WHENEVER YOU THINK YOUR LOVE LIFE SUCKS, just remember that I fell in love with a boy whose name I didn’t know.
Let’s be clear: I didn’t mean to fall in love. It just sort of happened, the way falling usually does. You trip on something you didn’t see and, if you’re me, you lose your heel and go stumbling into a stranger at the ExcelsiCon Ball who just so happened to be holding a glass of neon-yellow Galactic Twist punch that goes…absolutely everywhere.
And so now the front of your skirt is drenched with the sticky yellow Kool-Aid that looks more like, well, pee than Galactic Twist, and there isn’t a bathroom in sight. With one glance, I could already tell my cosplay was ruined. So was the other person’s cosplay, but he didn’t seem to care as he stumbled on.
He wasn’t who I fell in love with, by the way.
He’s just the reason I met him.
If I didn’t have my stupid mask on I probably would’ve seen the prop sword lying on the ground. Who puts a prop sword on the ground in the middle of the dance floor, anyway?
Apparently, with a quick look around, a person cosplaying as Cloud Strife did just before he broke down the Electric Slide.
I looped back for my heel, grabbed it off the ground before someone could kick it away, and left the dance floor to see if I could salvage my outfit. If I didn’t love my friends so much, I would’ve just stayed in my hotel room and watched reruns of The Great British Bake Off. I was still contemplating the possibility, honestly.
Quinn and Annie had told me the ball would be good for me. They told me it would take my mind off what had happened this past summer. They told me…well, I guess it didn’t really matter what lies those lying liars peddled to get me to come out of my hotel room. What mattered was the universal question:
How early was too early to leave a ball?
“You don’t want to miss the magic, do you?” Annie had asked as she pulled me out of the room toward the elevators. “Last year we saw Jessica Stone—the Amara!—stand on a food truck to Romeo and Juliet her girlfriend. And the year before that, Darien—Darien Freeman! Carmindor himself!—proclaimed his undying love for Geekerella! What if this is your year?”
I’d never been to ExcelsiCon before—it always seemed too big and too loud—but I knew that Quinn and Annie were trying to get me to have as much fun as I could, because the last year has sucked.
It’s sucked so terribly hard.
“Well, last I checked, Darien Freeman’s taken,” I had replied. “And so is Jess Stone.”
“Yes, but look across this great expanse, Rosie.” Quinn looped their arm into my free one, and they led me toward the hall balcony where, thirty floors below, the ExcelsiCon Ball began to come to life. “Do you smell that possibility?”
“All I smell is vom and con stink,” I replied.
Yet I caved, because wouldn’t it have been wonderful to find Prince Charming at the ball? They knew I was a romantic at heart—my mom fed me a healthy dose of fairy tales and romance novels when I was little—and they knew I was a sucker for every rom-com known to humankind, and so they tempted me with lies of Happily Ever After.
After all, if anyone was to find love somewhere romantic, why couldn’t it be me? Why not this year? Why not make something memorable to lessen the pain in my chest?
Still, though, I should’ve listened to my gut telling me to just stay in the hotel room. Because not five minutes after Quinn and Annie dragged me down to the ExcelsiCon Ball, I had lost them in the masses of people.
There were just so many.
I tried looking for them—they were hard to miss, dressed as floating glowing neon goldfish (“We’re the snacks that smile back!” Quinn had said with a wink). I had put together a closet cosplay that I found in my, well, closet—an unassuming black crop top and a white skirt, and an empty shot glass around my neck.
…A shot in the dark, get it?
No one ever does.
It only took another few minutes for me to become absolutely overwhelmed, run into a Nox King who spilled his Galactic Twist all over my cosplay, and bail from the ball. I returned to the elevators and squeezed into the first one available, damned which floor. To my utter chagrin, it only took me up to the tenth floor, and I let myself out to escape the smell of sweat and hairspray clogging the elevator.
The tenth floor was mostly a lobby overlooking the chaos below. It was quiet here, at least. Much quieter than I expected, given the thumping bass down below. There wasn’t a chance I was getting back into those elevators anytime soon—it looked like the one I just came out of broke on the fifteenth floor, and the other two were…well, to put it politely, not in the best shape.
Great, I guess I wasn’t going back to my room after all. And I was stuck in a damp skirt.
