Accidental It Girl (2 page)

You want to know how I can handle people hating me? How I can do a job that in the eyes of most people lumps me into a category with the likes of Phil? That's it, right there. I turn transitory moments—these blurs of fame and style and perfection—into immutable objects. I shape ordered little worlds where everything makes sense. Each photograph is a flawless moment in time, completely under my control. I can leave out anything I want, focus only on what's important, on the thing that tells the story I want to tell. The photographs are always in focus, always stable, always blissfully static. From the moment I picked up a camera and aimed it at a celebrity, I've been in complete control—of the pictures, of my career, of my life.

Phil's voice gripes in my head, “Come on, Sadie! Work with me here. Stall him. Those kids have been in the papers before! When he was boinking his nanny they were in every—”

I yank the earpiece from my ear and, with my brain all to myself, get back to shooting.

Like a streak of splattered ink, a black sedan screeches to a halt at the curb. Three little Jude look-alikes are swiftly plopped and cradled into the backseat by a stern-looking chauffeur.

Jude, making to get in the car, pauses for a moment. “Do you have what you need?” he asks me politely, with his signature timbre.

The question sends an uncomfortable shiver up my spine, a knot forms in my stomach.

Oh, right—he's talking about the pictures.

Marveling at how a voice trained for the Shakespearean stage can make even the simplest question seem fraught with significance, I reply, “Yeah, thanks.”

With that, Jude Law is gone. The black sedan has been swallowed up by the bustling avenues of Manhattan—just another black car, just another set of impenetrable tinted windows.

These frenzied encounters with celebrity often leave me, experienced as I am, with the feeling of having seen a ghost. When the adrenaline wanes, a tiny part of me still asks, “Did I just see that? Did that really just happen?” When you think about it, it's nothing but light, really, trickling into my camera. Now that I've gone digital there isn't even a physical object being created. Instead, they're these shifty little wisps, tightly knit groupings of electrons cleverly converted to an incomprehensible string of ones and zeroes. They're no more real than ghosts. That is, until they're put into magazines and newspapers. Until then, though, just like an ancient mystic or Dan Akroyd in
Ghostbusters,
the thrill is in chasing and capturing these elusive things. You have to admit, there is just a little bit of magic in what I do.

Phil, panting and sweating through his Are You Looking at My Shamrocks? T-shirt, screeches to a halt beside me. His skin, normally a grayish off-white sort of color, is a disconcerting shade of blazing, oily pink.

“You didn't even shoot the kids, did you?” he spits, swatting at the damp brown hair sticking to his brow.

I answer
no
by way of yelling, “You broke into my signal?”

“Please, that piece-of-shit cell phone you're using might as well be a baby monitor. I'm surprised you don't pick up FM radio.” He adds, “You didn't shoot the kids, did you?”

“No, I didn't.
Paparazzi
and
mercenary
are not always synonymous,
Phil
,” I say, infusing his name with as much venom as possible. Some of us have rules, and this just happens to be one of mine.

“Well, that's good for me. I'll get 'em later,” he says, showing his yellow teeth. Phil takes a step toward me, so close I can smell the pastrami on rye that he had for lunch. “I don't get how you can be so ruthless, so goddamn good at the job sometimes, and then pull shit like this. You'll never make it to the top of the game if you don't stop being such a pussy. Just a tip, Price—those little diapers were filled with money.”

Um,
gross
.

Though I have the sudden and overwhelming urge to shove Phil's camera in one of his orifices, I simply shrug my shoulders and flash him a little smile. As intended, this compounds his aggravation. Phil's cheeks become even pinker and more oily, he shakes his head at me and waddles off in a huff.

I admit this business is about chasing money. Like Phil, when I see a celebrity I also see the little dollar signs hovering above their heads. Jude Law alone—two dollar signs. Jude Law with his kids—three dollar signs. Jude Law with his kids and the
nanny
—five dollar signs. The difference between Phil and me, apart from the obvious, is that I weigh those dollar signs against my own standards. I work in a minefield of moral and ethical gray areas, but it's still a business. It's not personal. In my book, kids are personal.

