The Princess and the Fangirl Page 2

  “Hi. I’m sorry for bothering you but I’m a really big fan,” I said, which was one hundred and twenty percent true. “And I just wanted to tell you that I loved the way you portrayed Princess Amara. It really, you know, struck a chord. So, thank you.”

  I put the button in her hand: #SaveAmara.

  It’s from the initiative I’d started to bring Princess Amara back for the Starfield sequel.

  She looked down and she just…got really angry. “Save Amara?” She shoved the pin back into my hand. “She can’t save anyone—much less herself. She’s better off dead.”

  Then she turned and retreated into a stall.

  Honestly, I was too stunned to talk. I just pinned the button back onto my lanyard, checked my reflection in the mirror, and walked out.

  I didn’t know what to think. Maybe I thought she’d take the pin. Slip it among the dregs of her Prada bag and leave, forgetting it until years later.

  Instead, I tried to act as if her reaction wasn’t rude, or mean, or that I wasn’t beginning to feel just a little bit angry too.

  I’d just pulled down my beanie when I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Jess?” a volunteer said, looking at me. “It’s almost time.”

  “No, I’m not—” I pointed back to the bathroom just as the volunteer’s earpiece started to chatter. Panicking, she did the one thing that volunteers were absolutely not supposed to do.

  She grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me down the hallway…

  And now here I am.

  On the Starfield panel in front of three thousand people, standing room only. Displaced like a Yu-Gi-Oh! card in a Pokémon deck. Like a Nox in the Federation Court.

  Like Princess Amara on the starship Prospero.

  And I am in really, really, really big trouble.

  Through one of the side doors slips a girl wearing a suede jacket and a black space queen beanie. The same beanie I have on. It feels a little like looking into one of those fun-house mirrors. You know it’s you looking back, but it’s slightly distorted. I mean, not in that wonky super-tall or super-wide way—it’s just that something’s off and you aren’t quite sure what, and only you can tell. She and I have the same wide eyes and heart-shaped face, the same build, and I know she sees the same thing: a girl who looks a little too much like her, as if plucked from some impossible universe.

  And right now, at this moment in this universe, I’ve been mistaken for her.

  I remember what Jessica Stone said in the bathroom. The snarl on her lips.

  Save Amara? She can’t save anyone. There was no love in her voice for the character she’d played, or for the fans who loved her. She’s better off dead.

  “Jess?” the moderator says, and both Jessica Stone and I turn our gaze to Felix Flores, an internet-famous foodie and founder of the podcast SCIFI BYTES. He’s looking at me. Only me. I don’t think anyone notices the real Jess in the crowd. “Do you wanna take this question? Spoilers for all of you who haven’t seen Starfield yet! How did you feel when your character, Princess Amara, died?”

  I blink and my eyes dart to the fan who asked the question. He’s tall and gangly, but I can’t really make him out, blinded by the stage lights.

  Darien hesitates beside me, looking from the moderator to me and then back to the moderator. He begins to lean in to the microphone, but then so do I.

  I don’t know why. I shouldn’t.

  Maybe because Jessica Stone is in the crowd, and I’m up here…

  …something just shifts.

  She’s better off dead. Her voice echoes in my head and I can’t stand it. My lanyard is laden with the burden of fifteen #SaveAmara pins and I think of those fifty thousand signatures from the petition demanding to bring her back from the dead.

  The podcaster—and everyone else—is urging me to answer the question. I know exactly how Jessica Stone would feel. I hate it.

  I take a breath, trying to remember the tone and crisp lilt of her soft Southern accent. “I was heartbroken.”

  In the crowd, Jessica Stone’s face hardens.

  Felix barks a laugh. “That we were—”

  I cut him off. I’m not done. “She never should have died. She should have lived. She deserved to live.”

  The fan who asked the question stares at me, mouth agape, as if that was the most insane response I could’ve ever given to that question. It’s no secret that Jessica Stone hates Starfield. That she can’t wait to get out of the franchise. Like Robert Pattinson in his Twilight days, Jessica degrades the franchise every chance she gets.

