Runaway (Airhead #3) (18 page)

I just stared at him. Honestly, what could you even say to that?

I thought about spitting in his face.

But it didn’t seem like the right thing to do.

Especially since he’d just said he knew my little sister’s travel plans.

Did I really want to see Frida up there on that screen, being bid on like some kind of Ming vase at Sotheby’s…

…only to have her skull sawed open and her brain lifted out to have it replaced by that blue-veined lady’s?

I took back the purse that the security guard handed to me— minus my iPhone. Meanwhile, Robert Stark was already walking away, back into his macabre auction room. He never once looked over his shoulder at me.

Not that I’d expected him to, I guess.

It was just as well that he didn’t. He’d have seen the murderous look in my eye.

And he wouldn’t have liked it. He wouldn’t have liked it one bit.

The security guard took me by the arm and began guiding me down the stairs. Not the back stairs Brandon had shown me, but the wide main staircase I hadn’t been able to get up before, because I’d lacked a phoenix bracelet.

The other security guard was still standing at the bottom of it. He looked confused to see me being escorted down by one of his colleagues, but lifted the velvet rope and let me pass.

“Here you go,” the security guard who had my arm said, when we reached the coat check, where Gabriel and Nikki were standing waiting for me, with Lulu, who had my coat. They were all three flanked by other security guards.

“Oh, my God,” Lulu whispered, holding my faux fur coat out for me. “Are you all right? You look pale as a ghost. Are you going to throw up?”

“Let’s just get out of here,” I whispered back. “Where’s Brandon?”

“I don’t know,” Lulu said. “He disappeared a while ago with your agent.”

“Great,” I said sarcastically. The security guards were hustling us down the red-carpeted steps and out to the limo that was idling outside. Paparazzi snapped dozens of photos as we ducked inside the car, all calling out, “Nikki! Where’s your boyfriend?” and “Nikki! Did you have a nice time at the party?”

Once we were inside the car and the doors had been closed, Nikki said, “It’s so weird how they do that.”

“Do what?” Gabriel asked.

“Yell
my
name. But they’re talking to
her.”
She pointed at me.

“It must be weird,” Gabriel said, but his voice was softer than when he’d ever spoken to Nikki before, as if he were sympathizing with her for once. “You must miss it.”

“That?” Nikki’s eyes widened. “Being screamed at by the paps?
You
probably like it. But I’m sort of starting to appreciate this anonymity thing for a change.” She looked over at me and demanded, “So? Did you find out anything?”

“Oh,” I said, leaning back against the leather seat and taking a long, cleansing breath. “I learned a lot.”

“Oh?” Gabriel asked. “Care to enlighten us?”

I reached into my bra and pulled out my Stark brand cell phone. “You have no idea,” I said. “Can I borrow your phone? This one is bugged. I need to call Christopher.”

Gabriel fumbled around in his pockets, while Nikki just rolled her eyes.

“No one will let me have a phone,” she said. “I’m not to be trusted, evidently.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Lulu said, opening her gold Prada clutch and tossing me her phone. “But you better tell us what you heard up there….”

I was already dialing.

“Oh,” I said. “You’re going to find out, all right. Hello, Christopher?” He’d picked up on the first ring.

“Em?” he said, confused, because his caller ID had said Lulu’s name.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s me. Listen, you were right. About all of it. Project Phoenix is exactly what you said it was. And I’ve got proof. On film. The problem is, I got caught. By Robert Stark himself.”

“Jesus Christ, Em.” Christopher sounded like someone had punched him in the stomach. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “So far. They think they destroyed the only proof. That’s why I can’t e-mail it to you or anything…because if I do, it will totally send up a red flag. Because it’s on a Stark brand phone they’ve got bugged, so that means it’s also on their mainframe, I’m pretty sure. Which means Felix could probably pull it up…but then they might notice. So just in case, I’m going to hand deliver it to him right now with Lulu and Nikki.” I looked at the two of them questioningly. They both glanced at each other, then nodded eagerly. “So can you be there in, like, twenty minutes, Christopher, and be ready for it?”

“I’m already at Felix’s,” Christopher said. “He’s ready for whatever you’ve got. What are you going to be doing in the meantime?”

“The Stark Angel lingerie show,” I said, unable to keep the sarcasm from my voice. “Live.”

“We’re already tuned in to Channel Seven,” I heard Felix yell in the background. “All ten monitors! High def!”

I heard a crunching sound, then a cry of pain. I assumed Christopher had hit his cousin.

“Never mind him,” Christopher said. “If you don’t want us to be watching, Em, we won’t watch. Besides, it sounds like we’re going to be pretty busy.”

“No,” I said. I had to be mature about this, I realized. It was just a body. My body.

And with any luck, Christopher was going to be seeing it naked someday, anyway.

