“Crazy, isn’t it? That movie’s a mess. The script languishes in rewrite hell for the better part of the decade, then more rewrites before shooting, then a cast member axed a week or so before it starts production.”

  “But who replaced him, Dad?” I asked, as a cold dread seeped through me. I feared I knew who he’d say.

  “Jenner Davies. Of all people, Jenner Davies.”

  I stumbled back, and grabbed hold of a fencepost at the head of the trail.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I guess his charitable makeover campaign worked even better than he planned,” I said heavily. But it wasn’t his makeover campaign that had won him a part. It was blackmail.

  “That’s why the photos of Riley and Avery never ran,” I said to Anaka, frustration laced through my voice as the sun began its trek up the sky, casting early morning light across the hills. “They were never designed to run. They were taken for leverage, and Jenner used that leverage to blackmail Avery Brock into dumping Nick and stealing the role of the sixth student in weekend detention. Avery didn’t want his indiscretions to get out.”

  All because of me. Because I was seduced by money. Because I hadn’t thought to do the simplest of background checks on Keats Wharton. I’d believed he was who he said he was.

  “Don’t berate yourself, sweetie.” Anaka said after I told her everything as I hiked. I was too upset to jog, so I was power walking, and talking.

  “But it’s my fault he lost the part, Anaka.”

  “How would you have possibly known this would happen?” she said, then yawned deeply. I’d woken her up. She liked to sleep in on Fridays, but I wasn’t ready to call William this morning and discuss it with him. I needed to talk this out with my closest friend.

  “I don’t know. But I should have been smarter. I mean, how many one-year-out-of-college-graduates run photo agencies?”

  “How many college students earn a part-time living as a paparazzo? Only one,” she countered. “You.”

  “Two, actually. There’s another girl, but I think she’s nineteen,” I said, thinking of Flash.

  “Fine. One, two, whatever. It’s practically the same, and my point is he seemed totally plausible, and he paid you in cash.”

  I stopped walking, and pressed my thumb and forefinger hard against the bridge of my nose. “I just feel so stupid,” I said in a low voice, as I moved to the side of the trail to let a headphone-wearing guy run past me.

  “But, Jess. There’s no way you could have known Jenner was behind it.”

  “If I had studied up on publicists in Hollywood, I might have.”

  “Beat yourself up some more. It’s so good for you. But even if you studied the faces of every publicist in LA, you wouldn’t necessarily have been able to pick out the younger brother of Jenner Davies’s publicist. That’s why Jenner and the other dude sent the younger brother. To fool you. They planned it all out. They plotted it. And you have to admit, they did a damn good job.”

  I resumed my walk, and breathed out hard. “Yeah, they did,” I said. From the website, to the other photo placements, to the business cards, the plan was beyond solid, and I might never have even known about the ruse if I hadn’t stumbled upon the three of them toasting at Rosanna’s Hideout when I went to retrieve my toothpaste. Keats had played me all right, but I was merely an unimportant pawn. The real chess piece was Jenner Davies checkmating Avery Brock.

  The teen actor with the angry attitude had found his way back on screen with a bribe. And Avery Brock was exactly the type of person who was susceptible to blackmail, because blackmail only works when you have something to hide. Avery had a lot to cover up. It was ironic how I’d thought Riley was being set up by the poet brothers, when Avery turned out to be the real target. But where there was a target, there was a victim. That victim was Nick, and he was the innocent bystander with the wound from the bullet he didn’t see coming. I couldn’t just let him take the hit and lose a job. I had to make good for him.

  “I’m going to call Keats and confront him,” I announced to Anaka, feeling like I was taking charge of the situation.

  “What good will that do?”

  “I don’t know. But I feel bad for what happened to Nick. Given our, you know…”

  “Your history,” she said, finishing the sentence. “As photographer and subject, Jess.”

  “Yeah, and now my photos of someone else have hurt him again,” I said, guilt pinging through my chest.

