California Dreaming (15 page)
The film ended and the lights came back on, and Dean Daley took the stage again. “I hope you enjoyed the film. You're all invited to the lower lobby for a reception. A few dozen alumni will be there—directors, actors, agents, producers—here to mingle with you … and what's more Hollywood than that?” She paused as the crowd tittered excitedly. “Anyway, the people you meet today will be able to explain the USC film school experience better than any lecture, or even any film,” she concluded.
Waste of my time, Sam thought, but she dutifully trudged down to the lower lobby with everyone else. Soon it was teeming with students and faculty. The usual cast of waiters in black pants and white shirts, all of whom looked like actor wannabes trying to make a connection with the various famous alumni, were sprinkled among the crowd and manning a sushi buffet. This year's Hollywood's culinary obsessions for party food were sushi, sashimi, and five varieties of mini burgers from In-N-Out Burger.
Just as Sam reached for a bottle of Fiji in a large sterling bowl of crushed ice, a voice near her right shoulder said, “You look familiar.”
Sam turned, sweating water bottle in hand, to see Goatee Guy, still hidden behind those ridiculous knockoff Versace sunglasses.
“Probably because I was sitting next to you upstairs,” Sam said dryly. She had zero interest in going through the
Hey, aren't you Jackson Sharpe's daughter?
conversation.
“No, that's not it.” He two-fingered a piece of sashimi into his mouth and contemplated her. “I feel like I know you from somewhere else.” He swallowed the raw fish, then stuck out his hand. Fortunately, it wasn't the sushi hand.
“Nars Muessen,” he introduced himself. “And you're … ?”
“Sam.” She shook his hand, deliberately not giving her last name.
“I'm from Salt Lake City,” Nars continued, as if Sam was actually interested, as if she'd asked, which she most definitely hadn't. He went into a monologue about a student film he'd made a few months earlier, about a group of Mormon kids who hear a teen rock band and are so overwhelmed by their talent and their cool factor that they sell their souls to the devil in order to be in a similar band.
“Fresh,” Sam commented. Like that hackneyed play on Mark Twain's “The Devil and Daniel Webster” hadn't already been told ad nauseam. Her eyes darted right and left, seeking an escape route.
“It's Nars, isn't it?”
Nars smiled, because the question had come from none other than George Petrus, who had sidled up next to them, water bottle in hand. His silver hair was swept back from his handsome face. He wore a black shirt tucked into black pants and was smiling at Goatee Guy. Petrus was one of the city's great directors. Lucas, Scorsese, and Petrus. Sam's father couldn't stand him, but no one ever argued with his talent.
“Great to see you again, Mr. Petrus,” Nars exclaimed, shaking the famous director's hand as if it was a pump from which he was trying to coax water.
“I just wanted to tell you again how impressed I was with
Highway to Hell
,” Petrus said. “One of the best student films I've ever seen.”
Sam nearly inhaled her bottle of Fiji water. George Petrus knew Goatee's Guy's film? And thought it was great? Back when Petrus and Jackson were talking, he'd been a frequent dinner guest at the Sharpes’. But that had been back when Sam was still in middle school. He probably didn't even recognize her. Sam sort of wished she'd been nicer to Goatee Guy so that he'd bring her into the conversation. In Hollywood, people liked to corner talent and keep celebrities all to themselves.
Nars smiled so broadly that Sam thought his face might actually crack. “Oh, and this is Sam.” He gestured politely at her, and George Petrus turned to take her in.
“Just Sam?” He shook her hand and smiled, amused.
“Just Sam.” She smiled back. “I know you hear this all the time,” Sam began, realizing she sounded a bit like a gushing teenager but not really caring. “But I'm a huge fan of
American Legion
.” The film was about four different teenagers coming of age in four different parts of the country, and then coming together at a Who concert in Denver one summer night. In fact, Sam had watched it again recently, one night when Eduardo was working late and she couldn't sleep.
“Actually, I don't,” George said easily. “I usually hear about
Dark Star
and
Modesto
, so thanks. That one gets overlooked.”
“How did you happen to see Nars's film?” Sam asked, truly curious.
“Connections,” Nars admitted. “My dad went to USC. And then when I came to UCLA for my eye surgery a few months ago, I actually got to meet with Mr. Petrus.” He fiddled with his dark glasses. “I keep growing these nasty tumors behind my eyeballs. Lots of surgery and lots of pairs of dark glasses.”
