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  A Boy Shopping Novel

  NIA STEPHENS

  Dafina Books for Young Readers

  A Parachute Press Book

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1 - Ghetto Superstar?

  Chapter 2 - Where the Boys Are

  Chapter 3 - Putting It Together

  Chapter 4 - The Power of the Internet

  Chapter 5 - Justin

  Chapter 6 - Soap Opera Love

  Chapter 7 - Heart-Shaped Box

  Chapter 7 - Somewhere Over the Rainbow

  Chapter 5 - Antonio

  Chapter 6 - Heart and Sole

  Chapter 6 - Model Behavior

  Chapter 5 - Thomas

  Chapter 6 - Blind Luck

  Chapter 6 - Love Is Blind?

  Chapter 5 - Matt

  Chapter 6 - Dance Fever

  Chapter 7 - A Fine Romance

  Chapter 7 - Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

  BOY SHOPPING

  LIKE THIS AND LIKE THAT

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Ghetto Superstar?

  Bree stretched out her calf muscles, which were stiff after a night of clubbing. Two of her vixen friends from the music video industry were visiting from LA, and they’d danced for hours. Today Bree was paying the price, and the freezing wind cutting through the trees of Central Park made it worse. Even in her hot pink, velvety Juicy Couture tracksuit she was cold. Bree’s running partner, downstairs neighbor, and best friend, Sutton, actually preferred running on winter mornings like this one; the cold made her run faster, and the sooner they finished their nine-mile route, the sooner she could hop into a hot shower. Bree preferred to run on the hot, humid days that exhausted Sutton. It was her mother Ameera’s Sudanese heritage coming out—Bree would be perfectly happy racing cheetahs across African savannahs, a million miles away from crowded New York City.

  Not that Bree minded life in New York. She just wasn’t one of those New-York-is-the-center-of-the-universe types. She spent almost as much time in Malibu at her dad’s as she did at her mom’s place on Central Park West. She had also traveled all over the world with her mother, who had returned to modeling two years ago after a fifteen-year retirement.

  Part of the problem with New York, at least in Bree’s opinion, was also one of the things that made it great: it rivaled LA as the entertainment capital of the world. Megastars like Beyoncé Knowles came to New York regularly—to make movies, record songs, buy the latest fashions. Tourists were constantly on the lookout for celebrities, their expensive digital cameras with telephoto lenses at the ready. And since Bree had both the good luck and the bad luck to look a lot like Beyoncé, all too often those cameras were focused on her.

  “Get over yourself,” Sutton said, balancing on one long, slim leg while hugging the other one to her chest in a classic quadriceps stretch. “I’d rather look like Beyoncé than a starving horse.”

  “You do not look like a horse,” Bree said for the millionth time. “You look like a Bergdorf blonde who hasn’t had her first boob job yet.”

  “Or my first nose job. Or collagen injection,” Sutton added unhappily.

  “You don’t need plastic surgery,” Bree insisted as she rose slowly to her feet. She really was awfully stiff. Way too much dancing last night, she thought. But she always overdid when Selah and Melikka were in town. Bree had been in a few videos herself, in the background in club scenes, but Selah and Melikka were the real thing: they made a thousand dollars a day dancing in videos. They were used to doing the same moves for twelve hours straight, until the director was happy with every aspect of the scene—and that was after days of rehearsal. So when they danced for fun, they could really move and they never got tired.

  But Bree wasn’t a professional dancer, and she didn’t want to be, either. Selah and Melikka were both twenty-two, and their careers would be over in five years. Bree had asked them once or twice what they were going to do then, but neither of them had a real answer, except, “Hopefully I’ll be married, so it won’t matter.” Bree knew how long LA marriages usually lasted—her parents had done pretty well with seven years—and she knew that anyone Selah and Melikka were likely to marry would demand an ironclad prenup. But what could she say to them that would make any difference? They were from the wrong side of LA, the kind of girls that Bree never would have met if they hadn’t been in so many of her father’s videos. But they knew how to take care of themselves—at least, Bree hoped they did.

