by Anita Oh
The link was titled, “SUPERNOVA, SUPER MISTAKE! Ten reasons Why Audrey Day Does Not Belong in Supernova!” It was probably a bad idea to click on it. She definitely shouldn’t read it. Nothing good could come of it.
She clicked on the link.
The first thing that came up was a picture of her at the press conference. It was even worse than the spot the president had freeze-framed earlier.
“Reason #1: She’s an idiot,” Audrey read. “Don’t these people get media training? She can’t even answer a simple question. What does pineapple even mean? Supernova? More like stupidnova!”
Even though it was harshly said, Audrey couldn’t disagree. It was basically what the president had spent the morning saying, only way shorter and without the running commentary.
She clicked through to the second reason.
“Reason #2: Can she even sing? We know the rest of Supernova from their years of training, but where did this girl even come from? She seemed to appear out of thin air, and we know nothing about her skills. This is only going to give fuel to the rumors that Gemma Sparks has an idol-cloning facility somewhere in her pink tower and intends to use them for world domination.”
Audrey doubted that the president was cloning people. There was no profit in that for her. The rest of it was fairly on point, though.
When the page for Reason #3 loaded, Audrey froze. The picture was similar to the one that had been everywhere of her and Eli in the street, only this one showed more of her face and less of Eli’s.
“Reason #3: Is she the mysterious lover of Eli Gale? This street urchin has similar features, and it would explain why nobody’s talking about Audrey’s past. Could she have used her sinister hold over Tempest’s front man to kickstart her own career?”
Audrey ran a finger over her empathy ring. Even though she didn’t feel anything from it these days, she never took it off. It was weird to miss someone this much when she’d only met them once, she knew that. But Eli had changed her life. He’d saved her, and she couldn’t help but think she’d feel better if he were around.
She sighed and clicked on reason #4.
“Reason #4: No charisma. Of course, we don’t expect anyone to match up to the star power of Thomas Thorne, but this girl may as well be invisible.
“Reason #5: No personality. Even though it’s early days, it’s impossible to get a read on what this girl is even like. She’s not mysterious, she’s just boring!
“Reason #6: Annoying face. Standing there with that smug smile makes us want to slap her!
“Reason #7…”
Before she could read Reason #7, a hand covered the screen.
“Reading that kind of thing has never done anyone any good,” Suzie said, handing her a plastic cup of her special singing tea.
“Do you want to slap me?” Audrey asked.
“What? No, Audrey. I’m not angry with you.” Suzie sat down beside Audrey, looking shocked.
“The internet said my face is annoying.”
Suzie took a sip of her coffee, surveying Audrey’s face over the top of her cup. “People in this world have opinions on everything. You can’t listen to them all. For every person who thinks your face is annoying, someone else will think it’s lovely.”
“I bet nobody says Thorne’s face is annoying,” Audrey said. For some reason, the idea irked her. Thorne’s stupid face irked her sometimes.
Suzie laughed. “You’d be surprised. He’s got his fair share of haters.” She shrugged. “Sometimes people like to hate things for no reason. They’re angry or sad, or something reminds them of something they don’t like. When you’re in the public eye, you become a target. People project their feelings onto you, and of course the goal is for those feelings to be positive, but that won’t happen one hundred percent of the time. It’s more about them than you. You can’t do anything to change it.”
Audrey nodded, thinking about what Suzie had said. She sounded as if she was speaking from experience. “They said I can’t sing too. And I have no personality or charisma.” Those were things she could change, things she had control over. They were concrete things she could work on, steps she could take toward defeating the cult in her own way. She needed the dragonfire to defeat them, so she had to put all her efforts into getting it. All she could do was focus on the end game, on stopping the apocalypse. She had to accept that she couldn’t save everyone. “I’m going to change that. I’ll be the best.”
“You show ’em, Audrey,” said Joe.
Suzie smiled at her and patted her on the arm. “Well, if that’s what you’re planning, maybe we should get this song finished instead of sitting around chatting.”
Audrey smiled at her and went back to work.
Chapter Sixteen
Audrey started putting in extra hours each day at the dance studio and singing practice. When she wasn’t rehearsing, she studied. She studied Eli Gale, she studied Thorne. She studied all the popstars she could think of, both within Sparkling Gems and outside. She studied foreign popstars and unpopular popstars and tried to figure out why people liked some of them and were turned off by others. She studied her face in the mirror, pulling different expressions to see how she could convey different things and look as un-annoying as possible.
“Can you stop that?” Thorne said to her one day when they were having lunch in the Sparkling Gems cafeteria. “You’re really giving me the creeps.”
“Don’t be mean,” Peg said through a mouthful of mashed potato.
“No, seriously,” said Thorne. “Every time I turn around lately, she’s watching me like she wants to eat my face off.”
“Don’t eat his face off,” said Koko. “It’s our money-maker.”
Audrey shrugged. “He looks delicious.”
The three of them turned and stared at her.
“Did you just make a joke?” asked Koko.
“Please tell me it was a joke,” said Thorne.
“How do you get charisma?” Audrey asked, trying to bring the conversation back on track. “I want to get it.”
