by Zoey Dean
Sam was only half-listening, because she was figuring out exactly how she wanted to ask him to prom.
77
"And the love scene was so intense," he concluded, "I thought of you."
The love scene made him think of me? For chrissake, just ask already.
"So Eduardo, I was wondering," she began, hands suddenly sweaty. "In America, we have this stupid thing called 'prom,' which is--"
"A formal party for high school students," he filled in; there was a smile in his voice. "I live in a different country, Samantha. Not on a different planet."
"Right. Of course. Silly. So ..." She took a deep breath. "The Beverly Hills High School prom is Friday night. I know that isn't much notice, but I'll be there making a documentary, which you might find interesting, and I'll totally understand if you can't come because it's too little no--"
"Tell me about your film."
Sam couldn't help noticing a distinct lack of the words prom, yes , and love to in that request. Still, she gave him a two-minute rundown on the documentary, putting it in the best possible light. She even managed to sneak in a couple of her hottest ideas, like how she'd have an assistant film the prom weenies--she didn't call them that; she called them the prom organizers--as they went through their pre-prom-day routine and that she was planning to give walkie-talkies to some of the professional hotel staff so that she could be summoned instantly in the event of a meltdown. What the hell. Maybe he'd be dazzled by her creative genius.
"Impressive," he remarked. "So, will I be in it?"
78
Wait, did that mean he was going to be at prom? As in, be with her at prom?
"You mean ... you'll come to my prom?" she asked cautiously.
"Yes, of course."
"I'm so happy!" Sam gushed into the phone, unable to contain herself.
"But I would have to leave right after your prom, because Saturday night is my parents' twenty-fifth anniversary and we are having a surprise party for them in northern Mexico, at my cousin's estate. My family will disown me if I miss it."
"That is so no problem. I'm sure you can take my dad's jet there. I'll ask him."
"Samantha?"
Sam lay back on her bed. "Yeah?"
"I'll be coming on my father's jet."
She heard the smile in his voice. Then he told her he'd e-mail her the information about when he was arriving, but that it would probably be Thursday--two days away. A moment or two later they hung up, and Sam lay back against her pillows, stunned with happiness. The whole world looked wonderful. Eduardo was taking her to prom. This call changed everything. If he weren't really and truly into her, he wouldn't come halfway across the world just to spend a few nights with her.
This was it. She'd get him to stay until dawn on Saturday, at least. They would finally make love.
79
Unlike her other sexual experiences, which had almost always involved 420 or alcohol and had had nothing to do with an actual human connection, she would find out what it was like to really make love.
All that plus making an award-winning documentary.
Did her life fucking rock or what?
80
The World's Tiniest Leopard-Print ThongCammie pulled her jeweled and beaded emerald green Emanuel Ungaro peasant shirt over her head as slowly as possible, knowing that her boyfriend Adam's eyes were glued to her full breasts, perched inside the top of her white matte microfiber Gottex bikini top. While said breasts had been, pre-surgical intervention, three cup sizes smaller, it was a matter of personal pride to Cammie that no guy had ever commented nor any girl inquired in the locker room at the country club as to the identity of her plastic surgeon.
Shirt tossed on the bed, she hitched her fingers under the waistband--well, more like hipband , since the skirt's top fell several inches below her waist--of her 7 for All Mankind ruffled white cotton miniskirt and slid it down. She'd renewed her SunFX spray-on tan at Christophe's salon earlier that morning--the only tech she'd allow to touch her body, Marina from Moldova, had come in on her day off just to do Cammie--and
72
81
knew her artificially golden skin glowed against the stark white of the Gottex.
A slender rose gold belly chain loosely encircled her waist, with two tiny charms hanging from it: the letters A and F in platinum, taken from her boyfriend Adam Flood's initials. She'd had the charm specially manufactured by Rone Prinz, the famous jewelry maker who lived for some godforsaken reason in Woodland Hills. Cammie was utterly confident that she was about to kick off yet another new trend--two months from now the Bel Air Country Club pool would be overflowing with girls wearing their boyfriend-initialed belly chains. Of course, Cammie would have jettisoned hers weeks before. Honestly, most girls were just sheep--it didn't matter how much money daddy and mommy made.
