She flashes me a shaky grin. “And then one day, the craziest thing happened. I was at a convenience store, and there he was, on the cover of a tabloid. Chase, my brother. I recognized him immediately. This was just before the first Wanderers came out.
“I was sixteen, and my mom’s shitty new boyfriend had started coming into my room at night. I’d managed to hold him off, but I needed somewhere else to go. Fast. So I researched some fan sites and found out where Chase lived. I snuck out, took several buses, and walked the rest of the way to his gate.” She laughs. “It was a fancy estate in Malibu, and I managed to sneak past the guards, climbed a fence, and…”
“And what?” I lean forward.
“And the guards caught me, of course.” She shakes her head. “It’s a miracle I wasn’t arrested. Chase came home, and I can’t believe he still recognized me. I didn’t look anything like the girl he’d known anymore. But he took me in that night, no hesitation, no questions asked.”
My mind can’t comprehend Daisy—shiny, happy, always smiling Daisy—going through all that.
“What happened next?”
“It gets worse before it gets better,” she continues, her narrow shoulders slumping. “That whole summer, I stayed with Chase. I was too afraid to go to the authorities, too afraid to go home. I was broken and wild. Sebastian and Ryder treated me like a little sister as well.”
“Sebastian. As in Sebastian Blake?”
She nods.
“And Ryder?” I cry. “You lived with Ryder Black? So, when you said you had a crush on him, you weren’t talking about a fantasy crush. You actually know him.”
Her wry smile dims. “He just thought of me as a kid, which made me mad because he wasn’t much older than me. But they were all gentle and sweet with me, even though I was miserable and pushed everyone’s buttons. I was so messed up after everything that had happened.”
She averts her eyes, playing with the rim of her coffee cup. “I watched movies all day and didn’t go out. Chase kept trying to get me to see a therapist. He said we had to make arrangements, that he couldn’t hide me forever. He was right.
“Sebastian had these parties. Chase would always watch over me, make sure I didn’t get into any trouble. And Ryder was just as protective as Chase. But one night, Chase was working late, and Ryder had a date with some model. They told me to stay in my room, but I didn’t listen. I’d been crushing hard on Ryder all summer, so I was wild with jealousy. I got smashed and left with a random guy. All I wanted was someone to distract me so I didn’t hurt anymore and prove that I wasn’t the child Ryder thought of me as, but instead, I got into a bad situation. I called Chase in the middle of the night on set. He came and literally carried me out of some club. But we were photographed. The tabloids went crazy. The only blessing was they didn’t get a clear picture of my face.”
“I remember reading something about that,” I say, shocked it was my friend. I didn’t follow celebrities, so it must have been a scandal if even I heard about it.
She nods. “It was all over. They thought I was his new girlfriend. They called me ugly, a gold digger, a whore, a mess. I couldn’t stop reading the comments and the fan sites. It was horrible and everything that was written just reinforced what I’d been hearing all my life from my dad, my mom, and the assholes she dated. I felt as if everything I touched went to hell.”
“Daisy, none of that is true.”
She inspects her manicure, refusing to meet my eyes. I can’t imagine Daisy with low self-esteem. She’s always been self-confidence personified. But maybe I’m not the only one who tries to hide. Maybe we just hide in different ways.
She takes a deep breath before continuing, “I was tired of being a burden, of hurting, of being such a mess. So, I…I found pills in one of the guest rooms that someone had left and swallowed them all.”
“Daisy!” I hug her close to my side. I’m surprised at how small she feels, because she’s got such a huge personality. I’m not sure how long we stay like that, but my eyes mist as I think about how much pain she must have been in to be that self-destructive.
She sniffs and pulls away with an awkward laugh, wiping tears from under her eyes. “I’m fine now. I don’t think I truly wanted to die, but I wanted everything to stop for a while—all the confusion, all the hurt. They got me to the hospital and kept everything as hush-hush as they could.