The Princess and the Fangirl

by Ashley Poston

  I hate it.

  I think what I hate more, though, is that I’m lying here on the soft carpeted floor of Jessica Stone’s hotel suite, looking at the clock on the nightstand as it turns ten o’clock.

  Screw it, I think as I push myself up and onto my feet. I’m not going to stay in here.

  I want to say I don’t feel super incredibly foolish that Vance hasn’t called but…I do. Of course he wouldn’t call. He has better things to do, with parties to go to and hot people to meet, and I was that lousy girl who fell for his I’ll call you later?

  Ugh.

  I’m so freaking mad at myself I could cry. Because a part of me knows that I’m here in this suite because Jess told me I couldn’t be anywhere else, and the only other place I could be, as myself, is with my moms down the hall as they do their nightly unwind with wine and Buffy, or with my brother down at the Stellar Party…

  Grabbing my Converses out of my bag, I put them on, grab the keycard so I can get back in later, and leave the room. I’m not supposed to go out because I still look like Jess. I haven’t taken the wig off, and my eyeliner is on point, but I don’t want to be in here, either, waiting for Ethan to come back. It’s been three hours.

  He’s probably with Jess.

  I don’t really know where I’m going, but I avoid as many people as possible as I head through the hallway. Music pulses from the rooms with the parties, rattling the light fixtures on the walls. I pass hotel rooms hosting old-school LAN competitions, fan meetups, and revelries with no theme at all. I quickly duck away from them—but not fast enough.

  “Hey, Jessica!” someone shouts.

  I glance over my shoulder, but I can’t tell who’s calling Jess’s name, and I don’t want to know either. Whoever it is, it can’t be anyone I should talk to.

  So I dodge around the corner, into the emergency stairwell and out through another door. It leads to the rooftop pool a few stories below Jessica’s hotel suite. It’s not actually on the rooftop—which is still a few floors above me—but it is on a rooftop, I suppose. It closed at ten o’clock, so the place is quiet.

  I can barely hear the traffic in the streets way down below.

  Even in Jessica Stone’s makeup and clothes, I have the baggage of Imogen Lovelace underneath, and there is still that little voice in my head telling me that I am nothing, that I’m just someone in Milo’s shadow who won’t amount to much—and everyone else already knows it but me.

  I don’t want to listen to that voice.

  Especially now, when it’s closer than ever to being right. Because General Sond is the next villain.

  Because no one cares about Amara. Not really.

  Shut up shut up shut up! I say to that disembodied voice.

  Even as Jessica, I can’t seem to get Imogen out of my head. The highs from earlier are a dull throb in the back of my memories. How come the negative thoughts sound so much louder than the good ones?

  With an aggravated noise, I wrench off my wig, tossing it behind a planter with my keycard, slip off my shoes, and run toward the pool.

  The water is fresh and cool, and it shocks all the thoughts out of me—my mind is finally, miraculously void of everything. I swim a lap, letting Jess’s designer dress tangle around my legs. It’s a salt-water pool, so I know it won’t get ruined. I just needed to swim.

  Besides, swimming in a pool disguises crying fairly well.

  Not that I’m crying.

  Because I’m not.

  On my third lap, I hear someone calling my name, and I think it’s the security guard asking me to kindly get out of the pool. I pop my head up from the deep end and see that it’s—

  Ethan.

  Standing there at the other end with his arms folded over his chest, one eyebrow so archedly raised it would make my mother Minerva so freaking proud. My heart leaps into my throat before I realize that him being here can’t be anything good.

  Crap, what does he want? What did I do wrong now? I sink down to my nose and bob there, as if I’m hoping he’ll just go away. I’m glad my makeup is mostly waterproof, and that I stopped crying two laps ago. I hope my eyes are mostly dry by now and not red-rimmed and gross.

  “What on earth are you doing?” he asks in a hushed and very exhausted tone.

  I pop my head out of the water long enough to say, “Swimming,” before I half-submerge my face again.

