Vivian Divine Is Dead (2 page)

As usual, Dad doesn’t even notice I’m there, so I scoot up next to him, feeling completely invisible. I should be used to it by now, but every time he ignores me it still hurts, like being stabbed with a dagger.

“Where did you find this?” I ask him, pushing my open hand under his nose. He doesn’t move from behind the camera.

“I’m shooting, Vivian,” he says. Dad’s always shooting. He insists on authenticity in every shot, so it takes forever to get each scene right. When I’m working with him, I learn how to break my way out of handcuffs and shoot real BB guns so the viewer hears the lightbulb
pop
when it goes out.

I stomp my feet. “But where did you find it?”

Irritated, Dad looks at the pink rose earring in my open palm. Something freezes; like a piece of film skipping a beat. “Can we talk about this later?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Now.”

Dad sighs and looks at me. As usual, it’s not going to be a long conversation: he doesn’t even bother to turn the camera off. “The police found it,” he says, “near where she was . . . you know.”

A hard knot swells up in my throat, and I can barely scrape the words out. “Why now?”

“It was caught between the floorboards. A janitor found it when he was mopping.” Dad squashes his hair down over a balding spot behind his left ear. “The police kept it for a month, as evidence.”

“Evidence of what?”

“I don’t know,” he snaps, and then softens. “Maybe DNA or something . . . I don’t know why it took them so long to find it, but, well, they finally gave it back.”

“Where’s the other one?”

Dad shakes his head, and his bottom lip trembles slightly. “They never found it.” He runs his hand through his hair, and I see a few bald spots peppered into his scalp.

“Are you pulling again?” I ask.

Dad doesn’t answer; he just mats his hair down to hide the bald spots. Dad has something called trichotillomania. Mary says it happens sometimes when people go through a stressful situation. They pull clumps of their hair out: it comes out easily, like the hair has also lost the will to live.

“Give it to me,” Dad says, so I extend my open hand, the pink diamond sparkling under the studio lights. Dad takes the earring out of my hand and slips it into his pocket.

“What are you gonna do with it?” I ask.

Dad glances at the red blinking light on the camera. “I’ve gotta get back to work,” he says, and turns away from me. Again.

Chapter Two

D
AD’S SHOOTING ONE SOUNDSTAGE
over from me, so it’s not a far run to my set on the studio’s back lot. The set for my movie,
The Story of Don Juan
, is pretty elaborate. There’s a full plastic graveyard, half a block wide, and cranes are hunched over the three tallest tombs, where Don Juan is eventually pulled to heaven by his dead fiancée, Ines. Suspension cables crowd the air ten feet above the tombs, rigging up to one main point: my flying harness.

At the north edge of the graveyard, Pierre is already here. He’s leaning against a plastic tombstone, his cropped white-blond bangs poking out from under his Don Juan hat, talking to the press. I can tell he’s enjoying the attention.

Like me, Pierre’s been in show business all his life. He knows all the industry’s ins and outs: the way to lose a quick ten pounds, how to show your best side for the cameras, how to stay up all night without getting bags under your eyes. And above all, he knows that there’s no such thing as bad press.
Even if you cheat on your girlfriend with her best friend.

Luckily, Mary’s by my side, which makes me feel better. I don’t think anyone’s even noticed her. Her uniform—a slim black suit—is perfect for slipping into my shadow unless I need her. She’s so good at it, sometimes I even forget she’s there.

Before Pierre notices me, I spin on my heel and stalk over to the director. He holds out my harness, his thick bifocals making him look like an ancient turtle.

“You okay?” he asks.

I’m tired of people asking me if I’m okay. Of course I’m not. I want to ask,
Why doesn’t Pierre love me anymore?
I remember how, when I saw him kissing Sparrow on TV last night, I replayed it over and over, my nails cutting into my palms. When my cell phone rang an hour later, I turned it off and went to bed without our usual two-hour “mushy phone chat,” as Mary calls it.

But now I just nod and step into my stiff harness.

This scene, where I pull Don Juan to heaven to save him from his sins, is killing me. First of all, Pierre is the actor playing Don Juan, and second, I have to look him in the eyes the whole time, with the sick-puppy-dog look of true love.
That look was so easy before, when I thought we had true love.

As the grips raise my harness into the air, I try not to think about the day Pierre and I first fell in love. It was a year ago, when we were wrapping up
Zombie Killer
, my blockbuster about an orphan who saves the human race.

