Epic (27 page)

“Convenient excuses,” she spat. “Funny how you never saw fit to tell me any of this, even though we were the closest friends in the house.
”

“I know,” I said as I took a step towards her. “And I’m sorry. I grew up hiding so much of who I was that I didn’t know how to share that with you.”

“You shared it with Jace,” she pointed out.

“I know,” I admitted with another sigh.
“But after Eddie got that first photo, I didn’t know who I could trust in the house.”

“I
never
would have done that to you,” she said as tears welled in her eyes.

“I know,” I repeated again. “But I think it was easy to use that as an excuse because… because…” I took a deep breath. “Because you
were everything I wished I could be. I was so jealous of you I couldn’t see straight.” Her eyes widened and I went on. “You’re beautiful. People instantly love and want to protect you. You have this big family and this stable upbringing, or so I thought. I thought you could never understand my struggle because you were so perfect. It took me a long time to figure out that I was judging you as unfairly as other people misjudged me. By then I was so far down the rabbit hole that I didn’t know how to untangle all the lies.”

“You could have told me the truth,” she said softly. “I would have believed you. I would have fought for you. I could have been your friend if you would have let me. But you never did.”

Tears welled in my own eyes. “I know. And for that, I’m sorriest of all.”

“You’re not forgiven,” she muttered as she staggered toward the studio. She collapsed after the first three steps.

“Shelby!” I shrieked as I ran over to where she lay crumpled on the floor. But no matter how much I screamed, her eyes did not reopen.

“What’s going on?” one of the technicians asked as he ran into the room.

“Get help!” I cried out as I cuddled her unconscious body close. “Please! Shelby!” The room filled and faceless arms pulled us apart. By the time I heard the wail of the ambulance, several employees were working hard to revive her lifeless body.

“God, please,” I whispered as I watched the EMTs rush into the room
, tear open her blouse and try to jolt her back into consciousness with a defibrillator. I jumped every time they shocked her, and I didn’t stop praying until they hoisted the gurney back into the ambulance and raced off to the hospital.

Then, and only then, did I stop to call Jace.
I was so incoherent he could barely piece any information together. “Baby, slow down. What happened?”

“She collapsed,” I sputtered between hiccupping sobs. “She
wouldn’t wake up Jace… she wouldn’t wake up…”

“I’ll be right there,” he promised before he disconnected.

In all the chaos, I didn’t care what headlines would follow – though they promised to be brutal. Nothing mattered except Shelby’s life. I knew in that instant I’d trade every iota of fame that I had to make sure Shelby would be OK.

And I knew as I was snapped by very PING p
hotographer outside the studio that I probably just did.

New York City, NY

July 21, 2012

As it turned out, Jasper Carrington was just as formidable an obstacle to get close to Shelby as her father was. By the time we got to the hospital, we were told by security guards that we were not welcome and would be forcibly removed if we didn’t willingly leave. By the time we got to the hotel, PING had already taken the story and ran with it.

SHELBY GODDARD COLLAPSES IN STUDIO AFTER AN ARGUMENT WITH HER FIERCE RIVAL, JORDI HEMPHILL!

“
Fierce ain’t just a reality show anymore, folks!
A fight broke out today when Jordi Hemphill confronted her former costar after hearing that she and Hemphill’s estranged husband were now engaged to be married. Inside sources confided off the record that the two women battled bitterly in a private studio until Goddard, who had recently been hospitalized for exhaustion, collapsed under the strain of the painful confrontation. Goddard’s fiancé, Edward Nix, was in tears when we reached him for comment. He called his ex ‘poisonous,’ accusing her of willfully wrecking everyone in her path. Hemphill could not be reached for comment
.”

The news didn’t get any better once Eddie and Coy made it to New York to care for her that evening. They’d spill their guts about me to anyone who asked, but conveniently left out how Shelby’s own eating disorder had nearly killed her – again.

By nine o’clock I heard back from Jacob. He
was right in the thick things as Jasper scrambled to turn Shelby’s health crisis into something they could use. He was one of the few who knew the truth, but couldn’t tell anyone about it. Instead he was tasked with coordinating a massive media smear campaign against me, with my sex tape right at the heart of it.

By the next day h
e walked right out of his office at Carrington Entertainment nearly ten years to the day after he’d arrived, unable to stomach Jasper Carrington’s spin machine another minute.

“Who needs to live at Central Park West?” he quipped when he showed up at our hotel. Instead he marched right down
Schuster and Beckweth and was hired within the hour as Iris’s assistant. Though I felt responsible, he wouldn’t hear of it when I tried to apologize. “It’s not you, Jay,” he assured, adopting Corey’s nickname for me. We had all grown really casual as we camped out in Iris’s office most of the day, unintentional soldiers in a media war. “I’ve hated my job since I was tasked with spinning Jasper’s affair with Lourdes. I stayed because I didn’t have the balls to change. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, or so they say. But,” he said as he gave me a hug, “I can’t tell you to risk it all if I’m not willing to do the same. You’ve got more integrity than most of us, Miss Hemphill. Or is it Palermo now?”

I grinned. “Just Jordi. I wasted too much of this year trying to chase down everyone else to tell her who she was, rather than just listen to her in the first place.”

“We all need to hear from her,” he said. “So keep singing. The right people will hear you.”

That list dwindled
considerably by nightfall, when my naked image was splashed all over every news outlet in the country.

FIERCE DIVA LETS IT ALL HANG OUT IN SIZZLING SEX TAPE!!

