I can already count three of those cockroaches encroaching on the diner, and from the look of it, Imogen has no clue. Of course she doesn’t. I should’ve told her to stay away from Vance Reigns. That bloodsucking social climber will do anything to get ahead.
It occurs to me a little too late that I never prepared Imogen at all for being me, because though she might look like me and can imitate my voice, she doesn’t have the years of accumulated knowledge of who to trust and who to steer clear of. And she definitely doesn’t understand how to handle these sorts of situations.
But Jessica Stone does.
I whirl around to the paparazzo who had been following Natalia’s car and motion for them to pull over. I have an idea—it’s an awful one, and Ethan would definitely not approve, but I don’t have time for a better plan. The skies have brightened and it’s only drizzling now, and the city has become so humid that the air sticks to me like a tongue.
The paparazzo pulls over and a window rolls down to reveal a woman in her midtwenties, her hair swirled up into a bun atop her head. She pops her gum and lowers her heart-shaped sunglasses. “Miss Stone, you know I only park illegally for you—”
“Can I ask you a favor?”
“I’m sorry, did you just say you need to ask me for a favor?”
“I’ll give you an exclusive. A photo no one else’ll get. I just need you to help me out.” I glance over to the other paparazzi. “Can I get in?”
She gives me a once-over before she pops her gum again and smiles. “Yeah. Get in, loser. We’re gonna get some photos.”
TO GET OUT OF THE RAIN, VANCE AND I dip into a small diner a few blocks away from the convention and slide into a booth. We’re only moderately wet, and we’re laughing from our mad dash into the restaurant. The is the second time in twenty-four hours I’ve been within touching distance of Vance Reigns. My heart should be about ready to explode, but I can’t stop thinking about the glare Ethan gave Jasper at the meet-and-greet.
He looked about ready to kill him.
I shouldn’t have snapped at Ethan like that. He was only trying to help.
Yeah, but he’s a burnt Hufflepuff, I try to reason with myself, and you’re getting food with a Gryffindor.
A clap of thunder rumbles overhead, and lightning reflects off the skyscrapers around us. We made it to the diner just before the storm hit in full swing, and I shake off errant water droplets on my arms.
The diner is red-and-white checkered, with neon signs glowing in the windows and the smell of greasy fries and sweet ice cream hanging in the air. I sit on one side of the booth, assuming Vance would go for the other, but instead he slides in next to me, stretching his arm across the back of the booth behind me.
He smells like a mixture of motorcycle exhaust and some sort of expensive cologne, and sitting this close I can see stubble on his cheek. This feels really, really cliché, straight out of a ’90s rom-com starring a rough leathery bad boy and a chaste good girl.
Oh, if he knew me—the real me—he’d realize I am not that good at all.
“You looked upset earlier. Is everything okay?” he asks softly, as a preppy waitress comes over and hands us two menus.
“I’m fine. A strawberry shake, please,” I say before I can think of what Jessica would order. I’m too tired to play that game.
“Um, yeah, chocolate malt. Thanks,” he adds, giving the waitress a dashing smile before turning his gaze back to me. She stares at him, blinking, for another moment, realizing that yes, it is Vance Reigns, before she hurries off to tell the other waitstaff.
“Are you sure you’re fine?” he asks. “Is there anything I can do?”
I toy with my words, arranging them in my head, before I say, “Do you ever have a little voice in your head that tells you that you aren’t good enough? And you’ve never done anything in your life, so you begin to think that maybe that little voice in your head is right? That maybe you aren’t smart or talented or pretty enough—”
“Pretty? Jess.” He angles himself in the booth to turn his full attention to me. “I think you’re beautiful.”
It’s a phrase I’ve never heard in my life. At least, not directed at me. Not while some utterly gorgeous guy stares into my eyes, his gaze curving down my cheek, resting on my mouth. He knows what beauty is—he must, because he is beautiful. The way his shoulder-length blond hair is twisted back into a bun while wavy locks escape, framing his chiseled face. The intensity of his icy blue eyes makes it a little hard to breathe, and a lot hard to think.
