The Princess and the Fangirl (Once Upon a Con #2)(58)

And Jessica Stone—the girl I’m supposed to be playing, the actress in this Greek tragedy—never wanted that.

Because the fandom never gave her a reason to want it.

Oh, starflame. Now I understand, and it took almost three thousand manbabies to show me.

I set my jaw, my thoughts loud over the roar of the audience as a shouting match breaks out between new and old viewers, hardcore Stargunners and casual fans, shippers and antis, and it’s all a mess. Darien forces back his chair and leaves the stage in long, angry strides and I quickly follow him down the stairs and through the side door into a hallway. I don’t know whether to stop him, to comfort him, or…

I don’t know.

But I have to do something.

So I grab him by the sleeve to stop him. “Darien, do you want to talk about—”

He doesn’t look at me, his dark eyes trained on the ground. “Jess calls me Dare,” he says softly. “People will start noticing if you don’t.” Then he wrenches his arm away and stalks down the hallway out of sight. I clench my fists again. We fans of Amara have been living with the knowledge that she dies for years, since before I was born, but Darien is just now coming to terms with the fact that he might be dead, too.

I look down at my badge. JESSICA STONE. VIP GUEST. And the button beside it, so small I doubt anyone in the audience could read it: #SAVEAMARA.

I could have done what I wanted to do up there on stage. I had the chance.

But I didn’t, because it wasn’t my place. Because I’m messing with Jess’s life, and because Ethan’s right—I am nothing more than a clone, merely playing in her star-studded world. It wasn’t me those fans came to see, but her. It isn’t me they love, but Princess Amara. I just happen to look like her with a little makeup and a lace-front wig.

“You didn’t do it.”

Startled, I turn toward the soft voice.

Ethan is leaning against the wall a little ways behind me, his arms folded over his chest in his usual old-man pose. He looks tired. His raven-black hair hangs shaggily around his face, and his dark eyes behind his glasses look strained. He’s wearing a crumpled button-down with dinosaurs on it, unbuttoned enough to reveal a white shirt underneath, and blue jeans, definitely not in the state of dress I’m used to. Not pristine. Not Jessica Stone’s assistant. He looks like the eighteen-year-old boy he actually is. He pushes his fingers through his hair.

I feel my spine straighten, like it always does around him. “Because you’re right.” My voice cracks. “I’m nobody.”

“Imogen, you’re not—”

“It’s Jess right now, remember?” I turn so he can’t see the tears filling my eyes and start to walk away. “I’ll see you at the meet-and-greet thing.”

And I leave before I give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry.





I SLAP MY HAND OVER MY MOUTH to stifle a gasp, but the pretzel man notices me anyway and looks at me worriedly. I quickly turn my back to him.

Oh, poor Dare.

I don’t know how he feels, but I know what it’s like.

When I initially read the Starfield script, for the first reboot movie, Princess Amara did not die. It’s a little-known fact. But then Amon wanted to stick with Amara’s original arc from the television show. He wanted to make the diehard fans happy, even though so much else was changed, and he thought he could do that by killing her off.

“We want to give our older fans something to recognize,” he had said. “It’ll look odd if you live.”

He hadn’t even asked me what I thought about the script change. He just handed it to me one day during filming—the day after Dare did his building-jumping stunt—and told me to read through the rewritten ending and memorize it.

So I did. The difference was, Amon had told me in private. I didn’t have to learn about it out in public—in front of a crowd of thousands of people. I could process it before the rest of the world found out.

Dare deserved better.

Being an actor is weird sometimes. You get so attached to your character, some plot twist that takes you by surprise. But this is different. I was just a girl who was told that her character, to whom she connected, would die. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy when he told me. It wasn’t a guaranteed out, but I had been naive. Dare…Carmindor had been a dream gig, a fanboy’s dream, and now…

I try calling him for the third time but he’s not picking up. I begin to pace in Artists’ Alley, and the pretzel man’s gaze follows me the whole way, though honestly I can’t bring myself to care at the moment. I know that the panel ended abruptly but I can’t parse how, and my Twitter notifications are pinging faster than I can mute them. What in the world happened? Is Dare okay?

I get so many Twitter comments that the app freezes, so I log onto Instagram instead. I wish I hadn’t. A mind-blowing amount of comment notifications pop up. So many more than usual. I haven’t checked my feed since arriving at the convention, and after a few days the comments usually taper off because of the app’s algorithms. (Ethan once tried to explain all this tech stuff to me, but most of it soared way over my head.)

Before I can tap into the comments, out of the corner of my eye I see a pair of familiar sneakers and look up—there is Ethan with his hands in his jeans pockets. Alarmed, I turn to him. “Where’s Imogen?”