Cammie had arranged for this private little picnic to take place early in the morning, because she was supposed to go up to Ojai with Sam in the late afternoon to visit Dee at her inpatient facility. (Sam, unlike her and Adam, was going to school that day. Cammie and Adam were taking "senior" days; in other words, cutting school. By the end of the school year, senior attendance at Beverly Hills High School dropped precipitously.)
The drive up the coast to Malibu had taken an hour, but it was worth it. No sense going to the public beach at Zuma or Will Rogers State Park, where the sand was full of cigarette butts and you ran the risk of encountering the entire graduating class of Reseda High School on senior-cut day. Better to have a cozy getaway for two on
82
the semiprivate beach in Malibu, where the sand was ostensibly open to the public but you had to know someone whose house had beach access to actually get there. She and Adam had been having a scratchy time of it lately. This outing seemed like the perfect remedy.
That Cammie cared as much as she did about Adam surprised her on a daily basis. He was cute and appealing, with his lanky basketball player's build and spiked dark brown hair short enough to show off a small star tattoo behind his left ear, yet he wasn't nearly as hot as Ben Birnbaum, for example. In her eighteen years, Cammie had enjoyed countless boyfriends and even more flirtations--usually she was in it for the game, the tease, or the sex; her heart was never involved.
Ben had been different, though she hadn't really let him know that. He was different, too, in that he was the first guy Cammie had ever been with who had been the one to end the relationship. She was used to being the dropper, not the droppee.
The end had broken her heart. And then, adding insult to injury, Ben had hooked up with the New York ice princess goody-two-shoes Anna Goddamn Percy. It still made Cammie insane.
Her relationship with Adam was sweeter, kinder, even nicer than the one with Ben had been, because Adam was so essentially decent. He'd only been in Beverly Hills for two years, having moved here from Michigan with his lawyer parents. Though he was accepted by the school's A-list, he was also accepted by everyone else. That he was the starting point guard on
83
the school basketball team didn't hurt, but Adam couldn't have cared less about the social pecking order. That was weird, because everyone Cammie knew could pinpoint his or her own place on that pecking order with cruise-missile accuracy. Not Adam. He was sincere, smart, and always his own person. He didn't care where he was in that social pecking order, for example. As for the sex, it had started out south of zero but had improved rapidly once he got over his initial nervousness.
Plus, he treated Cammie like a jewel... which was a bit of an issue. Cammie knew she could be a stone-cold bitch, and she preferred to be treated like one at least some of the time. Sure, she knew that was twisted, but if a good man was hard to find but easy to hold on to, a bad boy was easy to find and impossible to hold onto. She admired badness. In fact, she often craved it. Whoever said that your boyfriend had to have the sensitivity of Dr. Drew? It wasn't like he was hot.
Cammie gazed up and down the pristine beach, cut off from the Pacific C
oast Highway by an endless stretch of mansions that appeared nondescript from the highway but were in fact spectacular from the beach side. Azure waves lapped against the diamond-white sand. Terns wheeled and dove at a school of baitfish driven to the surface by hungry albacore. Off in the distance, a luxury liner lumbered north, maybe to San Francisco, maybe to Alaska. It was a perfect setting for peace and serenity, which she needed today, for reasons she hadn't shared with Adam.
Her gaze followed a bikini-clad redhead who was
84
running her golden cocker spaniel down the beach; Cammie vaguely recognized her from a long-running, now-deceased sitcom set in the seventies. Coming in the opposite direction was an older world-famous singer who had married a second-tier television actor; they were hand-in-hand, strolling on the packed wet sand left by the receding tide. She had a long paisley scarf wrapped around her head that trailed behind her in the light breeze, and wore baggy white linen clothing that covered her completely and sported oversize black Chanel sunglasses-- but still, that nose made her instantly recognizable.
