The Princess and the Fangirl Page 5

  “Monster?”

  I freeze. I know that voice. That deep, captivating timbre. A lump lodges in my throat.

  This can’t be real life.

  But when I turn, I realize that this is most definitely real life. He-Who-Will-Not-Be-Named is standing right behind me, a curious look on his adorable face. His brown hair is long and swirled back into a man bun and there’s a little stubble on his cheeks, but it’s patchy and doesn’t quite pull off the hipster vibe I know he’s going for. But otherwise he looks exactly the same—sporting a gamer T-shirt that barely covers his biceps, and jeans, and Vans, and God why does my heart unexpectedly feel so heavy and awful?

  “It is you!” he says, and his curious expression quickly morphs into a smile that looks sincere.

  The barista calls another name and a Ghostbuster squeezes past. We take the cue and step to the side. He pulls me into a hug and I prickle at his touch. I don’t return the embrace, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Oh man, Imogen, it’s so great to see you!”

  LIAR.

  He lets go and looks me up and down. From my black jeans to my probably not-so-clean black hoodie to my black SPACE QUEEN beanie pulled over a pink pixie that definitely needs a wash.

  For one inconceivable moment, I wonder if he approves—

  APPROVES?

  What am I, some heroine in a nineteenth-century romance novel?

  Ugh, I hate my feelings sometimes. I hate the inexplicable way my brain works. And I hate the way he chews on his bottom lip, and the sea-glass-green color of his eyes, and the way his voice is always so soft and rich and tender, even when it’s really not. I hate—

  All of it.

  Not in a secretly-love-him sort of way, but in a we-dated-for-nine-months-and-he-stood-me-up-at-the-ExcelsiCon-Ball-and-then-dumped-me-in-a-text-message sort of way.

  I yank down my beanie, avoiding his gaze. “Hey. What do you want?”

  He looks hurt. “I’m just happy to see you—I thought I’d see you this year. Your, uh, fandom thing is really something. Excited about the news that just leaked?”

  I try to ask “What news?” but he just talks over me.

  “You always go in with a bang, don’t you, Monster?”

  Every time he calls me that I feel like my skin is on fire, and I don’t know whether it’s because I still like him or because I detest him so viciously I want to raze his crops and salt his fields.

  I look down at my #SaveAmara pins. “Yeah, I’m trying to keep Amara from becoming a fridged love interest.”

  “Fridged?” He grins. “But she went into the Black Nebula on her own. No one told her to go. Or forced her.”

  “But the writers had her die to further Carmindor’s character arc and—”

  “So every time a character dies it’s automatically fridging?”

  “No, but there were plenty of other ways for the series to end. And with her plot arc and development it didn’t make sense for her to…”

  He’s laughing. Really and truly laughing.

  At me.

  I swallow my words and sink into silence.

  “I love your passion,” he says, and steps closer to me, the laughter still fresh on his lips like blood on a newly fed vampire. “I miss it.”

  He misses it.

  I stare at him, trying—hoping, really—that he’s just a figment of my sleep-deprived imagination. But the longer I stand here, the longer I realize that he is no figment. He’s real, and he’s doused in a very heady sandalwood cologne.

  I clear my throat and look away. “Okay, so, you’ve been doing well. I mean, how many subscribers do you have now on your YouTube channel?”

  His grin only widens. “Enough.”

  My phone vibrates in my hand. I know it’s Milo. Has Bran Kamehameha’d the entire hotel in his hanger? I use the interruption as an excuse to exit this rotten situation. “Sorry, my brother’s waiting for me,” I say, holding up both the tray and the bag of tacos from the Magic Pumpkin food truck. “It was, um, nice seeing y—”

  He takes me quickly by the arm, jostling the coffees, and says softly, “Wait, for a minute? We need to talk. I need to talk.”

  “Now?”

  “No, I got an interview with another YouTube channel in a few minutes. How about tomorrow?”

  “I have to be at a booth all day.”

  He frowns again. “All day?”

  I nod. “Until the end of the con.”

  He frowns again, and I don’t think he gets it. “Then what about after the con? Sunday, five o’clock? At the top of the escalators in the main hotel.”

