Where the Grass Is Green and the Girls Are Pretty Read online

“I would have made a good boy mom, I think.” Peyton nodded thoughtfully.

  “I’m pretty sure in Paradise they’re spinning for boys. There is no way that many families are having all those boys naturally.”

  “Your town is so fucked up.” Peyton tucked her blond hair behind an ear. “Why would anyone want boys that badly?”

  “Sports, I think. The more boys you have, the more seasons you can cover and the more fields you can sit on and carpools you can drive and practices you can attend and teams you can coach. My working theory is that it’s a way for unhappily married couples to avoid having to spend a second of time together on the weekends.”

  Peyton laughed. “I did warn you when you moved to the suburbs.” She held her hands up. “I know, I know—outstanding schools, Gabe’s job. But what did you expect? It’s a tough crowd.” She pushed back her chair. “Let’s get out of here?”

  They paid the check and wove through the restaurant, past the now friendly hostess, and out onto the sidewalk. A mother and daughter pair did a simultaneous double take when they spotted Peyton, who offered an enthusiastic wave and a bright smile.

  “I don’t know how you do it,” Skye said, watching the exchange.

  “What?”

  “Constantly cater to your adoring public. Don’t you ever want to go somewhere and not be recognized? Especially on a weekend.”

  “Nope.”

  Skye laughed. “You’re a lunatic. I love you.” She hoisted her scruffy bag onto her shoulder and held out her arms.

  “Love you, too,” Peyton said, walking into Skye’s outstretched arms. “Send me ideas for Mom’s present. And we have to get on a birthday plan for her soon.”

  “Copy that,” Skye said. “By ‘we,’ I’m assuming you mean me?”

  “Yes.” Her sister made a mock-guilty face. “You’re so much better at this stuff.”

  They hugged goodbye, blocking the flow of pedestrian traffic on Madison Avenue. Skye pulled back quickly, unwilling to inconvenience strangers. Peyton laughed at her.

  “Love you,” Peyton said, offering a little flat-palmed wave like Queen Elizabeth at the Trooping of the Guard.

  “Love you, too.” Skye stepped out of everyone’s way and watched her sister stride down the street like it was a runway in Paris. Peyton could be self-absorbed and showy, sometimes downright impossible, but Skye couldn’t deny that she loved that crazy bitch.

  2

  Good Things Come to Those Who Pay

  “Back from commercial break in sixty seconds, stand by!”

  Peyton sipped her coffee from her All News Network mug and turned her head sideways, toward the makeup artist who’d materialized to powder Peyton’s forehead. The cameramen adjusted their positions for the upcoming segment while Sean, the EP, called over the studio’s audio system. “Homestretch, everyone! Only six more minutes to the weekend.”

  Peyton could see a few people in the control room give a cheer. It had been a long week, and everyone was anxious to get home to their real lives that weren’t counted in thirty-second increments or rated on a segment-by-segment basis. The living that took place outside the brutal hours of five to eight in the morning, the blazing studio lights, and the relentless, unforgiving pressure of live national television.

  Jim, her co-host, returned to their shared desk and lumbered to his anchor chair. Peyton wondered if Jim’s frequent bathroom visits during commercial breaks were actually a cover for a quick set of bicep curls.

  “TFGIF,” he said, reinserting his earpiece. He smoothed his hair back, but not a strand moved under his industrial-strength lacquer spray. “A full bottle every three days,” he’d often bragged.

  It’s not that Peyton didn’t like Jim, it was just that…well, fine. She didn’t like him. He was a damn good anchor, no arguing that, and their audience, which skewed female, absolutely loved his on-air personality—a kitchen-sink mixture of hyper-masculinity, unwavering positivity, and, when required, something that very closely resembled empathy. However, when the cameras were off, he reverted to his authentic self.

  “Am I right?” he asked Peyton, looking at her.

  “Huh?” Peyton asked. She’d just remembered that she needed to make a dentist appointment for that afternoon.

  “Thirty seconds!” the loudspeakers announced. A PA appeared to refill both their water glasses.

