Famous Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t really want my autograph.
    â€œSeriously,” she said. “Congratulations.” And the girls who’d collected around her like iron shavings clinging to a magnet all nodded in agreement. Shelby glanced at Nasim beside me and raised a curious eyebrow.
    â€œThis is Nasim Pahlavi,” I said, and turned to him. “You know Shelby, don’t you?”
    â€œI’ve never actually had the pleasure.” Nasim extended his hand. “Hello.”
    Shelby smiled and shook his hand. “The pleasure is mine.”
    Shelby’s compliment may have been a highlight of what I’ve come to refer to as “my first minute of fame,” but that didn’t mean it was over. All day long kids, teachers, and administrators stopped to say that they were impressed, that they never knew.
    And it didn’t stop when the school day ended, either.
    â€œWhat makes you think they’ll let us in?” I asked Dad later that night. It was ten o’clock, and we were standing on line in the dark outside Club Gaia with Raigh, Dad’s tall, blond squeeze du jour.
    â€œYou’ll see,” he replied. Ever since he divorced Mom he seemed happy living by himself while now and then dipping into an apparently bottomless well of stylishsingle career women in their early forties who wanted to get married and have children before the biological clock stopped ticking. They never stayed with Dad for long; as soon as they realized he had no interest in settling down, they were gone. I once asked him why he didn’t find someone—and settle down. His answer: “What fun would
that
be?”
    The line inched forward. It was a cool, breezy fall evening, and people wore light jackets and scarves. The entrance had no identifying marks—just a bare lightbulb over a plain green metal door. You’d never suspect there was a hot club there were it not for the enormous man with the twin earrings and sloping forehead guarding the door.
    With only one couple ahead of us, I tugged Dad’s sleeve and stood on my tiptoes so I could whisper in his ear without Raigh hearing. “Let’s just go. There’s no way they’re going to let us in. This is going to be really embarrassing.”
    â€œI think we have a shot,” he whispered back.
    I knew what his plan was, and I knew it wouldn’t work. Club Gaia was for the Famous. Not the “high school famous,” not even the “child prodigy famous,” but the Famous with a capital F as in movie and TV stars, best-selling authors, rock-’n-roll survivors from the sixties and seventies, and artists whose works hung in museums. If any mere mortals knew what the interior lookedlike, it was from photos that had appeared in
New York
magazine and
Vanity Fair
.
    â€œIt’s fine if you want to humiliate yourself,” I whispered. “But why bring me into it?”
    â€œJust chill, honey.” (I love my father, but I wish he wouldn’t say that.)
    After the couple ahead of us were rejected and had slunk away, we stepped forward into the glare of the lightbulb. Mr. Double Earrings pursed his lips and frowned the frown of nonrecognition. He was just beginning to shake his head when Dad pulled out a copy of
New York Weekly,
opened it to the story, then pointed from the magazine to me.
    Not a word was spoken.
    I groaned inwardly.
My own father was trying to use me as social currency, only he was about to find out that his money was no good here.
    The big man’s eyes narrowed. He looked at the magazine, then at me. This was where the butterfly of fantasy went
splat
on the windshield of reality. Feeling the heat of humiliation begin to warm my face, I stared down at the sidewalk.
    Dad’s hand closed on my arm and gave it a little tug.
    Next thing I knew, we were inside seated at a semicircular ottoman around a low table, with martinis for Dad and Raigh, a Diet Coke for me, and the scent of incense in the