  “Where is your head today?” Sutton asked, breaking into a slow jog down the path. They always started their run by the reservoir, near the center of the park, and then meandered through the park on the woody trails. “After You don’t need plastic surgery, you usually say, And you don’t really want it anyway. ”

  “You don’t want it, though,” Bree said, ignoring Sutton’s question. She didn’t want to get into a discussion with Sutton about Selah and Melikka’s problems. There was no way Sutton would understand. Her parents had started out as poor kids in Brooklyn, but after law school they turned themselves into five-star Manhattanites. Sutton’s mom had actually taken a class to lose every trace of her borough accent. Bree’s mother Ameera was the complete opposite: she dragged Bree to Dinka lessons at a language school near the UN once a week so that she would have someone to talk to in her native tongue.

  When Bree tried to discourage her friend from having plastic surgery, it didn’t help that Sutton’s mom was addicted to cosmetic procedures. She looked Barbie-perfect—if you ignored the faint scars along her jaw. But the first time the girls saw the drainage tubes after Mrs. Harris’s second tummy tuck, when she and Sutton were just eight, they both swore that they would never go under the knife.

  “Okay, I wouldn’t really have surgery just to look better,” Sutton agreed. From the look on her face, Bree could tell she was remembering one of her mother’s surgeries. “But I wouldn’t mind being supermodel gorgeous. Like you.”

  Bree rolled her eyes. They’d had this conversation a thousand times on a thousand different morning runs. She had memorized her lines perfectly a long time ago, but she was good at that. After all, she was an actress.

  “Sutton, you look more like a model than I do. You have to be tall and thin and elegant, not short and round. My butt is way too big—”

  “Your butt is not big!”

  “—for runway. And you need an oval face with sharp cheekbones, not a round face with a pointed chin. I look nothing like a model—”

  “Your mom is a model!”

  “And I look nothing like her. Which is actually a good thing. Because Mom is so beautiful she’s barely human. She could be a visitor from some planet with less light and less gravity, where everyone is six-and-a-half feet tall with eyes as big as hubcaps. Mom can’t play the girl next door, or the funny best friend, or somebody’s older sister. And if I want to act, I have to be able to do all those things.”

  “Fine, you don’t look like a model,” Sutton admitted as she stepped up the pace a little. Bree had to take two steps for each of Sutton’s longer strides. That was another thing about being shorter than her best friend—it made running together a lot harder. Good thing Bree loved a challenge. “But you’re still gorgeous.”

  “No. I’m just cute. People like Mom are gorgeous. And being cute hasn’t helped me any, except in acting jobs. Even then I never know how much of that is me, and how much is Dad helping me out.” She knew that he had everything to do with her presence in music videos, and though her agent claimed all the credit for getting her the two tiny bit parts in movies,
she suspected her dad had probably had something to do with that too.

  Most of the time, Bree appreciated her dad’s help. It was hard to get ahead in Hollywood without connections in the industry, even if you were pretty and a genuinely talented actress. But Bree always wondered if she could make it without her parents’ help—or if she would always owe all her success to Rashid and Ameera.

  “You’re a great actress, Bree.” Sutton actually slowed down a little, so Bree knew she was serious. “I mean, aren’t you screen testing for A World Apart today? That’s the real thing.”

  “It’s a soap opera!” Bree laughed—which was not good, since she needed to save her breath. They had miles and miles to go before heading to school for a quick shower and then class. Bree didn’t like a lot of things about their tiny, exclusive prep school—most of the boys, for instance—but the pristine locker rooms, with showers almost as nice as the ones in their apartment building, the Edwardian, weren’t on the list.

  “It’s an ongoing role in the most popular new soap on the air. That’s killer!” Sutton protested.

  “It’ll only be killer if I get it,” Bree said softly.

