The Journalist and Her Actor

Chapter 1

"I got nothing," I muttered, glancing over my computer screen towards Bowser, our tiny water turtle. He was currently sitting inside his tank, munching on a piece of lettuce, looking back at me with a deadpan expression, ever the vocal discussion partner.

"Super helpful," I replied dryly, giving up on my gossip column for a moment and instead drawing on my pink jean shorts with a gel pen with frustrated focus. The green glittery ink swirled into cotton candy cloud shapes, adding to the dozens of doodles already there.

With a sigh, I turned back to my computer screen, chewing on one of the strings of my Nyan Cat hoodie with angry vengeance. "Your sage advice always grounds me."

Shoving my fingers through my newly dyed pastel rainbow hair, I glared at the keyboard, hoping that by threatening it with a violent look, it would begin to type out a story all on its own.

I had been staring at the same blank screen for over an hour. Something that was becoming a problem. My boss didn't pay for stares and blank pages. He paid for theories that we passed off as truths. And I could make any theory sound plausible, a gift that I had come to hate.

Some people wrote real things about fake people. I wrote fake things about real people. Most of the time, people couldn't tell the difference. That was clear by the way they fell in love with fake stories.

But you could only scrounge up so much fake excitement about another Hollywood couple falling in love on a set of a movie. How cliché. 

And yet, it was tonight's job. I forced my fingers to clack across the keyboard, stared at what I wrote and instantly erased it from the world's existence. The undo button was my best friend. 

If only life had the same luxuries.

But what was there to write about with my newest assignment, famous actor and hottie, Luke Walker? A tall, muscular movie star with a million dollar smile, and dark hair that spilled out across his shoulders. Luke was... surprisingly clean, considering his grandfather had been charged with two murders and one attempted murder — over the last few months alone, and his brother was dating the detective that put their grandfather in prison. Not to mention that the rest of the Walker family was powerful enough to sweep every bad deed under the rug and keep it out of the papers. 

Luke was part of an empire family, but had gone off on his own to make a name for himself. And with that, apparently left the drama behind. 

I blew a strand of blue hair out of my face, looking around my small apartment with a frustrated expression, wishing an answer would jump out at me. 

There has to be something I can write about you, Luke Walker. 

My phone alarm blared— Bacon Pancakes - New York Remix yanking my attention from the screen where I had written... zero words— reminding me that this gossip column assignment wasn't the only job I had to work that evening.

Slinging my Lisa Frank mini backpack over my shoulders, I checked the six locks on my front door that helped me sleep at night, and ducked out my bedroom window, sliding out onto the rickety stairs of my sixth floor walk up in downtown Los Angeles.  

"Keep an eye out Bowser," I shouted out behind me. Bowser continued to watch me with his deadpan expression, clearly ready to protect our home.

Best guard turtle ever.

The night air was biting, cutting into me like a poorly rehearsed harmony, the sounds of evening traffic acting like an angry set of bassoons. 

Dropping my bright pink skateboard onto the sidewalk, I put on my large headphone's and tuned out the world, my favorite podcast, Welcome to Nightvale— a creepy radio show about a strange small town where weird things happened— tinting the evening with an eerie, calm energy— the opposite of what my life was like. Which was a chaotic dumpster fire of a thousand daily decisions and pieces of scattered to do lists that most of the time left me one breath away from wanting to scream and just quit adulting.