Pierre was already a big star, having been the lead singer of Anime, a boy band from Europe. At the wrap party, after he performed his hit single “Sexy Angel,” girls surrounded him, all oohing and aahing, but he walked straight past them like they didn’t exist, stopped in front of me, and said:
I wrote that song for you.

A song for me.

Nobody had ever written a song for me. I don’t remember what the words were, something about angels and love at first sight. But for the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged somewhere. With
somebody.

Pierre understood me in ways nobody else had. He knew what it was like to get bad-mouthed for wearing something out of style or staying in bed for a week after a negative review. He knew what it was like to have a father more dedicated to his career than to you, and to feel lucky to get an online “Happy Birthday!” chat on your special day. We were instantly inseparable.

The newspapers called us “the most promising young couple in Hollywood,” and Star Studios signed us for two major films together. There were even rumors going around that he was going to ask me to marry him when I turned eighteen. Rumors I thought were true.

But Mom never trusted him. She didn’t like the way Pierre taught me the secret of a good crash diet to lose weight, or how I never saw Sparrow anymore, unless she hung out with both of us, or how radically different our zodiac signs were. That bothered her the most, I think. Pierre was fire and I was earth.
Fires can ravage the earth
, she said.
Be careful.
But none of Mom’s tarot cards could tell me about love, so I didn’t listen.

At Mom’s funeral, Pierre sang a song he wrote for her. For days afterward, he held me, stroked my unwashed hair, and kissed my lips with a force that made me forget everything else.
You’re the only one for me
, he said, and I believed it. Pierre was the only one who could make me feel better, and the only boy who ever whispered,
This is forever
.

That’s all gone now
, I remind myself.
There is no forever
.

“Vivian?” I hear from below me.

The Devil speaks
. When I look down, I’m suspended from a rope ten feet in the air, bathed in bright light, and I can barely see Pierre standing below me, dressed as Don Juan.

“My character’s name is Ines,” I snap. “And you’re Don Juan. So for once, try being professional, and stay in character.”

“But I have to talk to you!”

“You’ve said enough already.” Anger, hot as lava, shoots through me. I can feel myself tremble in my flying harness, and the cables holding me up rattle.

“Vivian?” the director calls up to me. “I need you to stay calm.”

“I’m sorry it ever happened. But last night, when Sparrow and I were, you know,” Pierre says, the sound of her name on his lips sawing me in half, “we heard something strange—”

Mary steps out of the shadows, her voice wrapping safely around me as she talks to the director. “Stop this. He’s upsetting her.”

“Pierre!” the director orders. “One more word and you’re off the set!”

“Yes, sir.” Pierre’s defeated voice makes me feel a little better, and my shaking slowly subsides.

“Vivian?” the director asks me, sadness coating the edges of every word. “Are you ready?”

“Ready,” I say. And it’s the truth. I’m always ready for a movie shoot. It’s like stepping out of reality for a minute, letting go and knowing something will catch you. The sad parts are still sad, but I get to call “Cut” to end the scene and walk away. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything like that in real life. I would’ve yelled “Cut” months ago.

I’m headed back to my trailer, having successfully avoided Pierre, when I hear Mary’s scream. I’d know that scream anywhere; despite her ability to kill a man in two seconds, she’s terrified of spiders. Give her a full-blown samurai with a mean streak, she’s fine, but pit her against a spider, and the eight-legged arachnid wins every time.

We have a deal: I’m in charge of smashing spiders, she’s in charge of assailing stalkers, so with my heels clip-clapping against the hot asphalt, I jog the last few steps to my pink trailer. My two-story, custom-made pink trailer is blinking sunlight from every window. I push my thumb against the keypad beside the door, and the door slides open into my empty interview room, complete with vacant leather couches and hulking studio lights.

I rush past the interview room, bolt up the stairs, and run through the marble-tiled bathroom. When I get to my bedroom, I’m expecting to see Mary standing on a chair, a thing the size of her baby toe crawling on the floor beneath her, but she’s just sitting on my bed, staring at my flat screen.

“Where’s the spider?” I ask.

Mary’s gasping for breath, like she’s having an asthma attack. “No spider.”

“Then what is it?” I ask, glancing around my pink chiffon-draped bedroom. Everything seems in place: the door to my walk-in closet is still slightly ajar; the half-drunk cappuccino rests on my nightstand, making a thick water ring on the mahogany.

“You know that DVD you gave me?” she says. “Well, I watched it and—”

“Breathe.”

Mary takes one deep, shaky breath. “You need to see it.”

