Cammie's father wore his signature gray power suit and was reading the
Los Angeles Times
(you could always tell the agents from the producers in Hollywood—agents wore suits, producers wore jeans); Patricia was still in her lavender paisley silk Monique robe and was reading the
Hollywood Reporter.
Mia, meanwhile, was hunched over a science textbook, doing homework that she'd neglected the night before. Cammie was gratified to see that Mia was wearing her own clothes and not Cammie's.
“Mornin',” her father grunted, barely looking up from the newspaper. Neither Patricia nor Mia acknowl-edged her presence. This was not unusual—she and her stepmother were barely on speaking terms, and she and Mia hadn't been doing much better since she'd caught Mia wearing a brand new Dolce & Gabbana black gathered-chiffon corset blouse of hers just a few days earlier. In retaliation, Cammie had marched into Mia's room and used the gardener's clipping shears to shred Mia's favorite distressed leather jacket into brown confetti.
She sipped her coffee, reflecting on the night before. Okay, so she'd flirted a little with Rock 'n' Roll Doctor Actor. But she'd stayed true to Adam, and more important, she'd been true to herself. Her father's head was buried in the Living section; he was reading the review of the new Martin Scorsese film destined not to win an Oscar no matter how good it was. So much for them “discussing” what had happened last night. He just didn't give a shit.
Cammie picked up the front section of the paper and scanned the headlines. The mayor was meeting with the governor in Sacramento. Big whoop. The Russians had sent more cosmonauts to the International Space Station. Double whoop. Gas prices had hit a new peak in California. Yawn. The Bel Air Grand Hotel had burned to the ground.
Well, there goes prom. Oh yeah.
Part of her felt extremely relieved.
She thrust it at her father. “You see this?”
He glanced at the paper. “Yeah. Too bad, huh? We were there last night.”
Cammie quickly scanned the story. No one had been hurt in the blaze, but the hotel was ruined. It had burned quickly because there was no sprinkler system and because the city fire hydrant system was antiquated. The fire evidently had smoldered in a second-floor bathroom waste bin before erupting in full—
Fuck me hard.
She'd been in a second-floor bathroom with her new pal. She vaguely recalled him reaching for the roach and her carelessly tossing it into the waste bin right before their kiss. Had she made sure that the roach was extinguished before she'd offed it?
Double fuck. She was a fucking
arsonist.
“Cammie?”
She looked up from the
Times.
Mia was staring at her. “You look kinda sick.”
“Thanks, I love you, too,” Cammie sneered, desperately trying to cover her horror.
Oh my God, I'm responsible for the destruction of a Los Angeles landmark!
Okay, the hotel had been toast forever, but still, she hadn't intended to turn it into toast
literally.
This was terrible!
She nibbled at her lower lip, chewing off her Tarte lip gloss. There wasn't any way the fire inspectors could find out it was her, was there? No way. Rock 'n' Roll Doctor Actor wouldn't dare say a word; he'd have to admit what he'd been doing in the bathroom.
But even if no one ever found out she had caused the fire, she'd know. What was she feeling? Something … strange.
Guilt.
That was it. So this was what guilt felt like. It was not a feeling with which she was well accustomed.
“Excuse me, Cammie,” one of the maids announced, appearing in the archway. What was her name—Svetlana, something like that? She looked like she could break bricks with her bare hands. “A friend of yours is out front. Sam?”
Oh shit. Somehow Sam had found out. And if Sam had found out, what about the police? Was Cammie looking forward to graduation at Vacaville prison?
She opened the front door the blinding sunshine. Sam was right there, in jeans and a white fitted Cavalli T-shirt, holding the
Los Angeles Times.
She waved the morning paper in Cammie's face. “Did you see this?”
“Of course.” A small flock of red finches took off from the huge bird feeder Svetlana had erected to the right of the front door. “What brings you here? Bird-watching?”
“I wasn't in the mood for the whole family-at-breakfast thing,” Sam explained. She gestured to the newspaper. “What asshole would throw a cigarette butt in a waste basket?”
A guilty heat buzzed inside Cammie's head. “Someone who hates old hotels?” She kept her face totally impassive. “Anyway, why do we care?”
“Because prom is fucked.”
Cammie shielded her eyes from the sun. “I've said that all along.”