There was a door that opened to a small outside area, and I let myself out. The night air was crisp, and warm. I sucked in a lungful of fresh air to calm my nerves. There were only a few people on the garden balcony—a couple dressed as Pokémon making out in the corner, and a guy leaning against the balcony rail.
Oh, I thought as I walked up beside him to enjoy the view, he’s got a nice butt.
Not that it really mattered. I leaned against the railing and tried to see the damage to my outfit in the low rooftop light, patting down the stains with the wad of napkins I stole from the drinks kiosk on the way here. For once, I was happy that everyone was downstairs dancing the night away to a dubstep version of “The Imperial March,” because here it was so nice and quiet—so quiet my ears rang.
My skirt was ruined, that much I could guess. I just wanted to go back to the hotel room and get out of these heels and take a hot shower to get all of the con grime off me. There was a book in my suitcase just calling my name—the new Starfield: Resonance companion novel.
I’d rather be saving the galaxy with the insufferably kind Carmindor than be on this balcony praying for the night to end already.
“A shot in the dark, right?”
The voice startled me.
I glanced up to the guy, because it certainly wasn’t the couple playing tongue hockey who asked me. He was unnervingly tall, but then again I was known for two things—being stubborn, and being short. “What?” I asked.
He motioned to my costume. He wore a very well-put-together General Sond costume, complete with beautiful long white-blond hair and a crooked smile, and a mask that covered just enough of his face to make him look alluring and absolutely unidentifiable. “Your cosplay,” he followed up. He had a strange accent. I couldn’t place it—but it sort of sounded like those fake American accents you sometimes hear on TV from actors who are very clearly not American. It was too hometown, too clean. “A shot in the dark?”
I glanced down at my costume. “Technically I’m cosplaying the title of the thirty-seventh book in the extended-universe saga of Starfield, A Shot in the Dark by Almira Ender.”
His eyebrows jerked up over his mask. “Oh, well, I stand corrected.”
“It’s a really deep cut, though,” I quickly added.
“Oh, I do see it,” he replied, cocking his head. He pointed down to the hem of my skirt. “The little Starfield logo trim at the bottom. That’s a very nice touch.”
“You think?”
“Of course. There’s thought to it.”
“I just didn’t have the money for a nice costume,” I replied, motioning to his very, very nice costume, and then realized my mistake. “Oh God, that sounded like an insult! I didn’t mean it that way, I promise. I’m just, you know, saving up for college and all, and—” I forced myself to stop talking, I babbled when I got nervous.
“No, no, I didn’t take it that way at all!” he said, though his voice was full of thinly disguised laughter. He leaned closer to me—just a little—enough to whisper, “You want to know a secret? This costume isn’t mine. It’s for my job, so they let me borrow it for the night.”
“Just tonight?”
“Well, this weekend.”
“That must be quite a cool job, then, if you have to dress as Sond for it.”
He smiled again. “Yeah. So, did you come out to escape the socializing, too?”
“I know I’m going to sound boring, but I’m not really big on parties,” I said.
“That does sound boring.”
“Hey!”
“I was agreeing with you!” He laughed. “I’ve never known anything else. Parties, socializing, loud music, and lots of people. It’s a place I can get lost in.”
“Yeah, I hate that feeling.”
“I love it,” he replied, closing his eyes. “It’s like being invisible.”
I didn’t know what to say, but I wanted to reach out and touch his shoulder. We barely knew each other, but it felt like he had just admitted something to me that he’d never told anyone else before. Maybe he realized that, too, because his shoulders went rigid. I stilled my hand to keep it by my side.
“What’s home for you?” he asked.
I gave a one-shouldered shrug. Home, to me? If I was going to scare him away, I might as well start with the most boring part of me. “A small town and a quiet library, where sunlight slants through the window just right, making everything golden and soft and…” I trailed off, because I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. Not since the funeral. “My mom used to call them golden afternoons.”
“That sounds magical.”
“It is. You should visit. Maybe I can tempt you to the dark side with hot chocolate and a good book.”
He smiled, and there was a delicious dare tucked into the edges. “That sounds like a challenge.”
“Oh no,” I replied, returning that devil-may-care smile, imagining what he would look like in a certain slant of golden light, curled into a wingback chair with my favorite book. “It’s a promise.”
“I can’t wait, then,” he said earnestly. Then something caught his eyes behind me, and I began to look over my shoulder when he said, “This might sound a little forward, but would you want to go for a walk? With me?” He outstretched his hand.