“You can watch if you want. Just do this other thing first. Only…whatever you’re going to do with it,” I said, trying to control the shaking in my voice, “can you wait until Frida’s plane lands, and she gets home safe? Because Robert Stark said—” Suddenly, I was holding back a sob.

“What, Em?” Christopher asked. He sounded as worried as I felt. “What did Robert Stark say?”

The tender concern in his voice only made it harder to speak. I couldn’t believe this was the same Christopher with whom only an hour or so ago I’d been arguing.

“He said if anything about Project Phoenix gets out,” I answered, trying to keep from crying, “he’ll…he’ll…”

“Don’t say another word,” Christopher said. “I know what to do.”

“But.” How could he know? I hadn’t told him what Robert Stark had said he’d do. Something so awful, I couldn’t even think about it.

“Em,” Christopher said. His voice was warm. Warm with love for me. For me. “I know. Don’t worry. Consider it done. Frida will be fine. We’ve got it handled here, okay? We’re professionals.”

“But,” I said again. Now I couldn’t help smiling a little. The idea of Christopher and his cousin as professionals was ludicrous. “One of you is wearing an ankle bracelet.”

And one of you is an archvillain, with fingerless gloves and a dark streak a mile wide.

“She’s going to be all right,” Christopher reassured me. “You did your part. Tell Nikki and Lulu to get here with that cell phone. And I’ll do what I have to do. And, Em?”

“Yes?” I asked in a shaking voice.

“I’m really proud of you,” he said. “Mad as hell at you for putting yourself in danger. But really, really proud.”

“Yeah,” I said. Now the tears were coming.

But they were tears of happiness.

“Me, too,” I said.

Twenty

IT WAS CHAOS AT THE STARK ANGEL lingerie show. For one thing, Ryan Seacrest was there to emcee it. He hadn’t been there for the two dress rehearsals earlier in the month because…well, he was Ryan Seacrest. He was a busy man.

For another thing, Gabriel and I were more than two hours late for our call time. That hadn’t caused too much anxiety on the part of Alessandro, the stage director. He basically wanted to kill us.

“Dressing rooms for makeup and costumes,” he yelled when he saw me and Gabriel slinking in through the stage door. “Now.”

I figured if Alessandro had his way, we’d never be asked to participate in another Stark production ever again.

Then again, after tonight, if things went the way I hoped they would, there wouldn’t be any more Stark productions. Not ever again.

Jerri, the makeup artist, came darting in as I was wiggling out of my party dress, and the costume ladies were fretting about what to do about the indentations the seams of my panty hose had left on my belly. Seriously. These are the things we underwear models have to worry about.

“No worries,” Jerri said. “I’ll airbrush it. No one will see a thing.”

Jerri had a little machine that sprayed out liquid foundation the way self-tanning machines airbrushed bronzer on people. It was basically the same principle, only Jerri planned on spraying the foundation over my entire body instead of just my face…

…which was what she did for most of her clients, a lot of whom were male sportscasters.

“They have to look good, too,” she explained. “Now that everyone has high-def TVs. You can’t have any blemishes, or anything. I do their hands, too, for when they’re holding the microphones, interviewing people. If you don’t spray, you don’t play.”

It was amazing. Here I’d been thinking Jessica Biel and all those movie stars had perfect bodies, when it wasn’t true.
Everything
on TV was fake.

Make that everything on TV, in magazines, and in the movies, too. No wonder those Stark shareholders felt like they needed to murder young people and steal their bodies.

“Oh, sure,” Jerri said as I stood there in my bra and panties, feeling the cold spray go all over my body. “All the actresses do it, for their nude scenes? They’re all sprayed. It covers your cellulite, too. Not that you have cellulite. Oh, wait. Yes, sorry. Even Nikki Howard! Ha, wait till I tell my sister. She thinks you’re perfect. Not that you aren’t—” Jerri popped her head around to look up at me. “You know, you almost are.”

I smiled down at her queasily. “It’s okay. Can I borrow your cell phone?” I asked. “I need to make a call. It’s local.”

“Oh, go ahead, darling,” Jerri said. “Make as many as you want. I’m getting holiday pay for this, it being New Year’s Eve and all.”

She gave me her phone, and I quickly dialed my parents’ number. My mom picked up after the second ring.

“Hello?” she asked curiously, not recognizing the number on the caller ID.

“Hi, Mom,” I said. “It’s me.” I didn’t say it’s me, Em, because Jerri was there. “I was wondering…do you know if Frida made it to her plane all right?”

“Well, of course she did,” Mom said. “She called me from the runway three hours ago. She should be landing at LaGuardia any minute. The girls are all sharing cabs back into the city. Why do you ask?”

“I just haven’t heard from her in a while,” I said, trying to sound casual. “That’s all. Do you think you could have her call me the minute she walks in the door?”

