American Beauty Read online

  Copyright © 2006 by Alloy Entertainment

  All rights reserved.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group, USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at hachettebookgroupusa.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2006

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-04162-1

  Contents

  Also By THE A-LIST

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Black Sweatshirt with a Bad Chanel Knock-off Scarf

  Four-Foot Eleven and as Bad-Ass as They Come

  White Imitation of Christ Jeans Covered in Dog Shit

  Balancing Out the Baddies

  Bitch in a BMW

  The Girl’s Back Is Like, Cro-Magnon

  Sexy Blue Star

  Bohemian, Of-the-People Thing

  Crimson Crime

  Body-art Babe

  Her Guy Looked Luscious

  Dinner for One from L.A. Farm

  Sun Rising in the West

  Vermicelli Silk Sheets

  SOB

  Big Bird Hips

  Not a Screw-and-Run Guy

  Evolution T-Shirt with a Photo of an Ape

  Ugly Squared

  Celebrity Gawk Session

  Paired Up Like Penguins

  Granny Pants

  Mermaids and Mermen

  “Girlfriend” Material

  Just Sex Buddies

  Miss Priss

  Please-Forgive-Me Flowers

  Acid-Green Faux-Fur Shrug

  Two Surgically Enhanced Basketball Breasts

  Active Heroine

  If you have to ask, you’ll never be on …

  THE A-LIST

  Be sure to read all the novels in the New York Times bestselling

  A-LIST series

  THE A-LIST

  GIRLS ON FILM

  BLONDE AMBITION

  TALL COOL ONE

  BACK IN BLACK

  SOME LIKE IT HOT

  AMERICAN BEAUTY

  And keep your eye out for the eighth novel, coming July 2007.

  Be sure to read all the novels in the #1 New York Times bestselling GOSSIP GIRL series

  Gossip Girl

  You Know You Love Me

  All I Want Is Everything

  Because I’m Worth It

  I Like It Like That

  You’re The One That I Want

  Nobody Does It Better

  Nothing Can Keep Us Together

  Only In Your Dreams

  Would I Lie to You

  And keep you eye out for the eleventh novel, coming May 2007.

  A-List novels by Zoey Dean:

  THE A-LIST

  GIRLS ON FILM

  BLONDE AMBITION

  TALL COOL ONE

  BACK IN BLACK

  SOME LIKE IT HOT

  AMERICAN BEAUTY

  To Lynn Weingarten and Cindy Eagan, without whom I’d have much less time to shop.

  Hope and curiosity about the future seemed better than guarantees. The unknown was always so attractive to me … and still is.

  —Hedy Lamarr

  Black Sweatshirt with a Bad Chanel Knock-off Scarf

  “Anna Percy, you are a traitor to all that is good and holy. And to Manhattan”

  Anna Percy smiled. Cynthia Baltres might be living in the intellectual mecca known as New York City, and Anna might now be living in the anti-intellectual sun-dappled overindulgent splendor of Beverly Hills. But whether there were three thousand miles or three blocks between them, it didn’t matter. Cyn was still her best friend—one who could let fly with a friendly insult the way other uptown girls tossed off skimpy two-ply cashmere.

  “Jealousy is oozing through my phone, Cyn,” Anna teased, wriggling the discreet earpiece from her Motorola E815’s headset to a more comfortable position. Her pearl-gray Lexus powered down Wilshire Boulevard; the Santa Monica mountains stood sentry to the north. Anna had just informed Cyn that she was driving to a pregraduation party aboard her friend Samantha Sharpe’s yacht. Cyn had just informed Anna that she was stuck in the NYU library researching a final paper on pop culture references to the French Revolution and had also just admitted that a tiny part of her was actually enjoying working on it. “Anyway, what are you doing talking to me? You’re in a library.”

  She turned left on Sawtelle, as Sam’s directions had indicated. The neighborhood instantly got seedier—fancy buildings were replaced by low-priced Mexican restaurants, tire dealers, and the occasional strip club advertised by a dilapidated neon sign.

