Celebromancy

by Michael R. Underwood

  “Great responsibility. So you tried to nab the America’s Sweetheart title. What went wrong? And how does a ritual like that even work to begin with?”

  Ree hadn’t done much ritual magic and still didn’t have a good handle on it. Her former mentor used ritual frequently, since he didn’t have her knack for genre emulation. But the rituals he’d done only vaguely resembled what Ree thought of as traditional magic, even when you stripped away the geeky trappings.

  “The ritual was supposed to be simple. I took prints from each of my films, magazines where I was the cover model, featured, or interviewed, tapes of E! guest spots, so on, and gathered them on an altar as a representation of the fame and power I’d already accumulated. Then I made an effigy of myself and one of Rachel MacKenzie, who had the mantle at the time. I had a friend make the dolls, including a crown for Rachel, to represent the mantle.”

  Jane cracked her knuckles, looking anxious, like a junkie yearning for a hit. “I tied that crown to an actual tiara I borrowed from the prop department from Fairy Godmother with standard sympathetic magic. With that all set up, I jumped on Twitter and started slinging mud with Rachel. I called out her terrible, lowest-common-denominator films, and stirred up a shit storm.”

  “Is that why?” Ree asked. “It seemed totally out of left field.” Jane hadn’t been the Twitter-feud type, at least, as far as Ree and most of the sane journalists had thought at the time.

  Makes a body wonder what kind of secret agendas are behind all of the other weird shit in Hollywood.

  “It was the fastest, most sure way I could think of to get a boost. I thought I needed the extra attention from the fight, then moved the doll crown from Rachel, putting it on the doll of me as I donned the crown myself and released the power . . . and that’s when something went wrong. Instead of the sympathetic magic connecting the miniature mantle to the magical one and syncing them both to me, it all rushed through me and back to Rachel, or somewhere else.” Jane made a poof gesture with her hands and slumped against the headboard.

  “And ever since, any time I use my power, I get the backlash. I didn’t even notice it at first. A headache here, fatigue there. I just thought I was just running myself too hard, trying to build back up with One Tough Mama. So instead of taking a break, I pushed harder. And that led . . . that led to some things I’m not proud of. It was a crappy year, and it wasn’t until after rehab and the community service that I started to get a real handle on what had happened.”

  “So why didn’t you stop?” Ree asked. “It’s clearly getting worse.”

  “Could you stop watching movies? Stop reading comics? Stop writing? This is who I am, for better or worse, and I can’t just walk away from it. Not if I’m going to have any chance of doing what I want to in this industry: try to support real, compelling work and help people.”

  Jane smiled at Ree. “Like giving new voices a chance to shine. Or empowering women to have more of a voice in Hollywood and in this country. I can help make that happen, Ree, and I’m willing to pay the price to get there.”

  Ree narrowed her eyes, fighting the urge to just say bullshit like her mouth wanted to. But tact won the day. Mostly.

  “That’s great talk, but this is your life, Jane. Martyr is a powerful mantle, but most folks don’t get to wear it very long before they buy the farm. What good can you do dead? You kick off now, and I’m sorry, but they aren’t going to remember you for your feminism and your pluck. You can do a lot without magic.” Ree stood, folding her arms. “And if you want me to keep helping on the magic side of this, there’s no way I’m going to let you dig yourself even deeper into this curse.”

  Jane looked relieved at first, then shivered. She hugged herself, nostrils flaring as she held something in.

  “It isn’t something you can just walk away from. How am I supposed to work without it?” Jane shook her head, dismissing the thought.

  “Unless every actor everywhere has magic, then you can live without it. If it’s really that much like a drug, then you’ll have withdrawal, but that’s better than getting dead.”

  Jane gave a petulant look. “You ever kicked a habit?”

  Ree laughed. “I quit smoking after five years.”

  “But you still drink coffee, right?”

  Ree sat back down, her hackles resetting. “Of course. I happily dove into the arms of one addiction to escape another.”

  “Aha!” Jane said.

  Ree held her hands up in surrender. “Yeah, you got me on that. So, pick a new shiny to distract yourself from the jonesing!”

