Starkissed

by Gabrielson , Brynna

  I agree and he smiles, then he turns and walks off toward the dairy section.

  “Bye,” I whisper.

  Chapter Ten

  “Don’t freak out, okay?” Caroline corners me in the student parking lot the next morning. When I pulled into the lot she was leaning against her car, two cups of Starbucks in hand. When she saw me, she practically chased me to my spot. She was pulling open my door before I could even reach for the handle.

  I take the coffee she’s thrusting at me and shrug. “Okay.”

  “I didn’t do it, I swear.”

  “Do what?”

  “Someone, I don’t know who, but someone told.”

  “Told what?”

  “Your name. It just happened.”

  “My name? What are you talking about?”

  “Okay you know all the pictures of you and Grant online?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well they’ve just been calling you unnamed girl, or mystery girl, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well someone must have sent out a tip, because this was just posted online.” She hands me her phone once more, and I’m absolutely sure I’m not going to like what I’m about to see. I peer down at the glossy screen and for the second time in two days my heart drops to my knees.

  The headline reads: Grant’s Mystery Love Revealed

  Then right below is my school portrait taken last September. It’s not a terribly bad photo or anything. I actually look okay. But that’s not the point. The article beneath says:

  Grant’s mystery girl has been revealed as none other than New Mexico native, Sydney Kane. Sydney is an eleventh grade student at West Plane High School. No word on how her and Grant met, but kudos to him for finding someone outside the business. After that train wreck of a relationship with Summer Stone, he could use a little normal loving right now. Don’t you think? And what about this Sydney? Cute as a button we say! Post your comments below.

  I hand Caroline back her phone. “I thought you said the story would die!”

  “I know,” she shakes her head. “I guess they want to squeeze as much juice of out you as possible. And someone who knows who you are just tossed you into the juicer.”

  “Great.” I stalk toward the school.

  “Sydney wait,” Caroline rushes after me. “Um, this might mean...”

  “Mean what?”

  “If they know who you are and where you are, the paparazzi might just...come here.”

  “What?”

  “Well they think you’re with Grant! And now that they have a name and location, just don’t be surprised if it happens.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick. Who even did it?”

  “I don’t know. How many kids go to this school? How many people live in this town? It could have been anyone.”

  I stare hopelessly into Caroline’s eyes. A week ago only a handful of people could be bothered to remember my name, yesterday the whole town knew it, and now today...the whole world?

  ***

  Today I don’t sit down in the cafeteria until every single one of my friends is already seated. I’m flanked on either side by Zane and Alex. Shanae, Paul, Tara and Caroline sit across from us. Still somehow Michelle and her minions manage to squeeze in. Liam sits down next to Zane and Caroline practically weeps onto the Formica surface of the table, silently wondering why he didn’t sit by her again.

  “I’m having a party on Friday night,” Michelle announces. Everyone looks up but me. I stare at the turkey sandwich I brought from home.

  “You guys should come,” Michelle leans over and stares at me and my friends. I hazard a look up.

  “Us?” Paul frowns.

  “Um yeah,” Michelle smiles, like Paul ought to feel silly for not expecting to be invited to her party.

  Back to my sandwich.

  “You’ll be there right Sydney?”

  I shove a bite of turkey into my mouth.

  “It’ll be so fun. And I know Angelina will be there.” Clearly Michelle doesn’t realize that Angelina and I mostly despise each other, because if she did she wouldn’t be using Angelina as party bait. Unless Angelina is pretending to like me to her friends because of the whole Grant thing. I hope not. I was hoping she would convince them I’m some nobody that none of them want to associate with, let alone speak to. I peer up and look around the table. Despite the fact that all of her friends are surrounding me, she isn’t even here. Where is she? You can’t count on anyone these days.

  “I’ll think about it,” I shrug.

  “Great.” She seems to take this as a confirmation of my attendance. “And if you want to bring anyone else...” she adds. Anyone else of course means Grant. Stupid, stupid Grant. I ought to go to that party and bring along every nerd and geek this school has to offer. That would certainly thrill Michelle.

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  If, unlike Caroline, you don’t have a phone with high speed internet access, then school is a great way to cut yourself off from the rest of the world. For all I know photographers are lining up outside my house this minute but I’m none the wiser and I’d like to remain that way. Which is why when the final bell of the day sounds I’m far less inclined to go home than ever. At least I can count on the fact that my parents will be at work. After missing all day yesterday, neither of them can take time off to torture me today.

  I slowly drag myself through the halls of the school, following after Caroline, whose step is a little more snappy.

  “I bet your house is on TV right now,” she says excitedly.

  “Oh God.” I feel like I’m going to throw up. I may have managed to confuse my dad out of grounding me yesterday, but if photographers start following me around I’m dead. Caroline stops and waits for me, impatiently ticking her foot against the floor. “Maybe we should go to your house.” I suggest.

  “Hell no.”

  ***

  “No way. This isn’t right.”

  I smile.

  “But your name is everywhere!”