I thought about Quinn and Annie dancing the night away, and about the book waiting for me back in my hotel room, and how improbable this was, and for the first time in my life—
I pushed those thoughts aside.
I took his hand, because this moment felt like a dandelion fluff on the wind—there one moment, walking the streets of Atlanta and eating Waffle House, and talking on the rooftop of one of the hotels until the sun rose and all of the cosplayers down below were stumbling their way home, the memory so visceral I can still smell the strange scent of his cologne, lavender mixed with oak, and then, well—
Gone.
BUT EVEN THOUGH HE’S GONE, I can’t get him out of my head a month later when I should totally be over it by now, as I scan my math teacher’s box of jumbo condoms at the Food Lion where I work. I try not to make eye contact as I read off the total and he pays, also avoiding eye contact. He leaves the grocery store as quick as the clip of his shined loafers will let him.
I massage the bridge of my nose. Minimum wage will never pay for the years of therapy I’ll need after this.
Maybe I can put some of this—any of this—into the college essay I’ve been failing to write for the last week, but what college admissions officer would want to read about some lovesick fool ringing up condoms for her calculus teacher? Right, like that’ll win over admissions.
Suddenly, from the other side of the cashier kiosks, Annie cries, “It’s here! It’s here!” as she vaults over her checkout counter and comes sliding toward mine.
Already?
Every rumor on every message board said that it would drop at six—I check the time on my cashier screen. Oh, it is six. I quickly key out of my register so the manager won’t yell at me for goofing off on the job—technically I’m on break!—and turn off my cashier light even though there are two people in line.
“Hey!” one of the customers shouts.
“Three minutes!” I reply.
“This is life-changing!” Annie adds, holding up her phone screen for us. The glare of the halogens above us catches on the edges of the screen protector as she sticks one earbud into her ear and hands me the other.
The trailer begins to play.
Darkness. Then, a sound—the beat of something striking the ground. Sharp, high-pitched, steady.
Coming this December…
It’s only September, and December feels like a lifetime away. We’ve been waiting a year and a half for the sequel—a year! And! A half!—and my twisting stomach can barely stand it.
There is a soft, steady beat that echoes over the sweet, low horn of the Starfield theme.
The text fades and there is Carmindor kneeling in front of the Noxian Court. His lip is bloodied, and there is a gash across his eyebrow. He looks to have been tortured, his arms bound tightly behind his back. His eyes are shadowed by his disheveled hair.
“Prince Carmindor, we find you guilty,” says a soft, deep voice.
The other members of the court, of the different regions in the Empire, some emissaries from far-reaching colonies, representatives from the Federation, all dressed in their pale official colors. Their faces are grim. At the head of the court is a throne, where the ruler of the Nox Empire should sit, but it is empty.
“Guilty of conspiring against the Empire,” the same voice says. “Of treason.”
There are flashes of the first movie—Carmindor at the helm of the Prospero, the defiant faces of Euci and Zorine beside him, the fight between the Nox King and Carmindor on Ziondur, the moment Amara says goodbye to Carmindor and locks him on the bridge—
“But most of all,” the voice purrs, and the blurry image of a man in gold and white, hair long and flowing, looking like a deity of the sun, slowly comes into focus. Bright blue eyes, white-blond hair, a sharp face and a pointed nose, the hem of his uniform glowing like burning embers. A chill curls down my spine. “We find you guilty of the murder of our princess, our light—our Amara.”
Amara’s ship swirls into the Black Nebula, her smile, her lips saying words without any sound that mysteriously look like “ah’blen”—
A hand grabs Carmindor’s hair and forces his head back. Lips press against his ear, and the prophetic voice of General Sond whispers, “No one is coming for you, princeling.”
Annie gasps, pressing her hand to her mouth. Because Carmindor’s eyes—his eyes are the pale, pale white of the conscripted. The beat—the clipping sound—gets louder. It sounds like the drum of a funeral march, like the coming of a predator, like a countdown to the end of the world.
The screen fades to black again, and then on the next beat—two pristine black boots, heels striking against the ground. The flutter of a long uniform jacket the perfect shade of blue. The errant flash of bright red hair—as red as a supernova. The glimmer of a golden tiara.
Annie grabs my wrist tightly, and squeezes. I know—I know.
