Soleil and I did not win the karaoke competition. Unsurprising, since Soleil had spent our whole performance of “Defying Gravity” squinting at her phone screen and tripping over the lyrics, but it didn’t really matter, because I’d only ever wanted to sing for the fun of it. It was Soleil who cared about winning.
Her expression got darker and darker as they announced third place (Sherlock and Dr. Watson’s rendition of “Bad Romance”), then second place (a guy dressed like a Mountie, belting the crap out of “Livin’ on a Prayer”), and by the time they got to first place (a whole bunch of Harry Potter characters singing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” with Hermione doing the lead part), Soleil looked like she wanted to murder someone.
“Fine,” she muttered to nobody in particular. “Give the awards to the obvious song choices.”
“I think it was less about the song choice and more about the performance,” said Danielle, who was clapping enthusiastically as the first-place winners accepted their trophy on stage. “And those guys were fantastic.”
Soleil pointed her murder-face directly at Danielle. “They were totally basic.”
Danielle, obviously confused, faltered for a second. “Well, I wouldn’t say basic. But maybe their harmonies weren’t exactly right …”
Plus, I thought triumphantly, at least they knew all the lyrics.
Up on stage, the DJ thanked us all for being a good audience, and the lights went up, and it was over.
“What a waste,” said Soleil as she started following the crowd toward the door.
“I thought it was fun,” I replied.
She didn’t answer me. Just sort of huffed.
Marziya, jogging a little to catch up with her, said, “But you at least liked our performance, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Soleil flatly, without even looking at Marziya. “It was great.”
Marziya frowned. So did the rest of the Fangirl Trio. I didn’t blame them. I mean, come on. Your three biggest fans dedicate a song to you, and you can’t bother looking happy about it? I mean, she’d looked plenty happy just a little while ago. When the three of them had come down off the stage and joined us again, Soleil had given each of them a bear hug and then said, “Just you wait till this is over, I am going to scream about how awesome you guys are!” But apparently not winning had zapped all her enthusiasm away.
“I liked it a lot,” I told Marziya. “You guys are all really talented. And the choreography was so great! Have you been practicing a lot?”
“Every weekend for a month.” Even though she was talking to me, Danielle was still looking at Soleil.
“Well,” I said, “it showed.”
“Thanks,” said Danielle, kind of sadly.
And, okay, maybe I’d slightly hated her before, when she’d said she was interested in Soleil, but now I felt bad for her. If anyone knew what it was like to be rejected by Soleil, it was me. So I leaned over and added in a low voice, “Soleil thought you were great, too. I could tell. She’s just annoyed right now, you know, about the whole not-winning thing. She’ll get over it.”
Danielle looked skeptical, but she nodded.
Once we were out in the hallway, Soleil stopped walking and rounded on us. She was smiling again, but in this strained way that didn’t reach her eyes. “Okay, ladies. Creativity Corner project planning meeting tonight, yes? Want to meet us in our room?”
“We could come over now,” said Aimee.
Soleil shook her head. “I need some time to unwind, you get me? Change clothes, have some tea. How about you come over in an hour?”
The three of them nodded, a little row of bobblehead fangirls.
“Come on, Nessie.” Soleil started walking away, apparently trusting that I’d follow.
“See you guys in a few,” I said with a little wave, and went after Soleil.
She still looked ready to stab someone. Hopefully someone who wasn’t me.
“Hey, why don’t we go in the hot tub for a bit?” I said. “I bet that’d relax you.”
“I don’t need to relax,” said Soleil, striding down the hall so fast that I practically had to jog to keep up with her. “What I need is to come up with the most kick-ass Creativity Corner routine ever, so I can actually win something.”
“You mean so we can win something.”
“You know what I mean.”
I thought about that. Yeah, I did know what she meant. She meant exactly what she’d said.
“Hey,” I said, dodging around a girl wearing a unicorn horn, “why didn’t you tell them they did a good job?”
“Who?”
“Your Fangirl Trio.”
She raised a pointed eyebrow at me. “Yeah, that’s because they didn’t do a good job. I didn’t want to lie.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, even as my churning stomach told me to shut up, shut up, do not risk making her mood even worse. “They were totally fine. Plus that’s not even the point. The point is they dedicated a song to you.”
“It’s not about the song choice, it’s about the performance.” Her voice went high in a snotty mockery of Danielle’s breathy soprano.
“Yeah, unless someone dedicates a song—”
“And they were not totally fine,” she continued, talking right over me as we entered the lobby of the hotel. “They were off-key the entire time! Although, heh, how would you know, right?”
