“Ohmygod, what is that?” Chloe gasps.
James blinks. “A food truck?”
Cal beams. “I think it’s called the Magic Pumpkin.”
The truck skids to a stop in front of us. The windshield wipers flick on against the leaves, and Sage gives a whoop from the driver’s seat. “That was SO AWESOME!”
I drop the golf bag and run up to Sage and throw my arms around her. “I’m so sorry!” I croak, hugging her tight. “Catherine took my phone and I couldn’t explain and—I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”
She returns the hug, smelling like the place where I belong—pumpkin fritters and day-old coconut oil. “I missed you too! You wouldn’t believe who I picked up today.”
“I told you not to pick up hitchhikers,” I say.
She shrugs. “I’m trying to turn over a new leaf—”
Just then a black-haired young man falls out of the passenger door and all but kisses the ground. He rights himself quickly, leaning against the truck. Even though he’s a little green, everyone immediately recognizes him.
Chloe’s blond friend gasps. “Ohmygod…”
“Is that…” James says.
Chloe stands a little straighter, her eyes wide as saucers. “Darien!”
At the sound of his name, Darien Freeman quickly pulls back his shoulders and jerks his head toward her. There’s a subtle shift in his face—a rehearsed set to his lips, a levelness of his eyebrows—that makes me think of the masquerade. A mask.
He turns to me. “Elle—”
“Darien!” Chloe cries again, as she drops her club and hurries over to him. “Ohmygod it is you!” She looks around at her friends, her smile broadening in an I Told You So sort of way. “James—James, get this on video!” She slaps him on the arm to get him moving, and he pulls out his phone. She flips her hair back and rushes up to Darien. “Darien! I didn’t know how you would find me—was it the petition? You know I started that petition…”
“I can’t believe she was telling the truth,” Erin whispers to James, who nods, shocked. They’re literally speechless. I never thought I’d see the day.
My heart is in my throat when I tell it not to be, it’s speeding up when I tell it not to expect much. I don’t know why he’s here—he knows Chloe isn’t the girl he danced with—but of course he’s succumbing to her charms. Who wouldn’t?
“It took a while. I—I just wanted to formally apologize,” he says.
Chloe feigns shock. “Apologize? For what? And how did you find me?” she asks, touching his biceps, leaning toward him. To her, flirting comes as natural as breathing.
Right. Because she’s the one who wanted him anyway. Not me. Maybe in some other universe. But here—not me.
But then he tilts his head and glances over. At me. And the mask begins to slip away, little by little, until I can see something familiar underneath. He smiles at me. “I just came to return something to Elle.”
“Elle?” Chloe echoes.
He holds up a slipper made of starlight.
“Well, ah’blena?” he asks, offering it to me.
Ah’blena. There’s only one person who’s ever called me that, who’s ever wanted to.
My heart rises into my throat like a balloon.
Carmindor.
In front of Chloe and her friends, in front of James who pretended to love me and Cal who learned to love herself, and Sage who taught me that being who you are is okay, I slip a foot out of my boat shoe (ugh, country club rules) and set it before me.
He kneels and gently takes my heel, and then slips my mother’s starlight slipper right onto my waiting foot.
SHE STARES DOWN AT ME, HER messy braid of dyed-red hair spilling over her shoulder. She pushes up her boxy black glasses and steps forward, hesitant, like I’m playing a trick on her. A light brushing of freckles dot her cheeks. I noticed them before, but now I want to connect them like constellations, a starry sky on skin that is slowly but surely turning red. Glowing.
Elle.
Not Princess Amara, not the girl from the convention who broke my nose (still blaming her, don’t argue), not a stranger I can’t trust. I don’t know how I imagined meeting her—really meeting her, without a mask or a costume or a facade—I don’t even remember what I thought she might look like. How I imagined her. How I thought she’d be.
Because this is the only Elle I could ever imagine. She’s the only possibility that could have ever existed. I won’t say that she is perfect, or that she is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen, but the moment her gaze finds mine, she’s the best parts of the universe. She’s a person I would love to spend a lifetime with on the observation deck of the Prospero.
