Messy - Hardcover

Cocks, Heather; Morgan, Jessica

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316098299 ISBN 13: 9780316098298

Verlag: Poppy, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Sometimes life gets Messy.

When sixteen-year-old Brooke Berlin catches a taste of fame and her movie-star father's attention, she decides it's time to take her career to the next level--by launching a blog that will position her as a Hollywood "It Girl" who tells it like it is. But between schoolwork, shopping, and spray-tan appointments, she hardly has the time to write it herself...

Enter green-haired outsider Max McCormack, an aspiring author with a terrible after-school job pushing faux meat on the macrobiotic masses. Max loathes the celebrity scene almost as much as she dislikes Brooke, but wooed by an impressive salary, Max reluctantly agrees to play Brooke's ghost-blogger -- and the site takes off. How long will their lie last? Can the girls work together to stay on top, or will the truth come out and ruin everything they've built?

Along with an entourage of fame-hungry starlets, scruffy rocker wannabes, and sushi-scarfing socialites, the case of Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan's dazzling debut, Spoiled, are back for another adventure in Tinseltown.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Heather Cocks is a die-hard sports fan, a Leo, an ex-reporter, a Notre Dame grad, a dual citizen of the U.S. and U.K., a sandwich enthusiast, and a former producer for America's Next Top Model. Jessica Morgan is a Southern California native and UCLA alumna who has produced reality shows ranging from Growing Up Gotti to the docu-series 30 Days. She collects shoes, books, and unpaid parking tickets. Both ladies live in Los Angeles, California and watch almost everything on the CW.

Together, Heather and Jessica skewer celebrity fashion crimes on their popular blog, Go Fug Yourself, which draws millions of monthly readers and made Entertainment Weekly's Must List. Their dispatches from the front rows are routinely the most-read pieces on New York magazine's Web site during Fashion Week. Messy is the sequel to Spoiled, and this is their second novel for young adults.

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Messy

By Cocks, Heather

Poppy

Copyright © 2012 Cocks, Heather
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780316098298

one

“YOU WERE SO GOOD in that movie. Talking dogs are my favorite.”

Max McCormack felt a snicker bubbling up, like a secret, and willed it to die. Famous people—or in this case, a famous person’s groupie wearing a top so small it would embarrass a bikini—were so reliably, deliciously dim.

“What was your line again?” the blonde asked, scooting so close to the guy that she was practically in his lap.

“Bow-wow-wowza,” he boomed.

Molly Dix’s foot found Max’s underneath the table and began applying pressure, trying to shatter her focus. Max barely blinked. Molly, you amateur. They’d been friends for six months now; she should know Max’s boots would be steel-toed.

Max refocused her eyes on an empty space across the L.A. eatery’s sprawling patio and took a steadying breath. The rules of the game were simple: First to break paid the breakfast check. Max never broke—which was convenient, since she was broke—and she certainly wasn’t going to start now. She assumed an expression of supremely blithe indifference and saw Molly’s shoulders start to shake. Victory is mine, she thought triumphantly.

“Hahahaha! That’s, like, the best catchphrase!” gushed the girl. “It’s better than, like… what’s that one part from that thing with the guy?”

“ ‘You talkin’ to me?’ ” the guy crowed in a terrible Robert De Niro impression.

“Right!” the girl trilled. “You’re totally the Al Pacino of dogs!”

Molly’s laugh caught in her throat, but she managed to turn it into an outrageous coughing fit. The lovebirds in question shot them both a dirty look, then moved a whopping one table away, as if to say, Stop watching. Except, please don’t.

Max sat back in her chair and grinned at Molly. “Still undefeated,” she said in a low voice. “Too bad for you that you’re the only person I know who gets up early enough to eat with me.”

Molly shook her head, amazed, and propped a Nike-clad foot on the chair to her left. “That one was impossible. I don’t know how you didn’t lose it.”

“Years of practice,” Max said. “Have you noticed the people at our school?”

