Bookish and the Beast

I get it.

I just hate the look people give me. The pitying one. The one that, behind the sadness in their eyes, they’re thinking I’m glad it was her and not me.

“Rosie,” Annie calls, but I’m already halfway out of the store.

“I’ll see you at school tomorrow,” I say before the automatic doors close on me. I’m so angry I don’t slow down until I wrench open the door to my antique mustard-yellow hatchback and buckle myself in.

It’s finally quiet.

My hands are still shaking as I curl them around the steering wheel and breathe out a long breath. The kind of breath my therapist told me to breathe out whenever I felt the world spinning out of control. I’m okay. Everything’s fine.

Everything will be fine.

That’s when I remember the toy egg I crammed into my pocket before the whole fiasco started. I take it out, and shake it one more time.

Please, please let it be Sond.

I crack it open.

A small plastic figurine falls out. White-blond hair and a purple uniform. I smirk a little to myself and curl my fingers around the tiny General Sond, remembering the boy on the balcony. He didn’t look at me like I was broken, something that couldn’t be fixed. I wish I’d gotten his name. I wish I had pressed more ardently, even though I asked, again and again—

And each time he’d just smile at me and say, “You should guess.”

“That’s no fair, you won’t give me any clues! Fine, I won’t tell you mine, either. You’ll have to guess.”

He chuckled. “How many guesses do I get?”

“Until morning,” I decided.

“Until morning,” he agreed.

I wish I could go back and live in that night forever. But…it doesn’t matter what I wish, because that night is over, like the boy himself, one moment there—then by morning, gone.

“CAN YOU TURN THAT DOWN? I have a beastly migraine,” I murmur, passing the living room where Elias is watching some lip-syncing contest. I grab a bottle of water out of the refrigerator, crack open the cap, and drain half. I press the cool plastic against my forehead, but it does very little to alleviate my headache. “Do we have any medicine?”

Elias leans his head back to look into the kitchen. “Try left cabinet, bottom shelf.”

I find some generic shite that will work better than nothing. I swallow it down with a gulp of water and grab a biscuit from the pack above the refrigerator.

“Ooh, come here. I think Darien is about to go on,” Elias calls.

The last thing I want is to see my costar, but then I hear David Bowie purr through the TV speakers, and I slowly ease my way into the living room.

“Bloody hell,” I mutter through a mouthful of biscuit as Darien Freeman lip-syncs to “Do You Know the Babe” on live television.

In any other circumstance, I would rightly be laughing my ass off as he humiliates himself in front of millions of viewers, but I almost choke on my biscuit as he breaks into a tap-dancing number.

“Just think, that could’ve been you,” Elias comments, nonplussed by the situation at hand, while the sight of Darien Freeman dressed as a sexy Halloween version of the Goblin King from Labyrinth—a sparkly leotard and fishnets, with an exciting blond wig—will haunt me for the rest of my life.

It is very akin to watching a train wreck in slow motion. The lights flare on and he pulls out a riding crop and slaps his thigh.

The crowd, at least, goes wild. They wave around posters that say WANNA WABBA WABBA WITH ME? and YOU SAVED AMARA! and I’M SINGLE and I LOVE YOU DARE-BEAR! And a lot of other signs that should honestly be blurred out. He does a full-on split as the song ends and the entire audience erupts into chaos.

Well, that performance will certainly give Tom Holland a go.

“I’m going to bed,” I announce, because my migraine is only getting worse watching this, but even as I say that I find myself pulling my leg over the couch and sinking down into the cushions beside Elias. He’s curled up in the corner of the L-shaped couch in his comfortable blue robe, his wet dark hair gently curling against his neck. He’s my stepdad’s uncle, and my current guardian—for a multitude of reasons.

Sansa, my German shepherd, is stretched out on the other side of him. She barks at something only she can hear.

“Shh, Sansa, we’re watching an idiot in his natural habitat,” I tell her, earning a snort from Elias.

On the screen, the two judges rush over to Darien as he stands, that big dumb smile on his face, taking off his wig and flicking his sweaty black hair out into the crowd. They howl. He winks at them.