  “TFGIF,” Jim repeated. “Get it? Thank fucking god it’s Friday.”

  “Mmm.” Peyton forced a smile as she pulled out the small Moleskine she kept in their anchor desk, in which she wrote down the constant to-dos she only remembered when least able to act.

  Book dentist for 5 pm, she scribbled, before another thought occurred to her. Max had to schedule herself dentist, doctor, and gyn checkups before she left for college at the end of the summer.

  “Twenty seconds!”

  As she wrote, Jim took a loud, slurpy slug of whatever was in his ANN mug. Peyton wondered, for the thousandth time, if his coffee was laced with cocaine or crushed Adderall or at the very least some sort of black-market testosterone supplement. What else could make a seemingly normal man that aggressive?

  “Ten seconds!”

  Jim cleared his throat, pulled back his shoulders, and began making intimate eye contact with Camera 3, the one that would lead them back from commercial break.

  “Peyton? You good?” Sean asked, this time through her earpiece.

  She nodded. Dammit! She’d forgotten to check back with Skye about her mother’s birthday. She circled the reminder, making it priority number one.

  “And we have five, four…”

  “Peyton, for chrissakes, move it!” Sean’s tone was spiked with irritation.

  “…three, two…”

  She closed her notebook.

  The set went silent. Camera 3’s red light blinked to indicate they were live. Peyton felt a surge of calmness. It was the opposite of an adrenaline rush, a sudden feeling of complete tranquility. Her brain, ping-ponging only seconds earlier, settled into that hyper-focused sweet spot, and Peyton morphed, without the least bit of effort, into her trademark warm composure.

  “Welcome back,” she said, smiling straight into Camera 3 as though it were a living room full of her favorite people. “To close out this Friday, we’d like to share with you one family’s incredible story of fortitude and love,” Peyton read from the teleprompter. They always tried to end the week with a fuzzy human-interest story to leave viewers feeling less suicidal about the state of the world.

  “Logan Pierce is a nine-year-old boy who loves drawing, Legos, and cheering on the Astros from his family’s home outside of Houston,” Peyton read with just the right mix of gravitas and admiration, even though she was wondering which segment producer’s pet border collie had written that moronic script. “So imagine the Pierce family’s horror when Logan was diagnosed with pediatric lymphoma, a rare and life-threatening disease.” But then, the mother’s dignified sadness as she recounted Logan’s diagnosis, treatment, and ultimate recovery captured Peyton’s attention completely, an almost unheard-of phenomenon when she was on air and needed to juggle so many competing inputs. She was so absorbed by the woman’s voice—and Logan’s obvious sweetness as he cradled his infant sister—that she almost missed Sean’s urgent breaking news announcement in her ear.

  Her eyes darted to the control room, which had transformed from a calm, finely choreographed ballet to a chaotic rave. She glanced at the enormous digital clock above the cameras that counted the time to the second. Shit. They were still five full minutes away from eight o’clock, which meant that the breaking news would need to be announced on their watch.

  “I’ll take it,” Jim murmured into his microphone. On the monitors in front of them, Logan’s doctor described the effects of lymphoma on children.

  “Negative,” Sean’s voice came back. “Too disru
ptive. Bad enough we have to cut short the kid. Go to commercial when this B-roll ends.”

  Both anchors nodded their understanding.

  “They’re writing up the intro now but it’ll only be thirty seconds’ worth of material,” Sean continued. “The charges and a brief description. From there I’ll talk you through it.”

  With this, Peyton felt a small jolt of anxiety. It wasn’t panic, exactly, but something uncomfortable enough that it made her sit up straighter and breathe a little faster. Breaking news was always unpredictable.

  The tape ended, and when the camera switched back to Peyton, she calmly told the viewers that they’d be back after a quick break. Almost immediately all hell broke loose.

  “This better be worth it,” Peyton said aloud to no one in particular.

  “Seriously,” Jim echoed. “We just bailed on a kid with cancer!”

