Home Again

Chapter One

Reporters had been circling the event for days now. Headlines flourished. Innuendo about drug use and illicit behavior nipped at the heels of the celebrities who’d congregated in the small Oregon town. It was a wrap party for a major motion picture, and things like this didn’t take place in LaGrangeville. The Elks Hall hadn’t been used for anything other than quiet meetings in years, but tonight it pulsed with loud, discordant music. Townspeople and photographers swarmed the narrow main street, seeing themselves in the mirrored windows of the limousines that prowled past, waiting for something explosive, something totally Hollywood, to happen.

But even so, even with all the articles and interviews and paparazzi, no one knew how close to the truth the Enquirer’s headline sentence would be: It was a party to die for.

Angel DeMarco emerged from the temperature-controlled cocoon of the limousine. Through a blur of cigarette smoke and drizzly rain, he saw the crowd gathered across the street. Faceless bodies huddled behind a long, yellow police line.

“It’s him, DeMarco!”

Cameras erupted in buzzing bursts of light. The rain looked surreal, streaks of prismatic silver, puddles of impossible light on the black street.

“Angel… look this way! AngelAngelAngel…”

Their adoration swept through him in an exhilarating wave. God, how he loved his fame. He took a long drag off his cigarette and exhaled slowly, then flashed them the smile, the grin that just last week People magazine had labeled the “twenty-thousand-megawatter.” He waved. The gray trail of his cigarette smoke snaked through the air.

He stepped sideways to allow his date—he couldn’t remember her name—to get out of the car.

She surfaced slowly. A high-heeled black leather shoe and long, slinky leg shot out of the darkness. Her heel clicked hard on the pavement. She leaned forward, thrust her teased pile of peroxide-yellow hair forward, followed it with a magnificent amount of cleavage, and thrust out of the car. Instinctively she turned to the crowd, adjusting her pink rubber dress as she smiled and waved.

Angel had to give her credit: the woman knew how to make an entrance.

He took her hand and pulled her toward his adoring fans. Her ridiculous heels clicked and skidded on the slick pavement, but the sound was soon drowned out by the roar of the crowd, when they realized that he was coming toward them.

Young girls screamed and reached out for him. A few of them, he recognized—they were the same freckle-faced small-town teenagers who had skipped school to watch the filming of his movie. They’d stood on the perimeter every day, bunched together behind the barricades, screaming and giggling and crying when he emerged from his trailer to shoot a scene.

They asked nothing of him, this crowd of admirers, nothing except his presence. He could be wild and immature and s

elfish, and they didn’t care—they only cared that he gave his all to the screen. He gave them his biggest, sexiest smile, allowing his gaze to scan the crowd. He presented each girl a moment, a single heartbeat of time when he was looking at her alone.

“Angel, can we have your autograph? What do you think of LaGrangeville? When will the movie be out? Will you show it here first?”

The questions came as they always did, shooting from the rain like darts. Some he heard, others he didn’t, but he knew it didn’t matter. They didn’t expect an answer, they just wanted to be around him, to see if a few drops of his Hollywood glitter would dust their ordinary lives for a second.

“Angel, could I get a picture taken with you?”

He glanced up from the autograph he was signing and looked at the young girl who’d asked the question. She was short and round, with cheeks that looked like china plates, and waves of frizzled brown hair.

He knew her in an instant—she was the girl who never got invited to the best parties, and tried desperately not to care.

He knew all about that. Even now, years later, he could remember what it felt like to be a teenaged boy on the outside looking in. How much it hurt.

He smiled at her, and her eyes widened in surprise. She stared at him as if he’d hung the moon, and that was all it took—that one look from a stranger shot through his bloodstream like a drug.

“Why, darlin’, I’d be honored.” He pulled away from his date and ducked under the police tape. He felt hands all over him, smoothing along his jacket, tangling in his hair. It used to bother him, that unsought intimacy, but he’d learned to live with it, even enjoy it if they didn’t go too far. He slipped an arm around the girl and drew her close, huddling beneath the overhang of the old brick building. Another girl—tall and gangly—flashed a quick photo of them.

“You look awfully pretty tonight,” he said. The girl was wearing a floor-length white satin dress.

“It’th Homecoming,” she lisped, almost blinding him with the silver from her braces.

Homecoming. It was a word he hadn’t heard in a long time, a lifetime, and suddenly he felt old. If he were this girl’s father, he would have watched her get dressed in sparkles and beads for a school dance. He wondered what that would have felt like….

He brushed the vague sense of regret aside. “Where’s your date?”

A blush crept up her fleshy cheeks. “I don’t have one. Me and thome … girlfriends thought we’d just watch. We were on the decorating committee….”

For a split second he wasn’t Angel DeMarco, movie star; he was Angelo DeMarco, the kid from the wrong side of the tracks. “Where’s the dance?” he asked softly.