Some of the paparazzi are awful, it's true. They invade people's privacy. They yell obscenities and insults to the people they photograph, chase and intentionally terrorize them. I don't. There is a certain, very solid line I will not cross. I don't buzz helicopters over weddings, I don't dig through trash, I don't trick people into getting angry and violent. I just take pictures. Fluffy, silly, harmless pictures of famous people doing everyday things.

And as for the kids, I think it's important to remember that though the children of famous parents are born gnawing rather enormous silver spoons, they still put their onesies on two legs at a time like the rest of us. I think they deserve the same consideration as the children of nonfamous parents—the ones for whom an unsolicited snapshot will get you a one-way ticket to the clink, and a lifetime of registering your name on a special list. But hey, that's just my opinion.

I plug the earpiece back in my ear and adjust the mic. “Hey there, Super Spy. You ready to get out of here?”

“Yeah,” Luke replies.

“You're supposed to say ‘Roger.' ”

As I disentangle myself from the maze of wires wrapped around my middle, I hear a shrill, exasperating wail from my back pocket.

Stupid Sidekick.

I keep my life on that damn thing. A good portion of the time my life is whining, vibrating, and jingling at me, demanding to be heard. Right now it's screaming, “You're late—
again
.”

Y
es, I have a Sidekick. And I am not ashamed of it. Anymore. Like many, I once pictured the Sidekick as an accessory for Paris Hilton–loving tweens who relied on it as both hobby (lets cover it in glitter!) and a modern-day alternative to the “football paper fold” method of passing notes in class (U R soooo hot! LOL!). However, since I haven't missed an appointment in nine months, you can now consider me a total convert.

You know how people say, “When it rains, it pours”? Well, my little corner of the universe is smack dab in the middle of the cloud. Most of the time I manage to hover around the silver lining, but things around me have a distinct tendency to spiral out of control with very little notice.

A couple of years ago, I was planning a big blowout surprise party for Brooke. Her birthday that year happened to fall right between two big, flashy award shows that were going on in New York. Manhattan was crawling with celebrities, and my day planner was straining at the seams. I spent twelve hours a day on the streets, and the other twelve organizing streamers, guest lists, and mini shrimp cocktails. The kicker was, in the weeks prior to the surprise, Brooke and I began noticing a strange smell in the apartment. It was acrid and kind of gross, but it came and went. I was supposed to call the super.

I forgot to call the super.

The morning of Brooke's party, our building was evacuated. I mean the sirens blaring, hazmat suit, bomb squad kind of evacuated. Oh, and did I mention it was evacuated roughly ten minutes after I'd had twelve pounds of ice delivered to my kitchen? Yeah.

The smell turned out to be a man downstairs who had taken up a new hobby—pipe-bomb construction. Brooke and I were out of the apartment for two weeks while they cleared out what a very nice man in a silver space suit called “the residue.” Brooke's big birthday surprise turned out to be sitting on the stoop of the building next door, sipping Red Cross–provided coffee while disappointed friends stopped by, dropped off their presents, and went home. When we were finally allowed back in, Brooke and I had an apartment with first-class water damage and a refrigerator full of putrid shrimp cocktail, which, incidentally, was a hundred times more noxious than any pipe bomb.

Don't ask me to explain how these things happen to me. I have no idea. It just seems like whenever one thing goes wrong it causes a cascade effect whereby everything else in my life must go wrong, too—an isolated drizzle turns into a freak torrential downpour. My Sidekick is like a little umbrella, doing its best to keep me dry in a cloudy world.

I jam my key in the apartment door and jiggle it repeatedly, twisting, pushing, and actually begging the lock to cooperate. Rust, apparently, is our new high-tech security system. I can hear the super now: “If the door is this hard to open
with
a key, imagine how hard it'll be for someone without one.” Brooke and I have a rent-controlled apartment in a building desperately trying to go co-op. This means that the super performs only enough maintenance to keep us alive.

