The Pretty App (22 page)

“T
his way!” Audrey said a few hours later, yanking me behind the cover of azalea bushes. “Couldn’t you have changed into something a little less glow-in-the-dark?”

I was still wearing my billowy white gown, and the fabric made me look like a ghost moving through the darkness. “Lindsay didn’t exactly pack me a getaway outfit,” I said, and Audrey grinned. Our breathing was heavy as we edged along the line of the trees leading away from Audrey’s guesthouse. It was nearly one in the morning, and we’d waited until the producers and the camerapeople left, presumably to call it a night. Still—I was freaked out. If we got caught sneaking off campus it was grounds for me to get kicked off the show. But we had to get away: We needed somewhere safe to talk. What if there were secret cameras or listening devices hidden in the walls at Audrey’s?

Our feet scuffed over the white stones that lined the driveway. Audrey’s sneaker snapped a twig and the sound made me jump. I grabbed her hand, and we moved faster and faster until we were sprinting across the lawn.

Audrey let out a squeal when we reached the edge of the driveway. “I think we’re safe,” I said, breathless. We raced down the neighborhood’s hilly road past white stucco houses and palm-tree-lined sidewalks. We came to an intersection, and we were silently waiting to cross when a Jeep Wrangler zoomed down the hill. “Crap!” Audrey said when she saw it. It looked like the safari-man’s car. Headlights blinded us. The Jeep zoomed past us, and I made out the silhouettes of two women. “It’s not him,” I said, giddy with relief.

The traffic light changed, and we ran across the street. On the other side of the intersection, beneath the streetlamps, Audrey looked at me in my evening gown and burst out laughing. “I think you’re dressed just right for In-N-Out,” she said, pointing to the burger joint. I glanced through the window and made out three or four diners, and plenty of empty tables. “It’s perfect,” I said.

We pushed open the restaurant’s door. Red-and-white tiles covered most of the walls. A white painted border cut through the tiles, stenciled with red palm trees swaying in an imaginary breeze. A neon-yellow sign shone with cursive letters that read
QUALITY YOU CAN TASTE
. The air smelled like french fries and Windex.

We ordered our food and took it to a table in the back.
Audrey listened to everything I suspected my dad and Public of doing, and then she was quiet for a few moments. Finally, she swallowed a bite of her burger and said, “I know they played you, and I get why you want revenge. But you don’t want to mess with Public. They’re dangerous. They almost ruined my entire future last year, Blake. Or at least my chance of getting into college.”

“It’s not just me,” I said. I picked up the grilled cheese I’d ordered from the In-N-Out Secret Menu, a tip I got from Lindsay’s
Blake and Audrey’s Guide to Los Angeles.
The guide was so extensive that I’d asked Audrey when Lindsay had spent time in LA, but Audrey had said, “Never. She just knows stuff.”

The sandwich smelled like plastic-wrapped single-sliced cheese, the kind my mom never let us get at the grocery store. “They took advantage of Leo, too,” I said. I bit into the deliciousness of the preservative-laced food. Maybe I couldn’t forgive Leo, but I could still be pissed on his behalf. “And Amy should be the one winning this contest, not me. I shouldn’t even have made it past the first cut.” Amy’s private words to me in the green room after tonight’s show raced through my mind:
I wasn’t even in the top votes category. I’m not going to win this thing, am I?

“Yeah, well, some companies do bad things,” Audrey said. “Don’t you watch movies? Half of them are about big bad companies and their dark, dangerous secrets.”

“So we’re just going to do nothing?”

Audrey jabbed her french fry in my direction. “That’s
exactly what we’re going to do,” she said.

I snatched the fry from her fingers and popped it into my mouth. “This doesn’t sound like you,” I said between bites. “You were the one who told me to fight.”

Audrey pursed her lips. “That’s because I believed you could win this contest with or without Public’s scheming,” she finally said. “But I don’t know if we can win against Public, and I don’t want to put us in jeopardy just because your dad and Public have morality problems.”

“So you agree with me—you think they’re cheating?”

Audrey shrugged. “It’s possible.” She dipped two fries in ketchup. “The Pretty App voting application allows users to vote more than once from the same IP address. So you could write a script that casts multiple votes automatically.”

I thought about Leo. If this was what Public was doing, it was something one of their employees—someone like him—had programmed. Did he know about it? Had he been the one to do it?

“So how do we prove it?”

“I can’t prove it without illegally hacking their systems,” Audrey said. She looked down at her hands and let go of a breath. “I don’t want to do that again, Blake. Please don’t ask me to.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said, meaning it no matter how disappointed I was. I’d already lost everything; maybe there was some way to make things right and I just had to find it. I picked up my cell. “I’m calling my dad,” I told Audrey.
Her eyes went wide, so I said, “You know I at least have to ask him.”