Thorne rolled his eyes and went back to his lunch. “You can’t get it. It’s something you’re born with.”
“Not true,” Audrey said. “I saw your audition video for the academy. You had no charisma.”
Koko’s eyes went huge, and she slapped a hand over her mouth to hide a laugh. Peg edged his way down the table, away from them.
“I had charisma,” Thorne said coldly.
Audrey snorted. “No. No charisma.” She stood up and held her fork up to her mouth, hanging her head in impersonation of how Thorne had looked in his audition tape. When she looked up, Koko was openly laughing, and Peg had moved a whole seat away.
Thorne glowered at her. His cheeks had turned pink.
“Teach me,” she told him. “I’ve been trying to study it, but I don’t understand. The wikiHow was unhelpful. Teach me.”
“Come on, Thorne,” Koko said, still laughing. “It’s a compliment, really.”
Thorne gave a haughty sniff. “I suppose it would be for the good of the group. Fine, I’ll teach you, but it can’t cut into our rehearsal time.”
With Thorne’s charisma lessons on top of everything else, Audrey was getting barely three hours’ sleep a night, but when the next press conference went off without a hitch, she thought it had been worth it. She wasn’t sure if it was due to her hard work as much as Sullivan Snell not being there, but she counted it a win.
Both wikiHow and Thorne said confidence was one of the main factors in being charismatic. She talked about how they were working hard and looking forward to the concert. She said the words slowly but clearly and didn’t stumble over them, but luckily, most of the talking was left to Thorne. The president seemed happy at the end of it.
The hardest thing was staying off her news feed, trying not to look up whether there had been any more attacks. There were so many new songs to learn, so much choreography to memorize, plus magazine interviews and TV appearances. She tried to focus
on that instead, but every so often her hand would reach out, fingers itching to lick on the news app.
The days went by in a blur. She still had her regular lessons with Suzie, Agnes and Mike on top of everything else.
It was almost a shock when she got the news of the cult’s latest attack. It hit her like a freight train. She hadn’t even opened her news app; the reports were everywhere, all over the TV, the newspapers, the internet. It was all people were talking about. Even if she’d wanted to avoid the details, she wouldn’t have been able to.
It had happened on a live national broadcast, in what was supposed to be a high-security space. The alpha had walked in while Senator Tomkins was making a speech on renewable energy and had ripped out her tongue. He’d thrown back his head and roared, his face splattered with blood. His Followers were gathered around him, protecting him from the security guards trying to swarm him.
The news replayed it over and over, speculating about whether it was a terrorist attack, why Senator Tomkins had been targeted, why such a brutal attack, why the cult looked like monsters. People liked the idea that it was some sort of mask or makeup to hide their identity, and that it had a significance regarding their cause. There was a lot of discussion about what that cause might be, given that they’d made no demands. Nobody wanted to believe that those faces were real, that they had no demands to make.
“You can’t let it distract you,” Thorne said a few days later, on the way to work.
“I’m not distracted,” she told him.
He plucked the phone out of her hand and looked at the screen, where she’d been reading an article about Senator Tomkins.
“It motivates me to work harder,” she told him.
It was the truth, but it was more than that as well. She felt as if she was close to figuring something out. Some sort of pattern. The senator’s tongue. The businessman’s heart. Patty’s necklace, maybe? She’d looked into the animal attack on the schoolchildren some more too, and even though nobody had been seriously hurt, one of them had received a wound that had bled quite a bit.
A child’s blood. What significance did those things have? Did he need them for the ritual, or did he just like to keep trophies, like a serial killer? If she could figure it out, it felt like she could find the next victim before it was too late.
“You’re working hard enough,” said Thorne. “If you collapse from exhaustion before the concert, it’ll all be for nothing. You’re doing everything you can right now. You can’t save everyone.”
She wanted to be angry at him for saying that, but she couldn’t argue. She knew it made sense. She’d told herself the same thing enough times. She just hated sitting around while people got hurt.
She put out her hand for her phone.
He raised his eyebrows.
“Fine,” she said.
Before he could give her phone back, Peg let out a weird noise like a trumpet. His body went completely rigid, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
“He’s having a fit,” Audrey said, unplugging her seatbelt to scramble across the seat and help him. She used to share an alley with an old guy who had fits. He’d said they were nothing to worry about, but they’d scared her.
“It’s just a vision,” said Koko.
Peg twitched. “Lights,” he said in a strange, gravelly voice. “Darkness. Dark places.” He twitched again.
Audrey couldn’t look away from him. He looked as if he was in pain. She wanted to help him, but she didn’t know what to do. She held his hand, hoping that would at least make him feel as if he wasn’t alone.
“Five,” he said. “There are five, but only three.”
He drew in a sharp breath, then his body relaxed and his eyes rolled back down. He blinked down at her, his gaze slightly unfocused. “You go see Eli Gale,” he told her. “The four of us go. It’s important.”
“She can’t see him,” said Thorne. “It’s in her contract. She has to stay away from him.”
“We’re at his concert,” said Peg. “Bad things happen if we don’t go. The fate of the world depends on us being there.”