It’s her.
The camera pans with her as she makes her way toward the throne, from her fluttering Federation coat to the golden stars on her shoulders, to her face. You can tell she’s different. That she isn’t the same princess who sacrificed herself to the Black Nebula. She’s new, and unpredictable, and impossible.
My heart kicks in my chest, seeing her again, returned from some improbable universe, and my eyes well with tears.
Because for once death isn’t final.
For once, for once, love is enough.
And the left side of Amara’s mouth twitches up.
The screen snaps to black—and then the triumphant orchestra of the Starfield theme swells into our ears, and the title appears:
STARFIELD: RESONANCE
And then it ends.
We stare at the blank screen for a moment longer. My heart hammers in my chest. It’s real. It’s happening. And Amara is back—our Amara.
Finally, Annie whispers. “I…I think I just popped a lady-boner—”
“A-hem.”
Annie and I whirl around toward the sound of our manager, Mr. Jason. He’s red-faced and standing with his arms crossed over his chest in the middle of our respective cash registers. She quickly yanks the earbud out of my ear, rolls up the wires, and shoves the cell phone into her apron.
“If I see you two with cell phones out one more time tonight…” he warns, wagging his finger at us, “then I’ll—I’ll…”
Uh-oh, he’s so flustered he doesn’t have words.
“We won’t, sorry, sir,” Annie says, and Mr. Jason nods, not quite believing her, and turns on his heel back to his office.
I let out a sigh of relief.
Annie mouths, Yikes.
I agree. He’s really not in the best mood tonight. We shouldn’t push our luck. Mr. Jason is known to have two modes: absent and dickweed. At the moment, he’s in full dickweed mode.
After I ring up the waiting customers, I straighten my aisle and leave to wrangle the shopping carts from the parking lot. There’s a toy dispenser outside that is calling my name, and I’ve got just the quarter that feels lucky enough for me to test it.
“Going to go try it again?” Annie calls to me as I wander toward the automatic doors.
“After that trailer, I’m feeling lucky,” I reply, flipping the quarter with my thumb, and step outside in the warm September evening.
There is a Starfield toy dispenser by the grocery cart lane, featuring the old characters from the TV series, though the Amara really looks nothing like Natalia Ford. She’s in this skimpy bodysuit with a pistol, and honestly Princess Amara would burn the entire dispenser if she saw that. Carmindor and the other six collectibles look somewhat like themselves, at least, though I’ve gotten so many Carmindors I could melt them all down and make a life-sized Carmindor to use for target practice whenever I decide to take up axe-throwing.
Maybe today, though, I’ll finally snag a Sond.
I pop the quarter into the Starfield toy machine. A toy rolls out, and I fish it out of the metal mouth and shake it. It doesn’t sound like another Carmindor. Maybe Amara? Euci?
Ugh, I have enough Eucis, too.
The outside of the shell reads, LOOK TO THE STARS AND CHASE YOUR DESTINY!
Dare I disturb the universe, crack open the egg, and find out what my future holds?
I’m about to twist the sucker open when someone calls my name. Like, not just calls from across the parking or anything, but like…megaphone calls my name.
I glance up.
And pale.
Oh, no.
Garrett Taylor is standing in the bed of his Ford truck with a karaoke machine. On the window of his muddy black truck, he dramatically unfurls a banner that says, HOMECOMING?
What the…
Oh.
Oh Jesus Mother Mary Aziraphale Crowley.
The realization of what’s happening hits me like the Prospero fresh out of hyperdrive. And I don’t have time to escape.
“Rosie Thorne,” Garrett begins valiantly, turning his snap-back around. Tufts of his chocolate-brown hair stick out the hole in the back of his cap, shaggy around his ears. A silver stud glints in his left ear. “You and I are a tale as old as time,” he says into the microphone, trying to be smart and funny.
He’s none of the above, and this is one hundred and ten percent mortifying.
Forget the carts in the parking lot. I try to make it back into the store before he can do something I will regret.
“Rosie!” he calls after me, vaulting off the flatbed, and races to cut me off. He succeeds. Barely. “What do you think?” he asks, motioning to the large HOMECOMING? banner. His posse follows him with their expensive GoPros, and I can feel their tiny bulbous camera eyes slowly leeching my soul.