  “Look, I hate to say this, but you’re one of the winners here.”

  I scoffed. “Winners? How do you figure?”

  “You got paid. You got paid well. You made out okay,” Anaka said, talking coolly and calmly through the situation. “Look, Jenner had something on Avery Brock. He knew Avery was up to something, and so he sensed an opportunity and he took advantage of it. That’s what Hollywood is. That’s what Hollywood does. You should know as well as anyone. You document this stuff all the time, and the only reason it seems different now is you feel like you know the people. But this affair was going to happen. And someone was going to get the shots. And someone was going to use them to his advantage, whether or not you were involved.”

  She was right. There was an inevitability to the whole ruse. If Keats hadn’t found me, he would have tracked down another photographer. Still, this was one of those times when I felt about myself the way a lot of other people did about the paparazzi.

  That we were scum.

  I hung up with Anaka, blocked my number, and called Keats, hoping I’d catch him off guard. There was just something about a call from a private number that made Los Angelenos pick up their phones.

  “Keats here,” he said, and I wanted to smack him. He was playing the part and talking like a businessman, even though he was an actor like everyone else.

  “I wanted to commend you for your performance,” I said as I climbed up a series of switchbacks on the trail.

  “Excuse me? Who’s this?”

  “Just the ‘girl after your own heart,’ remember?” I said, quoting himself back to him.

  “Oh, Jess. Good morning.”

  “Not such a good morning for Nick Ballast, though, is it? I know what you and your brother did. I know who your brother is. Jenner’s publicist. I know you guys have something on Avery, and so your brother and Jenner blackmailed Avery to get on the movie.”

  “Whoa. You’re making a lot of assumptions.”

  “But none of them are wrong. So they’re not really assumptions. It’s kind of scummy, don’t you think?”

  He laughed so hard it was as if he was barking through the phone line. “You take pictures of actors and directors cheating with each other and I’m scum?”

  When he said that, I smiled, because I remembered I had a trump card. The person who takes the pictures almost always does. I wasn’t going to play it yet, but play it I would. “But the point is someone got hurt here. Nick Ballast had nothing to do with any of this. With you, with Jenner, or with Avery. And now he lost his job because of what you guys did. That’s just wrong.”

  “Nick Ballast is a big boy. I have a feeling he’ll be just fine.”

  “You can’t know that. Besides, Jenner’s plan won’t work if everyone knows what’s going on, right?” I asked, showing the corner of that trump card. Let him squirm.

  I could hear Keats rustling around, maybe getting out of bed, standing up, starting to worry. “What do you mean?”

  “Jenner’s leverage was that he’d keep Avery’s affair a secret in exchange for the role in The Weekenders, right? If everyone knew Avery was fooling around with Riley, Jenner would have no leverage to get the part in the first place,” I said, even as I wondered how Jenner had known that Avery and Riley were hooking up. How would Jenner have been privy to that info? “But if the pictures got out…”

  “You’re not going to share the pictures, Jess,” Keats said, but his voice wavered. He didn’t know what I’d do. He didn’t know me.

  “I have the copies. I have the files. I could get them to any photo agency and onto any site in seconds.”

  “But you won’t,” Keats said, and now his voice was firm and commanding. I slowed my pace. “Because I anticipated this might happen. And that’s why my brother and I picked you. Not because of your shots of Riley and Miles. Because you’re putting yourself through college, and then medical school by taking pictures. We researched you, Jess. We did our homework,” he said, and a chill ran down my spine. “Call me crazy, but I don’t think J.P. and whatever agencies you work for would be happy when they hear you backstab your clients. Because I’m your client, Jess. Whether you like it or not. You deposited the money. You were paid. You want all the photo agencies in town to know you take their money and then turn around and threaten them?”

  Silence gripped my throat, like a hand clamping down. I seared inside from the hot shame of his threat. And from the harsh truth of his statement. I wanted to punch him. Not only because he was hitting below the belt, but because he’d found my weak spot, and was using it against me. My Achilles’ heel. My dreams, my hope, my future of medical school and the way I paid for it—the way I had to pay for it. I felt like Avery Brock. I felt like that dick of a director because Keats had leverage on me now.

