Shooting Stars (4 page)

My cell still in my hand, I weigh the pros and cons here.

Cons:

• sick job

• will hate myself for taking it

• worried I won’t be able to take the shots or hand them over and will never be asked to work for Melissa again and won’t be paid Pros:

• will have all the money I need for school

• can cut back a bit on work, stop falling asleep at school, maybe even catch a movie now and then like a normal teenager

• I don’t see how they’ll ever be able to use the photos, so it won’t be like I’m truly evil

• $$$

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Gulp. There’s no denying that list of pros. Especially that fi rst and last one. Silently, I slide my cell back into my pocket and keep riding.

After a few more minutes, I fi nally get up the courage to admit the truth to myself. Okay, so maybe I left one big reason off my list. One big “con.” Now, I add it to the others: Cons:

• will be betraying Ned Hartnett, the one and only star who’s ever been truly decent to me That last “con” is probably the real reason I’m holding back. It’s kind of ironic that Ned Hartnett is my target, considering he’s the one who got me into the shooting- by- stealth thing in the fi rst place.

I guess you could say there have been two major infl uences in my career as a paparazzo so far: my dad and Ned Hartnett.

Everyone assumes that my dad pushed me into being a pap, considering he’s one as well, but that’s not true at all.

Sure, Dad had provided an early interest in cameras and how they worked, but the rest was all up to me.

I started with a pinhole camera when I was six. You make them out of any kind of small box that you paint black inside and put a tiny hole in the center of one of the ends, then you tape a fl ap over the hole to use at a shutter, and then you tape a piece of fi lm or fast photographic paper inside 28

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the box. It’s pretty cool— a camera made mostly from house-hold items.

Then I got my fi rst real camera for Christmas that year and started developing. I had this thing for taking pictures of people right from the start. I just loved it, loved trying to get their personality to shine through the lens. When my blood relations got sick of me, I turned to other sources. Like the cat across the road. I remember I spent one summer taking thousands of pictures of that cat, trying to capture how it was in real life. It had quite the portfolio by the time school started again. Considering it was a Los Angeleno feline, it could probably have gotten an agent.

If I’d grown up elsewhere, I most likely would have continued along happily with my little hobby and become something like a wedding photographer. But, no. I lived in West Hollywood, with a dad who was a paparazzo. Growing up, famous people walked past our house all the time. When I was ten, my dad pointed out a famous actor who would jog past our house every morning. Because it was what my dad did, I also started taking shots of him. The guy thought it was funny.

He probably wouldn’t think it was so funny now that he has an Oscar and I stand to make fi fteen thousand dollars if he trips and falls. More if he splits his lip and there’s blood.

My dad never suggested I start papping— I did it myself when I realized I’d need the money for school. It wasn’t exactly the kind of cash I could make working at KFC. That said, Dad 29

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never had any objections, either. Not even about my age.

Still, while he might be pushing the limits a bit as a parent, you have to hand it to him— he’s pretty good at his job. He’s so well connected he can pretty much fi nd out where any celebrity is anywhere in the world in under an hour. He knows everyone— nail and brow techs, drivers, maître d’s, personal trainers, valets, airline workers, masseuses, dog walkers. He knows which celebrities have relatives who’ll talk for a hundred dollars. Or even less. He can recite about 150 celebrity car license plates off the top of his head.

So, that was my dad’s infl uence.

And Ned’s? Well, that came later. I’d only been papping a month or so when we had our little encounter. I’d been having a rough time of it, to say the least. I wasn’t the youn gest pap ever, but I was by far the smallest. That didn’t stop some of the stars or their entourages from making my life diffi cult, though. During that fi rst month I’d been pushed to the ground by a bodyguard, had my camera ripped out of my hands by a model, and been kicked by a singer’s girlfriend.

Some of the other zos weren’t any better. New ones, not even ones related to the stars of the fi eld, weren’t welcomed to the fold. There wasn’t exactly a code of conduct and some people liked to play rough. Especially the full-timers; they

hated the part- timers who liked to pap outside of their day jobs, even if their day job was school. I was new, I was female and I was a kid. Let’s just say no one was splitting their lunch-box Twinkie with me.

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The night I came face- to- face with Ned, I was so close to packing in the papping thing, it wasn’t funny. A group of the

“old boys” had agreed on a little practical joke. They’d fed me a false lead that had me wasting forty- fi ve minutes of my time outside the back door of a restaurant. Every so often one of the paps would swing past and go on about this spot; apparently it was the new “in” place to dine— a restaurant that was actively being deconstructed around the diners— but was actually being renovated and had only workmen inside.

And I was green enough to believe them. After all, it was hardly all that out there for LA. There was a real restaurant nearby where patrons dined in complete darkness.

It was only after I fi nally got a peek inside the joint that I knew I’d never be stupid enough to trust them again. Trust was for people who didn’t have the smarts, or the guts, to do it on their own.

By the time I’d ridden another fi fteen minutes to the real hot spot of the night— a restaurant people were actually eating in— I was pooped and angry. So pooped that when I got there, panting, and a number of stars started to pile out of the restaurant, the hustling became a bit much. I should have given up and gone home at that point, but I didn’t, because I was still angry. And because I was angry, I did something pretty stupid— I got right in there with the bigger, badder, older, and uglier paparazzi and found myself being pushed around. Until, eventually, one last shove from the biggest, baddest, oldest, and ugliest of them all had me 31

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landing in a bad way, cracking my elbow loudly on some concrete stairs.

And I am not exaggerating when I say it really hurt.

Because it really hurt.

In fact, it hurt so badly I was kind of temporarily winded and could only curl into a ball on the stairs and hope I didn’t get kicked to death.

