This is not a good conversation.
“Yes, she’s here,” he says, and hands the phone to me.
I have to talk to her; I don’t have a choice. Is it about the script? Is she calling to say that I am in the sequel as some pointless five-second flashback? Or am I free?
Please let Amara stay dead, I think as I bring his phone to my ear. “Diana?”
“Do you still have the script?” she asks tightly.
What script? “Yes.” I lie.
“Oh, thank God.” She lets out a breath. “Because it’s leaked, and as long as we know it isn’t you, that’s all we care about.”
Dread slithers down my spine. The tweets. Are they real?
My heart is beating loud and ferocious. Please let Amara be dead. Please let Amara be dead. Please let— “So we know for sure? Am I in it? Am I free—”
“Jessica,” Diana interrupts calmly, “the execs are thinking you leaked the script, but as long as you didn’t then we’re fine.”
“Why would it be me?”
“Exactly. You’re the most recent person to be given a physical copy, no one else in the cast has been given one yet. But if it wasn’t lost in transit or anything, it must have been leaked from the studio—one of the interns, maybe, who got a hold of it when they shouldn’t have. Anyway, I’ll go ahead and tell the studio that it didn’t come from our end. Just hang tight and sandbag every question about the sequel, do you understand?”
Oh no. I swallow the lump in my throat and nod numbly. “I understand.”
“Good. Talk to you later with more details.” She hangs up to call whoever and tell them that I am, in fact, not the villain in this story.
I exhale hard and hand Ethan his phone.
He quirks an eyebrow. “You don’t actually have the script, do you?”
“Of course I don’t. Why would I—oh.” My eyes widen, and he must realize it at the exact same time. “Oh no.”
“Jess…”
Oh no—oh no no no no no—
“The package. The one from Amon. The one I was supposed to open.” My voice breaks and I can feel myself shaking.
Oh my God. I actually threw away a copy of the script for the Starfield sequel. And someone must’ve taken it out of the trash. And started tweeting it. This is my fault.
“Jessica!” Ethan looks more freaked out than I am. “You threw it away?”
“In the garbage, where it’s supposed to be!”
“You don’t mean that,” he says.
“Of course I don’t! I’m angry!” I bolt off the bed and dart out of the hotel room, Ethan instantly behind me.
Two minutes later, the elevator doors open into the lobby. I all but sprint to the trash can where I tossed the envelope, peering down into the dark crevice now filled with Starbucks cups and used napkins and candy wrappers. I have to dig through that? I reach in but Ethan grabs my wrist and motions for a clerk, who looks more than a little grossed out about someone trash picking in a five-star hotel.
Which is definitely not something Jessica Stone would do. But right now, I am definitely not Jessica Stone. I am a ball of anxious wet cats.
Ethan points to the trash and says to the hotelier, “I think my friend dropped her phone in here. Can we take this outside and dump it out?”
“Oh! Of course.” She looks relieved. “You can go into the back hallway, Miss Stone,” she adds.
I grimace.
Half the people in the lobby—the half who recognize my name—turn to look. Begin pulling out their phones. Clicking on their cameras at my arm elbow-deep in trash. I grab the lid with one hand and push Ethan toward the emergency exit with the other and we escape into an EMPLOYEES ONLY hallway that connects to a few offices and the laundry service.
“I hate this,” I mutter as Ethan takes off the ornate golden lid and drags out the clear plastic bag. “It’s at the bottom, isn’t it? Isn’t that it?”
He twists the bag and holds it up with one arm. “I think that’s a fast-food container.”
It is.
“Maybe it’s more toward the middle?” he reasons, but I shake my head.
“No, I remember the clunk as it hit the bottom.” I step back and press my palms against my eyelids. “Someone found it. Someone saw me chuck the envelope and then went after it.”
I feel myself spiraling just as inevitably as a spiral galaxy.
Breathe. Think. Breathe.
I press myself against the wall and slide down until I’m sitting because I can no longer stand upright. I can’t feel my knees.
“I am in so much trouble,” I whisper.
