Starstruck

She reached up and took off her sunglasses. Let them see exactly how strong she was.

A girl—a freckled, redheaded teenager—came running toward her. “I still love you,” she called. “I still do!” And before Madison’s driver stepped in front of the girl and cut her off, she tossed a single red tulip at Madison’s feet.

Madison gazed at it for a moment, lying there on the pavement, and then looked up. Down but not out. And then the unblinking eye of the PopTV camera caught a tiny but resolute smile flickering around the edges of her perfect red lips.

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Kate stretched out her legs on the chaise longue by the Park Towers pool and wriggled her toes, admiring the blue polish she’d picked out at Brentwood Nail Garden.

“I always thought blue would make a person look like they had poor circulation,” Natalie said. “Or frostbite. But you actually pull it off.”

Kate grinned at her former roommate. “Wow, thanks. You really know how to pay a girl a compliment.”

Natalie shrugged and popped a grape into her mouth. “What can I say,” she said, chewing. “I was raised by wolves.”

“At least they were wolves with a sense of fashion,” Kate said, noting Natalie’s colorful ensemble, which consisted of a leopard-spotted crop sweater paired with a royal-blue chiffon dress, a wristful of gold bangles, and a pair of navy Oxford-style flats. (Kate had, with some effort, convinced Natalie to ditch her opaque black tights; the girl needed a little vitamin D.)

“I found this sweater at a church rummage sale,” Natalie said. “Awesome, right?”

“It looks designer,” Kate agreed.

“It’s very Marc Jacobs,” Natalie said. (As a student at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, she knew the names of every designer.) “But it cost five bucks.” Then she poked Kate with an unmanicured toe. “Speaking of designer, are you getting free clothes now that you’re a superstar?”

Kate laughed. “I wouldn’t say superstar. But I have been getting some things sent to me.” She thought about the box that ShopAddict, an L.A.-based PR firm that repped some of the hottest designers, had messengered to her apartment and which she hadn’t even had time to open yet. It sat next to a Rebecca Minkoff handbag, several dresses from Alice + Olivia, and a pile of shoe boxes from Kate Spade. And they were all for her. To keep. Simply because they hoped she’d be photographed or filmed wearing them.

“Good-bye, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf apron; hello, fashion plate!” Natalie said. “I’m so incredibly jealous that I don’t even know if I can be friends with you anymore.”

“Oh, please,” Kate said. “For one thing, you have a huge wardrobe of amazing clothes. And for another, I haven’t worked at Coffee Bean in ages.” She took a sip of Evian and reapplied a bit of sunblock to her nose. All this L.A. sunshine was threatening to bring out her freckles. “You’ll probably always be better dressed than me. I have the fashion sense of a teenage boy.”

“Just promise to give me whatever you don’t like,” Natalie said. “I’m begging you.”

“Sure,” Kate agreed. “Come to think of it, I did get this jumpsuit that might be right up your alley… .”

Natalie clapped her hands in excitement. “Only the truly fashion-forward are bold enough to rock the jump-suit. Gimme, gimme, gimme.”

“It’s all yours,” Kate said.

“Brilliant. So tell me everything else,” Natalie said. “I saw you on D-lish.com yesterday. There was a picture of you walking down Rodeo Drive.”

Kate’s stomach still did tiny somersaults when she heard things like this. Really? she couldn’t help thinking. A paparazzo followed me? (And did he get a decent photo?) “Oh, that’s funny,” she said, as if she weren’t dying to Google the picture immediately. She had spent three hours in front of the mirror the other day, practicing smiles and poses after seeing a few extremely unflattering photos of herself on Popsugar.com.

Natalie nodded. “Yep. You were drinking a Starbucks and wearing those cute new brown platforms. Can I just say, it is so weird to have a famous friend!”

Kate laughed. It was weird, weird, weird to be so suddenly well known. It seemed like only yesterday she’d been a Midwestern nobody, working two jobs and living in a run-down Los Feliz two-bedroom, fantasizing about making it in the music industry. And now here she was after three episodes of The Fame Game had aired, lounging beside a beautiful pool, freshly manicured, pedicured, and waxed, and looking at her picture splashed across the pages of Life & Style.

The Fame Game’s producers had warned her that her life was going to change overnight, but it had never seemed real. Even though PopTV cameras had followed her around for weeks and she’d done a photo shoot and talked to reporters … the fact that she was actually going to be on TV and millions of people would watch her seemed unbelievable. And in a way, it still didn’t seem real. The attention was all around her, but it hadn’t completely sunk in that this was her life now. She didn’t even feel that different. Not yet, anyway.

And there were even better perks of fame than good pedis and free clothes. Her single, which Trevor had chosen to be the theme song for The Fame Game, had been in the top ten on iTunes for two whole weeks. She’d gotten calls from three different record labels, all of them expressing interest in her music. (They also wanted to know if she had any shows coming up. Ugh.) Trevor said she wasn’t ready for all that, though; in the world of The Fame Game, her getting a recording contract was more of a second-season story line. Meanwhile, Courtney Love—whose barely comprehensible tweet about Kate’s YouTube video had first brought Kate into the spotlight—seemed to be watching over her like some crazy fairy godmother (O gawd, gurl iss makin it! hitthe top sister, and sned me a postcard!!!! she’d recently tweeted). If Kate ever met the former lead singer of Hole, she was going to give her a big, fat kiss.