“
If you were waiting to see the sexy new video for Jordi Hemphill’s defiant anthem, ‘I’m Not Sorry,’ it turns out you can get more than an eyeful with a scathing, raw video released anonymously to the press just weeks before the video’s debut. Hemphill and her reality TV lover, Jace Riga, were captured on videotape during their time together at the Fierce mansion. The video shows in living color how our unconventional diva captured her man. This NSFW video is not for the squeamish. No matter what kind of video Roxy Malone has prepared for Hemphill’s second single from her new album, it is clear that that in every way, Jordi Hemphill is not sorry, folks. And she’s ready to do anything to prove how insatiable she really is! Lock up your men, ladies! And your cheesecake!”

Jace wouldn’t let me read further than that. In fact, he did a bang-up job keeping me preoccupied so that I didn’t have to see the negative commentary that followed my XXX-rated debut. We turned off the phones and put a “Do Not Disturb” placard on the door, as he loved away any feelings of shame or humiliation I may have harbored as my carefully crafted celebrity image imploded over the course of a weekend.

I postponed every public appearance, even the coveted spot on a national talk show to talk about my new family. I knew that under the cloud of this new information, everything I had hoped to accomplish by sharing my story had been sullied, and neither Maya nor Diego deserved that.

Maya was suitably distracted as we researched online for a new place for her to live in Los Angeles. Our floor was pretty safe territory at the New York hotel, as the hotel staff had been briefed on what was happening and assured us they would keep the press – or whatever masqueraded as such – away.

As blissfully ignorant of the events as
Diego had predicted she would be, Maya greeted me with a big, proud smile and an even bigger hug as I opted to spend Sunday evening in her room, perusing apartments for her in Los Angeles. This was the excuse. I had wanted to take her out to Jersey, in hopes that she would be able to tell me more about my past, but with her fragile health and the looming parasitic presence of PING just downstairs, the best I could do for my new family was keep them sheltered from the storm.

As I sat with her in the sitting room of her suite, scrolling through several properties to find the one she liked the best, Sonny crossed in from the bedroom to grab another beer from the fridge. His dark eyes were lecherous as he stared at me, his lips around that bottle, as he inhaled me with his eyes. From the way he
leered at me like a hunk of meat, I knew instantly he’d seen the tape.

My blood ran cold as I filled in the blanks in why it had taken him so long to emerge from the privacy of his bedroom.

I turned to Jace, who gave me a warm, supportive smile. He had no more use for Sonny than I did. He trusted my gut that this was an influence that needed to be edged out of Maya’s and Diego’s lives. Jace had established in no uncertain terms that there was a new sheriff in town, and Sonny – so far – had not attempted to challenge him. Mercifully he said mostly nothing at all as we planned their relocation, except for not-so-subtle hints on where I should rent a place.

Why was it all the abuse assholes in my life wanted to live near the beach completely on my dime?

“The beach,” Maya echoed with a dreamy look on her face. She covered my hand with hers. “That’s the very first place we went after we got out of the group home. I wanted to see the ocean, and Joey said we might as well go there first, since we wouldn’t see the shore again once we made it to Iowa.”

I held my breath as I waited for her to fill in the blanks even more.
Instead she had another coughing fit and had to put her oxygen tubes back in. I patted her arm and gave her a smile. Maybe her memories with my father weren’t mine to intercept. But they brought her such joy, I could be nothing but grateful she had had some ray of sunshine in her long, painful, disappointing life. “Do you need to go lie down?” I asked.

She nodded and I rushed to help her from the sofa in the sitting room to the large bed in th
e private bedroom. “You’re so sweet,” she said. “My perfect baby girl,” she wheezed before I tucked her into the fine linens, which were likely more luxurious than she’d probably ever known.

I curled up with her on the bed until she drifted off to sleep.
Her grip slacked around my fingers and I kissed her lightly on top of her head before I left her to nap.

By the time I walked back out into the sitting room, Diego and Griffin had arrived along with dinner. “Has Mama eaten?” Diego asked me, and I shook my head.

“She’s sleeping.”

He went to check on her, which made me smile. He had been such a good son this whole trip… and remarkably an even better brother.  Griffin and Iris had given Diego a crash course in public relations. He was the only one of us who would go out into public, and though PING pounced all over him, Griffin showed him the ropes in how to ignore their clamoring calls for a comment. Now that it was common knowledge he was my brother, his newfound celebrity status demanded that he weigh in on my scandal, but he didn’t have to answer any of those demands.

Though he slipped back under the sullen mask he wore when we first met every single time PING snapped a photo, he managed to withstand their bombardment without reacting like any impulsive sixteen-year-old might have.

I knew I had Griffin to thank for that, even though our professional pairing might have come to an end.

By that Monday, Iris called with the news. The producers of
Black-Eyed Pete
dropped me like a bad habit the minute the sex tape hit the six o’clock news, which opened up my summer whether I liked it or not. My career had officially entered limbo as we rode out the storm.

Jace wouldn’t let me read any of the negative reviews. Every time I opened my computer, he’d snatch it away, close it, and do whatever he could to preoccupy me.
We all decided that would be a lot easier to do if we headed back to Los Angeles, where we could resume a somewhat normal existence while the drama played out on every social media website. And of course Coy’s face was splashed all over the news, as he ‘surprisingly’ weighed in on this new hedonistic display.

“How do we know that she didn’t leak the tape herself?” he asked the viewing audience.

I turned off the TV via the remote just a hair before I threw it through the damned TV screen. I was frustrated when I glanced over at Jace on the other side of the bed. “This is not going away.”

Even getting back to L.A. was challenging. We had to set up a decoy in order to get my mother and Diego out of the hotel. Jace and I went first, along with Griffin, while the staff lied to anyone who would ask if the Palermos were still registered. They were moved to another floor for the day, and followed us in Angus’s private plane for a late night flight.