Amen, L.A. Read online

  “No?”

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t. I didn’t love it. And now I’m worried that it’s what it’s going to be like for the rest of my life. That I somehow polluted myself, and polluted us, and polluted all my hopes and dreams. But part of me is glad, too. I mean, I feel like I’m not a kid anymore.”

  Silence again.

  “Sean? That’s how I feel. Actually, that’s the start of how I feel. Just the beginning of how I feel. Now, I’d like to know how you feel, too.”

  As I urged Sean to talk, a hummingbird flew up and suspended at a feeder right outside my window that I hadn’t even noticed, his long beak dipping into the sweet red nectar, his wings flapping furiously. He was working so hard, I thought, to stay in the same place. Then, like a flash of ruby-throated light, he was gone.

  “It’s hard on the phone,” Sean said.

  “I know. It was hard for me, too. But I just did it.” It seemed like he was dodging.

  “How about if we talk face to face? I can come to Los Angeles in a few weeks.”

  What?

  That is exactly what I thought. What I said was “Really?”

  “My sister has frequent-flier miles,” Sean explained, “and she’s flying to New York for some business thing at the end of the month. She’ll get more miles for that, and she said she’ll give me a ticket. Isn’t that great?”

  Sean’s sister was ten years older than him and worked for Bank of America. She was constantly flying here and there from her base in Minneapolis.

  “That’s … that’s amazing.”

  What else could I have said? Don’t come? I want to force you to talk to me about your feelings before you come? That would have broken his heart.

  “Then I’ll keep you posted on my plans so you can check it with your parents.” His voice was lighter now that he was back on unemotional territory. Then his sister beeped in, and he had to go, and we said goodbye.

  Honestly? I didn’t mind. It had been a frustrating conversation. I’d put myself out there for him, and he hadn’t reciprocated. It left me feeling empty.

  A few moments later, my Mac had booted up, and Alex’s name stared at me from inside quotation marks on Google’s main page. All I had to do was push “Google Search.”

  I didn’t have to do it. But I did. It took 0.14 seconds for 134,000 Google hits to pop up. The lead links were taken from Google News. I didn’t even have to read the articles. I got all the information I needed from the links themselves.

  ALEX SHELTON DRUGGING IN REHAB RUMORS DENIED—14 days ago

  Teen party girl Alex Shelton has been forced to deny claims that she has smuggled drugs and alcohol into an Arizona rehabilitation facility where she has been ensconced for the last month. Another rehab patient made the allegations?.?.?.

  all 79 news articles »

  LAUREN CONRAD WEIGHS IN ON THE ALEX SHELTON NAKED ON HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD

  INCIDENT—MTV.com

  all 626 news articles »

  ALEX SHELTON CROWNED PARTY GIRL OF THE YEAR BY LA WEEKLY, WINNING THE UNDER-17 DIVISION.

  “There really was no competition,” says the editor of the alternative weekly. Shelton, the sister of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll guitar player Shepard Shelton, and daughter of deceased record?.?.?.

  all 84 news articles »

  There were a dozen links like this. Under those were the “Image Results,” just in case anyone might have thought that the Alex Samuels of the articles was a different Alex Samuels, in a different Beverly Hills, in an alternative universe.

  Alex on the beach, posing in the bottom half of a string bikini.

  Alex on the red carpet at the Teen Choice Awards with Vanessa Hudgens.

  Alex in a crowded nightclub, toasting the camera with a martini glass in one hand and a raised middle finger on the other.

  Alex outside House of Blues, sprawled on the ground, puking in the gutter.

  That was it. I couldn’t take any more. I slammed my finger down on my laptop power button and turned it off.

  A moment later, though, I was booting up my Mac again. Going to Google again. Then reading dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of newspaper articles and blog entries about my new maybe-friend Alex.

