Hollywood Hookup

Chapter 1 Nobody’s looking at you.

Nobody’s looking at you.

Josie

IF I COULD have any superpower, it would be invisibility.

Yes, I know flying is more fun, healing more practical, and controlling people with The Force more gratifying, but as I stride up the sidewalk to the gates of Sweet Spot Productions in Hollywood, I can’t help wishing I could blend into the sun-bleached brick walls.

The security guard sees I have Peyton with me and waves us to the head of the line. Emmy told them I’d be bringing her, and while that’s all I’m doing—dropping my best friend’s daughter off to her at a studio—half of the nerve endings in my body are acting like I’m crossing into Dante’s inferno.

Relax, Josie. Nobody’s looking at you. And you’ll be out of here before the taping even starts.

We duck out of the breezy October air and squeeze past the snake of studio audience participants waiting for permission to find their seats.

My gaze skates across the sea of California-ready women, their hair: perfect; clothes: designer or as close to designer as they can manage; makeup: influencer-approved.

Meanwhile, Peyton is the Gen Z poster child in a Bruh baseball cap and FBI shades, and I’m—what am I even wearing?

Yoga pants and a Maná T-shirt I bought at a concert in Mexico City when I was seventeen, so it doesn’t even fit anymore.

My boobs look like they’ve been shrink-wrapped to my chest.

The shirt was a bad idea on several levels but mostly because it’s a clue as to who I really am, and I don’t need to be giving anyone any clues.

I don’t need any of this Hollywood crap—the cameras, the adrenaline, the “magic” of television.

I forfeited a place in this world a long time ago and did a pretty good job avoiding it, but then Emmy got famous and kind of pulled me along in her wake.

Yeah, we’ll just blame it on her.

As we excuse me our way through the excited crowd toward the stage, each glimpse of the hulking, heavy TV cameras sends my heart galloping.

As a makeup artist for Lost Star Dance Troupe Saves the Universe, I work in a studio, but I know where all of our cameras are, and (spoiler alert) they’re not in the makeup room.

A few feet away, a grip shifts the spotlight, and my whole body flinches, but he’s not turning it on me.

He’s highlighting a sign at the corner of the stage: Date Your Celebrity Crush!

Lord have all the mercies, the game show is a cringey gimmick, but it worked.

Emmy says the contest featuring the four leading men from Lost Star has raised over two million dollars for the local children’s hospital.

If it had cost body parts instead of money, I expect we’d be seeing a lot of women hopping on one foot for a chance to go on a date with one of the hottest hunks in Hollywood. I would not be one of them.

“There’s my mom!” Peyton shouts. I love this kid as if she were my own, but she is loud.

If the Quiet Place aliens ever show up for real, Peyton and anyone within one hundred feet of her will be the first to go, which is too bad because otherwise, I’d easily be the grizzled old survivor with a rifle and a bunker full of pork and beans.

I’ve been operating under the radar for so long, it’s become second nature.

Emmy waves us out of the crowd, her highlighted curls pulled into a flirty pineapple ponytail, her dewy makeup making her look sun-kissed and shiny in her formfitting gold dress.

She’s cohosting the show today, and even though you can’t tell she’s pregnant from the back, it’s her waddle that gives her away.

Until Emmy got pregnant, the only things I knew about pregnancy were what I learned when I fake-delivered a six-month-old on set during a taping of Bajo el Mismo Paraguas at my stepfather’s studio down in Mexico.

My Spanish was decent, but my character’s wasn’t, so there was a lot of me shouting a poorly conjugated push!

over and over again. Now, however, I’ve got an insider peek at what two people in love making a brand-new person looks like. It’s pretty amazing.

It’s also pretty amazing seeing Emmy in her element like this—the star I always knew she’d become. “You look great,” I tell her as she kisses her daughter’s baseball cap before sending her off.

“Thanks.” She hugs me and adds an extra squeeze. “Listen, I need a favor.”

