Lost in Hollywood

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  To Kevin: I’d be lost without you.

  Acknowledgments

  In addition to the Academy, I’d like to thank . . .

  First, my awesome writing partners: Gale, Carolee, Josette, Jane, Chris, and Shannon, and the Northern Delaware Sisters in Crime group: John, KB, Jane, June, Chris, Janis, and Kathleen.

  And thanks to my friend Leo for inspiring the whole Burrito Taxi business!

  A special thanks to my USC friends for e-mailing and texting me details when my memory failed me, which was often. I hold my time with all of you in LA in a special place in my heart.

  If I could pick two people to stick on a Velcro wall with me, it would be my literary agent, Mandy Hubbard from Emerald City Literary Agency, and my editor, Alyson Heller. Thanks to you both for your continued support!

  Of course I would never venture down the red carpet without my loves: Kevin, Ellie, Evan, and Happy.

  Most of all, thank you to my readers, to librarians, and to teachers and parents who read and recommend my books. I hope you love Lost in Hollywood as much as Lost in Ireland, Lost in Rome, Lost in Paris, Lost in London, and Just Add Magic.

  A girl knows her limits,

  but a wise girl knows she has none.

  —Marilyn Monroe

  1

  I’m a totally normal thirteen-year-old girl. For real.

  The problem is that I’m surrounded by weird.

  Dad said, “Come look at this one, Ginger.”

  He was talking to me. I’m Ginger. I’m named after one of my mother’s favorite old movie stars, a lady named Ginger Rogers. (Mom is totally obsessed with old movies.)

  I walked over to see my dad’s latest contraption; he makes things out of stuff.

  I looked at this Saturday’s gizmo. “What is it?”

  “I call it, the Drool-o-Dabbler.”

  “Uh-huh.” He had taken the chinstrap off my little brother’s football helmet. FYI, Grant—who’s also named after an old movie star—doesn’t use the helmet for football. He tapes balls of aluminum foil to it to help him connect with aliens who might try to talk to him. Although they never actually have; he does it “just in case.”

  I told ya—surrounded by weird.

  Anyway, Dad took the chinstrap and melted it to pipe cleaners that he’d bent like candy canes. Then, he stuffed the cup of the chinstrap with wads of gauze, like from a first aid kit.

  Dad hooked the pipe cleaners over his ears. “You can wear this to soak up your drool while you sleep . . . or . . . I suppose, while you’re awake, if you’re the kind of person who drools when you’re awake. I would imagine there are people like that. And it keeps your pillowcase dry, or your shirt, if you’re awake.”

  “I guess it would come with extra gauze pads,” I pointed out

  “Replacements? Sure.”

  “It’s . . . ah . . . great, Dad. This could be TBO.” He was always looking for The Big One (TBO). While I agreed there might be people who drool a lot in their sleep—and maybe even some when awake—I wasn’t convinced this was TBO, but it always made my dad smile when I told him that.

  “I’m gonna need you for the video.”

  “Of course.” I am always in the video. Usually my part in it said, “You know what you need?” Then I would say to someone, usually a part played by Grant, “You need a Drool-O-Dabbler.”

  Grant would ask, “A Drool-O-Dabbler? What’s that?” Then my dad would introduce the product and an online bidding war would begin. “War” is a bit of an exaggeration. The highest bidder buys the Dabbler. The craziest part is, there are always people who want his stuff.

  “Just let me know when we start filming,” I said, and went to let Grant know about our next acting gig.

  I knocked and opened his bedroom door. Until just recently, his room used to be our room, which was wrapped in posters of UFOs and extraterrestrials. I just had to get out of there. My new room is very pink and neat. I picked out every single thing in it: lamp, curtains, beanbag chair, etc. . . .

  “Greetings, Earthling,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. Some girls have brothers who burp; some have brothers who punch them. I have one who thinks he’s parked at my house temporarily while he’s between intergalactic voyages.

  Yay me!

