HER careful arrangement of designer-styled, blond-highlighted hair bounced as she leaned back on the gurney. Her hand, set aglitter by deep maroon fingernails, clutched a cell phone to her ear. Her lips stretched full and amorphous, blown out of proportion by collagen injections. Dark eyeshadow filled the hollows beneath her eyes, where long-vanished tears had deposited it.
"Oh yes," she said into the phone, in a socialite's singsong cadence, "it's been awful. I tried to kill myself this morning… Um-hmm. Prozac, codeine, and a bad Bordeaux. Threw it all up by the time the paramedics arrived. You'll never believe where they brought me. The UCLA emergency room. I was terrified. Thought I'd get doused with alkali on my way through the doors." She picked at a cuticle. "What's that, darling?" She glanced up at the resident at the bed beside hers, drawing blood from another woman. "One of them is, I suppose, in a Billy Baldwin sort of way."
Carson looked up from his chart and nudged David. "Welcome to West