“Wait. What?”
Soleil reached the elevator bank, pressed the up button, and gave me a pitying look. “Well, I hate to break it to you, sweetie, but you’re a little … you know. Tone deaf.”
I had no idea what to say. I wasn’t tone deaf. I knew I wasn’t. I’d been in my school choir every year since the beginning of junior high, and I’d even made Select Choir this year. That didn’t happen to tone deaf people.
Before I could regain the power of speech, the elevator arrived. Soleil and I stepped in, and I gathered all the bravery I’d ever had, preparing to defend myself—but then someone else got in, too. The guy in the Mountie uniform. The one who’d won second place for singing “Livin’ on a Prayer.”
“Good day,” he said in this weirdly formal voice, and pressed the button for the eighteenth floor.
Soleil pressed the one for fifteen and didn’t reply. The elevator doors slid closed.
“Great job at the karaoke thing,” I said, nodding toward the plastic-looking medal that hung around his neck.
The Mountie smiled and touched his wide-brimmed hat. “Thank you kindly. I liked your song, too. You make a lovely Galinda.”
“You mean Glinda?” said Soleil, glaring at the guy.
“Actually,” he said, “at the beginning of Wicked, her name is Galinda. She changes it later to Glinda in honor of her teacher, because he’d been unable to pronounce her name correctly, and when he died, she felt—”
“Hey, look, it’s our floor,” said Soleil loudly, pushing me toward the opening elevator doors. I gave the Mountie one last wave before I left; he waved back. As soon as the doors closed behind us again, Soleil muttered, “Geez. Mansplaining much?”
“Well,” I said, as we headed toward 1502. “He’s right. Glinda’s name was Galinda at first …”
Soleil snorted.
I took a deep breath. “Also, I’m not tone deaf.”
She chuckled darkly. “Oh, come on. Why do you think we didn’t win?”
“Um, I dunno, maybe because you were reading the lyrics off your phone instead of actually performing the song?”
Aaaand cue the return of the murder-face.
“Okay. Sure. And riddle me this, Nessie: Whose brilliant idea was it to look up the lyrics on my phone in the first place?”
“Well, mine,” I said. “Because you forgot to memorize them.”
“I didn’t forget,” she said, jamming her key card into the door with such force that it gave her an error message. She tried again. “They didn’t tell us we had to memorize them. You have to tell people that kind of stuff. You have to— Jesus H. Christ, why won’t this stupid door unlock?”
I took her card and inserted it like a normal, nonviolent person. It worked fine. We went inside, where she immediately flopped down on her bed, closing her eyes and breathing heavily and, okay, on literally any other day, I’d’ve taken her silence as my cue to drop the whole karaoke thing altogether. But not today. Not after what she’d said.
“You should apologize to me,” I said. It came out kind of shaky, and kind of sounding like a question.
“Ha. Right. For what?”
“For saying I’m tone deaf.” My voice was a little firmer now, which, yes, good. “For saying I’m the reason we lost.”
She opened her eyes and propped herself up on her elbows. “Oh. Sure. Sorry. I’m so sorry I said that, and I totally didn’t mean it, like, at all.”
Yeah. Right.
“And for being mean to Danielle and those girls.”
“I wasn’t mean—”
“Are you StraightFlush?”
Soleil went instantly quiet. She sat up on the bed, really slowly, and fixed me with a look that probably could’ve melted an entire glacier.
“Excuse me?” Her voice was dangerously soft.
Every cell of my body wanted to turn and flee, but I knew I couldn’t do that. Not now. I had to know.
“On your phone,” I said. “I pulled up your browser to look up those lyrics, and … and, and, see, the page was right there. FicForAll, I mean. It was up, and you were logged in, and it said—”
“You snooped on my phone?”
“No, I didn’t. Like I said, I pulled up your browser and—”
“You shouldn’t have snooped.”
“If you didn’t want me to see, you should’ve looked up the lyrics yourself!”
“Lower your voice, will you?” said Soleil, leaning back on her hands. “You sound like a seven-year-old throwing a tantrum.”
She was right; somehow I’d ended up shouting and, okay, fair, I hadn’t planned on shouting, but still. I didn’t lower my voice.
“Answer my question.”
“Don’t give me orders.”
“Are you StraightFlush?”
Soleil rolled her eyes. “Jeeeesus. Fine. Yes, I’m StraightFlush.”
There it was. The truth I hadn’t wanted to believe. I let out a long breath.
“You’re a sock puppet,” I said.
She laughed. “A what?”