  “Oh well,” I exhale loudly and climb out of the car. No photographers. No news crews. Nothing. Just our regular old front lawn, slightly overgrown since Tommy, the kid who mows it, is sick with mono right now.

  Caroline follows me up the front walk, dejected. “I don’t get it. You’re Grant West’s girlfriend! They should be everywhere.”

  “I’m not his girlfriend.” I drone. I should record myself saying it and just hit play every ten minutes.

  “No one else knows that, though.”

  I rub my forehead. Poor Caroline. For a second I feel like I’m letting her down, not wanting my picture in magazines. But that second is very brief.

  “Come on,” I drag her into the house. “Let’s get some ice cream.”

  No one else appears to be home. Not that I’m surprised. Everyone else usually has things to do in the afternoon, well except Ava, but she’s probably off with some friends plotting to free a herd of cattle or something.

  I grab a tub of ice cream out of the freezer and Caroline runs upstairs to get my laptop so she can check her email. Her phone’s battery died during fifth period.

  She returns a few minutes later, just as I’m shoving two heaping bowls of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream across the counter. Caroline scrambles up onto one of the stools and I maneuver around the counter and sit next to her.

  For a few minutes Caroline ignores me while she logs onto her email account. Then she navigates to Facebook.

  “You’re already logged in,” she says. “Can I log you out?”

  “Sure.”

  But something stops her.

  “Holy crap!”

  “What?”

  She laughs. Loud and excited.

&nbs
p; “What?”

  She turns the laptop so I can see the screen. “Look.”

  I scan the page before me, unsure of what I’m supposed to be looking at. Paul just updated his status to ‘taking a shower’. Is she finally picturing him, instead of Liam, naked?

  But then my eyes see it. Top right corner of the screen.

  “No bloody way.”

  “Yes way. You’ve got 7,896 friend requests. That has to be some sort of record!”

  I turn away from the screen, the queasy feeling in my gut is back. Caroline starts scrolling through the list.

  “Oh my God Liam wants to be your friend. Add him!”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to be his friend. Or anyone’s friend.”

  “Fine,” she says glumly. “But you know, if you’re friends with him...then I could add him and it wouldn’t look stupid.”

  “Caroline!”

  “Okay. Okay.” She closes the page, but brings up a new browser. “I wonder how many people are following you on Twitter.”

  ***

  The madness doesn’t cease with Twitter (I have 11,022 new followers, by the way).

  About ten minutes later the house phone rings.

  “Hello,” a woman’s voice says. “May I please speak to Sydney Kane?”

  “This is her.”

  “Fantastic. My name is Miriam and I’m doing a story on you for Celeb Central Magazine. How does it feel to be dating the most famous man in the world? How’s the sex?”

  “Uh, uh,” I warble before having the common sense to hang up.

  The phone rings again. I pick it up and this time look at the display. It says Unknown Name. “Aren’t you going to get that,” Caroline asks.

  I shake my head and tell her about the last call. At first she seems rightly outraged. But then that little gleam I’ve come to know and fear returns to her eye. The next time the phone rings she answers.

  “Hello will pay you $20,000 for an exclusive!” she hisses.

  I shake my head furtively. No way.

  “I can probably bring them up to thirty.”

  “Hang up Caroline.”

  She looks disappointed and hits the end button. But it doesn’t matter, the calls just keep coming. I try ignoring the ringing, but it won’t stop. It echoes in my ears from every room in the house. Trill. Trill. Trill.

  Finally Caroline does something useful and unplugs the main line.

  Chapter Eleven

  When my dad gets home that night I expect him to be furious. But when he walks through the front door, he’s smiling.

  I’m in the kitchen with Mom slicing up a romaine heart for the salad I’m supposed to be assembling for dinner. Dad swoops into the room, grabs a beer out of the fridge, pops the top, then walks over to Mom and plants a huge kiss on her cheek. Then he comes over to me, hugs me with one arm, and says, “hey kiddo.”

  Maybe he doesn’t know about the phone. Or the fact that not only pictures of me kissing Grant are on the internet now, but also dozens of photos from my Facebook account.

  I don’t bother speaking up. No point in ruining his good mood and inflicting his anger upon myself again. He leaves the kitchen and heads for the living room to watch the news.

  “I thought he hated me,” I tell Mom.

  “Just let him have this,” she says quietly.

  “Have what?”

  She wipes her hands off on a towel and crosses the kitchen to grab her purse off the table. She pulls out a stack of papers. They’re print outs of articles about me.

  “The restaurant was the busiest it’s ever been this afternoon,” she says.

  She hands me an article. I read the first paragraph.

  Sydney, born and raised in West Plane, New Mexico is the daughter of Clarissa – a successful real estate agent, and Tom – owner of the downtown West Plane restaurant Canyon Grill, which locals claim has the best burgers in all of New Mexico.

  “You can’t buy publicity like this honey,” Mom says when I put down the first article. There are a dozen more like it.

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, the whole Grant thing...he’s still furious. But at least this has cooled him down a bit.”

