Back in Black (9 page)

If Anna wasn't going on this trip, I swear I'd bag the whole thing
, Sam thought.

As if on cue, the front doorbell—a renovated antique French one that had been programmed to play the first five notes of the theme from
Snow Job
— sounded. Sam opened the door to find Anna. “Hi. I'm not late, I hope.”

“Nope, right on time. If we can pry Dee loose from the young mothers' brigade in the family room, we might be able to get out of here early. Parker's meeting us at the Van Nuys Airport after his callback for
Everwood
. It's at the WB studio in Burbank.”

Anna looked great—pulled together as always, in a vintage Channel tweed blazer over a simple white tee and no-name black trousers from some bygone era. She wasn't even wearing heels; instead, she had on black Ferragamo ballet flats. She carried a Maschera Italian pink woven tote bag over her shoulder that could only have carried half the gear that Sam had chosen to bring along.

“He won't get it,” Cammie decreed. “A client of my father already has first refusal.”

“So why do they bother giving him a callback?” Anna wondered aloud. “He'll get his hopes up for nothing. That's just mean.”

“Aren't you sweet to care,” Cammie cooed, in a way that made it perfectly clear how much she
didn't
. “I'm sure Parker will let you kiss it and make it all better.”

“Meow,” Sam said. She picked her stuff up, thinking it was time for them to get going.

“You really need to be declawed,” Adam told Cammie, but he put his arm around her anyway.

“Not while I'm in heat, sweetheart,” Cammie purred. “Because you know how much you love it when I scratch.”

Sam sighed. It was going to be a very long four days.

A Deep Thinker

P
arker Pinelli was a man with a plan: Get in with the innest of the Beverly Hills High hip crowd. Use protective coloration—that would be his six-foot-tall-with-a-six-pack, James Dean–esque good looks—to swim with the sharks. And ride the wave all the way to superstardom on the silver screen.

The problem was, Parker came from a long line of bottom-feeders.

His mother, Patti, who'd had no education and had come from even less money, had been an exotic dancer while waiting for her “big break.” It had come in the form of Bruno Pinelli, owner of the Jet Strip club in North Hollywood where Patti danced. Bruno had used his “connections” to get her cast in an R-rated straight-to-video piece called
Posers
, in which her major responsibility had been to take off whatever top she was wearing at regular intervals. That had been the beginning and end of Patti's big career as an actress.

Four years and two sons later, Patti divorced Bruno—or, as she so fondly called him, “that son of a bitch”—and moved on. “On” had meant scraping by as a dancer—the older she got, the further the clubs were from home—or a waitress and renting whatever crappy makeshift apartment she could afford that put her sons on the tattered edges of the 90210 zip code. Her sons would go to school in Beverly Hills and hobnob with the best, Patti had stubbornly decided. They'd have access. Access would lead to success. Her ex—who'd told her once when he was drunk that she had a saggy ass—could kiss her tush and rot in hell. Her big dream was to be Parker's escort to the Oscars—to walk the red carpet with the whole world watching. And especially with Bruno watching. She repeated this dream often to her son, the way other parents repeated the Golden Rule.

Now, Parker sat alone on Jackson Sharpe's glorious private jet, which had departed from the Van Nuys airport just a half hour before, feeling his mother would be very proud of him. The others were watching
Hooligans
, starring Elijah Wood, on the new plasma TV. That was fine. He was content to stare out the window and feel good about where he was in his life.

Parker had been on the plane once or twice before, but that didn't mean it didn't impress him. It was a fifteen-seat Gulfstream that Jackson had acquired from John Travolta when John decided to upgrade. The Gulfstream could fly as fast as many commercial airliners, and the group was already halfway to Sin City. The plane had been redecorated since the last time Parker had flown in it. There were new leather seats and a custom-made sleeper couch in the deepest shades of brown; the entertainment center was brand-new, with a fifty-inch high-definition plasma television and state-of-the-art sound system; and Jackson had recently added a small games area, with foosball, table hockey, and a poker pit.

That was nice. But the important thing was, the members of the Beverly Hills High School A-list were on that plane, and Parker was firmly part of that group. It wasn't a big crew. Sam Sharpe and Cammie Sheppard and that gorgeous new girl, Anna Percy. Dee Young. Cammie's boyfriend, Adam Flood.