She swallows hard, her lips tightly together. The damp grass begins to seep into my jeans and I hear Lonny’s distinctive “keep back, please,” behind me, but I don’t want to get up. I want to stay locked here in this moment. I wait, wondering if she could—ever—forgive me. The Carmindor me, the actor me, the human me—Darien Freeman and Carmindor combined.
Finally, so quietly I almost can’t catch it—although I don’t need to, I’m watching her lips and read the words in the air—she speaks. Says what I never thought I’d hear from her.
“I hear the observation deck is nice this time of year, Carmindor.”
HE DOESN’T ANSWER FOR A MOMENT, but then he laughs. It’s soft and deep, like a velvet cake wrapped in creamy mousse. Eventually he replies—like I hoped he would, like I wished he would, my heart soaring up and up and up into space, “Only on the south side of Metron.”
He doesn’t look like Darien Freeman. He looks like any guy with dark curly hair, wearing a Starfield shirt that’s a little too small, faded jeans, and old Vans. He looks like someone who could play Carmindor if given the right color uniform, or someone you could meet at the mall.
There’s a scar on his chin that Carmindor doesn’t have, and a purpling bruise spreading around his cheeks, which—oh right. I guess that was my fault. He’s rubbing the back of his hand against one of his eyes like he has something in it. Like tears, maybe. Oh, Nox’s ass, is he crying?
“I thought you’d hate me,” he says, standing up. “I didn’t write that last text message—it’s a long story but I didn’t write it. But I didn’t own up to it either. I was scared. I thought if I told you who I was you’d hate me.”
“Oh you big dork!” I wrap my arms around him in a hug. He puts his arms around me too, and buries his face in my hair. “Stop crying, you’re gonna make me cry.”
“I’m not crying,” he strangles out, clearly crying. “Just to clear the air, I won’t always look this good. So if you’re just charmed by my killer abs…”
I press my hand against his stomach. “We both know they’re airbrushed.”
“How dare you. I won’t look as good is what I’m saying.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t fall for your charming looks.”
He hesitates. “So you can forgive me? For lying to you? For—”
I press a finger to his lips. It’s a good question. One I don’t know the answer to, but I remember our waltz, and his coming to my defense, and I think…“I think I could forgive you if…”
“If?”
“If you call me ah’blena again.”
He takes my hand and steps closer, so close my bones are jittery. He smells like the Magic Pumpkin and fresh deodorant and cinnamon, and it’s a scent I want burned into my memory. I want it on my clothes. I want his gaze, the way he looks at me—like I’m the last star in the night sky and the first one at dusk—branded on my heart. He’s tall, but not so tall that I’m looking up his nose into his cerebral cortex. And he’s unsure and he’s courageous and conflicted and so very…Darien.
The real one.
“Ah’…,” he begins, enunciating every syllable, raising his hand to my chin, “blen…,” tilts my face up, slowly drawing toward me, like two supernovas about to collide, “…a.”
And somehow, in this impossibl
e universe, his lips find mine.
“Got it,” James says somewhere behind me. “And…uploaded!”
“Uploaded?” Chloe echoes, her voice bordering on a shriek. “No—no take it down! Take it down right now!”
“Excuse me, miss?” A huge burly guy in a suit—Darien’s bodyguard, I guess—claps a giant hand on her shoulder. “I’m going to need you to calm down.” When he sees me looking, he shoots me a subtle thumbs-up.
Darien slowly pulls away from me, smiling. We can’t stop smiling, can’t look away enough to care. The entire world could be falling to the invasion of the Nox and we wouldn’t be the wiser. “I’ve wanted to do that ever since you called me ah’blen.”
“I’m glad you know what it means,” I reply, tongue-in-cheek, remembering Hello, America. “But what if I was bald? You didn’t even know what I looked like.”
“Shared it,” Cal confirms, looking at her own phone.
Sage peers over her shoulder and nods. “Nice. Twitter, Tumblr—want to hashtag it?”
“Done.”
“Stop it! This isn’t funny!” Chloe cries. “You are the worst! I can’t believe you’re ruining this for me! You all are!”