Thorne shook his head. “It’s only one possible outcome. You said yourself that your visions are only sixty percent accurate. I won’t allow it.”
“You don’t understand. Even I don’t understand. If we don’t go, there’s only darkness. It will be catastrophic.”
Audrey had never heard him sound so serious. “The cult?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “There was only darkness.”
The car started slowing down as they pulled into the basement carpark of the Sparkling Gems building.
“It’s too risky,” said Thorne. “The president would never let us go, and it’s impossible to get tickets otherwise. Scalpers sell them for almost two thousand dollars!”
“I might know a way,” said Koko.
Thorne raised his eyebrows at her.
“What?” she said. “I like Tempest. I wouldn’t mind going to their concert.”
Thorne groaned.
“Sorry, buddy,” said Peg. “You were in the vision too. It’s important that you’re there.”
“We’ll have to be sneaky about it,” said Koko. “Maybe wear disguises!”
Peg shook a finger at her. “Disguises! That explains so much.”
Audrey’s heart pounded. She didn’t know how much she believed in visions and that kind of thing, but she really wanted to see Eli. Even if he was onstage and she was in the very back row, just to be in the same space as him would be a comfort.
“We have our own concert to prepare for,” said Thorne. “We don’t have time to run around the countryside, wearing disguises and going to see Tempest!”
“It might give us inspiration for our own concert,” said Koko. “You know they’re spectacular live.”
Thorne sniffed. “They’re not so great.”
“So, three against one? That means we’re going, right?” Koko looked to Audrey for confirmation.
Audrey nodded.
“Yay! I’ll have the tickets by lunchtime.” Koko started singing a Tempest song that Audrey vaguely recognized from her popstar studies.
“I’ll talk to the costuming department about our disguises,” said Peg.
“This is a stupid idea,” Thorne said as the car shuddered to a stop. “You three are the worst. Our careers are going to be over before they begin. Don’t complain to me when we’re performing on the street for pennies.”
But even Thorne’s grumbling couldn’t dampen Audrey’s mood. They were going to find a way to stop the impending darkness.
And she was going to see Eli.
Chapter Seventeen
Audrey worked doubly hard for the rest of the week to make up for taking time off to go to the concert. Koko organized the tickets, and Peg got their disguises ready, though he wouldn’t tell them any details about his vision. Thorne mostly complained and glared.
They met in Thorne’s room after work on Friday evening because he had the best makeup collection for their disguises. His room had the same layout as Audrey’s, but because he’d lived there for five years, he had a lot more stuff. There were posters all over the walls, mostly of three-person Supernova but some of Thorne on his own. He had a lot of mirrors, a lot of hats and a lot of handcrafts. Audrey thought it was best not to question why.
“Okay, this is what you were wearing in my vision, so I don’t want to hear any complaints. If you want to whine, tell it to the mystic energies.” Peg handed them each an outfit zipped up in a suit bag.
Audrey was more than happy with hers. It was a PVC catsuit and a black bobbed wig. The catsuit fit her surprisingly well, allowing enough movement for her to fight if necessary, though she wasn’t sure she’d be doing any high kicks. Plus, she looked kind of awesome.
When she’d finished changing and emerged from the bathroom, she found Peg adjusting Koko’s long blonde wig while Thorne sat at the mirror doing his makeup. Koko’s outfit was plain, just jeans with
an oversized hoodie, but she looked nothing like the perky popstar of her image. Peg’s outfit was similar to Koko’s, except that he had a creepy clown mask on the back of his head. Audrey assumed he’d wear it over his face once they were outside.
As usual, Thorne outshone them all.
He wore a schoolgirl outfit and a long dark brown wig. Even though his skin was pale, the dark hair really suited him. His features were so delicate that even without makeup, he made a convincing girl. At least, until he opened his mouth.
“I don’t care what your vision said, there is no way I’m leaving this house without these eyelashes sitting properly,” he said, his voice sounding deeper than usual in contrast to his looks. “If you’re making me dress as an Eli Gale fan, I’m going to be the prettiest Eli Gale fan there. Now, will somebody hand me my magnifying mirror before I go crazy?”
Audrey would have expected him to complain about dressing as a girl, but he actually seemed happier than he had been since Peg’s vision. He was clearly more upset that people thought he might like Eli than about wearing a skirt. Audrey liked that about him.
“I’ll do your makeup, Audrey,” Koko said, taking her by the hand and leading her over to a dressing table.
The three of them were obviously used to getting themselves ready and to fast costume changes, so before too long, they were set to leave. There was only one problem. When they got to the bottom of the stairs, Maddie & Matt were hanging around the entranceway, complaining about their car being late.
“They’re going to the concert too,” whispered Koko.
“We’ll have to go out the back,” Peg said, just as Matt realized he’d forgotten his phone and turned to go back upstairs.
The four of them fled, and by the time they reached the back door, they were out of breath and giggling. Except Thorne.
“This isn’t funny,” he said, pursing his lips, which he’d painted in the perfect shade of pink to match his skin tone.
“It’s a little funny, Thorne,” said Koko.