  One of the segment producers, Jenna, a prodigy in her mid-twenties who they’d recently poached from Fox News, announced, “FBI just confirmed simultaneous arrests for twenty-two individuals, some high profile, all charged with felony conspiracy and/or mail fraud.”

  “Who gives a fuck about mail fraud?” Jim boomed, reading Peyton’s mind.

  Jenna ignored him. “All twenty-two are affluent parents accused of buying their kids’ way into elite universities,” she told them through their earpieces.

  “Thirty seconds!” came a voice over the loudspeaker.

  Peyton felt a flush of adrenaline. “What do we know? Are we ready?”

  Sean burst into the studio, a stack of papers in one hand and his signature large black glasses in the other. “Jenna, prompter?” he asked into the ether.

  Jenna’s disembodied voice confirmed that the teleprompter was set.

  “I have enough information here to get us to the end of the show,” Sean said, waving the printouts. “Read the prompter slowly, and we’ll take it together from there.”

  “Ten seconds!”

  Sean went back behind the control room’s glass wall. Peyton watched as he pulled on his headset and jabbed his finger at the graphics guy.

  “Buckle up, Buttercup,” Jim said, once again arranging his face into an impressive facade of empathy.

  “…three, two, one…”

  Camera 2 switched on, the one they primarily used for close-ups, and Peyton’s eyes found the teleprompter.

  “We are interrupting the emotional story of Logan Pierce to bring you breaking news,” Peyton read, wondering if the slight waver she heard in her own voice was real or imagined. “ANN has confirmed that the FBI has arrested twenty-two parents of college applicants across four states and accused them of purchasing their children’s admissions to certain elite universities. While we don’t yet have many of the specifics, sources have confirmed that at least three of these parents are high-profile individuals.”

  The teleprompter stopped scrolling. She knew it had merely run out of words—those were the only sentences that Jenna had time to type—but Peyton stopped breathing. It was only Sean’s voice in her ear that kept her from total panic. No anchor liked ad-libbing blind to millions of viewers.

  “Breathe!” he barked. “I got you.”

  And as she inhaled, Sean relayed nugget-sized bits of noninformation to Peyton, which she synthesized and regurgitated back to the cameras: “No comment yet from the College Board”; “Waiting to hear from the Manhattan district attorney”; “The largest conspiracy ever involving college admissions.”

  Then Sean barked, “Jim, ask Peyton when we’ll know more!”

  Jim, without missing a beat, turned his upper body toward Peyton, furrowed his brow, and said, “When can we expect more information on this developing story?”

  Sean said, “Peyton, end it,” seconds before Peyton returned Jim’s look and smoothly—she hoped—replied, “Our time this morning is just about up, but Suzanna and Alejandro will be closely following this story all throughout the nine o’clock hour.” She turned back to Camera 1 on her left diagonal and said, “Stay right here for all the details on this emerging scandal. We are Peyton Marcus and Jim Atwood, and we’ll see you bright and early Monday morning.”

  There was a three-second pause where no one moved, and then Sean announced, “We’re clear!”

  The studio broke into applause.

  Sean materialized in front of the anchor desk. “Loved that you called it a scandal,” he said, a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead. “Juicy!”

  “Thanks for carrying me,” Peyton said, her heart thumping hard in her chest. She pulled out her earpiece and collapsed back into her chair.

  “Good show,” Jim said, removing his earpiece. He stood up, towering over Peyton and Sean. He had the body of a former college football player and an uncanny knack for working the phrases “when I played football at Clemson” and “during my QB days” and “there’s no training for life like D1 football” into regular conversation, to the point where Peyton felt like she should do a shot of Jäger every time he used one of them.

  “Anyway, I’m out, girls,” he announced, grinning at Sean to show how totally cool he was with Sean’s gayness. “Have great weekends. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do….” He offered a meaty hand in a wave and barreled toward his dressing room.

  “Is he wearing Drakkar?” Sean asked, scrunching his nose. He turned back toward his office. “Walk with me.”

  Peyton unclipped her microphone and jumped down off her seat. “Do we know anything else?” she asked.

  “About?”