“Of course,” Mom said. “But aren’t you a bit busy? I thought you were doing that, er, lingerie show tonight, on Channel Seven.”

Damn. I was kind of hoping that Mom had forgotten about that.

“I am,” I said stiffly. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t worry about my little sister.”

“Well,” Mom said, “I’ll be sure to have her call you.”

Belatedly, I remembered I didn’t have a cell phone. One was smashed to bits on the carpet in Robert Stark’s upstairs hallway. And the other was on its way to Felix’s basement in a cab with Lulu and Nikki. Hopefully it was there by now.

“Actually,” I said, thinking fast, “could you have her call Lulu? My cell is messed up.” I gave her the number. “It’ll be better, anyway, in case I’m onstage.”

“All right,” Mom said. In typical Mom style, however, she didn’t sound like she thought it was all right. “Listen, honey, while I have you on the phone…about yesterday.”

“Yeah,” I said. I was conscious that Jerri was working her way up toward my head with the spray gun. “I’m really sorry—”

“No,” Mom said.
“I’m
sorry. I
realize
now that when you asked me if you were pretty— well, that’s such a loaded question, honey. I mean, for me. I don’t want you girls to judge one another by your looks—”

“Mom,” I said. I couldn’t believe we were even having this conversation. My boss had just threatened to kill my little sister if I exposed the fact that he was basically a murdering sociopath.

And if things went the way I hoped they would, I was just about to do exactly that.

And my mom wanted to have bonding time over the phone.

“I really don’t have time for this. I just wanted to check on Frida.”

“But this is important,” Mom went on. “I realize that maybe, at your school, that’s what all girls do. Judge one another by their looks.”

“Not just at school, Mom,” I said. “Try all of contemporary Western society.”

Hello, Mom? This is America. Welcome. This is called a McDonald’s. Can you say that word? Mc-Don-ald’s. They serve cheeseburgers here. And fries. Can you say the
word fries?

“I know,” Mom went on. She sounded like she was practically crying. “And it’s just so wrong. I don’t
want
you girls to judge yourselves that way. There’s so much more to you than that. You’re both just so amazing, you and Frida, so smart and strong and creative. I wanted to emphasize
that
part of you. But every time you turn on the television, what do you see? Well, skinny girls with big boobs, in tight pants with shirts cut down to their belly buttons. And every time I’d take the two of you to the store, you’d both want exactly what those girls— Nikki Howard— was wearing. You eventually grew out of it, but Frida— it’s like a mother can’t win. And my mother said I was exactly the same way, and that’s why she stopped telling me I was pretty— that I let it go straight to my head when I was growing up….”

This was news to me. Grandma? Grandma always told Frida and me that we were pretty. So much so that it really didn’t mean anything. Of course we were pretty. We were her granddaughters. It doesn’t mean anything when your grandmother tells you that you’re pretty.

But Mom? Mom never said we were pretty, or looked good. It was always, “Your mind is all that matters!”

And of course that’s true.

But it would have been nice to have heard our hair looked good, once in a while.

And now that I knew Mom had liked girlie clothes? Mom, who always dressed so sensibly in gray suits and low-heeled shoes? Grandma had had to stop telling Mom she was pretty because she got so conceited about it?

This was fantastic stuff. I couldn’t wait to tell Frida.

If I ever saw her again.

“And I guess,” Mom went on— she was practically babbling— “I just thought if I followed her lead, you two would turn out like me…more interested in things academic than…well…”

What? What had Mom been like as a girl? I was dying to find out.

But by then Jerri had gotten to my head with the spray blower.

“Look, Mom,” I said. “I have to go get ready for the show. I understand everything you’re saying. I know it’s all fake. No one knows that more than me. But it’s still nice to hear your mom say you’re pretty once in a while, you know? But don’t worry about me, okay? Everything’s going to be fine.” This was a boldfaced lie. I had absolutely no way of knowing this. But what else was I going to say? Look, Mom, because of my jackassery, my boss may be about to kill your youngest daughter? “Just call Lulu as soon as you hear from Frida.”

“I will,” Mom said. She hesitated, then said, “I love you, Em. In case that wasn’t clear. No matter what you look like. Or what you wear.”

This brought tears to my eyes. Because I so didn’t deserve it.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said. “Me, too.”

I hung up and handed the phone back to Jerri.

“Moms,” I said to her, rolling my eyes in an effort not to burst into tears.

“Tell me about it,” Jerri said, tucking her phone back into her pocket. “Mine smokes a pack of Camel Lights a day. Can I get her to stop? No way. Close your eyes now, hon, I’m gonna do your face.”

Forty-five minutes later— which Jerri claimed was a speed record for her— I was out of hair and makeup and tucked into the diamond bra and panties, my wings attached and floating behind me. I looked, when I saw myself in the mirror, like a cross between an angel and…well, a girl wearing a diamond bikini.

