No Ordinary Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

enough differentiation to tell one day from the next.
    My mom springs from the couch, her face lit up in a way that scares me. It’s the same look she had on her face when I was eleven and she announced we were going on a celebrity cruise where we would mingle with the famous. A total disaster. Even my mom didn’t recognize the has-beens that were billed as the stars on the cruise, and my dad and I spent the vacation leaning over the railing green with seasickness.
    “You’re not going to believe what happened today,” she says.
    “You won the lottery.”
    “Better.”
    “Better than winning the lottery? Tom got up in front of Congress and gave a speech on the injustice of banning peanut butter from school lunches.”
    “Better.”
    Nothing could be better than that. “What?” I say, tired of the game.
    She holds out a business card. “Look who came by the condo today.”
    Monique Braxton, Braxton Talent Agency , a Wilshire Boulevard address, a phone number, a website, an email, a Facebook page, a Twitter account.
    I shrug.
    “Don’t you know who that is? Monique Braxton. She’s like the biggest talent agent on the planet. She reps anyone who’s anyone. Not adults, only kids, but if you’re a someone under eighteen, you’re a Monique Braxton kid.” My mom is so excited that the words spit and sputter like machine-gun fire.
    “So?”
    “So, look at this.”
    Grabbing me by the wrist, she pulls me to her laptop on the kitchen table and wiggles the mouse to wake it. The screen opens to a YouTube page. She clicks the play button and the video starts…a video of Molly!
    I watch in disbelief. The video is from our day on the promenade. It starts abruptly, the big man strumming the beginning riff of “Johnny B. Goode,” his body bobbing with the beat. Behind him, off to the side, Molly does little he-man squats in sync with the big man’s big he-man squats. It’s very funny to watch.
    The big man does a hip thrust and a leg kick, and Molly follows with a hilarious mini–hip thrust and leg kick that causes a burst of giggles from the audience. The big man looks confused by the reaction and repeats the move. Molly mimics him again, and again the audience cracks up, then the big man whirls, spots his miniature impersonator, wiggles his finger for her to come toward him, and that’s when the throwdown begins.
    The video is three minutes and fifty-two seconds long and ends with Molly knocking knuckles with the drummer. In the final seconds I see us—Emily, Tom, and me standing in the background, matching grins on our faces.
    “So, the thing is,” my mom says, “this video’s gone viral. Look at the number of hits.”
    I blink at the number, certain it can’t be right. 7,867,672.
    “Did you hear me?” my mom nearly screeches.
    “Huh?”
    “The Gap wants Molly for a commercial.”
    “What?”
    “The Gap, you know, the clothes store.”
    “Yeah, what about them?”
    “They want Molly to be in one of their commercials. They hired Monique Braxton to track Molly down, and Monique Braxton did. Not some assistant but her. Monique Braxton, in the flesh. Here. In my condo.”
    She’s so giddy that I can almost imagine her as the little girl she must have been, a little like Molly but with a penchant for the stars. I bet she was one of those girls who collected princess paraphernalia and, when she outgrew that, plastered her wall with movie posters—her passion carried into adulthood, a fascination with the famous that borders on obsessive.
    My mom can tell you more about most stars than she can about me. She knows how old they are, where they were born, who they’ve dated, what movies they’ve starred in, what tragedies have befallen them, the addictions they have, who they’re related to, who supposedly likes them and who loathes them. She subscribes to every tabloid in print, has sat in at least a hundred studio audiences, and regularly signs up for Hollywood tours that drive past celebrities’