“Prom is not about
you,
Cammie. I mean our
location
for prom is fucked.”
“Let's do something else. Fly to Rio, how about that?”
“How about that your boyfriend wants to go?” Sam reminded Cammie, with an intense look. “Anyway, I've already been on the phone to the prom weenies. They wanted to move it to the school gym, complete with streamers hanging from the basketball hoops and a disco light. I did an immediate intervention.”
Cammie lifted her hair off her neck; it was a scorcher of a morning. “That was nice of you, even if your school spirit
is
nauseating.”
“It's not school spirit, it's … wait. I did tell you about my movie, right?”
“No. What movie?”
“A documentary I'm doing on prom, which is totally going to launch my directing career.”
“I'm waiting for the other Manolo to drop.”
“Picture, if you will, the Beverly Hills High School B-list preparing for prom, desperately trying to scratch their way to the A-list,” Sam explained. “A commentary on the teen social structure of the rich and famous. Prom is a perfect microcosm of said social structure. I told the B's I would help them with prom and supply the A's.”
“And being B's, they're clueless to the neediness oozing from their pores that will be oh-so-visible to the camera,” Cammie filled in. The truth was, this was a very shrewd idea on Sam's part.
“They think they're all about to be movie stars.”
Cammie smiled. “You're an evil genius worthy of my friendship.”
“I'm expanding the concept. Other proms. What it says about teens and their social strata. Like that.”
“Want to come in and ask Mia about proms in the valley?” Cammie offered. “Because that's like a foreign country.”
Sam shook her head. “Too much to do; I can only stay a minute.”
“So what new place did you find?”
“You know how my dad is doing that remake of
Ben Hur?”
“Sure.” Jackson Sharpe's
Ben Hur
remake was the talk of the town. Half the industry was aghast that Jackson was remaking one of the great films of all time; the other half couldn't wait to see a fresh take on
Ben Hur
with decent CGI and a twenty-first-century budget.
“They built the Colosseum outside of Palmdale for the big chariot race. My dad called the producers this morning; they're not shooting there on prom night. Tada, it's ours. For prom.”
“A toga party for prom?” Cammie scrunched up her nose. “Isn't that a little
Animal House?”
Sam laughed. “Feel free to wear the designer duds of your choice. Can't you just picture it? Ancient Rome—which, by the by, fell due to its inhabitants' unbridled decadence, juxtaposed with the equally unbridled decadence that is our prom. The haves and the have-nots, et cetera, et cetera. It's so perfect I could kiss me.”
Cammie nodded approvingly. “It
is
great, Sam. I'm impressed.”
“Impressed enough to help me with the movie on prom night? I have a zillion things to do and, like, no time to do it now.”
Cammie thought about that one for a moment. She
did
feel guilty about burning down a Los Angeles landmark. Helping Sam with her film would be a kind of penance. She only wished she could share the truth with Sam, who appreciated irony more than anyone else Cammie knew. But she didn't tell. Instead, she said yes.
“T
he chariot race set from
Ben-Hur,
“ Anna concluded. She'd just finished filling Ben in on the latest plot point in the prom saga; Sam had relayed the whole story to her at school. Ben had been training for his new job at the club and hadn't seen the news. He'd picked her up at eight to take her out for dinner. He wore baggy Lucky jeans—very low key and therefore very sexy, with a sky-blue Lacoste tennis shirt. They'd agreed to go casual, so Anna had on jeans, too, with a white T-shirt and her favorite gray flannel sweater, so well worn that it was as cool as cotton.
“A movie set for the prom,” Ben marveled as he steered his black BMW from the 405 onto the exit ramp for the 101 north. “Leave it to Sam.”
“Miss Resourceful,” Anna agreed. The sun was just beginning to set; spectacular colors refracted in the western sky—the upside of Los Angeles smog.
“I kind of liked that old hotel,” Ben mused aloud as he changed lanes. “A client of my dad's lived there whenever she was doing a movie. When I was, like, fifteen she slipped me a key to her suite and told me to visit her.”
Anna made a face. “Please tell me she was under thirty.”
“Not even close.”
“Now tell me you didn't take her up on it.”
Dimples twinkling, he steered with his left hand and put his right hand over his heart. “Do I look like a kiss-and-tell kind of guy?”
