Secret #1: Jealousy is a tiger that tears not only its prey but also its own raging heart. Chloe’s jealousy towards Giselle was nothing more than a fear of abandonment. Love sees sharply, hatred sees even more sharply, but jealousy sees the sharpest for it is love and hate at the same time. In her mind, happiness was just an illusion caused by the temporary absence of reality. Happiness always looks small while you grasp it in your hands, but let it go, and you instantly learn how precious and meaningful it is. Something about Hollywood just seemed so damn appealing. There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, soaring sexual energy, an inability to devote more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. Fame is everything, more consuming than sex, more pressing than politics; more valuable than the acquirement of money, which is never, for the gambler, the real point of the task. The charm of fame is so excessive that we like every object to which it is attached, even death and face lifts.

Chloe was ninety-nine percent sure she was dreaming. The reasons were quite plausible. Giselle was lounging on a cheetah chaise in the midst of Chloe‘s bedroom, looking like a store-front mannequin. Her ridiculously long legs were folded underneath her, and she was fiddling with her long caramel tresses, a sure sign that she was thinking about something. Giselle brushed her hair into such a tower of beauty, people populating heaven dropped their harps just to admire it. Yawning, she stretched out on the extra-long chaise like she was relaxing poolside. Her palms were pink like the bottoms of her feet, her elbows darker than the rest of her, and for some reason the sight of them filled Chloe with tenderness. The essence of being alive is loving acceptance of yourself, for once we accept ourselves we unleash the beauty that lies within our soul. Am I crazy? Chloe wondered. Crazy people who are creative are geniuses. Crazy people who are rich are exquisite. Crazy people who are neither productive nor rich are just plain crazy. Geniuses and crazy people are both out in the core of a bottomless ocean; geniuses swim and whirl, crazy people drown. Most of us are assembled safely on the shore. Chloe wanted to take countless chances, get her feet wet. A question that sometimes drives everyone hazy and muddled: am I or are the others crazy?

The heart is the place where we live our passions; it is frail and easily broken, but wonderfully durable. There is no point in trying to deceive the heart. It depends upon our honesty for its survival. Chloe believed she possessed some sort of miraculous sixth sense, because she felt tremors slide along her spine. She felt shivers and shudders along her skin, a traveling current that moved up her spine, down her arms, pulsing out her fingertips. She was practically radiating. The heart knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. Breathless, Chloe pondered what her heart desired to tell her. When it comes to the future there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened. Her heart beat kicked it. Chloe asked Giselle if she could hear it, it was that loud. Passion was waiting in the darkness of her heart. It stirred, opened its jaw, and howled for an escape. Passion is the source of our finest tears… the joy of love, the goodness of hatred and the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can swallow. Dreamers must be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. When spirit took the leap from formlessness to form, from unattainable to attainable, from being to becoming, it emerged from blankness as the creative impulse— the urge to become, the desire to exist. Chloe wanted to blaze with a scorching fire that was never extinguished, she wanted to feel alive. A life without passion is not living, its merely existing.