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It doesn’t matter what I think about visitors, though—I’ve barely even finished the sentence when the door swings open abruptly.
“I said you can’t come in!” I turn to shout embarrassingly weakly.
Heidi just rolls her eyes and leans against the vanity counter, phone in hand. As always, her features are severe—a sharp, pointy nose, icy blue eyes, and a blunt, shoulder-length blond bob doing nothing to counter her personality’s critical nature. “Don’t be absurd, Raquel. We’re all professionals here. Roberta will style your hair while you lie there on the floor. Then you can still have your moment.”
“My moment?” I question. “Trust me, I did not choose this moment.”
Heidi nods placatingly. “Right, sweetie.” With a snap of Heidi’s fingers, Roberta enters the room and starts running her unwelcome fingers through my hair.
Suddenly, something occurs to me, and I jerk my head around to look at Heidi with a general disregard for the hair stylist I didn’t ask to be here.
“Wasn’t the door locked?”
“I picked it.” Heidi shrugs nonchalantly. She’s always nonchalant about her own actions, if I’m honest with myself, even when they’re worthy of a moderately cushy jail sentence. Which is probably why when my mom finally decided to set down her momager, Kris Jenner-esque baton, she fought to make Heidi her replacement.
“You…picked it?”
The criminal rolls her eyes.
“What the hell? Where did you go to school?” I ask snidely. “Burglars University?”
“Close,” she says without batting an eye. “Southern California San Diego.”
Roberta silently pulls at my hair, and with the way it makes my scalp ache, I decide not to even warn her about the puke loogie. If they’d given me any time at all, I would have rinsed it out.
Heidi sees through me, though, getting self-conscious about the decision. Being purposely deceitful isn’t in my nature—a weakness, according to her. She smirks in the face of my discomfort.
“Roberta used to style Gwyneth Burgos. You think she didn’t ever have vomit in her hair, Raquel?” Heidi suggests.
I sigh. Gwyneth Burgos, God rest her soul, died of a drug overdose almost ten years ago. Rumor has it, it wasn’t her first time going on a seriously overzealous bender. So, yeah, I suppose she probably had vomit in her hair a time or two.
Still, that’s not my style. I never got heavily involved in drugs or alcohol like some of the other child stars I grew up with—like my brother. I channeled all of my energy into work and school. My parents hovered like hawks for the entirety of my adolescence, and my brother, Luca, for as much as he had problems of his own, was always very protective of me. He didn’t realize, I guess, that he didn’t even need to be. Watching him spiral his way through his life and eventually land at rock bottom was incentive enough to go the other direction.
That’s about the time my parents split up, divorcing in an ugly public shakedown of each other for all the world to see. When they finally settled, my mom met someone right away and moved to Barbados so she could bury her head in perfectly white sand, and my dad distanced himself from anything that had to do with show business and his past life. Obviously, as an actress and his daughter, that included me.
Who knows? Maybe in some sick, subconscious way, that’s part of the reason I held on to the purity ring my dad gave me for so long—hoping he’d make some storybook effort to come back and see it for himself.
But when my brother finally snapped and took off for somewhere, location unknown, that’s when I really focused all of my energy on my career. With no family around for companionship, I never even looked up. Next thing I knew, I was Hollywood’s goodest girl—a virgin at twenty-nine with no prospects or projections to make a change.
Now look at me—a big old bag of morning sickness and hormonal fluctuations.
Apparently, I’m so exhausted, I actually fall asleep. Right there on the bathroom floor with Roberta’s hands in my vomit hair. Because when I wake up, I’m being gently scraped from the tile by my makeup artist, Alejandro.
“Let’s see what we can do with this, shall we?” he says gently, and I sigh sardonically.
I’m half certain there’s an imprint of the ornate, shell-shaped tile from my bathroom floor on my face—the tingling, burning sensation on my cheek seems valid as evidence—but Alejo’s pretty good. Maybe he’ll be able to turn it into the next hot design or something.
I smile slightly as my internal monologue has a raucous laugh over the possibility. I can just imagine the cover of some magazine boasting “face etching” as the next big trend.
Sometimes I can’t believe I’m still doing all of this bullshit day to day. That I’m still going along with the ridiculous things Heidi and the rest of my team say in an effort to maintain the longevity and trajectory of my hard-earned career.