Sam felt, simultaneously, like an idiot and a bitch. She had just assumed Nars's glasses were pretentious. But they weren't; they were functional. He had eye tumors, for God's sake.
Petrus spent a good fifteen minutes chatting with them about film, as if he was just some guy who happened to like cinema as much as they did. He would be doing a small freshman seminar on personal-journey movies, and invited both Sam and Nars to attend. Then he invited Nars to come in to his production office to talk about him interning the following summer. After that, he melted into the crowd.
“Great guy, huh?” Nars asked, turning to Sam with a smile. She noticed for the first time that he had world-class dimples.
“Amazing,” Sam replied, quite honestly. “Why was he so nice?”
Nars's sparse eyebrows knit together over the top of his glasses. “I guess he knows we love film the way he loves film or we wouldn't be here. And …” He smiled. “I guess he liked my film. My parents maxed their credit cards for me to make it. But being a director is all I want to do.”
Me too
, Sam thought.
Just then, she heard her cell phone sound gently in her bag, and she fished it out. It was a text from Eduardo.
BORED MUCH? DREAMING OF PARIS
?
She closed her cell without responding. Two hours ago, she would have responded, “Hell, yes.” Now, she wasn't so sure.
She looked around the reception. All around she saw people engaged in conversations about film, not because they wanted to name-drop or show off, but because they were genuinely passionate and opinionated about cinema as an art form. Okay, maybe they wore ugly clothes and rode bikes around campus. Maybe they cheered like idiots at the sound of their graduation date. But maybe they were also her people, the people with whom she would connect and collaborate and exchange ideas as they journeyed together through the next four years of film school. Maybe Paris wasn't the right place for her, at least not right now.
The old saying, “Home is where the heart is,” flew into her mind. Her heart was with Eduardo. And Eduardo was soon to be in Paris. Did that mean, though, that Paris had to be her home?
Tuesday, 2:51 p.m.
“R
ight after this commercial break, comin’ back atcha with a girl who just turned eighteen and—check it out—is owner of the most happenin’ new club in L.A. Plus, she's managing the hottest new model in town. Stay tuned!”
The smile stayed on Kelly Clarkson's face until the camera blinked out. The kids gathered on pink and aqua faux-leather couches on the small Santa Monica MTV soundstage kept applauding and squealing as some mailroom graduate made twirling hand motions at them, which meant,
Keep it up
. Kelly was putting together her TV special,
Planet Kelly C
., and pieces of what went on today would be spliced in.
And that was about as much as Cammie knew. Her dad had talked to Kelly's manager about getting Cammie on, and the deal had been struck late last night. Evidently, it hadn't been difficult. Kelly had already been to Bye, Bye Love twice to guest-DJ and loved the place. The national publicity, Cammie knew, was worth a mint.
“Okay, so, you ready?” an assistant asked Cammie, who stood just out of camera range. The girl squinted at Cammie. “You need a little pat-down for the shine.” She craned her head around. “Where's Nattie with makeup? Damn. She's working on Kelly. Nattie! When you get a sec!”
“I do my own,” Cammie said coolly, reaching for her kelly green quilted leather Chanel hobo bag to fish out her makeup case. She'd worn a Free People pink-and-aqua flounce-hemmed mini-dress, and strappy pink Jimmy Choo sandals with a suede wedge heel. Since she hadn't learned she'd be on national TV until last night, she'd found an eyelash-extension artist in the Valley who made house calls 24/7, and charged twenty dollars per lash. Cammie didn't care. As she powdered her nose and gazed at her Bambi-like eyes, she knew the five hundred dollars’ worth of eyelash extensions had been worth it.
“Okay, don't be nervous, and don't look directly into the camera. Try to act like you and Kelly are just friends hanging out at home,” an assistant director with greasy hair and a plaid collared shirt that belonged back in the nineties was blathering at Cammie.
“It's not a problem,” Cammie assured him.
“People say that, but then the camera goes on and—”
Cammie held up a hand to interrupt. “Trust me.” Her cell sounded. She plucked it from her pocket to answer.
“Oh my God, turn that off before we're back on air!” Another equally unkempt production assistant was on her immediately.
Cammie turned away and put it to her ear. “Hello?”
“Hi-hi.”
