its presence, as though she still held it in her hands. It was impossible to believe it had happened to her again. Now she had three. She beamed at Val, and was startled to see something chilly in her eyes, something she had never recognized quite that clearly before. It wasn't just anger this time, it was jealousy.
“It was all right. You must be pretty pleased with yourself.” They were unkind words, and no one else seemed to hear them quite the way Faye did, but they were aimed straight at her heart, and Val had hit her mark.
“It's very exciting, it always is, I guess.”
Val shrugged as she looked at her. “I hear they give them out of sympathy sometimes.” The comment was so outrageous that Faye laughed at her.
“I don't think I'm quite that over the hill yet, although you never know.” And of course it was true, sometimes they passed one up and then made it up the next year, although they denied that it worked that way, but everyone felt that it did. “Is that what you think this was, Val?” Her mother searched her eyes. “Sympathy?”
“Who knows?” She shrugged indifferently and looked out the window again as they drove up to the house. It irked her that Faye had won and she made no secret of it. She was the first to leave the car, to reach her room, to close the door, and she never mentioned the Oscar again, not even to Anne the next day. Or when her friends mentioned it in school, and congratulated her. That seemed strange, she had nothing to do with it after all and what did she care anyway? So she just shrugged and said, “Yeah, so what? Big deal.” And changed the subject to something that interested her like the Supremes. She was sick of hearing about Faye Thayer. She wasn't so hot. And one day, she would show all of them, she would be an actress who would make Faye Price Thayer look pale by comparison. She only had a few months left before she could get out there and show them her stuff, and she could hardly wait. She'd show them all. To hell with her Mom … three Oscars? So what anyway?
CHAPTER 28
The twins graduated from high school two months after Faye won the Academy Award, and Greg came home for the summer just in time to attend the graduation ceremony at his old school.
This year their eyes were dry. Ward leaned over to Faye halfway through the ceremony to say “I feel as though they should be giving us a diploma by now.” Faye giggled softly and rolled her eyes. He was right, and they would be back again four years from now, for Anne. It seemed to go on forever. And in two years, Greg would be graduating from the University of Alabama. They seemed to be spending half their life watching young people line up in gowns and mortarboards. But it was touching when the twins got theirs, in spite of how many times they'd seen it before. They wore simple white dresses beneath their gowns. Vanessa's totally plain with a high neck and embroidered hem, Val's a slightly too dressy organdie with a pair of very sexy high heels that set off her legs. But the shoes weren't Faye's biggest disagreement with her. Valerie had staunchly refused to apply to any college, East or West. She was going to model, act, and in her spare time go to acting school, and not the drama department at UCLA, the kind where “real actors” went between jobs, to perfect their skills. She was sure she would find herself in classes with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford and she was equally sure that she was going to set the world on fire, despite everything Ward and Faye said to her.
It had been a heated argument for the past several months, and she was more stubborn than either of them. In desperation, Ward had told her he wouldn't support her if she didn't go to school, and that seemed to suit her fine. Someone had told her about a coven of young actresses in West Hollywood; for only a hundred and eighteen dollars a month, she could have a bed and share a room. Two of the actresses had jobs on soaps, one of them did porno films, though Val didn't tell her parents that, one was a big star in a horror film