Lauren Conrad - Infamous

To Max Stubblefield.

Little of what I have today would be possible without your guidance and friendship. Thank you for always sticking by me . . . and for being “singing guy.”

CONTENTS

Dedication

1 - A Turn for the Better

2 - The Rules of Unofficial Cohabitation

3 - Don’t Make Me Call Them Myself

4 - The Voice of an Angel

5 - How to Make an Entrance

6 - Cue the Hollywood Hunks

7 - Going Nowhere but Up

8 - Whoever Said Dreams Can’t Come True

9 - The Nature of the Business

10 - Larger Than Life

11 - Things Are About to Change

12 - An Entirely Different Person

13 - A Regular Cupid

14 - The Time of My Life

15 - Spicing Up a Story Line

16 - Bigger. Better. Brighter.

17 - A Little Red Carpet Thing

18 - A Short Communication Break

19 - Don’t Worry, Babe, I Still Like You

20 - Pretty Good While It Lasted

21 - A Star Waiting to Shine

22 - You Get One Chance

23 - A Lover, Not a Fighter

24 - Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You

25 - A Long, Emotional Road

26 - Look What the Cat Dragged In

27 - A Bright Side to Everything

28 - That Is Genius

29 - A Little Bit Brighter

30 - A Lot of History

31 - The Source of So Much Drama

32 - Another Chance

33 - Totally Unexpected

Epilogue - Moments in the Sun

Acknowledgments

Books by Lauren Conrad

Copyright

About the Publisher

Madison Parker poured two large glasses of iced tea and walked, slightly slower than usual, to the table in her sunny kitchen nook. “I have sugar,” she said, placing the glasses on two shell-pink linen cocktail napkins, “if you want any sweetener.”

Kate Hayes raised her eyebrows in surprise, and Madison noted that her friend must have finally started taking some of her beauty advice. Kate’s brows were perfectly tinted and shaped, as if she’d just stepped out of Anastasia Beverly Hills. Good-bye, strawberry-blond caterpillars, Madison thought. You won’t be missed.

“You have actual sugar?” Kate asked. “I thought you were a Splenda-only kind of girl?”

Madison sat down across from her. Carefully. The recovery from her most recent cosmetic procedure had taken a little longer than she’d hoped. She looked fantastic, but she still felt a bit sore. “I think it was left here from the previous tenant,” she allowed. “Along with that hideous mirror in the bathroom.”

Kate glanced around at the small apartment, as if she hadn’t been here a dozen times checking in on post-op Madison. Kate was the only person Madison had been willing to see, so she was Madison’s source for take-out sushi, issues of the weekly mags, and information on shoots for the new season of The Fame Game. Like how bad it was going. How flat the scenes were, how empty the fake-impromptu dinner parties. And Madison loved hearing it.

“Was that spider plant left over, too?” Kate asked, nodding her head in its direction.

“No,” Madison admitted. “That’s mine.”

She followed Kate’s gaze. The spider plant was dying, and—there was no getting around it—the apartment was pretty depressing. The kitchen was the nicest room in the whole place, which was ironic for a person who rarely ate and who definitely never cooked.

She’d moved into it the day after her sudden exit from The Fame Game, because it was cheap (for L.A., anyway) and available.

This lack of foresight, real-estate-wise, was only one of the things Madison had come to regret. The days immediately after her on-camera explosion at the hospital were dark ones. She hadn’t fully understood what PopTV meant for her, either personally or professionally. So, for the first time in her life, she was utterly alone, with absolutely nothing on her iCal.

Nothing but the remainder of her community-service hours, that is. Since she couldn’t face Ryan Tucker (her ex? her former friend-with-benefits?), Madison claimed a sudden onset of life-threatening pet-dander allergies and requested a transfer from Lost Paws.

Connie Berkley, the straight-talking paper-pusher from the L.A. County court system, granted it grudgingly, and Madison spent the next two weeks picking up beer cans, cigarette butts, and fast-food wrappers in a Los Feliz park. She had to wear bad sneakers and a hideous Day-Glo orange vest, and the three other people working with her were beyond offensive. But at least none of them were named Ryan. At least none of them had taken her heart and stomped on it.

Every day she came home, sweaty and hot, to an apartment filled with pretty but generic furniture she’d gotten free from Crate & Barrel (she promised them she’d do an “at-home” shoot for one of the weeklies). There was no Gaby to greet her, and there were no cameras to film her. If it weren’t for Kate, and for her dog, Samson, Madison would have been seriously depressed.

When she felt especially sorry for herself, Madison did her best to remember how things could always be worse. For instance: She hadn’t OD’d by mistake, the way Gaby had, and she wasn’t now in a locked-down rehab facility. (No at-home shoots there!) Gaby had been in treatment at the Hope Medical Center in Malibu for almost six weeks now. No doubt she was going to countless individual and group therapy sessions and getting really good at Ping-Pong.

Or was it mental hospitals where they played Ping-Pong? Madison would have to ask her, if it didn’t sound too rude.

They’d been in touch a few times since Gaby’s OD, but the Hope staff had confiscated Gaby’s cell phone and limited her computer time, so their interactions had been brief. Also, the moment Madison finished up her community service, she’d hopped on a plane to Mexico to regroup. It was her own personal emotional rehab.

She didn’t tell anyone she was going (except for Kate, who had agreed to dog-sit Samson); she simply vanished. And it felt great.

In a small town an hour outside of Cabo, Madison took long walks on the beach, ignored Trevor’s five thousand phone calls, and came to a major decision. She was not done with reality TV, but she was definitely done with trying to play nice. She’d been burned by Charlie, Ryan, and Sophie (twice). It was about time she remembered that a girl couldn’t trust anyone but herself.

“Madison,” Trevor’s voice mails always said, “we really have to talk.”

She took great pleasure in deleting each one. She’d talk to him when she was good and ready.

But all too soon, it was time for her to return to L.A. While Madison could plot her comeback beneath a palapa on a Mexican beach, she could hardly accomplish it from there.