  But not now.

  Not here.

  I shoot a look at Jessica, who is glaring up at me with all the hatred in her bones. Good. Because Princess Amara is better off alive.

  And I’m going to make sure everyone knows it.

  I AM GOING TO KILL HER. I don’t even know her name but I don’t need her name to put her in an unmarked grave. I am going to chop her up into so many pieces that when alien archeologists find her bones in a thousand years they won’t even realize that she was once human.

  That is how hard I am going to kill her.

  Spinning on my heels, my phone clenched in a death grip, I march out before anyone has even risen from their seats. I duck around the six-armed Zorine without so much as a second glance. She tries to say something to me, but I don’t hear her.

  All I’m seeing is red. I am livid.

  “Wow, I thought Jess was super fake, but she was so cool on that panel,” says a girl behind me as the ballroom empties. “And how she relates to Amara? I really hope they save her.”

  “Me too! I live-streamed the whole thing,” replies her friend. “My comments section was going nuts.”

  I glance up at the two girls. They look like high school sophomores, neither one cosplaying anyone other than their nerdy selves—all faded jeans and tees with cute sayings or pictures of male figure skaters clutched in an embrace.

  “She’s so cool.”

  “Super!”

  I turn away as they pass, but they don’t even blink. They don’t realize that I’m the real Jessica Stone. They just saw my doppelgänger on stage, so why would they even think it was me?

  I’m…invisible?

  To everyone?

  I don’t like this. I can’t like this.

  Breaking off from the crowd, I follow the signs to the backstage area. There’s a volunteer guarding it, of course, but when I rush up and tell her someone’s getting sick around the corner, she darts off to help and I slip into the hallway where the panelists had exited.

  My anger is morphing into some sort of confused panic. The girls’ conversation echoes in my head. How cool Jessica Stone was. How they related to the way that imposter felt about Princess Amara. They had to be joking, right?

  Why don’t they like me?

  Starfield has only been out for a month, and I’ve gained close to a million followers because of it—which should be great, right? You want to be famous on social. But while Dare’s touted for being one of the best character revivals of the decade, and Starfield as one of the best remakes in recent years, I am—

  My phone vibrates again. And again. My assistant, Ethan, had said I should take the apps off, but then I’d be worrying what people are saying while I’m not looking. I’d be worried about what they could say.

  My agent swore that playing Princess Amara would put me on the radar. It would make me a household name, like Jennifer Lawrence after The Hunger Games or Emma Watson after Harry Potter. Well, it put me on the radar, all right. But Starfield wasn’t a book series; it was an old sci-fi TV show. And that attracted a different kind of crowd. What my agent should have said was that Starfield would make me a household name like Kelly Marie Tran, or Daisy Ridley, or Leslie Jones, actresses whose biggest stories are not about their performances but about the trolls who chased them off the internet.

  And now the trolls have set their sights on me.

  Darien sort of got the same blowback when he was announced to play Fe
deration Prince Carmindor—which is how he met his girlfriend, btw—but it died off as the fandom embraced him. Now they write love letters about his inky-black eyelashes and immaculate abs while I get entire dissertations on how the small mole on the left side of my mouth has ruined the beauty of Princess Amara.

  So although I don’t know what I’ll say or how I’ll say it, I know I can’t let that girl wreck my image any more.

  She played you better than you do, whispers a little voice in my head. The fans like her better. Maybe she should just b—

  Shut up, shut up, shut up!

  A boisterous laugh stops me dead.

  I’d recognize it anywhere: Calvin. The panel must be coming this way, and that means my impersonator is, too. I glance around, nowhere to go. I curse. If they find me here with my “twin,” I don’t know what the director will do.

  Will I be in breach of contract? There were too many witnesses for it not to make media rounds. Oh, that cannot happen.

  I can see the headlines now:

  jessica stone faking it.

  doppelgänger plays jessica stone better than jessica stone.

