Star Crossed (Stargazer) (14 page)

“I’m not telling you to lie if the TV station asks you about that,” Wendy said. “I’m telling you to withhold information and become a more private person. You can have relationships the public doesn’t know about. Just because somebody asks you a question doesn’t mean you have to answer. Especially if it comes from the paparazzi.”

“Oh.” Lorelei’s whole lithe body sank into the cloud of padding around her. “I can’t dis the paparazzi. A lot of those guys are my friends.”

And that was exactly why the public had known so much about Lorelei’s snockered coming of age. Lorelei had invited the paparazzi into her parties on occasion. Wendy was guessing that Lorelei was very lonely.

“We’ll work on this,” Wendy assured her. “It’s a process. We’re not changing you into a different person. We’re presenting a different side of you. It’ll be fun.” She hopped on Lorelei’s plush king bed like they were at a slumber party and opened her laptop.

She asked Lorelei to recite every rehearsal and appearance she’d planned for the week. Lorelei seemed to know where she was going. That was good. She remembered the events out of order, as they popped into her obviously scatterbrained head. That was bad. Wendy made a mental note to double-check the schedule with Lorelei’s wardrobe mistress and her agent.

“The biggest deal is probably the party I’m throwing Thursday night for my twenty-first-and-a-half
birthday,” Lorelei said. “It’s here at the casino, but in the club on the roof, Wet Dream.”

“Good Lord,” Wendy blurted. “These club names were all made up by fourteen-year-old boys. Are you serving food? Is that even sanitary?”

Lorelei laughed, and Wendy realized she was lucky this star wasn’t as easily offended as the lead singer of Darkness Fallz. She needed to dial down. And despite the untoward name of the club, it was one of the hottest spots in Vegas right now. She wished the party weren’t so close to the awards show, but it had already been planned and she would work with it. “Will there be a cake shaped like a penis?”

“You are so funny!” Lorelei exclaimed. “Of course not. It’s a guitar.”

Lorelei sounded too cavalier for Wendy’s liking. She made a note on her laptop to check personally for penis cake. Stars ruined themselves being photographed with penis cake with almost the same frequency that they were arrested with their pants down in public parks.

Then Lorelei said, “Tonight there’s a party at the wax museum because they’re unveiling a statue of my mother.”

“What?” Wendy exclaimed, going back over what she’d already typed. Some of these shindigs had been forwarded to her by Lorelei’s agent. Not this one. “That’s a terrific public relations opportunity, but I haven’t heard a peep about it in the media.”

Wendy could picture it already. Lorelei’s kick-ass,
rock star, heroin-chic mother in her ethereal and wasted blond glory standing next to her musical prodigy daughter, who, for all her faults, would look positively angelic in comparison. If Wendy didn’t keep tabs on Lorelei during the party after the unveiling of the statue, the night could go badly. The tabloids could run a drunken photo and say Lorelei was following in her mother’s staggering footsteps. But if Lorelei kept herself together, the public would see only that she’d inherited her mother’s talent and, despite a difficult childhood, had turned out okay, considering.

But it would all be for nothing if nobody showed up to the party. In fact, a tabloid report that Lorelei threw a party and nobody came would be worse PR than anything Lorelei had come up with yet.

Lorelei shrugged. “The museum said at first they were going to make a big deal out of it. I guess they decided not to, with all the shit that’s gone down.”

Wendy gripped the sides of her laptop. Any other day, she would have launched a tirade at Lorelei. The
shit
had not
gone down
, unattached to anyone, a misfortune Lorelei had unsuspectingly walked into. Lorelei and Colton had been the manufacturers of said shit.

Today Wendy did not yell. She was not that person anymore. She grimaced, swallowed, and said, “I’ll call the museum and get the announcements to the media outlets so plenty of paparazzi are there to watch you walk in. I’ll contact the publicity people for all the guests to make sure they’ll be there. I’ll fix it.” She
typed a few notes on her computer, omitting the curse words she normally would have included, because Lorelei beside her on the bed might catch a glimpse of the screen. “Who’s on the guest list?”