He called me beautiful.
VANCE REIGNS.
CALLED ME.
BOOOTEEF—
“I-I do?” I stutter. “I…I am?”
“Of course. Why do you seem so surprised?” His thumb trails down the side of my neck.
Gooseflesh prickles my skin before I can remember that I’m Jessica and not Imogen, and Jessica is told that she is beautiful all the time. She lives in a land where she’s probably never been told anything else.
She’s probably reminded that she’s beautiful every day of her life.
I love my Kathy and Minerva—they tell me I’m pretty and special and so Gryffindor I probably need a disclaimer, but it’s not the same. My moms love me to the moon and back, but they’re my family.
A stranger has never called me beautiful until now. Not sincerely.
All my life I’ve thought that maybe if I didn’t rush in, if I grew my hair out, if I put on makeup or liked Gossip Girl or sports or anything besides Starfield and animes, maybe I would’ve been asked to study sessions or proms or football games.
Maybe Jasper wouldn’t have bailed on me at ExclesiCon last year.
And yet, when I slip into playing Jessica, people take notice. I’m interesting as Jessica—I’m smart and talented, and this boy I barely know just called me beautiful.
Then why does it feel weird, and wrong?
“No one has ever called me beautiful before,” I say softly.
Vance laughs, deep and rumbly. “Now I know you’re lying. Everyone knows you are, Jess. It’s part of the package.”
That word gives me pause; his hand rests on the side of my neck and he leans in close. I ease backward a little. “The package? Like I’m some made-to-order special on QVC?”
“It’s just a saying, Jess. You’re gorgeous,” he says and twirls a finger through my hair. I really hope it’s human hair and not, you know, fake, but he doesn’t seem to mind either way. “And you’re mysterious, and not easy to take out on a date, that’s for sure.”
“A…date?”
“Isn’t that what this is? You finally agreed to go out on a date with Vance Reigns.”
Oh sweet baby Carmindor, he just referred to himself in the third person.
“And I finally get to go out with one of the most elusive girls on the market.” He lowers his face as if to kiss me—
NO HE IS COMING TO KISS ME.
I plant a hand on his chest and push him away.
“Whoa, we barely know each other, Vance.”
He scoffs. “Barely? Jess. We run in all the same circles. You dated that cad Darien Freeman, and we both know I kiss much better than him.”
Oh no.
I’ve made a grave mistake.
The Vance in my head, the one who is kind and charming and puts a finger down to “Never have I ever had a crush on Ron Swanson,” is dying in a blaze of bad acting.
He goes on, even though I really would just appreciate him shutting up. “We’d look great together, don’t you agree? General Sond and the dead Princess Amara. The tabloids’ll go nuts.”
“You…want to date me,” I fill in.
He rolls his eyes. “Duh.”
“But what if we aren’t compatible?”
“Jess, we’re not on the market for what’s inside.”
“On the market?” There it is again. Those words.
The waitress comes and sets down our shakes and quickly scurries away. Warning signs flare up in every corn
er of my brain because this is not where I want this conversation to be going.
Vance takes out his phone from his back pocket and pulls up the camera.
“I’m sorry to lead you on,” he says, sounding not very sorry at all, “but honestly, you play the game too, don’t you? Go on a few dates, call a few paparazzi, pretend something scandalous is about to go down.”
“But what if I…”
He gives me a peculiar look and the charming set to his face is no longer charming at all, but arrogant. “What? You actually thought I—? Oh, Jess.” He tsks and takes a selfie of us, even though my face is already beginning to fall. He turns his head to me, our shoulders touching, and he is so close that I can smell the mint gum on his breath and see the individual strands of bronze in his hair. His lips part into a strange toothy grin, more beast than prince, and he says, “Princess Amara doesn’t have a happy ending. I thought you knew that.”
“What?”
“And you’ll never get a second chance.” He runs his thumb along my jaw. “Stop looking at me like I’m talking nonsense. Why couldn’t you act this swell on screen?”