  Alex Samuels was notorious. A club kid since the age of thirteen, she’d done every drug in the book and then some. She’d been arrested for shoplifting and public indecency, been kicked out of two private schools and one public school, thought nothing of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, meals, and jewelry, and—this was maybe worst of all—been accused of giving Ecstasy and LSD to some junior high students at her last school. She had spent the entire month of May and part of June of that year in rehab in Arizona, at an exclusive center that cost a thousand dollars a day. That was, however, not her first experience with rehab. She’d tried twice before. Each time, it had taken less than a month for her to return to her partying ways.

  This time when I shut down my laptop, it was for good. I went to the window, which had a little seat by it, and stared into the distance, past the hummingbird feeder, and across the arroyo between our place and Alex’s. As I sat there, the hummingbird returned, but the whirring of his wings barely registered.

  Look, I may be the eldest daughter of a minister, but I am not, and was not, naïve. Mankato, Minnesota, may not be Los Angeles or New York, but it’s not, like, Mars. We have drinking, we have drugs, we have girls who get pregnant in ninth grade, we have guys who are strung out on crystal meth and everyone knows it. Kids go to juvie, kids get polluted and wreck their cars. Last year, a guy in my math class drank so much that he barfed and inhaled his own vomit. I think he’s still in the hospital. I hope my non-hayseed credentials are now hereby established. That said, in comparison to anything or anyone I’d encountered in my former life, Alex scared me. Yet the Alex Samuels of the past was not the Alex I’d met. Still, she’d tried rehab before. Failed before. Twice.

  What to do? Eat.

  Ice cream. Now.

  I went downstairs to the kitchen, where I knew my dad had laid in a hefty supply of Baskin-Robbins rocky road, his favorite. I preferred mint chip, but I didn’t much care about the flavor in my current mental state; rocky road would have to do.

  Maybe my folks were in a mental state, too. They’d each changed into a variation of the clothes I was wearing; I found them sitting side by side at the kitchen bar, digging into the rocky road container with two spoons.

  My mom smiled wearily at me. “Hi, sweetie.”

  Her voice was tired. No shocker there. She must be completely exhausted.

  “Grab a spoon,” my dad suggested.

  I did, then sat next to Mom and put said spoon to work.

  “What’s going on, Nat?” My mother’s voice was gentle.

  Let me say this about parents right now. While it is not a fashionable thing to talk to one’s parents, and while it doesn’t happen very often on television shows on the CW or in teen novels about rich girls in New York City or here in Los Angeles or at private school, and while advice columns are full of tips for parents on how to talk to their teens, I would guess that a lot more kids my age actually do converse with their mom and/or dad and respect their opinions than don’t.

  You don’t have to remind me that I wasn’t willing to talk to my parents about Sean.

  I’m a long, long, long way from perfect.

  We did talk about Alex, though. I told them that we’d spent an afternoon and an evening together, that I really liked her, that she’d been nothing but decent to me. I told them how ashamed I was that I’d Googled her, and then how upset I was about what I’d learned.

  My folks looked at each other when I was done.

  “What?” I asked. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” my mother replied.

  Huh. She almost never said “I don’t know.”

  “I think what your mom is saying is she and I want some time to talk about all this.” My father gave his ice cream spoon a final lick.<
br />
  “I’m worried about you,” my mother admitted.

  My father turned to her, his jaw set. “I’m not worried about Nat. I’m worried about this girl.”

  “I’m worried about her and this girl.” My mom’s gaze shifted to me. “The Googling? I could go either way. As for what you learned, you would have found out eventually. And I’m guessing the reason you Googled her is that someone else told you something about Alex.”

  “I didn’t want to believe that it was true,” I admitted.

  “Then you did hear something. It’s human nature. Bad news travels fast.” She put the lid on the ice cream. “Gossip travels faster.”

  “Her parents are dead, Mom,” I said, rising to stick my spoon in the dishwasher. “In a plane crash. If anything happened to you guys? I might turn to drugs, too.”

  “Poor kid,” my dad murmured. “Your mom and I need to talk about this, Nat.”

  “It can wait till tomorrow.” I hoped I was being helpful. I also hoped I wasn’t going to have to face some kind of ultimatum from my parents about Alex. They’d never forbidden me to have a friend before, but we’d never lived in Beverly Hills before, either, and I’d never had a friend like Alex Samuels.

