Lauren Conrad - The Fame Game

Kate was taken aback. It was one thing to be recognized in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, but in L.A.? Sure, her YouTube video had gone viral, ever since Courtney Love had tweeted something barely comprehensible about it (whos this brillient chica I found bymistake loveher!), the girls over at HelloGiggles.com had made her a pick of the day, and Rolling Stone had done a small profile of her on its website. Kate still had no idea how all that had happened, but it had made her, briefly, just a little bit famous.

But hey, this was Los Angeles, land of a thousand people who were just a little bit famous. It was a sea of Where do I know you from? faces where nearly everyone had had a brief encounter with celebrity only to have it taken away just as swiftly.

Dana had asked her to come in for a screen test, and Kate had surprised herself by agreeing. But as she sat in a small, sparely decorated room with Dana and a single camera, Kate had to fight the urge to downplay the video, which she’d made on a lark last year with her ex-boyfriend. She’d had no idea Ethan was going to upload it to the web, and they’d gotten into a huge fight once she found out he had. But then people started commenting on the video, liking it and sharing it and reposting it. Everyone had agreed that her voice was incredible, unusual. Like Lucinda Williams meets Joni Mitchell, watched over by the ghost of Nina Simone, someone wrote. (And it hadn’t hurt that as she’d strummed the last chords of the song, Ethan’s Bernese mountain dog had flat-out howled, as if he couldn’t bear to live in a world in which Kate Hayes was no longer singing. That got all the dog lovers on her team faster than you could say Purina Brand Puppy Chow.)

The problem with the video was that it wasn’t her music, which Kate had been writing obsessively ever since she was eleven years old and started teaching herself to play her dad’s old guitar. It was someone else’s. Which meant that the video was, in a way, just a glorified version of karaoke.

But it was enough to make you pack up your things and move to L.A., Kate reminded herself. It was enough to make you think you might be able to make it.

Yes, she could admit it: She’d thought her video would be the beginning of something. But ever since she’d arrived in L.A. it had seemed like more of a dead end.

Speaking of dead ends, Kate was now stuck in traffic. Again. Even though she’d been in the city for a year, she still hadn’t figured out how to get anywhere on time. She checked the clock—she had twenty minutes to get to Trevor Lord’s office, which was probably thirty minutes away at this rate. She glanced next at the little brass chime that hung from her rearview mirror, something her mother called “the bell of safe travel.” Marlene Hayes said it would protect against accidents on the crowded L.A. freeways. But as Kate sat in the exhaust cloud of a Cadillac Escalade, stopped at yet another red light, she wished her mother had given her a bell of speedy travel. That she could have used.

She figured she might as well multitask and felt around for an eyeliner in the bottom of her purse. Obviously she hoped Trevor would appreciate her talent, but it couldn’t hurt to put on some makeup. As she finished smudging the black kohl a touch, her phone buzzed beside her on the passenger seat. She picked up. “I’m late,” she said into the mouthpiece, not even caring to whom she was talking.

“Well, that’s certainly a surprise,” said the cheerful voice on the other end of the line.

“Oh, hey, Jess,” Kate said. Jessica was her sister, older by fifteen months and taller by five inches. She was calling from Durham, North Carolina, where she played center on the Duke women’s basketball team. “What’s up?”

“Just calling to check in on my favorite chanteuse. That’s French for singer, you know.”

Kate snorted. “Just because I didn’t go straight to college doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.”

“I know, I’m just kidding. How are you?”

Kate thought about this for a moment before answering. She hardly talked to her sister these days (Jess was so busy with classes and basketball practice), and Kate didn’t want to sound like a bummer. On the other hand, they were best friends and blood relations, and there was no reason to lie. “Well, I’m stuck in traffic. I’m late for an interview. There are termites in my apartment building. And I went to an open mic last night and couldn’t even get on stage.”

“Oh, Katie,” Jessica said, her tone sympathetic.

“Yeah, I know. I drove all the way to Glendale for some singer-songwriter thing, and then fifteen minutes before I was supposed to get on stage my hands started to tingle and my stomach, like, grew a bowling ball inside of it. I took two tequila shots at the bar, but it only made me feel worse. So I turned around and drove home.”

Kate sighed as she finished her story. Not for the first time, she pondered the irony of a person with major stage fright hoping to make it in the entertainment business. No doubt her sister was thinking the same thing, but Jess was too nice to state the obvious. She would never, for example, bring up Kate’s sophomore year in high school, when she waited for ten hours to audition for American Idol and made it past the pre-screening round, only to panic and bomb on stage. (You might want to reconsider your career aspirations, Simon Cowell had said, not unkindly.)

“You’re in excellent company,” Jess soothed. “Think about Cat Power. She was so crippled by stage fright, she could only sing in utter darkness. But then she got over it.”

Ahead of Kate, the Escalade started inching forward. She gingerly tapped the gas pedal. “So you think there’s hope for me? Or am I just being crazy?” she asked wistfully.

“Of course there’s hope,” Jess said. “Like my coach says, you just need to keep dribbling.”

An image of herself holding a guitar in one hand and trying to dribble a basketball with the other popped into Kate’s head. She gave a little laugh as she clutched the phone tighter in her hand. (She really needed to get a headset; one of these days some cop was going to bust her.) “The thing is, I’m sort of stalled,” she admitted. “I mean, I’ve been here since graduation. That’s over a year, which means I’ve got another year to make something happen before Mom comes out here, ties me up, drags me back to Columbus, and forces me into college.”

“But you’re trying,” Jess said. “You made more awesome videos. And didn’t you write, like, ten songs in the last few months?”

“Yes, but no one hears them,” Kate wailed. “I just sing and play for myself!”

Thinking about this made Kate want to pull over to the side of the road and curl up in the backseat of her hand-me-down Saab. The thing was, she’d lied to Dana about what she’d been doing to further her music career. Oh sure, she’d told her, I do open mics all the time! And Dana had nodded, looking pleased; an open mic was pretty much a talent show, and who didn’t love a talent show? It’d be like a mini acoustic American Idol. No fancy lights, no celebrity judges, just some would-be musicians with their instruments and their songs. America would love it!

But of course Kate’s real attempts at furthering her music career consisted of playing her guitar, scribbling down lyrics and chord progressions, and recording bits of songs on her old-school four-track. And that didn’t seem like it would make for exciting TV.

“Well, you’re just going to have to get out there more,” Jess said matter-of-factly. “Like I said, keep dribbling. What about that show you emailed me about?”

“That’s the interview I’m late for,” Kate admitted. She craned her neck out the window, trying to see past the Escalade. Was there construction? An accident? “I don’t know why people insist on driving SUVs in L.A. It isn’t exactly known for its rough terrain,” she huffed.