“This was all a stunt? You—you invited me here for a photo?”
“They’re worth a thousand words.” He shrugs away from me and takes out his wallet, tossing a five-dollar bill onto the table. “You can pay for the rest, yeah sweetheart?”
Sweetheart.
The word pulls me out of my stupor.
We aren’t sweet—he barely knows me. And I’ve seen enough BBC Doctor Whos to pick up on the sarcasm in his brilliant British accent.
I can handle a surprise selfie. I can handle figuring out that he’s a douchebag supreme with a side of dumbass.
But what I can’t handle?
I am the daughter of Kathy and Minerva Lovelace, and I am no one’s pet name.
I plant my hands on his chest and shove him out of the booth so hard, he flops onto the ground. He stares up at me from the tiles, because clearly he’s never been put on the ground by a girl before.
“Don’t call me sweetheart,” I snarl, “you two-faced nerf-herding hobgoblin!”
He stumbles to his feet, shaking out his leather jacket, vibrating in anger. “I’ll see you on the front pages!” He jabs a finger toward the window, and for the first time I notice the paparazzi outside, peeking from behind parked cars. He sneers. “Good luck getting off them.”
He called the paparazzi, I realize, and a flash of anger jolts through me.
Then—just to add insult to injury—he reaches for his shake. Oh no, sir. No you don’t. I snatch it away and toss it at him, melted ice cream spilling across his shirt and precious leather jacket. He gives an anguished cry, as if I’ve torn his favorite Blue-Eyes White Dragon Yu-Gi-Oh! card in half.
Oh, he hasn’t even seen what I can do yet.
I grab the other milkshake, glad that it’s strawberry, which goes so well with chocolate. I stand on the booth’s bench and hold it menacingly over his head.
He looks up in disbelief. “Stop! What the hell—”
And then, I dump it.
He slushes around, wiping strawberry milkshake from his eyes, calling me all of the most colorful names in the book, and then he storms out of the diner on squeaky shoes. The paparazzi train their lenses on him as he leaves.
The waitress returns, handing me a handful of napkins. “Your insult was way better.”
“Thanks. I’ll help you clean up,” I offer, and take the mop from her hands. I’m glad I’m in motion so that when the paparazzi turn back to take more photos, they don’t see Jess’s hands shaking.
But it’s strange.
They don’t turn back to me.
They don’t click their cameras.
There’s a woman shooing them away from the window—
The bell above the diner door dings and my skin prickles, thinking it’s Vance, come back with the paparazzi. I summon all of the best insults I can think of. I launch into my tirade: “Coming back for seconds? Good, because you haven’t even seen my Angry Feminist Rampage yet. Jess?” Her name comes out as a squeak.
Jessica Stone is standing in the middle of the diner, her SPACE QUEEN beanie in her hands and her soaking wet hair pulled back into a ponytail. She leaves a puddle on the ground around her. “Angry Feminist Rampage? See, the trick is,” she replies, folding her arms over her chest, “to always be angry.”
“Jess!” I jab a finger at the people with cameras. “They’ll see!”
But she waves her hand. “Don’t worry about the paparazzi,” she says, and I notice they’re not pointing their cameras at us. She levels a look at me, “I think I need to tell you the truth.”
AS IMOGEN FINISHES MOPPING UP THE MILKSHAKE, she says, “So let me get this straight: you accidentally threw away the Starfield sequel script that some asshole then found in the garbage and started posting on Twitter, so you asked me to switch with you in hopes that you could find the thief before they revealed that it was yours?”
“That about sums it up.” I tap some hot sauce onto my fries.
“Huh.”
Most of the paparazzi have left us for Calvin (I gave them his hotel name and room number, so I make a mental note to buy him a sorry-you-were-bait bouquet later), but a few hang around in the diner, watching Imogen and me from a distance. They aren’t taking photos, though, because I promised them a better op later. The paparazzi aren’t all soulless cockroaches. They just go where the money is, and I’ve never given them a reason not to trust me. They’re more like—what’re those things called? The birds that sit on a rhino’s back, picking bugs off its skin? They’re more like that.