It didn't hurt to be the only unattached guy on this outing. Vegas meant gambling and drinking. Gambling and drinking meant lowered inhibitions. With lowered inhibitions, who knew what could happen? It wasn't that he was necessarily interested in sex, though he certainly wasn't morally opposed. But two of those four babes had fabulous industry connections, and Anna Percy had to know a ton of people too. And connections, after all, were what it was all about.

Normally, Parker would even have made something of the opportunity of the flight. Sam had told him that the pilot had written a pretty good screenplay about an Air Force officer who blew the whistle on wrongdoing at the Pentagon that her father had actually optioned. One charming conversation with the guy, and Parker figured at the very least he'd be able to snag an audition. And if the pilot were gay … well, Parker wasn't morally opposed to that either.

He closed his eyes. Parker was sure that no one would suspect that he was deep in thought. Doubtful any of them would even consider the possibility, since none of them considered him a deep thinker. They all saw him as Richard Gere in
American Gigolo
, when he knew he was actually Richard Gere in
An Officer and a Gentleman
. Of course, that was if they'd seen those pictures. Parker was reasonably confident that Sam had, since she was obviously the smartest of the bunch except for the chick from New York. As for the others, who knew?

He thought for a moment about Richard Gere's dad in
An Officer and a Gentleman
. Man, was he messed up. Parker could relate. His mother was equally messed up, diagnosed as manic-depressive years ago. When she took her clozapine, she was on the fringe of functional. When she didn't, she was a wreck; it was everything he and his younger brother, Monty, could do to keep her out of either jail or a mental institution.

But things were looking up. For the last month, Mrs. Pinelli had been part of a clinical trial at the UCLA Psychiatric Institute, where a new drug was being tried out—a drug so new that it didn't yet have a name, just a number. The good news was that the drug worked much better for her than any of the previous drugs. Parker's mom was calmer, more functional, sometimes even funny. He hadn't come out of his room in the middle of the night to find her scrubbing the kitchen floor on her hands and knees with a tiny sponge since she'd started taking the drug. Plus it only had to be taken once a week, thereby increasing the odds that his mother would actually ingest it on a regular basis.

The bad news: QVC.

The new drug gave his mother insomnia. Chronic insomnia. One particular night when she couldn't sleep, she'd discovered the joys of shopping via TV. Now it was a nightly ritual. She'd get home from her cocktail waitress job at the Sheraton by the airport and turn on the television, chain smoking and watching until three or four in the morning. It wasn't a rare thing for Parker to awaken for school and find his mother snoring on their threadbare Sears tan-and-black tweed couch, the remote still in hand, the plastic hotel ashtray she'd pilfered brimming with Merit Ultra Light cigarette butts.

And the things she bought! She kept a messy hand-scrawled list on the battered coffee table: European-inspired Amadeus fine linens, Tiffany-inspired limited-edition lamps, Polish-inspired functional ceramic cookware, even though she didn't cook and the family lived largely on deli-counter takeout from Ralph's supermarket. How she could afford all this stuff, he wasn't sure. But the boxes arrived by UPS, sometimes on a daily basis. And the goods stacked up in her closet, even squeezing out her limited wardrobe. Once or twice Parker and Monty had tried to talk to their mother about her QVC habit. The conversations had been futile.

“Hey, what's up?”

Parker looked up to see Sam plop down beside him. He recognized her outfit, the black Armani T-shirt under a red leather J. Crew blazer, and Seven jeans with black satin peep-toe Stuart Weitzman pumps. He remembered that she'd worn a variation on it to school a few weeks ago. Parker knew fashion—it was part of the image he wished to maintain, although his own outfits were usually purchased on the sly at one of the many upscale used-clothing boutiques found in the San Fernando Valley, that vast wasteland of suburbia over the hill from Beverly Hills and Westwood. He understood how shocked many in flyover country would be to know how many of their favorite stars lived such lavish life styles that they were reduced to selling off their wardrobes when they were “between deals.” He'd run into some of them at the consignment places in the valley where he liked to shop.

Now Parker flashed Sam what he knew to be his killer smile and made sure his tone came off casual, easy. “Not much.”

“Hey, I heard about the
Everwood
thing, that bites.”

Parker shrugged. “What can you do? Cammie's father is a great agent; mine can't compete with him.”

Sam nodded. “Good attitude.”

“Doesn't do any good to complain. Maybe one day Clark Sheppard will take me on.”

“So anyway, Vegas will help you forget all about it, right? No worries? And make me forget about Eduardo for a few days. Maybe.”

“For sure,” he agreed.

There was one thing, thought, that Parker was worried about: money. He'd planned to be part of the cool kids' alternative senior trip ever since he'd first heard about it his freshman year. Of course, in his fantasies, he'd already have been a star at that point, throwing cash around like water. Reality was more than slightly different. As in, he had ninety-three bucks on him, and only that much because he'd recently filmed a local advertisement for a really bad mattress company that would be shown in movie theaters before the trailers started. If Parker didn't win a bunch of money quickly, he knew he'd have to do his usual hustle to cover his costs on the trip.

He wasn't
that
worried, though—he'd been in situations like this before and had always come out okay. Life wasn't fair, and it was a tribute to his acting skills that he'd this far been able to fool everyone into thinking that he was one of them.

“Mr. Pinelli?” The flight attendant, a tall guy in his twenties with closely cropped red hair, held out a tray with steaming hot washcloths.

Parker knew from past experience on the Sharpe jet that the flight attendant always knew everyone's name ahead of time. He took a washcloth. “Thanks.”

The flight attendant moved on to offer hot washcloths to Cammie and Dee. Parker turned to peer at the girls. They'd given up on the movie and were deep in conversation about something or other. And at Anna, who was reading a thick hardcover novel, probably by some dead writer from England or France whom he'd never heard of. No, life was not fair. But he was sick of being the poor kid pretending to be rich. Look at them! Cammie, so hot it was painful, and so rich that she never wore the same things twice. Her father made a fortune as an agent—she was almost as rich as Sam. Dee, with her lost-little-girl thing, spent more on clothes in one month than his mother made in a year. And Anna … well, there was the very distinct possibility that she was the richest of them all.

The flight attendant came around again holding out his empty tray for the used washcloths. Parker deposited his. The attendant moved on to Adam.

Parker really liked Adam Flood. He was the epitome of a stand-up guy—laid-back and genuine. He might not have the deep pockets of the others, but his parents were both lawyers, which meant they had to do mid-to-high six figures, easy. He was certainly well-heeled enough to hook up with the Princess of Heat, Cammie Sheppard. In fact, right now she was all over him.

Parker made a mental note to pay extra attention to Adam. The guy was such a study in contrasts. He'd seen Adam on the basketball court, and the guy was a warrior. Once, when he'd thought one of his teammates had been fouled too roughly, he'd gotten right in the face of the aggressor, a guy ten inches taller and sixty pounds heavier than he was. The refs had had to keep the two players apart. But at other times, Adam seemed mild-mannered and laid-back. Who was he, really?

“Miss Sharpe, the champagne you requested?” The flight attendant had just wheeled in a magnum of Veuve-Clicquot in a silver bucket, buried to the hilt in ice chips. After Sam approved the bottle, he handed everyone champagne flutes. That everyone on the plane was underage was not an issue. Jackson Sharpe had given instructions that the pilot and flight attendant were to treat the passengers as if they were adults. The only thing that wouldn't be tolerated would be felonious substance abuse.

“Who wants to pop the cherry?” Sam sang out, holding the bottle aloft as her friends gathered around her and Parker.

“I'd be honored,” Parker volunteered. “And I'll try to make it good for you, sweetheart.”

“What a guy.” Sam ceremoniously handed him the champagne bottle, which the flight attendant had wrapped in a white towel monogrammed with Jackson's initials.

“Better you than me,” Cammie cracked.

Whatever. Parker didn't rise to the bait. He knew most things that a boy who faked being rich in Beverly Hills should know, including how to remove the cork from a bottle of champagne that cost more than all the cash in his wallet. Undo the cage—there were always six half turns, no matter how expensive or cheap the brand. Hold the cork in one hand, twist the bottle with the other. When you felt the cork start to release, you had to press down on it, so that it released with absolutely zero spillage. (Parker couldn't believe that Alexander Payne had given this last tip away in his screenplay for
Sideways
.)