Darien chuckles. “You’re behind Rebelgunner. That’s worse.”
I scrunch my nose. “Is it, really?”
“Oh yeah. You’re the enemy.”
“I’ll just keep you on your toes.”
He mock-gasps. “I wouldn’t want to jeopardize the integrity of a critic!”
I grin against his mouth. “Then you better kiss me again. I want to make sure I get that part right for my next post.”
“Now that I can do, Princess.” And he kisses me again. It isn’t the kind of kiss to end a universe of possibilities. It’s the exact opposite.
It’s the kind of kiss that creates them.
EIGHT MONTHS LATER
I STARE OUT THE TOWN CAR window in amazement.
“They’re monsters,” I mutter to myself, looking at all the fans. I imagined myself getting out onto the red carpet with the greatest of ease, but there’s no way that’s happening with this crowd—let alone in this dress. I couldn’t even wiggle out of the Magic Pumpkin at prom, and now I’m supposed to just casually slip myself out of the back of a black SUV? Ha.
Sage and Cal gaze out their windows too, their hands laced together. I don’t think they’ve stopped holding hands since that day at the country club. And I don’t think they’re going to stop anytime soon. They’re even going to the same city for college. I mean, New York is a huge place and there are tons of colleges there, but they’ll still be in the same city. Sage even designed their wardrobe for the premiere tonight: a sleek pantsuit—with a subtle print in the shape of starwings—for herself, and a slinky dark-purple dress that swirls in and out of itself like the Black Nebula for Cal.
“I’ve never seen so many people—uh, dog!” Sage scowls, shoving the brown Dachshund off her pantsuit. “This is premium quality! Next time you jump on me I’ll skin you and wear you as a hat!”
Frank the Tank swishes his tail and gives a yip. I pick him up and stroke him under the chin. “Shhhh, Auntie Sage didn’t mean that.”
“Oh like hell I didn’t!”
“You’d clash with her wardrobe,” I whisper into the Frankenator’s ear. “You’ll never be a hat.”
He barks again, tongue lolling happily out of the side of his mouth, and Sage scowl-smiles. Under her thorny exterior, she’s actually grown attached to the Frank.
After the con, Catherine was still…well, she was still Catherine. She never apologized for her words, but I never expected her to. I just began treating her with the exact courtesy she showed me. Which was none.
So on the night of my eighteenth birthday last September, I packed my bags, got into the Magic Pumpkin idling in the driveway (surely drawing the ire of all the neighbors), and left. I didn’t even write a note. For the rest of my senior year I lived with Sage and her mom. At night, I missed my house. I missed the way it creaked and groaned. I missed the leaks. But I learned that when I closed my eyes, I was still home. I still saw my parents waltzing in the living room. I still smelled Dad’s burnt roast in the oven. I could still remember following him around as I read my fanfics. It was all still there, tucked tightly away inside me. The house might have belonged to my parents, but Mom and Dad weren’t the house. They were in me, and wherever I went I carried them along.
The car slowly moves up in the cue line. There are so many people out there, waving signs and shouting Darien’s name. Some say I HEART DARIEN, others I WANT TO WABBA-WABBA WITH YOU. It reminds me of the crowd I first saw on Hello, America.
I lift Franco so he can see all the crazy people too.
“So is your lover boy gonna meet you on the carpet?” Sage asks.
I shrug. “I think so.”
“You think so?”
“Uh, I’ve been a little preoccupied, remember?” I put Franco back down and scrub him behind the ears. “That whole cross-country move? Not to mention orientation at school. And Darien’s been insanely busy with promo. So I’ve mostly just been talking with his manager, Gail.”
Long-distance relationships are hard. I found that out right away. The video got an enormous number of views, but reality soon settled in and Darien went back to postproduction, promo, and the next season of Seaside Cove. Sometimes I would see him with other girls in magazines—just friends, I knew—and I pushed down the jealous part of me. I tried not to think too much about it. Senior year was busy anyway, between SATs and college prep and applications and scholarships. Plus, I had Sage and Cal to hang out with, and I even went to a party or two. No country club people there, of course.
