For as long as I could remember, I’d had my life planned for me. I had been betrothed from the moment I turned thirteen. I wasn’t like my sister or my brother, I never made a fuss about it. Like the perfect daughter I was, I accepted it.
My ex-fiancé, Horace, had been more boring than wet bread, not the love of my life by any stretch, but he was safety. With him, my life had been on autopilot and I didn’t have to worry about crashing. There was something inside me that I didn’t understand. I didn’t know how to control it, how to tame it. And now for the first time in my life, I had freedom to choose.
Freedom to crash.
FOUR
GEMMA
Under a ceiling dripping with Swarovski crystals designed to look like stars, I lingered among the glitterati, smiled for photos, swiveled and laughed with socialites.Smile. Laugh. Pose.No longer Gemma, butGemma Crowne, America’s Princess.
One by one, men approached. In the back of my mind I heard the nasally, rapid-fire drawl of the auctioneer:Ding ding, step right up, America’s Princess is for sale.I gave them my Gemma Crowne smile, my head a mental Rolodex of information my mother had stocked.
He’s from old money.
He’s from new money.
He’s broke—but royal—and looking to marry into money.
Sure, he’s old, but he’s too old to expect sex and his family line goes back to the Stuarts.
I was careful with my responses—crafted.
Every word I spoke a headline.
Every photo a potential to go viral.
I had perfected this. The ability to be present and disappear at the same time.
The storm outside had broken, no longer raining a sheet of metal. My mother had already commented on how it had fucked up the valet—not in so many words. To her horror, people would have to fetch their own cars. It was now softly drizzling. Far away lightning crashed into the black ocean waves.
My eyes drifted to some old and famous rug my mother had hung for display, and the two girls staring at it, pretending to care. Blaire’s curly black hair was done up in diamonds. The hair that Kennedy colored weekly, and that gained her millions of followers, was dyed a soft pastel pink and straightened down to her waist. She’d toned down some of the e-girl look that made her famous, a piercing removed from her nostril, the pink in her hair made more acceptable by a headband.
They saw me and pushed their tongues into their cheeks, mimicking a blow job.
I laughed.
“Gemma?”
Oh. Right.
I blinked back into the dead eyes of some…tech mogul? I don’t know. He was explaining crypto to me. Guess what he’d said wasn’t supposed to be funny.
Oops.
“So…you were saying I should invest in Bitcoin, because it’s more established or something?” I twirled the yellow diamond pendant at my throat. “Altcoins are too volatile for someone like me?”
“Uh-huh.” His eyes dropped to it, to my neckline andthe subtle cleavage designed to catch attention without being obvious.
“Hmm…but what about staking? Or are you just, like, holding your coins?”
His eyes grew, coming back to mine.
Bad Gemma. Tansy Rule #1: Let them be smarter.
“Uh…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m gonna get a drink.”
I watched him walk away, still playing with the pendant. Noticing a lull in the meat market, Kennedy and Blaire beckoned me to them. Kennedy raised a small bag with candy-colored pills into the air, just as someone stepped before me, blocking them. Brown hair, green eyes—he was like every other man here with the same arrogant, self-important countenance.