  He was right. I couldn’t turn on him because then I’d be known for doing just that. I’d never work in this town again.

  “You go ahead and run those pictures and I’ll make sure every photo agency knows how you do business.”

  “You’re an ass,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Yeah. Probably. That’s why I’ll be good in this business. It’s cutthroat.”

  “And what are you going to do when other photogs take pictures of Avery? You know someone else will catch him on camera with Riley. It’s the inevitable law of Hollywood hooking up,” I said, scrambling to regain some kind of foothold.

  “The deal will be done by then. The movie will have started shooting with Jenner in the role. We moved first, and we moved fast, and that’s what matters. Avery won’t replace another actor.”

  “You don’t know that,” I pointed out.

  “I’ll take my chances. But look, it was nice doing business with you. And hey, my hat’s off to you. You played it well. You thought you had me. But in the end, Jess, we both get to walk away having gotten what we wanted. I guess you are a girl after my own black and twisted heart. We’re just a couple of players in Hollywood after all. Here’s to dealmaking.”

  He hung up first, and I stared at the phone, my head pounding with the anger of having been played. I pushed my hair out of my face, blowing a frustrated sigh across my lips.

  “Heads up.”

  I turned around in time to press myself against a tree to let a group of pink shorts–wearing middle-aged women run past me. They must be a running group, training for a breast cancer run together, because they were led by a younger woman, who was cheering them on and shouting motivational phrases.

  A personal trainer.

  As I let them pass, I flashed back on the image of Nick Ballast and his trainer from earlier in the week, recalling that they ran not far from here. Excitement flared in me, the daring possibility that I could make things right. That I could fix my mistake by telling the one person who could do something about this whole mess I’d made.

  Nick.

  Because this was my real trump card—not photos, but encyclopedic knowledge of celebrities’ whereabouts. I knew where stars hung out. I had studied them, memorized their routines, and committed their every habit to memory.

  Turning around, I ran as fast as I could back to my scooter. I yanked on my helmet and sped off to the parking lot at the trailhead where Nick had been seen running the other day. Nick Ballast was an early morning exercise junkie, and I hoped against hope that I’d catch him. I’d screwed him over and I couldn’t just let that lie. Especially since the news had probably broken by now. When I parked at the trails, a quick check of my email revealed a Hollywood Breakdown news alert. I read the item and it was like a hard kick in the stomach with the heel of a sharp boot: Nick Ballast Booted from The Weekenders, Replaced by Jenner Davies.

  The news my dad had first heard from my makeup artist mom’s friend had made it into print a mere hour later. That’s how it worked in Tinsel Town. That’s why you had to move quickly if you wanted to make a living reporting, shooting, or following the famous faces that speckled the canvas of Southern California.

  The lot was empty, so I stretched and waited. After thirty minutes, Nick pulled up and emerged from the passenger side of a brown Mercedes, sunglasses on. His goateed trainer got out of the driver’s side, a Bluetooth tucked on his ear. Nick was laughing and smiling, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He and his trainer headed for the path.

  I called out. “Hey, Nick.”

  The look on his face had turned veiled, unreadable. “Hey,” he said. He probably thought I was a fan but couldn’t be sure.

  “I’m a photographer,” I said quickly, and with those words the trainer grabbed the sleeve of Nick’s T-shirt and nodded to the path. Because photographers were the bad guys. Nick and his trainer began to jog, but I kept pace as I began my confessional. “I don’t have a camera with me now. I’m not here to take a picture. I’m here because I know that Jenner bribed Avery Brock to get your role on The Weekenders. He bribed him using photos I took. But I had no idea they were going to be used that way. And if I had, I wouldn’t have taken them.”

  He stopped running. He didn’t seem surprised that I’d mentioned the photos of Avery. He seemed intrigued. “But what did you think they were going to be used for?”