Which is when Ned came along.

“Hey, you. And you. Move. Now. Get out of the way!” are the words I remember him saying before I felt something warm on my back— his hand. “Are you okay?” I think I’d just groaned. But then I’d heard someone else speaking. Telling Ned that I was one of them. I’d expected him to leave. But he didn’t.

“You can’t be serious. He’s just a kid.” Oh, nice. I remember this comment ripping through my pain and, amazingly, causing a bit more. I might have had a baseball cap on and been wearing jeans and a hoodie, but I was not a little boy out past my bedtime. My elbow still throb-bing, but my breath restored, I somehow managed to uncurl myself. “I’m fi ne,” I said.

Big lie, but what else was I going to say?

I looked into Ned’s eyes and saw him come to the realization that I was (a) female and (b) not quite as young as he thought. To his credit, however, he didn’t turn and walk off at this point, but took my good arm and started to lift me up the rest of the way.

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The problem was, being tall and well built, he may have underestimated how much I weighed, because I sort of went fl ying, bounced off Ned’s chest, and came back to a resting position on my feet just inches away from him.

I stood there, dazed for a few seconds, before I’d glanced up at him. “Um, thanks,” I managed to say. I went to take a step back, stumbled, and Ned pulled me in close again, steadying me.

“Whoa,” he said. “Are you really okay?”

I took a step back without falling over this time, but Ned kept a fi rm hold on one of my hands just to make sure. By that stage, the pain in my elbow had died down to nothing more than a gigantic throb. I started to think I had bigger problems, though, because I still felt woozy. And my heart was kerthunking inside my ribs. I wondered if there was something more serious wrong with me— like a con-cussion.

When he’d established I

wasn’t going to fall over, Ned

frowned. “Where are your parents?” he asked me. I was still close and he smelled good— a combination of citrus after-shave and mint.

At least this took my mind off things, not to mention the biggest thing of all—

that Ned was still holding my hand.

“Where are yours?” I had to laugh at his question. Ned Hartnett and I were the same age. I’d read in an interview once that his birthday was only days before mine. He still looked confused, however, so I added, “We’re the same age.” 33

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“No, we can’t be. I’m . . . ,” he trailed off before his eyes moved down to my hand. He let it go.

“Look,” I told him, “you can go. You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll be fi ne. Despite appearances, I’m a big girl.” He’d frowned again and turned his back away from the other paps, towering over me and effectively wrecking any nice little pictures they might be thinking of taking. “How long have you been doing this for?”

I shrugged. “A month.”

“And how many times have you almost lost an elbow?”

“Once.”

“And other bodily parts?”

“Maybe more than once.”

Ned Hartnett shook his head at me. “You’ve got to get out.”

Ha! He wished! I wondered if he said that to all the paparazzi he picked up off the ground. I just shrugged again. “It’s not forever. And, like I said, I can handle it.” He gave me a long look. “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like it.”

I started to get a little peeved at this point. “Are you fi nished? Can I go now?” I couldn’t fi gure out why on earth he was even talking to me— I was a paparazzo, for crying out loud! The most attention we usually got was a rude gesture.

And that was if we were lucky.

Ned paused for a second. “No.”

At fi rst, I thought I hadn’t heard him right, or that I’d asked 34

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a different question than the one I’d meant to. “No?” I scowled.

“You’re not fi nished? What’s that supposed to mean?” He kept right on staring at me. “It means you look smart.

And what you’re doing is dumb.”

That was the end of the line for me. “What I’m doing is dumb?”

Quite calmly, he nodded. “Yes. It’s dumb.” I tried to control myself. Ned Hartnett might have been supercute, but what made him think he should be giving me career advice? I considered simply turning and running, but something held me to the spot.

“You’re crazy. Look at you. You’ve got this distinct advantage over them and you’re not even using it.”

“Advantage?” Now it was me who paused. My anger started to dissipate.

Ned looked around and pulled me aside slightly, farther away from prying eyes. People were getting pretty interested in us by now and I didn’t blame them— a couple of the paparazzi had even taken some shots. I tried not to notice his hand on my arm again, which took a whole lot of effort.

“I thought you were a kid, right? You could pass for one and get into places no one else could. Why you’re out here with them, I have no idea. You could be in there—” he jerked a thumb in the direction of the restaurant “—and no one would look twice at you.”

I stared at him, frowning. My dad had fi lled me in on Ned Hartnett, how he was one of the top fi ve best- paid stars. But, 35

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I mean, I’d already known he was huger than huge— I’d grown up with him. He was one of those child prodigy singers, the type who’d had a parent push them onto every TV show out there from the age of six. But the thing about Ned was that he could not only sing but also write, which meant his popularity kept growing. As he’d gotten older, he’d hidden away from the limelight more and more with each passing year, but his song writing hadn’t suffered for it. Not one bit. And he kept in touch with his fans through Facebook and Twitter and his blog. But because he hardly ever left his house, there were all kinds of rumors about him— that he had some kind of skin disease; that he weighed over fi ve hundred pounds; that he was chron-ically shy and could only speak to one person on the whole planet (his father); that he was addicted to this, that, and the other drug. But this guy standing in front of me was none of those things. . . .

Well, except maybe plain old crazy, because he seemed to think I could walk into a restaurant and take shots of people and no one would notice because I was short.

“Um, and what do you suggest I do with this?” I held up my rather large eight- thousand- dollar camera, my anger now completely gone, replaced with bewilderment. A star giving the paparazzi tips on getting the best shots? If only my dad were here. Thinking about my dad, I remembered the many shots we’d viewed online together of Ned. He looked different in real life. Though that was to be expected— anything put 36