  “What are they going to do, throw me out?” Cyn asked rhetorically. “The new research wing will be named for Uncle Georgie, who just left them a mint. The Times obit said he died from a heart attack, but the whole family knows it was actually … Well, let’s just say he had a nasty habit of picking up boy-girls near the Holland Tunnel.”

  Diseased cross-dressing prostitutes seemed light years away from Anna’s current life. Yes, she loved New York. It was officially her home, but a lot could be said for La La Land, despite the squalor of Sawtelle Boulevard. She smiled as she passed a red Prius with a surfboard sticking out the rear window whose twenty-something blond driver was talking on her cell, applying lip gloss, and allegedly keeping an eye on the road all at the same time. There were some things in life—commuter-friendly transvestite hookers—that could only be found in New York. There were others—triple-tasking Prius-driving surf bunnies—that existed only in L.A.

  “When do you guys graduate?” Anna asked, making a conscious effort to pay more attention to the road.

  “Two weeks.”

  “Mine is next Friday. It feels surreal, doesn’t it? This huge rite of passage—”

  “Oh please,” Cyn scoffed. “This is not some ancient John Hughes flick; it’s not such a big deal.”

  When they were in eighth grade, Cyn had rented all the John Hughes movies for Anna in an effort to broaden her friend’s cultural horizons beyond the nineteenth-century British fiction with which she was already enamored. They’d watched The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and their all-time favorite, Pretty in Pink. For a few days after that one, they’d both dressed like Molly Ringwald as the lead character, Andie Walsh in quirky layers of lace, mismatched fabrics, and multiple shades of pink.

  “I’ll tell you what graduation really is,” Cyn continued. “Intermission before we can get on with our real lives. Finally.”

  Anna smiled ruefully. In typical Cyn fashion, her friend had nailed the truth of the matter. Though loath to admit it, Anna had actually switched time zones and moved in with her father several months ago to be more like Cyn: wild, fearless, and sexy. Admittedly, the plan hadn’t gone smoothly. Sometimes Anna wondered if the wild gene was simply missing from her DNA.

  “Did you hear about the wait list at Middlebury?” Anna asked. Cyn’s parents had both gone to the prestigious liberal arts college in Vermont, but Cyn hadn’t gotten accepted there immediately. Instead, she’d been put on the dreaded wait list.

  “Yes. And no.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning they didn’t take me, the fuckers.” Cyn went uncharacteristically silent; Anna could picture the sour look on her best friend’s face. “So I’ll be going to Colby, which is like Middlebury in Maine. It’s okay. Some of my favorite writers went there.”

  “That’s a good school,” Anna assured her.

  “And you’re going to Yale. Only six hours away. Anyway, less about dumb-ass next year and more about the party,” Cyn went on. “Please tell me you took my advice about the outfit.”

&nbs
p; Anna fingered the skinny strap of her eggshell-colored Egyptian cotton Anna Molinari dress edged in silver scalloped lace that fell below the knees of her long legs. She’d originally planned to wear a pale ice-blue vintage Chanel silk shift straight from her grandmother’s armoire, but Cyn had nixed that idea, saying you couldn’t wear Chanel silk on a boat. As it is utterly impossible to dry-clean away the smell of dead fish.

  “Yes, I bought something,” Anna replied, stopping for a red light at the corner of Venice Boulevard. “Cotton. Happy?”

  “Deliriously. Do you look fantastic in it? No. Of course you do. Next question. Can Ben remove it with his teeth?”

  Anna burst out laughing. “I haven’t put that to the test. Anyway, he won’t be there. He has to work. I’ll see him tomorrow, though.”

  Ben Birnbaum was her very significant other. They’d randomly met on her flight to Los Angeles the day she was moving, the day before New Year’s Eve. Since then, they’d been on again, off again, over and over. Ben was back in Los Angeles for summer break after his freshman year at Princeton, and now they were very much on again. And they had the whole summer ahead of them to prove it.

