But then the flashlight beam catches glitter and dark-purple cloth. Can’t be—Catherine threw all this stuff out. She said she did. Donated it with the twins’ clothes and her clutter.
I sink my hands into the trunk and take hold of a dress that could have been made from a midnight sky, the fabric a rich plum, soft and silky. I lift it up, wisps of gauzy silk slipping between my fingers. In the shadows, it sparkles like a galaxy caught in the threads.
Tears brim in my eyes. It’s Mom’s dress. Princess Amara’s dress. I never really knew her, not like I knew Dad. But I wish with all my heart that I did.
I hug it tightly, squeezing my eyes closed. For a moment, it feels like I’m not alone in the attic. It feels like they’re here.
An idea begins to dawn on me. Catherine can sell the house. She can take away my parents and put them in boxes. She can make me do the chores. She can berate me for working at a food truck…But besides what’s here, in this trunk, I’m the last bit of my dad the world has left. I might be no one, but my father was extraordinary. And he loved me more than anything.
What kind of daughter would let that fade?
Then again, what can I do when the only thing I really own in the world are my parents’ old costumes?
The answer hits me like a lightning strike.
I’ll go to ExcelsiCon and enter that contest. I’ll win that contest. And I’ll get my tickets out of here, away from Catherine and the twins, and create a new universe where I can be whoever I want to be and not what everyone thinks I am.
I’ll be my father’s daughter.
It’ll be work. I’ll have to clean these things up, alter them so they fit, somehow find a way to get to Atlanta for the convention. But Dad taught me a long time ago that it takes much more than a few good pieces of costume to be worthy of the Federation insignia. It takes courage and perseverance. It takes all the good things I still feel in Dad’s old cosplay uniform. All the kind things in Mom’s galaxy dress.
And with their help, I’ll make them proud.
I’ll ignite the stars.
I’VE MET MY DOOM, AND IT isn’t even breakfast yet.
Six foot eight, as broad as a New York Jets linebacker with sausage fingers that could snap me—even buff, gained-twenty-pounds-of-muscle-for-a-movie Darien 2.0 me—in half. A tribal tattoo winds across the side of his mostly shaved head.
Holy looming nose hairs, Batman.
Mark looks between me and my doom with this proud grin on his face. Like he’s won the county fair with a stolen prized pig.
“So?” he says, egging on a compliment that I will not give him. He can call me petulant. He can tell me I’m showing my age. I don’t care. “What do you think, Darien?”
“I don’t need a bodyguard,” I reply, crossing my arms over my chest. I try to stand as tall as I can, but even then Mr. Doom towers over me by a good six inches. Think half the Rock, half Terry Crews. All three hundred pounds of muscle. And when I stand up straighter, so does he. Showoff.
“He’s not here for your benefit,” Mark replies through a smile. His teeth are clenched. “He’s here because our insurance company insisted on it.”
“It’s not my fault you insured my abs. They never asked for that. If you hadn’t made me do that stupid stunt on Hello, America—”
“I’m thinking of your future, Darien. You don’t want to mess it up more, do you?” He taps my chin—the same spot where I have a “career-ending” scar. After my unfortunate boat fail, Mark tossed around names of plastic surgeons like NFL quarterbacks throw Hail Mary passes. I didn’t think the stitches were that bad, but the showrunner had to go back and reshoot almost every scene in the finale to incorporate them. Needless to say, the resulting scar did not end my career. The only thing that ended was my last and only friendship.
I tear my eyes away from Terry Crews Jr. to glare at my dad.
“Don’t give me that look, Darien,” he says with a sigh. “I just want to do best by you. I just want you to get jobs in this town. You understand that, right?”
“Fine. Fine.” There’s no point arguing. “For how long?”
“Now see, that’s the thing—”
“How long? And what does Gail say about it?”
“Gail agrees it’s a good idea. And indefinitely.” He takes out his vibrating phone and glances at the number. “I need to take this. You two get to know each other. This’ll be an adventure, right?”