  He sighs. “I can see that. You weren’t in the room, so I thought…Anyway, I saw you swimming down here and came to inform you that the pool’s closed. I’m going back up to the room. To bed.”

  “What about Jess?” I say, and instantly kick myself for asking.

  Surprised, he tilts his head. “I suppose she’s with your friend Harper. Why?”

  “I’m surprised you two aren’t hanging out.” Ugh, why am I being so petty? It’s like my mouth can’t stop it. “I mean, unless you two already were.”

  “The panel ran over and I stopped to get dinner. There’s Chinese takeout in the minifridge if you want any.”

  He doesn’t seem to be lying. I swim halfway across the pool until my tiptoes can touch the bottom. The pool area is dark. The only light comes from dim lamps in the corners of the deck and the bright fluorescents in the sides of the pool, turning everything a whimsical, unearthly blue. Like being underneath an ocean.

  His expression is curious. “You know Jess and I aren’t…we don’t like each other like that. If that’s what you’re insinuating.”

  I roll my eyes. “Right. Like anyone can resist the pull of the beautiful Jessica Stone.”

  “You’re also beautiful,” he says. But before I can ask whether that’s in response to my statement or it’s a compliment, he adds, “when you’re not being an absolute pain in my ass. What if someone checks the security cameras? Sees you swimming out here?”

  “I took off the wig outside the camera’s view,” I reply.

  He scowls and pivots to leave, and I realize that I don’t want him to go. Mostly because I’ve been alone all night, and I guess even his company is better than none. “How did you meet, then?”

  “Who?”

  “Jessica.”

  He hesitates, but then he turns around and sits at the edge of the pool. “Honestly? She’s my godsister. Our mothers met way back in college.” As he says this, he rolls up his trousers to just below his knees, takes off his shoes, and sticks his feet into the water. “I’ve known her my entire life. We’ve done everything together.”

  “Wait, so you’re like twenty-something? Really?”

  He blanches. “Do I look that old? I’ll be eighteen in December. I just finished high school. I’m taking a gap year, and Jess needed an assistant, so here I am.”

  “But you wore a suit today!” I reply, flabbergasted. “And you’re always on this high horse of ‘oh look at me I’m so superior to you.’”

  “I do not sound like that.”

  “Oh you so do. You called me a rapscallion.”

  “I will never live that down,” he mumbles, more to himself than to me, and rubs his hand over his face.

  “So.” I slowly migrate toward his side of the pool, doing the numbers in my head from what I know about Jess and now what I know about Ethan. “You two are like five years apart? Jess is twenty-three, isn’t she?”

  “Actually…no.”

  “Older?”

  “She’s nineteen.”

  “Nineteen,” I echo. “But the internet says she’s definitely older.”

  “The internet’s wrong, surprisingly. She lied when she was fourteen to get the part in Huntress Rising. She told the director she was almost eighteen. After that she just never corrected anyone.” He shrugs. “She’ll do just about anything to make sure she succeeds. She needs to. It’s like there’s this dial in her head that’s constantly turned up to eleven. She’s intense. She’s always thinking one step ahead—or three.”

  He talks about her in such a tender tone, like he really does admire her. He might say he doesn’t love her, bu
t maybe he just doesn’t realize it yet.

  “Sounds like she means a lot to you,” I say.

  “She does—she’s like a sister to me.”

  “Well, she’s doing better than me. I’m no one,” I reply. “I mean—Jess is smart, and she’s gorgeous, and she’s talented. She made a fantastic Amara. She’s amazing, and I…I guess I can do cool voices?”

  Ethan studies me with those dark, dark eyes, and I feel myself shifting uncomfortably. “Imogen,” he starts—and the way he says my name, like it’s somewhere between a lullaby and an exasperated sigh, makes my stomach flip all the same. “Why did you want to trade places with Jess?”

  The question takes me by surprise. I turn my eyes toward the water, watching my dress float and ripple around me. The reflection of my pink hair creates a rosy halo around me. “Don’t you already know? You sleuthed me out, Detective. I want to save Amara.”

