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? Catering? 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.