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I’d be able to have some fun.
    I’d never gambled before, but I was just tipsy enough not to be self-conscious about asking the concierge how to go about using my room account to get chips. (I don’t remember the last time I actually carried cash on me.) He was happy to provide some, also happy to point me to the high-rollers tables. Armed with a purse full of $1000 chips, I headed out to make my fortune or lose whatever respectability I still had.
    I didn’t much care which one came first.

    12 hours ago…
    A s it turned out , Vegas casinos were more than happy to keep feeding a girl daiquiris if she was happy to keep losing money at blackjack. I was just starting to get the hang of things, had started to win back the $10,000 I’d lost so far, when my luck turned again.
    Either that or I was now drunk enough to think you should hit on two jacks.
    As the dealer swept away my last chips, I had to laugh. I fell into a giggling fit that made the guy next to me--a tall, lanky, older man wearing too many gold rings--ask, “You okay, sweetheart?”
    Then, “If you need a place to get yourself together, my room’s right upstairs.” His wink made my skin crawl.
    “No, thank you,” I managed through my giggles, relieved that he only shrugged and turned his attention back to the game as I tripped away, weaving through the disconcertingly large crowds of people on the casino floor the way I’d once woven my way through my grandma’s seemingly endless fields of wild herbs, back before I’d dragged my parents out to L.A. to support my desperate desire to be an actress; a real actress. Something I could be proud of. Back before I’d walked away from Mom and Dad because Ken convinced me they were holding me back. Back when I’d just been Ava, shy and coltish and too precocious for her own good. Back when I hadn’t known what it meant to be America’s sweetheart.
    I was dangerously close to breaking down again, and drunk enough now that I couldn’t bother being worried about who might see me. So Ken had plastered those pictures all over the gossip sites. So what? I wasn’t going to let him take any more of me away. Even if it only lasted tonight, before most Vegas vacationers were even aware of my fall from grace, I was determined. Tonight, no starlet, no incognito. Just me. Just Ava.
    I strode into the hotel bar with a renewed purpose, ignoring the table of frat boys in the corner, not letting myself wonder if the guy in the oversized tank was the same guy who’d seen me in the elevator, sliding onto a stool, and plucking the floppy hat from my head. The sunglasses came next, then the wig. By the time the bartender came over to take my order, I was taking out the last pin from my hair, shaking my head to let it fall around my face.
    If the bartender thought about carding me, he didn’t show it, and a few moments later, I had a line of tequila shots in front of me. I’d never done a shot before, but I’d seen it done often enough, and it didn’t seem that hard. I sprinkled a little salt on my hand and licked it off, then knocked back the shot the way I’d seen it done hundreds of times.
    It burned and nearly made me choke on a cough, but I held my constitution. I’d be damned if tequila was going to beat me tonight. No. I was done being bested. I was done losing. I knocked back another, and then paused to take a bite of a lime wedge.
    By now I knew the frat table was watching me, talking about me. If one of them approached me….
    I didn’t have a plan. All I knew is that I already hated them.
    I was about to start on my third shot, hoping it would make my brain fuzzy enough to ignore the college guys, when another man, a man I hadn’t noticed before, slid onto the seat next to mine and offered a hand.
    “Hi,” he said, smiling at me like he didn’t know what I looked like naked. Like he was just a boy. Like I was just a girl. “I’m Bennett.”

    I made it back to the shower to finish washing my hair, and