Size 12 and Ready to Rock (Heather Wells 4)

Even now, sitting by herself in her brown leather pants—so inappropriate for summer—and six-inch heels, white-sequined tank top, and smoky eye shadow, Tania looks like something ethereal.

The girls seated at the base of her stool can’t stop gazing at her. Neither can Sarah.

Tell story about time when you felt most emotional, I see Sarah scribble in her notebook. Like time when Sebastian went to Israel and tore your heart out.

Cassidy also notices that Sarah is taking notes and leans over to whisper something to Mallory, and the two of them giggle again. I kick the leg of their couch, and they both turn to scowl at me. I scowl back.

“Pay attention,” I whisper.

Cassidy gives me the finger. I look for her mother, but she’s nowhere to be seen. Most of the chaperones consider “class” time to be “me” time—as opposed to “performance” time, when they’re always present to cheer on their little darlings, or “meal” time, when the cameras are almost always on. They run off to shop, work out at the Winer Sports Complex, get their hair and nails done, or—as in the case of at least a couple of the moms—drink as many Cosmos as they can at the bar in the lounge of the Washington Square Hotel down the street.

“Write about the person you love the most,” Tania goes on, strumming the guitar that Lauren the PA has suddenly handed her. “Write about the person you hate.”

I notice that when Tania says the words “person you hate,” Cassidy begins to scan the room for someone. Who does she hate this week, I wonder? Last week it was Mallory, but now the two of them are best friends forever . . .

Ah. Bridget. Cassidy’s gaze falls on the pretty dark-haired girl, curled by herself in one of the charmingly Victorian chairs purchased by CRT for the filming. Bridget is gazing dreamily out the casement windows, paying no attention to what’s going on around her. Cassidy, noticing this, elbows Mallory and nods toward their roommate. Mallory rolls her eyes, and Cassidy smirks.

Hmmm. So this week, both Cassidy and Mallory are ganging up on Bridget. I wonder if this has anything to do with the hot-pink silk scarf Bridget has taken to wearing, Bollywood style, around her neck.

“She’s doing it to pop on camera,” I’d overheard Mallory complaining to some of the other girls as they stood outside my office the other day, waiting for the elevator to arrive. “Especially in HD.”

“No. I know why she’s doing it,” Cassidy said authoritatively. “She’s got so many zits, she thinks a scarf will draw attention away from her face. But I’m sorry, it isn’t working. And she doesn’t have enough talent to draw attention away from that pizza face either. If she thinks she has a chance in hell of winning the Rock Off, she’s sadly deluded.”

The other girls agreed.

I’ve come to the conclusion that, aside from Nazis, the Taliban, and possibly the honey badger, there is no one on the planet more merciless than a teenage girl once she’s decided she dislikes you.

“Write about what would happen if you lost the person you loved most in the entire world,” Tania goes on, strumming on the guitar. I hadn’t known she could play, but she does, quite competently. “Write about what would happen if the person you hate more than anyone else in the world”—Tania’s expression grows faraway—“suddenly started threatening that he was going to kill the person you love more than anything else in the entire world. How would that make you feel?”

Uh-oh. I glance over at Cooper, who is standing discreetly out of camera range. He meets my gaze, raising his dark eyebrows. This has taken an unexpected turn.

“Would you lie awake every night, thinking of how empty and alone you’d feel without that person? How meaningless life would be without him or her?” Tania is strumming the guitar strings with unnecessary force. “What would you do? Would you kill yourself? But maybe you can’t, because you’ve got a dog, and that dog needs you—”

“Okay, cut,” Stephanie yells, looking a little red-faced. “Great.” She pulls off the headset she was wearing. “Sorry, everyone. Tania, that was fantastic, can we just go back to writing about what you love and concentrate more on the part about . . .” She drops her voice and turns her back on the rest of us, speaking to Tania so softly that we can no longer hear what she’s saying.

The girls, growing restless from the hour they’ve already spent filming this workshop, stretch, then begin to whine for a break. They don’t seem to have been affected by Tania’s trip to the dark side, or even to have paid much attention to it.

“Wow,” a masculine voice says from beside me, “if this is what it’s like to work on a professional film production, I might have to rethink my chosen career path.”

I turn to find Gavin leaning against the wall.

“How’d you get in here?” I demand.

“I saved you from dying once last year, remember?” Gavin nods at Cooper. “He told me that gives me a free pass for life, as far as he’s concerned.”

I try to repress a smile but fail. “Cooper said that?”

“Yeah,” Gavin says. “But I have to watch myself, or he’ll knock me around. What’s so wrong with me being here, anyway? I don’t exactly fit this Gary Hall’s description, do I?”

I frown. “No,” I say. “You don’t.”

Though Tania hadn’t liked it one bit, going to Detective Canavan had turned out to be the right thing to do . . . not, of course, that the police were having any better luck finding Gary Hall than Cooper was. Aside from locating a more recent photo of him on file with the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles from when Gary had gone to get a new driver’s license—in which he seemed to have put on a good deal of weight, dyed his hair red, donned a pair of thick-framed black glasses that made him look, if anything, even more unhinged, and added a goatee, also dyed red, in some sort of misguided effort to look younger—there appeared to be no sign of the guy whatsoever.

“How is that possible?” I’d asked Cooper when days passed and the police still had no leads, despite their having plastered the photo everywhere.

“Easy, actually,” he explained. “There are over eight million people in this city. All he has to do is shave off the goatee, dye his hair back to its original color, ditch the glasses, not use a credit card to pay for anything, and no one’ll ever find him.”