Starstruck Read Online Free Page A

raked his eyes from the tip of her expensively shod toe to the crown of her shining hair, and murmured, “Here comes trouble.”
    She was reading for a bit role in a gangster picture he’d done some rewrites on; he—in one of the series of degrading errands he was forced to run in his role as a glorified, and gloriously overpaid, script assistant in Hollywood—was delivering the pages. She didn’t get the part, not that day.
    But she got something better. She got Harry.
    “Oh boy,” Harry had said again, after their chaste first kiss outside the Top Hat Café that night. “I’m in trouble now.”
    Funny
, Amanda had thought at the time. Because in all of her eighteen years of life, the only person her astonishing looks had ever brought trouble upon was herself.
    Well, not anymore
, thought Amanda as she pulled her pearl-gray Packard convertible into Olive Moore’s pink gravel drive for what she hoped would be the very last time.
From now on, things are going
my
way
.
    It wasn’t dark yet, but the party inside Olive’s house looked as though it had been going for hours. As she entered the parlor, Amanda heard the pop of a fresh champagne cork, sharp as a gunshot, followed by a chorus of raucous cheers. A plump man in a tailcoat was sprawled across the red velvet love seat as three girls coiled around him, like serpents in satin. Another drunken customer—a small-time producer, Amanda thought—was passed out on the floor, snoring fiercely beneath a pile of feather boas. A washed-up crooner pounded out a popular tune at the white lacquered piano. He seemed to be having a little trouble keeping focused with Dot, a brassy blonde in a lurid violet gown, warbling along at the top of her lungs, although to be fair, the problem wasn’t so much with Dot’s singing as the fact that she was lying directly across the keyboard.
    “I can’t give you anything but love, baby,”
Dot bellowed.
“That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, BAAAAAAABY!”
    She kicked her leg up in the air, sending an unbuckled evening slipper flying across the room, where it narrowly missed Amanda’s head.
    Amanda sighed as she ducked. She could hardly pretend tobe shocked at a scene of debauchery. After three years at Olive’s house, a girl got used to anything; Lord knew she’d seen worse. But now, with her new life, and Harry, beckoning on the horizon, it all felt so pointless, so embarrassing, so
dirty
. Once, Olive’s house had seemed like a refuge. Now it was just another place she had to escape to get where she was going. Just like Hollywood Boulevard, and the dance hall in Nevada, and the orphanage in Denver, an unbroken line reaching all the way back to Oklahoma. Amanda was always on her way somewhere. Sometimes she thought that feeling of moving forward was the only one she trusted. She just wondered whether she’d know when she was
there
.
    Carefully stepping around the snoring pile of feathers, Amanda made her way over to Lucy, who was wisely standing as far from the piano as possible and was engaged in an intense conversation with a slender young man in a monocle, who, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a slender young woman.
It takes all kinds
, Amanda thought wearily.
    “Ginger!” Lucy exclaimed. It was what all of the girls at Olive’s called her. Only Olive knew Amanda’s real name, which of course wasn’t her real name at all. “Where ya been?”
    “Oh, just a little place called
not here
.”
    Lucy grinned at her companion. “Ginger likes to be mysterious. She thinks it’s part of her charm, but the rest of us just find it an awful drag. Ginger, this is Erika. Erika, Ginger. Erika just came here all the way from
Berlin
,” Lucy added. “That’s in Germany.”
    “Gute Nacht, gnädige Fräulein.”
Clicking her heels, the woman in the monocle made a great show of manfully kissing Amanda’s hand.
    “Nice to meet you.” Amanda turned to Lucy. “You seen Olive?”
    “Sure. She’s upstairs, going over