I shouldn’t have.
I can’t think about that, I tell myself. I’ll apologize later. I’ll tell her the whole story.
That is, if she ever wants to talk to me again.
“So, Monster, tell us how to get in trouble,” Milo says. “You were always the best at that,” he adds, not unkindly.
That makes me smile despite my probably-ruined-friendship with Harps. I clear my throat and say with Princess Amara’s saccharine ruthlessness, “It is one of my most glorious qualities,” and I ask him to follow me.
MY PHONE BUZZES AS I HEAD DOWN the hallway to my hotel suite. It’s from Imogen. I actually decided to trade numbers just in case something goes wrong. I don’t think she’ll be posting mine to any lewd websites.
IMOGEN (4:47 PM)
—Harper isn’t going to help us.
—I’m sorry, Jess.
I am, too. It’s because of me that Imogen lost her friendship with Harper, and I lost…
How could I lose something I never had? We shared ramen and stars and stories, and maybe that’s all that two people are, sometimes.
We’re just satellites that fell into each other’s orbit for a breath and then traveled on.
I slip my keycard into the door and shove it open.
“Ethan, I know you’re in here!” I call as I sweep into the room. The Great British Bake-Off is blaring on the TV, and that can only mean one thing. I turn it off and call his name again.
It means he’s utterly smitten by Imogen Lovelace.
I knew it.
“Ethan!” I call. The door to the bathroom is closed, and there isn’t a single sound coming from behind it, but I know he’s in there. He has already stress-ironed all of his shirts, hung up all of my dresses—oh brother, what did Imogen do to him? “I’ll keep screaming until you come out of there! I’ll tell everyone that you wear Superman boxers and—”
There’s a clatter on the other side of the bathroom door, and he wrenches it open in nothing but his jeans and a towel around his shoulders, his face half shaved and shaving cream still sticking to one side.
“Shush!” he pleads. “And they’re Batman boxers, thank you very much.” But then he blinks and takes me in—me, Jess, his friend, is standing in her own hotel room again. His eyes go wide. “Oh no, did something else happen? Did that monster of a girl—” I hold up a hand and he quiets down. “I think you need to apologize to her.”
“Me? To her?”
“I know you, you dolt,” I remind him. “You like her.”
“Her? Why on earth would I like that—”
“Ethan.”
His shoulders sag. There are plenty of things Ethan Tanaka can do. But the one thing he can’t do is lie to me, his best friend. And I can’t lie to him. “Come here,” I mutter, and I pull him into a hug even though I only reach up to his chest. I tell him about the plan Imogen and I have come up with to get my script back—or at least to expose Vance for the thief he is—and Ethan nods quietly as I explain what he has to do, which is also very important.
“You need me to…work the lights,” he clarifies.
“Elle will distract the tech guy and you, wearing a black shirt, will just squeeze into the booth and hijack the lights.”
“But I don’t have a black shirt,” he says helplessly. He begins to scratch at the side of his face still covered with shaving cream and then stops himself.
I hurry over to my suitcase, pull out a black shirt, and hold it up to his torso. It’s a women’s medium, so it should easily fit over his scrawny shoulders. “It might be a little short, but it’ll have to do.”
“Is this punishment for being mean to Imogen?”
“Yes,” I reply happily, shoving the shirt into his chest, “it is. Now finish shaving and go change.”
THIS IS THE LAST TIME I WILL EVER BE Jessica Stone and, starflame, am I going to make it count. The panel is about to begin, and I’m pacing back and forth in the small space behind the curtains that block the audience from our waiting area, chewing on my thumbnail because, screw the rules, I have pink hair. You know, under my wig. Hidden.
It’s still pink, okay?
This is it. Our moment of glory. We’re on the edge of it. Just waiting.
On the other side of the waiting area, Vance Reigns flirts with one of the volunteers, and I restrain myself from losing the fries I ate back at the diner.
I check my phone. Three minutes before the panel. I’m trying not to hardcore freak out but honestly? It’s much harder than I thought it’d be. One, I’m playing with my new friend’s career, and two, I really hope things go according to plan.