  His response threw me off. I figured he’d want to know more about the pictures and that he could use my information to get his job back. But instead, his question was inquisitive, it was lawyerly, and it cut me to the core.

  “I just thought they’d be used—” I started, but then I stopped. I thought they’d be used on a website or a magazine. I thought they’d be used to titillate the public who craved sordid stories just like I did.

  “You thought they’d be used on some gossip site, right?” he fired back. “Whatever these pictures were. You thought they’d just go up online? Just like the pictures of me eating in my car. Did you take those pictures, too?”

  I might as well be in the witness box because I was getting a grilling before the jury and I was sure that no twelve people would sympathize with a paparazzo.

  “Yes,” I said in a small voice. But then I spoke up, because I might be a bottom-feeder on the lowest rung in Hollywood, but I understood Nick. I had the same issues. I wanted him to know I wasn’t that different from him. That stars are just like us. Just like me. “I’m sorry. I feel bad for taking those pictures. I know what it’s like to battle with food. I’ve been there myself.”

  Nick pushed his sunglasses on top of his hair, giving me full view of his green eyes and boyish face. He raised both his hands toward his left shoulder, took out an imaginary bow, and began to play a make-believe violin.

  “Too bad you don’t have your camera now to get this shot,” he said with a full-on sneer of a smile as his violin-playing hand stopped thrumming in time to flip me the bird.

  Then he and his trainer left me in the dust.

  I turned back the way I came, anger coursing through me as I cursed under my breath like a sailor. I wasn’t swearing at Nick, though. Nick had been screwed over, and it had been my fault. Instead, I cursed Jenner, but most of all I cursed myself.

  As I reached the parking lot, I forced myself to cordon off the encounter with Nick. I could wallow in it, or I could keep moving like the other sharks in this town, and there wasn’t a choice between the two options. I had to stay strong. I had to stay hungry. I had to keep taking pictures whether the subjects liked it or not. I reminded myself of what J.P. had taught me when I started working for him: There’s a dividing line between celebrities and the rest of us. You stay on your side, Jess, and you never ever apologize for a photo. We’re all just trying to make a living in this town.

  I replayed his words, nodding as if he were here giving me a pep talk. I needed a pep talk because I’d started to go soft. But I could put my hard shell back on. I had to live and die in LA.

  8

  William

  * * *

  After a full morning of being Uncle James’s errand boy, a task that entailed picking up his dry cleaning and fetching coffee, I was tired of his runaround. I supposed I shouldn’t complain—a job was a job was a job. But yet, he’d shown zero indication that he would sponsor a visa, and sending me out on girl Friday tasks was unlikely to prove my worth.

  As I headed to the printer to retrieve a backup of the guest list, I heard James’s loud voice from his nearby office.

  “Your credentials are great. I’d love to have you come in and we can talk more about the details of working here. We’re looking to expand and hire more full-timers and I’ve been the most impressed with you of all the interviewees,” he said, and I nearly stopped in my tracks. I continued very slowly to the printer, so I could hear the rest of his chat.

  “Absolutely. Come in Monday and we’ll nail down the details.”

  He hung up as I grabbed the pages. What the hell? I’d been practically begging the bastard for a job, and he’d gone and offered a gig to someone else. Annoyance coursed through me. I couldn’t catch a break with him, and he was constantly stringing me along. If he was going to keep teasing me, I’d just as soon cut bait with him.

  I popped my head into his office, knocking twice. “Knock, knock.”

  “Come in, William,” he said gruffly, barely glancing up from his computer. “You think you could get me a sandwich soon? My stomach is growling.”

  Deep breath. Take a deep, calm breath. “Of course. Just let me know what kind. And by the way, I couldn’t help but overhear as I was walking down the hall that you’re hiring someone. I think that’s fantastic, and I’m hoping you might have room here for me, too,” I said, gripping the printouts tightly to channel my nerves.