Shooting Stars Read Online Free PDF

hobby and become something like a wedding photographer. But, no. I lived in West Hollywood, with a dad who was a paparazzo. Growing up, famous people walked past our house all the time. When I was ten, my dad pointed out a famous actor who would jog past our house every morning. Because it was what my dad did, I also started taking shots of him. The guy thought it was funny.
    He probably wouldn’t think it was so funny now that he has an Oscar and I stand to make fi fteen thousand dollars if he trips and falls. More if he splits his lip and there’s blood.
    My dad never suggested I start papping— I did it myself when I realized I’d need the money for school. It wasn’t exactly the kind of cash I could make working at KFC. That said, Dad 29
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    never had any objections, either. Not even about my age.
    Still, while he might be pushing the limits a bit as a parent, you have to hand it to him— he’s pretty good at his job. He’s so well connected he can pretty much fi nd out where any celebrity is anywhere in the world in under an hour. He knows everyone— nail and brow techs, drivers, maître d’s, personal trainers, valets, airline workers, masseuses, dog walkers. He knows which celebrities have relatives who’ll talk for a hundred dollars. Or even less. He can recite about 150 celebrity car license plates off the top of his head.
    So, that was my dad’s infl uence.
    And Ned’s? Well, that came later. I’d only been papping a month or so when we had our little encounter. I’d been having a rough time of it, to say the least. I wasn’t the youn gest pap ever, but I was by far the smallest. That didn’t stop some of the stars or their entourages from making my life diffi cult, though. During that fi rst month I’d been pushed to the ground by a bodyguard, had my camera ripped out of my hands by a model, and been kicked by a singer’s girlfriend.
    Some of the other zos weren’t any better. New ones, not even ones related to the stars of the fi eld, weren’t welcomed to the fold. There wasn’t exactly a code of conduct and some people liked to play rough. Especially the full-timers; they
    hated the part- timers who liked to pap outside of their day jobs, even if their day job was school. I was new, I was female and I was a kid. Let’s just say no one was splitting their lunch-box Twinkie with me.
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    The night I came face- to- face with Ned, I was so close to packing in the papping thing, it wasn’t funny. A group of the
    “old boys” had agreed on a little practical joke. They’d fed me a false lead that had me wasting forty- fi ve minutes of my time outside the back door of a restaurant. Every so often one of the paps would swing past and go on about this spot; apparently it was the new “in” place to dine— a restaurant that was actively being deconstructed around the diners— but was actually being renovated and had only workmen inside.
    And I was green enough to believe them. After all, it was hardly all that out there for LA. There was a real restaurant nearby where patrons dined in complete darkness.
    It was only after I fi nally got a peek inside the joint that I knew I’d never be stupid enough to trust them again. Trust was for people who didn’t have the smarts, or the guts, to do it on their own.
    By the time I’d ridden another fi fteen minutes to the real hot spot of the night— a restaurant people were actually eating in— I was pooped and angry. So pooped that when I got there, panting, and a number of stars started to pile out of the restaurant, the hustling became a bit much. I should have given up and gone home at that point, but I didn’t, because I was still angry. And because I was angry, I did something pretty stupid— I got right in there with the bigger, badder, older, and uglier paparazzi and