I should’ve warned Jess that my plans usually fall spectacularly to pieces.
Nah.
“Something eating you?”
I jump at the voice and look up from my phone. Darien is standing in front of me, all glorious black curls and long eyelashes and warm brown eyes. I wait for my fangirl senses to kick in and freak out but…they don’t. Ethan’s eyelashes are much longer.
What am I doing? This isn’t an eyelash-length competition. Weirdo.
I put my phone away and clear my throat. “Well, um. You know, just the usual.”
He nods. “Uh-huh.”
From across the room, I hear Vance chuckle at something the volunteer says. It’s smooth like honey and makes my entire body go rigid. I can’t believe I fell for that—for him. How naive could I be?
Darien glances over his shoulder at Vance and then back at me. “You know, he disguises himself pretty well for a bag of dicks.”
My eyes widen. “Darien.”
“I can say it,” he replies, and takes a bottle of water offered by a volunteer. “He’s a piece of trash. He shouldn’t have tricked you like that.”
He’s in on the plan, too. After apologizing to Ethan, Jess’s second order of business was to find Darien because we couldn’t pull this off without him. Jess shot him a text, and we reconvened in Jess’s suite so she could freshen my makeup. By the time we made it back to Jess’s suite, Darien and a girl with crimson hair were waiting outside her door.
She had grinned at us—that kind of troublemaking grin I recognized from the gossip news proclaiming her Geekerella—and brandished a box of red hair dye. “So who needs to become a princess?”
And that is how I met Elle Wittimer.
If I ever shipped people in real life (which I don’t, because it’s weird to me, unless it’s me and someone really hot and it’s only in my head), then she and Darien would be my FOREVER OTP. But I totally don’t ship real people.
…except maybe them.
“I just hope this plan works,” I mutter to Darien, eyeing Vance as he and the volunteer break out into a flirtatious laugh. “I’m kinda mostly afraid that Bran won’t get his phone number in time. And…”
I hesitate, because this part I hadn’t really wanted to say out loud. I don’t want to jinx anything.
“And even if we do expose him, Jess will still take the blame for throwing the script away in the first place. And even though she said she wanted to take the blame, I don’t understand why she would.”
Darien nods. “I know. But let’s trust her, yeah? She’s not the brightest witch of her age for nothing.”
I gasp, fake-shocked. “Darien Freeman, did you just refer to something other than Starfield?”
“I know, right? It’s like I’m multidimensional or something.”
“Shocker.”
Then he checks his phone. “Oh gosh, look at the time. It’s distraction o’clock!”
He winks at me and hurries to the exit of the waiting area. A volunteer stops him, but when he says he has to go to the bathroom, she lets him escape into the hallway.
I quickly text Jess.
IMOGEN (5:55 PM)
—The Carmindor is in motion.
THERE IS SOMETHING TO BE SAID WHEN the actress playing the new Amara in the reboot devises a plan to steal the original Amara’s gown from a coffin case while half of the con wa
tches.
Although I don’t know what that something to be said would be, honestly.
I guess I’m about to find out.
The dress is located in the center of the exhibit, beside the original Carmindor’s uniform, which is, as Dare once pointed out, the perfect shade of blue. A hue that matches the swirls in Amara’s dress exactly.
There are three booth attendants patrolling the exhibit, orbiting one another in bored rounds. Fans take photos in front of the cases, posing beside their favorite uniforms. There is a constant crowd in front of Amara’s dress that I had hoped would ebb as it grew nearer to the big Starfield panel—where they’re supposed to announce the title of the sequel—but the crowd doesn’t seem to be letting up at all.
I share a bag of popcorn with Imogen’s beefcake of a brother while we watch from the edge of the showroom. Bran is back at the booth, hopefully hacking into the Twitter account. It’s just a few keystrokes, he assured me. Just ask for password retrieval, get a glimpse of the characters in the Twitter profile’s phone number, and go to work on a phone directory site. He stressed that there was a program to test out hundreds of thousands of phone numbers—or whatever. I’m not even going to pretend to understand it. I had half a mind to ask him to purge the entire account—delete every tweet until no trace remains—but that won’t help my narrative.
