Starstruck. Lauren Conrad
was more of a second-season story line. Meanwhile, Courtney Love—whose barely comprehensible tweet about Kate’s YouTube video had first brought Kate into the spotlight—seemed to be watching over her like some crazy fairy godmother (O gawd, gurl iss makin it! hitthe top sister, and sned me a postcard!!!! she’d recently tweeted). If Kate ever met the former lead singer of Hole, she was going to give her a big, fat kiss.
Kate reached down to brush a dragonfly away from her ankle. Yes, she was really, really lucky. There was no doubt about it.
But it wasn’t as if life was all sunshine and roses. For one, she had—against her castmates’ advice—read some of the comments about her on the internet. People were brutal. Who is this random chick who thinks she can sing? asked NeNe67. Bru43ski wrote, Why would they cast this girl? She is sooooo boring. Kate, horrified, had stopped right there. Lesson learned. Quickly.
Then there was Luke Kelly, the drop-dead gorgeous Australian actor she’d fallen for at the beginning of the summer. Even though Kate knew she’d been right to break up with him—if a guy wouldn’t own up to dating you, you had to give him the boot, right?—the decision still hurt. She’d thought they had something. Something real.
For a while, Luke had seemed to feel that way, too. But then his attention turned to something fake: his manufactured-for-the-cameras relationship with Carmen Curtis. As costars of The End of Love, Luke and Carmen were the new Hollywood It couple. Kate saw pictures of them everywhere she turned. She couldn’t even buy her over-priced salad at Whole Foods without them smiling at her from the cover of a magazine.
Then, to add insult to injury, she’d learned that Luke and Carmen had hooked up—for real—in the spring. Nothing had come of it, and it was before she’d met either of them, but still. If it didn’t mean anything, why had they both kept it a secret from her?
Kate thought she’d found a true friend in Carmen, but now she felt like an idiot. Carmen had been texting her— at first acting like there was nothing wrong, and then wanting to talk—but Kate wasn’t interested in anything she had to say off-camera.
“Life is different, all right,” Kate said, rolling over onto her stomach and letting the sun warm her back. “It’s mostly great, though.” She felt like she was reminding herself of it as much as she was telling Natalie.
“Oh, hey, you guys,” chirped a voice. “What’s up?”
Kate turned back over and saw her costar Gaby Garcia approaching them, wearing a pair of six-inch strappy sandals and clutching one of her trademark spirulina smoothies.
“What is that?” Natalie asked. “It looks like you put Oscar the Grouch into a blender.”
Kate laughed, but Gaby only looked confused. “Gaby,” Kate said, “you remember Natalie. She was my roommate before I moved here. Natalie, you remember Gaby, my fellow Fame Gamer.”
“Hi,” Gaby said. She sat down on a chaise longue and sighed. Her brow twitched almost imperceptibly, which was—thanks to all the Botox injected into her forehead— her best version of a frown.
“What’s the matter?” Kate asked. “You look upset … I think.”
Gaby took a sip of her smoothie and sighed again. “It’s Madison,” she said. “I’m worried about her.” She slipped off her high heels and contemplatively rubbed at her toes. “I mean—wow. Like, I’m really worried? I just … like …”
Kate waited for Gaby to finish her sentence, but then realized that nothing more was forthcoming. “It’s pretty crazy,” Kate said.
Gaby turned her brown eyes to Kate. She bit her over-plumped lip. “I tried to talk to her about what happened with the necklace, but she totally shut me down. And I tried to ask her about my diamond earrings, too. I mean, those were totally on my dresser until her dad came over. And then he leaves, and suddenly they’re gone. I was all, Like that’s really a coincidence! But then after the whole necklace thing, I’m thinking maybe Madison took them. I mean, it was obviously one of them, right? And of course she didn’t want to talk about that, either.”
Gaby stopped and took a deep breath. It was a long monologue for her.
Kate nodded. “Yeah, well, I’m sure it’s a hard thing to talk about.”
She had tried to talk to Madison, too. In the first days after the Fame Game premiere, when it seemed like their whole world was exploding in flashbulbs, Madison had been practically invisible. She’d been a no-show at the morning-after brunch, and she’d spent ten minutes at the informal cocktail party for cast and crew before making a French exit out the back. And no one had seen her since.
Kate had figured she was just taking a break from things, lying low in Charlie’s bungalow, and ringing up quite the LAbite.com bill. But then things had gotten weird: Suddenly Madison was nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Her photo was on every celebrity website and on the cover of every gossip magazine. And they all accused her of the same thing: theft.
It was so unlike Madison to avoid attention—they’d all thought something was up. Sophia had said Madison was upset because their dad had to leave town unexpectedly. Kate could tell how much Madison adored Charlie, so that explanation made sense. But Kate, for one, certainly hadn’t expected the headlines: STARLET STEALS STONES; MADISON MAKES OFF WITH MILLIONS. Kate’s reaction had been shock, quickly followed by confusion. Really? Madison had stolen and sold her loaner necklace? Really? One could argue that Madison was a lot of things: cruel, sly, manipulative, and selfish. But an honest-to-goodness thief? It didn’t sound right. The girl had a collection of Birkins that rivaled Victoria Beckham’s. Why would she steal a diamond necklace when she had a wardrobe worth double that in value?
Gaby set her drink down on the concrete. “Between Madison and her father … well, you know what they say: The apple doesn’t fall far from the pie.”
“I think the saying is ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,’” Natalie suggested.
“Whatever,” Gaby said. “Same thing.”
“I find it all really hard to believe,” Kate said. “I don’t get why she’d steal a necklace and then sell it. Did she actually think she wouldn’t get caught?”
“Who knows with that girl,” Natalie said. “She lied, slept, and cheated her way to the top in the first place. Is this really so out of character for her?”
Kate looked up at the big windows of Madison’s and Gaby’s apartment. She could see the passing clouds reflected on their shiny surface. Madison hadn’t been living there for a while now, but she still thought of it as Madison’s and Gaby’s place. Maybe she hadn’t known Madison as well as she thought she had. It wasn’t like they were good friends or anything, but she’d started to like her. She’d thought everything was cool with them. So the more Madison avoided her, the more Kate began to think she really was guilty. Maybe it didn’t make sense that Madison would have stolen the necklace, but it made even less sense that she would say she’d stolen it when she hadn’t.
Kate leaned back and rearranged the Egyptian-cotton towel she was using for a pillow. She didn’t want to think about Madison anymore. Obviously the girl didn’t want to talk, and maybe she never would. “Mad’ll be fine,” Kate said. “It will do her some good to see things from the bottom for a change.”
Gaby shot her a look of surprise. “Ouch,” she said.
Kate shrugged. She knew that didn’t sound like something that the nice girl from Columbus, Ohio—the one who couldn’t bear to pack her old teddy bear in a moving box because she was afraid she’d hurt its feelings—would say. (Instead she’d carried Paddington to her new apartment in her purse, with his legs sticking out like some furry kidnapping victim.) But she had reached out to Madison and got a whole lot of nothing in return. So, moving on.
On second thought, maybe fame had made Kate feel different. But just a tiny bit—and anyway, she didn’t have much of a choice. In this business, it was kill or be killed. A girl needed to