I don’t even answer before Mark spins off, phone nestled against his shoulder. “Hello, yes, this is Mark. Harrison! How are you? How’s the ankle?”
The door can’t slam behind him quick enough.
My bodyguard and I exchange the same expectant look. I size up his crisp black suit and his neat tie and his silver Rolex—which makes you wonder how well bodyguards get paid—and I scowl. When he doesn’t flinch I give up, pull off my day-old T-shirt, and stomp over to the corner where I stashed my suitcase.
We rolled into Atlanta late last night. I couldn’t sleep a wink because the plane powered through a monstrous thunderstorm. The moment I got to the hotel I fell asleep in my clothes, and I’m still tired. The glaring red clock on the bedside table reads 8:31 a.m., which means I only slept four hours.
“You’re probably good at taking lip, aren’t you?” I mutter more to myself than to my bodyguard, clawing through the suitcase for a T-shirt that isn’t tight on me. “Like a CIA operative, right? Do bodyguards go to bodyguard school? Are you like the hitman in Hitman?”
He adjusts his cuffs. “You know the rule about fight club?”
I give him a surprised look. “So you can talk!”
He raises a single eyebrow. “I will be right outside your door if you need me. You have to be down at the lot in twenty minutes. I suggest you hurry.” Then he takes his burly frame and saunters out of the room.
I shove my head into a clean shirt and pull my arms through just as my phone blips.
There’s a message. Well, two messages.
Gail 8:36 AM
—HIS NAME IS LONNY. BE NICE.
“Lonny?” That name definitely is not fit for a three-hundred-pound machine of total annihilation, but okay. I find a clean pair of gym shorts and socks. My phone dings again, and that’s when I remember the other message.
Unknown 8:44 AM
—Okay, sorry to bother you but I thought you might know this. What do you call it when Eucinedes does that thing to the ship’s guns? Correcting? Fixing?
—Bah.
Right. The stranger. My lips twist into a half grin as I respond.
8:44 AM
—Writing fanfic this early in the morning?
Unknown 8:44 AM
—NO.
—That sounded too strong, didn’t it?
8:44 AM
—Slightly. I’ll give you a hint.
—It starts with a C.
Unknown 8:44 AM
—Crap, I knew it was a C! Let me think…..
I pull on my gym shorts and socks, stick the phone in my pocket, and run my hands through my hair while looking in the bathroom mirror. The scar on my chin is more prominent in harsh lights, a razor-white line against my brown skin.
Mark’s right. Carmindor doesn’t have a scar. Just another reason on my list of why the casting director was crazy to pick me. Crazier to think I could pick up where David Singh left off.
Another message flashes and I sort of dread it. I hate text messaging. Especially with strangers. But somehow…I don’t know…there’s something comforting about texting this person. Being completely anonymous. I don’t have to be anyone. They haven’t even asked for my name—I haven’t asked for theirs. I don’t need to make excuses for why I have a bodyguard or my weird diet or why I insist on wearing my favorite T-shirts even though they have holes in the armpits.
We’re just…we’re just talking.
Unknown 8:45 AM
—Correcting? Calculating?
—Come on, Carmindor!
—Collecting? Cateri
ng? I have NO idea
—wait
—OH MY GOD IT’S CALIBRATING.
—I am terrible.
8:46 AM
—And you call yourself a fan…
Unknown 8:46 AM
—A TERRIBLE one!
—I’ll never forgive myself for this.
—Thank you, Your Highness.
“Ten minutes, boss.” Lonny-aka-My-Doom has poked his head in from the hallway.
“What are you, a timer too?”
“I’m whatever I’m paid to be.”
“Can I pay you to disappear?”
He gives me a deadpan look.
“It was a joke,” I say, shoving the phone in my pocket and grabbing my keys. I wouldn’t say that I make my way out of my room fast, but I don’t take my time putting on my shoes, if you’re wondering. And just before I leave, I send one final message.
8:56 AM
—Just Car is fine. :)
CALIBRATING.
I’m going to kick myself for eons.
“Euci calibrates his guns, Elle,” I grouse to myself, scribbling it in my notebook. “Why the hell was I thinking with calculating?”