  “The con closes at five,” I say helplessly, as if that’ll get me out of this.

  He grins. “Perfect ending to a perfect con then, don’t you think?”

  Before I can say no, a guy in a backward Five Nights at Freddy’s cap calls his name. Jasper leaves with a wave, the scent of his cologne lingering on me like an extra layer of skin. How dare he! Thinking he can just walk in all suave-like and act as though nothing happened? Like he didn’t break my heart in the most cliché way?

  And yet I know that on Sunday at five o’clock I’ll be at the top of the escalators. I know I will.

  Because I’m that kind of predictable, and even though he broke my heart, he was the only one who saw me. With him, I wasn’t nothing. I was something.

  I guess I just wasn’t enough.

  Grateful that Jasper’s gone, I quickly turn to leave.

  What I don’t realize is that there’s someone standing directly behind me—that is, not until I collide with the solid mass of another human. The two iced coffees on the front of my tray explode onto a tidy white T-shirt.

  “Starflame!” I curse. “I am so sorry! Here, let me get some—”

  “Jess?”

  I look up and am assaulted by liquid brown eyes and amazingly long eyelashes. The human is tall and angular, like a lot of the J-Pop singers Bran likes, with thick dark hair and black-rimmed glasses and…oh.

  Oh no.

  He is very very hot. Hot like I-want-to-be-stuck-in-an-elevator-with-you hot, not we-are-now-mortal-enemies-because-I-just-spilled-my-coffee-on-you-while-not-paying-attention hot.

  He’s holding a phone in one hand and a wallet in the other, and the front of his once-pristine tee and neat black pants is absolutely drenched.

  Worse yet, I recognize him at the exact same moment that he recognizes me.

  “Really?” is all I can say to Jessica Stone’s assistant.

  A subtle, almost vulnerable look crosses his face before his expression closes like a vault slamming shut. He scowls. “Do you even look where you’re going?”

  “You snuck up on me!”

  “Snuck up? I was standing here the whole time!”

  “Yeah, on your phone.”

  “The fact that I can stand and text and you can’t see me isn’t quite my fault,” he snaps, picking his wet shirt off his stomach.

  I grab a handful of napkins to mop up the floor. People are beginning to turn and stare. A barista armed with a mop and bucket is heading in our direction.

  He crinkles his nose. “Ugh, hazelnut…”

  I pause. “What’s wrong with hazelnut?”

  “Besides that it’s all over me?”

  “Trust me, it adds character.” I stand up, tossing the sopping napkins in the trash.

  We glower at each other. What an infuriating—awful—irritating—ARGH! The fury coming off us both is as thick as the Georgia humidity. You could try to cut it with a knife but it’d only cobble itself back together, like some Scooby-Doo slime monster.

  And here I thought he was hot?

  He opens his mouth to say something but then his phone rings. It’s a generic tone—of course it is. White T-shirt, black glasses, skinny slacks, default ringtone.

  Ugh, Muggles.

  He’s probably just as horrible as his boss. Like goes with like, as they say.

  The barista pulls out the mop, which I take as my cue to esc
ape. I grab my half-intact tray from the counter and beat a hasty retreat.

  I don’t stop until I’m back at my hotel, where I discover that, as fate would have it, I’ve lost my keycard.

  * * *

  MILO OPENS THE DOOR TO OUR room and leans against the doorframe. “Lost your key, eh, sister dearest?”

  I scowl and push inside and he closes the door behind me. I dump the vegan tacos on the desk, put the remaining coffees beside it, and sink down onto one of the queen beds. Bran and Milo have the other one, but I doubt they’ll be sleeping here. They’re already packing for a night out watching Demolition Man. There are entire convention rooms where they play sci-fi and fantasy movies all night long.

  Bran, sitting on the edge of the other bed as he scrolls through Twitter, looks up. And blinks. “Mo, what the hell happened to your shirt?”

  It’s only then that I realize I’ve got hazelnut latte trailing down my favorite hoodie. My scowl deepens into the bowels of hell. “I ran into this good-looking guy who turned out to be the spawn of Satan.”

  “The Hellmouth has opened.” Milo nods solemnly and shoves a taco into his face. It’s there one minute and then gone the next. Like Pac-Man chomping up those little white dots. I don’t even think he tasted it.