“I don’t wanna see it,” I say, stepping closer to my nightstand and scowling at the milk now curdling up on the surface of my cappuccino. “That’s why I gave it to you.”

But Mary ignores me, focusing on the TV.

And that’s when I find out I’m going to die.

Chapter Three

I
DON’T WANT TO WATCH
as the familiar scene from Mom’s murder passes before me: the yellow
CRIME SCENE
tape, wrapped around the perimeter of the run-down apartment building, bleaching white as camera flashes hit it; the shattered streetlight outside the crumbling brick facade; the bloodstains on the second-story window. It’s the same scene from Mom’s
Etv!
Memorial Special
that I swore I’d never watch again, except this time, the voice-over is different.

“Last night, Vivian Divine was found dead in an apartment in North Hollywood.”

An ice-cold wind sweeps over me, making the hairs on my neck stand up.

“What did he say?” I ask Mary, chills running over my skin. She doesn’t answer; her eyes are glued to the screen. I turn back to the TV, shivers slithering down my spine as a collage of pictures of me fills the screen, all wearing that same cereal box grin.

“Just six months after the death of her mother, Pearl Divine, the world mourns this tragic loss.”

On TV comes the sorrow shot, the picture I couldn’t get away from for the past half year. It goes straight to the heartstrings of America: me at my mother’s funeral, wearing a black Chanel dress, glaring at my dad. At that time, nobody knew that twelve hours earlier he had a gun to his head. Or that I had found him, drunk off whiskey and delirious with grief, before the gun went off.

My Oscar picture flashes briefly onto the screen, and then fades away as the voice-over continues:

“November first will live on in history as the day the young starlet and recent Oscar nominee Vivian Divine was killed.”

The camera zooms in on a grainy picture. It looks like a cell phone shot, blurry but unmistakable. I’m lying facedown in my own blood, a knife sticking straight through the
V
on my purple hoodie.

I sink down onto the bed, wrapping my arms around my knees.
It’s exactly how Mom was killed. The same apartment building, the blood on the window, the knife through her back. . . .
I’m too stunned to breathe, and I feel like I’m falling into a deep hole, darkness surrounding me on all sides.

The hoodie I’m wearing, my purple one with a
V
across the back, suddenly feels threatening. Sweat breaks out across my skin, and I can’t feel anything but the knife plunging into my back. My sweat stinks like blood, and—

“Vivian?”

My head snaps up. Mary has the same frightened look as when she wakes me screaming from a nightmare. I want to answer, but my voice is tied in a knot in my throat and I’m shaking so hard I can barely see the TV.

Then out of the corner of my eye, I see my filming schedule tacked to the wall of the trailer and something catches in my brain.
The video said I died on November 1.
My brain struggles to remember why that’s so important. Then it slaps me. Hard. If today’s October 28, that means I’m going to die . . . four days from now.

Everything starts to fade away. It’s like I’m not here, in my trailer, in this body. A heavy numbness spreads over me and the room gets fuzzy. I want to look in a mirror to make sure I’m still here.

“Maybe it’s just a stalker,” I whisper. Hollywood’s used to stalkers, and most of them are harmless. Everyone wants their fifteen minutes of fame. Just last month, some girl threatened suicide out of love for Pierre, and a guy followed Sparrow home swearing God ordered them to be together. “People will do anything for attention.”

“For attention?” Mary says, and I know we’re both thinking of the dangerous ones, like Mark David Chapman, who shot John Lennon, or the obsessed fan who locked Sparrow’s cousin in his cellar for two days. “I think we have to consider the possibility,” she says, and I’m already putting my hands over my ears, hoping to block out her next words, “that someone’s coming after you.”

“This isn’t a movie, Mary. These kinds of things don’t happen. Not in real life.”

I could tell her about real life, where people just die, suddenly, for no reason, on a normal day. There’s no great buildup—just one moment they’re here, and the next they’re gone.

“It’s happened before,” Mary whispers.

“To who?” I roll my eyes. Mary’s watched every TV series under the sun. She’s probably waiting for a detective to walk in with a piece of evidence gripped in a set of tweezers.

“I’ll just go to the police,” I continue. “They’ll protect me from this psycho, whoever it is.”

Mary’s eyes are choked with tears. They remind me of my cappuccino’s curdled milk, thick swaths of liquid clinging to the surface.

“Did you hear me?” I say to Mary, raising my voice. “The police will protect me.”

“I heard you,” Mary says softly. “Your mother said the same thing.”