The high Tuesday sun bakes over our heads as I watch tourists wander down the Battery. My brick of a phone rests in the shade, struggling to play a YouTube video about how to measure and sew darts on its ancient screen. I must’ve watched this one about forty times. There’s a lot of weird sewing vocabulary I don’t understand, and the tutorial lady is using a sewing machine, which I don’t have and have no way to buy. All my savings is already going toward materials and, eventually, a bus ticket and convention pass. I’ll be lucky if I can afford a needle and thread, let alone figure out how to use it.
“Why couldn’t it be a fanfiction contest,” I grumble. Writing is easier. When I’m a screenwriter, I’ll get to draft dialogue and describe characters all I want, and someone else can handle the costumes.
But for now, I’m a one-woman shop.
I’ve decided to enter as Carmindor, stupid as that may be. Mom’s Amara dress probably fits better, but there’s something about it that keeps me at arm’s length. I always needed permission to wear that dress. Dad would pull it down from the top of the closet and make me promise to tread lightly or else the galaxy sewn into the seams would swallow me up. But really he was asking me not to ruin the costume that held the memory of Mom. To treat it cautiously. To pretend it was spun gold. Besides, you cosplay who you want to be, and I’ve wanted to be Carmindor for as long as I can remember.
The problem, of course, is that Dad’s jacket swamps me. He was a big guy, but I must’ve forgotten just how big. Memory becomes funny after a while. In my head, he’s this broad-shouldered hero, with a soft smile that tugs up one side of his mouth more than the other and eyes as deep and dark as the Atlantic Ocean. I got Mom’s brown eyes. He used to hum “Brown-Eyed Girl” as he danced her around the living room. Her head fit against his shoulder like a lock and key.
I wonder if he ever waltzed Catherine around the living room. My stepmother has blue eyes, and I can’t think of any happy songs about blue-eyed women. Were Dad and Catherine ever happy? They must have been at some point. After the first night I met her—when she showed up on our doorstep in a tiny white dress, holding a bottle of wine in a fancy little bag—Dad asked me what I thought of her. I was eight. Mom had been gone four years. I wanted to shake him and remind him that Princess Amara dies at the end—that Mom died at the end. That stories shouldn’t get sequels. That sequels are always bad. A rotten on the Rotten Tomatoes critic scale.
But I didn’t.
“I like her,” I said.
Seven months later they were married. Then the impossible happened and Catherine and I were stuck with each other. Stuck together in a world where he no longer exists. Or at least I thought he didn’t. In the jacket, I feel him. In the seams and buttons and epaulets I can hear him humming “Brown-Eyed Girl.”
Maybe everything does die—but maybe, somehow, everything that dies someday comes back.
The door to the Pumpkin swings open and I hide my phone under the notebook. Sage climbs in, two cups of ice cream in hand.
“Oof, remind me never to take a lunch to run across town to the ice cream store,” she says, breathless, and offers me a melting cup. The spoon wedged inside has already begun to tilt to the side. “Butterscotch? Or praline?”
I look at her, confused. “For…me?”
She rolls her eyes and puts both cups on the counter. “No, for the other coworker we have around here. Jeez. I’m eating the butterscotch.” She sits down on the water bucket and begins to eat. “The line was ridiculous. Anyone come while I was gone?”
I shake my head, claiming the praline. I actually really like praline. But something about this feels…weird. And not just the part where Sage is talking to me.
“You bought ice cream,” I say stupidly.
“Uh, yeah. It’s hot outside.” Sage stirs her ice cream soup.
“But ice cream has…cream.”
She blinks her purple-shaded eyelids. “And? Oh”—she grins big—“you thought I was a vegan? No way. That’s just boss lady. I don’t get it at all.”
“Same,” I agree. “I’m too much of a bacon fan.”
“Mmh, bacon-flavored ice cream. Now that would be a sin in a vegan truck.” Sage laughs. “We’d go straight to vegan hell. Though I don’t know how much of a hell that’d be if we’re already in it.”
