Kass
Kass hurried down South Vermont Avenue, periodically glancing at her watch. The sidewalks were bustling with students and couples on Saturday-night dates. Crap! She was so late for her dinner with Eduardo.
As if he didn’t have enough to be pissed about. The dinner had been her idea, so she could make it up to him for agreeing to go to San Diego with him last weekend and then canceling at the last minute. And in general playing hot and cold with him.
She wasn’t sure why he hadn’t told her to get lost, already. She hadn’t exactly been the greatest . . . well, whatever she was to him. Part friend, part almost-girlfriend? Anyway, she’d done a lot of soul-searching lately and decided (finally) that Kamille had been right when they’d had their recent heart-to-heart. It was time for the chastity belt to come off—and for the emotional walls to come down.
Her cell buzzed. It was a text from Eduardo: WHERE R U?
5 MIN, she typed back. SORRY, TRAFFIC!
Which was a lie. She was running behind schedule because it had taken her half an hour to decide what to wear for the evening. Which was not like her. But she really wanted their date (yes, date) to be special, and it had taken her a long time to find something that made her look sexy and not so . . . flat. Why did Kamille and Kyle get all the boobs in the family?
Plus . . . she’d had important errands to run, like getting the bottle of champagne, which was chilling in the refrigerator with a Post-it note saying “HANDS OFF!” in case Kamille and Ballboy were tempted to help themselves. She’d also bought condoms at Rite Aid, just in case. She’d been so nervous and embarrassed bringing it up to the counter, mixed in with a bunch of other items she didn’t even need, just to defuse the impact of the orange box with the words TROJAN ECSTASY spelled out so glaringly. The salesclerk had looked completely disinterested as he rang her up.
Kass turned the corner and spotted the restaurant across the street. As she headed for the crosswalk, she passed a newsstand.
Something caught her eye. It was the latest issue of Dish magazine, with a picture of Kamille and Chase on the cover looking tense and unhappy. The headline blared:
KAMILLE AND CHASE:
NOW WHO’S CHEATING ON WHOM?
“What the hell?” Kass said out loud.
She picked up the magazine. At the bottom of the cover was another, smaller picture, of Kamille hugging some guy.
Kass squinted. Was that Giles Sinclair? Her agent?
“Yeah, that’s hilarious,” Kass snorted, flipping through the pages. “These reporters are really scraping the bottom of the barrel.” This was obviously a “follow-up” to the “story” that ran last week, with the picture of Chase allegedly hooking up with some girl at a club. Kamille had told Kass all about it, and how she and Chase had had a huge fight about it afterward, then made up with the “hottest sex” they’d ever had (like Kass needed that detail).
Kass wondered, not for the first time, if Kamille’s relationship with Chase was entirely healthy.
“Are you paying for that?” the guy behind the counter snapped.
“What? Oh, sorry.” Kass reached into her purse and handed him a five-dollar bill.
On page 28, Kass found the story about Kamille’s alleged “torrid affair” with her “high-powered agent Giles Sinclair.” There was another, perfectly innocent-looking photo of Kamille and Giles at some event. This was too much.
Then Kass’s gaze fell on a bright red sidebar. She clamped her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. It was a picture of her with the caption Kamille’s dumpy older sis—or is it her bro?
In the picture, Kass was wearing her “ugly sweats,” the ones she usually threw on if she had to run a quick errand and everything else happened to be in the wash. They made her look even more flat-chested than she already was, and were definitely not flattering. Her long hair was back in a ponytail, but the angle of the shot made it appear as though she had a mannish crew cut. Her face, devoid of makeup, was contorted, as though she were trying to suppress a burp.
Kass tried to think. She remembered wearing the sweats on Wednesday when she had to drop off some dry cleaning. Had some paparazzi followed her there and taken pictures of her? How dare they? And how dare they imply that she looked like a guy?