Jessica Stone, who is also my costar and who plays Princess Amara of the Starfield kingdom, lounges on the spectator couch in a bedazzled golden dress. She stares at Darien, openmouthed, and I can’t tell if she’s actually surprised Darien did that split, or pretending.

“What a performance!” the female announcer cries.

The male announcer agrees. “And that was Darien Freeman as the sexy Goblin King! How do you feel after that performance?”

“I feel like I’m going to win this,” Darien says to the audience, grinning, and then turns to Jess to add, “Sorry, ah’blena,” with a wink. She sticks out her tongue at him. The teen girls in the front row squeal as he says ah’blena like he just hit the sweet spot of their souls. “I couldn’t ask for a better opponent.”

“Or a better costar,” she adds.

“Or a better costar.”

“Speaking of costars, now I’ve got to know,” the announcer says, leaning toward Darien a little, and I can feel a chill curl up my spine. “Do you think you could ever get Vance Reigns on the show?”

“Never,” I reply, putting my feet on the coffee table. I steal a piece of popcorn from Elias, and one for Sansa, before Elias bats my feet off the table with a glare because it’s not our house.

It doesn’t matter—if I ruin something, I’ll just buy the owner a new one.

“I mean, after he returns from his break, of course,” the female announcer agrees with a smile.

“My break?” I mutter. “More like exile.”

“That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?” Elias says.

Darien laughs. “I’ll see what I can do. No promises. But! I can give you one thing that I know you’ve been waiting for.”

Jess nods from the sofa. “The first-ever look at Starfield: Resonance!”

I finish off the last few kernels of popcorn and roll off the couch. “All right, I’m heading to bed—”

“Let Sansa out first,” Elias reminds me.

“How could I forget my good girl? My best girl!” I scrub Sansa behind the ears. Her pink tongue lolls out happily, and she slides off the couch and follows me to the back door. Sometimes it feels like Sansa’s the only girl who doesn’t care that I’m Vance Reigns. It’s because she doesn’t understand the concept of an A-list film star with a track record for bad ideas, but I’d like to think it’s because I give her extra treaties when Elias isn’t looking. I slide the door open, and she trots out as I find the floodlights and flip them on. Sansa’s ears whirl around, and she darts out into the darkness beyond the pool and the shed and into the backyard.

I shove my hands into my pockets and kick a rock into the pool, and watch it sink to the bottom.

Everyone keeps calling this a break, but it’s not.

I didn’t choose this.

My stepfather did. “If you can’t grow up, then you’re going to learn the hard way,” he’d said.

He thought that by taking away all of my toys, my cars, my friends, he could somehow punish me for—for what? Having a little fun? As if he could throw me into some nowhere town to teach me a lesson.

Well, joke’s on him.

The only lesson I’m learning is how to absolutely ignore him the second I turn eighteen on October 11. As soon I do, I’m out of here. Just a month more.

I can endure this for a month.

* * *

—

THE MOMENT MY FLIGHT FROM LA ARRIVED, I hated this place. Four hours in an airplane, and it seems like I landed on another world. Into the tiniest airport imaginable. One terminal, twelve gates. Outside, it wasn’t much better. Too many trees, all still somehow green even though it was September. A hired driver in an old tweed suit drove me to the middle of nowhere and deposited me in front of a house that looked like a castle, though, complete with a drawbridge and two turrets and a mazelike rose garden in the back, built of gray stones and some recluse’s pipe dream. I came with my suitcase and nothing else. My driver pulled away without even a second glance. He left me to be murdered by goats or cows or whatever the hell is in the middle of farmland.

I slung my duffel bag over my shoulder and squinted up at the place where I’d be living for the next few months.

“You can’t keep doing this, Vance,” my stepfather had said when he sentenced me here. “Maybe some time away will help you see things differently.”

And it just so happened that the director of Starfield: Resonance—my stepfather’s best friend—had a house she wasn’t using.

The front door was unlocked, so I let myself in and took my Lacostes off in the foyer. I was expecting swords on the walls and skeletons hanging, mouths agape, but the inside of the castle looked right good, really. The floors were a dark wood and while the walls were bare stone, they were decorated with paintings from IKEA and Better Homes and Gardens.