Page 2 of Flirtatious

Dude, you have no idea. Honestly, you are so off base I can’t even find you on the map.

And the third doctor, whose name I don’t know because I’m no longer interested in giving them names, thinks that his book, Why Good Women Love Bad Boys, contains the answer to all my problems. I can’t focus much on what he’s saying because his forehead is so big, it’s distracting. Damn, man, we could show movies on that space.

Wow. If I didn’t laugh right now, I’d cry at how clueless these assholes are.

My tour that lasted eight months took me to five of the seven continents and hundreds of cities around the world. I’ve broken up with one guy, sworn off men entirely, and tragically, I’m rumored to have turned to booze and drugs. The reason why they don’t give a damn about, but my being lonely after performances that left me feeling like a wrung-out dishrag might be a good place for everyone to start. I’m tired and my body aches after all those shows, and I’m only nineteen years old, but damnit, these jackasses and everyone else in the world is absolutely sure I’m off doing something destructive.

No mention about how hard I push myself to give audiences the best show they could ever experience. No hint about what it’s like to be a homeless singer, living out of suitcases and missing your bed night after night. Not a peep about what it’s like to feel like you’re living in a fishbowl and every damn supposed journalist has their nose pressed to the glass, dying to catch me doing something that will get them a big scoop. Not a word about the fact that I’m still getting my bearings in life and it’s not the end of the world if I make a mistake or two.

Or ten.

No, that would be boring. Instead, they diagnose from afar and make claims they can’t possibly back up because they don’t know me. They know the public face I put on, but they don’t know me. They see Mia, the superstar, not Mia the person.

For four years, I’ve tried to be everything the world wants me to be. Can’t I take forty-eight hours to be just who I want to be for once?

Mason with the gray hair interrupts the female doctor to say my mother is about to come out to hold a press conference. Good to know she isn’t letting a chance go by to make this an even bigger circus. I’d hate to think she could just sit tight for a couple days and let me be alone.

I watch as Andrea Shanoff stands in front of the bank of microphones looking entirely too upset for the circumstances. My mother’s a beautiful woman with long dark hair that lays perfectly against her head like Cher’s did when she was young back in the day. I wish my hair would do that, but with every time my stylists insist on doing something interesting with my look for the crowds who come to see me, the chance that my hair will ever simply hang normally again becomes less and less likely.

Today, she’s gone for a light brown jacket over a tan blouse, a look meant to convey her utter despair over my being missing. It’s all very earthy and grounded, making me think she took some cues from Ainsley when she was getting ready for this performance of hers. She’s gone with less makeup than she usually prefers too. No fake lashes or heavy eyeliner to accent her dark brown eyes. She wants to let the world know that this whole thing has been so trying for her.

“Thank you for all your concern about Mia. I’m here today to make another plea for whoever has her to let her come home. My daughter is a beautiful person, inside and out. She loves to share her God-given gift of her beautiful voice, and I only ask that you release her so all of us can hear her sing again.”

I hear the words come out with the right emotion attached to each syllable, but the whole thing sounds hollow to my ears. All I see is panic that her control over me is slipping away. She looked much like this right after I turned eighteen and went off with Jonny to his place in Miami. That press conference was one for the ages. She should have won an Oscar for all that crying and wringing of her hands that her baby was dead in a ditch somewhere.

It’s always a ditch with the drama queens.

She likes to fall back on the tried and true ideas. I imagine she’ll mention that at some point in this press conference too, but I turn off the TV before she gets the opportunity. Something about her fascination with me in a ditch on the side of the road unnerves me.

I’m my mother’s meal ticket. Sure, she loves me, but what she loves more is the lifestyle she has because of my fame and success. At fifteen, I had my first number one song. That was followed by two more before the record company and my manager, my mother, decided that I needed to get my ass out on tour since that’s where the big money is.

So tour I did.

I celebrated my sixteenth birthday alone in the back of my tour bus right outside of Tucson. Everyone else had fallen asleep after congratulating me on that night’s show, and I sat with a cupcake that Michael, one of my bodyguards, had left me. Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, my favorite. My version of a sweet sixteen party.

It’s thanks to him that I have this hotel room to lounge around in for a couple days. Thank God there’s someone I can rely on to understand I need to decompress sometimes.

My seventeenth birthday I celebrated on stage in Rio de Janeiro with thousands of my closest friends waving banners with my name on them while I sang my version of Happy Birthday. They loved it. All I wanted was someone to sing it to me.

That never happened that night. Instead, we all boarded a plane to Mexico City and by the time we landed, the day had ended and I didn’t even get a cupcake.

By the time I turned eighteen, I was the biggest star in the world. And the loneliest. I had an entourage around me at all times, especially once the crazy letters from stalkers began to come and my mother felt the need to hire more people.

But eighteen was different because then I was officially an adult. I could be who I wanted to be. I could do what I wanted to do. I could theoretically say no to doing what I didn’t want to do because I was an adult.

So, when Jonny Chambers with all his tattoos and piercings came to meet me after one of my shows a few weeks after I turned eighteen, I went back to his hotel room with him and lost my virginity. In retrospect, he wasn’t my best choice to lose my V card, but I can’t change the past.

As a belated eighteenth birthday present, he took me away to his place in Miami and gave me the biggest party the world has ever seen. The tabloids are still writing about it to this day over a year later. It’s the reason why all the talking heads and shrinks on TV are so sure I’m with him right now.

They never saw what happened behind the scenes with us. They think they know things because he was all into drinking and coke when I was with him, and I had bruises they were sure were from him hitting me.

That wasn’t what happened, though. He never hit me. What he did was worse. He made me feel like I was just another girl in his harem, that I didn’t mean anything to him and he could replace me as easily as he found me.

Since I broke up with him, everyone’s talked about how I was abused, and I guess in a lot of ways I was. Jonny never physically abused me, but he did a number on my confidence, so that’s a kind of abuse, I think.

That’s all behind me now, though. I’ve got someone I care about in my life who cares about me enough to risk God only knows what my mother might do if she ever finds out Michael was the one who got me this room. He protects me from what really can hurt me, and that means more than I can ever tell him.

To hell with everyone but Michael. My mother, every damn person who thinks they know my life better than I do, and all these jackasses on TV who spend their days and nights talking endlessly about things they know nothing about.

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