Page 7 of My Unscripted Life

Now I’m sitting bolt upright. “Where did you—I can’t believe you know that!”

“I can’t believe youdon’t,” Naz says. And she’s not wrong. Of the two of us, I’m much more likely to be up on the celebrity gossip of the moment. The DailyGoss is part of my usual morning Internet circuit, along with checking the weather and scrolling through SocialSquare to look at all the artfully edited photos of people’s outfits and what they had for lunch. But two weeks ago I spilled a jar of paint thinner on my laptop, and my parents refuse to replace it until closer to the start of school in the fall. And since I hate reading on the tiny screen of my phone, I’ve been mostly Internet-free ever since.

Naz reaches over to pull her laptop from her desk and quickly types into a search bar. Immediately the screen is filled with a list of increasingly hysterical news stories about the scandal, all with little thumbnails of the offending photos. Naz clicks on the top one, which is accompanied by a dire warning about Milo’s impending emotional destruction. The photo fills the screen. It’s sort of grainy, but it’s unmistakably Lydia Kane. And the man standing behind her, his arms wrapped around her waist, kissing her neck with what may be an errant pixel but is most likely tongue? Yeah, that’s unmistakablynotMilo Ritter.

“Oh my God,” I mutter, my eyes moving over the text of the story. It happened two weeks ago, but the images came out only a few days ago. The man turns out not to be a directorora producer, but a lowly camera guy working on Lydia’s latest film. No statement from Lydia, and no statement from Milo. In fact, the only image of Milo that’s been captured since the photos came out is one of him barreling through a sea of photographers at LAX before boarding a flight to Atlanta to begin production on his first film.

It boggles my mind that I have a more recent sighting of Milo Ritter than the DailyGoss or any of the press. And oh could I tell a tale about it. Naz is right; he’s apparently in a deep, dark place, and he’s taking it out on whoever is unfortunate enough to come across his path. Which, today, was me.

“So they’re broken up,” I say, as much to myself as to her. I’m letting the information sink in, because Milo and Lydia have been athingfor almost as long as I’ve been paying attention to gossip. In fact, I barely remember a Milo before Lydia. Shortly after he burst onto the scene with his first album, a slew of singles, and a collection of smoking-hot videos, he met Lydia and they became a unit. They were the perfect pair: he a teen pop idol, she a teen screen starlet. It was sort of surprising that they managed to stay together as they both grew out of those identities. Milo’s music took on a different sound, and Lydia’s movies got darker and more obscure, and yet still they appeared on red carpets together and in countless paparazzi shots—pumping gas, buying coffee, grocery shopping, or simply trying to hide. But those days are over, apparently.

“I mean, nobody’s confirmed the breakup, it seems, but I certainly wouldn’t stay with someone after that.” Naz clicks on the photo so it fills the screen, and my annoyance with Milo starts to fade, replaced with a growing sympathy. It must suck to count on a thing for so long, only to find it yanked out from underneath you.

Actually, Iknowthat sucks.

“Poor Milo,” I say. And now those images that were hiding in the back of my brain are starting to creep out, the ones of us eating lunch together, of us laughing on set, of…maybe more. They were pure fantasy, practically science fiction, when I thought he was still with Lydia. But now? I feel a small smile start to form, the corners of my mouth tugging upward. I bite my lip, which does nothing to hold in the massive grin that’s now there. Sure, he was a total jerk to me, but now I know why. And eventually he’ll get over it, and then maybe…

“Oh no,” Naz says.

“What?”

She stands up from her desk chair and comes over to take a seat next to me on her bed. She pulls one leg underneath her so that she’s facing me, and places her hands on my shoulders.

“Dee, can we have a moment of friend talk?”

I nod and brace myself for what will follow. “Friend talk” is the term we came up with for when we need to be honest with each other, even if it might sting. Declaring friend talk means the other person has to take a deep breath and not freak out about what the other person is going to say. The last time we had friend talk, it was because Naz was so busy studying for her AP chemistry exam that she neglected sleep, hygiene, and anything resembling nutrition. I caught her eating a lunch consisting only of leftover packets of oyster crackers and a flat, day-old ginger ale. It wasnotokay.

Naz takes a deep yoga breath, pulling her hands up, and then letting them float down to heart center with the release. It’s a patented Nazaneen move that comes just before she puts on her most grown-up voice.

“Dee, I know you’re having a hard time right now, and I suggested you needed a distraction—”

“I do!” Naz silences me with a stern look and one long, thin finger held in my face. “Right, friend talk.” I clamp my mouth shut and mime a lock and key for added effect. Naz rolls her eyes but nods.

“I said you needed a distraction, but you’re on the first step down a path toward a total lobotomy,” she says.

When she doesn’t expand, I jump in. “What are you talking about?”

She takes another deep breath, and then out comes the voice of her mother. “The dumbest thing you could do this summer would be to fall all over yourself chasing after some overexposed pop star who may or may not be heartbroken. It would be a distraction for sure, but not the good kind. And I can see from that look in your eye that you’re already planning your outfit for your first date.”

“Jeez, Mom,” I say, my voice light to hide the fact that her words have hit a little close to home (my favorite broken-in jeans and the gauzy yellow top with the little ties on the straps). I flop back onto her bed, and she falls back next to me, both of us staring up at the apex of her turret.

“Dee, I know you. You are a person with a lot of…” She breathes in, searching for the right word. “Well, a lot offeelings.And sometimes those feelings can take on the properties of a heat-seeking missile.”

“What doesthatmean?”

“Remember Ryan Burke?” I can’t see her face, but I know she’s cocking an eyebrow at me right now.

“Low blow,” I mutter. Oh, I remember Ryan Burke, he of the black jeans and the wallet chain, who skulked around last year muttering about his graphic novel and shaking his shaggy, dyed-black bangs out of his eyes. He was a year ahead of us, but because it’s a small town and small school, I’d knownofhim for years. And one day, while we were going through the lunch line, I experienced some kind of mysterious lightning bolt. I can’t explain it, but all of a sudden I saw Ryan Burke in a whole new light.

“You followed him around for weeks until you finally worked up the courage to ask him to a movie,” she says.

“Which was a disaster,” I reply, nodding. When my best friend is right, she’s right. I dated Ryan Burke for the entire month of October, culminating in a horrific Halloween incident where he took me to a poetry slam in Atlanta and got so stoned he forgot who I was and left without me. Naz had to make the hour-and-a-half drive up the interstate to get me, because I was too scared and embarrassed to call my parents.

“Ryan Burke is the reason you still have six black T-shirts in your wardrobe and a stack of comic books on your shelf.”

“Graphic novels,” I reply, thinking about the unread works of Alan Moore that at leastlookpretty cool alongside my collection of vintage art books.

“See? Whocareswhat they’re called. You’re never going to read them, but you justhadto have them because all you could think about was Ryan Burke. And if you don’t watch out, you’re going to find yourself in some other ridiculous disaster spending your whole summer pining for Milo Ritter.”

---