A Phoenix First Must Burn

by A Phoenix First Must Burn (retail) (epub)

  But I never said that to him. I wasn’t ready for him to leave Hearts yet. I wasn’t ready for him to leave me yet.

  As the “root for” couple, every other scene of ours was together. Sometimes I had scenes with his evil brother and other times with my best friends—one who was a witch, the other a vampire. But it was Reid that I ran lines with. It was Reid that I did homework with. It was Reid that I ate lunch with, and it was Reid that I went to movies and got meals with even when we weren’t working.

  “I got another script,” he said as we stood in front of the studio, backs facing the photographers.

  “What’s this one about?” I asked.

  “Psychic alien assassin . . . wait for it . . .”

  “Who falls in love with his victim and has to decide whether to love or to kill,” I finished.

  He laughed.

  “Close—psychic alien killer who’s charged with killing the president but falls in love with his daughter and has to decide whether to love or to kill.”

  I raised my hand dramatically.

  “I would see it.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t think it’s me, though.”

  “You get more scripts than I get food from Grubhub.”

  “I’m being a brat, aren’t I?” he said.

  I was his costar, and I had only been offered a handful of roles, two out of three of which were teen prostitutes. I would kill to be offered the chance to lead an epic space battle. But every role I really wanted involved my agent pitching me to studios, not the other way around.

  Reid saw how unfair the business was. He was trying to learn from that first onslaught of tweets and everything that came after. Enough to know that sometimes I wanted him to be quiet when it came to the difference in our careers. And that sometimes I just wanted him to listen when I wanted to vent about it.

  I swatted him with the end of the blanket. He retaliated by ballooning the blanket over our heads and engulfing us in it. I laughed.

  “Hey, maybe we should have practiced,” he whispered.

  “Practiced what?” I demurred. I wasn’t sure, but it almost sounded like Reid Hamilton was flirting with me.

  I was close enough to see his chest move as he breathed. Which meant he was close enough to hear my heart beating double-time in my chest.

  He whispered my name and left it hanging there.

  I met his gaze and I could have sworn that the whites of his eyes were almost luminescent. It was a trick of the light, I reasoned. And as his smile spread, the light was forgotten.

  Was it really possible? Was Reid going to kiss me?

  But just as suddenly, he stepped back and unblanketed us. And the daylight crashed in.

  “Want to go get froyo?” he suggested as I tucked my hair behind my ears and tucked away my expectations.

  “I should really get home,” I said, thinking of Mom.

  “We saved like three hours with the fire. Come on. You can help me read President Alien?”

  “That is not the name.” I laughed again.

  “Would I lie to you?” he said, and I nodded.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  When the car dropped me off at home, I was full of frozen yogurt, and the morning’s fire was in my rearview.

  When my mother answered the door she was clearly upset. The studio had called and told her about the fire.

  “I should have been there.”

  “Mom, I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine.”

  “I’m fine. It was just a freak thing. The electrical or something. The crew will get it fixed, and we’ll be back on set in two days.”

  “Honey, it wasn’t a freak thing, and it wasn’t an accident. It was you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Mom wasn’t good on her own. Since Dad had divorced her when I was five, she’d been practically my shadow for most of my life. My decision to have a closed set clearly upset her. She paced the room.

  “I don’t know how to say this except to just say this . . . You are not like other girls. “

  “Mom!” Sometimes she criticized me, but I’d never have expected her to agree with Michael and call me a freak.

  “I know you’re upset about today,” I told her, “but I am allowed to have a little privacy.”

  “No, honey, not just you, the whole family. You don’t know your power.”

  “Are you seriously going to do this today? Michael insulted my kissing, and then there was a fire. Isn’t that enough? I should have taken you with me so you could have had a front-row seat to my humiliation. Is that honestly what you’re saying?”

  “Listen to me. Look at me,” Mom said suddenly. “I am not talking about today. I’m taking about your whole life.”

  “I am not listening to another word,” I said, tears forming.

  My mom opened her palm, and a tiny flame erupted from it.

  “What the hell?” I screamed.

  “We all have different gifts. Some of us control air, some fire, some water. Some of us control all of the elements. Others control minds. Still others control space. Some of us control all of those things—”

  “And you control fire?” I asked, still absorbing the new reality.

  “And so do you,” she said.

  I heard a voice in my head that wasn’t mine—it was my mom’s. I control more than that.

  I jumped.

  Honey, I know that this is a lot. I wish I’d told you sooner.

  “How is this happening?”

  “You might have all of my gifts or just some of them—sometimes they skip a generation. Your grandmother could barely cast a spell.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more.

  I got up suddenly and walked toward my room.

  “I need a minute.”

  “Honey, there’s so much more to tell you—”

  I slammed the door.