  Jane gave a knowing smile and scooted closer to Ree. “Are you volunteering?”

  Uh-oh. I walked into that one. Ree leaned back, her heartbeat picking up speed. Being someone’s methadone wasn’t exactly a good premise for a relationship.

  But look at how gorgeous she is! her libido said with a stating-the-obvious tone. Ree refrained from following the trail of smooth leg up toward the hem of the star’s robe, but when she tried to look Jane in the eyes, her gaze slid down to where the sides of the robe overlapped, and the promise of soft flesh underneath.

  Down, girl! she told herself.

  Jane noticed Ree’s lingering gaze and said, “It doesn’t have to last after the pilot, or after the show if we get picked up. But I haven’t had a lot to be happy about since the ritual.”

  “I don’t know if that’s romantic or sad,” Ree said, regretting her Snark Impulse as soon as the words left her mouth. Goddamnit. Ree mentally set her Snark Dial down a few notches, hoping it would stick. With luck, her libido would have her back.

  Jane looked away for a moment, then shrugged. “Take your pick, but it is true. I’ve wallowed, lashed out, shut off, and your script was the first thing that really excited me, that broke through whatever fugue-self-destructive bullshit this ritual has done.”

  Jane winked. “Plus, you’re pretty cute.”

  Ree raised an eyebrow. “Said the international superstar-slash-model with thirty cover spreads to her name.”

  “Thirty-one,” Jane said, her tone turning coy.

  “I’m sorry. I must have lost track somewhere in the summer of ’08 when you were on every cover in the universe.”

  Jane inched closer. She was close enough that Ree could smell the shampoo she’d used on her hair and what was probably lotion. A chill ran down her spine. A happy chill, not the holy crap, about to die chill. She’d had precious few of the former the last few months.

  “That was a crazy year,” Jane said. “But I’ve had crazy, and I’ve had rock bottom. And it’s taught me to appreciate the now.” Jane reached a hand up to brush a lock of hair behind Ree’s ear. It was a familiar gesture, something for an old friend or well-known lover. It was all still new with Jane, but she made Ree comfortable and nervous at the same time. The implications were frightening, catching her in loops of overthinking. But she wasn’t scared by Jane or what the star might do. Maybe she should be, but she wasn’t.

  Drake had made his choice, and so her mess of a situation had gotten a helluva lot clearer.

  Ree leaned in and kissed Jane slowly, testing the waters. Last night had been a whirlwind. This wouldn’t be like that, one way or another. Jane’s lips met Ree’s, strong but not forceful. Ree’s shoulders relaxed, and she settled into the kiss, building momentum. Her bag slipped from her shoulder, hitting the floor of the trailer with a thump.

  “Danny’s in the front room,” Ree said, breaking off for a moment.

  Jane stood without a word, took the two steps to the door and closed it in a slow, smooth motion. She looked over her shoulder back at Ree, smiled, and said, “It’s just us. We have all night. So, what do you want to do?”

  “I think we were getting somewhere just a moment ago.”

  Jane smiled as she slinked back to the bed. “Oh, really? Where were we getting, again?”

  Put up o
r shut up, she told herself, once again instructing her sixteen-year-old self to play it cool, despite very clear memories of spending quality time in her room with an image gallery and clips from Jane’s films.

  She high-fived her inner sixteen-year-old and chucked caution out the window.

  Ree brought her hand to her chin, pondering. “My memory’s a little foggy. But I think it involved you being over here.” Ree gestured to the bed. “And I was here.” Ree slid back a few inches. “You better come over and help me remember.”

  Jane took the steps back to the bed slowly, drawing out the moment. Ree felt pulled, like two magnets held inside each other’s range. Two pieces yearning to meet, shaking with anticipation. The star ran a hand through her hair as she settled back onto the bed.

  Jane moved achingly closer and reached out to brush the back of her hand across Ree’s cheeks. Ree flushed at the motion, leaning in and taking Jane’s hand to keep it close.

