“Want company this afternoon?”
She looked up to see that Anna had slid into the chair beside her. “Company?”
Anna was in her usual athletic gear, a matching purple set today. Her hair was down, and it looked so soft, although Eden had no idea why she was noticing such a thing. “We could watch a movie or something?” Anna suggested.
Eden usually spent her afternoons alone on show days, but right now, the idea of watching a movie with Anna sounded undeniably fun. “Yeah, sure. Stay.”
“Really?” Anna asked as one of those infectious smiles stretched her cheeks.
“Yes,” Eden said, feeling a smile of her own forming in response. “But who gets to pick the movie?”
“You pick this one, and I pick next time?”
Next time.Yeah, okay, she liked the sound of that. “Deal.”
Paris placed a fresh cup of tea in front of Eden. “Are you sure you don’t need anything else from me before I go?”
“Positive,” Eden told her. “Thanks for the tea. Now go have fun, and don’t lose too much money on the slots.”
“No worries. Fifty dollars is my gambling limit,” Paris told her.
Kyrie’s eyes widened. “I’m going to follow her lead.”
“Have fun, you two,” Anna said, waving them off. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“That doesn’t narrow it down much,” Kyrie responded, pulling a silly face.
Anna laughed, and it was such a joyous sound. Once Kyrie and Paris had left the suite, she turned to Eden. “This is going to be fun, like the daytime version of a middle school sleepover. Think room service would send us popcorn?”
“I’m sure they would.” Eden picked up her tea and took another sip. “Can you drink tea at sleepovers?”
“Not any sleepover I ever attended,” Anna told her earnestly. “I think you might be breaking sleepover code.”
Eden shrugged. “Would you believe I’ve never been on a sleepover?”
Anna pressed a hand to her chest. “No! That’s tragic. Why not?”
“My parents moved us to LA when I was twelve. After that, I was homeschooled between auditions and music lessons. I didn’t really have any friends my age.”
Anna’s smile faded. “Was that what you wanted? The move to LA?”
“Oh yeah.” Eden didn’t share this story often. She didn’t like the way it had ended, at least not for her relationship with her parents, but Anna had already had a front-row seat to that disaster, so maybe she deserved the backstory too. “Being a pop star is the only thing I’ve ever wanted since I was a little girl. I wasthrilledwhen we moved to LA.”
“You and me both,” Anna said. “Living our childhood dreams.”
“Mm,” Eden agreed. “When I got my first record contract at sixteen, it was like wow, I really did it, you know? I was going to hear my song on the radio. That was one of the best days of my life.”
“At sixteen.” Anna gave her head a quick shake. “I knew that, obviously, but I never really thought about what it meant for your adolescence.”
“I don’t feel like I had one, to be honest,” Eden told her. “Like I mentioned before, the media treated me like an adult from the start. They were constantly critiquing my body and speculating about who I was dating. In reality, I’d never even been kissed, yet they were telling jokes about my sex life on late-night shows.”
“That’s ... yikes.”
“Yikes” didn’t begin to cover it. “It was a weird time. The world saw me as this super-successful singer, but offstage, I had no control over my life whatsoever. I got a monthly allowance from my parents, and not a very generous one. My father hired Peter Roth as my manager, and the two of them made all the decisions about my career. I was just the face, the voice.”
“I had no idea,” Anna said quietly.
“I was so young that at first, I was glad I had people telling me what to do, because reaching superstardom before you turn eighteen is surreal and overwhelming. But then Ididturn eighteen, and I still had people making all my decisions for me. They chose which songs I would record and told me what to wear and how to act. I probably let it go on longer than I should have, but they were my parents, and I assumed they knew best.”
