an attorney (or a doctor), having first a daughter and then an adorable son. There isn’t any room in the plan for a fifteen-year-old girl at this time in my life and there isn’t a contingency for something like this.
Still feeling like I’ve been socked in the chest, I wander around my apartment; my mind is racing around looking for an exit. As I pace, I straighten. I align the picture frames on my mantel, I confirm that my CDs are in alphabetical order, and I fluff the pillows on my Pottery Barn couch. I like things to be perfect. I thrive on perfection…that’s why I’m so good at my job as a fact checker on The Renee Foster Show!. Okay, I admit that putting my degree in journalism to use confirming what color underwear Jennifer Aniston wears (white) and how John Travolta orders a steak (rare) isn’t exactly what I’d planned on, but it includes a brief (sixty-second) on-air segment every single day (Monday–Friday), and being on air really is my dream. Plus it’s a whole lot closer to perfection than a fifteen-year-old Victory teenager under my guardianship. I look at the photo exactly centered on my mantel; it’s a shot of Dan and me at his parents’ house last Christmas. I love this picture because we look like the ideal couple—faces squished together, smiling broadly in front of his mother’s uniformly decorated tree.
The first Christmas I spent with Dan’s family, I felt as if I’d died and gone to holiday heaven. Unlike the dusty, hot Victory Christmases I’d grown up with—the ones where my mother had brought the fake, color-not-found-in-nature-green tree in from the garage and not bothered to remove all the cobwebs before hanging mismatched glass balls and plastic Baby Jesuses all over it and plopping a supermarket ham on our regular dinner table—the McCafferty family Christmas was like a postcard. From their long mahogany dining room table, you can see the twelve-foot Douglas fir, decorated with matching gold balls and red bows on one side, and the front yard covered in a flawless blanket of snow on the other. Their mouthwatering homemade dinner is served on Wedgwood china, and everyone gathers around a baby grand to sing carols after dessert. Like I said, Holiday Heaven.
“Oh, God,” I moan to the perfect couple in the picture. I pick up the phone and dial Courtney’s cell phone. Debra Messing will have to understand—this is an emergency.
“Hello!” Courtney booms into my phone and her voice is so upbeat it almost makes me feel better…almost. I can picture her sitting in Debra Messing’s backyard, surrounded by Hollywood’s elite and talking on her perfectly rhinestoned flip phone.
Courtney is gorgeous. Way back when we first met, I was pretty sure that somebody like her would never want to be friends with a Victory girl like me. Courtney’s father is Bennett Cambridge, the head of the Watson Bros. movie studio, and her mother is Alana Russo Cambridge, a former movie star turned executive housewife. Executive housewife is a term Courtney penned for her mother, since she doesn’t actually do anything that a housewife does. She simply overseas the staff that does it in their Bel Air mansion, which is so big that it has its own bowling alley—which, Courtney often boasts, has two more lanes than the Spellings’.
Courtney is the spitting image of her glamorous mother, and the two are featured in every single Hollywood mother-daughter photo shoot alongside duos like Blythe and Gwyneth and Goldie and Kate. She is tall and slender, with curves in all the right places. Her curly blonde hair is always just on the complimentary side of bed head and her brown eyes are so dark that they look almost black. You never know from one day to the next if she’ll be in a tailored Armani suit or a sari that she actually got in India while chasing down the “love of her life,” of which there have been quite a few.
She is the most dramatic and impulsive person I know, the type of girl who can turn lemons into lemonade effortlessly and even make you forget you had lemons to begin with. Prime example: following Ajay Dhir all the way to India, determined to show him that they were meant to be together. When he finally was able to convince her that they were not (something, in Ajay’s defense, he had been trying to do for three months in Los Angeles before traveling home for his grandmother’s funeral), Courtney turned it around and made the trip one of the most fabulous shopping sprees I’ve ever heard of. If anyone can prevent me from becoming suicidal over this, it’s Courtney. Plus even though she’s not practicing, she did graduate from law school and pass the bar, so she should be able to figure out how to get me out of this mess from a legal standpoint.
“Court,” I say, feeling both relieved to have connected with her and terrified that by speaking the words aloud my situation will somehow become more real than it already is. “Something awful has happened.”
“What’s wrong?” she asks, and I know that even surrounded by a designer lunch and countless celebrities, she is giving me her undivided attention.
“Remember I told you about Charla?” I confirm, because while Courtney is brilliant and wonderful, she is known to have her share of “blonde moments.”
“Right, the dead girl,” she says in the same tone a person might confirm a girl had brown hair or was in dental school.
“She left me her daughter,” I spit it out. I don’t know how to sugarcoat it and there is no point beating around the bush.
“Oh my God!” Courtney exclaims, and I feel comforted that her sentiment is the same one I’ve been having since Buck Platner hung up the phone. “That’s so exciting!” she continues, and I am momentarily shocked before quickly realizing that she is in fact having a major blonde moment.
“No, Court, I am this kid’s legal guardian. I don’t have the papers or anything yet, but I’m pretty sure I have to raise her.”
“I’m so jealous!” Courtney continues, and I realize that she must be talking to someone at the party and not to me.
“Courtney!” I command—whatever starlet she is talking to is going to have to wait. “I need your undivided attention right now!”
She is the only person I can talk to. Besides Courtney, I don’t have many other friends. I’m friendly with people at work—like the days that I actually have the time to take a lunch break, if I’m not racing around to the dry cleaner or eyebrow waxer, I don’t have to eat alone; but there isn’t anybody else who knows about Victory. I’ve even been vague on the details with Dan. Needless to say, it’s a past I’ve worked all of my adult life to overcome and not something that I’m very happy to share with the world.
Daniel McCafferty is exactly the type of person I have always wanted to marry and I never wanted to take any chances with the relationship. He grew up in an affluent midwestern family and then followed his two older brothers to Princeton. After Princeton, he went to USC law school because he knew he wanted to practice in Los Angeles. Now he is an assistant district attorney and living in Beverly Hills. The apartment is in 90212, not 90210, but that’s because he has chosen a life of service as an ADA. Honestly, he would be making so much more money if he were working in a private firm, but he likes to give back to people. I know he wants his wife to be a certain type of person—to fit a certain image—and I’m not sure that person comes from Victory. I’ve simply said that I grew up in a small town and I’m not that close with my family. It’s all true, it’s just not very detailed, and thankfully that doesn’t seem to bother him, since we are officially engaged now. The plan was really going so well up until now. Our engagement arrived exactly when I wanted it to—give or take eight months—but if we plan the wedding in one year and then are married for a year and a half (instead of two years) before getting pregnant, we can catch up and be right on schedule. Dan and I may not have the passion or the sex life of fairy tales, but he is exactly what I have always wanted and I am positive (I really am) that I will be happier with him than with someone who can give me an orgasm—I can do that myself.
“Can I tell you, I was just thinking about getting inseminated,” Courtney starts chatting. “I’ve been playing with
