wiggled. “I miss home.”
“I know. You’ll make new friends here.”
“I liked my old friends.”
Julian nodded. “But they were not particularly good for you.”
“How do you know people here will be better for me? Maybe I’ll find even worse friends.”
He inclined his head, mentally flipping through the parental handbook to see if there was a proper answer to a veiled threat. She had been in serious trouble in LA, running with a crowd of kids whose parents had too much money and not enough time. Left to their own devices, with far too many resources, they drugged and drank in great quantities.
“I’m sure you can if you try,” he said after a minute. “There must be some stoner snowboarders around. Probably some speed freaks, too, and hey—if you try, I bet you can find some abusive alcoholic boyfriend to punish me with.”
She pursed her sullen lips, unpainted and sweet as a Kewpie doll’s. Just now, she was still slightly blurry, a soft-edged version of the woman she would be in a few years, but one day she would be a tremendous beauty—a gift that would be more burden than blessing if he didn’t figure out how to help her develop the right tools to manage it. If the movies had taught him anything, it was that Beauty often self-destructed.
“I hate my life.” Portia blinked back tears. “How’m I supposed to know what to do?”
“Maybe you could listen to your dad, huh? You’re only fourteen. You’re not supposed to have all the answers.”
She shrugged.
“What I’d like to see you do here is make a fresh start. Make friends with kids who have goals and dreams, who want to do something with their lives.”
“Oh, like jocks and cheerleaders?”
“Since you’re a natural athlete, I would like to see you mix it up with some jocks, actually. But maybe spend time figuring out what you love and find other people who love those things, too. Just find friends who want to believe in life instead of making fun of it.”
A little of the tension eased away from her body. “I guess.”
Julian mentally wiped sweat from his parental brow. Whew. Right answer. For once.
Flinging herself forward to perch elbows on her knees, she said, “I have an interview with somebody for community service tomorrow. What do you think it will be? My friend Aida is working at a museum. That would be so boring I’d want to kill myself.”
Aida was one of the friends Portia had gotten in trouble with, the anorexic daughter of a pop star. “It’s hard to imagine her in a museum. What is she doing?”
“She says she’s giving tours, but I think she’s cleaning bathrooms.” Portia made a face. “Gross. Will I have to do something like that?”
He knew a lot of people who’d had to spend time in community service, mostly for drinking-and-driving offenses. Portia had a lot of hours to work off. “It seems like there are a lot of jobs out there, kiddo. My suggestion is to think of something you wouldn’t mind doing as a volunteer, then see if they have anything like that.”
“Like what? They probably don’t have anything to do with fashion.”
“Probably not.” He thought a minute. “Something with animals? Maybe skiing? God knows there’s plenty of skiing here.”
“Get off the skiing, Dad. I’m not going to ski. It makes your thighs fat.”
“Muscular,” he corrected, but raised a hand to stop the argument before it continued. He’d chosen Aspen in particular because he believed she could not live here when the slopes were open and continue to resist the lure. “Okay. Animals, then.”
“I’ll think about it. Can I get on the Internet?”
He grinned and passed the laptop over to her. She was only allowed access to the Internet through this laptop, and only in his company. She probably did go to Internet cafés, but that was limited access, too, so he looked the other way. “All you had to do was ask.”
“This is stupid, too, you know,” she said, flipping open the laptop.
“Probably.” He doodled circles on his page. In one, he wrote, sorrow.
“You don’t have time for this, to monitor my every move. You have movies to make. People to see.”
He grinned without looking up from the page, and drew a line between two circles. Descent, he wrote into the second circle.
“Are you working on a new movie now?”
“Sort of. It’s not going that well.”
She tapped something into the keyboard and waited, her poreless skin bathed with blue-white light. “You want my opinion, slasher pics