“You don’t like working here?”
She looks away guiltily. “I mean, if I say no it makes me a bad kid, right? That I don’t want to inherit boss lady’s pride and joy.” She pats the counter like she would a dog, like good boy, it’s nothing against you.
“So…what would you do instead?”
She shrugs. “I try not to think about it.”
“You draw, right? And make your own clothes?”
She glances down at her skirt, which is seven different colors sewn together in vertical panels with tulle underneath. It reminds me of those Japanese fashion magazines she reads, as if she jumped out of the pages. “You can tell?”
“Not in a bad way!” I amend quickly. “You just always look so cool.”
She snorts. I try again. “Do you want to be a fashion designer?”
She eats another spoonful of ice cream and hums. “I want to marry this ice cream is what I want. We’ll abscond to Tahiti.”
For a split second, I think about asking her to explain the sewing video, but before I can even articulate the thought, a voice interrupts me.
“Oh look, it’s our gross sister in her natural habitat.”
Chloe and Cal are sneering into the order window. In the three weeks I’ve worked at the Pumpkin, the twins had yet to find me. Of course that had to end today. Naturally, they’re flanked by the whole Country Club Crew: their mutual best friend Erin, her boyfriend, and a few guys from the football team whose parents own yachts down at the harbor. And, standing a little farther behind, James. Great.
Sage sets down her cup of ice cream and stands. “Can we help you?” she asks, spoon tucked into the corner of her mouth.
Chloe ignores her. Her blonde hair is pulled up into a loose ponytail; she’s wearing short pink shorts and a College of Charleston T-shirt—the college she wants to go to next year. Beside her, a tall and broad guy—linebacker on the football team, buzz cut, stinks like his father’s got money—nods at Sage. “You the only one working with her?”
Sage leans against the counter toward them. “What’s it to you?”
“Might want to be careful around her. She’s crazy,” he says, turning his gaze to me. At the back of the crowd, James shrugs and looks away. The tips of my ears burn with embarrassment.
Sage either ignores them or doesn’t hear. “We have pumpkin fritters, tofu pumpkin spread sandwiches, pumpkin tacos, and pumpkin fries,” she intones dryly. “We’re all out of chimichangas. Although I’m sure we could make an exception if you’d like to be on t
he menu too.”
The linebacker really looks at Sage this time, from her green hair down to the ring in her lip. “Hey, you’re the chick in my homeroom, yeah?”
“And you are holding up the line,” she replies.
He looks behind him. “There’s no one here.”
She smiles a tight-lipped smile. “Which means you’re scaring the customers away. Now run along. Go chase tail somewhere else.”
Chloe squints at her. “Excuse you, who do you think you are?”
My coworker feigns shock. “I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce myself, did I?” Then she pauses for a long, long moment as they wait for her to introduce herself. Finally, Sage goes, “Oh, I’m not going to.”
Behind Chloe, Cal chews on her bottom lip, trying to hide a smile.
“Freak,” Chloe sneers, grabs James by the arm, who is also kind of smiling because no one makes Chloe look like an idiot the way Sage just did, and drags him away. The rest of the posse follows like a herd of cattle. Cal lingers for a moment, her gaze fixated on Sage as if she’s trying to puzzle out what she’s made of, until her sister calls her name and she hurries away too.
Sage rolls her eyes and turns to me. “Your sisters are the bane of all existence. Bet you can’t wait to graduate.”
“I guess,” I reply, but the words put a sour taste in my mouth because I don’t know what’ll happen after senior year. No—I do know. I’m going to win this contest and fly out of here, straight to L.A. And never come back.
She picks up her ice cream again and turns to me. “Anyway. What were you saying?”
“Oh…nothing.”
I can’t bring myself to ask her about the sewing video. I know Sage isn’t like the others—I just saw as much—but she’ll want to know why I’m asking and there’s no way someone like Sage is going to care about Starfield. If I’m going to fail, I don’t want to drag someone as cool as Sage down with me.
She shrugs. “Suit yourself.”
Besides, I can do it myself. I’ve always done everything myself.