  “I don’t think we want to wait. Do we, Marsha?” My dad raised his eyebrows at my mom, who shook her head.

  “No. I want to think about this now. And talk about this now,” my mom agreed. “Nat, how about we check in with you in an hour?”

  I nodded. I had some thinking to do, too. Maybe this was the kind of friendship I wanted to pursue. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t.

  Chapter Seven

  While I waited for my parents to call or text me—Ricardo’s mansion was so big that cell phones had become the main means of getting someone’s attention—to come back downstairs to talk to them, I opened my lyric notebook and took a look at what I had on paper for “The Shape I’m In.”

  The sun sets bright, it rises dim,

  That’s the measure of the shape I’m in.

  The ice it warms me, the heat it chills,

  That’s the measure of the games and the thrills.

  The sun sets bright, it rises dim,

  That’s the measure of the shape I’m in.

  Sleep wears me out, life makes me sleep,

  That’s the measure when I try to go deep.

  The sun sets bright, it rises dim,

  That’s the measure of the shape I’m in.

  It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great. It needed a lot of work. The thing was, I’d started a week before we moved, in anticipation of how I might feel after the move. Now that we’d actually moved, the lyrics seemed, well, inadequate. I tried for the next forty-five minutes to improve them, until the knock came at my door.

  “Nat? Can we come in?” My father’s voice was calm but had that undertone that brooked no opposition. In other words, they were coming in whether I said okay or not. Yes, that is annoying.

  “Okay.”

  The hour break had actually turned out to be a good idea. It gave me time to think between futile stabs at my lyrics. Thinking for me never involved just sitting in a chair and staring into the night. I’m one of those people who do their best thinking while doing something else. Cleaning out the closet. Taking a shower. Or most often, playing music or writing songs.

  “Hey,” my mother said. She’d changed into her favorite gingham bathrobe, given to her as a Christmas gift by one of our parishioners in Minnesota.

  “Hi.” I leaned my guitar against my bed.

  My folks sat on the floor with me. “We’ve been talking.”

  “And I’ve been thinking,” I replied honestly. Not that my thinking had gotten me anywhere. The whole sex-drugs-Hollywood thing was so not me. But apparently, it was very much Alex and her friends.

  “What your father and I think matters,” my mom declared. “But it doesn’t matter as much as what you think, Nat. So?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” I admitted, staring at the woven rug.

  My mom cocked her head at me. “Have you prayed about it?”

  “Honestly? No.” That was the truth. “I wanted to think rationally about this one.”

  A small smile tweaked the edges of my mom’s mouth. “They’re not mutually exclusive, you know.”

  “Sometimes prayer helps you be still enough to listen to your own inner voice,” my dad added.

  Like I hadn’t heard that one from him a thousand times. “I know.”

  “At the risk of stating the obvious, I can’t tell you I’m thrilled with the choices Alex has made,” my mom said. “But evidently she’s trying to change. We have enough confidence that you’ll be true to your own values, no matter what.”

  Dad stood and went to the window. “What’s your biggest fear?” he asked as he looked toward the hills.

  “That Alex has a lot of problems that I can’t handle. That I’ll be her friend, and then she’ll do something that scares me.” I stretched my legs out and bent to touch my fingertips to my toes. Normally, it would be no problem for me to do that. It was now, after the call with Sean and what I’d learned about Alex. I was tense. I got even more tense as I thought of Sandra and the church kids I’d met.

  “There’s more,” I said. “The girls from church? They won’t like me for liking Alex. Sandra warned me to stay away from her.” I thought about that for a moment. “Which kind of ticks me off.”

  Dad turned away from the window. “She probably thought she was doing you a favor.”

  I folded my arms. “Well, she wasn’t.”

  My mom nudged me with her foot. “Who knows? Maybe Alex will come to church with you some Sunday, and you’ll help Sandra and Alex become friends.”

  Right. And maybe I’ll grow a third breast. But I doubt it.