  “So,” I go on, tearing my eyes away from Milo as he rips into yet another taco, “I accidentally spilled our drinks all over him, and the dude just went off on me. He was so nasty. I honestly felt like, if the last few years hadn’t made me It’s Fine fireproof, then I’d be a roasted main course of Imogen Lovelace.”

  Bran sighs and lounges back on the bed. “That’s a pity. Sounds like it would’ve been a pretty memorable meet-cute. I’ve read it on AO3 at least a dozen times.”

  “Right?” I echo his wistful sigh. “But alas, true love has eluded me yet again.”

  “Oh merciful heavens,” Milo moans from the chair, the wrapper carcasses of five tofu tacos littering the floor around him like tombstones in a graveyard. He leans back, one hand on his stomach. “I have been revived by tofu and fake cheese.”

  “I didn’t take that long,” I say, folding my arms over my chest, and my coffee stain, crossly. “Although I don’t know why you wanted vegan tacos.”

  Bran rolls his eyes. “Because it’s from the Pumpkin and your brother is extra.”

  “Hey, you’re dating him. What’s the Pumpkin?” I ask, handing him a coffee that he didn’t order but I know he wanted. Americano with extra water.

  “You are a goddess,” Bran replies. “You know, the Magic Pumpkin?”

  My stare must be brilliantly blank because my brother adds, “The food truck Geekerella worked at?”

  I give him a surprised look. “That was that food truck?”

  They nod in unison.

  I remember a young woman with blond hair and purple glasses working the register while a green-haired woman prepped tacos in the truck’s tight kitchen. No Geekerella in sight. “Huh.”

  Milo takes out two tacos for me and shoves the rest into his Spider-Man backpack. “All right. We got blankets. We got water. We got food. Got my eye mask,” he adds, pulling a Carmindor-themed eye mask out of his back pocket and putting it on. The eye pads sit on his forehead, making him look as though he has a pair of Darien’s dreamy peepers above his real ones. “Anything else we need?”

  “What was the news you guys were talking about?” I ask.

  Milo and Bran shoot each other the same unreadable look. “Didn’t you see Bran’s text?”

  “No, I was carrying tacos and coffee, remember? What news?”

  Quickly, Bran takes out his phone and shows me a tweet with a photo. A grin spreads across his lips and he says, “Monster, someone’s leaking the Starfield script—and rumor is, it’s real.”

  WITH AN EXASPERATED SIGH, I FALL back onto the bed, holding my phone and scrolling through the @s and RTs. The script has to be fake, but the internet is going insane. Again. And with more comments come more trolls and more fanboys bemoaning my existence. The first time the sequel script “leaked,” earlier this year, it turned out to be a reject from the first movie. I got sent hateful comments for surviving at the end of the film. The three times after that they’ve just been fakes.

  Honestly, though? I’d kill for one of them to be real just so Diana can finally confirm whether or not I’m in the damn thing.

  @Fantasticwho

  SOMEONE IS LEAKING THE SECOND STARFIELD SCRIPT

  @sayjess @notthatdarien @calvinrolfe4real @dudebroamon

  @Scifibytespodcast

  A scene of the sequel script leaked!!! I AM SHOOK.

  @starfieldscript337

  EXCLUSIVE: photo of a page from the long-awaited sequel!

  CARMINDOR fills the doorway, refusing to let the NOXIAN GENERAL pass in the hallway. The tired GENERAL gives him a dangerous look.

  NOXIAN GENERAL

  Your Highness, your treaty with us is already thin.

  CARMINDOR

  The Black Nebula - what’s happening to it?

  The NOXIAN GENERAL draws herself up to full height. She is unafraid of her answer.

  NOXIAN GENERAL

  It has opened again, unsurprisingly .

  Looks like your princess didn’t sacrifice enough.

  Now get out of my way.

  CARMINDOR’s mood darkens. He stands rigid in the doorway, like a sentinel. Just out of the NOXIAN GENERAL’s line of sight come two Federation officers. They have their hands on their pistols, ready to draw.