Ethan puts the bag back in the garbage can and digs into his pocket, bringing out a small bottle of hand sanitizer. He squats next to me, squirts some into my palm, lathers his own, and stuffs it back into his pocket.
I take out my phone to look at the Twitter handle that leaked the scene. A faceless gray icon. Whoever it is posted a photo of the script. In it, the page is surrounded by retro green carpet. I know I’ve seen it before, but the longer I wrack my brain the less familiar it looks.
Ethan glances down at my phone and makes a face. “Looks like the hideous showroom floor. Well, I guess there’s no accounting for taste.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, I guess there’s no accounting—”
“About the background in the photo. This is the con carpet?” I point to the art-deco pattern behind the script. “This carpet?”
Realization hits him. “That carpet.”
All the color drains from his face—and probably mine, too. That confirms my worst fear. I tossed the script Amon gave me, I leaked it, and the worst of it is: this anonymous trash panda knows the future of my career before I do.
Never mind whether Amara is dead—
“I am so dead,” I say. My voice is barely a whisper but steadily gets louder the more I panic.
“Someone must have known what you threw away,” Ethan says. He presses the back of his head against the wall, looking up at the popcorn ceiling, but his brown eyes have a distant look. He’s thinking. “And that same person must have known you had it to begin with—maybe the hotel clerk?”
The peppy girl who had looked utterly disgusted by my impromptu Dumpster dive comes to mind. I shake my head. “I think she’s the same one from earlier,” I tell him, “so she couldn’t have taken that photo.”
“Crap,” he grouses.
Stay calm, I want to yell at myself. Jessica Stone doesn’t panic. She’s cool and controlled and—and—
Everything I am not at this moment. I clench my fists and force myself to suck in a lungful of air and breathe it out slowly.
Get my mind back on track. Think of what to do. First things first.
“I have to find that script,” I say aloud, trying to keep my voice level. “Whoever took it is still here somewhere. I just have to remember who was in that lobby and…find them? Scour the con floor? When they post the next leak, try to figure out where they are and get there in time?”
“You’re seriously going to do that?”
“I have to. The execs already think I leaked the script, and if they find out I threw it away? I’ll be blacklisted for life. No one’ll work with me after this.”
Ethan pushes his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose. “Jess, you can’t be in two places at once. You can’t be snooping out the culprit and be on panels and at signings and photo ops and….”
His voice trails off as he looks down at his coffee-stained T-shirt, and then back up at me, and the idea strikes us at the exact same time. It already worked once, hadn’t it? And no one noticed. No one even batted an eye.
“What if,” I say, “I could be in two places at once?”
He groans. “Jess, no.”
“Oh, Jess, yes.”
SOMEONE POUNDS ON MY hotel room door.
I barely glance up from my phone. I’m in the Marriott—the con’s official hotel—so it’s probably some drunk Spider-Man or Goku o
r Overwatch cosplayer mistaking my room for someone else’s. During the day, ExcelsiCon is pretty amazing, but at night, when the showroom floor closes, it gets wild. Already I’ve heard a conga-line dance party, led by Beetlejuice, sashay down the hallway to the Banana Boat Song and the last echoes of a flash-dance down in the lobby of the hotel almost a dozen floors below me.
So I decide to ignore the poor lost soul at my door and I roll over onto my stomach, scrolling through Twitter. So many people I follow were at the panel today, tweeting about Jessica Stone (me), saying that they supported her (ME!), and how they wished she would’ve spoken out sooner (definitely her). I try not to think about what could happen to my #SaveAmara campaign if Jessica Stone backed it. I got a taste up there on the panel, and I can’t get the sweetness out of my mouth. Starflame, it was intoxicating.
People actually listened to me—to her. To us.
Imagine what I could do with a little more time.
I pause on a tweet by Darien Freeman, posting a pic of him kissing his girlfriend’s cheek, him in his geeky Starfield T-shirt and her in what I assume is her costume for this year’s cosplay contest—Princess Amara with a Cinderella twist. His caption reads Ah’blena.
