Jennie clicked the bedroom door closed, letting out a sigh of relief. Her headache from before had eased, but that wasn't the reason she'd left the room full of Lisa's friends to come lie down. She just couldn't bear one more moment of self-conscious awkwardness.
Everyone had come back to Lisa's suite after the rehearsal session except for a couple of the assistants, who were sent out on a dinner run. They'd come back half an hour later with six-packs of Corona and a cardboard box full of cheap Mexican from some taco truck in East LA. The whole crew had pounced on the food the moment it arrived. Jennie had done her best to share in the feeding frenzy, randomly picking out one of the lukewarm containers and sniffing at the foil pouch inside.
It was an amazing sight to behold, really - a room full of multimillionaires sitting around a luxury hotel suite in Beverly Hills, eating dinner with their hands out of styrofoam. She could well remember nights just like this, back when they were all a bunch of penniless kids. A celebratory dinner back then meant greasy gyros and falafel from some New York City food cart. Jennie used to eat it with them back then too - no problem. But it had been years since she'd eaten like that. Nowadays, dinner from a food cart meant a guaranteed case of indigestion.
Bella and Kendall appeared to have no such reservations. They munched away contentedly at the tacos without so much as a sideways glance. Clearly, these little fiestas were not an unusual occurrence. The two of them were nearly keeping pace with the band, downing one taco after another and licking the sauce from their fingers between bites. All those rumours about models eating nothing but celery and rice cakes? Not true, apparently.
Jennie had picked at the food, not wanting to look like a spoilsport. But of course, it was too late for that. She knew what they thought of her, after that conversation she'd overheard earlier. She didn't fit in. She looked to them like an imposter - a fish out of water.
No one had batted an eyelash when she left her food half-eaten and went to stand by herself at the window, nursing her beer. Only Lisa had reacted when she'd tried to slip out of the room entirely.
She hadn't wanted Lisa to spoil the fun on her account. Easier to lie and say she still had a headache. "I'm just going to close my eyes for 15 minutes," she'd told Lisa. "I'll be right back."
She had no intention of going back out there, of course. It wasn't as if any of them would miss her.
She sat down on the bed instead, turning on a bedside lamp and flicking open her laptop to catch up on work emails. She sat staring at the screen, but it failed to hold her attention. Her mind kept going back to the conversation she'd overheard. What had Bella called her? "That old chick." Jennie tried to summon up some indignation, but she knew she was kidding herself. Bella had put it a little bluntly, but deep down inside Jennie knew that it was true.
Maybe she and Lisa were the same age, but it didn't feel like it when she was out there in the other room just now. All these years, she'd been growing older, and Lisa had been staying the same. That was why she kept dating the 21-year-old Gigi Hadid look-alikes these days. It made perfect sense, with the life Lisa led - the VIP section at the hottest club in town one night, followed by beer and take-out from a food truck the next. The fact was, she and Lisa didn't go together. They didn't match. They lived in two completely different worlds. There was a time, once, when they made sense together. But that was a long time ago. They'd been moving in two different directions ever since.
