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Princeton.”
    “Don’t care, Anna.” He pressed a button on the dashboard, and cool jazz filled his Nissan’s interior.
    “Sorry about the sound system,” Ben apologized. “This is a rental car, remember.”
    “It doesn’t matter. The sound. But going back to school—you must think about it,” Anna said. She twisted around so she could see him.
    “Only because you keep bringing it up.”
    “But school is—”
    “Can’t we just be here, now? Can’t we?”
    She sat back. Why wouldn’t he talk about Princeton? It wasn’t like it was a state secret. The crisis at his house was over, he’d told her. Why was he still hanging around Beverly Hills?
    “What happens when I do go back, Anna?” he asked, staring hard at the road.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, the Contessa and the Southern-Fried Chauffeur.”
    Anna’s jaw flapped open. “Are you talking about Django?”
    “The way he looks at you—”
    “Ben. We’re
friends.
”
    “Close friends?” Ben probed. “Close personal friends?”
    Heat came to Anna’s face. “I don’t deserve that.”
    His hands gripped the steering wheel. “The idea of being on the other side of the country, being without you, and he lives right there, it’s just …”
    Anna put a slender hand on Ben’s thigh. “Django and I are
friends,
” she said again.
    He nodded, then cranked up the music. They didn’t talk again until they reached her father’s house, where he parked in the circular driveway and took her into his arms. “Hey. Sorry about before. I just care about you so damn much.”
    “It’s okay.” She kissed him softly. “It’s forgotten.” He walked her to the door and kissed her again. She thanked him for an incredible evening, then watched him drive away. And out of the corner of her eye, she couldn’t help noticing that the lights in Django’s guest-house were still illuminated.

Nice-ta-meetcha
    “S o I was wondering if you might stop by the
Well
office sometime this afternoon so we could do an interview.”
    “I don’t know … ,” Anna said, stifling an unintentional yawn. “I mean, I just—”
    “Come on,” cajoled Juliet Dinkins, editor in chief of the Beverly Hills High newspaper, the
Well.
“The whole school already knows that you’re working on
Hermosa Beach
anyway. It’s not like it’s some big secret.”
    “I didn’t tell anyone.”
    Juliet laughed. “Welcome to L.A.”
    Anna had been eating lunch alone at one of the picnic tables in the quadrangle. Tired from her late night with Ben, she hoped the yogurt and fruit she was about to eat would help perk her up. She had been reading
Love and Death in the American Novel,
the seminal—in more ways than one—collection of essays by the late literary critic Leslie Fiedler and spooning vanilla yogurt into her mouth when Juliet had come running over to her, steno notebook in hand.
    “Look. I’ll make it easy for you. I’ll give you the questions in advance,” Juliet said, her lustrous dark hair glinting in the noonday sun. “Is it true that Clark Sheppard picked you from out of a thousand applicants? What exactly are you going to be doing? What kind of connections did you use to get this gig? What’s it like on the set of the show? Is Scott Stoddard, the star, really gay, or is that just a rumor? Can we come down to the beach to do an interview with the cast?”
    Anna shook her head, thinking that this was insane. She hadn’t told anyone about her new gig at Apex—not even Sam. But word had spread like wildfire, which meant the most likely explanation was that Cammie had gotten the news from her father after Anna departed. Surely Cammie would have demanded to know why Anna was in her dad’s office. Surely Clark Sheppard had told her.
    However the word had leaked, kids were coming up to her—kids she didn’t even know!—all through her morning classes to either offer congratulations or wheedle favors. There were plenty of young actors at Beverly Hills High; each