Free Absolutely True Lies by Rachel Stuhler Page B

of us but Daisy were banded with red paper strips and she had a black X scrawled across the back of her hand. This relieved me somewhat, as I hadn’t been able to figure out why an underage girl was parading into a club in full view of the cameras. I figured no one would stop her from actually drinking, but I just couldn’t imagine she’d be dumb enough to do it while people were filming her.
    “What is this place?” I yelled loudly to Daisy as we settled into a large red velvet couch.
    “New club, just opened,” she shouted back. Jameson walked by us and handed her a large plastic cup with MOUNTAIN DEW on the side. “They paid us fifty grand to show up.”
    “Fifty grand?” I asked incredulously. No wonder she could afford to hire a biographer—she could cover my salary with one night’s work. If you could call this work. “What do you have to do?”
    “Nothing much,” Daisy said. “We just need to hang out for an hour or two, I’ll walk over to the balcony a couple of times and pretend to dance, and then we can go home.” She seemed to remember something, snapping her fingers for Jameson, who handed her a cell phone without a word. “Oh, and one more thing.”
    Daisy set down her cup and turned so that her back was to the main part of the room. She raised her phone and put on a bright, fun smile. I’m sure there was a photo click during some portion of this, but I certainly wouldn’t have heard it. “Selfies!”
    I hate the word selfie . It’s a tween’s word, rammed into our cultural consciousness and now spoken by everyone from the president to the Dalai Lama. I know it’s a perfectly legitimate word these days, but I refuse to utter it out loud. “Who are the pictures for?”
    “My tweeties,” Daisy answered, never taking her eyes away from her phone. She tap-tapped for all of one second before passing the phone back to Jamie. It was lightning-quick.
    “You already got that up on Twitter?” I asked. “You’re fast.”
    At this, Daisy and Jamie turned to each other and laughed, sharing their first moment of true camaraderie in front of me. “I don’t handle my own social media. What am I, a hobo? Or a reality star? I have people who handle these things.”
    Jamie crossed behind me, leaning in to my ear. Despite the level of background noise, I heard him pretty clearly. “We don’t even give her the passwords. Trust me, it’s for the best.”
    Her “work” now done, Daisy picked up her cup and leaned back on the couch, yawning. I used to feel sorry for celebrities who couldn’t take two steps without a bodyguard and a camera in their faces, but my sympathy died in that Miami club. In fact, I was pretty angry. I practically lived in gangland, and she was getting paid to sit on a couch, drink soda, and fake-smile for her millions of fans onthe Internet. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so obligated to waste my night keeping her company.
    Axel and Sharla, already with drinks in their hands, ran over to me.
    “Dance?” Sharla shouted, holding out her hand to me. Axel hadn’t waited for us; he was twirling right there in the VIP section.
    “No, thanks,” I answered her. I thought I had refused loud enough, but Sharla grabbed my hand and yanked me up off the couch. Either I was screaming for nothing or it didn’t matter what I wanted. I looked back at Daisy. “You coming?”
    “Can’t,” she said. “Security issues. No one in their right mind would put a celeb in the middle of a dance floor.”
    Perhaps some tiny bit of sympathy should have returned, but it didn’t. Maybe Daisy was forced to be bored out of her mind for a couple of hours, but it was for money. And I was stuck in a smelly, sticky, hundred-degree club where I didn’t know anyone and I hadn’t eaten in twelve hours. I seriously wouldn’t have cared if cleaning the toilets was a requisite for Daisy collecting her fee.
    So I made my way downstairs and out onto the dance floor, completely sober but wishing I was blackout