Shooting Stars Read Online Free PDF Page A

The more I think about it, the sleazier the job seems, and I know from experience Melissa can’t be trusted. Ever since she saw me off at the diner door with her usual “Toodles, dahling!” (I really hate it when she says that), I’ve been thinking there has to be more to this job than meets the eye.
    But I don’t call Melissa, because something stops my fi ngers from doing anything more than hovering over my cell. And it’s not the money that stops me. It’s the other thing.
    The six- foot- tall, green- eyed and dark- haired, good- looking thing.
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    The Ned Hartnett thing.
    Okay, fi ne, so I’ll admit it: 99.9 percent of stars make me want to puke. And the other .1 percent? Well, he makes me sort of swoon.
    That’s right. Me. A paparazzo. This is a huge fail. It’s practically the fi rst rule of the job: don’t think you’re anything like them and never think they could ever be interested in you. Seriously, my dad would die a little inside if he knew I’d had even a passing thought about Ned Hartnett that wasn’t related to how I could get him out of his house and into my camera’s line of sight.
    My cell still in my hand, I weigh the pros and cons here.
    Cons:
    • sick job
    • will hate myself for taking it
    • worried I won’t be able to take the shots or hand them over and will never be asked to work for Melissa again and won’t be paid Pros:
    • will have all the money I need for school
    • can cut back a bit on work, stop falling asleep at school, maybe even catch a movie now and then like a normal teenager
    • I don’t see how they’ll ever be able to use the photos, so it won’t be like I’m truly evil
    • $$$
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    Gulp. There’s no denying that list of pros. Especially that fi rst and last one. Silently, I slide my cell back into my pocket and keep riding.
    After a few more minutes, I fi nally get up the courage to admit the truth to myself. Okay, so maybe I left one big reason off my list. One big “con.” Now, I add it to the others: Cons:
    • will be betraying Ned Hartnett, the one and only star who’s ever been truly decent to me That last “con” is probably the real reason I’m holding back. It’s kind of ironic that Ned Hartnett is my target, considering he’s the one who got me into the shooting- by- stealth thing in the fi rst place.
    I guess you could say there have been two major infl uences in my career as a paparazzo so far: my dad and Ned Hartnett.
    Everyone assumes that my dad pushed me into being a pap, considering he’s one as well, but that’s not true at all.
    Sure, Dad had provided an early interest in cameras and how they worked, but the rest was all up to me.
    I started with a pinhole camera when I was six. You make them out of any kind of small box that you paint black inside and put a tiny hole in the center of one of the ends, then you tape a fl ap over the hole to use at a shutter, and then you tape a piece of fi lm or fast photographic paper inside 28
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    the box. It’s pretty cool— a camera made mostly from house-hold items.
    Then I got my fi rst real camera for Christmas that year and started developing. I had this thing for taking pictures of people right from the start. I just loved it, loved trying to get their personality to shine through the lens. When my blood relations got sick of me, I turned to other sources. Like the cat across the road. I remember I spent one summer taking thousands of pictures of that cat, trying to capture how it was in real life. It had quite the portfolio by the time school started again. Considering it was a Los Angeleno feline, it could probably have gotten an agent.
    If I’d grown up elsewhere, I most likely would have continued along happily with my little