That Max wholeheartedly approved of gawking at the rich and famous would have surprised her classmates at posh Colby-Randall Preparatory School, the majority of whom were children of celebrities, celebrities’ agents, or celebrities’ agents’ cousins (or, at the very least, deludinoids who thought they were one miniskirt at the supermarket away from being discovered). Most of them knew Max only as the snarky green-haired girl who lived in their peripheral vision. But to Max, people-watching was the city’s best free entertainment, and giving L.A.’s celebrities what they clearly wanted—attention—was a deliciously perverse way of paying it forward: Be careful what you wish for, fools.

Curling herself into a little ball on the chair—at five-two, this wasn’t hard—Max mused to Molly, “I figured that living with a guy as famous as Brick Berlin would give you an ironclad poker face.”

“Yeah, but my dad doesn’t usually woo people at the breakfast table. Thank God,” Molly said, pulling her hair into a ponytail. “But I’m still totally awkward whenever somebody famous comes for dinner. You saw me after Robert Downey Jr. brought over that Iron Man Bundt cake. I went catatonic.”

Complicating Max’s pro-gawking worldview was the fact that Molly, Max’s best friend since the fall, was the until-recently secret daughter of the world’s biggest movie star (both professionally and physically: Brick’s biceps were like pythons). But Molly was different. She hadn’t even known about Brick until last summer, right before she moved to California from Indiana; even then, she never courted notoriety, and so—other than a few accidental incidents after she’d arrived—for the most part, it didn’t court her. Whereas people like the Pacino of Pooches over there went begging. It was a clear distinction.

“We might have to make this harder—like, force you to keep a straight face while standing on your head or something,” Molly said, watching the couple take photos of themselves sipping from the same latte. “What is this, fifteen straight wins?”

“Sixteen,” Max corrected her. “If this were an Olympic sport, I’d be on a Wheaties box.”

“Yes! You’d be the Michael Phelps of eavesdropping.”

“The endorsement deals would definitely solve some of my problems.” Max sighed.

Sometimes Max thought Molly had invented this game as a way of springing for breakfast without getting Max up in arms about accepting charity. Max appreciated the gesture too much to fight it. Plus, Molly’s Brick Berlin–funded black Amex was easily up to the task of weekly eleven-dollar coffee-and-pastry jaunts, whereas Max’s bank account contained a whopping $86 and change. L.A. was not the best city to live in with parents who believed in self-sufficiency and the value of menial labor.

But what Max never told Molly was that their game mostly functioned for her as a small daily affirmation. It was exhausting, and a tad demoralizing, living in a place where every third person thought he or she was the next big talent, and thus ignored you if you didn’t look like you could buy a screenplay, buy their screenplay, and/or make them a star. (Nobody ever confused Max McCormack, with her neon bob and wardrobe occasionally held together by safety pins, for a Somebody.) So these eavesdropping sessions were a pleasant reminder that no matter how bored or poor Max was—or how much she dreaded going to school and hearing her classmates weep that life without the latest Louis Vuitton simply wasn’t worth living—things could always be worse: She could be that girl, writhing on some guy’s lap just because he had three platinum records. Seeing the stereotype in action was so unappealing that Max felt like the universe was validating her efforts to remain as disengaged from her schoolmates and surroundings as possible.

The prospect of an entire summer away from the ridiculousness of Los Angeles was the only thing keeping Max sane. NYU, NYU, NYU, she repeated to herself, like a mantra.

“You’re going to shred that thing before you even fill it out,” Molly said, interrupting her train of thought. Max looked down at the notebook propped up on her lap. The corner of a loose page was poking out, and she’d been absentmindedly fiddling with it so intently that it had practically disintegrated.

“If I ever fill it out,” Max said, sighing. “My writing sample is currently a three-word essay that says, ‘NYU Writing Sample.’ ”

“Give it time,” Molly said, looking sympathetic. “Writer’s block can’t last forever, right?”

“I guess we’ll find out.” Max fished around in her...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Poppy
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0316098299
• ISBN 13: 9780316098298
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar