AllFreeNovel
Share Us
For a moment, she pretended she was in Miami.
The fantasy was short-lived. Looming ahead was a second Monica billboard—another reminder of
her disastrous failure.
What no one knew was that without her new book, she couldn’t pay Jonny.
Meaning she, PJ Wallis, was finished. Monica had won after all.
And then she frowned. Like the first billboard, this Monica also lacked her leg.
Despite the circumstances, the sight caused her to convulse with mad, wild laughter. She suddenly had a crazy urge to call SondraBeth Schnowzer to tell her that Monica’s leg was still missing.
SondraBeth was the only person in the world who would have appreciated the hilarity of the situation.
The car rounded the corner, and Pandy took one last look at the billboard as her laughter turned to tears. And for the first time in a long time, Pandy remembered how different it had once been, nine years ago when it was new and fresh and exciting…
And how it had all started when she’d said those four fateful words:
“I want that girl.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER FOUR
I WANT that girl!” Pandy had exclaimed.
She was in Los Angeles, sitting in the backseat of a town car, when she’d seen the billboard. It was hanging over Sunset right near the Chateau Marmont, where Pandy was headed after another dispiriting round of auditions for the lead role of Monica.
All of a sudden, the car had come around the curve after Doheny, and there she was: masses of hair fluttering behind her like the American flag; shining green-gold eyes looking out over the flattened landscape of the universe. In her arms was a golden wolf pup.
Then the tagline: WHAT IF DOGS CAN SEE STARS, TOO?
“Her!” she screamed, pointing up at the billboard as they passed by. “That girl.”
The driver laughed. “She’s a model.”
“So what?”
Handsome and genial, the driver laughed again. “It’s the same old story. Everyone who comes to Hollywood has the same dream. They think they’re going to discover some unknown talent. Some gorgeous model who turns out to be a movie star in disguise.”
Pandy smiled. “And isn’t that your story, too? A movie star in a gorgeous male model’s body?”
The driver glanced back at her in his rearview mirror. He laughed toothily, appreciating her humor. “I guess you could say that.”
For a second she could see The Girl’s reflection in his mirrored shades.
And then she was gone, and in the next moment, the driver was pulling into the driveway of the Chateau Marmont.
The studio had flown Pandy out to Los Angeles for the casting of Monica, and Pandy had been given the star treatment: a car and driver at her disposal, and bungalow 1 at the Chateau. Bungalow 1 may or may not have been the room where John Belushi died; the staff was vague on the particulars. In any case, the large, dark apartment was enormous. It included two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a terrace shielded from the pool by a chain-link fence woven with thick greenery. Not surprisingly, given its history, there was something unsettling about the place. The first evening, sitting in the front room on the orange fuzzy-caterpillar couch, the TV an arm’s length away, Pandy had thought, You could go crazy here.
Well, she wouldn’t be the first, she thought now, getting out of the car and slotting her key into the private door that led to the pool and the bungalow. Throwing her stuff onto the caterpillar chaise, she rushed upstairs and flung open the windows, looking past the brown haze on the horizon and trying not to think about the word “no.” A word that was to showbiz as smog was to LA.
“No.”
“No?”
“Noooo.”