  I wince as the Starfield cast comes around the corner. Calvin, Dare, her—

  But no director. Amon must be doing damage control after that disastrous panel. He’ll scold me later, I just know it.

  Dare is the first to see me; our eyes connect. It only takes a split second for him to slip an arm around Calvin’s and Felix’s shoulders to steer them in the opposite direction.

  “You know, I think this is a shortcut,” he says smoothly.

  Bless Darien Freeman. Bless his tight jeans and his curly hair and his insufferable smile. Bless everything about that Hufflepuff.

  I hear Calvin ask, “But what about Jess?”

  “She has that interview, remember?” Dare says quickly.

  “Oh yeah…”

  Meanwhile, the girl is just standing there, looking at me with my fists clenched and my arms stuck at my sides. Just seeing her makes me want to murder her again. Like, meat-grinder murder. Fargo murder.

  There’s no one else in the hallway as I march up to her. The first thing I notice, in the steady flicker of the hallway halogens, is that she doesn’t have my light-blue eyes. Hers are dark gray. And no one noticed?

  “Look, I’m really sorry—” she says hesitantly.

  I turn her badge to read the name on it. Then I look at her through my long fake lashes and tell her, “You will never say a word about this. You will never write in your little blog about it. You will never talk about it on Instagram or even subtweet it. And if you impersonate me again, Imogen Lovelace, I will see you purged from this con—and every other con—forever. Do you understand?”

  She stares at me like I’m speaking parseltongue. “You know I didn’t want to be you, right?”

  “But you were.”

  “What else was I supposed to do?” she bites back. “Tell everyone you weren’t there?”

  A flash of anger burns in my belly. I let her badge drop, all those wretched pins clinking together. “You will never do it again. Got it?”

  “But—”

  “Jess!” shouts a familiar masculine voice behind me. I look over my shoulder and see my assistant, Ethan Tanaka, seventeen going on forty. His expression is pinched, no-nonsense. He stops a few feet away when he realizes who I’m talking to.

  His eyes dart quickly between us. “So, that actually did happen.”

  “It’ll never happen again,” I clip in reply, and turn back to Imogen. “Why’re you still here? It’s VIP only, and you’re not.”

  Her head jerks back as if she’s been slapped, and then she scowls and shoulders past us on her way down the hall. I don’t take my eyes off her until she’s gone, and then I sigh in relief.

  Ethan begins to talk but I raise a finger. “It was a misunderstanding.”

  He holds up his hands. “I was only going to say you were rather rude to her.”

  “She impersonated me, Ethan! She could’ve ruined my career—”

  Ethan’s gaze snaps behind me and he jerks upright. “Mr. Wilkins, it’s great to see you!”

  I bite my tongue and spin to face my director. Amon saunters up like he owns the hallway—he saunters everywhere, so it’s no big deal—mirrored aviators pushing his thick blond hair over his head, a manila envelope tucked under one arm.

  “Jessica! You did so great on that panel. It’s like you were a different person!”

  My smile strains a little. “You know, I’m sorry for anything I might’ve said—”

  He waves a hand. “Nonsense! It was perfect. Any publicity is good publicity, and you definitely got the pot stirring. That reminds me.” He hands me the manila envelope. “For you.”

  Warily, I take it. It’s thick and heavy. My heart pounds against my rib cage because I know what it probably is. The contract extension that was detailed in my option clause, tying me to Princess Amara for another year, or two, or ten.

  I—I feel like I’m about to vomit.

  He winks and taps a finger against his lips. “Our secret, yeah?”

  “But I don’t think—”

  A ringtone cuts through my words and Amon holds up a wait a moment finger, pulling his phone out of his jean jacket and looking pleased. “Finally! I gotta take this call—but read it over, will you, Stone?” He heads down the hallway in the direction that Imogen Lovelace went and shoves open the exit door, almost nailing the volunteer guard in the back of the head. He doesn’t apologize, just bleeds into the crowd.

