Eve

Chapter 3

'I came to Hollywood from Alabama, with nothing to myself but a pickup truck and twenty dollars in my pocket. For the first six months, I waited tables at a café in Westwood. I lived with four other people in a two bedroom apartment. Then I got the call back from an agent. It all started there.'

The floor of the Hollywood and Highland is riddled with these kind of quotes - success stories from people who made it in LaLa Land, engraved in stone like a prophecy. Little sparks of hope the waiters and janitors step over every day, daydreaming that it will their stories there, someday.

Yeah, cause that's how it happens. Move to L.A., wait tables for six months, get a call from an agent. "Hey, you look fabulous! Wanna star in the new David Finch?"

As if.

I don't think I've mentioned this before, but I've met quite a lot of important people from the Dream Factory, before it all went to shit and everyone died. Mom and Dad were never in the business, but they were fairly successful at what they did, and we lived in L.A. - which means I spent my early teens in of most exclusive High Schools in all of Beverly Hills (and, consequentially, the world). Which means most of my classmates were the sons and daughters of everyone who matters in this city.

I never took an interest in it, mind you. God forbid I'd buy into the dream of so many of my colleges, eager to follow their parent's footsteps into exclusive dinners, overpriced shoes and cocaine.

Nope, Mr. and Mrs. Huttner's precious little girl wanted to be a physicist. Or a philosophy teacher, like her dad. Or a serial killer.

Really, anything but working in the entertainment industry. I'll tell you, I was probably the only teenage girl who's ever yelled to her parents, "It's my life, and I don't want to be a movie star!"

Still, you learn a thing or two from studying with the sons and daughters of movie stars and executive producers and Academy Award winning directors. The main one being you don't wanna be around these people.

Case in point: Innara Hitchens.

I remember Innara mostly from her Vanity Fair hair style in flocks of blonde, her high-end D&G dresses and the way she looked at me like I was something pulled out of a dog's nose. Innara was in my class, and both her parents worked in one of the biggest production companies in town.

Do you know what having Chris Hemsworth and Emma Stone coming to your house regularly for dinner does to a teenage girl's mind? Do you have any idea the emotional impact it has on a growing mind when you get to attend Elton John's Oscars afterparty, every year? Especially when your parents are more concerned with Box Office numbers than grades?

Innara was a bitch is my point. And she haaated the fact that, despite my parents having as much to do with the glamour of Hollywood as dinosaurs have to do with outer space - despite Eve's family being what the cool kids in class would call 'not from the biz,' - it was me that Damian Madsen was dating.

Damian Madsen, whose father was one of the most successful doctors in LA, and actually had his own, crappy doctor TV show for middle-aged house wives. Damian, whose mother was the producer for said TV show. Damian, whose family was totally, one-hundred percent 'from the biz' - a fact I decided very soon didn't bother me at all.

Shut up, I know it's hypocritical. Bite me.

No, but really, he wasn't an asshole about it. I didn't even know about his parents until we started dating - I just assumed he was one of the normal people, like me, and that he was only accepted in the cool kids' group because... well, he was Damian. Everyone liked Damian.