HDU (13 page)

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COMMENTS:

Kitster629

lol that’s definitely his maid tho

ishipbeeler

um why is this even a question? they’re obv not
dating if she weighs over 100 lbs… which from the looks of these pictures she
deffffinitely does….

It was like pulling teeth as Ian sat across from
Amanda at a crowded French bistro on Spring Street.
 
She only laughed at his frustrations as she poured extra
milk and sugar in her coffee.

“There had to be
one
thing that you dreamt of as a kid,” Ian said, his chicken liver and
foie gras
mousse untouched as he interrogated
her.
 
“One thing that you always,
always dreamt of being.
 
Anything.
 
Something stupid,
like an actress.”

“What’s stupid about wanting to be an actress?”

“Low probability of success?” he answered.
 
“Degrading yourself by auditioning for
tampon commercials? Selling your soul or doing something stupid like reality
TV?”

“Ah,” Amanda nodded, opting not to ask if he was
talking about Natalie.
 
She sighed
and gave a helpless shrug.
 
“Well,
I still don’t know.
 
I’ve honestly
never known what I wanted in a career.
 
I guess I’m talentless?”
 

“No, we’ll find something.
 
Something interesting to say you do,” Ian said adamantly before
finally taking a bite of food.
 
“Because when a blog finally identifies you and everyone in the world
Googles your name, you should have something to show them.
 
If you’ve got no results, they start
forgetting about you right there and then.”

“I feel like I ask you this a lot, but
how
do you know all this again?”

Ian shrugged.
 
“It’s just a matter of being prepared for opportunity,” he said.
 
“I carry my camera with me everywhere
in case there’s something interesting to film, and I’ve had my own website
since I was eighteen, in case someone important checks out a trailer and is
interested in giving me a job.”
 
He
laughed.
 
“Of course that hasn’t
happened
in the six years that it’s been
up, but at least I’ll have it once someone identifies the kid in the hoodie and
sunglasses.
 
Which better happen.”

Amanda raised her eyebrows, impressed.
 
“That does make sense.”

Ian smiled, relieved by her agreement.
 
“We’ll just start slow.
 
We’ll make you a website and a Twitter
today because by the end of your date tonight,
someone’s
bound to have you identified.”

“True,” Amanda nodded, surprised that her own mother
hadn’t already called the press to confirm her name.
 
Or even Tandy Mueller, who probably would do so and then try
to sell additional stories about alleged meth use.
 

“You know what,” Amanda said suddenly.
 
“If no one identifies me by tonight,
we’ll leak the info ourselves on HDU.
 
They’ll believe that we got an exclusive, we’ve done it before,” she
pointed out, though the only other exclusive HDU had ever published was a post
of an underage starlet drinking, the photo having been snapped personally by
one of their users.
 
The site wasn’t
known for having the scoop, but it certainly wasn’t out of the question that
they could.

“Al
right
, I’m
with you on that plan,” Ian said, raising his champagne pick-me-up only to
remember that Amanda wasn’t drinking.
 
He clinked his glass against her coffee cup, the giddy smile returning
to his face.
 
“Then here’s to the
start of our fame by tonight.”

~

The date at Lilac was scheduled for eight-thirty in
the evening, but by seven, Amanda still hadn’t heard from Liam.
 
It was still unknown as to when he planned
to pick her up or whether they would be “figuring out” what to do with her
wardrobe.
 
She had decided not to
make Ian shop with her because Liam had alluded to helping with that situation
the night before.
 
Amanda figured
he would tip off the paparazzi to make a shopping trip with her worth it.
 
But by 7:30PM, Liam was still MIA and
she was forced to start preparing some sort of backup ensemble.
 

Wearing all
black tricks people into thinking you’re chic, right?
Amanda stood up
straight before her reflection in the mirror but groaned.
 
Not so much.
 
Her black sweater dress was ratty and pilled, her matching tights
already loose at the knees.
 
She
couldn’t help but wonder if Liam was punishing her for requesting Lilac by
forcing her to go looking like a hobo.
 
It was a worrying thought.
 
Amanda had intended to look sufficiently plain for the tabloids, but
never grotesque, which she imagined would be the case among the Lilac crowd
full of models and actors.
 

If Liam would simply pick up his phone, she would
know whether she had time to go pick up something from a boutique.
 
But alas, he was unreachable and her existing
wardrobe was beyond saving.
 
She
had already excluded most of it while packing, but even the pieces that had
made it to New York were hopeless.
 
Some of them had been in her closet since early high school.
 

“They’re good for nostalgia, but not actual wearing,”
Ian had laughed that afternoon, taking pictures of the messy garments strewn
all over the room.
 
Amanda had emptied
them from her suitcase in frustration, chucking every last sock and ugly
sweater over her shoulder with vexation.
 
But there was some good to be made of her tantrum.
 
Ian decided that a few of the photos –
one of an old shearling coat, another of a Merit High School sweatshirt –
were worthy of Instagram and blog posts for her new website.

Their afternoon and early evening following lunch had
been spent back at the hotel, buying a domain and constructing a website from
Ian’s faint knowledge of computers.
 
He managed to produce a simple but rather appealing homepage featuring
Amanda’s full name before the image of a henbit field.
 
The photo of the purple henbits was one
that Amanda had snapped herself last spring.
 
The plants were common weeds back at home, but she found
them beautiful anyway and an easy decision for the backdrop of her site.
 