  Payton and I have said that Grant will be our first patient.

  Payton, btw, is my BFF and future business partner—we’re going to be brain surgeons.

  “You’re needed for an internet video later,” I said.

  “I comprehend.”

  “No duh. Not like it was complicated,” I said. I didn’t know if Grant actually had a shortage of brain cells or if he had some type of cerebral condition that contributed to his whack-a-doodle behavior. I was about to harass him more when the phone rang. I ran to the kitchen to grab it.

  “Hello. This is Ginger Carlson,” I said. One day I’d have someone who would answer the phone for Payton and me: “Hello. Dr. Ginger Carlson and Dr. Payton Paterson’s office.”

  “Hello. My name is Leo. I’m Betty-Jean Bergan’s housekeeper. Can I talk to you about her?”

  This guy thought I was my mom. Probably because I sound so mature. People always tell me that.

  “Uh—” I tried to interrupt, but didn’t succeed.

  “Your aunt has had another incident. It was serious. Dude, I don’t know what to do about her.”

  I asked, “What do you mean another incident?” And why is he calling me (or my mom) dude?

  “Oh, my bad. I thought your hubs told you. I spoke to him the other day . . . about her behavior. It’s strange, odd, Halloween without the candy. And today, well . . . she fell.”

  I gasped. “Is she okay?”

  “Get this, she wanted to climb the Hollywood sign,” Leo the housekeeper said.

  “THE Hollywood sign? The big famous one?”

  My mom’s aunt Betty-Jean (or ABJ as I call her) lives in Hollywood, California. She’s my coolest relative: she’s beautiful, used to be an actress, and lives this totally glam life in Hollywood. I’ve always wanted to visit her, but she comes here instead of us going there. At least she used to; it’s been about three years since I’ve seen her. I never understood why she would want to come to Delaware when she lives in California.

  “There’s only one Hollywood sign,” Leo continued. “She’s out of the hospital, and they said she’s gonna be okeydokey, hunky-dory, A-okay, but there’s something else. A sitch.”

  “What kind of sitch?” I asked.

  “The money kind. She has none: zip, zero, piggy bank empty.” He paused. “The bank wants to take away her house.”

  I gasped again. “Her home? That’s terrible!”

  “You’re telling me. She asked that I call you to see if the family would come out here and help her.”

  Out There? As in Hollywood? For real? Obvs I wanted to go to LA, and my mom, the classic movie nut, would totally love it. Dad always says he has to work, but if ABJ needs him, I bet he’d take time off. I mean, he finds time to make contraptions, right?

  “I hope you do come because she doesn’t only owe the bank money, if you know what I mean.”

  I covered the mouthpiece and yelled to Mom and Dad in the living room, “ABJ’s housekeeper is on the phone. He says that she fell off the Hollywood sign! The bank is taking her
house!! So we need to go to Los Angeles to help her!! Can Payton come?! Next week is spring break!!”

  Mom rushed away from the TV—something she only does for a pee emergency or a grease fire. “Let me have that.” She snatched the phone. “And please stop yelling.” She took the phone out of my hand. “Hi, sorry about that. Okay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yes. We’ll be there.” She hung up. Now Dad and Grant joined us in the kitchen.

  Mom said, “My aunt Betty-Jean needs our help. Get ready. We’re going to Hollywood!”

  2

  Dad arranged to take the week off from work, so the whole family was going. And Mom confirmed that I could invite Payton, as long as her parents said okay.

  “ABJ is your aunt, which makes her my great aunt?” I asked Mom. “She doesn’t have a family of her own, right?”

  Mom nodded. “She never got married or had kids. She was always so busy with her acting,” Mom explained. “You know, she’s the reason I love old movies.”

  “So, she’s on her own out there, in Hollywood?” I asked.

  “Well, she has friends and Leo, but no family other than us.”

  Payton flew in the back door without knocking, which is nothing new. We have that kind of house, and Payton is that kind of friend. On the other hand, when I ride my bike to her house, I knock on the door, she has that kind of house. “Are you sitting down?” she asked.