Kate reached down to brush a dragonfly away from her ankle. Yes, she was really, really lucky. There was no doubt about it.

But it wasn’t as if life was all sunshine and roses. For one, she had—against her castmates’ advice—read some of the comments about her on the internet. People were brutal. Who is this random chick who thinks she can sing? asked NeNe67. Bru43ski wrote, Why would they cast this girl? She is sooooo boring. Kate, horrified, had stopped right there. Lesson learned. Quickly.

Then there was Luke Kelly, the drop-dead gorgeous Australian actor she’d fallen for at the beginning of the summer. Even though Kate knew she’d been right to break up with him—if a guy wouldn’t own up to dating you, you had to give him the boot, right?—the decision still hurt. She’d thought they had something. Something real.

For a while, Luke had seemed to feel that way, too. But then his attention turned to something fake: his manufactured-for-the-cameras relationship with Carmen Curtis. As costars of The End of Love, Luke and Carmen were the new Hollywood It couple. Kate saw pictures of them everywhere she turned. She couldn’t even buy her over-priced salad at Whole Foods without them smiling at her from the cover of a magazine.

Then, to add insult to injury, she’d learned that Luke and Carmen had hooked up—for real—in the spring. Nothing had come of it, and it was before she’d met either of them, but still. If it didn’t mean anything, why had they both kept it a secret from her?

Kate thought she’d found a true friend in Carmen, but now she felt like an idiot. Carmen had been texting her— at first acting like there was nothing wrong, and then wanting to talk—but Kate wasn’t interested in anything she had to say off-camera.

“Life is different, all right,” Kate said, rolling over onto her stomach and letting the sun warm her back. “It’s mostly great, though.” She felt like she was reminding herself of it as much as she was telling Natalie.

“Oh, hey, you guys,” chirped a voice. “What’s up?”

Kate turned back over and saw her costar Gaby Garcia approaching them, wearing a pair of six-inch strappy sandals and clutching one of her trademark spirulina smoothies.

“What is that?” Natalie asked. “It looks like you put Oscar the Grouch into a blender.”

Kate laughed, but Gaby only looked confused. “Gaby,” Kate said, “you remember Natalie. She was my roommate before I moved here. Natalie, you remember Gaby, my fellow Fame Gamer.”

“Hi,” Gaby said. She sat down on a chaise longue and sighed. Her brow twitched almost imperceptibly, which was—thanks to all the Botox injected into her forehead— her best version of a frown.

“What’s the matter?” Kate asked. “You look upset … I think.”

Gaby took a sip of her smoothie and sighed again. “It’s Madison,” she said. “I’m worried about her.” She slipped off her high heels and contemplatively rubbed at her toes. “I mean—wow. Like, I’m really worried? I just … like …”

Kate waited for Gaby to finish her sentence, but then realized that nothing more was forthcoming. “It’s pretty crazy,” Kate said.

Gaby turned her brown eyes to Kate. She bit her over-plumped lip. “I tried to talk to her about what happened with the necklace, but she totally shut me down. And I tried to ask her about my diamond earrings, too. I mean, those were totally on my dresser until her dad came over. And then he leaves, and suddenly they’re gone. I was all, Like that’s really a coincidence! But then after the whole necklace thing, I’m thinking maybe Madison took them. I mean, it was obviously one of them, right? And of course she didn’t want to talk about that, either.”

Gaby stopped and took a deep breath. It was a long monologue for her.

Kate nodded. “Yeah, well, I’m sure it’s a hard thing to talk about.”

She had tried to talk to Madison, too. In the first days after the Fame Game premiere, when it seemed like their whole world was exploding in flashbulbs, Madison had been practically invisible. She’d been a no-show at the morning-after brunch, and she’d spent ten minutes at the informal cocktail party for cast and crew before making a French exit out the back. And no one had seen her since.

Kate had figured she was just taking a break from things, lying low in Charlie’s bungalow, and ringing up quite the LAbite.com bill. But then things had gotten weird: Suddenly Madison was nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Her photo was on every celebrity website and on the cover of every gossip magazine. And they all accused her of the same thing: theft.

It was so unlike Madison to avoid attention—they’d all thought something was up. Sophia had said Madison was upset because their dad had to leave town unexpectedly. Kate could tell how much Madison adored Charlie, so that explanation made sense. But Kate, for one, certainly hadn’t expected the headlines: STARLET STEALS STONES; MADISON MAKES OFF WITH MILLIONS. Kate’s reaction had been shock, quickly followed by confusion. Really? Madison had stolen and sold her loaner necklace? Really? One could argue that Madison was a lot of things: cruel, sly, manipulative, and selfish. But an honest-to-goodness thief? It didn’t sound right. The girl had a collection of Birkins that rivaled Victoria Beckham’s. Why would she steal a diamond necklace when she had a wardrobe worth double that in value?

Gaby set her drink down on the concrete. “Between Madison and her father … well, you know what they say: The apple doesn’t fall far from the pie.”

“I think the saying is ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,’” Natalie suggested.

“Whatever,” Gaby said. “Same thing.”

“I find it all really hard to believe,” Kate said. “I don’t get why she’d steal a necklace and then sell it. Did she actually think she wouldn’t get caught?”