So it was okay that Darien went along with his life, and I mine. We never missed saying goodnight to each other, though. Not once.
But now that we’ll be on the same side of the country, in the same city, it makes me nervous. Nervous because of his larger-than-life persona. Nervous because I don’t know if I want to be part of that circus. Nervous because I have my whole life ahead of me, and this is just one small part of it. An important part, but a small one.
I don’t know if I can keep balancing on the tightrope. I’m starting at UCLA in the fall, film studies, because apparently my blog garnered the attention of some film professor and he liked my Starfield critiques enough to vouch for me despite my grades. My entire world is about to open up and bloom. Do I really want a famous boyfriend on top of all that?
I bounce my knees nervously as our car reaches our destination. Cameras flash like strobe lights in a haunted house. I stare down the red carpet like a too-long hallway. I gulp.
Finally, the car stops. “Okay, misses,” the driver says, “here we are.”
Sage and Cal look at me expectantly. “So: question,” Sage says. “Does this mean we can’t gripe about his bad acting anymore?”
“Since when did I say his acting was bad?”
Sage raises an eyebrow, and my smile fades.
“Not a word, you hear me?” I poke a finger in her face.
“My lips are sealed.” She grins. “After you, Geekerella.”
I sigh—one BuzzFeed article and you’ve got a nickname for life, apparently—and wrap my free hand around the door handle. Breathe in, breathe out. The world is watching. Even Catherine and Chloe, somewhere, on that giant TV of theirs. Or maybe they’re sitting in their new condo in Mount Pleasant, in an immaculate living room, looking for someone else to make miserable.
You can do this, Elle, I tell myself. You went to a cosplay ball alone. A red carpet’s nothing.
Channeling my inner Princess Amara, I open the door to a raging flash of cameras. I slide out, only slightly stumbling on the curb, and clutch Franco tightly to like he’s a football and the theater door is the goalpost. I just have to get there.
I strain my lips over my teeth in something that I hope is a smile, and move down the red carpet. Thank god I decided to wear my Doc Martens instead of those three-
inch heels Sage suggested. I’d have done fallen flat on my face.
“What’s your name, gorgeous?” asks a paparazzo.
“Here with someone?” another asks.
“Oh look, over there! I think that’s the contest winner!” someone else adds, pointing to a tall dark-skinned woman making her way down the red carpet—the girl who won, way back at ExcelsiCon—and they flutter off to her like moths to a flame.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. Holy overload, Batman, how can Darien do this twenty-four-seven?
I hold Franco a little tighter to my side. “Talk about star-crazy, huh, buddy?” I whisper to him. “C’mon, maybe I can get you a hotdog at the concessions stand—if there is one.”
Behind me Cal gasps, grabbing Sage by the arm. “Oh my god, that’s Jessica Stone!” She points down the red carpet to a beautiful dark-haired girl signing a fan’s Starfield poster. “God I love her—not as much as you, though.”
“Oh no, I’d be okay if you loved her more,” Sage replies. “Maybe we can share her. Hey, Elle, is that Darien with her?”
A knot forms in my throat. It is Darien. He came to my high school graduation a few weeks ago—briefly, in sunglasses—but seeing him across the red carpet feels like I haven’t seen him in years. He looks so different in his natural habitat, relaxed and magnetic, an arm around Jessica as he talks warmly to a news camera. Everyone around drinks him in, wanting more. And for a moment, I feel so, so small.
“We should go over,” Sage says, but I catch her before she can. She shoots me a strange look. “Why not?”
“I just—he’s busy. It’s fine. I’ll find him later.”
“But he’s right there now,” she insists, furrowing her eyebrows.
“If she doesn’t want to go, she doesn’t have to,” Cal says. “I mean, he does look busy.”
“Too busy for his own—”
I cut her off. “Ssh. We’re not, like, official. To the press.”
Sage glowers but quickly gets distracted. “Ooh is that Calvin What’s-His-Face?” She loops her arm through Cal’s and pulls her down the red carpet.