The prior tenants of our place were two eccentric spinster sisters whose lease was signed in March of 1962. Each of the two bedrooms has its own bathroom and these dreamy built-in bookshelves that form an arch perfectly sized for a double bed to snuggle under. The ceilings are absurdly high and the floors are the original deep-amber hardwood. The floors are so original, in fact, that deep troughs of wear pit the surface, marking the paths the sisters took from room to room. Someone, apparently, liked to look down onto First Avenue from the living room window, because the northwest corner of the floor has a divot so deep that it's practically a health hazard. But try telling that to the super.

With a loud
clang-pop
the lock finally yields. It's managed to give my key a worrisome (but graceful) curve and taken off what was left of the fingernails on my right hand. Excellent, it's a vicious and aggressive
guard
lock.

“Brooke!” I scream, while thundering through the apartment toward my bedroom. Luke shuffles in behind me, loaded down with my camera equipment. “Help!” I try again. I have a date at seven. It is currently six-thirty. I haven't seen the inside of a shower in twenty-four hours. My hair looks like a blond feather duster and my nails give the distinct impression that I've been clawing my way out of a coffin for the last several hours. I am an
Ambush Makeover
just waiting to happen.

“Brooke? Have you seen my—”

“Ta-da!” Brooke says, scaring the crap out of me.

She's standing in front of the TV, pointing and waving her arms around an enormous brown box. Brooke, having been blessed with the ship-launching, traffic-stopping type of facial structure—high cheekbones, perfectly symmetrical
everything,
and bright green eyes—looks like she's in the middle of a challenge for
America's Next Top Model
. I half expect Tyra Banks to saunter in from the bedroom.

“What the hell is
that
?” I ask, eyeing the slender six-foot by four-foot, craft-paper-wrapped monolith.

“It's a plasma TV!” shouts Luke excitedly.

“No,” Brooke says, idly tidying her chestnut hair under the triangular scarf thingy she wears when doing household chores. In it she looks like a cross between Lucy Ricardo and Betty Crocker. For some reason, this gives her no end of enjoyment. She continues, “Well, it could be, I guess. But I don't know. You'll have to ask Sadie.”

“Me?”

“Well, it's got your name on it. What is it?” she asks, rubbing her palms together greedily.

“I have absolutely no idea,” I say, truly shocked. How could I order something that enormous and forget about it?

“This is so exciting!” Brooke flaps, while tearing open a corner of the brown paper.

“Wait!” I recognize that zip code. “It's from
Paige
.”

Brooke stops dead in her tracks, and slowly backs away from the package like she's just found out it contains a cache of anthrax.

I cautiously take a seat on the sofa, doing my best not to anger the box. Brooke sits down on one side of me, Luke quietly takes a place on the other. We sit in silence, staring at the monstrosity while muffled, canned laughter from the TV struggles out from behind it.

The box reminds me of Paige, actually. It gives the impression of being larger than life, while also being oddly too thin to support its weight. The box's slim three inches of depth seem grossly inadequate to underpin its volume. Part of me wants to go over there and keep it from toppling over and burying us all.

“What do you think it is?” asks Brooke quietly, her eyes never leaving the package.

If I had to guess…“A life-size portrait of herself?”

 

Biologically speaking, Paige is my mother. But in all the ways that count, she's more like a complete stranger who just happens to have my icy blue eyes, overly long torso, and wavy hair.

Paige abandoned us, my father and me, in 1988. I was ten. She was a vivacious thirty-two then, and looking to improve her life and lifestyle by finding someone who could provide more than the basics of subsistence. My dad, the insolvent manager of a local seafood place, had big dreams of owning his own restaurant. They were plans that, it seems, weren't progressing quite as rapidly as Paige had anticipated. She moved out under the cover of darkness one cold October night, and two months later married Dr. Hank Farmer, DDS. The gust of wind caused by her sprint to the altar actually dried the ink on the divorce papers.