There is an ecosystem in Hollywood that I know well. It’s just the rest of the world that I don’t quite get. Especially the internet.
Imogen leans on the mop. “And you still haven’t found out who took the script?”
“It’s a big convention. I was stupid to think I could do it alone.”
“Then that makes two of us,” she replies with a sigh. “Listen, Jess, about the whole Save Amara thing—”
“Why does it mean so much to you?” I interrupt, picking at my basket of fries. “Why does she mean so much to you?”
She. Princess Amara.
Imogen winces, her lips pressed into a thin line. She picks at the rough handle of the mop, as if I had asked her to explain solar combustion. Now that I finally have a good look at her, I much prefer her with a pink pixie. She looks a little too much like me in that brown wig and drawn-on mole, and I’m really not all that surprised she pulled me off so well. In any other life, she could’ve been me.
There is a theory of parallel universes—or a multiverse—much like String Theory’s extra dimensions of spacetime. It’s the speculation that there are other parallel universes running alongside ours with different pasts and different futures—where one choice you make splits off into another parallel world. So, perhaps there’s a universe out there where the impossible happens and I’m not Starfield’s princess.
Perhaps there is a universe where a girl with a pink pixie is.
“Princess Amara is brave,” Imogen finally says, and her voice is soft and timid, like she’s telling me a great secret not many people understand. “And resourceful and she’s the kind of princess who rescues herself, you know? She wasn’t made to be someone else’s character arc. When I first saw Starfield, I knew her. She wasn’t perfect—and that’s what I needed. She’s constantly in her father’s shadow, or Carmindor’s—but she tries so hard, constantly, to cast her own. And in the end she does by becoming the best version of herself. That’s why Amara means so much to me. She taught me that I can make mistakes, and own up to them, and be better because of them. So…I want to apologize—I didn’t know what you’d gone through. Or I mean, what you go through.”
I snap my gaze up to her, and she quickly looks away, but it’s too late. I know that tone. “What happened? Did something happen?”
Her mouth thins, and she sits down on th
e other side of the booth in silence. The waitress refills my glass and, seeing that she’s interrupting something, quickly hurries away. Imogen refuses to meet my gaze.
I don’t know Imogen very well, but I know that when she’s quiet, there’s something incredibly wrong. “Imogen, what happened?”
“It’s stupid. I mean, it’s done now.”
“That doesn’t tell me what happened.” Then I add, “It wasn’t Ethan, was it? I know you two got into a fight last night but…” I reach for my phone in my pocket and pull it out to call him. “I don’t know what’s come over him but—”
“NO!” She almost climbs over the table to stop me from texting him. I stare at her, startled, and she melts back into her seat in embarrassment. “No—it’s not him. It’s really not that big of a deal, okay? During the meet-and-greet today, a guy I knew came in. He just—his hand ‘slipped’ and he—you know—sorta copped a feel,” she says hurriedly, her cheeks burning.
Oh. Oh no.
“It was mortifying,” she adds quickly, “and before you ask, he didn’t recognize me. He thought I was you.”
Wait—she thought that I’d be mad at her? I’m furious, but not at her. I exhale through my mouth, the one thing I can do to keep myself calm as I process this. “And you’re okay?”
“Me?” She gives me a surprised look. “I want to punch his teeth in, I’m so mad.”
“You and me both,” I reply, and on my phone I pull up the email for the con’s management team.
“Do you know this asshole’s name?”
“I don’t know if he’s going under his real name or his YouTube name, but I’m supposed to meet him tomorrow after the con anyway. He wanted to tell me something. Me, Imogen. Not you,” she clarifies, and with a relieved sigh, she stands to put the mop back into the bucket. “I can really pick ’em, you know.”
I send off the email. “Well, if you meet him tomorrow, I just told management—although I’m sure Ethan already has, too—to tell security to come by so you won’t be alone.”
The Princess and the Fangirl Page 20
