Heartthrob Read Online Free PDF Page A

comedy, huh?”
    “It’s not as awful as it sounds. The script is actually a really sweet story about hope. This guy Laramie kind of camps out in his in-laws’ barn, does what chores he can manage during the day, and drinks himself into oblivion each night. But he’s got this sister-in-law, Jane. She’s only fourteen, and the writer, I swear, he caught the perfect mix of woman and child in this character. She works for the Underground Railroad—her family doesn’t know it—and she’s just so full of life, she manages to breathe some back into Laramie and”—he shook his head—“and Vic Strauss wants Susie McCoy to play her.”
    “You say that as if that’s bad.”
    Jed exhaled a burst of air. “I don’t know what Vic’s thinking, but I find it hard to believe Susie McCoy can handle a part with this kind of depth. She’s been doing television for the past two years.”
    “
Uptown Girl
is one of Ken’s favorite shows,” David pointed out.
    “Kenny is six.”
    “Have you watched it?” he asked.
    “I gave up bad sitcoms when I quit drinking.”
    “This one’s pretty good.”
    Jed wasn’t buying that. “There’s a hell of a huge difference between playing a spunky sitcom kid and playing a character like Jane Willet,” he said. “It was bad enough when she was making movies like
Little Mary Sunshine
and
Slumberparty.
They weren’t Shakespeare, but they were better than TV.”
    “I read somewhere that Susie McCoy took the sitcom part to try to keep her parents from splitting up. All that travel for the movies was taking its toll on their family life.”
    “That worked really well.” Jed stood up and started pacing again. The McCoys most recent divorce settlement battle was making headlines in the tabloids.
    “So here’s a question for you, Jeddo,” David asked. “Suppose they do cast Susie McCoy as Jane. Would you walk away from Laramie? I guess what I’m wondering is, how badly do you want this role?”
    “Badly,” Jed admitted. He wanted it so badly, his teeth hurt. “I’d do damn near anything to get this—even work with little Susie McCoy.”
    Her father’s face had turned a very dark shade of red. It was so dark, it could almost be described as purple.
    But this time he wasn’t mad at her—he was mad at her mother.
    “Union scale!” Russell McCoy had been shouting those two words as if they were going to starve if she accepted the Screen Actors Guild’s minimum wages—wages that were significantly higher than what other fifteen-year-olds earned by working at Taco Bell. “Jesus Christ, Riva! How could you let her do this?”
    Her mother was nearly in tears. “Don’t shout at me! We’re divorced now! You have no right to shout at me!”
    “I can shout at you all I want, goddamn it! How long have you known about this?”
    Susie sat at the kitchen table, hands tightly clasped in front of her, waiting for this portion of World War III to end. Her agent had made a major mistake by leaving a message on her father’s answering machine. She’d been waiting for the perfect time to break the news to her father about her decision to take a role in this low-budget, lowpaying, high-quality independent feature film, but the perfect time had never appeared. She’d put it off, and put it off, and now she was paying the price.
    She’d told her mother about the movie weeks ago, but all that had done was make her father even angrier today when he found out Riva knew and he didn’t.
    Susie’s stomach hurt, and her head ached. She tried to block out the hateful words that were being fired over her.
    Her father looked like an angry bulldog, his jowls nearly shaking. A purple bulldog. The purple-red flush extended up past the receding hairline of his forehead, making him look more than angry. He looked vicious and mean, and Susie could not imagine what her timid, pretty little mother had ever seen in him.
    He finally looked at Susie. “Union scale,” he said again. “I told them one