Blonde Ambition by Zoey Dean

into a chair next to Anna that had just been vacated by one of the production assistants. She waved her hand in Anna’s face. Her nails were no longer long and vermilion. Now they were short with no polish. “Are you responsible for this?”
    “Not directly,” Anna hedged.
    “Bullshit.” The girl leaned closer and blew boozy breath on Anna’s face. “You’re Clark’s spy, right? They told me Clark’s spy was some trust fund princess from the Upper East Side.”
    “I am not Clark Sheppard’s spy,” Anna insisted all over again. “I’m his
intern.
”
    She waved a dismissive hand. “I do not appreciate having my character fucked with by some little intern, understandez-vous?”
    “Allez vous faire enculer, et vite, s’il vous plaît,”
Anna said in an apologetic tone, with an impeccable Parisian accent. Which roughly and politely translated to:
Go have sex with yourself, and quickly, please,
something that Anna would never have said in English but that in French sounded fabulous and not very obscene at all.
    “Yeah, I like it that way, too,” the actress agreed, pretending she understood what Anna had said. She got up and wove away.
    “What’d you tell her?” Danny asked.
    “Danny. When you go to Paris to write the great American novel, how are you going to cope if you can’t speak the language?” Anna teased.
    “I don’t know. Maybe you’ll be there to translate for me.”
    Anna smiled mysteriously and tried another sip of her ale. It seemed a bit less pissy. “Blue Suede Shoes” came on the jukebox—the Carl Perkins original version. Anna didn’t know it, but she liked the beat. Some people down at the other end of the table got up to dance.
    Danny watched the dancers for a moment. “Don’t suppose you know how to jitterbug, Anna?”
    “Actually, at finishing school one summer we learned everything from how to curtsy properly to every kind of interaction that might involve music.” To illustrate, Anna held her arms up as if ballroom dancing.
    “Finishing school?”
    Anna nodded gravely. “Sure.”
    “We who?”
    “Upper East Side trust fund princesses. What about you? Where’d you learn?”
    “Living room. My mom.” Danny took Anna’s hand. Together they headed for Dublin’s small dance floor. As Anna walked away, she could hear her cell phone ring in her purse. She knew she should answer it. But really, all she wanted to do was live in the moment, have fun, and jitterbug with Danny.
    Everything and everyone else could just wait. Even Ben.

Hetero and Breathing
    “T hat’s all right, that’s okay, you’ll be working for us someday!”
    Approximately twenty miles north of Hermosa Beach—at the same time that Anna was jitterbugging with Danny—the fans of Beverly Hills High’s basketball team were chanting fervently, having slummed it north on the crowded 405 freeway to root against the home team of Birmingham High School in Van Nuys.
    Van Nuys. Meaning area code 818. Meaning
the valley.
Meaning the San Fernando Valley, the vast flat suburban wasteland directly over the big hills that fortunately walled it off it from real places like Beverly Hills and Brentwood and Santa Monica. The valley was fifty square miles of boredom, always twenty degrees hotter or ten degrees colder than the rest of Los Angeles. The pollution was insufferable, the restaurants detestable, the clubs passé before they even opened. Los Angeles was famous for Beverly Hills and Hollywood. The valley was famous for its pornography industry.
    As for Van Nuys, it skidded dangerously between lower-middle and middle class—the students on the home court side of the gym reflected these demographics. When Cammie gazed across the basketball court toward their fans, her eyes met an array of fashion disasters. Plus the Van Nuys girls were so fat! Yet even the fat ones were in skintight jeans and heels—like they were proud—and dipping talon-length fingernails into paper plates full of greasy