  “You’ll get it,” Sutton said with the perfect confidence she had about nearly everything except her looks, a blind spot that drove Bree crazy. After all, Sutton was the one who had to use every excuse in the book to fend off all the boys in their class at Rittenhouse Academy. Half the time Sutton claimed that she was going out with their friend Kylian, who had come out to Sutton and Bree during their freshman year. The rest of the time she made up stories about boys in boarding school, or mysterious older men. There wasn’t actually anything wrong with the guys at Rittenhouse, but Sutton and Bree had known most of them since preschool. The Rittenhouse boys had been their dates for cotillions, and probably would be their dates for weddings that would be covered in Vogue, but they weren’t guys they wanted to date for real.

  And they weren’t all that interested in Bree anyway. It had less to do with the race thing than with her career. According to Kylian, the guys at school were intimidated by Bree.

  “How could they find me intimidating?” she had asked one time, amazed. “They’ve known me since I didn’t have teeth.”

  “It’s the LA thing,” Kylian had explained. “They’ve seen you dancing with Usher and drinking coffee with Orlando Bloom.”

  “I wasn’t drinking coffee with Orlando Bloom. My character served coffee to Orlando Bloom’s character in a scene that was cut to twenty seconds.”

  “Whatever,” Kylian had shrugged. “You were in a movie. Two movies. That means you’re out of their league. But it’s not like you want to go out with them either.”

  “Still, I wouldn’t mind if they asked me out once in a while,” Bree had admitted in a small voice. It had been months since that conversation, but it rang in her ears as she and Sutton rounded the northern-most point of the reservoir trail.

  “I’d love to get a role in A World Apart,” Bree told Sutton. “But honestly, I think I’d rather have a boyfriend.”

  “Wait! What happened between you and Jake? I thought things were pretty hot.”

  “They were, until he realized that I wasn’t just playing hard to get.”

  Sutton laughed. “No one is that good an actress. Not even you.”

  “Someone should have told Jake that.”

  Bree and Jake had met at the cattle call for A World Apart and wound up hanging out at Starbucks afterwards, then getting Thai takeout and heading up to Bree’s apartment. Jake was hotter than Bree’s pad kee mao, with skin dark as wild honey and startling bright green eyes. After an intense half hour of spicy kisses on the sofa, Jake suggested that they move to the bedroom. Bree suggested that he move on home. The next two dates continued the pattern of fun hanging out, hot making out, and Bree ordering him out. On the fourth night, though, Jake really thought that he was going to see what Bree’s sheets looked like.

  But, contrary to every stereotype about actresses, and especially those who turned up in rap videos, Bree was not a slut. Technically she was still a virgin, though she had done some things that might qualify as sex, depending upon who you asked. The truth was that Bree had never really had a boyfriend. She had never even gone on more than five dates with the same guy. She met lots of them, of course, at auditions and clubs, but things never worked out. It always went one of three ways: One, the guy flipped when Bree wouldn’t put out on their third date. Two, Bree dumped him when he asked too many questions about her father and how to get into a music video. Three, Bree got bored.

  Usually it was option three. Guys asked her out because of how she looked, and she said yes because of how they looked, and after an hour or two of trying to talk to them, Bree realized that physical attraction was not enough to keep her interested.

  “So what did it take for Jake to finally get the message?” Sutton asked as they headed off the main path and into the woods.

  “I told him that if he didn’t cool down, I was going to bite off the next thing he tried to shove in my mouth.” Bree grinned, showing off her perfect white teeth.

  Sutton laughed so hard she had to stop, doubling over in the middle of the path.

  “I meant it, too,” Bree said, taking the chance to stretch her hamstrings while Sutton caught her breath. “I am so sick of trying to teach guys that no means no. That’s pretty basic English. Even dogs understand no!”

  “Some dogs are pretty smart,” Sutton said, easing back into her stride, Bree pounding along with her. “Boys, not so much.”

  “No kidding. Well, except Kylian, of course.” Bree loved having one guy in her life that she knew would never try to pressure her to do much of anything.

