hold up a hand to stop her. He just interrupted with, “How about another thirty grand per episode? Will that ease your worries? But we’ll need your answer by the end of today. Or we’ll have to look for someone else. And I’m sure we won’t have any trouble finding someone who wants the job.”
Madison took a deep breath and willed her facial expression to remain neutral. (Thanks to years of Botox injections this wasn’t much of a challenge.) Suddenly they were talking money—like, real money. And Madison always needed money, because looking as good as she did didn’t come cheap. She could already imagine the expression on her agent’s face when she told him. Nick would be so proud of her.
“PopTV will send over the revised offer to your agent,” Trevor said, as if reading her mind. He was an expert at staying one step ahead of his girls and hitting them with an unforeseen twist—both on the show and off.
“And I’m the star,” Madison said firmly.
Trevor smiled. “You can’t make a star, Madison,” he said smoothly. “You can only show her off to the world.”
Madison laughed. Another thing about Trevor? He always knew just what bullshit thing to say. She loved that about him.
“And no one makes more than me?”
Trevor laughed. “After you, do you really think the network can afford it?”
She took another sip of her coconut water and then, ever so slowly, extended her hand. “Then I think,” she said, the corners of her mouth pulling up into a brilliant, ten-thousand-dollar smile, “we may have a deal.”
Kate Hayes tore off her Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf apron and pulled her strawberry-blond hair from its elastic as she raced to her car. This was her final interview for the new Trevor Lord show and she didn’t want to be late. She’d met with Dana twice already, and apparently she’d done well, because Trevor’s assistant had called that morning, telling Kate to come at two. And make sure to bring your guitar, she’d said, her voice syrupy but firm.
When Dana first approached her at the Coffee Bean, Kate didn’t know what to think. She’d noticed the tall, tired-looking woman staring at her from behind the food case long after she’d paid for her sugar-free Soy Vanilla Blended. Blank-faced, Kate had gone about grinding beans and pulling shots, pretending that nothing was unusual about having a stranger ogle her like she was some misplaced exotic animal. Finally, when Kate was beginning to feel slightly freaked out by the attention, Dana had introduced herself. She was a TV producer, she said, and she wondered if Kate was the girl who’d done that YouTube cover of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”
“Who hasn’t done a cover of ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’?” Kate had asked, still not trusting that Dana was the real deal. “It’s like the number-one karaoke song ever.”
Dana had run her fingers through her frazzled hair and sighed. No, she’d said, she meant the one that took Cyndi Lauper’s 1980s party anthem and transformed it into a slow, quiet, nearly heartbreaking look at class anxiety and a young girl’s longing for independence. “That was you, wasn’t it?” Dana asked, narrowing her brown eyes.
Kate was taken aback. It was one thing to be recognized in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, but in L.A.? Sure, her YouTube video had gone viral, ever since Courtney Love had tweeted something barely comprehensible about it (whos this brillient chica I found bymistake loveher!), the girls over at HelloGiggles.com had made her a pick of the day, and Rolling Stone had done a small profile of her on its website. Kate still had no idea how all that had happened, but it had made her, briefly, just a little bit famous.
But hey, this was Los Angeles, land of a thousand people who were just a little bit famous. It was a sea of Where do I know you from? faces where nearly everyone had had a brief encounter with celebrity only to have it taken away just as swiftly.
Dana had asked her to come in for a screen test, and Kate had surprised herself by agreeing. But as she sat in a small, sparely decorated room with Dana and a single camera, Kate had to fight the urge to downplay the video, which she’d made on a lark last year with her ex-boyfriend. She’d had no idea Ethan was going to upload it to the web, and they’d gotten into a huge fight once she found out he had. But then people started commenting on the video, liking it and sharing it and reposting it. Everyone had agreed that her voice was incredible, unusual. Like Lucinda Williams meets Joni Mitchell, watched over by the ghost of Nina Simone, someone wrote. (And it hadn’t hurt that as she’d strummed the last chords of the song, Ethan’s Bernese mountain dog had flat-out howled, as if he couldn’t bear to live in a world in which Kate Hayes was no longer singing. That got all the dog lovers on her team faster than you could say Purina Brand Puppy Chow.)
The problem with the video was that it wasn’t her music, which Kate had been writing obsessively ever since she was eleven years old and started teaching herself to play her dad’s old guitar. It was someone else’s. Which meant that the video was, in a way, just a glorified version of karaoke.
But it was enough to make you pack up your things and move to L.A., Kate reminded herself. It was enough to make you think you might be able to make it.
Yes, she could admit it: She’d thought her video would be the beginning of something. But ever since she’d arrived in L.A. it had seemed like more of a dead end.
Speaking of dead ends, Kate was now stuck in traffic. Again. Even though she’d been in the city for a year, she still hadn’t figured out how to get anywhere on time. She checked the clock—she had twenty minutes to get to Trevor Lord’s office, which was probably thirty minutes away at this rate. She glanced next at the little brass chime that hung from her rearview mirror, something her mother called “the bell of safe travel.” Marlene Hayes said it would protect against accidents on the crowded L.A. freeways. But as Kate sat in the exhaust cloud of a Cadillac Escalade, stopped at yet another red light, she wished her mother had given her a bell of speedy travel. That she could have used.
She figured she might as well multitask and felt around for an eyeliner in the bottom of her purse. Obviously she hoped Trevor would appreciate her talent, but it couldn’t hurt to put on some makeup. As she finished smudging the black kohl a touch, her phone buzzed beside her on the passenger seat. She picked up. “I’m late,” she said into the mouthpiece, not even caring to whom she was talking.
“Well, that’s certainly a surprise,” said the cheerful voice on the other end of the line.
“Oh, hey, Jess,” Kate said. Jessica was her sister, older by fifteen months and taller by five inches. She was calling from Durham, North Carolina, where she played center on the Duke women’s basketball team. “What’s up?”
“Just calling to check in on my favorite chanteuse. That’s French for singer, you know.”
Kate snorted. “Just because I didn’t go straight to college doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.”
“I know, I’m just kidding. How are you?”
Kate thought about this for a moment before answering. She hardly talked to her sister these days (Jess was so busy with classes and basketball practice), and Kate didn’t want to sound like a bummer. On the other hand, they were best friends and blood relations, and there was no reason to lie. “Well, I’m stuck in traffic. I’m late for an interview. There are termites in my