  “But you could’ve done that a myriad of other ways—you are doing that, it seems, at least by your online presence.”

  “As if that’s enough,” I sigh, resting my hand just above the ripples of the water, watching the lights from the pool dance across my skin. “You know, I really love Amara. I relate to her. She was able to make mistakes and still come back from them—she wasn’t ruined because of them. She learned, and she grew, and she became stronger.” Because Amara is the type of character who always screwed up—like me, trying to do the right thing but never doing it the right way. Like the online petitions, the Twitter hashtag, the movement itself—it’s all fine and good, but it wasn’t the right way because…“I’m no one, Ethan. I haven’t done anything. So I guess that’s why I wanted to be Jess, so I could be someone. So my voice would matter.”

  “Imogen, that’s not—”

  “Oh, it’s true,” I interrupt. “My brother’s a year younger than me and he’s vice president of his class, and he’ll probably even be quarterback. He’s just so talented at everything, I feel like…like I’m letting everyone down because I’m not good at anything. And it’s not because I don’t try,” I add before he can suggest it, because people always suggest it. “I’ve tried out for the debate team, but when I had to debate a guy over women’s reproduction he told me that women are too fragile to have control over their own bodies. I got kicked out of the club for kneeing him in the nads—”

  “Whoa, really?”

  “—and I tried to join the track team but I’m about as good at running as I am at algebra, so I couldn’t join the math club, either.”

  “Imogen,” he tries to stop me, but I’m just getting started on the Great Failings of Imogen Lovelace.

  “I suck at grammar, even though I love books,” I tell him, beginning to count my shortcomings on my fingers. “I’m in the book club, and the anime club, and I started a sci-fi club for the sole reason of getting after-school credit for watching reruns of Starfield. I’m still very proud of that.”

  “Imogen.”

  I begin to pace from one side of the pool to the other, half floating, half moon-walking. “But it’s not like the sci-fi club will turns heads on a college application. I don’t even know where I want to go, or what I want to do, and I’m a senior now. Milo’s basically already accepted to any school he sets his sights on and I—”

  I don’t realize that he’s slid into the water until he catches me by the shoulders with his large hands and turns me around. He didn’t take his clothes off, either, abandoning only his glasses on the edge of the pool, and dampness is slowly bleeding up his starched button-down shirt. He sinks down and looks me level in the eyes. Starflame, is he handsome. Long eyelashes and warm brown eyes and expressive brows that crinkle together a little as he says my name for what feels like the millionth time, and I’m still not tired of it.

  “Imogen. You started an online movement that has over fifty thousand signatures to try to save a character from a television show you are fiercely passionate about.”

  I quickly look away. “Yeah, but anyone can do that.”

  “I think you’re wrong—and I certainly don’t think just anyone can step into Jess’s shoes as well as you have.”

  “But that’s only because I look moderately like her with a wig on and I can imitate voices pretty well.”

  “Not everyone can do that.”

  “Look moderately flawless?” I joke.

  “Imogen,” he says, and I kind of just want him to shut up and keep saying my name over and over again until I get so sick of that name that I want to change it to something else, and then I want him to say that name, and then the next one, and then—“you might not be now, but you’re learning how to be, and someday I know you’re going to be amazing.”

  My bottom lip begins to tremble. Starflame, now why did he have to go and say that? Why couldn’t he just laugh at me like Jasper did and tell me how he loved my passion in that tongue-in-cheek way that really wasn’t a compliment at all? His hands begin to loosen from my shoulders the longer I’m quiet, because I’m not sure what to say.

  What do you say to something like that?

  He opens his mouth again and I am incredibly afraid of what’s about to come out, because I know it’ll only stir up feelings I definitely don’t have about this boy who is secretly in love with Jessica Stone but doesn’t know it. And I really, really don’t want to be the Other Girl in that situation, because I’ve seen Jess’s life—I’ve lived it!—and I’ve seen his devotion to her, and I know where I’ll be at the end of all of this:

  On a curb outside of the ball, waiting for a Prince Charming who’ll never come.