  Their lips met again, and for one night, they put aside magic, show business, mantles of power, and everything that wasn’t touch, taste, and connection.

  • • •

  After a night of sleep uninterrupted by monster attacks, Ree woke up to the warmth of sunlight kissing her cheek. No, scratch that. Just kissing. Lips. Ree blinked her eyes open and saw Jane beside her, wearing a million-dollar maybe it’s Maybelline smile and nothing else but the sheets.

  “Good morning,” Jane said.

  Ree stretched and yawned, enjoying the half-awake state and enveloping sense of contentment. She was aware that Bad Shit was going down somewhere that she’d have to deal with soon. But nothing had happened in the night, so Ree made an executive decision that worry could bugger off, at least until the day was truly under way.

  “Good morning,” Ree yawned. “What time is it?”

  “6 AM. I have call for makeup in thirty minutes.”

  Ree blinked, the threat of imminent no-hot-girl-in-bed-with-me-ness souring her mood.

  “I roll to disbelieve. I say it’s 5 AM and the sun is just an overachiever.”

  Jane ran a hand through Ree’s hair. Her body tingled at the slight tugging on her scalp. The Brazilians, being some of the sexiest people around, had a word for the gesture: cafune. And it was one of Ree’s favorite bits of affection. Familiar and sensual, but still simple, and acceptable in public. And since Ree was a card-carrying PDA fan, it was all kinds of win.

  “Do you need some help with the shower?” Ree asked. “I hear the ones in these trailers can be tricky.” Ree added her best knowing look, hoping to extend the closeness just a little while longer.

  Jane sighed, then shook her head. “No time for that, sadly.”

  “But it saves time and water. You are a conservationist, aren’t you?” Ree asked.

  Jane took a pillow and thwapped Ree on the shoulder. “You’re too much.”

  Ree melted back into the bed. “And proud.”

  Jane slid out to her feet and retrieved her robe. “You’re welcome to borrow some more clothes if you want. Chances are Yancy will want to talk to you before we start shooting for the day.”

  Ree nodded, waking up bit by bit. The scary loomed closer at the edges of her attention, teaming up with the be-a-screenwriter demands on her time to kill her buzz. “I need to hit the pavement again, try to get a better read on Rachel, how the ritual worked, what we can do to break the curse-backlash thing.”

  Jane slipped into the robe and leaned back to the bed. She touched Ree’s cheek and kissed her softly. “You’ve got it, hero.”

  Ree flinched at the appellation. “Save that for when I get MacKenzie off your case.” Ree found her clothes from last night and her bag of tricks, arranged in a haphazard pile in the corner. Ree imagined some horny grad student and her paper.

  “Where Are My Pants?: A Psycho-geographic Analysis of Sartorial Shedding in Hook-Up Culture” by R. G. Houston in Damn Kids Get Off My Lawn: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Twenty-First-Century Youth Culture (New York: Palgrave Quirkmillan, 2011), 47-69.

  Jane headed for the shower, leaving Ree to her thoughts and her pile of clothes.

  Well, you’re right and properly in it now, Ree told herself. She checked her phone and saw that Drake hadn’t called. Did he go to Grognard’s, or had his night gone like Ree’s?

  Too many things to keep track of. Focus. There was more detective-ing to be done, script management to be done, and she should probably tell her friends she was alive sometime.

  There were more Google Alerts for her name and Awakenings, which she glossed over and skipped any time they got too gossipy or mean-spirited (which, sadly, was most of them). But one was from a woman who had been a Konrad fan since they were all teenagers and who thought the story sounded interesting. Ree emailed the link to herself and then read it again, boosting her spirits (+2 Morale Bonus to Getting Shit Done).

  Ree plugged her phone in to get a charge, as it was sitting at 35%. Since starting down the Geekomancy path, she’d taken to treating her phone even more reverently, since it was both her connection to the rest of the world and the best, most convenient source of magic. It was a Green Lantern Battery and communicator in one. Plus, Angry Birds.

  Charge, my pretty! she willed the phone while reviewing the scenes they were set to shoot that day.