  I looked at myself in the mirror and began removing my makeup. When I was done, I took a long look at myself. Who was I? I tried to wrap my mind around what my mother had told me. I studied myself for a beat. I put up my palm and concentrated. Nothing happened.

  I wasn’t playing a witch. I was one.

  I flashed back to the day I’d auditioned for Hearts. I’d been sitting in a room filled with blonde Barbies who were thinner and taller and a couple of years older than me. I was the only one who had dressed up in the school uniform that Rhiannon wore to her supernatural school in Noelle Harking’s Eternal Damned series. I had been a fan of the series since I discovered it when I was seven. With the books coming out each year, I felt like I grew up with the little witch who starts at a new school, gets bullied, and has to decide whether to use her powers for good or for evil.

  “That was great, Gemma, thank you for coming in,” the casting director said when I finished the audition monologue in which Rhiannon finally tells the boy she likes that she is a witch.

  Something in the way the casting director said it told me I wasn’t getting it. That she thought I was great, but she wasn’t going to pick me. And it wasn’t just that she got my name wrong.

  I got to the door and turned back and walked back to her.

  “I know I’m not what you are looking for,” I said.

  “Gemma—” she said delicately.

  “Gamine,” I corrected. “But I know this character—I can be this character . . .”

  She blinked up at me. I had her attention.

  “I know there are tons of people who think they know this character—and some other girls out there look just like you think she should look—but when I read this book, I felt it on the inside. I felt I could be her.”

  Before she could respond, I clicked my heels back across the floor and out the door.

  Three days later, I had the job. />
  Now I looked at the mirror again and then stormed back out to see my mother. She was still sitting in the same spot. The television was on but she wasn’t looking at it. She looked up at me.

  “Honey, I . . .”

  “Can you tell me one thing?” I said over her. “You said you could control things. Did I or did you—did we make this happen, too? The acting, the roles, everything that I thought I earned—did you . . . magic it?”

  Mom’s face fell as she realized what I was thinking. “Oh, honey . . . no. Everything you did was yours. Not even a hint of magic.”

  “How can I believe you?” I asked.

  “I actually thought this life would be easier for you than your old life was.”

  “I’m on television. Thousands of kids are watching me. Thousands follow me. How was that supposed to work? How is that the way to keep a secret this big—one that you didn’t even bother to tell me?”

  “Your life is your own. You don’t have to see other kids on a daily basis. You see me and a small crew. If anything witchy happens, you’re on a show about witches . . .”

  I studied my mother for a beat. This woman who was always so calculating and so smart had somehow missed the point of everything.

  “Mom, you’ve made this big show of how close we are my whole life, and yet you’ve been hiding the most important thing about yourself. About me.”

  “I never thought of it as a gift. I thought of it as something I had to control. I hoped that you would never have to deal with it.” She paused and wrung her hands. “For most of my life, being a witch wasn’t a good thing.” Her face looked pained, as if she was remembering something.

  I went back to my room and shut the door again. I felt a twinge of concern for Mom’s younger self for whatever she’d gone through, but she didn’t get to make me feel bad for her when she’d hidden who we really were my whole life.

  I threw myself on the bed, knowing that sleep would not come tonight. A bitter laugh escaped my lips. This morning I’d thought the kiss was going to cause a shift in my life. Now I was someone who had been kissed but there was something else, something much more seismic. I was a witch.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  In the morning, I woke up to a ton of texts from Reid making sure I was okay and asking if I wanted to have breakfast. I ignored them, not wanting his pity pancakes. When I slipped out of my room I found a note on the kitchen table from my mother. She was off getting chocolate croissants for us from my favorite bakery. She would be back in a few minutes. The only thing I knew was that I wasn’t going to be there when she got back.

  When I got downstairs, I walked through the building, past my doorman, and out into the street. Before I could decide where to go, my phone pinged.

  An hour later I was at Freds with Harris, the writer-producer who’d been on set yesterday with a front-row seat to my kissing debacle.

  “What do you want to drink? I’m ordering a bloody Mary. Do you want one?” he asked in a rush. Harris was only a few years older than most of the cast. He’d been directing since he got his big break with an indie slasher movie about kids trapped in a superstore.

  I declined the drink and ordered an omelet with egg whites.

  “Skip the egg whites. Live a little.”

  I’d been on a diet since I was born, it seemed. I shook my head.

  “I can’t afford it,” I said.

  “I say you’re perfect. Girls want to see themselves, not stick figures on the screen.”

  The waitress cocked her head at me.

  “Okay, regular eggs.”

  I didn’t even know what real yolks tasted like. When I took a bite a few minutes later, I was surprised at how good they were. They melted in my mouth. Another reason to hate my mother—a lifetime of deprivation.

  “Thanks for this,” I said, filled with gratitude.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” he said gently.

  The eggs I’d been enjoying threatened to come back up.

