Movie Star By Lizzie Pepper by Hilary Liftin

she wrote back. Then another text came in from Aurora.
don’t sweat it, pepper. the web people are lowest common denominator
. Uh-oh. I tapped a search into my phone:
lizzie pepper rob
.
    Search results immediately came up on my phone. Lots of them.
    Lizzie Aims High, Shoots for Mars
    Lizzie Pepper Cast as Rob Mars Costar: It’s All an Act
    Liz and Rob: Love or Money?
    Rob’s Tin Lizzie: Fake Love at Last
    What the hell was this? I looked up at Rob. He was reading a newspaper, so nonchalant.
    “Babe?” I said. “It’s out.”
    He nodded. “Okay.”
    “I haven’t looked yet . . . but I think they’re saying we’re a sham.”
    “Yeah, because I’m gay, right?”
    “It’s so . . . mean.”
    Rob put down his paper. He smiled and my heart took a roller-coaster dip. I couldn’t help smiling back. He came over and sat straddling the foot of my chaise, facing me. He set my feet on top of his thighs. “Who cares what they say? We have each other.”
    He leaned forward and gave me a long, deep kiss. My phone dropped out of my hand to the patio. I started to pick it up. “To hell with that,” he said, pulling me back toward him.
    I left the phone where it fell. Still, we went inside to have sex. We weren’t idiots.

    Later I read the articles. They were worse than I’d anticipated. The tabloids had indeed decided that our relationship was all an act. A business deal. We didn’t love each other. Rob was gay. I was a status climber. Depending which “news” outlet you read, our “love” was orchestrated by One Cell Studio to prove that Rob, their best-known practitioner, was straight; or the relationship was a ploy for him to promote
Firing Squad
and for me to promote myself in general. Running alongside the ludicrous stories were the photos of us taken on La Croisette a few hours earlier. Rob looked like the tall, confident, handsome movie star that he was. I hurried two steps behind him at the end of his arm, like a child. My eyes were cast slightly downward, a dazed half-smile on my face. I looked like one of the Manson girls.
    Rob didn’t care about any of it. I wished the faceless people behind the tabloids and everyone who believed their crap could see how little he cared.
    “When they don’t have news, they invent it, Elizabeth. I don’t blame them. It’s a crappy job, but if they don’t do it, someone else will.”
    It was a perfect response. I respected him for this attitude, but I didn’t have such thick skin. The only bad press I’d ever gotten was when Johnny and I had that fight at the ball game, and when we split up. And even then I had to admit that they’d pretty much gotten it right. He was sometimes drunk and I was always miserable. We were breaking up and, unfortunately, everyone knew it. But this was the first time I’d had to read straight-out lies about myself, lies that made me sound like someone I was not.
    My father was outraged. “I thought Rob’s people were pros,” he said on the phone that night. “I thought Geoff knew how to handle this.”Though I’d spoken to my father about my relationship with Rob, I’d never had reason to mention Geoff, the chronic mint sucker. How my dad knew that Geoff existed, much less that he might be involved in Rob’s PR, was a mystery to me. But my dad hadn’t built the biggest corporate consulting business in Chicago by twiddling his thumbs. Leave it to Dad to suss out the key relationships in my romance. No doubt he was worried that I was in over my head—and I certainly was.
    My father wanted to know how we were going to spin this back down to earth. But when I asked my publicist, she just said, “There’s no point in trying. This is what you get for dating Rob Mars. Take it or leave him.”

    Two weeks later, back in L.A., the press still hadn’t let up. Every time we left the house, we were photographed. The photos were accompanied by the same negative rumors. Rob didn’t care, but I felt like there was a shadow over our