Prologue

It's not like Sondra Smith and I were ever best friends. I'd arrived at her office several hours after my first table read, which was exactly three days after my first trip to Los Angeles. I was already having a big week.

"Ms. Smith?" I said timidly, poking my head into her office. "I'm Amy Spencer? Here for our marketing meeting?" Sondra was a mid-forties power woman with alabaster skin, spiky red hair, and a ton of makeup that looked like it took hours to apply. She even looked intimidating sitting down, which was why I was compelled to end every sentence in a question. "Yes, hello, nice to see you," she said, sounding less than enthused. "Have a seat. We have a lot of work to do."

I plopped myself in the giant leather chair next to her desk. She looked at me for a long moment, sighed, and began.

"Listen," she said. "I don't want to make you uncomfortable, but you're going to need to tell me anything and everything about yourself, so I can design an appropriate outreach strategy to the media. Once the show launches, we're basically going to make you into a brand. We want to put you in the position to be the next Hilary Duff or Lindsay Lohan, you know? They both got their start in television."

With that, she reached into a sleek black leather portfolio, pulling out a pad of white paper and a typed list. "We're just going to go over a few basics about your life, so I can decide which angle is best for you. Do you have anything major in your past that we should know about? Siblings in trouble with the law? Any uncles in jail in Tijuana?" She attempted to lighten the mood with a short laugh, but it came out a little like a grunt.

I drew in a breath. I had checked the "deceased" box under Father on the paperwork from the network, but I didn't know if that information had made its way to Sondra.

"My dad….died." I said slowly.

"Of what?" she said, then quickly, "I'm so sorry." Then again. "Of what?"

"He… had a heart attack," I said. "It was two years ago."

Sondra's face remained expressionless, and she barely looked up. "Were there drugs involved, or any other kinds of issues? Is there anything else that's going to come up later about this?" She grimaced, scribbling feverishly on her pad.

Anything else that's going to come up about this? Did she mean my feelings? "No…it was a heart defect," I said. Why were we still talking about this? Did she also want to know about the coma, and the ICU, and the mountain of hospital bills that didn't stop coming even after he died? I felt my face getting hot.

"No, he had a congenital defect," I said. "He was forty-six, and he had a heart attack." I willed myself not to cry. She pretended not to notice.

"I'm not trying to sound harsh, but I don't want the Enquirer going to your hometown, digging up some dirt about how your dad was really a crazy drug addict who had just been released from prison and was doing speedballs in front of your local strip bar, and that's what caused his death…. do you know what I mean?"

I resisted the urge to jump across the desk and strangle her. "He had a heart attack on the way home from work," I said. Then, more assertively: "That was it. Can we talk about something else?" My face ached from fighting back tears. "Let's move on."

She paused for a moment, and I wondered if she was going to push it even further. "What about you? Do you have any medical issues?" she said. "Anything that we might have to spin later, like Marcia Cross with her migraines, or Camryn Manheim with her Rheumatoid Arthritis, or Linda Hamilton, with her bipolar disorder?"

I let out the breath I'd been holding, thankful that she'd moved on from the subject of my dad while at the same time impressed with her near-encyclopedic knowledge. "No, none of that stuff. I'm fine, but I'll let you know if I start to feel sick," I joked.

Nothing. No reaction. Maybe she was frozen by Botox, and was laughing inside. She looked down at her list.

"OK, what about sex?"

"What about sex?" I said, mentally gearing up for another mini-drama.

"I mean, have you had it?" she said, looking up across the desk. "I'm just trying to suss out whether or not to work the whole 'Jessica Simpson/ Britney Spears/ cast of Seventh Heaven I'm a virgin' angle, since your character on the show is supposed to be sixteen. It's a stance some of the girls want to take. We can try it, but it's a little hard to back down off of if someone comes out of the woodwork and said you had some wild spring break weekend with them, or anything like that."

I made a mental list. Virginity = lost to high school boyfriend during prom of junior year. Subsequent experiences = Charlie, co-star in freshman year production of Hamlet at Hudson. Henry = summer romance between freshman and sophomore years. So, three. Not bad, not terribly slutty, but definitely nowhere near Jessica Simpson territory.

"Yes, I've had it. Probably not with anyone who would talk to the Enquirer." I said finally, attempting to answer the question while giving her as little information as possible. Why was this her business?

"OK then…what about videotapes? Don't want those coming back later to haunt us."

"Oh my God!" I squealed. "I'm from Bay City, Michigan. We don't videotape ourselves having sex in Michigan, okay? These questions are crazy." Was this some kind of test?

"OK, OK… she said. "Listen, it's better for everyone if we're just open about everything from the beginning. Then we have a strategic plan ready to go for when it comes out. The one thing we cannot tolerate is being blindsided because you've kept something from us. The more information you give us, the more we can help you." She finished up with a little nod, as if to signify the end of this tender moment.

"What about beliefs? She continued. "Are you a strict vegetarian, or a vegan like Alicia Silverstone, or macrobiotic like Gwyneth Paltrow? Do you not wear shoes made of leather, like Moby? This is something we need to tell the stylist, who you'll definitely need to see sooner rather than later. Also, we might be able to work that angle in the media, like in the Vegetarian Times. Chris Martin was voted "World's Sexiest Vegetarian" by PETA, for instance. Just make sure if you're going to claim you're a vegan, you don't get photographed eating a hamburger. Those people are militant when you betray them."

"Nope...I love steak." I said.

She didn't look up from her list. "Religion? Are you a militant Baptist or something? Were you raised in a commune, are you a Christian Scientist, or do you have any relatives that are Jehovah's Witnesses? Religion itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but those groups are very likely to pop up out of nowhere at critical times in your career and 'claim' you." She seemed serious.

"It's fine," I said. "I was baptized Lutheran, but I haven't been to church in awhile."

Finally, she was done with her 'questions' list and seemed satisfied that I had no major skeletons in my closet.

"We'll need to meet again before the show premieres, but I think we're going to try to market you as an "overnight success Cinderella story," like Kimberly Williams when she was cast in Father of the Bride in the early nineties," she said. "Everybody loves a rags to riches story…one minute you're shucking corn in some field in Iowa and the next you're the star of a Hollywood TV show!"

I didn't bother mentioning that, in fact, I was from Michigan, and that I had never even been in a cornfield. Somehow, the real details of my life seemed less important by the moment.