Sugar Valley (Hollywood's Darkest Secret) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Schultz, do you want to be an actor?”
    He stared at her and closed his eyes. He was
afraid to answer, but his mind began to be overwhelmed with tears
as he replied in a faltering motion, “Yes ... yes, I do.”
    “Well, then that’s enough of an answer to at
least try for it,” Maria spoke, still holding his hand.
    Jose saw her hand in his grasp and then
placed his own hand on the script that Darell dropped. Jose
shouted, “I’m in.”
    “I’m in too,” said Darell, putting his hand
on top of Jose’s.
    Damen just watched, he fixed and stared at
their hands on the script; he stared and thought that maybe this
was the way it had to happen. He slowly walked over to Jose and
Darell, like he was ready to harm them and punch the idea right
from their heads. Damen lifted up his palm, like he was ready to
punch Jose in the face, and slapped it down on top of his hand. He
made the decision that changed his destiny, his life forever. “OK,
okay, I’m in three...” Smiling with hope, Damen added, “We leave
tomorrow morning. I guess my father’s going to have to work on the
cornfield alone.”
    Jose screamed, “Yes! You’re the man, you are
the man.” He then scratched a scar on his neck with his right hand,
and pretended to punch Damen with his other. He had received the
scar from his father throwing a cigarette butt at him when he was a
little kid. Maria took his hand away from it and started to kiss
it.
    Damen then explained, “First things first, we
have to all write our parents a letter.” He saw Maria kissing
Jose’s neck, but instead of jealousy striking at his heart, Damen
swallowed it whole and started thinking of how to get out of Ridge
Crest.
    “What should the letter say?” Darell asked,
shaky and confused in speech, he was a full-fledged nerve.
Nervousness was growing in all of them at this point.
    “Just say that we’re going on vacation to ...
to ... um, I know, just say we’re going on vacation to New York
City. Yeah, say we’re going on vacation for a while, that way they
won’t come looking for us, because we’ll be in California,”
declared Damen with a permanent smile engraved over his face. His
mind was finally released from fear, and the old hope was revived
once again.
    Jose eagerly voiced, “My father won’t come
looking for me anyway, he’ll probably be happy to see that I’ve
left his house.”
    “Well, write it anyway, because my father
will come looking for me. And if you say you’re going to
California, my father will know I’m with you. Just say the New York
idea,” Damen repeated.
    Darell suddenly picked up an old box. “Yeah,
I like the New York one better.”
    Jose looked at Darell and the box he was
holding in a puzzled way, saying, “Okay, fine, New York it shall
be. Um, what are you doing, Darell?”
    “I think we should all get some memorabilia
together and put it in this box. We could make a time capsule or
something... I know, after we all become famous, we come back to
this very spot and look at the time capsule. My first contribution
to the capsule is a script from the play Our Town,” Darell replied.
He placed the script inside of the old box and then waited for
someone else to contribute to his corny but unique idea.
    “Why are you putting that script in the
capsule?” Damen questioned.
    “Because this is the first script that we
didn’t finish.”
    Jose opened up his wallet and grabbed a photo
from it. Even though Jose gave a face of unimportance to Darell’s
idea, he still wanted to make Darell feel good, and so he went
along with it. “My contribution is a photo of all of us together.”
Jose placed the photo in the box, the capsule, and looked at
Damen.
    “What’s your contribution going to be,
Damen?” Maria asked, grabbing the box from Darell and bringing it
over to him.
    “Well, even though this is a very, very corny
and stupid idea, it’s still a good one... So, my contribution will
be my journal; the journal about, well, about Sugar