomato soup on your blouse or something? By ‘you,’ I mean ‘I,’ you realize.”
He nodded and put his script on the glass patio table. “I know it seems nuts, but you’ll get into it. Whitehall is the hottest table in the city right now.”
I smiled. “Nice way of saying, ‘It’s almost impossible to get seated there, but I got us in anyway.’ ”
“Nothing gets past you, huh, Minnesota?” he joked, and then ran his fingertips gently over my forearm.
I couldn’t help it: I shivered. Not because of the breeze that had come up, either.
“Not much,” I managed to say.
His fingers maintained their contact. I sprang a few goose bumps. A few more. Then more than a few more. He edged toward me. I think—I know—he would have kissed me for the first time, right then and there, if we both hadn’t heard a voice call down to us from the top of the deck stairs.
“Umm … I thought you guys were here to welcome me home?” We looked up. There was Alex at the top of the redwood deck stairs, a bemused smile on her face, looking far better than anyone should look when they’re coming home after almost two weeks in the hospital. She wore a short flowered skirt, a long-sleeve sheer black top, and a black choker with a silver pendant. Either she’d spent time on hair and makeup in the hospital bathroom, or she’d brought in a stylist for the occasion. Probably the latter, because it seemed like her mahogany locks had been trimmed since I’d seen her two days before. They fell to her shoulders in an artful bob, which made her sky-blue eyes seem even bigger.
“Hi,” she said in a small voice as Brett and I bounded up the stairs to greet her. She hugged me first, then Brett.
“Thank God,” I breathed as I took her in. She was painfully thin, but that made sense. After the accident, she’d had her spleen removed and had been fed intravenously for five days while the doctors let her pancreas heal. “Thank God you’re out of there.”
She smiled wanly. Meanwhile, her brother, Shepard, joined us on the deck. Five years older than Alex, he wore khaki pants and a yellow golf shirt. With his hair gelled and Foster Grant sunglasses on, he looked more like a young stockbroker heading for the Riviera Country Club than the death-metal guitar player that he was.
At least Shep had been able to go to the hospital. When I’d first met him, he’d been under house arrest on a drug charge and couldn’t leave the premises, though he sometimes found a way to sneak off. One of those times I found him naked in my bedroom, but that’s another story.
A few days ago, a judge had modified his sentence to probation.
“Thank God is right,” Shep echoed.
“I’m thanking the doctors and the air bags, not God. And certainly not myself,” Alex observed.
“Hey,” I said, challenging her, “a car hit you guys. Not the other way around.”
“I should have seen it coming,” Brett muttered.
“And I should have been with you,” I added.
“That wouldn’t have been easy to do, under the circumstances,” Shep said, a little sharply. “You did what you could.”
Let me fill in some of the blanks here. Alex got drunk at a party. I was supposed to stay with her at that party but had to leave because I’d found my brother, Chad, there. He’d snuck out of the house to meet an older girl, Lisa Stevens. As for Brett, he was driving the car that was hit. He was totally sober. Alex wasn’t. In fact, she upchucked on his lap, distracting him enough that he couldn’t avoid the oncoming SUV. Brett went to Cedars-Sinai, too, for a day of observation.
Now Alex glared at her brother. “Easy, please. I just said I can’t thank myself. All I can do is get better.”
“The best way to do that is to let your friends help you,” Shep declared. “Which means you have to decide who your real friends are, and then actually do your part.”
Whoa. Intense yak for the top of the pool deck four minutes after Alex had come home. How about if Shep let her get settled before he laced into her?
“Maybe we should all just get something to eat,” I suggested softly. “Mrs. Cleveland put lunch out.”
“Great idea,” Brett agreed. “Anything you want from inside, Alex?”
Alex looked relieved to change the topic. I couldn’t blame her. She was probably tired of talking about what had happened, and was ready to move on. “Can you maybe ask Mrs. Cleveland to bring out some ice cream? That’s what I really want.”
“I think she’s on break. I’ll get it,” Shep told her.
“Let me give you a hand,” Brett said, though no hand was necessary.
He and Shep walked off and were soon deep in conversation about some song Brett had just downloaded with a “sick” guitar riff. Alex and I were left alone. Obviously, that had been Brett’s intention. How thoughtful.
To my surprise, Alex was steady on her feet as she went down the stairs to the table where Brett and I had been waiting. There was no need for me even to take her arm.
“I could have been released two days ago, you know,” she confided.
“No way.” I was incredulous.
“It’s true. But Shep kept telling my doctors not to rush me out. He thought I was safer in a hospital room than anywhere else.”
We approached the round glass patio table; I pulled out a black cushioned chair, and she sat with a sigh. “I’m a little tired,” she admitted. “I haven’t walked anywhere but a corridor for a long time.”
I poured Alex a glassful of iced mint tea. Despite
her saying that what she wanted was ice cream, she drank gratefully.
“Want to know what’s weird?” she said after she’d drained the glass. “I feel good. Like, all that drinking at the party was just a stupid slip, and I paid a big price. But I felt good the night of the party, too, and look what happened.”
I was about to offer a platitude like “You have to take it one day at a time,” but I stopped myself. What did I know about addictions? What good would my words be? All I knew was what I’d learned from Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, and Dr. Drew. What could I tell Alex that she didn’t know? Her parents had died in a plane crash when she was in eighth grade. What did I know about that kind of pain? I heard the voice in my head.
Nothing. You know nothing. So STFU.
Alex wiped her lips with a blue cloth napkin. “Thanks for being here. It means a lot to me.”
“I wouldn’t miss it.” I tried for a joke. “Aren’t you going to show me your scar?”
“Nope.” Alex’s answer was immediate. “I wouldn’t show it to you in the hospital, and I won’t show it to you now.”
“I didn’t ask to see it in the hospital,” I responded.
“And I thank you for that.… Oh, what the hell. I have nothing to hide.”
Suddenly, Alex lifted her blouse. I couldn’t help it: I gasped.
I’d done a little Internet homework and expected that the surgeons would have taken out her spleen laparoscopically. That is, there’d be a few small incisions, and that would be that.
No such luck. There was a long, angry scar running across the midline of her abdomen, above her navel.
“My spleen ruptured,” she said hollowly. “Hard to suck it out with a laparoscope. Guess I won’t be wearing any Wicked Weasel bikinis anytime soon. Anytime ever.”
She started to sob. I hugged her, being careful not to squeeze too hard.
Whitehall was … well, white.
Everything but the clientele and the food, that is. The clientele was white, black, Latino, Asian—you name it. All dressed in white. The waitstaff, too, though they wore white fedoras so they could be easily identified. The food was every color of the rainbow and then some, and absolutely breathtaking. Brett had picked me up at five; our reservation was for six. I’d rooted around in my limited supply of clothes and found some white pumps, a white cotton A-line skirt that fell conservatively below my knees, and a white top that I’d last worn to a distant relative’s wedding in Milwaukee. The clothes were nothing special, so I spent an extra-long time in front of the mirror, putting on the makeup that Alex had given me after our spa day at the Mondrian, and blowing out my still-new extensions to maximum pouf. I thought I looked okay.
Little Lies Page 1