  So I do the only thing I can think of—

  I splash him.

  Like, not just one of those pansy splashes, either. I grew up with a brother, so I had to learn to deal some real damage whenever we visited the community pool. I splash Ethan so hard it’s like a tidal wave of pool water coming at him. He sputters, drenched, the gel finally loosening his hair from its meticulous hold.

  “You did not just do that,” he says, offended, as he wipes his eyes.

  “You talk too much, anyone ever tell you that?”

  He scoffs. “Like I’m the only one!”

  He proceeds to rake his arm across the surface in revenge. Water gets into my eyes and my nose, and blindly I shove water back at him. But he’s way taller than me and, not surprising, has longer arms, so he has full advantage in pool warfare. I try the doggie-paddle maneuver, but he comes back with a fan of water that drenches me, and the tides turn and I’m on the losing end of this battle, like the Prospero pitted against a fleet of Noxian horde ships. I try in vain just to stay above the surface.

  But then he does the unthinkable.

  He puts his massive hand on my head—

  And pushes me under.

  I barely make a sound before he dunks me, and when I come up for air, gasping and blinking salty water out of my eyes, he’s already starting for the stairs. “I win,” he says over his shoulder. “Now get out before someone calls Security—”

  “Never surrender!” I cry, and take off after him—which in the water, you know, is basically slow-mo running in real time. I grab him around the middle and use the only move that ever works on Milo—I knock his legs out from under him and I suplex his body into the deep end.

  Turns out he’s a lot heavier than I thought, especially for a beanpole. And his torso is very solid. And are those abs I feel?

  Oh sweet baby Daleks, please don’t tell me Ethan actually has a nice bod.

  That would just be too much.

  He pries my arms from around his waist and comes up for air first. I’m right behind him, coughing the water out of my lungs.

  “What’re you trying to do, drown me?” he sputters as he paddles to the edge of the pool.

  I wipe the water off my face, half coughing and half laughing, and grab on beside him. “Add that to my resume. World-champion splasher. Another useless talent of Imogen Ada Lovelace.”

  “You flipped me back!”

&
nbsp; “Is your pride wounded?”

  “A little,” he admits.

  He could make for the stairs again, but instead he lingers near me, and I think we both realize at the same time how close we actually are, and there are flecks of gold in his eyes I haven’t seen before and that is so freaking cliché I kind of adore it. Not him. But his eyes. I have to remind myself that I can’t like him, but it’s so hard when a droplet of water beads at the end of a lock of raven hair in front of his face, and falls on his cheek, and rolls down his cheek slowly, languidly, like I want to run my finger down his jawline. It’s like there’s no one else but us in the world, and his eyes navigate steadily to my lips.

  I should’ve exfoliated them earlier. A sugar scrub or something. I should’ve packed a cute bathing suit instead of jumping in wearing Jess’s dress. I should’ve done something—

  NOT THAT THIS IS ANYTHING.

  BECAUSE IT’S NOT.

  It can’t be.

  But then he migrates closer, closing the gap between us—the snippy remarks and the snark and the circumstances—until the heat from his skin burns against mine without even touching me, and the cool blue of the pool reflects across our faces like ripples in the ocean, and I think I might be—

  I think this is—

  “Ethan,” I whisper, and it’s my voice—my real voice—that breaks the spell.

  He jerks back as if he’s forgotten that I’m me. Then his look morphs into mortification. Because it is me. And he wants Jess.

  “I should, ah…I should get out of the pool. I—I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, of course,” I murmur, trying to keep my voice steady.

  “It’s not you. It’s just, I’m only here to keep a lookout for you for Jessica, so you don’t r—” But then he stops himself. “And you seem fine at the moment. You’re not masquerading as her. So.”

  He pushes off from the edge and swims toward the shallow end.

  I don’t say anything until he’s halfway to the stairs. He stands, his wet button-down clinging to the cordlike muscles of his back. Dammit, he does have a nice body. And it kind of just makes me angrier. I don’t know why.

  “So that’s the only reason you came out here?” I ask. “For Jessica?”