“You made up StraightFlush and had him attack your stories so you could make yourself look good and get everyone’s attention. Sock puppeting. That’s what that’s called.”
“Oh, grow up, Vanessa. Obviously I wanted to get everyone’s attention. I’m a fanfic writer. I wanted readers. That’s not sock puppeting. That’s marketing.”
I shook my head. “It’s lying. You lied.”
“So?”
“What do you mean, so? You created a whole fake identity just to make yourself famous!”
“At least I got famous on my own, instead of riding somebody else’s coattails.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Let me paint you a picture, Nessie,” she said. “FicForAll, circa eight months ago. I post the last chapter of ‘I Knew You Were Trouble.’ I get thousands of hits in just a couple of hours. Over the next week or so, the entire Wonderlandia fandom starts posting fanfic of my fanfic. Missing scenes and sequels and prequels and AU fic and whatever. I read a bunch of them, because who wouldn’t? Most of them suck. But one of them’s pretty good. So I start reading other stories by this author—an author by the name of Ness—and hey, she’s got promise.
“See, I had this idea for a new story. But my fall classes were about to start, which meant I’d have way less time to write—and everyone knows you have to maintain a steady posting schedule in order to keep your fans. So I figure, why not ask her to co-write with me? So I ask. She sends me the cutest email you’ve ever read, saying it’d be such an honor to write with me, blah blah blah. We spend a couple days outlining this new thing together, and we call it ‘Carry Me Home,’ and we start posting it as we write, chapter by chapter. And you know what happens then?”
My stomach churned. Yeah, I knew what had happened then.
“What happens then,” she says, “is that all my fans are suddenly interested in this new unknown author’s stuff! Her hits start skyrocketing, and her comments get to the point where she can’t even answer them all. And I’ll bet you anything she wasn’t at all surprised by it. I’ll bet you anything that she knew that was gonna happen. She was counting on it happening. I’ll bet you anything that was the reason she said yes to co-writing with me in the first place.” She grinned at me. “We all wanna be famous, Nessie. I used a sock puppet. You used me. So I’m not sure you’re in any position to judge here.”
For a second, I had no idea what to say. Not because she was wrong—but because, if you squinted, she was actually … well, kind of not wrong? Back when she’d first asked me if I wanted to write with her, sure, it had occurred to me that attaching my name to hers would boost my popularity. But it also wasn’t the first thing that had occurred to me, and it definitely wasn’t the main reason I’d said yes.
The main reason was that I’d never written with anybody else before, and I wanted to try it out.
But still. She wasn’t totally wrong.
“Well, looks like that’s settled!” said Soleil, clapping her hands together. “Wanna talk about our Creativity Corner routine?”
“Soleil—”
“I’m thinking we go with Harry Potter. I know it’s so passé, but pandering to the masses might help us win.”
“Soleil,” I said, and she blinked up at me, looking vaguely annoyed. “No. It’s not settled. Just because I got famous from writing with you, that doesn’t make it cool that you lied to me about being StraightFlush.”
Soleil rolled her eyes. “Fine. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. Happy?”
“No.”
“… No what?”
“No, I am not happy.” I took a deep breath and my hands were shaking and I curled them into fists. “You want to know the truth? I haven’t been happy since I got here. I’ve been trying to be, because you’re … well, you’re you … but you’re not … you’re … I mean you’re different.”
“Oh yeah?” she said acidly. “Different from what?”
“Well, first you didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend,” I began. “And I thought, well, that’s weird, but I’ll deal. Then you ditched ‘Carry Me Home’ to read your own story, but I let that slide, too. And then you were so rude to Danielle and her friends just now—Oh! And by the way! Danielle told me earlier that she was interested in asking you out. And do you know why she told me?”
“Do tell,” said Soleil icily.
“Because she wanted to make sure I was cool with it, because she thought you and I were dating.” I paused, just long enough for it to sink in. Soleil narrowed her eyes. “And you know why she thought we were dating? The same reasons I thought we were dating. You keep posting all this suggestive stuff about us on FicForAll. You keep calling me, like, ‘my dear’ and ‘my love’ and whatever. We talked about sex, Soleil. Like, not even in a general way. It was specific. It was us. It was all, like, stuff we’d do if we ever met in real life.”
“Oh my god,” she said. “I told you, we were just kidding around—”
“No, we weren’t,” I said quietly. “Maybe you started out kidding around and, okay, maybe I was a moron for not seeing it. But I wasn’t kidding. And if you didn’t see that, then that makes you just as much of a moron as I was. Unless you did see it and you just pretended not to see it, in which case you’re not a moron. You’re just kind of a horrible person.”
