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The Terminator.
    As I walked back down The Ramp, I tried to hold my head high but it was difficult. It was one thing to wimp out around Amy Loubalu, but it was another to watch my dream of becoming the most acclaimed director of my generation go up in smoke because Dylan Schoenfield had no sense of right or wrong.

chapter three: dylan
    Random Fact number 210 you should know about me: unless they come in shopping bags that say Fred Segal or Kitson, I’m not big on surprises. In fact, it’s more like the opposite: I prefer routine. For instance, if I open the fridge and see a bunch of Weight Watchers strawberry-banana and key-lime nonfat yogurts rolling around instead of a nice, even row of vanillas (my breakfast every morning for the last two years), I start to get a little anxious.
    So you can imagine how I felt when I got home on Friday at 5:30—after stopping at Fred Segal for a quick jog-through to start scoping out possible dresses for the Fall Fling formal in November (six weeks away, but it’s never too early to start preparing)—and Daddy’s car was in the circular driveway of our Spanish-style house. This was so not part of the routine I was used to. Daddy’s a workaholic and never leaves the office before 8:30, even on Christmas Eve. What was even more weird was that parked right behind his black Jaguar was a beat-up old blue Volvo that not only looked like it hadn’t been through a car wash in years, but had a Neil Diamond bumper sticker on it. In case you don’t know who Neil Diamond is—not that you could be blamed seeing that he’s super old and was popular way back in the seventies —he’s this dorky singer who, from the pictures of him on Daddy’s CDs, is obsessed with sequins and rhinestones.
    Parking my red BMW behind the Volvo, I made my way toward the house. “Hola, José!” I sang. He’s our gardener, who’s married to Marta, our housekeeper.
    He looked up from where he was pruning some roses. “ Hola , Miss Dylan,” he yelled back. Our house is on an acre of land—huge for L.A. standards—so José’s a very busy guy.
    I felt very lucky that I was exposed to so many different cultures living in L.A. Between José and Marta, who were from El Salvador, Kathy, my Vietnamese manicurist, and Zora, the Bulgarian woman who waxed my eyebrows, I was one of the most well-rounded people I knew.
    “Daddy?” I yelled as I stashed my Fred Segal bags in the front hall closet. I must have this disease that makes it impossible for me to walk out of a store without buying at least a T-shirt.
    “We’re in the family room,” he yelled back.
    I figured the other half of “we” had to be whoever the Neil Diamond-loving person was. Maybe one of Daddy’s fraternity brothers from Northwestern back in the day who now worked for Greenpeace or one of those other annoying organizations that stalked poor innocent people like myself when all we wanted was to get some frozen yogurt at Pinkberry. Those people always drove beat-up Volvos.
    As I walked into the room, I stopped short. I wish it had been a friend of Daddy’s. It wasn’t—it was none other than that Geek Boy James or Joe or Josh or whatever his name was. The one who got my purse out of the fountain the week before and thought I owed him my firstborn child because of it. I couldn’t believe it—I had already told him I wasn’t interested in doing his dumb movie. What part of no did he not understand? Talk about not letting something go.
    I thought I was going to throw up. Not just because Geek Boy was in my house, but because he and Daddy were sitting on the black suede couch watching a baseball game surrounded by corned-beef and pastrami sandwiches, pickles, knishes, and black-and-white cookies from Nate ’n Al’s, my most favorite delicatessen back before I gave up carbs my freshman year.
    “Hi, honey!” Daddy said through a mouthful of knish. Other than the fact that Daddy was about twenty-five pounds overweight and a few inches