  He had a summer job at Trieste, currently the hot club in L.A. Not that Anna was an expert on these things, but that is what Sam had told her. There was always a line down the block, and they were constantly flying in some cutting-edge DJ from Rome or London or Dubai.

  Ben’s job was both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because he was interested in learning the night-club business. Bad because the club was consistently overcrowded, full of incendiary girls who flirted outrageously with her boyfriend. Anna had witnessed that phenomenon firsthand.

  “Wow, what a sucky charmed life you lead,” Cyn joked warmly. “Want to hear about mine? Scott and I are totally over. I went to Bungalow 8 last night to drown my sorrows and got stuck in a banquette with some fat-ass loser masquerading as the son of the Japanese ambassador to the UN. Busted. The real son of the Japanese ambassador is in my history class. When I casually mentioned this, he mumbled something about needing to go talk to a friend and practically sprinted to the bathroom. I think he hid in there for the rest of the night.”

  Anna giggled as a skinny girl wearing all black, with a bull ring through her septum, and her buff, bald boyfriend stepped brazenly onto Sawtelle at the corner crosswalk of Washington Place. Cars whizzed by; Anna stopped completely as the couple crossed the street with their mouths in a lip-lock.

  She was just about to share with Cyn the details of what she was witnessing when she felt the Lexus suddenly jerk forward—there was a sickening crunch of metal and a tinkling of shattered glass, and Anna’s head smacked backward into the headrest.

  Accident, she realized, even as her earpiece and phone were thrown to the floorboard. Someone just hit me. She reached down and grabbed the phone, instantly grateful that the air bags hadn’t deployed.

  “Oh my God, Cyn! I just had an accident!”

  “Anna are you—?” Cyn started to say.

  Anna quickly cut her off. “Don’t worry, I’m totally fine but I have to go. I promise I’ll call you later.” And she clicked off her phone with unsteady hands.

  Heart pounding, shaking with adrenaline, she turned around to see what had smacked her—a cherry-red Honda Civic dotted with rust spots was stopped on Sawtelle ten feet behind the crosswalk. Fortunately, her own engine was still running; she cut the steering wheel hard to the right and managed to ease the Lexus to the west side of the boulevard, directly in front of the red sign for Wild Women—yet another strip joint.

  What am I supposed to do? Anna panicked to herself. She’d been driving for two years, and this was her first accident. But she remembered what she’d learned in driver’s ed. In case of an accident, try and remain calm. Step one: Turn off the engine. Step two: Make sure everyone in her car was okay. Step three: Make sure the other driver wasn’t hurt. She stepped out of the Lexus to check. …

  “What the fuck is the matter with you?”

  Anna whirled. The driver of the Honda—a middle-aged woman with a pale face that looked like it had been smashed in a closing elevator door and never resumed its normal shape—was striding over to her. Gray hair roots led to a red ball of frizz tied back with a bad Chanel knock-off scarf. She wore a black sweatsuit; pastel puffed-paint pandas marched down the sleeves.

  “Where the hell did you learn to drive?” the woman barked throatily with the voice of a lifelong smoker. “You stopped like a maniac! Don’t deny it—you gave me no chance to stop. You better get the fuck out of here before the cops give you a moving violation.”

  Anna blinked in surprise. “B-b-b-but you hit me.”

  She quickly racked her brain. What now? Call the cops? In New York, her mother’s driver took Anna wherever she wanted to go in their Mercedes town car. On rare occasions Anna had hailed a taxicab, but that was only when Reginald was sick or doing what he did best—playing the ponies at Aqueduct racetrack.

  “Are you even Licensed to drive?”

  “Of course I am,” Anna fired back. “Let’s just call the police.”

  “Are you nuts?” The frizzy-haired woman’s voice went up an octave and her face began twitching. Anna noticed the red lipstick that had crept past the lip line at the corners of her mouth melting down, like two mini scarlet fangs. “I bet you were on your cell phone. You want the cops? The cops will arrest you!”

  Was that true? Could they arrest her? Dammit, if only Cyn were with her. Or Sam Sharpe, the self-assured friend whose party she was heading to. They’d know exactly what to do.