Disgustingly enough, she kept my father's last name. I suspect this was only because Paige Price-Farmer sounds much more like a well-bred country club wife than the alternative, which sounds more like a person who harvests loose-leaf.

The predivorce Paige I remember was glamorous and fun, if a bit absentminded and careless with my safety—and my father's limited funds. She had a costume jewelry chest six layers deep that I spent hours digging through, and she took me to the movies three times a week. She was tall and slender with gracefully curving hips. Her fingers were long and tapered down to tasteful French-manicured nails. She wore cigarette pants and halter tops, and never looked me in the eye.

The postdivorce Paige didn't call me for three years. She was too busy helping Dr. Hank build a successful cosmetic dentistry practice and patent the very lucrative Farmer Bleaching Tray. In the days before Crest White Strips and GoSMILE, Dr. Hank gave thousands of perfectly attractive people obnoxiously white teeth. He now specializes in porcelain veneers—doing his part to homogenize the human race by giving people with already lovely smiles the too-symmetrical, blinding white teeth of a Ken doll. The American obsession with fake teeth affords my mother the lifestyle she loves. This life includes five new Chanel suits per year, a Mercedes the same golden champagne color of her hair, and three Pekingese puppies named Oodles, Munchkin, and Donks.

The last thing I need right now is any of her drama. Come to think of it, there's
never
really a good time for Paige's drama. “I'm not going to open it,” I say finally.

Brooke and Luke each look at me with a curious mix of frustration and understanding.

Brooke says, “Of course. Sure. Absolutely.”

Luke chimes in, “Good plan,” and then nods his head to emphasize his simulated certainty.

This is followed by several awkward moments of silence, during which I glare at the gigantic box in front of the TV and my two best friends shrug their shoulders at each other and mime a conversation about what to do next.

It's just a box.

For some reason I feel the need to keep telling myself that.

It's just a box.

But, it's just a box from
Paige
.

I'd really like to chuck it out the window and erase it from my memory. With my luck I'd probably flatten somebody on the street and become the lead story on the evening news. The bomb squad would then blow it up—as a precaution. Hmmmm. Maybe I should just call the bomb squad directly and cut out the middleman. Somewhere in my bedroom I have the card of that very nice man in the silver space suit.

“Uh…Brooke,” pipes Luke tremulously, “a friend of mine is thinking about buying an apartment. He's looking on the Upper East Side.” Luke sounds like he's reading from a script.

“Oh, that's nice. Is he in need of a broker?” Brooke not only sounds like she's reading from a script, she sounds like she's doing it badly.

“I believe he is. I recommended you.”

“Thank you, Luke.”

“You're welcome,” Luke replies in an overly cheery falsetto.

The apartment once again falls into an eerie quiet—save for the garbled, box-filtered opening notes of the
Jeopardy!
theme song.

“So, Sadie,” Brooke begins, “hot date tonight, huh?”

“Holy shit! I totally forgot!” Damn Paige. I jump up from my seat. “Help!” I plead. “I have precisely zero minutes to get ready for this date. Brooke, could you just throw an outfit together for me while I'm in the shower?”

Brooke lets out a squeal of delight that I will assume is a
yes
. The fervor of the squeal worries me a little, but I don't really have a backup plan.

“You're a saint, thank you,” I blubber while peeling my clothes off. “Nothing crazy, okay? I have some things from the dry cleaner somewhere—”

“Come on!” exclaims Luke, out of nowhere. He slaps his hands to his eyes. “When will you people realize that I don't have a vagina?”

Oh, I'm down to my bra.

Luke struggles with the fact that his two best friends are women who, for all intents and purposes, consider him one of the girls. While he, a completely heterosexual man, does his best to consider his two best female friends just a couple of the guys. He's fallen headlong into one of the great paradoxes of modern life.

I cover myself for Luke's benefit.

“Oh, Sadie?” Brooke says, stopping my rush to the bathroom.

“Yeah?”