Oh, well. Hopefully, Mom wouldn’t be watching.

I strode in my platform heels toward the soundstage as Jerri trotted alongside me, blotting on the last dab of lip gloss.

“There you are.” Rebecca appeared as if from nowhere, still in her black evening gown with the slit up to here. “I heard you were late. What did I warn you about? Did I tell you not to be late? Did you eat anything? I can see your hip bones. I know you didn’t eat anything. If you faint on me, Nikki, I swear to God…”

“I’m not going to faint,” I assured her. “Is Brandon here with you? Because I really need to talk to him.”

“As a matter of fact, he is,” Rebecca said, looking demure. Or as demure as it was possible for Rebecca to look, which wasn’t very. “You might as well know, we’re an item now. And I know there’s a bit of an age difference, but honestly, I think he could use a mature woman in his life. No offense, Nikki, but you haven’t exactly been the most steadying influence on him. And he needs stability.”

“I really don’t care about that,” I said. “You can have him. That isn’t what I want to talk to him about. It’s about his dad, actually.”

“His dad?” Rebecca shrugged. “Not exactly his favorite topic. But it’s your funeral.” She pulled her BlackBerry from her Chanel bag and began banging on the keyboard. “You sure you want to get into this now, right before the show? Can’t it wait? You’re onstage in five. And don’t talk to Ryan, all right, darling? All the girls are talking to Ryan, and it’s getting on his nerves.”

I looked up and down the hall. There were models in Stark brand underwear and wings everywhere. I saw Kelley, my friend from the dress rehearsal, wave her cell phone at me and set off her ringtone. It played the
Journeyquest
Dragon Battle Cry. Kelley laughed and pointed at me, then gave me the thumbs-up. I smiled at her like
Ha! That’s funny.

But mainly I was thinking how much I wanted to throw up.

“I won’t,” I said.

Rebecca shrugged and kept banging on the keyboard.

What was Robert Stark doing right now? I wondered. Was he trying to kill my sister?

And what about Christopher? Had Lulu and Nikki gotten him my cell phone? I felt so vulnerable not knowing what was going on.

I wasn’t the only one. Gabriel stepped out of his dressing room in full makeup and his tux. He was with his band— all of whom were good-looking enough to cause a ripple of excitement to pass through the other models, Ryan Seacrest suddenly forgotten.

But Gabriel ignored it. When he saw me, in fact, he said to the rest of his guys, “Hey. I’ll be right there,” and fell back to whisper to me, “So? Have you heard anything?”

I shook my head. “Nothing. You?”

He shook his head. “I’m sure it will be fine.”

“Or,” I said, “we’ll walk out onto the stage and a boom will fall on us, killing us both instantly, courtesy of Robert Stark.”

“It’s always good,” Gabriel said, tugging on his lapels, “to think positive.”

“Brandon will meet you after the show,” Rebecca announced, reading from the screen of her BlackBerry.

“But I really need to talk to him now,” I said, unable to keep the dismay from my voice.

“Well.” Rebecca shrugged. “What do you want me to do? The man says he’s busy. He’ll meet you upstairs in the Stark Sky Bar, he says. There’ll be champagne for all of us to toast in the New Year. It’s where we’re all going to watch the Times Square ball drop. There’s a perfect view from there—”

“Places!” Alessandro came scurrying down the hallway, clapping his hands. “All of you. Backstage, now! What are you dillydallying for? Are you trying to give me a heart attack? The show’s started! We’re live! No more talking once you get through the soundproof door. Go! GO!”

I reached instinctively for Gabriel’s hand. My own was ice-cold. But his felt warm…just like his gaze when it met mine.

“It’s going to be all right,” he assured me, with a smile. “You did the right thing.”

“Did I?” I asked. I wished I could believe him. In theory, I did.

But Frida! My own sister! How could I have been so stupid?

“Oh, God,” Rebecca said, noticing our clenched hands. “What is going on here? Are you two an item? This is perfect. Can I announce it to the press? Do you have any idea what this is going to do for your sales numbers, Gabriel? You’re already in the stratosphere, but this, honey, we’re talking Mars—”

By this time, I was going through the studio doors, and all the cameramen and sound engineers were shushing Rebecca to be quiet.

Still, she stood behind the doors, even as they were closing, whisper-yelling, “You can’t hide things from me, Nikki! You can’t run away! I know all your secrets!”

If only she knew.

Inside the backstage space of the studio, where we were all gathered to wait our turn onstage, it was so quiet, I could almost hear my own heartbeat. It was the front of the studio, where the stage was, where it was another matter entirely. There, it was thunderously loud. The live audience was screaming with appreciation for Ryan and the models who were already strutting out onto the stage, doing their catwalk up and down the runway, showing off their different bra and panty sets.