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she said. “Award season. How do women walk in ten-foot shoes? I’m too much of a tomboy to wear dresses every night. I feel like a transvestite.”
    Good. Between the Golden Globes, the People’s Choice Awards, the NAACP Image Awards, and every honor until the Oscars, April wouldn’t have much time to meet new men. Except the rich and famous ones , my Evil Voice reminded me.
    â€œCutest tomboy on stilettos I ever saw,” I said. “Anyway, I’ll make a visit worth your while. I can get you a sit-down with Gustavo.”
    April could always be lured closer with the right carrot, and my film’s director, Gustavo Escobar, was the whole ensalada . Escobar was a near-recluse who was impossible to reach when he was working on a project. April supplemented her publicity work with freelance journalism, and an interview with him might be the coup she was looking for to help her land a job on the staff of Entertainment Weekly . Even if not, she might impress her bosses by convincing him to sign with her agency. April was looking for any break she could get.
    Gustavo Escobar’s enlistment to helm a horror movie was the fanboy coup of the year, evidence that horror and prestige weren’t mutually exclusive. He’d won Sundance and been nominated for an Oscar for Nuestro Tío Fidel, which he’d shot guerrilla-style in his homeland of Cuba. Our current project, Freaknik, was more blood and guts than heart and soul, but he was a meticulous craftsman.
    As always, I wished my part were bigger, but my agent thought it was the right move for me on the heels of art-house juggernaut Lenox Avenue, which had just been released to slobbering reviews. My slim part in Lenox Avenue had barely survived the editing booth, but it was still listed on my IMDb page for the film world to see.
    â€œPlay your cards right, Ten, and this could be a new beginning for you,” my agent had lectured me at our last lunch before I left for Miami. He knew I chased trouble like a junkie. A year before, I’d been a household name for all the wrong reasons. Unless you live in a cave, you know about my brush with actress Sofia Maitlin.Even that wasn’t enough for me. In the past six months, I’d allowed a bad influence in my life to get me into new trouble I hadn’t told my agent about—or April. Just as April had once told me, maybe on some sick level, I needed to ride the tiger.
    I hoped I was ready for a new beginning, free of trouble. But I couldn’t lie to myself about the biggest secret I still harbored: I would never propose to April Forrest. It would be cruel to inflict someone like me on a nice girl like her.
    â€œI want to see you,” my mouth said, ignoring my conviction. “I miss you.”
    This time, the silence was barely noticeable. “I know,” she said. “I miss you, too.”

I WAS LESS impressed by Freaknik after I read the script. Even if you haven’t seen it, you’ve seen it: Teenagers in bathing suits on spring break on an island paradise contract a venereal virus that turns them into pustuled, sex-crazed killer zombies. Despite Escobar’s reputation, any aspirations toward art were only in his press releases. Len Shemin, my agent, told me that Freaknik was a script Escobar had been shopping for quite a while, based on a series of novels by a bestselling husband-wife team I’d once encountered at the NAACP Image Awards. His new name recognition had finally won him $25 million to bring his vision to life.
    Picture a standard zombie movie with a bit of political philosophy sandwiched between bloody orgies. The disease had originated in Project Coast, the real-world South African attempt to create a race-specific disease back in the seventies. Look it up.
    Escobar hadn’t cast me as one of the leads, since they’re both twenty-somethings meant to lure in Hollywood’s Golden Demographic: white boys between the ages of fourteen