No, people already know that Amara is dead and Carmindor dies. What they don’t know is the ending to the story, and that is something I do not intend to give them. At least not yet.
Endings can always change.
Amara’s dress is the last piece of the plan. This part was my idea, actually. I don’t just want to expose Vance as the the insufferable jerk he is. If I’m going to back Imogen and save Amara, I need to convince the fandom that Amara needs to be saved.
Not only that, but I know that I would look like perfection in that dress. The new Amara in the dress she could never live up to. And in it I will prove to everyone that there are stories yet to tell, and stars to cross, and shipper wars to wage, and if a fandom can’t shift a narrative then nothing can.
At the beginning of all this I was against #SaveAmara, but now I realize that Imogen and I are on the same side. We both want meaningful narratives, less flavor-of-the-week female characters, more legitimacy as a genre. We want to save Amara—but we want to save our future, too.
“So what’ve I missed?” Dare asks, jogging up beside me. He has on a pair of Ray-Bans, as if that really disguises him in the crowd. People are doing double-takes the longer he stands beside me.
Imogen’s brother gapes at him. “You…you’re…”
“’Sup, my man,” Dare says coolly, and gives Milo the finger guns.
“I think I’m going to die,” Milo whispers.
Nerds. The lot of them.
I toss another piece of popcorn into my mouth. “Cause a distraction while Milo and I get the dress. You think you can do that?”
“Can I do that,” Dare scoffs and looks at me from over his Ray-Bans. “I was born ready.” He wiggles his eyebrows and saunters out into the hallway, opening his arms like, Ladies.
Honestly.
But it seems to work. The first girl who notices him screams and comes running, and then another and another, until he’s surrounded by fans asking to take his photo and pose with him. He treats them all so graciously, I’m kind of a little annoyed.
It doesn’t work for long, however, and by the time Milo and I get to the case, a volunteer appears, red-faced and panicked. “Mr. Freeman! You’re on a panel, like, now!”
Oh, no.
Two of the booth attendants are beginning to separate from the crowd, and neither Milo nor I have even opened the case yet. I mutter under my breath and work my hairpin into the hinges. The first screw pops out. I start on the bottom one. Imogen’s brother blocks me with the hulk of his body, but that isn’t going to help if the booth attendants look over and see me unhinging the door to the case.
“Um,” I hear Dare say to the volunteer, “I mean—I’ll be there in a—I have to—can we wait a few—”
Ugh. I forgot how Hufflepuff he is. Pushover.
But then another voice cuts through the crowd. I recognize it, but I can’t put my finger on where exactly I’ve heard it before. It’s rough and gravelly. Definitely an older gentleman.
“Skipping out on a panel? In my day, I’d never do such a thing.”
It sounds like the pretzel guy. Henry or whatever.
I look around the case to the commotion. It definitely is Pretzel Henry, but without his pretzel stand and no longer wearing his pretzel smock. He stands across from Dare, wearing a tropical shirt with a white undershirt peeking out and beige trousers, his face is clean shaven and his graying hair is pushed back over his head.
Imogen’s brother makes a strangled noise in his throat. “Holy George Clooney’s bat nipples. That’s…”
Oh.
Ohmygod.
That’s where I recognized him from!
Now that he and Dare are in the same spot, the likeness is almost uncanny. Dare’s nose is a little bigger, and his eyebrows are much more expressive, but the two of them could be cut from the same cloth. Natalia Ford and I look a little alike, but this is like that scene in the new Star Trek where the new Spock, Zachary Quinto, meets the old Spock, Leonard Nimoy. This is probably the single strangest unscripted thing I have ever seen in my life.
I don’t think they’ve ever been in the same room before, although Dare knew he was here. David Singh hasn’t been in the spotlight for years. According to what I’ve read, he’s done humanitarian work supporting disaster relief and charities across the world. And, apparently, he’s been here. At ExcelsiCon. As…a pretzel guy.
I watch as Dare stares, unabashedly, at the elder Carmindor. “I’m…you’re…sir!”
