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“What?” Pandy demanded.
SondraBeth shrugged. “It’s just that I got a call from my agent. According to him, PP says you’re in the papers too much. And not in a good way.”
“Me?” Pandy laughed, outraged. “What about you?”
“I’m not as famous as you are, Peege. Anyway,” she continued, honking her horn at a pedestrian trying to cross against the light, “don’t get huffy. He’s mad at me, too.”
“About what?” Pandy said, outraged.
“About my sticky fingers.”
“I see,” Pandy replied knowingly as she leaned back and crossed her arms. She was all too familiar with SondraBeth’s habit of picking up things that didn’t belong to her, with the sort of careless impunity that implied she simply didn’t know better.
“Come on, Peege,” SondraBeth whined. “You know how it is. I borrowed from the wardrobe department a couple of times. I have to. Everyone expects me to look a certain way, but no one seems to understand that I can’t actually afford to look that way. And, okay, maybe the clothes didn’t come back perfect. But it’s not my fault if I fall down every now and again. I’ve never had to walk in high heels on a goddamned sidewalk before.” She swerved sharply to avoid hitting a taxi that had suddenly stopped to disgorge a passenger.
“Fuck PP. He’s toast!” Pandy declared, slamming her hand on the dashboard for emphasis. “How dare a man who calls himself Pee-Pee tell us what to do?”
They laughed the whole way through the long, long drive up the coast, stopping for fried clams and Bloody Marys, screaming profanities out the windows at other drivers—“Asshat!” “Asswipe!”—and even talking their way out of a speeding ticket.
They were drunk by the time they got on the ferry, and drunker and high when they got off. In the middle of the ferry ride, SondraBeth had pulled Pandy into the stinking stall in the ladies’ room. SondraBeth shoved her hand down her bra and pulled out a small envelope of cocaine. “Stole it from Joules himself the other night,” she said, handing Pandy the package and a set of keys. “It’s melting…it’s melting… ,” she opined, like the Wicked Witch of the West.
“It’s your goddamned body heat,” Pandy said, dipping the key into the powder and taking a hit. “You’re just tooooooooo hot!”
“And don’t I know it.”
Full of themselves, the
y strolled through the packs of tourists in the lounge. It was their first time together away from the axis of LA and New York, and Pandy discovered yet another thing about SondraBeth: She had a disconcerting way of getting friendly with strangers. Which she immediately began doing the moment they entered the bar at the front of the ferry.
“Hello,” she said brightly to the bartender as she plopped onto a stool. “What’s your name?”
“Huh?” The bartender’s head jerked up.
“I’m SondraBeth,” she said, leaning over the counter. “And this,” she added with a flourish, “is PJ Wallis.”
The bartender, an old guy with a creased face who looked like he couldn’t deal with one more drunk tourist, took a good look at SondraBeth. He wiped his hands on a cloth and suddenly beamed, causing the skin on his face to shatter into a million wrinkles.
“You don’t say,” he said, glancing quickly at Pandy and back to SondraBeth.
“PJ Wallis,” SondraBeth repeated. When the bartender only cocked his head in inquiry, she hissed, “She’s famous.”
Before Pandy could intervene, SondraBeth was telling the bartender—along with several other passengers, all of whom were men—about how Pandy had “discovered” her in a hair salon in LA and had brought her to New York to be the star of the movie version of Monica.
* * *
They got the last room at one of the big inns on the bay in Edgartown.
They spent the first night holed up in their room, sprawled on the king-sized bed, ordering vodka cranberries from the curious and yet seemingly amused staff. As the TV blared in the background, they snorted up the rest of the first gram, and then another that SondraBeth had hidden in her suitcase. “Did I ever tell you the story about the Little Chicken Ranch?” SondraBeth asked.
“No,” Pandy said, laughing. She figured SondraBeth was talking nonsense.
“I’m serious. And you can’t ever tell anyone. It could ruin my career.”
“I promise,” Pandy said.
“Well.” SondraBeth took a deep breath, got off the bed, and pulled back the curtain. The view was of the Dumpsters behind the kitchen, which was why the room had been available. “Remember how I told you I grew up on a cattle ranch? Well, I did, but I ran away when I was sixteen.”
“You did?” Pandy asked in awe. She’d never met anyone who had actually run away from home before.