My mom had left me a voicemail after last night’s premiere saying how proud they were of me, but I hadn’t heard anything from them today about the footage shown online from the roadkill pickup and the school’s mural. Maybe they’d seen Nina’s awful letter on
TeensBlogToo
and were too disappointed to talk.

“Blake?” My father sounded strained on the other line. It was the middle of the night South Bend time. No doubt I’d woken him. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine, Dad,” I said, fumbling for the best way to do this. “I’m sorry to call so late, but I was wondering if I could talk to you about something?” I asked, my voice question-marking and squeaky.

He cleared his throat. He didn’t say anything, so there was nothing for me to do except blurt it out. “Did you and Public arrange for me to win the contest?” I asked. I met Audrey’s glance across the beige plastic table. She was staring at me with a french fry frozen in midair, her dark eyebrows furrowed with worry.

My dad was silent.

“Is she okay?” I heard my mother ask in the background. “Tell her not to worry about all those lies people are telling about her. Tell her we saw the show and we loved her dress.” She sounded like she knew something was wrong and was trying to fix it.

“Where would you ever get an idea like that?” my father
snapped, suddenly very awake. And then he laughed to himself. “Did Audrey come up with it?”

“No,” I said, annoyed that he’d even suggested that. Did he assume I couldn’t figure it out on my own? “It’s something I found out while I was here,” I said. I tried to sound like I had proof, even if I didn’t. “And I wanted to hear it from you.”

My father’s voice was muffled like his hand was over the phone. He was saying something to my mom, and then I heard a door shut.

“Now you listen here, Blake,” he said. “Everything I’ve ever done for you has been for your benefit and for the benefit of this family.”

He didn’t deny it, which was basically the same thing as him admitting it. I knew my dad—if I’d accused him of something so bad as cheating on a national level and he hadn’t done it, he would’ve been pissed and defensive. It was possible he’d act pissed and defensive even if he
had
done it. But for him to feed me some BS line that everything he’d done was for my own benefit and the benefit of my family was basically the same thing as him saying
I did it
.

“I want what’s best for you,” I heard him say, and even after everything he’d ever done, I still felt shocked that he’d gone this far. My skin went cold as I tried to make sense of his words rambling together. “I always have,” he said. “And being beautiful is your strong suit, and I know you want this, too.”

“Okay, Dad,” I said, my voice shaky. “I think I understand.” In his warped mind, me being in the public eye and
winning a beauty contest was what was best for me and for our family, even if he had to fix the contest to make it happen. I felt one step closer to understanding how he operated.

It just didn’t mean I had to operate that way, too.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Dear Public CEO Alec Pierce and to whomever else it may concern,

I am aware that I do not belong in this contest. Please do not crown me the winner or runner-up in tonight’s final round of competition, or else I will be forced to reveal what I know.

Blake Dawkins

My fingers shook as I pressed send. I whirled around to face Audrey and covered my mouth with my hands.

“You did it,” she said.

“I did it.” I felt more nervous than ever before, but relieved, too. I was doing the right thing—I could feel it.

It was almost three a.m., and we were back in Audrey’s guest room. In-N-Out had closed at one thirty, and we figured now that I’d gone and formally accused Public, it wasn’t like any hidden recording devices would even matter.

“So now what do we do?” I asked Audrey as I drummed my fingertips on the desk.

Audrey squished her butt next to me in the ergonomic chair and pressed refresh on my inbox. “We wait,” she said. Then she ripped open a bag of M&M’s and a box of Good & Plenty that reminded me of Amy’s story about stealing the candy. She offered me some but I shook my head, too nauseous to even consider it. “What if they don’t email me back?” I asked her. Email was the only contact information we had for Public—we figured Alec Pierce’s address would be the same configuration as everyone else who used a Public email account. We’d toyed with the idea of talking to Marsha and Rich, but we were worried they might not even know about any of this. Public could be the only ones pulling the strings behind the scenes.

“They’ll email,” Audrey said, “or they’ll figure out some way to get a message to you. They’re not going to take a chance that you’ll blow their cover. They’ve had enough PR fiascos this year, courtesy of me.” She sorted the brown M&M’s away from the colored ones, and the white Good & Plenty candies away from the purple ones, and shaped them all into an oval pile. “What?” she asked when I gave her a look. “I’m trying to avoid food coloring.” She shoved the brown M&M’s into her mouth and refreshed my inbox again.

Nothing.

“Maybe no one at Public is awake,” I said at four o’clock.

“They’re Trogs,” Audrey said. “Trogs don’t really sleep all that much.”

