My aunt and uncle calmed down a lot in the limo.
“I’m sorry, baby,” Aunt Maybellyne said and tried to pet my hair, but I shoved her hand away. She gave an unhappy squeak of protest.
“Let her be, May,” Uncle Chester said gently. He sent me a worried look out of the corner of his eye.
I looked away out the window. At the hotel, I locked myself into my room and showered and crawled into bed. I felt utterly destroyed.
Their voices came faintly through the door. I pulled my pillow over my head.
My thoughts were not pleasant.
Baz had confessed to plotting to sell a sex picture of us to the tabloids. I didn’t believe it. But he’d said so. He looked me straight in the eye. I felt like vomiting.
I got up and vomited.
That didn’t help.
And why had he collapsed onstage?
I still had the prickling horrors that had paralyzed me when I watched him fall. Maybe he’d fainted. Low blood pressure. Drugs.
I shook my head violently. I would have known if it was drugs. I should, having been in this business since I was twelve.
I saw his sad look, heard him say, Yes. I did. Sorry, babe.
And my uncle yelling, tabloids, sex pictures, paparazzi, hidden camera, exploit you.
I hid under the pillow again.
Eventually the voices in the next room faded and stopped.
Streetlight filtered through the drapes.
My stomach sank endlessly, like the endless falling in nightmare.
After an hour I got up, tiptoed out across the open center of the suite, and listened at my aunt and uncle’s bedroom door.
Silence.
I listened harder.
Could I hear them breathing? Was that even possible through a closed door? My senses had heightened painfully since this goddess stuff started.
I tried not to think about how I’d lost my afterlife coach.
Uncle Chester drew in a huge roaring snore and nearly deafened me.
Shaken, I eased their door open. I slid into their bathroom, pawed in the dark through my aunt’s vanity case, and found what I was looking for.
For the first time, feeling gut-deep terror of an inevitable downward spiral of self-destruction, I stole one of my aunt’s sleeping pills.
I took it back to my room and laid it on the nightstand beside my bed and stared at it, until I fell asleep.