Dee. Only one person in the world had a voice like that. No amount of Prozac could change it, either. Cammie liked Dee's voice.
“Hey, what's up?” Cammie watched the makeup artist work on Kelly's mascara while the hairstylist swept the bangs to the side so that they looked artfully mussed, and then sprayed them into place.
“I'm at Tiffany, and you were supposed to meet me?” Dee reminded Cammie. “We're picking out the wedding party favors? Do we want to go with diamond studs for all the girls and diamond cuff links for the guys, or is that too old-fashioned?”
Cammie tried to remember ever telling Dee she'd help with this particular duty, and vaguely recalled a conversation that had taken place over the roar at the club late the night before. “Do whatever you want, Dee—I can't make it.” Across the soundstage, the assistant director was giving the three-minute signal.
“But you're the maid of honor!” Dee protested. “This is what you're supposed to do. I'm just a bridesmaid!”
“I'm doing this television thing, Dee,” Cammie explained quickly, gesturing to the hyperventilating production assistant that she was just wrapping it up. “And after that, I'm doing an interview for
Teen Vogue
at—”
“But we're supposed to meet Sam for coffee!”
Shit, she
had
said she'd meet them. But she'd also told Ben she'd meet him at the club to talk about the next round of designers they'd bring in, since they planned to change the interior décor every week. And she had a lot more interest in meeting with Ben than she did in planning Sam's wedding. Not that she didn't love Sam, because she did. But a wedding? The only people Cammie knew who actually got married at age eighteen were drunk bimbo celebs looking for cheap publicity by running off to Vegas with their high school boyfriends. And even then it was all a public relations stunt, and they planned to get divorced shortly thereafter.
But Sam was in love with a capital
l
. As in, always and forever. It was enough to make a girl upchuck the blackened mahimahi with pomegranate chutney she'd had for lunch at Kobe while being interviewed by
L.A. Weekly
. If Ben and Adam both proposed and threw in world peace, she'd still turn down the deal. Marriage. Cammie shuddered.
The assistant was holding up a one-minute finger. Cammie spoke quickly into the phone.
“Tell Sam I can't make it and I'll meet you guys later, sorry. I'll call you. Bye.”
She hung up quickly before Dee could protest further. In some remote part of her brain, she thought maybe she was letting Sam down. But then again, Sam was just as ambitious as she was, so surely Sam would understand. In the long run—say, a week from Friday, after the wedding—Sam would have forgotten all about it.
Neighborhood coffee shops came and went, Sam mused, but Starbucks was ubiquitous, forever, and bred and multiplied like the obnoxious aliens from that
South Park
episode. Sam loathed Starbucks. It was the McDonald's of coffee shops. Fortunately, there were alternatives.
The Brighton Coffee Shop, located near North Camden, was one of them. Sam had come here with her friends and their accompanying nannies for years when they didn't feel like dealing with the tourists at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The home-cooked food was a big draw: meat loaf and mashed potatoes with gravy, warm chocolate chip cookies—the kind of thing their parents’ chefs never prepared because it was either gauche, fattening, or both. “Home-cooked” had a varying definition at the Sharpe estate, since the “cook” who made said food in their “home” was almost always from another country and culture. Her father had gone through a Vietnamese phase, a Russian phase, and a Mexican phase as various cooks passed through her life. Plus, whatever food was “hot” at the time on the Los Angeles restaurant scene inevitably made it to her father's dinner table. She remembered eating Kobe beef skewers at least twice a week when she was in eighth grade.
Striding through the swinging glass doors, Sam saw that Cammie and Dee had already arrived and were at a red leather-backed booth. Cammie, looking even more made up than usual in a Free People number, leaned her head against the long mirror behind her as she chattered away to someone on her cell. She waggled fingers at Sam and kept talking as Sam slid into the booth next to Dee. Dee was wearing a brown-and-aqua polka-dotted Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress and a John Hardy twisted cuff bracelet. She already had her PowerBook open to
SAM'S WEDDING FILE
on the white Formica countertop, a cup of black coffee cooling next to it.
The new Interpol song was playing in the background, and Sam drummed her French-manicured nails in time with the music. This would be a great song for the opening credits of her first USC film, she mused, as visions of whirring dolly shots danced in her head. Not that she was sure she was even going. She hadn't even told Eduardo yet how impressed she'd been by the orientation, as if saying it aloud would be somehow betraying the Paris plan.
