Sam took a deep breath and linked her arm through Anna's; they started down the red carpet in earnest. “I didn't think I'd be this freaked. Do you know how much fatter TV makes you look?”
“You look fantastic, Sam, honestly.”
Sam squeezed Anna's arm with her own, in gratitude.
“Sam Sharpe!” someone yelled. “Marilyn Haskell, for
Inside Access
. “Sam has arrived with Hollywood's newest ‘It’ girl!”
“It” girl
? Anna thought.
A young woman in her twenties made a beeline for them, a camera crew in tow. Her red hair had been flat-ironed into submission. As Sam steeled herself, Anna hung back. For one thing, she had zero interest in being interviewed, either as herself or as whoever it was people kept mistaking her for. For another, she didn't want to steal Sam's thunder.
“This is the daughter of Jackson Sharpe, the great one himself, who's been nominated once again for best actor,” Marilyn gushed. “Sam, that dress is smokin’. Who is it?”
“De la Renta,” Sam replied as the red light of the television camera glinted off her face. Anna watched her friend smile hugely. “What about you, Marilyn?”
“Bebe! And the bling was made by my younger sister in Oregon. Hey, it looks like you took off a few pounds since that
Vanity Fair
article a few months ago,” Marilyn continued to gush in the same over-the-top tone. “That's fantastic.” She looked over at Anna. “So I noticed you two were arm-in-arm on your way down the carpet.” Marilyn poked her microphone toward Anna. “So are you two, like,
together
? Because you certainly look like you're
together
.”
“I don't know,” Anna responded innocently. “Are you?” Anna looked back and forth between Marilyn and one of the cameramen.
Marilyn's smile grew forced. “You're the one being interviewed.”
“Why do you say that? Are you embarrassed by the nature of your relationship?” Anna asked.
Marilyn frantically looked past Anna and bellowed, “Kirsten! Kirsten Dunst! Hey, over here, Kirsten! It's Marilyn Haskell,
Inside Access
!”
As the reporter scuttled away, Sam pulled Anna down the carpet, laughing so hard she had to gasp for breath. “That was priceless.”
“My mother always told me that if someone asks you an incredibly rude question, instead of answering, ask them a question in return,” Anna explained with a chuckle. “Remember that.”
“I will.” Sam chortled. “It rocks. Of course, it helps when it comes from the lips of a girl so cool she doesn't appear to have bodily functions. The new ‘It’ girl, no less.”
Anna laughed. “Right. That's me.”
They finally reached the security tent, stepped inside, and showed their credentials. They'd be sitting two levels up, near the front. With luck, they'd be able to see Jackson make his way to the stage. To her surprise, Anna felt her heart start to race with excitement. She hadn't figured that Oscar night—afternoon, evening, whatever—would have that kind of effect on her, but it was as if the crowd and the anticipation and even reporters like Marilyn Haskell had conspired to hijack her emotions. She grinned spontaneously, because she understood just what was going on.
She was having fun.
Make out in an airplane lavatory with a guy you just met on the airplane? Check.
Have sex for the first time? Check.
Attend the Academy Awards with the daughter of a superstar? Check.
Perhaps it wasn't quite as personally dazzling and life-altering as the have-sex-for-the-first-time thing, but Anna could not deny that attending the Oscars with the daughter of Jackson Sharpe was well outside the well-bred-East-Coast-WASP box. And outside that box was exactly where she wanted to be.
“S
am? Anna? Hey, how's it going?”
They were standing toward the back of the third level of the rapidly filling Kodak Theatre. Anna had been impressed when she came in—she'd been in many of the world's great performing spaces, but the enormous Kodak rivaled them all. The dominant color theme was red, and there was more crushed velvet than at a bad Italian wedding. There were three huge sections of red seats down below, while the tiers themselves swept around in a semicircle several hundred feet from the football-field-size stage. Everything still smelled new, since the theater was just a few years old.
Anna and Sam turned to see Parker Pinelli hustling down the aisle. With his dirty-blond hair, intense blue eyes, and cleft chin, Parker was a spectacular-looking guy and an aspiring actor. He was a friend from Beverly Hills High School, and Anna had learned through a number of conversations with him that his gifted appearance fronted a less-than-gifted intelligence. On the other hand, intelligence wasn't everything—Parker had always been very nice to her. He really seemed like a decent guy.