The actress lived just up the beach, three houses away from a diminutive female rap artist who had just switched representation to Apex, the new agency co-owned by Cammie's father. It was courtesy of this singer that Adam and Cammie were here--Cammie and the singer had bonded when a crucial strap on the rap artist's metallic dress had snapped at an Apex party, exposing perhaps the world's tiniest hot-pink leopard-print thong. The omnipresent photographers had done their thing, as other party guests offered safety pins. Cammie had done two things. One, in the bathroom, she showed the artist that she was wearing an identical thong. Two, she figured that the rap artist had done it completely on purpose, as a publicity stunt. The suspicion was confirmed when the artist made the cover of Star magazine just in time to coincide with the release of her latest CD, Your Mama Ain't in Kansas Anymore, Neither.
Cammie had called her new friend to ask if she and
85
her boyfriend could hang on her beach. The rap artist said sure, but she'd be lounging by her swimming pool since she hated the beach, as it was full of fucking sand.
Now Cammie stretched, the better to show off her curves, and smiled down at Adam, who sat on the large Indian blanket he'd brought along, looking extremely cute in blue-and-white surfer jams. She knelt so that he could see his initials dangling near her right hipbone.
"I thought about getting a tattoo," she told him, shaking her strawberry curls out of her eyes. "But those are so Cher-Angelina Jolie-mall-girl-in-the-'burbs now. Every chick in the valley has a tattoo just above her butt. And it's not like those girls can afford laser removal."
He fingered the charms. "I'm flattered."
"You should be. Plus, I got up early for you; I never get up early for anybody." She leaned over to kiss him gently, concentrating on his lower lip. "Nice here, huh?"
"Very. You have friends in high places."
Yes, she did.
Adam reached for Cammie and tugged her down next to him on the blanket. She landed artfully, her head on his chest. "Did I tell you how hot you look in that?" he asked.
"That's called stating the obvious, Adam. The real question is, How did you ever hook up with such a babe?"
"Brat." He reached for a giant white chocolate-dipped strawberry that nestled on a special cold plate he'd brought in their cooler and dangled the berry near Cammie's lips. She flicked her tongue out and licked it, eyeing him slyly.
86
"Don't do that in public, Cam. It gives me a very private reaction."
"Good." She took the strawberry and bit into it. When they'd first been getting together, she'd tried to seduce Adam on a beach and it definitely had not worked out. Adam was a private-sex kind of guy, while Cammie adored an audience. He kissed her gently, and she felt it down to her flame-red pedicure.
"Hey, you think we should rent a limo for prom, or should I drive?" he asked, then kissed her collarbone.
She made a face. "Everyone has prom on the brain; Sam and Anna were talking about it yesterday. It's so desperately high school."
"We're in high school."
"Please. Prom makes me think of clueless fat valley girls stuffed into mall gowns like huge pastel sausages. Then their dates rent some hideous purple tux and buy every rubber in Rite Aid in case they get pathetically lucky."
"You're such a snob, Cammie." He reached for her hand and helped her to her feet.
"Thank you."
"Come on, you. You're about to get wet." He spanked her ass once and started jogging toward the water. Cammie sighed. When she'd planned this private, serene picnic, actual swimming had not been part of her plan. She couldn't even remember if the MAC mascara she'd put on was waterproof, but since she was in dutiful-girlfriend mode, she trotted after him. When
87
they reached the edge of the surf, they goofed around for a while, kicking water at each other with each gentle breaker that rolled up the beach. Then they waded into the cold water, up to their thighs.
Adam pointed. "Nice boat. Gotta get me one like that."
A white cabin cruiser, maybe thirty-five-feet long, was cutting slowly through the water from north to south about four hundred yards offshore. Cammie could see two fishing rods in the stern.
She wasn't fond of small watercraft, hadn't been ever since her mother had mysteriously drowned at sea. Every New Year's, Cammie made a secret, private, and very drunken pilgrimage to her mother's gravesite at Forest Lawn Cemetery in the valley, where she wondered if her mom's death ten years ago was really what it had been reported to be: an accident.