  Mom and I gestured at the stools we were sitting on at the kitchen island.

  “Oh good. Six words: Airplane miles. Free trip. Payton coming.” She jumped up and down. “My parents said okay!”

  My eyebrows jetted up to the ceiling. “That’s perfect!” Going to Hollywood would be awesome. But going to Hollywood with Payton would be better than awesome. I asked Mom, “That’s perfect, isn’t it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I know. Right?” Payton asked. “I feel like I’m one of the family.” She held up a tote bag. “And you know what’s in here?”

  “I bet I do.” I ticked off a list on my fingers. “Model Magic, paint, notecards, thin-tipped Sharpie markers, thumbtacks, toothpicks and. . . hmm . . . chocolate?”

  Payton closed her eyes and smiled happily. “Eeeeexactly.”

  Mom asked, “What’s all that for?”

  We yelled at her, “The Science Olympics!”

  “It’s right after spring break,” I added.

  “We’re making a model of the brain,” Payton said. “Of course.”

  “We’re totally gonna win,” I declared.

  “We have to.”

  “We made a bet with the DeMarcos,” I said.

  “They’re twins,” Payton added.

  Mom followed our conversation back-and-forth like she was watching a Ping-Pong game. This is how Payton and I speak. We’ve been best friends since we were babies and we spend every spare minute together, so we pretty much always knew what the other was thinking. Not that we’re telepathic, because that doesn’t exist, although some scientists think that communication using only thoughts is within our reach, but if it did, we’d have it.

  “The DeMarcos are making a robot,” Payton said.

  “How cliché,” I said.

  We rolled our eyes in sync.

  Mom hates listening to us when we talk like this. (She calls it “chat back.”) She put her hands over her ears. “Stop it, girls. You’re giving me a headache.”

  Then Grant came in wearing his football helmet with aluminum foil balls. He poured a glass of milk, squeezed in strawberry syrup, and stirred. Then he grabbed a Twizzler, and instead of eating it, he used it as a straw. “Good stuff,” he said smacking his lips. Tucking a roll of aluminum foil under his arm, he left.

  I said, “His weirdness gives me a headache.” I slipped two Twizzlers out of the bag and gave one to Payton. “Doesn’t it bother you, Mom?”

  “He has an active imagination. He’s nine. It’s normal.”

  “Do you think it’s normal?” I asked Payton.

  “Sounds like a family matter,” Payton said. “I’m staying out of it.”

  “I thought you said you were part of the family,” I teased.

  Mom said to Payton, “You know while we’re in California, you’ll have to help with Grant too.”

  “No problem, Mrs. C,” Payton said. “I’ll hide in the closet, and in my alien voice I’ll whisper that we’re sending a spaceship to get him.”

  I laughed. “Good one.” We high-fived by tapping our Twizzlers together. We’d come up with a million different ways to high-five without using our palms.

  “No,” Mom said. “Not a ‘good one.’ ” She snatched our Twizzlers, and with one bite nibbled on them both. She smiled. “But a little funny.”

  3

  The cab drive from LAX (that’s the airport in Los ­Angeles) was traffick-y. There were ten lanes of superhighway, five in each direction, and all were packed with cars. If the highway was the central nervous system and the cars were oxygen, there would be seriously bad neurological consequences, like brain damage.

  It was also seriously bright out, and I had lost my sunglasses at the bottom of my bag. Luckily, Payton handed me her very cool aviator shades; they looked oh so Hollywood. Speaking of Hollywood, hello, palm trees! I’d never actually seen one in person, but they were everywhere, and they looked just like you’d think they would from their pictures.

  “We need a teleporter,” Grant said, staring at the traffic. “Intelligent life on other planets teleport all the time. I’m sure.”

  I whispered to Payton, “I’d like to teleport him back to his home planet.”

  Mom said, “I heard that.”

