Spoiled (10 page)

Two tiny girls in shiny formal shorts scampered past her and stopped five feet away, looking back with their hands over their
mouths.

“I heard she was an illegal alien,” the first one giggled.

The second chortled, “Her
bangs
are illegal.”

Are they talking about me?

Molly slowly looked around and saw she was at the center of a radioactive halo ringed by countless pairs of eyes openly staring
right at her. Doubtless her future classmates, they all seemed to prefer to point and stare rather than come talk to her.

“And that dress! Where does she think she is? The Oregon Trail?”

“She must have left her bonnet with her oxen.”

Molly suspected she was blushing. She cracked a smile and wiggled her fingers, as if to say,
Hey, I see you, and I’m not toxic
, but all she heard were more snorts.

“Look, she’s not even talking to anyone.”

“What a snob. Just because she’s Brick Berlin’s kid doesn’t mean she’s so great.”

Molly felt herself melt under their judgment. Nobody was making an effort to lower the volume, so every insult, every half-baked
rumor—a dude to her left actually just said he heard she was Brick’s child bride—made it to her ears. And everywhere she moved,
they seemed to follow. The grapevine was growing up around her and squeezing her to a pulp.

Frantically, she scanned the crowd again for any sign of Brooke. Nothing. Molly was all alone.

She suddenly wished she’d gone to more swim-team parties with Danny. Most of his teammates had a tendency to morph into obnoxious
meatheads when they were drinking, and she’d never liked waking up the next day feeling like her brain had gone through a
blender. But the consequence of being such a homebody was that Molly, unlike Danny, was lousy at small talk. He could approach
anyone and make conversation; Molly tended to hang back and watch. But if she did that here, everyone would be watching
her
watch
them
, and…

“Here’s your drink, ma’am. Sorry for the wait. The ice makers broke,” a waiter said, grabbing a vivid pink martini off a tray
full of clanking glasses. He pressed it into her hand and then wriggled off through the crowd.

The teen masses started to whisper, delighted.

“Wait, I didn’t order this,” Molly called after him, but he
didn’t hear her. At a loss, Molly tried to follow him, pressing onward as the crowd of students parted, until suddenly she
was swallowed by a crush of socializing adults who either didn’t care who she was or had already forgotten. The waiter was
nowhere to be found, but on the plus side, Molly felt deliciously invisible.

She looked down at the drink in her hand. It resembled the cocktails the JCMHS cheerleaders had made at their New Year’s bash,
when Danny had ended up dancing on the roof of someone’s car, inadvertently causing a grand’s worth of damage. They’d fought
the next day about why he always seemed to go from zero to hammered in fifteen minutes. Molly was no stranger to alcohol,
having sipped it a handful of times herself; she just didn’t like it much, and Danny couldn’t quite relate to that.

“It takes the edge off. It’s relaxing,” he’d defended himself. “Why do you think I was voted Most Friendly? Everybody loves
Weekend Danny.”

Retroactively, Molly felt bad about being such a nag. Finally, she got what he meant. She had never felt more tense in her
life.

What the hell?
she thought, and took a swig.

Plopping down on the stone bench in her father’s rose garden, Brooke chewed on her lip, silently thanking God for creating
flavored glosses that staved off stress eating.

On the one hand, this party sucked. Some new flunky of Brick’s had shoved her out of the way before she’d so much as snuck
into the background of a photograph; nobody had even batted an eyelash at Molly’s bathroom-wallpaper dress; the Blahniks hadn’t
broken her sister’s ankle; and Molly either hadn’t remembered or had chosen to ignore Brooke’s tip about standing with her
legs crossed above the knee at all times. So much for making her look incontinent.

But Molly
was
at least acting like someone who had walked out to present an Oscar and then suddenly realized people could see her nipples.
She kept wiping her palms over and over on the pockets of that heinous pinafore, her eyes were unnaturally wide, and as best
Brooke could tell, the only complete sentence Molly had uttered all night was that her favorite actress was Jennifer Garner.
Who
said
stuff like that, anyway? Jennifer Garner was a
brunette.

That much, at least, was what Brooke had hoped for when she’d shoved Molly out onto the patio unaccompanied—but she couldn’t
fully enjoy the awkwardness because nobody else seemed to notice. It was as if they were hypnotized, like that brief period
in first grade when Brooke had been so in love with Freddie Prinze Jr. that she never noticed what a terrible actor he was.

“
There
you are.”

Brooke turned to face Arugula, who had appeared with Jennifer Parker by her side.

“How did you know I’d be back here?”

“Duh. It’s the bench where your dad introduced you to
Jake Gyllenhaal,” Jennifer replied. “You always come here when you’re bummed out.”

Brooke held her head aloft. “I am not bummed out. In fact, everything is going according to plan.”

“Interesting. From where I sit, it looks like you’re cowering behind a bush,” Arugula said.

“I have Molly under control,” Brooke insisted. “She’s a nervous wreck. But everyone’s so busy drooling over her that I haven’t
gotten any face time with the press.”

“Well, then get out there.” Arugula tsked. “Show a little backbone instead of sulking in the shrubbery like a vagrant.”

Jennifer gasped, but Brooke saw the truth in this. “You’re right. I know you’re right.”

She closed her eyes, inhaled hard, and repeated her new mantra: “I must be Zen. I must be dazzling. And I must not use the
word
bumpkin
.”

“Much better,” Ari said.

Brooke smoothed her dress and shook back her hair. “How do I look?”

“Like third runner-up in the West Hollywood Miss She-Male America pageant,” came a familiar voice from the mouth of the rose
garden. “Too bad—I thought your shoulders made you a shoo-in for at
least
second place.”