“Skipping out on your panel, you should be ashamed,” Pretzel Henry—I mean, David Singh—says, shaking his head. “That isn’t very princely of you, Mr. Freeman.”
“I—but I wasn’t—I’m not—”
David Singh turns his gaze ever so briefly to Milo and me and then back to Dare. He knows what we’re doing. He’s…distracting them for us? Dare darts his eyes from us, to David Singh, and then back to us again as if trying to piece together this hectic turn of events. But all I can give him is a helpless shrug because this is not going as planned. Come on, Dare, improv a little.
He swallows thickly and, apparently finally making up his mind, straightens his spine and sticks his hands in his pockets in a very jerklike way. “I was merely giving my fans some one-on-one time, unlike you. You haven’t been seen in years.”
“I prefer anonymity in my retirement, but maybe I should’ve come back and taught you some manners, kiddo.”
“Manners? Like I could learn anything useful from you, old man,” Dare bats back.
The crowd is growing, and now everyone is most definitely interested in this showdown. They don’t even notice Milo and me.
Imogen’s brother pats me on the shoulder, and I hurriedly wiggle my hairpin into the bottom hinge. It pops off and the glass door falls open. Milo catches it, and I grab the dress on the metal mannequin, folds of spun silk and taffeta, and pull it out of the case.
In the next blink, we’re gone.
“SO, WHERE’S YOUR BOYFRIEND, PRINCESS?” Vance’s oil-slick voice purrs behind me. “Darien got cold feet?”
I resist the urge to shove my fist of fury right into that smug jawline of his and instead whirl around to him and feign shock. “Oh look, a wild nerfherder appears!”
His blue eyes narrow. “You look nervous, sweetheart.”
“And I’ve told you not to call me that, supercreep. What, are you done flirting with the volunteers? Were you lonely, Vance?” I say, trying to keep my voice in Jessica’s range, but after using it constantly these last few days, my vocal chords waver in and out.
He smiles at me and begins to say something, but then Amon bursts through the doors, clapping h
is hands loudly to get our attention.
“All right, crew! Let’s—wait, where’s Darien?” he asks, taking a frantic headcount of the panelists. “Where’s our Carmindor?”
I clear my throat and say in Jess’s sweet accent, “He went to take a piss.”
“Now?”
I shrug. The lights on the stage begin to rise.
Amon glances at his phone, and his lips curve down into a frown. Vance nudges his chin toward him. “What’s wrong, Boss?”
“Nothing—it’s nothing. Everyone, gather round!” He motions to bring us all in, and Calvin and Vance circle up with me. “Here’s where we get to announce your hard work and the title.”
Calvin thrusts up his fist. “Heck yeah! Beating that leaker to the punch!”
Amon’s phone begins to ring, but he quickly silences it.
“That too. Are you ready, team?” He sticks his hand out into the middle, and everyone puts their hands on top of his. “Jess, I know you’re off in your own world, but are you with us?”
I blink out of my thoughts and put my hand with theirs.
“Look to the stars!” he starts. “Aim!”
“Ignite!” we cry, and break the circle.
Bunch of nerds, I realize. The lot of them.
Except for Vance. Vance can go take a hike off the nose of a Nova-class star cruiser.
The lights in the audience crash to black, and the Starfield theme comes on, so loud it vibrates my chest. Excitement races across my skin like electricity. Jess should be here experiencing this. She should be the one about to walk out onstage.
She’ll be here, I remind myself, and I eye Vance for the umpteenth time. Bran should be taking over his Twitter account by now, getting his phone number.
Amon climbs the stairs to the stage first, and the rest of us follow into the blinding light.
The roar of the crowd is…monstrous.
Three thousand screaming fans, and even more watching the live-stream on the internet. With so much Starfield fandom gathered in one place, there’s no way not to feel alive. Like every one of us is linked in some cosmic tapestry, all of our lives affected, in some small way, by Starfield. I close my eyes and listen to the crowd singing along to the theme song like it’s their own heartbeat, and there’s nothing quite like it.
The Princess and the Fangirl Page 22
