Sequins, Secrets, and Silver Linings Read Online Free PDF Page A

some folded sheets of paper. Edie takes them from her and spreads them out. They’re from one of the Sunday papers. On the front page are two pictures: one of Hollywood’s Sexiest Couple Alive looking gorgeous in Armani from last night, and another of Jenny half-hiding behind her dad, looking traffic-light-ish. The headline says: EXCLUSIVE! THEATRE KNIGHT’S HAPPY ENDING . Inside is the article. As Jenny sobs on, Edie reads out the opening paragraph:
    “‘Last night, Sir Lionel Merritt was proudly accompanying his daughter, Jenny, on the red carpet at the premiere of the new blockbuster Kid Code . As the cameras flashed and the stars posed, few people could imagine the great man’s recent heartache, and the happiness he has finally found with the woman who rekindled the flame in theatre’s enfant terrible . …’”
    It turns out that Sir Lionel has decided that now’s the time to leave his third wife for his latest mistress, and Jenny’s premiere is the ideal way of getting the publicity to finance the divorce and the “exquisite Cotswolds home” he’s setting up with wife-to-be number four. There’s an awful lot about Sir Lionel and his various stage productions thirty years ago, but newspapers need family appeal, so he’s padded it out with the few bits of Jenny’s childhood he was around for, her mother’s “tragic” nervous breakdown (which coincidentally happened around the time he left her for wife three), and Jenny’s embarrassment about her boobs, zits, and weight. He rounds it off by wishing her well and promising he’ll always stick by her, as “theatre is in the Merritt blood.”
    Edie finishes the article with a look of disbelief.
    “That man is evil!”
    “He’s just … Dad, I guess,” Jenny mumbles. She’s at the hiccuping stage now. “He needed the money. The funny thing is, he invited me to that country house in the Cotswolds last night. He said if I wanted to spend the summer there, I could. It sounded quite nice. Mum wants to murder him, of course.”
    I look back down at the paper.
    “Has anybody mentioned it?” I ask. “Today, I mean. In there.” I indicate the Dorchester, across the road.
    Jenny looks at me as though I’ve gone barmy.
    “ Mentioned it? I was all ready with the lousy monkey story. I was geared up to talk about Joe Yule’s incredible talent till I was blue in the face. And all they’ve asked me all morning, for the last four hours, is ‘What’s it like growing boobs when you’re in the public eye?’ ‘What do you use for your zits?’ ‘Have you got any messages for fat teenage girls?’ ‘What’s it like growing up with a famous father?’ And I don’t even know, ‘cause he was never there.”
    I look at her, hunched up on the grass, makeup streaming. (She doesn’t normally wear it, but they slap it on thick for those TV interviews.) She’s in her usual jeans and some black cotton top they’ve given her, which billows over the boobs while suggesting that underneath its capacious covering they may be the size of hot-air balloons. A large, fierce pimple has emerged on her cheek since last night and is sitting there defiantly, soaking up the midday sun.
    “Anyway,” she says, desperate to change the subject, “what did you think of yesterday?”
    There’s a long pause while I will Edie not to mentionthe traffic-light effect. Luckily, she’s distracted before she can say anything. A bus is heading down Park Lane with a picture of Jenny’s face on it, six feet high, beside Joe Yule’s. She looks spotless. Literally. And supermodel thin. It’s kind of surreal to see her this way. Especially as real, runny-makeup Jenny is sitting beside us. Edie bobs up and down and points. We look over.
    “They airbrushed me!” Jenny says, affronted. “They even airbrushed my neck! I would’ve said that was the one bit of me that wasn’t fat or broken-out, but they had to airbrush that.”
    Edie and I exchange despairing looks. Our cheering-up job