The words are like a sword through my middle. My hands involuntarily fist.
“It must be tough,” he goes on, as if he understands what I went through, as if he knows what it’s like to have part of your heart ripped out, “and I’ve read in plenty of coping books that acting out is a part of healing, but—”
“I’m not acting out!” I interrupt, shoving myself to my feet, but he just stares at me with this sorry sort of look in his eyes. It’s the same look I’ve seen in the eyes of teachers, and neighbors, and classmates, and strangers alike.
And something in me breaks. It snaps. Right in two.
I claw at my name badge, unhook it, and slam it onto the desk. “I quit.”
“Rosie!” He gives a start, rising to his feet. “We can talk about this—”
I force myself to my feet and leave the office, anger pulsing through me like white-hot fire. I grab my bookbag from the lockers and I don’t look back.
Annie looks up from her phone, which she has, unlike me, artfully hidden under the counter, as I pass her toward the front doors. “…Rosie?”
I don’t stop for her. My eyes are burning with tears, because he had the nerve to look at me like that. My mom died. Yeah, that happened. Yeah, it sucked. Yeah, there’s a hole in my chest where she should be but it’s empty because she no longer exists.
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.”