The Fame Game. Lauren Conrad

Saab. The thing was, she’d lied to Dana about what she’d been doing to further her music career. Oh sure, she’d told her, I do open mics all the time! And Dana had nodded, looking pleased; an open mic was pretty much a talent show, and who didn’t love a talent show? It’d be like a mini acoustic American Idol. No fancy lights, no celebrity judges, just some would-be musicians with their instruments and their songs. America would love it!

      But of course Kate’s real attempts at furthering her music career consisted of playing her guitar, scribbling down lyrics and chord progressions, and recording bits of songs on her old-school four-track. And that didn’t seem like it would make for exciting TV.

      “Well, you’re just going to have to get out there more,” Jess said matter-of-factly. “Like I said, keep dribbling. What about that show you emailed me about?”

      “That’s the interview I’m late for,” Kate admitted. She craned her neck out the window, trying to see past the Escalade. Was there construction? An accident? “I don’t know why people insist on driving SUVs in L.A. It isn’t exactly known for its rough terrain,” she huffed.

      “Stay focused,” Jess said. “Tell me about this show.”

      “It’s about four girls trying to make it in Los Angeles,” Kate said. “It’s by the people who did that show L.A. Candy,” she added, slightly embarrassed. (But also kind of thrilled.)

      Jess hooted. “Shut up! You didn’t tell me that.”

      “Hey, you loved that show as much as I did,” Kate laughed. “So don’t pretend like you didn’t.”

      “Guilty as charged,” Jess said. “I always had a soft spot for Scarlett.”

      “Yeah, me too.” Kate had loved Jane Roberts, of course, but Scarlett Harp was her favorite. Scarlett was smart, sassy, and down-to-earth, and she didn’t care about hair or makeup or fame. Or so it had seemed, anyway. But in an interview after she left the show, Scarlett had complained that the producers had edited her life into something that it wasn’t. The real me got left somewhere on the cutting room floor, she’d said.

      That line had stuck with Kate, especially after her first meeting with Dana, in which the seemingly perpetually stressed-out woman had grilled her about her dating life (“um, a little slow these days since I’m holding down two jobs—you know, to afford my rock ’n’ roll lifestyle”—that got a smile out of Dana at least), her exercise routine (“I wouldn’t call it a routine, exactly”), her family (“single mom, normal, nice, and almost two thousand miles away”—she hadn’t felt like bringing up her father, who had died when she was ten, but figured she might have to eventually if she made it onto the show), and a hundred other things. If the PopTV people offered her the part, would she be able to be herself in front of a camera? And if by some miracle she could, would they edit that real self into something different? It was a worrisome thought.

      “But being on a TV show—that’s totally amazing,” Jess went on. “I mean, you could be a star!”

      “Yeah, right,” Kate said, applying a little lip gloss touch-up in her rearview mirror. “Let’s not set our hopes too high.”

      “Well, at the very least you’ll get paid well,” Jess pointed out.

      Kate’s ears pricked up at this. “Paid well?”

      Jess laughed. “Yes, dummy. What, you think it’s like some kind of extended open mic, where you do it for free?”

      “Oh, uh, no, of course not,” Kate stammered. The truth was she hadn’t even considered the fact that she might get paid. Weren’t there millions of girls across the U.S. who’d give anything to be on a PopTV show? Trevor Lord could sell his spots to the highest bidder if he wanted to.

      Suddenly she felt even more grateful that Dana had stumbled into her branch of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. What if she actually nailed the audition? Money meant being able to quit at least one of her two jobs. Money meant being able to afford an eight-track digital recorder or a new MacBook with a functioning version of GarageBand—or, even better, time in an actual studio. Money meant her mom couldn’t drag her back to Columbus.

      “You’re such a nerd,” Jess said affectionately.

      “I know,” Kate said. “Believe me, I know.”

      Ahead of her, the Escalade began to pick up speed, and Kate was able to shift into second gear for the first time in ten minutes.

      “You’re going to do great,” Jess assured her.

      Kate felt her heart flutter lightly in her chest. If she could just keep moving, she’d be only five minutes late to meet Trevor Lord. She had made up her mind: Forget stage fright. She was going to rock this interview.

      “I should go, Jess,” she said. “Love you. Call you later.”

      As Kate sailed through the intersection, she glanced up and saw Madison Parker, probably thirty feet tall, smiling down at her from a giant billboard. It was an ad for Madison’s Makeovers. Beauty’s a bitch read the tagline.

      Kate smiled in return. Madison hovered over the corner of Venice and Sepulveda like some guardian angel of reality TV.

      Surely that was a good sign.

      

      Carmen Curtis rushed around her bedroom, madly searching for her new brown leather ankle boots. Shoe boxes and shopping bags were littered across her floor, testament to an outrageous (even by Carmen’s standards) shopping extravaganza that had taken place earlier that day. Three nine-hundred-dollar sweaters dangled off the edge of her bed, and a ridiculously expensive silk dress lay, already crumpled, in a corner. Even though the amount of free clothing and accessories that were sent to her mother could fill a room in their very large, but not obscene, house, the two always spent a day demolishing Barneys before Cassandra left on tour. Cassandra would soon be leaving for ten sold-out concerts in Japan and Australia, so they had practically emptied the place out.

      Plus, they were celebrating Carmen’s news: She was going to be on The Fame Game, Trevor Lord’s newest reality series. Filming began in two weeks, and now Carm had a pile of cute things to wear.

      She had been worried that her mom might not want her working in “reality” TV (after all, there was nothing real about it), especially since the whole family had been the subject of a documentary about Cassandra’s comeback tour nearly a decade earlier. Cassandra had had extremely mixed feelings about Cassandra’s Back, but she said that The Fame Game sounded cute. She also agreed with their publicist, Sam, who argued that it was the perfect thing to help Carmen out of the shoplifting mess she’d gotten herself into a few months earlier.

      Carmen tossed a new lacy La Perla bra on top of her dresser and flung a pretty little Lanvin handbag onto the chaise longue. Where were those damn ankle boots?

      For the record, she hadn’t actually shoplifted anything. But it had been a crazy time in her life, full of ups and downs. Ups: She’d just graduated high school and was free from the tyranny of textbooks. Her role in an indie movie about estranged sisters who go on a road trip to find their mom, which she’d filmed the summer before her senior year, was getting great reviews. (She only wished the critics didn’t sound so shocked, as if they’d assumed she got the part only because of who her parents were. Which, okay, hadn’t hurt—her dad was a producer on the film, after all—but the director wouldn’t have cast her if she couldn’t act.) But there were downs, too: She’d deferred her acceptance to Sarah Lawrence because she wasn’t convinced college was for her, and her dad wasn’t thrilled about it. She’d broken up with her boyfriend of six months when she saw pictures of him on D-lish.com getting a lap dance. (Somehow “liar” and “cheater” had not been included in his photo caption when the jerk made it into People’s Most Beautiful issue; even worse, he’d managed to spin it so that Carmen was perceived