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The next morning, it was worse than I’d imagined. There was a picture of me looking terrified on top of Paula. The headline read:

BOVINE BEAUTY STEALS HORSE PILLS FOR CHEAP THRILLS

The British paparazzi were waiting outside of my hotel, and when I got to the lobby, the hotel manager said, “I wouldn’t go out that way, ma’am.” He said he’d order the car to come back around the side entrance, but they were there too. I was used to cameras flashing in my face, but not forty or fifty at a time. The hotel manager threw his jacket over my head and shoved me in the backseat.

“Um, thanks,” I said, just before he slammed the door shut.

“Tell the agency you need some sort of security,” he said. “Protect you from the wolves.”

Call time was eleven a.m. I arrived on set, with a lunch packed by Aunt Zo. She’d run out to the food court at Harrod’s and prepared a feast for me. If I could’ve kept it under lock and key, I would have.

Jess took me aside and apologized for the band’s behavior. She said that they were all going to apologize to me as well and she hoped that we could get through the rest of the shoot without incident.

Garrett and the guys arrived, and they shuffled over to me one by one, like they were naughty schoolboys preparing to be spanked. I accepted their apologies, though I decided that Benny was a toad. He seemed to be holding back a laugh when he muttered, “It wasn’t a very funny joke, was it?” Which I guess in England passes for an apology. But when I went to the bathroom, someone had taped a dozen copies of the front page of the Daily Mail to the bathroom wall. I wonder who?

21

Just Bee-astly

The
next day, I got dressed up as Queen Margherita once again. Maybe it was the residual tranq in my system or maybe after the day I’d had, I was up for anything, but I mounted Paula with no problem and managed to get through Garrett’s song with a loving expression on my face.

Since we’d missed a day’s worth of work, we were pulling a double shift. Just before dinner, we set up for the third shot. In this one, I was to be portraying the
Toilet of Venus
, by Rubens. In the painting, the woman is looking in a mirror held by an angel. She also had one breast showing, which Leslie had already told them wasn’t happening. Karl put extensions in my hair, and I wore this white silky nightgown. There was a little girl dressed up as an angel, all set to hold my mirror. Her name was Gwendolyn, and she was gorgeous: big beautiful eyes, dark curly hair. She was also a little monster. She started off by sticking her tongue out at me. No biggie. I stuck my tongue out back at her. I thought we were just playing around.

Then she started pulling my extensions out. Karl had glued them instead of sewing them in since we were pressed for time. Every time she yanked one, I screamed in pain. Finally Jess took both the monster and the monster’s mother aside and gave them a talk about professional behavior.

Gwendolyn came back to the set with a little angel smile on her face.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I said, reaching down to give her a hug. But she pulled away from me.

“I’m sorry you’re a drug-addicted cow,” she said, and then she kicked me.

Kicking me when nobody was looking, which was every five minutes or so, became Gwenny’s game for the rest of the shoot, which lasted until two the following morning. I know that I’m vastly overpaid as a model, but on the Guess Again Girl shoot I was earning every penny.

The final day of the shoot was an easy one. I was to be Madame Monet in Renoir’s
Madame Monet Reclining on a Sofa Reading Le Figaro
, which meant that I got to wear a gorgeous pale blue gown, lie on a chaise lounge, and read a French newspaper. Well, look at a French newspaper and pretend to read. Still, the shoot took all day. Jess wanted to get plenty of angles so that she’d have a lot to work with in the editing room, so we did a thousand variations on this one simple shot. By the end of the day, when she called a wrap, I thought if I never heard “Picture in a Frame” again, it would be too damn soon.

Afterward, everyone went out to dinner at a cool restaurant called Spoon. I was nervous about eating anywhere in the vicinity of the band, but Jess assured me she’d keep Benny and the other guys far away from my food. I sat at the other end of the table with Karl and Mickey, the hair and makeup guys, who referred to themselves as BQs: bitchy queens. They made wicked jokes about everyone in the restaurant, and I laughed all night long.

After dinner, Garrett asked me if he could walk me back to my hotel. I figured it was okay. After a guy sings you a love song two hundred times, you start to have friendly feelings toward him. He was cute, and he knew it. In the restaurant, girls kept coming up to him and asking for an autograph. Even walking down the street, it was funny to see people doing double takes as they realized who they’d walked by.

I’d never been to London before, and central London at night was like something out of a movie. We walked past the most perfect town houses: cream-colored bricks with shiny jet-black doors and wrought iron balconies and gates. There were a million little parks and greenery everywhere: plants, trees, shrubs. No wonder all the cool American celebrities were moving to London: Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. It was like New York, but older and different and so pretty.

Garrett told me about how he’d grown up north of London in Manchester. Apparently they have a really great soccer team, which they call football. He told me how he’d named the band, Guess Again Girl, after his high school girlfriend dumped him and told him he’d never amount to anything, which I thought was pretty cool. He asked me if I had a boyfriend, and I told him that we’d just had a pretty nasty breakup. He said, “Those must be going around. I just had one of those too.”

When we got to the hotel, I was telling Garrett all about the goldfish the front desk had given us for our stay and how we’d named him Ben, after Zo’s new boyfriend.

“I’d love to meet Ben,” Garrett said, touching my hair.

“Well, my aunt Zo is sleeping,” I said, covering, as if Zo ever went to bed before midnight.

“Fine, I’ll get us another room,” he said, walking toward the check-in desk.

“I’m not going to bed with you,” I said bluntly.

“What? You’ve got morals now?”

“I’ve got morals always.”

“How American of you, to sit up on your high horse . . .”

“You should know better than to talk to me about horses, Garrett.” I glared at him, memories of the night Zo missed her concert because of his friends and their stupid practical joke returning.

“So you let me fly you to London, make you the star of my most expensive video yet, and you don’t think I’m entitled.”

“Entitled to what?”

“Entitled to some of that ass that I paid for.”

You know how if you ask your parents what the sixties was about and they always say, “Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll”? If someday my kids ask me what the early twenty-first century was about, I’m going to tell them, “Sex, drugs, and bullshit.”

“Garrett, let me break it down for you. You did not fly me here: your record company did. You did not pay my modeling fees: your record company did. And neither you nor your record company paid for any ass. Now run home like a good little boy.”

He looked like he was going to say more, whether to insult me or cajole, I couldn’t tell. But then Aunt Zo walked in the front door and came over and gave me a hug.

“How you doing, Bee?” she said, giving Garrett a once-over.

“Just fine,” I said.

And on that note, we turned and left him standing there. But even as we walked away, I could hear a girl asking him, “Excuse me, are you Garrett Phillips from Guess Again Girl . . .”

“Well, guess again, girl,” Leslie said.

“Uh-oh.”

“Someone put out an underground video of the same song. Black and white. Not so flattering of you. I think it’s got to be the guys in the band, but the record company is claiming total innocence.”

“Is it going to be on MTV?”

“No, thank God. But it’s on
youtube.com
.”

“Okay, Les. I’ll check it out.”

I went over to my computer and typed the URL in. There I was on the front page, a really unflattering shot of me trying to eat that wretched potato salad. The video was called
The Picture Won’t Fit in the Frame
.

It was grainy, black and white, but definitely me. Someone had filmed every time I had something to eat, then they’d spliced it together as one giant food fest. The grand finale? Me, falling flat on my face after eating that horse tranquilizer. Instead of the last chorus of the song, there was a girl’s voice singing, “Food coma, food coma, food coma,” until there was this electronica crescendo and a fuzzy fade-out.

My phone rang. I checked the number. It was my dad.

“Honey, I need to talk to you.” He sounded awful.

“What’s wrong, Dad? Are you okay? Is Mom okay?”

A million thoughts ran through my head. Had my mother been in a car accident? Did my father have cancer? Did my mother have cancer? What could be so wrong?

“We’re okay,” Dad said, but his voice said different.

“You’re lying to me, Dad,” I said. “I’m getting on a flight first thing in the morning; I’ll be in Philly by the afternoon.”

“Bee, you don’t have to do that.”

“Well, I will, unless you tell me what’s wrong.”

“I don’t know how to say this,” Dad said. “I just never thought I’d ever have to worry about something like this.”

My heart was beating so fast. I couldn’t bear the thought of something bad happening to him. Or my mom. But especially my dad.

“Dad, just tell me,” I said in the most mature, grown-up voice I could manage.

“Bee, are you on heroin?”

What?

“Bee, are you there?”

“I’m here, Dad.”

“I need you to be straight with me. Are you using heroin?”

“Dad. Where would you get an idea like that?”

“This guy at my office showed me your music video on You Tube.”

Did I mention that my dad is a scientist? And that all of his co-workers are geeky science nerds? Of course, they spend their downtime trolling websites like You Tube.