  Chapter Ten

  The Show Must Go On

  There’s an unspoken code in show business. People speak it all the time, but those aren’t the ones who really mean it. Someone gets sick? The show must go on. Script sucks? Show must go on.

  Each show is a living thing; it has its own momentum. Shows are like sharks: They have to keep moving forward or they die. No matter what happens, keep going. Better to go down as the most ambitious messy failure than to just quit and fade away, having never tried.

  —Jane Konrad, Actor’s Alley, November 17, 2010

  It looked like Yancy’d had a rougher night than Jane. His hair was rumpled and he had bags under his eyes, sipping coffee as he orchestrated the grand machine that was One Tough Mama.

  The set crew was dressing the apartment where they were shooting scenes between Allison and her girlfriend, which would actually go before the dinner scene they’d shot two days ago. It blew Ree’s mind that actors could keep a whole story in their head and tell it part by part, out of order, while building in a character arc that made sense when viewed in the proper order. The postproduction editors and producers obviously helped, and that’s part of why they’d get several different takes of any scene, to have a range, but it was still foreign to Ree’s LARPer/gamer/writer brain, where characters tended to develop emergently (which was just the fancy way of saying that she made shit up and hoped it worked).

  The PAs were clearly getting to know her, since two steps into the building, Patricia/Vanessa greeted her with a steaming Styrofoam cup of coffee.

  “You’re gorgeous,” Ree said, accepting the cup. The assistant stepped back and started to walk off, and Ree said, “Wait.” The woman turned around slowly, looking like she’d already mentally moved on to the next task.

  “I’m very sorry, but I can’t for the life of me remember your name.”

  Understanding flashed on the woman’s face, and she relaxed for a second. “Vanessa.”

  “Thanks, Vanessa,” Ree said, raising the cup in salute.

  Vanessa nodded and zipped off.

  One mystery solved. Now if all of the other ones would be as easy to solve as getting over my pride.

  Ree ran a partition in her brain to think up caper-style ways of getting access to Rachel MacKenzie while going over the day’s sides with Yancy, making little tweaks here and there. Yancy liked to get a fresh look at the script each day, to work it around in his mind like a tumbler. He was a great editor—after all, the man had been directing since Ree was a diaper-wearing, lightsaber-binky-wielding toddler.

  Not that he’d ap
preciated it when Ree had said as much in conversation. But he’d grumped with a smile on his face, so all was well.

  Ree watched from her still-totally-exciting chair as the shooting got under way.

  She failed her Save vs. Charm when Jane walked into the room, as radiant as she’d been at the panel. Most of her mind was busy being entranced, while her Spider-sense was going off, reminding her of the cost.

  You shouldn’t be doing that, remember? she thought at Jane. With the night-haunt and all?

  Ree harrumphed to herself. It’s her life. If she wants to burn out rather than fade away . . .

  Then your career gets tanked before it even takes off, and everyone here loses their jobs.

  There was some enlightened self-interest involved, but Ree knew she couldn’t let Jane go out like Marilyn Monroe or Kurt Cobain. Though neither of them had killed themselves through overuse of magic. Probably. Maybe. Possibly. Damnit. Magic exists, and it is weird as hell never ceased to make things that Ree used to be certain about totally up in the air.

  Ree started to get up to do something about it, but Yancy beat her to it, launching out of his chair. The rest of the room seemed to be under the same level of entrancement, but Yancy was having none of it.

  Deciding that not dog-piling on your maybe-girlfriend was the better part of dating (if not valor), Ree returned to her phone, where she saw she had a handful of direct messages from Charlie.

  She’d almost forgotten about putting him on Rachel MacKenzie’s trail.

  All right, King of the Internet, give me the lowdown.

  Charlie being Charlie, he sent the whole report in Twitter DMs instead of an email.

  Ree scrolled through the tidbits and links, assembling the picture of a woman who was indulgent in public and aggressively reclusive in private. She made plenty of public appearances and was working as actively as ever, but her personal security had stepped up in the last year, as evidenced by the fact that four paparazzi had been arrested for trespassing on her property since last summer.