  “About the college thing! I mean, we have covered this before, have we not? Is this really still a thing?” Peyton hurried along the corridor behind him.

  He pushed his office door open and flopped into his desk chair. “It’s always a thing. I’d bet half my class at Stanford got in by rowing or playing volleyball. Or tennis. So much tennis. These idiot parents certainly take it up a notch, but it never gets old hearing what the wealthy will do to get their kids into Ivy League schools.”

  Peyton accepted the bottle of water he passed her. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was. Her breathing returned to normal. “Yeah, you’re right,” Peyton said, nodding. “This goes on all the time, I’m sure. But these parents are probably different, at least if they were like the last ones: literally faking photos of their kids and paying strangers to take tests for them. I mean, who does that?”

  “Exactly.” Sean’s desktop phone rang. “Yeah? On my way.” He stood up again. “Gotta run. If I don’t see you before you leave, have a great weekend.” He kissed her on the cheek and pulled the door shut behind him. It was a small courtesy but a fortunate one, since Peyton felt a wave of nausea wash over her. Probably just lingering adrenaline, she thought. The parents getting rounded up were nothing like her or any of the thousands of other parents who killed themselves giving their kids every possible advantage. Still, it was unsettling. A second round of this, after they’d all just put the first one to bed? Peyton took one last sip before she dropped to her knees and swiftly vomited up the entire contents of her stomach into Sean’s elegant wooden wastebasket.

  * * *

  —

  It only took thirteen minutes in an Uber—a record—to get to her private gym at Seventy-fourth and Madison, a second-floor loft space so gorgeous that it could easily be mistaken for a movie set. Tucked into one of the spacious, private changing pods, each featuring a steam shower and vanity stocked with Malin+Goetz products, plus a lounge area with a loveseat and gas fireplace, Peyton stripped off her sapphire-blue sheath dress. She yanked on a pair of cropped leggings and a tank with a built-in bra. It took four premoistened makeup remover wipes to clean off the extra-thick layer of TV foundation and a half dozen swipes with a boar bristle brush to break up the industrial-strength hairspray, and although every inch of her body screamed to sit down on the plush sofa—just for a minute!—she wil
led herself to keep moving.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” Kendric said to her, swatting her with a towel when she entered the cardio area. “Great show today. Now get on there and move that ass.”

  Peyton saluted and headed to the nearest treadmill. Sometimes she missed the frenetic energy of Equinox, but not the fact that everyone recognized her and would either stare at her, sneak pictures, or, worst of all, approach her for a chat. But here, at the hidden oasis that called itself a gym but charged like it was a fractional jet service, there were only two men in their sixties on adjacent treadmills and one woman in her twenties working distressingly hard on a stair-climber. Otherwise the place was empty. Abandoned! It was beautiful.

  Peyton claimed the treadmill in pole position and plugged in her earbuds.

  While she waited for the screen to load ANN, she set the pace to a brisk 6.0 with a 4 incline to get warmed up but was distracted by her own appearance in the fully mirrored wall. Lord. Not good. Everyone looooved to talk about how the wheels came off at forty, and Peyton always smiled and nodded and was not the least bit worried that it would affect her whatsoever. She’d spent her teens, twenties, and the first nine years of her thirties doing whatever she damn well pleased, and it never mattered. She’d smoked for a decade. Drank way too much. Ate like a teenage boy. Barely worked out. Never got more than five hours of sleep a night. And still, despite the fact that she was only five-five, which was at least four inches shorter than she would have liked, she’d always been trim, tight, and toned. But now? Still nine months shy of forty? It was a horror show. The barely noticeable lines around her eyes had become trenches. Her skin was sallow and gray, no matter how much she spent on exfoliators or eye creams or face oils. There was hair everywhere, except where it should be. And her body? It was like a switch had been activated that made her stomach paunch out, her boobs sag, and her ass start to spread in all the wrong directions.

  When she’d shown up, nearly hysterical, at her OB’s office, her doctor nodded knowingly. “Perimenopause,” she said. “Normal.”