Shelby Kendall slithered into view, looking irritatingly great in the Marchesa that Brooke had made Molly reject.

“I just overheard Tom Hanks’s kid saying that Molly looks like a young Jennifer Aniston,” Shelby continued, twirling a lock
of black hair around her finger and touching it
thoughtfully to her heart-shaped mouth. “Isn’t that a delicious coincidence, since you’re kind of an old Lisa Kudrow?”

“Excuse us—Brooke is supposed to rendezvous with a
Hey!
reporter right now,” Arugula said, grabbing Brooke’s arm and hauling her away before any further sniping commenced.

“I didn’t know you had an interview set up,” whispered Jennifer, trotting along behind them obediently.

“She doesn’t,” Arugula hissed. “But why should that stop her? What do we always say? WWBWD—What Would Blair Waldorf Do?”

“Make it about herself,” Brooke said.

“Exactly,” affirmed Arugula. “So get out there. Be the story. You look resplendent.”

Brooke knew that much was true, once she realized it was a compliment. The green dress she’d bought at Inferno looked even
better than it had in the store, and when she paired it with her gold peep-toes, she looked like Diane Kruger, which trumped
Aniston any day of the week.

The three girls drifted toward the locus of the paparazzi hubbub as if they were only crossing its path by accident, but Brooke
had drawn a solid bead on her father. She could see the light gleaming off his hair. As she approached, she realized happily
that Molly was nowhere to be found. Brick held court alone.

“Why would I take her in now? Why
wouldn’t
I?” he was saying. “DNA is thicker than water. Nothing should come between me and my daughter.”

Arugula grimaced. “Nobody that beefy should rhyme,” she muttered.

“Great, Brick, thanks,” the reporter said, snapping her fingers to signal that the camera crew could cut. “That’ll be perfect
for the website. Where’s the kid again?”

“She’s off mingling,” Brick said. “When you love something as I cherish her, you set it free.”

“Please intervene before I regurgitate my Slim-Fast,” urged Arugula, shoving Brooke in the direction of her father.

“Ow, you’re hurting—uh, I mean, hi, Daddy!” Brooke recovered in time to shoot her father a blinding, toothy grin.

“Sunshine! You look fantastic!” Brick said, giving her a hug. “Am I the luckiest dad on earth to have two such gorgeous daughters,
or what?”

The assemblage of female reporters tittered adoringly. If this were a rock concert, at least one bra would be dangling from
Brick’s ear by now.

Still, staring up at her dad’s elated face as he gently tugged on her curls, Brooke felt warm. He was all hers and he looked
delighted. It was exactly what she’d pictured when she—

“Oh, Mark, hold up a sec. We need to talk to the Weinsteins about this Key West thing,” Brick said, flagging down a gangly
guy and disappearing with him into the crowd. This left Brooke surrounded by press girls who were all murmuring into their
digital recorders and acting like the
story had just left along with her father. Her skin turned cold.

“Um, Brooke?”

Brooke turned to see a small, plain woman holding up a notebook.

“I’m Ginevra McElroy,” she began, tucking muddy blonde hair behind her ear. “I work at
Hey!
Well, technically, I’m an intern, but you know, hopefully there’s an opportunity for upward mobility, because—”

“What can I do for you, Ginevra?” Brooke asked, ninety percent sugar and ten percent edge. She knew enough to take any and
all comers, but if she had to listen to this mouse ramble about her journalistic aspirations, she’d bleed from the ears.

“Well, I asked if I could talk to you for this story,” Ginevra said.

Clearly, this piteous creature was smarter than she looked.

“Of course.” Brooke beamed. “Well, I’ll be president of Colby-Randall’s prestigious Drama Club this fall, and because I’m
an actress and I have such a passion for the craft, I’ve got all kinds of ideas for—”

“Because, you know, this story is just so
interesting
,” Ginevra continued, as if she hadn’t heard Brooke speaking at all. “Tell me what you like best about her.”

Brooke’s face tightened, like she was suddenly caught in a very small wind tunnel.

“What I like best… about
Molly
?” she asked.

“Yes. What is the most wonderful thing you’ve learned about her?”

The fact that I can murder her in her sleep tonight and get away with it because Brick is never home
.

“We… well, we have very different interests,” Brooke hedged. “So she can learn from watching me fulfill my destiny as the
heir to the Berlin family acting legacy, and I can learn about… chickens… from hearing about her favorite, um, hayrides, and
stuff.”

“Diversity is so important!” Ginevra chirped. “Would you say that you are upset, though? Now that you have to share your father
with her? Do you feel
obsolete
?”

The force of Brooke’s shock flipped a switch in her brain. The one that controlled her behavior in public.

“You don’t know me very well if you think that I would
ever
feel threatened by someone who once rode a cow topless through the streets of her hometown,” she heard herself say.

“Wow,” Ginevra said, a slow smile spreading across her face. “So Molly is a bit of a bad girl?”

“Just when there’s gin involved,” Brooke said. “But that’s really only, like, sixty percent of the time.” She beamed. “Off
the record, of
course
.”

“Of course,” Ginevra breathed, pulling out a business card. “Brooke, I have to run, but you have been so helpful. And you
look fabulous.”

“Thank you, Ginevra, and if you ever need anything—
anything—
just let me know,” Brooke said, squeezing the girl’s shoulder before they both walked away.

Well played
, she congratulated herself. Brooke hadn’t counted on a media ally, but far be it from her to look a gift intern in the mouth.
Brick’s irritating enthusiasm meant she couldn’t go after Molly directly, but it certainly didn’t preclude Brooke from finding
other ways to remind her half sister exactly whose kingdom this was. If that rube wanted to run with the big girls, she’d
have to learn to keep up with them.