Fighting back her rage, she took a deep breath and read the paragraph next to the photo. It said that Kass was twenty-one, a junior at USC, a part-time employee at her mother’s restaurant, and single. It went on to say that according to an “inside source,” she was a closet lesbian in a hush-hush relationship with a fellow USC student named April Jansen.
“What . . . the . . . fuck?” Kass yelled. Even if she were a lesbian, closet or otherwise, she would never, ever hook up with that pompous little bitch April, who was in her small-business-management study group.
The guy behind the counter stared at her nervously. “Uh, you want your change? Magazine’s only two ninety-five.”
“No!”
Kass ran to the intersection, just barely catching the WALK sign, and crossed the street to the restaurant. Eduardo was waiting for her at one of the outside tables. His beer glass was almost empty.
“You made it.” He stood up and kissed her on the cheek.
“You wouldn’t believe what just happened!”
“What’s wrong?”
She slapped the magazine on the table between them, practically knocking down the flickering votive candle and the tiny vase of pink sweetheart roses. Oh, yeah. She’d picked this restaurant because it was supposed to be romantic.
She stabbed her finger at the story about her. “This! I’m so furious! I think I’m gonna call a lawyer. Do you think I should call a lawyer?”
“Whoa, wait a sec. Sit down, Kass. Let me get you a drink.”
“I don’t want a drink, I want these people to burn in hell!”
“Kass. Please.” Eduardo sat down and read the sidebar quickly. Kass sat down across from him, drumming her fingers on the table, waiting for his reaction.
“Yeah, this is pretty idiotic,” he said after a moment. “But this is what tabloids do. I’d let it go if I were you.”
“But how can they invade my privacy like that? I’m not the celebrity in the family! Kamille’s the damned supermodel, with her famous baseball-player boyfriend and all that. It’s one thing for them to write trash about her, about the two of them. But I’m just a regular citizen! And they lied about me!”
Eduardo reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “You’re Kamille’s sister, and that’s enough. Look, I know this sucks. But don’t let these media scumbags get you down. Let’s just enjoy our evening, okay? I’ve missed you,” he added softly.
“Enjoy our evening? How can I?”
Eduardo smiled patiently. “You said you had a big surprise for me. What is it?”
A big surprise? Right. This was the night Kass was going to apologize to him for stringing him along. And take him back to her house and ply him with champagne and invite him into her bedroom, where that brand-new, bright orange box of Trojan Ecstasy condoms was waiting . . .
But she wasn’t in the mood anymore. She felt so ugly and unsexy. And pissed off.
“Look.” Kass yanked her hand away. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. This . . . this thing has given me the mother of all migraines. Not to mention the fact that I want to kill someone right now. Can we reschedule?”
Eduardo frowned. “Kass. You keep ‘rescheduling.’ I’m beginning to think you don’t really want to be with me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not that I was so sure to begin with. You’re like the queen of mixed signals, you know that?”
“I’m really not in the mood to psychoanalyze our relationship right now, okay?” Kass said irritably.
“Fine.”
“What does that mean, ‘fine’?”
Eduardo stood up and put some money on the table. “I hope you figure out what you want, Kass,” he said quietly.
With that, he was gone. Stunned, Kass stared after him as he headed down the sidewalk. “Eduardo! Wait!” she called out. But he didn’t hear her. Or if he did, he was pretending not to.
Had he just broken up with her? Not that they were together, as he had (sort of) pointed out. But still . . .
Kass slumped back in her chair, trying to sort out her jumbled thoughts. This evening, which had started out so well and so full of promise, had taken a nosedive into hell. She was supposed to be having a romantic dinner with Eduardo. Instead, she was all alone at their table for two with nothing but a crumpled-up, hateful, lie-filled magazine. A magazine that had just ruined her life.
But she couldn’t really blame the magazine, could she? Maybe she had overreacted . . . and then taken the whole thing out on poor Eduardo.
Kass buried her face in her hands and did something she never did.
She burst into tears.