Soleil wasn’t even trying to interrupt me anymore. She sat quietly on her bed, leaning back on her hands, watching me with narrowed eyes.
“I came here thinking I was meeting my girlfriend for the first time. My actual, literal girlfriend. I spent so much time waiting for you to, you know, do something. Kiss me, you know, or even just talk to me like you do online and on text and stuff. But you didn’t—so I did—and then you played it off like, oh, no big deal, just a misunderstanding. And maybe it wasn’t a big deal for you, and whatever, fine. But me? That was …” Deep breath, in and out. “That was my first kiss. You were my first.”
For a second, Soleil just sat there, letting my confession sink in, and when she finally spoke, it was in this icy-calm voice: “So either I’m horrible or I’m a moron.”
It felt mean when she echoed it back at me, but I stood my ground. “Unless you apologize to me and mean it, then … yeah.”
“Cool,” said Soleil. “Now pack up your stuff and get out of my room.”
My jaw went slack because, what? Was she really kicking me out? Was she not even going to try to fix all the things that were wrong between us?
“You can’t just …”
“Sure I can,” she said smoothly. “Hotel room’s in my name. You haven’t paid me back for your half yet. So yeah, I can do whatever I want. Have Mommy and Daddy pick you up. Whatever you want. But get out.”
I wanted to argue. I should have argued, maybe. But I didn’t actually want to stay anymore. So I turned around, went into the bathroom, and swept all my stuff off my half of the counter. Not that there was much of it. I took my clothes out of the dresser, and I took my books off my side of the nightstand, and I shoved everything into my suitcase.
“Don’t forget your laptop,” said Soleil. “Wouldn’t want to lose any of those precious unfinished novels that you always abandon after the first chapter.”
Clenching my teeth together, I went over to the desk, unplugged my laptop, and slid it into the front compartment of my suitcase.
“Actually, wow,” she went on, “this explains a lot. You abandon your novels because you get bored with them, right? You get bored because you never know what the plot is. And you never know what the plot is because original fiction is all about writing what you know, and you don’t know anything about anything. You haven’t lived, unless you count being online all the time. You’re so freaking sheltered that you think a little internet flirting means we’re actual girlfriends.”
“At least I don’t just change the names of my fanfic characters and try to pass it off as original.”
“Get out,” she said. “My real friends will be here soon, and we need the rehearsal space.”
That was when I remembered something.
“Actually,” I said, “remember how I was the one who registered for the Creativity Corner? Under my name?”
She rolled her eyes. “So change the registration to my name, duh.”
I smiled at her. “Well. No.”
“What are you talking about, Nessie? It’s not like you’re gonna do something without me.”
“Who knows?” I said. “Maybe I will.”
And I left.
As soon as the door clicked shut behind me, it took everything I had not to collapse onto the floor and start sobbing. But if I did that, odds were good that Soleil would come out and find me, or that Danielle would find me when she and her posse came over, or something even worse, and, just, no. I had to get away.
I definitely didn’t want to call my parents about this, so that wasn’t an option. Maybe I could find Merry and see if they were up for hearing about my drama; I could picture their face already, going all soft and sympathetic when I told them what had happened. But I had no idea where their room was. Actually, I had no idea where anyone’s room was.
Except … no, that wasn’t true. That girl from the taxidermy thing. Callie Buchannan. When we’d met and swapped badges yesterday, she’d told me where she was staying, in case I wanted my badge back at the last minute.
A few minutes later, I was knocking on the door of room 1535. And a few seconds after that, Callie was opening it.
“Vanessa, hey!” Her eyes took in the empty hallway, then fell on my suitcase. “Uh, what’s going on?”
A lump rose in my throat because, oh god, so many things were going on. “I, um. Um.” Why, why, why couldn’t I get words out? Had I used up all my sentence-forming abilities on Soleil? “I just need, uh …”
Callie’s eyes widened. “Here, come on in. Let me get you some water, okay?”
I dragged my suitcase inside, and Callie fetched me a cup from the bathroom. I drank the whole thing; she refilled it and handed it to me again.
“Chair,” she said, pointing to an armchair identical to the one in my—in Soleil’s room. “Sit. Talk.”
Ugh, no. I’d already done enough talking to fill a lifetime. But I couldn’t exactly come into an almost-stranger’s hotel room and expect her to let me stay without actually telling her anything, right? So I told her the most basic version possible:
“I had a fight with my roommate.”
Callie perched on the edge of the nearest bed. “Your roommate as in your girlfriend? Cirque du Soleil?”