It’s a term of endearment in the Starfield universe. The closest translation is my heart or my other half, and for a moment I sort of wish I had someone to call me ah’blena.
“You don’t have time for romance,” I mutter to myself, and scroll on to the next tweet. Besides, I have a princess to save. I don’t need some hunk-a hunk-a burnin’ love clouding my head—
Someone knocks on my hotel room door again.
This time I glance up, and wait. Because instinctively that’s what everyone does when they hear strange sounds at night, right? Like a dumbass, they wait for it to happen again instead of calling the police. Or the front desk.
This is why I’d die in a horror movie.
It’s not Milo—I just got a text from him saying he and Bran are at a showing of Galaxy Quest.
Another three loud raps on the door. I crawl to the edge of the bed.
“Hello!” a voice calls from the other side. Female. Light, honeyed yet harsh, with the slightest Southern drawl. I know that voice. I imitated that voice.
Dread coils in my stomach like a snake.
Oh no.
“Hello!” she calls again and bangs on the door. I stumble out of bed, my legs still wrapped in the sheets. “I know you’re in there! I have your keycard!”
Holy crap, how loud can she be?
Before she has a chance to wake up the entire hallway (including my parents, and I do not want to explain to them what a starlet is doing knocking at my door at ten p.m.), I unlatch the lock and peek through the peephole, but someone has their finger blocking it. Because that isn’t murdery at all.
I’m going to die.
Maybe I can wait a few more seconds, maybe she’ll leave and—
She knocks once more and I quickly crack open the door just a hair.
There in the hallway is Jessica Stone, her winged eyeliner alarmingly crisp, her lipstick bold and blood red. She’s wearing the same black suede jacket and jeans from earlier but no beanie. Her hair is pulled up into a bun atop her head.
“I swear I didn’t tell anyone!” I loud-whisper.
She gives me a once-over before handing me the keycard. “You dropped this in the bathroom earlier,” she says, and pushes her way into my room.
“Okay, thanks?” I say uncertainly.
“I came here to set some ground rules.”
“Ground rules?” I blink, making sure I’m seeing what I’m seeing. I am seeing this, right? THE Jessica Stone actually in my hotel room.
I blink. Yep, still here. I’m blinking and she’s still here.
“Ground rules for what? I swear I didn’t tell anyone!”
“I almost believe you.”
“I didn’t! Not a soul! Not even my brother, and trust me, he’s very charismatic—”
“You,” rumbles a deep voice from the hallway.
Oh, noooooooo.
I know that voice, too.
I turn to face the guy who is now taking up the entire doorway. Impossibly tall and gangly, thick black-frame glasses, with a swoop of raven-black hair gelled back. Jessica Stone’s assistant.
And he looks about ready to kill me.
I groan. “Not you again.”
“Trust me, the feeling’s mutual.”
Jessica shrugs out of her jacket and tosses it on the bed, flopping down beside it. “Oh right. You ran into each other, so we can skip the introductions.”
I jab a finger at him. “He is possibly the worst nerfherder in the—” I say, while at the same time he says, “She’s that monster of a girl I was telling you—”
We both stop midsentence.
“I’m what?” I ask.
“Did you just call me a nerfherder?”
I draw myself up to my full height. “It was either that or Muggle, and you don’t deserve Muggle.”
His eye twitches. It actually twitches.
From the bed Jessica calls, “Be nice to my assistant. Ethan, she looks like me, right? I mean her hair’s a little loud, but we can work with that.”
The anger inside me dissolves with a fizzle, replaced by a foreboding curiosity. “Hair? And work with what? I don’t understand.”
“This is a terrible idea, Jessica,” Ethan sighs, massaging the bridge of his nose.
“It’s the only one we have,” she replies, “terrible or not.”
“What is a terrible idea?” I ask them, glancing from Jessica Stone lounged on my bed to her assistant and then back again.
Instead, her assistant—Ethan—waves his hand toward my hotel room. He sounds tired—kinda like the Twelfth Doctor. Aged and haggard, having seen way too much to be optimistic about anything. “Aren’t you going to let me in? And maybe put on some clothes?”