Ever since he went viral on YouTube, I can’t stand him. He was fine before, but now he’s just insufferable. Everything has to be video’d and monetized.
“Garrett,” I say, putting my hand up so the GoPros can’t capture my face, “I’m flattered, but—”
He grabs me by the hand I was using to block the cameras and squeezes it tightly. “Don’t say it! Just think on it, okay?”
“I did think—”
“Rosie, you know as well as I do that we’re a team! Remember back in elementary school? We were the best Red Rover pair.”
“We have similar last names so we had to stand by each other—”
“And then in middle school, we made the best English projects together.”
I try to yank my hand out of his. “I did all of the work!”
“And I’m sorry high school hasn’t been very kind to you. Not since your mom died, and you had to move into a bad apartment after you had to pay for the medical bills—”
All things that make my skin crawl when he brings them up. Things that he has no right to say—period. Especially not on camera.
“—but I want to make your last Homecoming the most magical it can be. Yeah? Remember back on the playground? I promised you I’d look after you.”
“I’m not a charity case, Garrett,” I snap, finally able to pull my hand free. “Is that what you’re doing? ‘Oh, poor Rosie, she’s had a tough time—’ ”
“You’re also really pretty, if that helps,” he adds, and his two henchmen wince. He realizes a moment too late his folly, because I’m already halfway back into the grocery store. “Wait! That’s not what I meant!”
“You’re just too kind, Garrett,” I tell him over my shoulder in the most sickeningly sweet voice I can muster. “I don’t deserve you.”
I return into the grocery store, and as soon as I’m out of direct eyesight from Garrett, I duck down behind a line of shopping carts and watch as he returns to his truck with his two goons, waving at them to quit recording. Then they hop into his truck and they drive away, the HOMECOMING? banner flapping in the wind like a strip of toilet paper on the bottom of a shoe.
I pull out my phone to text Quinn.
ROSIE (6:16 PM)
—YOU. WOULDN’T. BELIEVE.
WHAT. JUST. HAPPENED.
QUINN (6:16 PM)
—Oh no did Annie just throw down an entire bottle of kombucha again?
ROSIE (6:17 PM)
—No but
“Rosie!” I hear Annie hiss, and when I look up she’s at the register, making a motion to hang up the phone. But I’m not even on the—
The intercom squeaks and the tired voice of my manager says, “Rosie Thorne, please report to the office. Immediately.”
Shit.
Annie sighs to the heavens.
Well, time to grovel, I guess. Dejectedly, I stand and brush off my work slacks—someone really needs to clean the floors—and make my way toward the back of the store. The manager’s office is situated in the far left corner, shoved between the frozen produce and the meat counter, so it always smells like frozen chickens and artichokes. I knock on the metal door before I poke my head into his office. Mr. Jason is sitting behind a crappy desk, vigorously pumping a smiley-face stress ball. He motions me inside, and I close the door gently behind me.
“Just let me explain,” I begin, but he holds up a hand and I quickly fall silent.
He doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Mr. Jason is one of those guys who hangs his screenwriting degree behind his desk to remind himself of all of the mistakes he’s made in his lifetime, now a lowly grocery store manager in the middle of nowhere rather than some award-winning screenwriter in LA. Maybe once he had a head full of black hair, but he opted to buzz it short when he started going bald. I only wish he’d shaved off his porn-stache too, but we can’t always get what we want.
“What did I tell you,” he says quietly, “about your phone?”
“You see, out in the parking lot—”
“This is your third write-up, Rosie,” he interrupts.
I stare at him, uncomprehending. “Third? That can’t be right.”
He flips open a folder on his desk—a folder I hadn’t noticed before—and begins reading from a detailed write-up form. “First write-up happened last summer, when you told Travis Richardson—and I quote—‘sit and rotate’ while presenting him the middle finger.”
“I turned him down, so he told me I’d die alone with seven cats!”
He went on, “And the second write-up was this past spring, when you filmed a TikTok in the middle of the frozen meats section to the song—”
“ ‘If I Can’t Love Her’ from the ending credits of Starfield, yeah I remember that one,” I mutter to myself. “But it went viral! I mean, sure I did a few bad things, but I’m a good employee! I was an employee of the month!” I add, flinging my hand back to the wall of photos behind me.
Mr. Jason closes the file and gives me a weary look. “Listen, Rosie. I understand that life without your mother must be difficult.”
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.