“I’m not even nominated.”
“No, but the films are, and, frankly, you’re the most interesting actress in both. You’re young, you’re hot, you’re going through a breakup and just sobbed your way home on the Metro in front of half the photographers in the city. You’re the one the world cares about.”
———
The world, it turned out, included Harper Moore.
I hadn’t heard from her, obviously. Amos had mentioned her only briefly, and only as “that mad woman Stampy dated.” I hadn’t even really considered that the rest of my old class at CADS would have graduated and might even be on their way to roles of their own.
Not until Ruchi phoned me and asked: “Who the fuck is Harper Moore?”
“What?”
“Harper Moore. Her PR just got in touch and asked if I wanted to set up a press moment.”
“Why?”
“He said to check outSwishmagazine. She’s on some new show on AHX. She went to—”
“Central Art and Drama School, yes.”
“Nadine, what the hell did you do to her?”
“Nadine Heywood stole my boyfriend,”
Claims New Star of AHX’sCity Girls
“That’s it?” I asked, flipping to the appropriate page—hardly able to focus my gaze on the words because Harper was staring back at me. It had only been a few years, but they’d chiseled her into perfection and polished her to a shine. Her mother would be proud—she held herself just like a model, hands on her hips, all jaunty angles as she leaned forward toward the lens, that long neck of hers jutting up from the high collar of the black dress she wore like it was bared to be bitten or slashed at your pleasure.
She did not need to do anything but exist for me to feel threatened. Only she had done something, hadn’t she? I found the right section.
But despite the looks inherited from her mother, the iconic ’70s model Greta Liao, Harper has been thoroughly unlucky in love. “Oh no, let’s not discuss that,” she says with a smile that doesn’t hide the pain behind the words. “I lost the only man I’ve ever loved to the biggest star in Hollywood. You can’t compete with that.”
If this beautiful woman sitting before me can’tcompete, surely nobody can. “No, no, sorry,” she says when I press. “It sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? I’m not saying Nadine stole my boyfriend … Well, okay, maybe I am saying that.”
“Nadine Heywood?” Not exactly the biggest star but certainly a rising one—and a woman whose own heartache has been well documented of late. But is there more to it? Perhaps this is simply karma coming back for her.
“Oh no, I shouldn’t be saying any of this. But yes, Nadine Heywood stole my boyfriend. It obviously didn’t work out for her either.”
———
“God, she looks good,” Amos said, leaning over my shoulder.
“Shut the fuck up, Amos.” I snapped the magazine closed with more aggression than I thought myself capable of. He plucked it out of my hands, dropping the tape he’d been measuring my hips with, and opened it back up again to peruse himself.
Harper. I almost couldn’t believe she was real. She surfaced a little too regularly in my thoughts, an infestation I couldn’t shake. But that’s what she’d become—a haunting thought, a rallying call, an idea to spur me on. Not a person in her own right, living her own life and plotting a course straight toward me.
But clearly somewhere between CADS and this adolescent shout in a newspaper, I’d lingered far more substantially inhermind.
There was a sort of pleasure in that.
Ruchi was watching me carefully. “It’s only this one interview. I don’t imagine it will get more traction.”
“Maybe it should,” I said quietly, looking back at Harper’s smug face gleaming out of the pages in Amos’s hands. God, she was such a prick. This stank of desperation—and wasn’t that laughable? That she might need to use me to claw her way up Hollywood’s ladder of fame?
She’d hate that even more, I think, to know her fame owed itself to my name on her treacherous lips.
“What do you mean?” Ruchi asked.