  “Michael’s firing me. Is that why you invited me? That’s why you wanted me to order the real eggs.”

  Anger welled in me.

  “He can’t do that because of the kiss. He can’t fire me.”

  “It’s more than that. He says it’s your look.”

  “My look? What’s wrong with my look?”

  “You know he wanted someone different when the role was cast—he made no secret of it.”

  “I know that. But I thought he had come around. Everyone has. I can’t change who I am—”

  “Hey, I would never suggest that. I think you’re perfect just the way you are—but your character is growing up. I think it could be time to show Michael that you’re more grown up, too. What I mean is your wardrobe, the hair—time to lose the pigtails and trade them in for a blowout. And the overalls . . .”

  “You think a makeover can save my job?” I said hesitantly.

  “It’s Hollywood. We think that a makeover can save the world. I know it sucks that this is the way it is. But I want it to work.”

  “I want it to work, too,” I said. I forced a smile. I had been through so much more.

  He planned the whole day. The best salon. A private stylist at Barneys, upstairs from Freds.

  When we emerged from the store into the LA sunlight, Harris turned to me and asked, “How do you feel?”

  “Different.”

  “Different good or different bad?”

  “Good. I guess everyone has to grow up sometime.”

  It was a strange afternoon. I’d never spent so much time alone with Harris. He was funny and kind and laid back, and he made me feel better about everything. I felt myself relax, and I was finally feeling better despite the fact that my job was in jeopardy, I had to kiss Reid again, and oh yeah, I was a supernatural being with powers like the one I played on TV.

  A thought occurred to me that dampened my improved mood. “Is Michael going to be okay with the show paying for a makeover?”

  “He will be when he sees you. Let me worry about Michael, okay?” he said with a certainty I didn’t quite share.

  “Okay,” I said, and flipped my hair, which was blown straight for the first time in ages and reached well past the middle of my back. In my hands I held a few shopping bags—the rest had been sent to the studio.

  Harris laughed, and I pulled my hair behind my ear in response.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Be self-conscious. You are stunning. You always have been. Down deep you have to know that. Own it,” he said.

  Impulsively, I gave him a hug, and he patted me on the back.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Harris’s words followed me home up to the apartment, back in front of the mirror in my room, where I was hoping to find something. Or someone. I think I was looking for myself. Instead, I saw a girl playing dress-up. But no amount of makeup was going to make me what the studio wanted.

  Suddenly, somehow I knew that I could change my face with enough concentration. Focusing hard, I widened my eyes, lengthened my nose and sharpened it. I elongated my face and raised my cheekbones.

  Magic could make me the girl that they wanted. But I couldn’t bear looking at her. She wasn’t me.

  I closed my eyes and the bedroom quaked. When I opened them, the mirror cracked and the pieces flew toward me. I crouched down on the ground as glass shattered around me. The bags containing the new clothes Harris had bought began to smoke. I grabbed a pillow from the bed and smothered them before a fire could start. I caught a glimpse of myself in a shard of glass hanging from the mirror’s frame. My face had returned to itself.

  It was my choice what kind of person and what kind of witch I was going to be. For now, I wasn’t ready to change a thing.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ �
�

  Reid showed up a few minutes later. He looked and smelled like he had just gotten out of the shower. I liked him like this, free of the pancake makeup and preppy clothes that the role required. He wore an orange sweatshirt and jeans, and his signature sunglasses were propped on top of his head. He almost looked like a normal sixteen-year-old, except for his devastating good looks. Instantly I knew I could trust him, I had always trusted him, and the words burst forth. “I’m a witch, Reid. I can do things just by thinking about them. I started the fire, too.”

  He put his hands gently on my shoulders. “Let me handle it,” he said, pulling out his cell phone.

  “What are you doing? Who are you calling?” I asked. The lights flickered and I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. I did not want to hurt Reid.

  I could protect myself, but if I couldn’t do so while hiding my power, where would I end up? Dissected by a lab or caged by the government or used by them as weapon? I shuddered, thinking about what could happen to me

  With a flash of movement, Reid crossed the room in less than a second. He deposited the mirror shards in a trash can and the offensive new clothes outside the door.

  “What are you?” I asked as he finally stopped moving and stood in front of me again.

  He opened his mouth and revealed teeth that did not look like ones that took an hour in Sandy’s makeup chair.

  I sat on one of the chairs and caught my breath.

  “You’re . . .” I began.

  “Yes,” he finished.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

  “I didn’t think . . . I didn’t know if you would accept this. Accept me.”

  “Of course I accept you; you’re Reid.”

  “And you’re Gamine. What happened here?”

  I told him what Harris said about Michael wanting to fire me. And about the makeover.

  “He’s a jerk!” he said.

  “He’s just the messenger.”

  “You’re perfect. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  “I’m not perfect. I’m something else.”

  “I’m something else, too.”