  The NOXIAL GENERAL notices them and she whirls back to CARMINDOR angrily.

  NOXIAN GENERAL

  You know this is war.

  CARMINDOR

  (to the Federation Officers)

  Arrest her.

  For a moment, it seems like CARMINDOR won’t let her pass, but then he steps aside and the General leaves.

  Ugh, people.

  From across the hall, the booms and murmured shouts of a TV show hum underneath the door. Dare and Calvin have been marathoning old Star Trek movies in preparation for the fourth or fifth one—I can’t remember—coming out next week. They’re up to the one with the whales. I recognize Leonard Nimoy’s voice. My mom loves Spock—I think she had a crush on him, honestly.

  Things were simpler back then, when Mom would catch the last thirty minutes of her favorite Star Trek movie before she bussed me off to auditions. Ethan would sometimes tag along, playing his Gameboy in the backseat while Mom and I played traveling games in the front. That was before I appeared in a commercial, which got me in front of a casting director for Huntress Rising, which nabbed me an Oscar nomination. Sometimes I wish Ethan and I could go back to Mom’s VW bus, with the windows rolled down to catch the summer breeze, Led Zeppelin blaring from the speakers, the road wide and open and the stars spread out across the endless horizon.

  I could be anyone I wanted.

  My story was mine.

  The door to my hotel room creaks open and Ethan appears with a dirty chai latte and chocolate Frappuccino. I quickly sit up, checking to make sure my mascara isn’t runny from crying—until I notice a stain in the shape of Texas on Ethan’s once-immaculate shirt.

  “What the heck happened to you?”

  He scowls. “It was that girl again—the one who impersonated you. She’s a total monster, but I survived.” He marches over and gallantly hands me my chai latte and sits down beside me. He takes a long gulp of his Frappuccino.

  I sip my chai, and it tastes like bliss. He smells like hazelnut creamer, but I don’t say anything since he looks as annoyed as the time his older brothers put blue dye in his shampoo (they didn’t know he used it for body wash, too).

  “Thanks, Ethan,” I say quietly, and lay my head on his shoulder.

  “Don’t mention it—”

  “Not for the coffee, for everything. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Call me every day and complain about your other PAs?” His spot-on guess makes me laugh. “You can complain to me any day
of the week whether I’m your assistant or not, you know that, right? I’m always all ears.”

  “I’ve tried not to do it too often.”

  “But it’s okay if you do. Everyone needs to vent sometimes, you know?”

  I do know, but there are some things I can’t even tell Ethan—especially not now. He reports to my agent, so it’s his job to tell her whether I’m all right or if something is wrong in my life and how to make it better. But those are questions I don’t know how to answer. He’s my best friend and my secret-keeper, but it isn’t his job to be burdened with all the self-doubts in my head.

  He shifts slightly, a little uncomfortably, and says, almost in a whisper, “Hey, Jess? Are you…are you happy?”

  At first, I don’t understand the question. I blink once, twice, and the words sink in.

  Are you happy?

  Of all the interviews and online questions and magazine articles, this is one question I’ve never been asked. Perhaps because, in everyone’s mind, it’s never been a question. It’s always been a statement:

  Jessica Stone is happy.

  She has to be.

  I open my mouth to tell him the truth when—

  My phone dings. Ethan looks at me expectantly but I wave him off. “Twitter notifications. Someone’s leaking a fake script again.”

  “Again? Wasn’t there one last week?” he asks. Thankfully he doesn’t push the “are you happy” question.

  “Yeah, they’re being ridiculous—”

  Suddenly, the Jaws theme shouts from Ethan’s front pocket. We both glance down to it. The duuuuuun-dun, duuuuun-dun is so loud it would be almost comical if we didn’t know who he assigned the ringtone to.

  My agent.

  But…I just talked to her. Why would she be calling Ethan so soon?

  We exchange the same questioning look before Ethan pulls his phone out and answers. “Diana, good evening.”

  I sit quietly, straining to make out whatever Diana is saying. Ethan tries to keep his face impassive, and to most people it would look like he succeeds, but I know him better than I know anyone. I know that the left side of his lip twitches when he hears something he doesn’t want to know; his breathing becomes even, deep, almost like a trance.