She studied him for a minute. “You have the smuggest look on your face.”
“You are
so
much fun to tease. No, I didn't take her up on it. Damn.” A traffic jam—it was the end of afternoon rush hour, after all—forced him to brake quickly. “I gotta hand it to Sam—she knows how to pull strings. Half the schools in L.A. have their proms on Friday night, the other half on Saturday. Every decent place was booked months ago.”
“Same thing in New York. Where are we headed?” Anna queried.
“Nowhere, if the traffic doesn't thin out.”
“I just didn't expect you to take me to the
valley
.”
His eyes flicked to her and then back to the freeway, where the traffic had mysteriously begun to move again. “You haven't lived here long enough to be a snob about the San Fernando Valley.”
“‘Home of the unwashed masses?’” Anna joked. “That's what Cammie calls it. I'm not a snob, and you know it. And the answer to my question is … ?”
“What color is your prom dress?”
“What are you talking about?”
Ben burst out laughing. “I was artfully changing the subject so that I didn't have to answer your question.”
“So you're keeping me in the dark about our destination,” she surmised.
“Exactly. Let's just say that tonight you'll get the chance to try something you've never tried before. And we'll leave it at that.”
A grizzled old man in rags carrying a plastic garbage bag over his shoulder was walking along the blacktop that bordered the expressway. “Poor guy,” Ben murmured.
“It's funny,” Anna mused. “My mother does all this charity work, but it's always for chic causes: museums, the symphony, the ballet. If she walked by that man begging on a street corner and he had his hand out, she wouldn't even see him.”
Ben's eyes flicked to Anna, then back to the road. “You're nothing like her, you know.”
She smiled. “This might sound awful, but that's one of the nicest things you could say to me.”
Anna had loved Ben's self-assuredness right from the start, when they'd met on the plane; it was sexy. What made it even hotter was learning that it was tempered with kindness. Goodness, even. He cared about people and hated to see anyone get hurt.
She opened the console where he kept his CDs, knowing that Flogging Molly would be on top; it was Ben's current favorite band. Instead, she found something else. “Ani DiFranco,
Not a Pretty Girl?
“
“She's this alt chick singer who was big in the nineties.” Ben nodded toward the CD. “That's Maddy's. She wanted me to hear it.”
He flicked on his blinker and got into the right lane, then took the Coldwater Canyon exit to Studio City. “Her prom's the night after yours.”
Maddy. Lately, the girl's name seemed to come up whenever she was together with Ben lately.
“That's nice,” Anna commented, hoping she sounded much more pleasant than she felt—she had a niggling little suspicion that Maddy's interest in Ben was a bit more than friendly.
“She's going with Jack,” Ben continued.
Thank God.
“Great!”
She saw him knit his eyebrows.
“Not great?” Anna ventured.
Ben puffed some air out between his lips. “Look, Jack is a good bud of mine, but …” He hesitated. “Remember when I was fooling around and I said that all guys were dogs?”
“Who could forget such poetry?” Anna teased.
“Let's just say that when it comes to girls, Jack has had major canine moments.” He turned left onto crowded Ventura Boulevard, the main drag of the valley. It was just as packed with cars as the 101 had been.
“You're worried about her,” Anna filled in.
“Well, yeah,” he declared, as if it were obvious. “She is the last of the innocents, Anna, I mean it. No way is she ready for Jack Walker.”
Anna put the Ani DiFranco CD back in the console. “I think you should relax. Maddy has done a lot of things harder than going to her prom with Jack. She moved to a new town, went to a new school—”
“So did you.”
“I didn't have my stomach stapled,” Anna reminded him.
“Kids still give her shit at her high school,” Ben interjected. “Amazing what assholes people can be.”
“It's sweet that you feel like a big brother to her, Ben, but I think she's a strong person. Maybe she's ready for new things.”
“Maybe.” He didn't sound convinced.
Ben swung a right turn and pulled over to a valet stand in front of a dark wooden building. The gold-filigreed sign announced,
SWINGERS.
No. It couldn't be. Anna had read somewhere that the valley was the center of the porn industry. Had Ben had brought her to a
swingers'
club?
This
was the new thing he expected her to try? How could he … why would he … ?