I freeze. I don’t like the sound of that. Not here. Not now. On set, cameras everywhere.

“One of our contestants had to bow out. I need a replacement.”

I glance around and spot the other Jason—the colossal Jason “Mount” Ramirez, not Emmy’s husband, Jason Connor—skirting a corner. Through an open door, someone rises from a chair, his identity blurred by a swarm of hairspray particles. I think it’s Zachary Tay.

I swallow hard. “Wow, you need a replacement contestant for a celebrity dating show? Wherever will you find one?”

Emmy’s nostrils flare. “It can’t just be some rando, Josie. What if she’s a serial killer? Or a multilevel marketer? I can’t subject the guys to that.”

“Is that why your contestant had to ‘bow out’? You found out she sells essential oils?”

“No! She had a heart attack. She’s, like, eighty, and she’s had transplants and I don’t know what else, and she’s got a super-huge crush on Sean O’Sullivan.”

At the mention of his name, my traitorous heart leaps.

There’s no excuse for it. It’s not like I’ve never met the guy.

He’s one of Jason Connor’s closest friends, and I do work on the Lost Star set.

I’ve gotten a hug from the fearless Captain Footwork, danced with him once, too.

I’m still recovering from both of those things. But this is too big an ask.

“Emmy, I can’t,” I whisper.

“Why not?”

My voice box slams shut like she’s asked me for the launch codes.

I haven’t told Emmy everything about my past. She knows I used to live in Mexico when I was a kid, long enough that I sometimes still think in Spanish, but I kind of left out my showbiz career and the dumpster fire that turned into.

For example, she has no idea that, for six years, I starred in the highest-rated bilingual children’s show in the country.

My stepsister, Lupe, and I had a regular segment with her ventriloquist puppet about learning languages and cultural exchange and how not to be a total jerk to kids who were different from you, which is ironic because, off set and at home, we were often total jerks to one another.

Club Bilingüe was an instant hit. In fact, we were so popular that an educational firm in the States licensed our content for their ESOL and Spanish-language programs. Our smiling faces appeared in textbooks and classrooms from New York to LA.

We were featured on Sesame Street three times.

We even had a theme song: “Friends Para Siempre.” Emmy has no idea that, for a lot of folks in Mexico and the U.S. , this gringa is a household name.

Well, not Josie Days. They don’t know me by that name. They know me by my real name—Savannah Bateman.

“You know how I feel about cameras,” I say.

I don’t remember exactly what excuse I gave Emmy the last time she tried to wrangle me into the spotlight.

When you tell enough lies, they all start to run together, like watercolor paints.

Not that I use watercolors. When I create art, I like it bolder: acrylic and gouache or thick, sticky oil pastels.

Anyway, I think I told her something she could identify with—that the eye of the camera triggered me because it reminded me of the Eye of Sauron.

Stupid, I know, but a lot of people were traumatized by The Lord of the Rings movies. That was a lot of orc. Mucho orco.

“Sometimes, in our heads, things can seem bigger than they are.” Emmy’s hazel eyes are determined.

“I need you. A lot of people gave money to this. We’ve announced one hundred contestants, so we can’t run the show with only ninety-nine.

Contestants have to be vetted, and because I know you and I love you, you’re automatically vetted. ”

“Whatever happened to backups?”

“We already used the backups. Apparently, there’s this thing that happens to people called life.”

I don’t want to disappoint Emmy. She’s my best friend, practically my family.

She got me the makeup artist gig on Lost Star after I mortgaged my soul for F/X makeup classes, and I love getting to be a part of showbiz again, in a safe, hidden, backstage kind of way.

But I can’t be in front of the cameras ever again.

It’s just… not possible. If anyone finds out who I really am, it’ll be another shit show.

It’s amazing how something stupid you did when you were eighteen can haunt you for the rest of your life.