That night, her parents had been guests on the yacht of their friends the Strikers. They'd been cruising near Santa Barbara Island. Cammie had spent that night at the Strikers' second home in Montecito. She was friends with their son Brock, and they'd had a live-in Irish nanny. It was strange: Cammie remembered nothing of that evening other than a game of Scrabble for Children with Brock and the nanny.
At that point in his brilliant career, Clark Sheppard had yet to make his fortune as a talent agent and the Sheppards had not been living large, so Cammie had been wowed by the place. It was a French chateau that
88
had been brought to America stone by stone and then painstakingly reassembled on a hillside with a perfect view of the Pacific.
Cammie had been eight at the time; she remembered hearing her parents argue a lot. Her father, who had always been very ambitious, was frustrated that his career hadn't yet gotten on track. Cammie's mother was an elementary school teacher who couldn't have cared less about the whole upwardly mobile show-business thing. She taught at the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, where the most liberal Los Angeles families who could afford the tuition sent their kids. Cammie had gone there for a while--until her mom died, in fact. Donna had been quiet, introspective, soft-spoken--the exact opposite of Cammie's father. In fact, she'd been perfect. At least that's how Cammie remembered her.
If one parent had to die, why couldn't it have been her son-of-a-bitch father? Of course, she understood full well how if that had happened she'd have been one of those valley girls buying a prom dress at Proms R Us in Sylmar, because that's all they would have been able to afford on her mother's schoolteacher salary.
That terrible night ten years ago, her father had awakened to find her mother missing. He'd immediately called the Coast Guard on the Strikers' ship-to-shore. When he was interviewed by the police, he claimed he'd taken a sleeping pill and hadn't realized she had never come to bed--he'd been out like a light since ten o'clock. The Strikers' story was that everything had been lovely on the yacht that night. No fighting, and only a single bottle
89
of Cristal shared four ways. They'd been as surprised as Clark Sheppard to awaken and find Donna gone without a trace.
But that made no sense to Cammie. For one thing, her father would never share a bottle of Cristal with three other people, if only on principle. Plus, she remembered,
even after all these years, how her parents and the Strikers would get sloshed together. She recalled, on one occasion, walking in to see Mrs. Striker sitting on her father's lap. That memory made her feel like puking; she quickly banished it from her brain.
Cammie gritted her teeth to keep herself from tearing up. The hardest thing was that her mother's body had never been recovered. At the Forest Lawn Cemetery, the headstone was merely symbolic, though she gave it the same respect as if her mother were actually buried there.
Mom. Mommy. How could you leave me?Once when Cammie was about twelve, a bird had managed to fly into the chimney of one of the six fireplaces in their new mansion, and the bird had headed straight for Cammie's room. It was a small yellow finch, and it perched on the silver headboard of Cammie's bed as if it belonged there. Yellow had been Cammie's mother's favorite color. She'd wanted the bird to stay, hadn't even called anyone to tell them it was there. But then she went off to school, and when she returned, the bird was gone.
Though Cammie had never told anyone, she always wondered if that bird had been ... more than a bird.
90
"Where'd you go?" Adam asked softly. His voice pulled her out of her musings; he put his large hands on her hips.
"Just thinking." She nudged her chin toward the distant yacht. Adam knew all about her mother. She'd told him everything. Except this: "Today is her birthday."
"Your mom's?"
Cammie nodded.
Adam turned her around and held her fast as a bigger-than-average wave rolled by.
"That's tough." He kissed her lightly. "Want dry land?"
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. They waded back to the beach and padded to their blanket, using two oversize black towels to dry off.
"Remember in Vegas, Cam? When you asked me if I'd help you find out what really happened to your mom that night?"
Cammie nodded. She had asked him.
"Well, I asked my parents to see what they could find out. I mean, they're lawyers. They can get access to all kinds of stuff that we can't."