Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [113]
In the audience, Tim stands up but then, clearly realizing there’s nothing he can do, sits back down.
“So you’ve been living a lie?” Joy asks.
“Well, yes and no,” I say, amazingly calm for someone who’s in the process of upsetting a number of people. “Everything I’ve written about did happen, and a lot of it did seem amusing and entertaining at one point. But I wasn’t so much free and loose as I was just out of control.”
“Why have you been writing the column, then?” Elizabeth asks, looking perplexed.
“I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately,” I say. “And I guess the answer is that I wanted to feel special. I could just be another struggling freelance writer, slugging it out with everyone else, or I could be celebrated—albeit for a part of me that I put to rest. And I chose to be celebrated.” I gaze out at the studio audience. “Wouldn’t anyone?”
A heavyset woman in a flowered sundress nods and Joy makes a gesture to a producer that they should cut me off. Before that can happen, I say, “I may be a fraud, but I’d like to introduce you to someone who’s not—someone who’s living the life because it’s who she is and not because her self-destructiveness brought her there.”
I glance down at Charlotte—aka Tube Top girl—who’s sitting, as planned, in the farthest audience seat to the right.
“Want to come up here, Charlotte?” I ask as I hear a producer backstage shout that they need to cut me off. But Charlotte stands up and removes her Marc Jacobs wrap, suddenly the very picture of sexified youth in a halter dress, thick belt, and dainty heels. Joy shakes her head while the other three cohosts sit there eagerly, waiting to see what will happen next. As Charlotte walks onto the stage, her tanned and muscular legs sauntering confidently toward us, I marvel over how ripe she is for this opportunity and how much publicity Nadine and Tim will surely get over my dramatic departure and her sure-to-be stunning takeover. I walk over to give her a hug, then turn back toward the women.
“May I present the real Party Girl,” I say, nudging Charlotte toward them and then walking off the stage. I remove my mic from my shirt and place it on a shelf filled with other microphones in front of the green room. As I walk down the hall toward the exit, I hear a producer say into a headpiece that they’re going to bump the next guest so they can see how this story plays itself out. I smile as I continue into the green room, stopping only to pick up my bag, which contains my ticket back to L.A. My BlackBerry beeps that I have a text message, so I pull it out as I make my way from backstage into a hallway. Glancing at my BlackBerry, I see that the text is from Adam and it starts with the line Always trust your first impression.
As I take the elevator down to the ground floor, I read the rest of what he wrote. Just saw Hasselback almost lose her lunch, thanks to you. She wasn’t the only one. Any chance you can forgive me for buying into the hype instead of trusting my first impression?
I smile as I put the BlackBerry back in my bag and exit the building. Nobody chases after me, and, casually as can be, I hail a cab and ask to be taken to JFK.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I cannot conceive of what rough road Party Girl and I might have traveled had we not been lucky enough to be discovered by the tenacious and devoted Pilar Queen—who guided me through every step of this process.
Thank you as well to Maureen O’Neal and Jenny Brown at HarperCollins for always being so respectful and encouraging, and to Suzanne Wickham, Chase Bodine, Gregg Sullivan, and Megan Beatie for doing all they could to get the Party Girl word out.
Without a doubt this book would not have existed had Melanie Bromley not made a deal with me that we’d send each other one thousand words of the novels we planned to write every Sunday.