“Parker,” Sam declared. “What are you doing here?”
“Seat-filler,” he explained, with a grin almost as bright as Jackson Sharpe's. “Until I get my own nomination.”
Anna regarded him blankly. “Seat-fill—”
“Seat-filler,” Sam explained, waving her arms over the expanse of upholstered seats that spread out down to the main stage. “Basically, glorified props. Gil Cates—he's the producer of the show—hires people to fill the seats when actors or presenters have to go to the bathroom, or to do whatever, or when they're back-stage. How would a bunch of empty seats look to the billion people watching on TV?”
Anna nodded, though she wondered why the television cameras just didn't focus on another part of the audience.
Parker smiled. “Last year I sat in for Ben Stiller for the last half hour. I heard a rumor he went to the Hollywood Coffee Bean and never came back. Renée Zellweger was in front of me, Angelina Jolie was behind me. How killer is that?” He smiled at the memory. “So, you guys up for Vegas?”
An announcement over the theater's speaker system reported that there were just twenty minutes until the show began; Anna wasn't sure she had heard Parker correctly over the noisy crowd and loud announcement. “What about Las Vegas?”
“Come on, Anna,” Sam insisted. “I told you. The senior trip thingie.”
Anna had heard about the senior trip. Later that week, the entire graduating class of Beverly Hills High—herself included—would be going to Washington, D.C., for several days. She'd already sent in her check for fifteen hundred dollars. Not that a trip to the nation's capital was a big deal. She'd been there at least a dozen times, including one time last year when she'd dined with Senators Clinton and Schumer and another time when she'd attended President Bush's first inauguration; her parents were smart enough to donate to both political parties.
“The senior trip is to Washington,” Anna reminded them, though she was sure they needed no reminder. “I don't know anything about Las Vegas.”
“You will.” Parker took her arm lightly and edged her toward the seats so that the people in the aisle could pass more easily. Then he pointed across the theater. “See that skinny brunette standing near Charlize Theron? I auditioned with her once. Total space cadet.”
Sam smiled. “I heard the brunette turned into this total coke 'ho. They had to replace her in
Grown
-
up
.”
Anna tapped Sam on the shoulder. “Could you two please focus with me for just a moment? Isn't the senior trip to Washington?”
“Nope.” Sam laughed lightly as the loudspeaker announced that there were just fifteen minutes to air time and that all Academy Awards personnel should be in their assigned positions. “I told you, we're going to Vegas. Vegas like you've never seen it before. Upscale Vegas.”
“I've never been and no you didn't,” Anna protested as once again she had to edge out of the way of people finding their way to their seats. The awards show had an orchestra in a pit below the stage, and it now started to play “There's No Business Like Show Business,” which Anna recognized from the cartoons she'd sometimes watched as a child.
“Yes, I did. I'm sure of it. Hey, don't blame me if you didn't put it in your BlackBerry.” Sam shrugged.
“I didn't put it in my BlackBerry because I don't
have
a BlackBerry. And you never said anything.”
“Well, if I didn't, I meant to,” Sam told her with a long-suffering sigh. “You try living with a father who's up for an Oscar and a stepmother from hell with a newborn spawn and see how perfect
your
memory is. Anyway, we're not going to Washington.”
Parker shuddered. “Monuments, more monuments, Congress in action and all that shit. How boring would that be?”
Anna shook her head in disbelief. In her three and a half months on the West Coast, she'd discovered that Los Angeles was a different kind of place. But what kind of high school would change its itinerary at the last minute from Washington, D.C., to Sin City?
“Okay,” she said evenly. “So we're all going to Las Vegas. Where does everyone stay?”
Parker and Sam looked at each other, then exploded in laughter.
“Anna,
everyone
doesn't go Las Vegas,” Parker sputtered. “Just—”
“The cool kids.” Sam grinned. “A few of the cool kids, really. It's tradition. Hey, check out the dress on Nipples over there. She's about ten rows from the front. Her dress is completely see-through.”
Parker flashed his movie-star-wannabe grin. “Don't worry, Anna. It's a piece of cake. On Tuesday—that's when everyone is going—we call in to the school office with the stomach flu.”
