Owned

Thanks to her most recent unnecessary splurge, Angelina slept soundly beside her brand new dark purple curtains which blacked out her entire bedroom. Without opening her eyes, she felt around through her egyptian cotton sheets ever so slightly to find her iPhone. Startled by the time, her heart suddenly raced. The iPhone 4G must have had another glitch. What time was it?

If she was late, powering up her laptop to check the time would only jeopardize her chances of missing the worst part of traffic. Oh, if the 101S wasn't such a terrible commute, her mornings would be so much easier.

Getting ready for work never went smoothly. For instance, the day of her marketing pitch, Angelina dropped her toothbrush in the toilet and was instead forced to use her finger to scrub the leftover alcohol out of her mouth. The taste of Jack Daniel's whiskey and stale cigarettes remained for days. That's what you get for pulling an all-nighter on a work day, but hey, that's what you do if you want to remain relevant in this town.

This morning, she couldn't find her blowdryer amongst the vast amounts of hoarded makeup which sat unused beneath her bathroom sink. Giving up, she quickly stood up without looking and smacked the top of her head on the corner of her bathroom mirror. Red blood slightly peaked through her ice blonde hair. Shit. Her thin hair couldn't cover up a bump like that. Mornings always pretty much sucked but hey, that's what made the evening just so much nicer.

Seven long years spent living in Los Angeles. Not a single paid acting gig, not one nice and normal guy to call a boyfriend, and a bunch of friends who are now deemed indefinite waitstaff. Angie once believed she was actually better off being the only person out of her West-Coast friends with a Masters Degree, even if it was in Nutrition. In reality, it was barely enough to have gotten her foot in the door at one of the many promotional and marking companies in downtown LA. Never did she expect that she would actually have to have a back-up plan. With modelesque looks, at 5'8 and 110 lbs, and a killer writing and acting resumé, her friends were convinced that she'd knock 'em dead out in Hollywood. Back then she was 23 years old, the world was still her oyster.

Sometimes she can barely even remember the reason why she had moved to West Hollywood, California in the first place. Her hometown of Brightwaters, Long Island was a completely different animal. On Long Island, eight months out of the year would be spent primarily indoors but those four months of prime beach weather was enough for city snobs to take the Hamptons Jitney all the way to their precious beach houses. Oh, how she had loved Manhattan but not the Manhattanites. The ones that claim they grew up in 'the center of it all', therefore making any 'average' family-bearing suburbanite inferior. Two years of living in the Lower East Side was enough for her. As cleaned up and un-1980's Manhattan as it was while she had lived here, it was still filled with enough crackheads and bed-bug infestations to make anyone wonder why pay the $1,900.00 rent for a studio bedroom on the seventh story walk-up.

From the minute she moved to West Hollywood, she realized that Hollywood wasn't as magical as seen on television. Never in her life had she lived in a place with so much pollution and rampant street crime. The amount of police arrests in broad daylight made New York seem like a Disney theme park. At least the weather was nice and there was always an event or night out planned to keep her distracted from the mere thought of it. In fact, she couldn't believe how many of these Hollywood-types completely denied the fact that they lived in a polluted cesspool filled with homelessness and joblessness and to top it off, it's settled amidst dangerous fault lines.

Did any of that matter? No. She still was living the Hollywood dream in the city she had always dreamed of.

After nursing her bloodied head for a few minutes, her phone restarted. The time read 7:30, just enough time to make it to work by 9 a.m.

Quickly, she grabbed her keys and opened the door to her garage. She had left her garage door open all evening, meaning someone could have walked right into her bedroom while she was asleep.

And so it goes...

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