What? I look down.
Ohsweetbabyjesus, I’m wearing my ratty Sailor Moon T-shirt and ladybug pajama shorts and Starfield socks that come up to my knees. I look like…ugh. I am not dressed for company. Boy company. Any company at all, frankly.
I quickly cross my arms over my chest. Why’d I sling my bra onto the lampshade in the corner? Why did I think that was funny, like, two seconds ago?
“I—um—it’s not, I’m not—”
“Just let him in,” Jessica calls to me.
I open the door all the way. “Come on in. Don’t mind the mess or…”
He takes two steps inside before we both realize there’s a pair of my pink and white Superman underwear on the floor. Whether it’s clean or dirty, neither of us knows.
Why.
Am.
I.
Like.
This.
I grab the underpants and shove them into my suitcase, which is half-exploded over the left side of the room. “Don’t, uh, mind the mess. Don’t even notice. Just be blissfully ignorant of it all.”
And please don’t look at the lampshade.
“I think I can manage,” he replies cattily.
I find my cheeks heating up and avert my eyes to look at Jessica, who is now lackadaisically browsing through the pay-per-view channels on the hotel television. I hope she knows I have to pay for them. I begin to bite my thumb but she snaps her fingers at me.
“Nuh! No. That’s the first rule. No thumb biting. It’s gross and I never do it.”
I quickly take my thumb out of my mouth, though I don’t know why I’m listening to her. “It’s a nervous habit.”
“Pick another one. Second rule, always wear eyeliner. I’ll show you how to wing it. It’s one of my trademarks. Can’t be Jessica Stone without the trademarks.”
“But I don’t wear makeup.”
She rolls her eyes. “Are you one of those girls who thinks girls who wear makeup are vapid?”
Yes. “No.”
I can feel her disapproval.
“I don’t see the point of tricking peo
ple into thinking you have bigger lips or higher cheekbones,” I admit. “I just don’t think it’s worth the time, is all. Unless you’re cosplaying.”
She sits up on the bed and turns to face me. “Look, makeup is anything you want it to be. It can make you look like you have more defined features or more perfect skin, but to me it’s like armor. Eyeliner as lethal as daggers. Lips red like men’s heart blood. It’s more than a mask, makeup is protection in battle.”
“But what does Jessica Stone need to protect herself from?”
At that, she quickly glances away. “Rule three—”
This is too much. I can’t think straight. “STOP!” I yell, forming my arms into an X. “Pause. Back up. Why are you here, Miss…?” It feels weird calling her Miss Stone, and she scowls at the title, too.
“Call me Jess, please,” she says, turning back to me. “And I’m here because I need your help. Look, I fail at being me. Especially in this…environment. But you? You’re perfect at it, and I need to appease the masses. So. You do still want to be me, don’t you?”
This feels like a trap.
“Who doesn’t want to be Jessica Stone?” I say hesitantly.
She spreads her arms wide. “Then here’s your golden opportunity! Let’s trade lives!”
She can’t be serious. I wait a heartbeat, then another, expecting her to cave and expose this elaborate joke, after which a cameraman busts out of the closet and surprise! I’ve been punk’d!
And yet…
I don’t think she’s joking.
Everything about Jessica Stone is perfect, from her manicured nails to her artfully messy topknot. Even in an unassuming blazer she looks like a movie star. It’s weird how some people just shine.
Is it really that easy? Can I just step into her shoes and become her? I’ve seen people don cosplays all my life, becoming space princesses and starship captains and robot mercenaries and Vulcan Jedis. Assume other lives, other names…
And here is Jessica Stone offering up her name to me. Does she know what I could do with it?
I narrow my eyes. “What’s the catch?”
She falters. “Catch?”
“Yeah. Why would you let me be you? What’s so bad about being you that even you don’t want to be you anymore?” By the tightening of her lips I know I’ve struck a chord.
The Princess and the Fangirl Page 6