  Dad sat in the front seat gabbing with the driver about his driving-related gadgetry needs. He gave the driver a card with his website address. Then he gave him a second card in case he needed life insurance—that’s my dad’s real job.

  As soon as we got off at the exit marked HOLLYWOOD, my mom started snapping pictures. “This is Sunset Boulevard!” CLICK. “It looks just like it does in the movies. There’s the Sunset Tower.” CLICK. “And—oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! THERE IT IS! Pull over.” The taxi slowed until it finally stopped on the side of the road. “Do you see it?” CLICK. CLICK. “It’s the Hollywood sign.” CLICK. CLICK. CLICK.

  Like palm trees, I’d seen pictures of the Hollywood sign, but I had to admit that in the hazy sunshine, the letters in the distance, way up on the hill, were amazing. Even I clicked and—swoop—sent it to my QuickPik page. If it isn’t on QuickPik, it’s like it didn’t really happen.

  “Birth mother, can we please go now?” Grant asked out the window, squinting.

  “I’m your only mother.” She got back into the cab.

  “We don’t know that,” Grant said.

  I said to Mom, “I think he’s giving you permission to put him up for adoption.”

  Mom ignored me. The cab maneuvered through the city streets, and the CLICKs started again at the approach of the Beverly Hills sign. Mom said, “Look down the streets.” CLICK. “Look at how every street has only one kind of tree. How interesting.” CLICK. “And not a garbage can anywhere.” CLICK. “Where do you imagine they put their trash?” CLICK.

  “You know, we’re going to run out of room for all the trash,” Grant said. “And you know where it will go then? Space. We’ll attach it to a space shuttle and just drop it somewhere. Space litter. That’s what it’ll be.” Somehow he wasn’t worried about the junk in my former bedroom. “Unless it can be glued together into some kind of lump.”

  These are the kind of brain things that fascinate me. At nine he has to wear Velcro sneakers because he can’t learn to tie the laces, but he can solve the issue of space garbage while driving through Beverly Hills.

  “Do you think we’ll have intergalactic trash pick-up people?” I teased. “Like, is that a job of the future?”

  “We’ll need someone to gather the trash lump, like a . . . a . . . an Interstellar Waste Engineer, to prevent a hazardous outer space situation. That person would ne
ed to know about planetary orbits and gravitational forces.”

  He can’t tell when I’m teasing him. It takes some of the fun out of it.

  CLICK.

  Dad scratched a note on the little flip pad that he always keeps in his shirt pocket. “There are a lot of invention needs for trash right here on Earth,” he said. “Like lids, for example. They blow off and fall to the ground and get run over. I should be able to make sure they stay on the can.” He jotted on the pad.

  I wondered, not for the first time, if this was my real family. Maybe I’d been switched at birth—somewhere there was a family of doctors with a daughter in a space suit watching old movies while doodling inventions.

  4

  Aunt Betty-Jean’s house was nestled high up in the Hollywood Hills. The houses around it were more like bungalows. In comparison, ABJ’s was huge.

  “Only one person lives here?” Payton asked about the two-story flat-roofed house with floor-to-ceiling windows.

  “Just Aunt Betty-Jean,” Mom said.

  “It’s wonderful,” I said. “Look at all those windows!”

  A man who didn’t look like a housekeeper or butler, but more like a fifty-year-old surfer with unshaven, tanned skin; sun-bleached hair; a woven parka; and sandals, let us in.

  “I’m Leo,” he said. “Welcome to Hollywood! Although, I wish you were visiting for a better reason.”

  Mom gave him a squeeze. “So good to meet you in person.”

  The first thing I noticed when I entered the house was a huge painting of ABJ. She looked beautiful in a long red dress, wind blowing in her hair, which was blond like mine.

  “She’s totally glam,” I said, pointing to the painting.

  Mom said, “She looks like Marilyn Monroe in that picture.”

  “Check this out.” Payton ran her hand along a sculpture that nearly hit the ceiling. “Maybe it’s by a famous artist.”