“Oh, anybody who was going to be in Vegas. Lots more people are coming in for the awards show rehearsals today.” Bored with serious conversation, Lorelei plucked the strings of her guitar and wiggled her fingers on them to make funny noises.

“Colton?” Wendy asked.

Lorelei plucked a string so hard that Wendy thought it might break. “Yeah.”

Wendy waited for Lorelei to ask if they could have Colton taken off the list. Lorelei didn’t say a word. She went back to fingering her guitar, more thoughtfully now.

Daniel had been right about this, too. Lorelei was still interested enough in Colton that she wanted him at her party, even if they were at each other’s throats. Daniel and Wendy might well be able to get them back together. But Wendy had said no to this.

Jet lag was catching up with her. Taking a deep breath with her eyes closed, she pondered the possibility of excluding Colton from Lorelei’s party to avoid another altercation. If she called Daniel ahead of time to warn him they were blackballing Colton, Daniel might stage repercussions. If she
didn’t
warn him and Colton found out the hard way, standing in the street outside the wax museum while pedestrians wandered by and stared curiously, the repercussions would be
worse. The tabloids would say—and Daniel might even feed them this line—that Lorelei had invited Colton, then maliciously reneged on the invitation and humiliated him.

Bitch.

“Sit up and look at me, sweetie,” Wendy said.

Obediently Lorelei crawled toward the headboard like an overgrown toddler. She propped herself up against the pillows and held her guitar in front of her for protection, sensing she was about to be scolded.

“You can’t have another run-in with Colton tonight,” Wendy said. “Everybody understands there are hard feelings between you, but beyond that, you have to take the high road. You can’t keep posting pictures of your private parts and telling him to suck it.”

Lorelei ran one freshly manicured finger along the glowing wood grain of her guitar. “I just want to show him I don’t need him to have a good time.”

Wendy nodded. “Like you’re in middle school. Totally. Listen, pretty girl, there is more at stake here than your battle with Colton. There’s your performance on the awards show. Your concert tour. Your album. Your whole career. All of that depends on your PR, and that’s what you’re paying me to repair. Yes?”

“Yes,” Lorelei said earnestly.

“In PR, we have tools to track your ratings,” Wendy said. “We contract with companies that conduct surveys and ask people if they’ve heard of you and what they think of you. Your name recognition is extremely high, but people say you’re as likable as that executive
in New York who swindled her company out of a hundred million dollars, abandoned her husband and children, and escaped with her lover to Papua New Guinea.”

“Oh,” Lorelei said dejectedly. Now she was getting it.

“We want to rebuild your image as America’s sweetheart.”

“No, wait!” Lorelei exclaimed. “Why do I have to be that? There are plenty of girls who have a badass image. Why can’t I be a badass chick that people like better than the cheater lady?”

“You’re not a badass at heart,” Wendy said. “When you try, like in this war you’re having with Colton, you just end up sounding insecure. To be a real badass, you have to
be
one, and those girls are a special breed. You could, however, be America’s sweetheart.”

“I could?”

“You totally could, but you have a deep hole to crawl out of. I can picture people in a few years saying, ‘Remember when Lorelei Vogel went through her difficult period?’ and other people will be unable to recall this at all. But you would need to start today to build that image. Definitely don’t do anything else to make it worse.”

“But I just posted last night that you were a twat. If I suddenly turn nice, won’t it seem like I had a talk with my PR expert and she told me what to do? I mean,
that’s
not going to play well.”

“You’re a fast learner,” Wendy said. “Yes, we may have a clean break here from your past behavior, and
people may comment on its suddenness. The alternative is worse. Let me explain something to you. It’s wonderful publicity for you to hang out in Las Vegas. There are bars here that your average chick would kill to get into. You can get into them. You need to go wearing your shortest skirt and your highest heels,
but
you have to look good in the dress, and you have to be able to walk in the heels. Don’t pull a Björk on me, or a Gerald Ford.”

