Johnny looked at Taj before answering to see what she would say. Taj remained silent.
"Actually, Haven--it is Haven, isn't it?" Johnny asked, putting an arm around the reporter's shoulders. "I wrote the song for you."
The woman giggled.
Johnny's honeyed voice continued its slow seduction.
Taj rolled her eyes. Walk out, walk away. You don't have to put up with this anymore. You don't have to be part of this charade. The whole media maelstrom, the whole star treatment. It was all bullshit. She fetched her skateboard, exited the hotel suite, grabbed the Sunday Times from the doorway. She noted another missing-kids headline and while taking the elevator down to the lobby checked to see if she knew anyone they were looking for.
Kids were disappearing all over Los Angeles. It had started a few months back, when a sixteen-year-old Westlake Village girl was reported missing by her parents over Labor Day weekend. She'd never made it home from a beach bonfire. Taj remembered that party. It was a TAP event. The newspaper said that foul play
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was not suspected at this time; the police suspected the girl had simply run away. Runaways hardly made the news anymore, except that these were private school kids--rich kids with parents who owned summer homes in Malibu. What would they be running away from, exactly? Taj knew there were missing kids from her neighborhood too, but no one seemed to care about kids who disappeared from Echo Park and Hollywood. She folded the paper under her arm and walked out of the elevator to the hotel patio.
It was noon, and the SoCal sun flattened everything in sight, making everything look two-dimensional, as if drawn on a postcard--the guests lounging in bikinis by the David Hockney-blue swimming pool, the pool boys in their crisp white linens. At the Chateau, time seemed to stop in a cocoon
of decadent luxury.
She carried her board on her left hip and walked past the valet stand, where a Bentley convertible was parked. Johnny's new car. Another gift from the record label.
Taj lay down her skateboard and pushed off with her back foot--mongo style, they called it, because it was a bit more awkward and harder to pull off-- balancing down the hill, cruising all the way. Johnny owned a different set of wheels now, but she still preferred to skate.
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The crowd gathered in front of the hotel suddenly went berserk, screaming and hooting. Taj looked up. Johnny had finally come out to the balcony; he was blowing kisses and waving. He caught her eye and smiled, gave her the thumbs-up. Taj nodded but didn't return the smile. She weaved her way through the crying fans.
To them, Johnny Silver was a hero. A rebel. An icon. A god.
But to Taj, he was just the boy she loved who had broken her heart.