Page 66 of Heart to Heart
“Well,” Eleanor said, smugly, “with her gone, it’s going to be anyone’s competition.”
“Oh, please,” Charlie added. “All getting rid of Avery will do is clear the way for Bianca’s big win.”
My legs grew weak; my ears began to ring as my vision clouded. Signs of an impending anxiety attack. Whatever was on the paper in each of their hands was about me—and it wasn’t good.
Jacqueline moved to speak but stopped short when she looked up and saw me heading toward their group, only able to get out a surprised, “Oh.”
The rest of the women looked up, noticing my presence, a mixture of smug, disappointed, and even gleeful expressions on their faces.
“What’s going on?” I asked, taking a step forward as sweat began to bead on my forehead. “What’s on that paper you’re holding?”
“Oh, Avery,” Kennedy said, shaking her head, “I didn’t take you for a fraud.”
A fraud? Oh, shit. Did they know about my alliance with Tristan, that I was here for the prize money? And what’s this about a boyfriend?
“What’s on that paper?” I asked again, my voice more desperate than I would have liked. I took several hurried steps in their direction but was stopped short by someone grabbing my arm.
“Avery, come on,” Sasha said. I looked behind my shoulder, my eyes tearing up with unspent tears. In her hand was a sheet of paper that I was sure had to be what the others had in their hands. She guided me away from the others, their whispers deafening, as Sasha ushered me down the hall and into a small sitting room near the foyer, where I collapsed into a chair. Sasha pushed an ottoman in front of me and sat down, placing her hand on my knee.
“What is it,” I asked, shaking.
“You know I’ll believe you over any stupid tabloid, right?” she asked. “I’ve gotten to know you over the last few weeks, and I don’t believe this is anything more than a smear campaign.”
“Sasha, please, I need to know what’s happening.”
She exhaled, not wanting to show me but also knowing there was no getting around it, and, resigned, held out the paper for me to take.
“What?” I asked, a laugh falling out of me. “What the hell is this?”
Sasha looked at me like I was crazy for looking as relieved as I probably did. There was no mention of any alliance with Tristan or my mom’s bakery, only a blurry photo of me with Ryan Reynolds-Gosling. I read the headline, chuckling even more at the insinuation that he and I were in a relationship together.
“This is bullshit,” I said, balling up the paper and tossing it onto the floor.
“Who is that guy?” Sasha asked, relief palpable in her voice.
“Just some bartender I danced with at a bar my friends and I went to before I left. He slipped me his number, and I threw it away when I got home.”
Sasha nodded. “Okay, that’s good. And I suspect that whoever made it a point to make a bunch of copies of this article and sprinkle the pages around the parlor knows it’s a bunch of crap, too, but, Avery, there is going to be damage to you,regardless. Because no matter what, there will be people who believe every word in that article and everything this Ryan guy is going to say in a televised interview tonight.”
“Oh, God,” I said, throwing my hands over my face. Sasha was right. Even though my real secret wasn’t being revealed, a vicious story about me, whether true or not, was going to put Tristan between a rock and a hard place, which wasn’t the place I wanted him to be.
“What am I going to do?” I asked Sasha, suddenly fearful that I was going to lose my place in the house.
“You can start by coming with me.” I looked behind my shoulder to see Kamila standing in the doorway, eyebrow arched, holding the article in their hand, and behind them was a camera.
CHAPTER 35
AVERY
“I’msure you know what I want to discuss with you,” Kamila said, sounding much like my mother when she’d discovered I’d skipped school to go to the mall back in my junior year of high school. Except back when she was administering her discipline, a camera hadn’t been shoved in my face to air footage of my humiliation to millions of drama-hungry viewers, though had that been the case, it would have been one hell of a deterrent for both myself and every other teenager on the planet.
“I have a pretty solid idea,” I replied, willing myself not to cry on camera.
“Some pretty disturbing information has been published byPeep Holemagazine, depicting you and a man named Ryan Davey making out at a club right before flying out here.”
Ryan Davey? Huh, I guess it wasn’t Reynolds-Gosling, after all.
“You know what the show’s policy is, that if you’re in any kind of romantic entanglement in any way, you cannot be on the show.”