“Who?” Lorelei asked.

“Inside the club,” Wendy went on, “sure, you can drink. That’s what you went for, and it would be weird if you didn’t imbibe. But you can’t get too drunk, Lorelei.”

“I can’t? I thought
that’s
what I went to the bar for.”

“Maybe so, but the public can’t know that. You need to drink but not get drunk. You need to eat but not look fat. You need to wear high heels without getting blisters and wear short skirts when it’s cold out without getting goose bumps. You have to be a superhero, because that’s what the public expects.
I
don’t expect that. Maybe the awards show doesn’t, either. But we expect you to make every effort to hide that you’re human. And so far, you are doing a terrible job of it. You’re acting like a senior on spring break from a West Virginia high school.

“Keep your eyes on the prize, pretty girl. I have trouble with this, too. We want our dream careers, but we have to battle against our own natures to get and
keep those careers. If you want it badly enough, sometimes you just have to swallow things you were going to say. Like this.” Wendy swallowed, closing one eye as if everything she shouldn’t have said to Darkness Fallz was very hard to get down. “Ah, it tastes good and makes you feel so much better afterward. Try it.”

Lorelei performed her own swallowing act, then asked, “Can I make a blow job joke about this?”

“A lady should never make a blow job joke in public. Let someone else make the blow job joke. You may giggle good-naturedly.”

“Tee-hee!” Lorelei played along.

“Very good.” Wendy patted Lorelei’s knee, then consulted the notes on her laptop. “Prepare me for the unveiling of your mother’s statue. You feel okay posing for the magazines with this likeness of your mom?”

“Sure.” Lorelei nodded. “The photographers will get some cool shots I can use in my tour.”

Exactly what Wendy had been thinking. “You’re not going to do anything to her statue, though.” Wendy didn’t want to approach this touchy subject, but Lorelei was so unpredictable that she felt it was her duty to make sure. “You’re not going to be photographed picking your mom’s nose? You don’t harbor any ill will toward her?”

“Oh, gosh, no,” Lorelei said. “I was so little when she died, you know? I hardly remember her. All my dad ever said about her was how much she loved me.”

“Really.” Wendy’s very low estimation of Lorelei’s ne’er-do-well father rose several notches.

“Yeah. It was only later that I learned all the other stuff. What she was into and how she died.” Lorelei turned away from Wendy, toward the window onto the sunny Strip. She was clearly used to the idea of her mom being gone. It was more a part of her than her mom herself. But it still made her sad, and she liked distraction. Wendy knew the feeling.

“My mom died when I was three,” Wendy said.

Lorelei turned back to her in surprise. “I’m so sorry. How’d she die?”

This question would have been rude coming from anyone else. Coming from another motherless girl, Wendy didn’t mind it.

“She had cancer,” Wendy said. “My dad was between jobs. We didn’t have insurance. When you don’t have insurance, they do stuff to try to save you, but they don’t do everything.” Unlike Lorelei, Wendy had always known the details of her mother’s death. Her father had described it like the losing end of a cash transaction.

Lorelei opened her hand on the duvet. Wendy put her hand inside Lorelei’s. They held hands for a few moments while something passed between them. Wendy wasn’t sure what it was, and for once she didn’t try to analyze it. It wasn’t part of her job.

She drew her hand away and placed her fingertips on her laptop keyboard again. “So. Tonight. Do you have any really good friends coming to the museum?” Lorelei named a few who passed muster. Wendy would
call their PR folks and invite them to go with her and Lorelei to a braid bar before the party. Lorelei would get a stylish, dreamy updo to go with tonight’s bohemian outfit, which the wardrobe mistress had showed Wendy. Lorelei would be photographed having comparatively innocent fun with her friends: a first. And Wendy’s own braid would hide the jagged ends where her hair had gone missing.