  “It’s possible,” my dad chimed in. “You won’t know unless you try.”

  The level of naïveté in my bedroom at that moment was breathtaking. It was the kind of parentally blind statement that would make anyone—including me—question the validity of anything else that came out of their lips. It was more likely that I could get Modest Mouse to ask Miley to be their new lead singer than broker a friendship between Sandra and Alex.

  Fortunately, my folks picked that moment to say good night.

  Great. How helpful. Not that there was anything they could have said or done differently. In a sense, they were absolutely right. It really was my decision.

  I sat on my bed and fished my cell phone out of my pocket. I had put Alex’s number on speed dial. She picked up on the second ring.

  “Hey, Nat.” She sounded happy to hear from me. “How are you?”

  “Not so good,” I told her. My heart started to pound. “We need to talk.”

  When I reached her, she was in Beverly Hills, getting her eyebrows done and eyelash extensions put in at Valerie’s, which I later learned was one of the top salons on Rodeo Drive. She’d invited me to come by—Valerie had opened the place for her—and assured me that the queen of Beverly Hills beauty would be happy to work her magic on me. What girl couldn’t use a little of Valerie’s magic? I demurred—not that I was morally opposed!—and wondered aloud if there was someplace we could meet afterward. She suggested the Ivy, on Robertson Boulevard. It was a beautiful evening, they had a great terrace, and I’d definitely be able to do some celebrity sighting. Cell phone photos for my friends in Minnesota, however, were discouraged.

  “A lot of the really big stars have bodyguards,” Alex explained. “Some tourist will snap a photo and the bodyguard will follow the poor schmuck to their car and demand their phone. Then he’ll crush it like a cockroach. It can get ugly.”

  I put on a clean pair of jeans and a black tank top, brushed my hair, and applied some mascara and lip gloss. Then I explained to my parents that I was going to meet Alex, MapQuested directions, and drove the Saturn to the west side of Robertson between Beverly and West Third. The Ivy valets gave me the most bemused look ever when I handed over the keys
. Evidently, Saturns were the moral equivalent of rickshaws. Yet I took the valet ticket and gave my name to the petite Asian hostess inside the white picket fence atop the low brick wall that separated the patio from the street, just like Alex had instructed.

  “Ms. Shelton? Alex isn’t here yet. But we’ve got a wonderful table for you. Follow me.”

  I did. The patio was filled with beautiful people chattering and eating at circular tables under big white umbrellas. The night was warm and still; I felt like I was walking onto a movie set. Then I realized I very well could have seen a movie scene that had been set right here. So the slight sense of déjà vu was not unwarranted.

  “Natalie Shelton?”

  Someone behind me called my name. But it couldn’t be Alex. She wasn’t here.

  I turned. A handsome couple in their early forties—the guy in a white button-down shirt and jeans, the woman with thick lush blond hair and an enviable figure—beckoned to me. They looked vaguely, very vaguely, familiar.

  “Hi!” The man greeted me warmly. “We’re Ben and Cecilia.”

  “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “We met you at lunch today,” Cecilia said with a smile. “We’re members of the church.”

  I must have looked embarrassed, because Ben came to my rescue. “Hey, no biggie if you don’t remember. I bet you met five hundred people today. Anyway, we just wanted to say hello. Are you here with friends? Do you want to join us?”

  “I’m—I’m meeting someone,” I told them.

  “Then enjoy. The artichoke pizza is to die for,” Cecilia confided. “We’ll see you around. Welcome to L.A.”

  I shook hands with them, thinking that maybe this was something not so different from Mankato. That is, there wasn’t a single place I could go in Mankato without someone knowing me as the minister’s daughter. The supermarket, the hardware store, the bowling alley, the roller rink, the library—it didn’t matter. Even though our church was small, everyone knew who I was. As my mom’s radio show got bigger, it got worse. I felt like I was constantly watched. Constantly evaluated. Constantly judged. Now here I was, two thousand miles away, and it was exactly the same thing. Only with more expensive clothes, better perfume, and longer menus.