  I head upstairs and climb onto my bed. I pull my sketch my pad out from my bedside table drawer and drop it on to my lap. I’m not a fantastic drawer. Not like some of the other kids at school, but I’ve got enough talent that my drawings aren’t limited to stick figures and little swirls. I grab a pencil out of my case and rest the tip of it against the creamy white paper. I draw a line, straight down, and then curved. I don’t even know what I’m going for, but it doesn’t look right. I flip the page and start fresh. This time I draw a shorter line then curve it to the right. I keep going. I add lips – a little full, a nose – a little flat, and eyes – thin, and narrow, beneath a tilted brow.

  I’m drawing him, I realize. Grant, in profile. The way he looked that night in that split second I was staring at him, right before he caught me looking.

  He is beautiful. Drawing in black and white I can’t capture the coppery tone of his cheek, or the deep brown of his eyes. But I’ve got that little tilt of his neck, and the faint dimple in his chin.

  I stare at the drawing for a minute, then abandon the sketch and flip back through previous drawings. I stop near the front of the book on a drawing of Colin from almost a year ago. Sightings of him being scarce, I drew it from memory. But he doesn’t look quite right. Like I missed something, I’m just not sure what.

  ***

  Later that night I’m sitting on my bed trying to get through my physics homework when the phone rings. Not the house phone, which is still unplugged, but Dad’s office line, which is still hooked up due to the fact that it’s unlisted and only people we know have the number.

  Mom saunters into my room and holds out the cordless silver handset from downstairs.

  “It’s your sister,” she says. I stare at her, awaiting further explanation, seeing as ‘your sister’ really doesn’t narrow the field of who might be calling by that much.

  “Arianna,” she finally tells me.

  I wrinkle my nose. The world really must be off its axis right now. Little Miss thinks she knows absolutely everything about absolutely everyone – she drives me nuts – trying to control my life and everyone else’s.

  “Hello?” I hold the phone to my ear.

  “Sydney,” Arianna says curtly.

  “What’s up?”

  “What’s up is that my sister is running around like a little harlot with some illustrious film star and I have to find out about it on the television. You couldn’t be bothered to call me, to warn me?”

  I hold the phone away from my ear and glare at it. Don’t be fooled by her big words, she just called me a slut.

  I put the phone back to my ear. She doesn’t even give me time to answer her question, but continues on.

  “I was in the pub at school this afternoon when your photo came on the screen and suddenly everyone was saying, ‘West Plane, aren’t you from West Plane Arianna? And isn’t your last name Kane too?’ Before I could come up with some reasonable way to pretend I didn’t know you, everyone had figured out we’re related! Now I’m the girl whose sister is with Grant West. Do you know how hard I worked to establish a reputation on this campus, and in one day you wiped it out. No one cares I’m the editor of the Law Review. No one cares that I got an A plus on my last final. All they care about is whether or not you’re going to take me to the premiere of Deader than Night.”

  “Well that sucks for you,” I sigh.

  “You should have called.”

  “I think I have bigger things to worry about right now.”

  “Oh har
dly. So are you?”

  “What?”

  “Going to get me tickets to the premiere of Deader than Night. It’s in three weeks in New York. He’s your boyfriend, not mine. You should know these things.”

  “Grant isn’t my boyfriend Arianna. I can’t get you tickets to anything.”

  “Well what use are you then? Goodbye.” She hangs up.

  ***

  The next few days play out pretty much the same and the previous two. People at school follow me around like I’m some Mecca, Michelle tries to get me to try out for cheerleading, and Mr. Hughes actually starts calling on me during class. The good news, though, is that by Thursday night it seems most of the country’s reporters have given up on me and we can finally plug our main line back in. Caroline was right. The more time that passes, the more people are starting to realize there’s nothing exciting about me and they’d be better off trying to get pictures of starlets exposing themselves while improperly exiting limos.

  On Friday after school I rush home and jump in the shower. I know taking my car to the garage to have a stereo installed isn’t exactly a date, but I’m going to see Colin and the last memory he has of me is me standing, frenzied and rumpled, in the middle of the grocery store needlessly ripping apart plastic bags. So in the shower I take care to shave my legs, and when I get out, I put on that expensive moisturizer Mom got at Sephora, the one that she forbade anyone else from using.

  I spend nearly half an hour staring at my closet, trying to find the perfect outfit. I can’t look like I’m trying too hard...but I want to look good. I pull on a pair of deep blue, skinny jeans, and a long, turquoise camisole. Then I grab a gauzy white v-neck sweater and pull that on over top.

  No. I’m going to a garage, not the mall. And that sweater cost like ninety dollars. What if he wanted to reach out and brush the hair off my shoulder, but the grease on his fingertips smeared the sweater? Wishful thinking, but it could happen...maybe. I take the sweater off and grab a black cardigan. Better.

  I use a flat iron to straighten my already mostly straight hair so that it hangs like a curtain on either side of my face. Then I carefully wisp on some silver eye shadow and coat my eyelashes in mascara.