The final additions to the page were some
photographs that Ian had snapped of Merit from his iPhone.
 
Altogether, the elements gave off a
dreamy and sweet but somewhat mysterious feeling.

Amanda gazed at it on her computer screen, letting it
distract her from her date night frustrations.
 
However the page quickly reminded her of a façade, a hollow
shell trying to pass itself off as something important.
 
Amanda shut her laptop, forcing herself
not to reopen it like a Pandora’s box of insecurities.
 
Don’t
tempt yourself
, she thought.
 
After all, she still hadn’t read the comments on the HDU post about Liam
and herself, still fearful of what the users might be saying.
 
All she had allowed was for Ian to give
her a summary, which he had phrased in a text as “nothing crazy – everyone
thinks you’re the housekeeper.”
 
It
actually made Amanda laugh.
 
They’ll be in for a surprise after tonight
,
she grinned.

Though with that thought, she was reminded to look once
again at her clock.
 
Just as she
realized that it was eight on the dot, Amanda heard the front door of the hotel
room swing open.
 

“
Who’s there
?”
she immediately asked, grabbing something, anything to use as a weapon before
freezing in fear.
 
Her body
practically crumpled in relief when she saw Liam enter her bedroom.

“Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you?” he laughed,
taking the beaded necklace out of her hands.
 
“What, you were going to strangle me with this?”

Amanda stared, not even realizing what an ineffective
weapon she’d chosen.
 
She then
turned her eyes on him and his infuriating amusement.
 
“God!” she suddenly huffed, surprising
herself by smacking him on the chest.

“What – ? Stop it, you freak,” Liam laughed,
controlling both her hands with just one of his.
 
She tried to wriggle free from his grip but it tightened
effortlessly around her.
 
“Why are
you hitting me?” he asked.

Amanda calmed, realizing that she was in fact hitting
him, and that it was mostly unwarranted.
 
“
Because
,” she sputtered.

“Oh, okay.”

“
Because
number one, you kept me waiting around cluelessly and number two, you just barged
into my hotel room like some crazy intruder!”

Liam let go of her hands, delighting in her
fury.
 
“I booked this room.
 
I have a key and I can technically come
in whenever I want.”

“That’s
not
true,” Amanda contested.
 
“That’s
wrong, that’s…
perverted
,” she said,
still too flustered to be eloquent.
 
Liam let out a hearty laugh.

“Don’t worry, I have zero interest in walking in on
you changing.”

“Screw you!” Amanda blurted, immediately covering her
mouth with her hands.
 
She felt officially
embarrassed and additionally unsure of where her emotions had come from.
 
Liam only raised his eyebrows, rather
entertained.

“Do you want me to walk in on you changing? I can.”

“Shut up.
 
Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

He relented, guiding her by the elbows to her bed and
sitting her down.
 
“What? Are you
upset about what your HDUers said about you?” he asked.

“What’d they say about me?”

Liam’s smile faltered.
 
“What?”

“What’d they say about me?” Amanda repeated.

“You should know.
 
You posted it.”

“I went out with Ian before the comments started,”
Amanda said.
 
She eyed her laptop but
as if reading her mind, Liam snatched it off her desk.
 
  

“Let’s go.
 
We’re already late,” he said, no longer smiling, looking a little dull
and exasperated.
 
Amanda ignored
him and stood up defiantly.
 
She gripped
the edges of her laptop, playing with him a losing but relentless game of
tug-of-war.
 
“Stop it, Amanda,”
Liam said, annoyed.
 

“Give it to me, it’s mine,” she grunted, recognizing
her childish tone.
 
Liam rolled his
eyes and let go, sending her falling back onto the bed.
 
She ignored how silly her flailing legs
looked and opened up her laptop, navigating straight to the post and its
comments.
 
She read them.

“not a gf for
sure. prob the maid. she’s got the uniform.”

“ewww wtf am i
looking at?!?”

“if liam brody
were to try dating non-models, he def wouldn’t start with this girl.
 
take it one step at a time, buddy!”

 
“lol someone needs a stylist. and
makeup. and a gym membership.”

Amanda stared, each comment seeming worse than the next
with very few about Liam himself.
 
It seemed that everyone was just in awe of her.
 
Her unremarkable looks – her
ugly
looks.
 
She swallowed hard and tried to recall if she had been
wearing enough makeup that day.

“I don’t know if you know this, but there are a lot
of idiots on your website,” Liam said, leaning against her dresser.
 
“The only reason it’s popular is because
there are so many comments, and the only reason it has so many comments is
because those people are always home doing nothing.”

Amanda didn’t bother explaining that the comments
were from users she liked, certain she’d cry if she opened her mouth to
speak.
 
That would be the ultimate
embarrassment.

 
Liam
heaved a sigh, rolling his neck.
 
“So do you still want to go out or do you want to stay here?”

Amanda paused.
 
She honestly wanted to go out – she was in New York for
God’s sake – but she didn’t want to give the gossip world any more
ammo.
 
There were thousands –
maybe tens of thousands – of people dissecting her every flaw at that very
second, tweeting about her ugly dress, messaging links of her photos to their
friends so they could all have a laugh together.
 
It was absolutely terrifying to think about.

But at the same time, she knew that staying in would
be accepting defeat.
 
If the world
never saw her face again, their last memory would be of her wearing an ugly
blue dress that apparently looked like a maid’s uniform.
 
Before she could tell Liam that she
simply needed to go shopping first, he whipped off his sweater.