LITMIR.BIZ

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brightly, “so let’s get started.”

      Madison clutched the seat bar of the Ferris wheel as it shuddered to a halt. She might vomit. She might pass out. Or—if she was capable of speech—she might call Trevor and give him hell. She didn’t care if the cameras were rolling or not. They’d been pointed straight at her for the last painful hour, as three-quarters of the Wardell family from Armpit Falls, New York, spun around and around on a giant rickety wheel above the Pacific Ocean. Sophie was giddy, squealing. Meanwhile Madison had been clutching her stomach in a combination of nausea and fear. She prayed that Laurel wouldn’t add a roller-coaster ride to the shooting schedule, because if she did, Madison might not make it.

      “I loved it!” Sophie cried, leaping from the still-swinging seat. “Do we have time to go again?”

      Laurel shook her head no, and Madison breathed a sigh of relief. She steadied herself against the gate as a dirty-looking carnival worker leered at her.

      “You all right?” Charlie asked, touching Madison’s elbow. “Here, come here.”

      She was too queasy to protest as her dad led her to a bench and gently sat her down. “I’ll get you some water,” he said.

      “You know what I want?” Sophie asked, her eyes wide as a little kid’s. “I want some cotton candy!”

      Madison put her head in her hands. Wow, Sophie was (a) oblivious to her suffering, and (b) hitting every mark and location with the subtlety of a hammer. How much were Trevor and Dana working with Sophie on the Wardell family story line? From the looks of it, a lot—which did not make Madison happy.

      Charlie returned and handed her a bottle of water. “Four bucks for that,” he said to no one in particular.

      Madison took a few sips and eventually stood up. She felt a little better now; the ground wasn’t moving beneath her feet. “How about we skip the cotton candy and try the air rifle.” She slipped her arm through her father’s. It was a small thing, changing the shooting order, but it said that she was in control of the situation. Without waiting for Sophie’s response, she began to walk through the crowd, Charlie Wardell at her side. It seemed like the right time to play the role of the forgiving daughter to the repentant father.

      At the air rifle booth, cheap stuffed animals—hot-pink pandas, blue kangaroos, acid-green turtles—hung from the rafters in sad-looking clumps. The carnival worker wore a striped apron and desperately needed a shave.

      Charlie stepped up to the booth. “You remember the Harvest Festival in that little town on the Hudson, the one I used to take you girls to?” he asked.

      A dim memory of cool evenings, carnival rides, and baby animals that you paid ten cents to pet flickered at the edges of Madison’s mind. She kept it there at the edges, though, and said nothing. She watched as her father handed over a five-dollar bill to the worker and picked up an air rifle.

      “This was always your favorite part,” he said.

      “Shooting a gun was my favorite?” Madison said skeptically.

      “Nope,” Charlie said. “Me shooting the gun and you winning a stuffed animal was your favorite.” He bent over the counter and let three air pellets fly. Miss. Miss. And . . . a miss. He stood up and shrugged sadly. “I guess my aim’s not what it used to be.”

      “Well, I’m a little old for stuffed animals,” Madison said, inexplicably wanting to comfort him. “I like shoes now. Do you think there’s a booth where you can win me a pair of the new Marc Jacobs wedges?”

      Charlie smiled wistfully. “You’re so grown-up,” he said. “So sophisticated. You probably don’t even remember that old purple unicorn I won you.”

      “What?” Madison looked at him closely.

      “There was this unicorn,” Charlie said.

      “Yeah, I got that part,” Madison said. “It was purple.”

      “You were only three or four, and you named it Bitsy,” Charlie went on, smiling at the memory. “You carried it with you everywhere. I seem to recall wrapping Bitsy in a plastic bag so she could take a bath with you.”

      “How funny,” Madison said. But it wasn’t actually funny. Because she still had Bitsy in her apartment, tucked in the back of her sock drawer. She hadn’t remembered who’d given her the thing; she only knew that the unicorn was one of the few possessions she took with her when she left Armor Falls. Most of her memories of home were bad, but somehow some old good feelings had been attached to that cheap, made-in-China unicorn. And now she understood why.

      She was torn between wanting to hug Charlie and to hit him in the face. (Which would Trevor like more? The punch, probably.) She had loved that unicorn instinctively because it was all she had of her father. Her heart felt tight in her chest.

      “Bitsy probably ended up in the Dumpster years ago,” Charlie said. “Well, she was your best friend for a long time.”

      My only friend, thought Madison bitterly. What a joke her life had been! She’d had a drunk for a mother, a convict for a father, a headcase for a sister, and a stuffed animal for a best friend.

      But now she was Madison Parker, star of three (well, it’d be three soon enough) hit TV shows. Here on the Santa Monica Pier, amid the bustle of tourists and the stink of fried food, she straightened her spine and tossed her hair back. Thank God things were different now.

      “So, it’s been great,” she said, “but I should really—”

      “I thought if I left, then things would get better,” Charlie said, as if they were in the middle of discussing a topic neither of them had even gone near today. The sun was in his eyes and he squinted at her. It made him look much older than his forty-two years.

      “Well, they didn’t,” Madison said coldly.

      Sophie, who had briefly vanished, reappeared with a giant snow cone. “Yeah, Dad, it was bad.” She shook her head as if lost in a horrible childhood memory. “Really bad.” She didn’t seem angry so much as baffled. Maybe that was part of her new goddess-of-love trip: She wouldn’t blame him for leaving them with a mother who drank Wild Irish Rose for breakfast and whose best efforts in the dinner arena amounted to a few slices of wet ham on sale-rack Wonder Bread.

      Well, Madison wasn’t Sophie. She was pissed. Her mother couldn’t even keep a jar of mayonnaise in the fridge for the awful sandwiches! So what if she hadn’t realized how much she missed her father until right this very moment—it didn’t matter. She was still furious.

      “I’m so sorry,” Charlie whispered. “I tried to explain in my letters.”

      God, those stupid letters again, Madison thought. As if they mattered, as if they even existed. And if they did? Well, you could have a stack of letters ten feet high and they still didn’t add up to a father.

      She turned on her heel and walked to the edge of the pier. Leaning over the railing, she took a long breath of ocean air. Any dad who vanished for a decade and then showed up only after his daughter had made it was obviously in it for the money. Two could play that game, couldn’t they? She, Madison Parker, was in it for the ratings.

      Ratings, she whispered. Ratings, ratings, ratings.

      It was a mantra that kept her from flinging her mike pack into the Pacific Ocean. It gave her strength to turn back around and smile her megawatt smile.

      “So,” she said to her family, “how about that cotton candy?”

      Standing in her colossal walk-in closet, Madison brushed her fingertips along the sleeves of her silk tops, arranged by color from deep jewel red to coral, from lime to lavender. Even in her wildest dreams, she’d never imagined a life like this. That she would own these nice things. She’d been an eight-year-old scrubbing her jeans by hand in the kitchen sink because her mother couldn’t be bothered to take them—or anything—to the Laundromat. And now she didn’t have to even touch her dirty clothes: She tossed them into

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