“The plane to Washington leaves without us, we hop on my father's jet, and we party,” Sam went on, her eyes glued to the stage, where a couple of sound engineers were doing a final check. “An hour later we're in Sin City.”
“Like Sam said, it's a tradition. Except for the jet, of course. Usually we drive over. It's a straight shot across the desert, and there aren't a lot of cops.” The lights in the auditorium blinked on and off—an indication that it was just ten minutes to show time. “I gotta book.” He leaned toward Anna and gazed soulfully into her eyes. “So, you
are
coming with us, right?”
“I'm not sure. …”
Parker put both hands directly over his heart, atop his single-breasted Ted Lapidus tux. Anna saw that it was slightly frayed at the cuffs. “You
have
to come, Anna. Really.”
Odd. Parker had just shifted into obvious flirt mode. But their relationship lay in that vast gray area between friend and acquaintance. It wasn't like she'd ever had anything going on him. Then he gave her and Sam a thumbs-up before hurrying away to wherever the seat-fillers congregated.
Anna shook her head in disbelief as he departed. “Was Parker flirting with me just now?”
“Nah,” Sam explained. “He told me he's up for a part in a couple of days on
Everwood
. They'll probably turn it into a U-five.”
“What's a U-five?”
Sam laughed her patented Anna-you're-so-naive-it's-charming laugh. “Under five. If a script gives you under five lines, the producers don't have to pay you as much. Union rules. Anyway, he'd be this boy slut who uses fake sincerity to seduce every girl he sees. He was rehearsing.”
Before Anna had a chance to respond, an older woman with perfectly coiffed silver hair stepped by them, nodding at Anna. “I loved you in that little independent film. So original. You've got a big future.” She continued up the aisle.
Anna and Sam turned to each other and shrugged.
It was a long two and a half hours until they got to the Best Actor award; there were many times during the ceremony when Anna wished that she'd been watching at home. Up in the second tier of the theater—the third level, really—with the stage so far away that she needed binoculars (which neither she nor Sam had brought), she couldn't see very well at all. Evidently, nepotism was sufficient to get you a coveted seat at the Academy Awards, but it didn't mean you'd get a
good
seat.
Back in New York, Anna used to go to the annual Oscars party given by the parents of her classmate Olivia Macklow. The Macklows lived in a town house just a few doors away from the Percys; they were theater producers who'd compiled an enviable record in the last several years by producing a series of small-cast musicals about the sexual foibles of aging. The first show had been called
Forty-sex
, the second one
Fifty-sex
, and so on. The critics had hated these musicals—Anna remembered reading a scathing review in the
New York Times
of
Sixty-sex
,—but the public ate them up. Consequently, the Macklows had become filthy rich.
The feature of the evening was that Olivia gave every guest a supply of supple rubber bands before the broadcast began. The idea was that whoever fired a rubber band and scored a direct hit on the actress who showed the most cleavage went home with a bottle of Veuve-Clicquot from the Macklows' well-stocked wine cellar.
After another break for television commercials, it was finally time for the Best Actor award. Jackson had been nominated not for one of his summer tent-pole blockbusters but for a low-budget (read: under twenty million dollars) independent film he'd done as a favor for the Weinstein brothers. The picture was a tale of redemption called
Snow Job
, in which he'd played a disgraced-in-a-sex-scandal college basketball coach who took the only job offered him: coaching a tiny high school team in the Eskimo village of Ambler, Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle. The title was a pun on the location and on how Jackson's character was able to convince his group of misfit basketball players that their skills actually merited their participation in the sport.
Snow Job
had garnered Jackson the best reviews of his career and won him his third Oscar nomination. But he was up against brutal competition: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Al Pacino, and a blind teenage British actor named Alan Bosworth, whose psychological thriller
Miracles
had been a dark-horse international hit. Sam had seen it and declared to Anna that it was a pretentious piece of shit. Objectively speaking, she'd said, her father deserved to win. But she'd offered Anna the caveat that in Hollywood, nothing was objective.
Meryl Streep and Danny DeVito were presenting the award. Sam grabbed Anna's hand as Streep tore open the envelope containing the name of the winner.