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“I had to,” SondraBeth said, nodding as she tipped more powder onto the top of the shiny wooden bureau. “Once my boobs came in—well, let’s just say those ranch hands got a little too grabby.” She looked at the coke, then picked up a cigarette instead. “My father didn’t do a thing—he’d always said he wished I’d been a boy—and my mother…” SondraBeth paused as she lit up the cigarette. “She was basically checked out.” She inhaled deeply and passed the cigarette over to Pandy. “So I split,” she said as she exhaled. “I’d heard about this place where they’d help you—but they were Jesus freaks, so I went and worked at this strip club called the Little Chicken Ranch instead.”
“What? You ran away and you were a stripper?”
SondraBeth looked back at the line of coke. “Hello? That’s what usually happens to runaway girls. They become strippers. Or worse.”
“Oh, jeez,” Pandy said as she picked up the straw, trying to digest this information. “I’m sorry,” she added, wiping the sticky residue from beneath her nostrils.
“Best way to make money in a pinch,” SondraBeth said, leaning over to take another line. “But it gave me an advantage, that’s for sure. It made me realize how incredibly stupid men are. They’re worse than animals—most animals have more respect for each other than most men have for women. But what the fuck, right? I didn’t make the world; I just have to live in it. And then I got lucky—some guy saw me and said I should be a model. But the fact is, if I had to sell my body to survive, I would,” she said fiercely, handing Pandy the straw.
And suddenly, Pandy understood. SondraBeth was an angry girl, too.
“That fucking sucks,” she declared.
“Hey.” SondraBeth shrugged. “I survived. So that was my childhood. What about yours?”
“Mine?” Pandy laughed. “It was terrible. My sister and I were the cootie queens of the school.”
“You?” SondraBeth shook her head. “No way.”
“We were pretty isolated. I never even went to see a movie in a movie theater until I was sixteen. Before that, I thought most movies were like those old black-and-white films on TV.”
“Christ,” SondraBeth said. “Where the hell did you grow up?”
“In Connecticut.” Pandy smiled viciously. “In the smallest town on the planet. Called…” She hesitated. “Wallis.”
SondraBeth’s eyes bugged out of her head. “You’ve got a town named after you, sista?”
Pandy waved this away. “It’s hardly a town. More of a village. My great-great-great-something founded it back in the early 1700s. And then they just stayed there.”
“What about your parents?”
“They died in a car crash when I was twenty. So I’m kind of an orphan.”
“What about your sister?”
Pandy hesitated. SondraBeth had just revealed one of her deepest secrets; for the first time in her life, Pandy was tempted to disclose her own.
Except it wasn’t her secret to reveal. “She lives in Amsterdam,” Pandy said quickly. “I haven’t seen her for a while.”
“Why on earth would anyone live in Amsterdam, except for the pot?”
“I guess she likes it there.” Pandy’s voice sounded unintentionally forlorn.
“Oh, Peege! I’m sorry,” SondraBeth exclaimed. She got on her hands and knees and crawled across the bed toward Pandy. She flung her arms open and pulled Pandy’s head to her chest, patting her on the back. “Don’t be sad. From now on, I’ll be your sister.”
And she had been. For a while, anyway. But what SondraBeth didn’t know was that even sisters didn’t last forever.
CHAPTER SIX
LOOKING BACK on it, Pandy realized that she, too, should have known better. She should have understood the dangers of being so close with SondraBeth, and how the success of Monica would inevitably drive them apart. But she’d never suspected that a man—Doug Stone—would end up being the lever, inserting himself into their friendship like a wedge.
And she certainly should have known better about Doug.
But once again, when it came to romance, hope trumped common sense.
Three years had passed since that raucous party at the Chateau Marmont where SondraBeth claimed Pandy had made out with Doug in a drunken moment that Pandy still couldn’t remember.
During those three years, Doug had been proclaimed the next big thing. Named one of People magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive—which in turn landed him on the cover of Vanity Fair—he was now a genuine movie star. During a cold, blustery February, while Pandy was celebrating the success of another Monica book and the second Monica movie was in production, Doug Stone arrived in New York.
