You Are Not Alone(69)
So why are my hands shaking?
I cancel my appointment with the lawyer, eating the $260 fee.
How could Detective Williams understand all the strange things I’ve done? I’m friends with Amanda’s friends. I snuck onto Amanda’s mother’s porch and stole her mail. I’m living in Amanda’s apartment. I even look like her.
It’s safer that I leave it all alone.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
VALERIE
Two years ago
“MISS?”
Valerie turned around, expecting the silver-haired gentleman who’d placed his lunch order to modify it. Instead, he snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “I just figured out who you are!”
She stood there in her black slacks and crisp white shirt, the tray she’d used to deliver his iced tea aloft on her upraised palm.
“Law and Order: SVU. Am I right? I never forget a face!”
Valerie smiled and affected her best thick Brooklyn accent. “‘Put back the Doritos, kid, I saw you stick them under your coat.’”
The customer laughed, then his expression changed. Valerie knew what he was thinking: another failed actress serving BLTs on Sunset Strip.
“I’ll be right back with your sandwich, sir.” She hurried off.
It wasn’t the first time she’d been recognized, but it was years since it had happened. In her late twenties, she’d won a small recurring role on a daytime soap opera that went off the air due to low ratings, and she’d enjoyed signing autographs—once—for a pair of middle-aged women who were touring the studio lot.
It was hard to accept: That single-season part was the zenith of her career.
Too young, too old, too short, too tall, too pretty, not pretty enough, not quite right …
Her story wasn’t exactly original: At the age of seventeen, she’d stepped off a Greyhound bus with only two suitcases and a few hundred dollars in cash, determined to make it in Hollywood. But Valerie wasn’t only chasing a dream; she was running even harder from her past.
Arf-arf!
No matter how many miles spun under the wheels of the cramped Greyhound bus that reeked of the meatball sub the guy a few rows up was eating, she could still hear echoes of the taunts that had followed her as she’d walked down the long school hallway lined with lockers on both sides.
Heard you like it doggie-style! one of the football players had shouted while the guy who’d betrayed her—the asshole who was funny and popular and had seemed so normal—smirked and accepted a high five from the idiot football player.
It didn’t stop there. Not that day, or week, or even the next week. The taunts and whispers spread through their high school like a virus.
Someone—she didn’t even know who—threw a dog treat at her head in the lunchroom. She had the role of Rizzo in their school’s production of Grease, but she abruptly quit. She knew the moment she walked onstage, the barking would begin, just as it did when she was called on in class.
She couldn’t tell anyone the truth—that it hadn’t happened that way at all, that their buddy was a liar and a bastard, that she was still a virgin.
Who would believe her?
No one. Not even her own mother, whom she’d tried to tell first.
She couldn’t bear to remain in high school.
So, California. It was all the way across the country. No one knew her there. It was a chance to start fresh—to show everyone who she could become. She worked as a nanny, a personal trainer, in craft services, and as a bartender while she tried to earn her SAG card. She lived in small apartments with two or three other girls crammed in to split the rent—except for the year she turned twenty-one, when she was briefly married.
As marriages went, hers wasn’t bad: Valerie lived with Tony rent-free in his one-bedroom while he slept on the couch. Tony, who was born in a small town outside Madrid, paid Valerie five thousand dollars, mostly in tens and twenties he’d saved from tip money, and got his green card. She kept a few fond memories and his last name, Ricci—which put even more distance between her and her past.
Valerie had a knack for accents and a formidable memory for her lines, which helped her land an agent. But as her twenties slid into her thirties, her opportunities diminished. Her most recent job had been in a local commercial as a young mom with a laundry problem, which didn’t even cover her rent for a month.
Her agent hadn’t phoned with so much as an audition in weeks.
Valerie scooped up the BLT from the kitchen and grabbed the pitcher of iced tea with her free hand. The restaurant charged for refills—a ridiculous rule—but she freshened the silver-haired man’s drink and said, “On the house.”
“Thanks, sweetie.”
When she cleared his table a little later, she found a twenty-dollar tip and a scrawled note on his receipt: Hang in there.
Maybe he’d sensed she was thinking of giving up.
The problem was, she had no backup plan. Her bank account held less than a thousand dollars. She’d never attended college. She was living in a small apartment with two other women who were also trying to make it in the business—just as she’d done when she’d first moved to L.A. The only difference now was that her roommates were nearly ten years younger than she was.
That evening, as Valerie sat on the edge of the bathtub soaking her tired feet in hot water, she gave herself a deadline: Her thirty-fourth birthday was three months away. If she didn’t have any leads by then, she’d find a real job. Maybe she’d stay connected to the business as a personal assistant to someone who’d actually made it in Hollywood. She dried her feet, reached into the medicine cabinet to sneak a little of her roommate Ashley’s expensive face cream, and fell into bed, exhausted from her double shift.