  “Well, obviously when I say guys I don’t mean Kylian.”

  “Hey now, you know how he hates us insulting his masculinity.”

  Sutton laughed again, a little more breathlessly this time. “I don’t think Kylian is smart because he’s gay. He’s smart because he’s our friend, and not so obsessed with getting laid that he can’t remember how to spell his first name.”

  “No, no, he’s our friend because he’s smart, not the other way around,” Bree insisted.

  “True. But he thinks we’re stupid for waking up early to run in the cold.”

  “He might be right,” Bree admitted. Her muscles were finally warming up, but every breath she dragged into her lungs was freezing cold. Still, the sun was sparkling on every frost-covered leaf beside the path. It was so bright, she almost missed the flash of a camera in the shadows beneath the trees.

  “Did you see that?” Sutton asked, slowing again.

  “Paparazzi,” Bree said, rolling her eyes.

  “You think?”

  “Who else photographs random strangers jogging through Central Park?”

  “Some kind of perv who gets off on teenagers in sports bras.” Sutton turned and sped up, running for the bushes so fast Bree didn’t think she could keep up.

  “Hey, asshole!” Sutton shouted. “I never said you could take my picture! Do you know what a release is, dickwad?”

  A man not much older than Bree burst out from behind an evergreen bush and took off, an expensive camera with a telephoto lens in one hand. Sutton pounded after him, still screaming, Bree trailing behind her. She would have laughed if she weren’t so surprised. This was not exactly standard Sutton behavior. If anything, Bree was usually the one flipping out and screaming her head off—though she was much more likely to scream at idiots on the dance floor who thought that two girls dancing together were just waiting for a man to grind them. Sutton might take a minor injustice and launch a major crusade out of it, but Bree had never seen her scream at anyone, ever, not even Kylian at his most infuriating.

  The photographer had to have been a track star in his former life, because he made it halfway to the pond before Sutton nailed him, shoving him from behind. The camera went flying, and Bree caught it almost by reflex. She didn’t really care about the pictures. The phot
ographer would understand his mistake when his editor pointed out that the real Beyoncé was taller, had longer, blonder hair, and a much larger cup size.

  “We’re under eighteen, jerkface—know what that means?” Sutton screamed down at the cowering photographer. “New York has all kinds of laws about photographing minors!”

  “She’s twenty-five!” he answered, pointing at Bree accusingly.

  “She may look twenty-five, but I have been at every birthday party she has ever thrown, buddy, and she is definitely seventeen.”

  “I know she’s twenty-five! That party Jay-Z threw for her twenty-fifth birthday—”

  “Give me a break!” Sutton slapped her own forehead in amazement. “You were hiding in the bushes just in case a celebrity came jogging by? You must be new to this paparazzi stuff.”

  “I had a tip,” he said, rifling through his coat pockets for his press ID.

  Sutton examined it closely, then shrugged at Bree. “I can understand some random tourist mistaking you for Beyoncé, or a bouncer in a dark club, but this is just ridiculous.”

  Bree raised her eyebrows. Ridiculous, yes. But lots of things about her life were ridiculous.

  “Here’s your camera,” she said, handing it back to the still-shaken photographer. He scrambled to his feet and took off running, glancing nervously over his shoulder at Sutton every few feet.

  “I think I pulled something,” Sutton said, balancing on one foot while she twisted the other ankle in slow circles.

  “Well, that’s what you get for sprinting when we’re supposed to be doing long, slow distance,” Bree pointed out.

  “That’s what I get for going running with a goddess,” Sutton said, limping to the nearest bench.

  “Which one is the running goddess? Nike? Artemis?” Bree’s best subject was drama, of course, but she didn’t pay much attention in English class, unless they were reading a play.

  “I don’t know. One of the virgin goddesses, I think.” Sutton’s face, already red from running, turned even brighter. “Oops. I didn’t mean to say that.”