Eleven minutes of me deep breathing and Audrey eating brown M&M’s later, an email with the subject line
Are you sure about that?
popped up from an unidentified sender. I was too nervous to open it, so Audrey did. There wasn’t any text inside the email, only a video attachment. I looked closer and my stomach dropped.

“No way,” Audrey said.

I knew what it was the minute I saw the freeze frame, but Audrey pressed play anyway. The video of Nic kissing her girlfriend at Notre Dame came to life on my screen. We both scrambled to press stop, and then stared at each other.

“Public,” I said, unbelieving.

“Bastards,” Audrey said. Then she turned to me. “They’ve got you.”

My throat felt like it was closing. “You really think they’d release this?”

“They’ll show it to your dad at the least.”

“How did they even get the video?”

“Maybe they just keep tabs on you and your family,” Audrey said. “Maybe they have alerts in place for when any of you show up on the internet.”

A pit formed in my stomach. “What if Leo did it?” I asked, my voice hushed. What if he’d taken the video
down from the site and stored it somewhere to be used later, if needed?

Audrey covered my hand with hers. “We don’t know that,” she said.

“But what if it was him? What if he used me even more than I realized?”

“Blake, listen,” Audrey said in her
calm the F down
voice. “We need to focus on getting out of here without getting your sister exposed.”

“So now what? I just go along with this? I win the show?”

“If you don’t, if you try to say something about not belonging here, they’ll just accuse you of being a hysterical, hormonal, insecure teenager who feels undeserving of her crown.
And
they’ll do something with the video. They have ways to beat you, Blake. This is Hollywood,” she said, her green eyes narrowing. “It’s way worse than high school.”

I shook my head. If Hollywood meant deceit, backstabbing, and head games, then maybe I knew the rules, but I needed to figure out another way to play. “I should go,” I told Audrey, wrapping my arms around her shoulders and thanking her for the millionth time for everything she’d done for me.

I left Audrey’s and called Nic from the dark woods between Audrey’s house and the mansion. I was sobbing by the time I finished the story about everything that had happened since I’d arrived in LA, about what I’d figured
out and what I’d tried to do, and about what Public threatened to do with her video to stop me. Nic was crying, too, when I finished, her voice shaking when she said, “I wish I could be there for you.”

I stopped pacing and sat on a patch of cold grass. “It’s okay, Nic,” I said, letting go of a long breath. I tipped my head back and took in the tiny stars dotting the clear night sky.

“It’s not,” she said. “This isn’t the first time that I haven’t been there for you. I gave up on you and me and everything that we had together, and I’m so sorry.” She started crying harder, and I wanted to reach through the phone and hug her. “I’m so sick of holding on to this secret,” she said. “I don’t know how much longer I can do it. It makes me feel a thousand pounds heavier.”

Nic and I were both still a mess when we said our good-byes, and right when I was about to hang up, she asked, “Have you read my letter yet?”

When I said no, she made me promise I’d read it as soon as I could.

I crossed the dark grass to the white cobblestone walkway and made my way to the door. I nearly screamed when I saw one of the cameramen on the front porch. He was dressed all in black and silently filming my entrance. It felt gross, like someone had spied on me naked and alone and unaware. I swiped at the mascara that I was sure had smeared while I was crying, and held my head high as I passed him.

“Where were you tonight, Blake?” he asked, smirking.

“Taking a walk to burn some calories,” I said sweetly, figuring it was the most boring thing I could possibly say, and therefore wouldn’t be used on air. Two could play at this game.

I yanked open the front door and took the marble staircase to my room. The hallway was dimly lit, and I glanced around to check for cameras in the shadows. I eased the bedroom door open and slipped into the darkness. Amy and Charisse’s bodies made long lumps beneath their peach satin comforters. Moonlight fell on Amy’s delicate shoulder.

I dug into my suitcase and pulled Nic’s folded letter from beneath instant nail polish remover pads and gummy bears. I pulled a blanket over my head and used my phone to illuminate her handwriting, which looked just like mine.

Dear Blake,

I’m so proud of what you’re doing. You’re leaving your comfort zone in South Bend and trying something new. It won’t always be easy, but no matter what happens, just give it your best shot and don’t forget I’ll be rooting you on the whole way.

I always used to dream about what it would be like to finally get to LA. I’m really glad you’re testing the waters first. Maybe when you graduate Notre Dame I’ll already be out there, and you can move out, too, and we can get an apartment together or something. You never know. It
sounds like both of our dreams might take us there. I’m just so proud that you’re starting to make progress on yours.

I want you to know that you are my sister and that I have always loved you. But something is changing, and over the course of the past couple weeks, I don’t only love you, I like you. I like the person I see in you and I want to get to know her better. I hope you’ll give me the chance.

Love,

Nic