Read Online Messy by Heather Cocks, Jessica Morgan - Free Book Online
Authors: Heather Cocks, Jessica Morgan
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unclench. It’s cracking your tan.”
Brooke let slip a small snicker, then pushed out a crisp breath. “Great. You can go now. I have to cross-reference tonight’s outfit with everything I’ve worn this past month just to make sure it’s not repetitious.” She shot Max an appraising look. “Your homework is to talk to Molly about the finer points of wearing shirts without writing on them. Rachel Zoe would die. And not in the good way.”
Max watched Brooke disappear into her vast closet. “This ought to be interesting,” she said aloud to no one.
“Are you sure about this?”
Ari had asked Brooke that question earlier, and now—two hours after Max left her room—it rang in Brooke’s head like a cowbell.
Of course
she wasn’t sure. She’d been formulating this plan so fervently, and privately, for the past few months that it felt weird to be acting on it at long last. And with somebody with whom she’d historically exchanged more glares than words.
“She’s just so
low-rent
,” Jennifer Parker had said on thephone earlier, when they’d three-way called with Arugula to discuss Brooke’s outfit. “And she’s always up in Jake’s business. Why are you doing this to me?”
“She’s not low-rent. She’s… unvarnished,” Brooke insisted. “I can handle that. And it’s not about you, it’s about my career, so I expect your full support. If you so much as breathe a word of this to anyone, even Jake—especially Jake—I swear to God I will find a way to lock you out of your IMDb page and put every infomercial you’ve ever done on there.” Jen was silent. Brooke soldiered on. “Besides, it’s too late now. I hired her. It’s done.”
“It’s
not
too late,” Arugula argued. “This is Hollywood, honey. People get terminated midsentence in this town. It’s called a recast.”
“Actually, I welcome the challenge,” Brooke had said airily. “It would be boring if my blogographer were exactly like me.”
She
almost
believed this. Although Max had been surprisingly comforting and in command earlier—never in a million years would Brooke have imagined she’d bare her soul to a person in cargo pants—now that it was zero hour and Brooke was applying the finishing touches to her makeup, she was still worried Max would turn out to be a surly loose cannon who only wanted to insult her trendy Louboutins, thus ruining Brooke’s dream of having the designer name a pair after her.
On the other hand, hiring someone with a different worldview could be considered savvy, right?
Brooke assuredherself.
How else do you explain that Elisabeth Hasselbeck is still on
The View?
The bigger issue was that as much as Brooke felt her master plan was a theoretical stroke of genius, she also had no idea whether it would actually
work
. Phase One, at least, had gone well: Brick had been blown away by her performance as Eliza Doolittle. His unabashed paternal pride—attention she’d been craving her whole life while he was off shooting movies with other people’s kids—was like a drug. Brooke wanted more. But scoring another hit was taking longer than she would’ve liked.
My Fair Lady
had been a wild success, but it was still just a school play. She needed a larger platform. A louder one.
And it was that epiphany, which came in part after Brooke realized that Kourtney Kardashian had two million Twitter followers just because she made bad relationship decisions in front of a camera crew, that led her to what she referred to in her head as the Big Idea: a blog. Something
good
, not just some random site where she uploaded pictures of herself in novelty sunglasses and then wrote about pants, or whatever. No, it had to get people talking. About
her
.
Brooke studied herself in the mirror. Her sleek navy backless Calvin Klein looked fantastic against her tan. Surely she already had enough going for her to stir up some buzz. Was she crazy to put her public image in the hands of a pale hobbit who probably hated
Brooke let slip a small snicker, then pushed out a crisp breath. “Great. You can go now. I have to cross-reference tonight’s outfit with everything I’ve worn this past month just to make sure it’s not repetitious.” She shot Max an appraising look. “Your homework is to talk to Molly about the finer points of wearing shirts without writing on them. Rachel Zoe would die. And not in the good way.”
Max watched Brooke disappear into her vast closet. “This ought to be interesting,” she said aloud to no one.
“Are you sure about this?”
Ari had asked Brooke that question earlier, and now—two hours after Max left her room—it rang in Brooke’s head like a cowbell.
Of course
she wasn’t sure. She’d been formulating this plan so fervently, and privately, for the past few months that it felt weird to be acting on it at long last. And with somebody with whom she’d historically exchanged more glares than words.
“She’s just so
low-rent
,” Jennifer Parker had said on thephone earlier, when they’d three-way called with Arugula to discuss Brooke’s outfit. “And she’s always up in Jake’s business. Why are you doing this to me?”
“She’s not low-rent. She’s… unvarnished,” Brooke insisted. “I can handle that. And it’s not about you, it’s about my career, so I expect your full support. If you so much as breathe a word of this to anyone, even Jake—especially Jake—I swear to God I will find a way to lock you out of your IMDb page and put every infomercial you’ve ever done on there.” Jen was silent. Brooke soldiered on. “Besides, it’s too late now. I hired her. It’s done.”
“It’s
not
too late,” Arugula argued. “This is Hollywood, honey. People get terminated midsentence in this town. It’s called a recast.”
“Actually, I welcome the challenge,” Brooke had said airily. “It would be boring if my blogographer were exactly like me.”
She
almost
believed this. Although Max had been surprisingly comforting and in command earlier—never in a million years would Brooke have imagined she’d bare her soul to a person in cargo pants—now that it was zero hour and Brooke was applying the finishing touches to her makeup, she was still worried Max would turn out to be a surly loose cannon who only wanted to insult her trendy Louboutins, thus ruining Brooke’s dream of having the designer name a pair after her.
On the other hand, hiring someone with a different worldview could be considered savvy, right?
Brooke assuredherself.
How else do you explain that Elisabeth Hasselbeck is still on
The View?
The bigger issue was that as much as Brooke felt her master plan was a theoretical stroke of genius, she also had no idea whether it would actually
work
. Phase One, at least, had gone well: Brick had been blown away by her performance as Eliza Doolittle. His unabashed paternal pride—attention she’d been craving her whole life while he was off shooting movies with other people’s kids—was like a drug. Brooke wanted more. But scoring another hit was taking longer than she would’ve liked.
My Fair Lady
had been a wild success, but it was still just a school play. She needed a larger platform. A louder one.
And it was that epiphany, which came in part after Brooke realized that Kourtney Kardashian had two million Twitter followers just because she made bad relationship decisions in front of a camera crew, that led her to what she referred to in her head as the Big Idea: a blog. Something
good
, not just some random site where she uploaded pictures of herself in novelty sunglasses and then wrote about pants, or whatever. No, it had to get people talking. About
her
.
Brooke studied herself in the mirror. Her sleek navy backless Calvin Klein looked fantastic against her tan. Surely she already had enough going for her to stir up some buzz. Was she crazy to put her public image in the hands of a pale hobbit who probably hated
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