Something loosened in my chest, and I actually found myself kind of smiling. “That’s the one. She’s not … we’re not actually … See, she kicked me out. You were the only person—I mean, I knew your room number. I’m not asking if I can stay here. I just … can I leave my stuff here while I figure out what I’m gonna do?”
“No way,” she said.
“Oh.” I started to stand up again. “No problem. I’ll just—”
“No, no. I mean, you should obviously stay here.”
“Wait. Really?”
She spread her arms wide, gesturing at the room. Two huge beds, plenty of space. “I’ve got this whole place to myself, and … honestly, I could use the company right now. So yes, really.”
I wasn’t going to cry, I wasn’t going to cry just because a girl I barely knew was being nice to me, I wasn’t.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” she said. “You don’t have to if you don’t feel like it.”
“I really, really don’t feel like it.” I looked down—and caught sight of something. Something completely awful.
Shooting up out of my seat, I wriggled out of the shirt I was wearing and threw it across the room.
“Uh …”
And, yeah, now Callie was staring at me. Well, obviously she was, because I was standing there in jeans and my bra, like a total weirdo.
“Sorry, crap, I’m so sorry,” I said, trying to cover myself with my hands. “I’ll … uh … I’m not hitting on you or anything. It’s just—it’s hers. Soleil’s. I’ve been borrowing her clothes.”
Callie’s face changed completely. “Ohhhh. Okay. Here, let me get you another one.”
She knelt in front of my suitcase, unzipped it, and rifled through until she found a plain black T-shirt. She tossed it over to me, and I pulled it on. “Thanks,” I said, sinking down into the chair again.
Callie nodded. “No problem. Make yourself comfortable. Put on some music if you want; my speakers are over there. I actually have to get back to this, um … project.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “I should do some writing, anyway.”
I’d said it automatically, partly because Ms. Scherer’s critique had been at the back of my mind all day, but mostly because writing was always my default escape route when things got stressful. But as soon as the words were out, I realized that actually, for once, I kinda didn’t want to write.
“Hey,” I said, “what kind of project are you working on?”
Callie’s expression turned shifty. “My dad’s doing his big Mounting a Strutting Turkey demo tomorrow. And I might have a plan to make it go, um, not so smoothly.”
For some reason, this perked me right up. “This wouldn’t be a vengeancey sort of plan, would it?”
“Decidedly vengeancey,” she said. “You have no idea how much he deserves it.”
Just like that, I no longer felt like crying at all. “Can I help?”
She looked surprised—not that I blamed her. If you told me an hour ago that I’d actually be offering to help with a taxidermy thing, I’d’ve said you were nuts, but now? Well, it wasn’t like my night could get any weirder, right?
“How are you at mixing stuff with other stuff?” said Callie, grabbing a bottle off the desk. Wait—was that Nair?
“Depends on the stuff,” I said. “As long as I don’t have to, like, touch anything dead.”
“Okay. I’m gonna set you up in the bathroom with some hide paste and this”—she wiggled the Nair bottle—“which is not mine, by the way.”
“Whose is it?” I asked.
“Phoebe stole it from her roommate.”
“Ooh, she’s in on the vengeancey plan, too?”
“Yup,” said Callie. “You just missed her, actually. She should be back any minute—she had to check in with her teacher. Oh, and there’s another thing you can help me with! I need to heat up the skin, and it’d be so much easier with two people.”
“Wait, skin?”
Callie nodded. “Turkey skin. You don’t have to touch it. You can be the wielder of the blow-dryer.”
This was getting really gross, really fast. “But won’t it, like … smell?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, it’s tanned.”
I gave her a pointedly blank look.
“Like a leather jacket. Except made out of a turkey instead of a cow. And not a jacket.” She hesitated. “You don’t actually have to help me if you don’t want. It’s really okay. And didn’t you just say you have to write?”
I took a deep breath. Yeah, I definitely had writing to do. But on the other hand, Soleil was right: If I really wanted to write original fiction, I had to start living in the real world. Taking risks and having experiences and whatever else people did when they didn’t live on the internet all day.
I doubted that she’d meant messing around with dead turkeys, but still.
“No, I want to help. I mean it. Show me what to do.”
Ten minutes later, as Beyoncé called for her ladies to get in formation, Callie held up a leathery turkey skin and I carefully pointed the hotel blow-dryer wherever she told me. It occurred to me, then, that I’d been wrong before, thinking that my night couldn’t get weirder. It was definitely weirder now.
And I actually really liked it that way.