  “Look. Just wait. Why don’t you push your car off the road if you can’t drive it?” Anna suggested, with more bravura than she actually felt. “You’re holding up traffic.”

  The redhead got right in her face. “If I was you, I’d get my ass out of here.”

  Maybe she should. If her car was drivable, she could get it as far as a service station. No, she decided. You didn’t leave the scene of an accident, no matter what. Then what? Wait, you were supposed to swap insurance information. Did you need to call the police here in California if there wasn’t an injury involved?

  Ben. Ben would definitely know what to do.

  “I’ve got to make a phone call,” Anna announced to the woman. “Go back to your car. I’ll talk to you in a minute.”

  The other driver let out a scoff, rolled her eyes and stomped back over to her car. Anna took a deep breath and quickly assessed the damage to the Lexus. The oyster-gray rear bumper was severely dented; the right taillight had spider-glassed. A glance at the tailpipe revealed that the impact had bent it shut. So much for driving away from this mishap—she remembered enough from chemistry class to realize that she’d die from carbon monoxide poisoning before she even got to the service station.

  Anna went back inside the car and dialed Ben. The phone rang, once, twice. Anna could feel the anxiety fluttering in her stomach. After three rings her heart was sinking; evidently, he couldn’t come to the rescue this time. But just as she was about to hang up after the fourth ring …

  “Yeah?”

  Anna was taken aback by the brusqueness of his tone. “Hi, it’s me.”

  “Hey, Anna.” His voice immediately softened. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing. Well, I mean, I just got into a car accident.”

  “Jesus, what happened? Are you okay?” he asked quickly, his concern obvious in his voice. That made her feel better.

  “I’m fine. It’s nothing, just a fender bender, but—”

  “Thank God you’re okay. Whose fault was it?”

  “Hers, I think. I’m going to trade license and insurance information. Do I need to call the police?”

  “No police if there’s no injury. Definitely get her license and insurance info and you’ll be all set. Listen, I’m in the middle of a work thing. Glad to hear you’re okay. I’ll call you later to check in, I promise. ’Bye.” He hung up.

  Anna just sat there for a moment, tryin
g not to get upset. It wasn’t fair to expect him to drop everything and come to her rescue, right? Actually, the whole damsel-in-distress thing wasn’t very appealing. Well, it was appealing, actually, but she was definitely learning to take care of things herself these days.

  Swap info. Then what? Call AAA. She remembered Django, her dad’s driver and caretaker, had signed her up when she arrived in California. Wasn’t there a card in the glove compartment? “Yes!” She found it and quickly dialed the road-service number. It only took her a minute or two to provide the monotone operator with all the pertinent information.

  “Okay, just sit tight. There’s been an oil tanker spill on the Ten at the Vermont Street interchange—we’ve got all our wreckers there; it’s a total mess. We should have someone out to you in about two hours or so,” said the operator. “Give or take an hour.”

  “B-But I’m on the street outside a strip club!” Anna sputtered. “Can’t someone get here sooner than that?”

  “Ma’am, I understand you frustration, but the California Highway Patrol told us to make clearing the freeway a priority, and that’s what we’ve got to do. Is there anything else I can do for you? A tow truck will be with you as soon as one is available.”

  “No.” Anna didn’t know what else to say. “I don’t think there—”

  The operator hung up before Anna could finish the sentence. Damn. Now she was supposed to swap her license and insurance information with a shrieking harridan? As for Sam’s party, the one that was supposed to kick off graduation week in less than an hour, her attendance was becoming more and more unlikely by the minute.

  Anna decided it was a long shot, but she could at least try to contact her dad and see if he could help her. He was shuttling between Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco these days, trying to negotiate the acquisition of an off-strip but still pricey hotel/casino for a group of men in Sausalito who wanted to turn it into a gay-and-lesbian-themed destination. But if luck was with her and Jonathan Percy was in Los Angeles, maybe he could get her out of this godforsaken neighborhood.

  “Jonathan Percy.” His brisk voice came through the phone.