  “I can’t think about this right now,” I mumble. “I can’t think about anything that’s happened in the last three hours.” He takes the package dutifully and pushes his thick black glasses up the bridge of his nose. He’s much taller than I am—five foot eleven—and lean, with short black hair gelled against his scalp, warm taupe skin, and a scar just to the left of his mouth. All of his brothers are tall, too, and every time I’ve gone over to his house, I only felt normal next to his grandmother, who is ninety-four and bent from almost a century of gravity, but she makes the best onigiri, a steamed rice ball wrapped in dried seaweed. Whenever Ethan visits home, he smuggles a few back on the plane.

  “It wasn’t as horrible as you think it was,” he says. “She didn’t do that bad.”

  Ignoring him, I eye his outfit: a crisp button-down shirt and slacks. “Why’re you dressed up?”

  He adjusts his cuffs. “This is my first time out in the wild as your assistant, so I have to look nice.”

  That makes me laugh. “Really?”

  He nods seriously. “Plus it’s part of my Angus cosplay.”

  “Ugh, nerd.” I punch him in the shoulder, and he grins in delight.

  Ethan Tanaka and I have been best friends since he was born, two years and three days after me. We went to the same middle school and kept in touch after I left for dramatic arts high school. Even as I became famous, our friendship just seemed to stick, although we couldn’t have been more different. He wanted to go and do nerd things like write for video games, and I was, well, by then I was Jessica Stone. Then a few months ago, as I was complaining about my last assistant, who stole my expensive eyeshadow palette, Ethan—fresh out of high school and taking a year off before college—suddenly asked, “Is the pay good?”

  “For what?”

  “To be your assistant.”

  And that was it.

  Ethan’s the only person in the world who knows everything about me: that I’m deathly afraid of being forgotten; that every morning for at least three hours I comb through my Instagram profile, deleting the unsavory messages, only to have more pop up moments later; that I hate the mole on the side of my face that my agent, Diana, says is too iconic to get rid of; that I eat raw instant ramen straight out of the package when I’m stressed; that I’m not really twenty-three, but nineteen; and that I lied to a casting director to get a starring role in the indie film that got me an Oscar nod. I was fourteen at the time, but I told them I wa
s almost eighteen.

  We’d stuck with the lie ever since.

  Ethan knows I’ll do anything to keep my career. Even endure the trash in Starfield.

  I know everything about him, too. That his favorite color is that god-awful yellow everyone hates, and his favorite band is some obscure indie-rock group that broke up eons ago, and he always selects Kirby in Super Smash Bros., and he takes his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches without the crust, thank you very much. I couldn’t ask for a better best friend. He’s like a brother to me.

  It’s just a bonus he gets paid for putting up with my drama.

  I keep waiting for him to figure out that he is way too smart, and way too nice, and way too talented to be my assistant.

  I take a long breath. “If this is the extent of the fallout, I’m okay with it. Are you sure she was fine up there on the panel? Nothing’ll come of it?”

  “I don’t know, Jess, but I didn’t think it was that awful.”

  “Right.”

  His smartwatch beeps and he checks it. “Ah, crap, you need to be at an interview in three minutes. We better hurry.”

  “No rest for the wicked,” I say, and follow him down the hallway. I trust Ethan knows where he’s going. He has the nerd sense, or whatever it is, and can navigate ExcelsiCon despite never having been here before. I trail him like his shadow. I don’t even try to remember where we are, what hotel we’re in or what part of the convention center we’re wandering through. It all looks the same. Bland hallways and people dressed up as characters and long lines and meet-and-greets.

  We take an elevator up a few floors and step out into another long empty hallway. At the end, waiting patiently, is Dare. He’s snacking on some sort of protein bar. Since filming for the sequel starts next month, he’s back on his dreaded diet, which means he’s just a little bit cranky and scowling at salads most of the time.

  He sees us and waves.

  “So, you get that whole thing sorted out?” he asks, inhaling the rest of his protein bar and tossing the wrapper in a trash can.

  “Yeah,” I reply. “Thanks for distracting Calvin and Felix.”