But whatever. That’s life, right? We screw up, we flee the country, we dye our hair and change our name, and we move on, hiding out with our estranged bio dad, getting him all excited that he’s reconnecting with his kid, and then we find out he’s really sick and take care of him until he’s gone, and then we’re alone, with a cosmetology certificate and just enough money to buy a trailer and plop it on a pad in a sweaty trailer park on the Gulf of Mexico.

Maybe make a friend or two. Or just one.

But she’s a good one, and those are hard to come by.

Maybe I’m overreacting. My rational brain tells me the world should have forgotten about me by now.

They probably would have, too, if my stepsister’s beloved puppet hadn’t been ruined and gone missing along with me.

There wouldn’t be news stories and conspiracy theories and Bring Back Chuy memes.

I haven’t seen one of those for a while, thank goodness.

Still… “It’s a hard no, Emmy. I’m sorry.”

I hate the hurt look on her face. She doesn’t take my shit as much anymore since she leveled up from bestselling novelist to bona fide celebrity, so I know I’ve got it coming.

“Anxiety is a liar, Josie, and I’m not going to let it make you miss out on a chance to go on a date with Sean O’Sullivan.” My face heats, and she adds, “Uh-huh,” as if I’ve just openly pledged my undying love to the man instead of having a completely uncontrolled physiological reaction.

“I don’t want to date anyone famous. That lifestyle isn’t for everyone,” I complain, but she’s already grabbed my hand and is navigating us through the staff-choked hallways like a couple of spies through a lasered security net.

“This wouldn’t be dating him, it would be a date, just like it would be for poor Vera hooked up to her EKG right now. No strings attached.… just electrodes.”

Emmy halts in front of a barely cracked door.

The sign above it reads PRIVATE GREEN ROOM.

Inside, five of the hottest men in Hollywood are sitting along the walls, sipping clear or dark liquid out of etched glasses, chatting, and looking at their phones.

What they spent on shoes and haircuts alone could fund a small nation for a year.

You wouldn’t think a show called Lost Star Dance Troupe Saves the Universe would contain as much testosterone as it does, but hoo-boy.

I think it’s the choreography. Or maybe all that butt-hugging space-leather.

The scent of them wafts into the hallway—subtle, like a fragrance insert in a men’s magazine—and I’m yanked back to the night I danced with Sean O’Sullivan at the Pershing Square ice skating rink.

He was wearing a ridiculous stocking cap, and his coat smelled like this when I hid my face from the cameras in it.

I held on tight as he led me, spinning and spinning, while the air throbbed with Wham!

’s “Last Christmas,” and the lights around us sparkled, and I got lost in time and space and the firm grip of Captain Footwork’s arms just like his alien lover in that one episode that I secretly watched over and over and lied to Emmy about when she caught me.

“Josie?”

“Electrodes,” I repeat to confirm I’m listening, not fantasizing. Also, electrodes sound pretty good right now. I could use something to zap my heart back into rhythm.

“I know you like him,” she says. “It’s written all over your face.”

Accurate, if the going definition of like also describes the feeling I get when I see a perfect pudding parfait with its whipped cream in a flawless whirl like Ramona always manages to do with Captain Footwork’s pompadour.

I just want to shove my face into it and gobble it up without breathing. The parfait, not the pompadour.

“I work on the show,” I argue. “That’s got to disqualify me.”

“Nope,” Emmy chirps. “Our lawyers kept it wide-open on purpose. Even their moms can win it. Heck, their dads could win it!”

“Aren’t I supposed to make a donation? I don’t have any extra cash right now.”

“I’ll do it in your name. Come on, Josie. You deserve nice things, too.”

A bud of guilt blossoms in my chest. Would she say that if she knew that I’ve been lying to her about who I really am? In six years of friendship, I’ve never had the guts to find out.

I’m scrambling for another excuse when the green room door pulls all the way open, the scent of cologne mushrooms our way, and suddenly there, standing in a rectangle of light, is my perfect Irish cream pudding parfait—Sean O’Sullivan.