For example, once I saw Hannah, the Queen Bee of the drama department, sitting on her own at a party, so I selflessly ditched my friends to go over to her so she wouldn’t feel like such a loner, but she was utterly ungrateful about the whole thing. All I was saying was how I thought the play she had just been in was nice, but the ending was completely predictable and it would have been really cool if they’d mixed it up a bit more and had the fairy queen do something totally dramatic, like kill that boring fairy king, who was topless and everything, but such a creep. She looked at me in disgust and went all narkily, ‘Sorry, but some of us don’t think Shakespeare’s works need “mixing up”,’ and then just got up and walked away.
Some people have no manners. And so, for that and several other reasons, I left my theatre career behind and believed that because of Mum’s unnecessarily strict vlogging rules, I had stepped out of the spotlight for good.
That is, until I went for dinner with Skylar Chase.
Because that is what it’s like when you walk around somewhere with her, it’s like being onstage all the time, followed by a constant spotlight. And that’s just walking from her suite to the dining room downstairs, it’s not even leaving the hotel and going out into the real world. People stared at us as we walked down the corridor, then they stared at us in the lift, and then they stared at us walking from the lift and into the restaurant. And it felt GREAT. In fact, the only time we weren’t being stared at was when I persuaded Skylar to hide with me behind one of the massive vases near reception for a few minutes on our way to the restaurant because Audrey was prowling about the lobby.
‘Is it always like this?’ I asked, as we reached the dining room and pretended not to notice all the turning heads.
‘Yes.’ Skylar nodded wearily.
‘It’s so much fun.’ I smiled, lovingly stroking the clutch bag she had lent me.
‘You think?’ Skylar shook her head. ‘It’s like being on a permanent catwalk.’
‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’
She looked at me curiously. ‘You don’t think you’d get bored of it?’
‘Of being admired and adored?’ I flashed her a smile. ‘Oh, I think I could handle it.’
She laughed as Timothy came hurrying over to us, clutching some menus in his hands. He did a double take at me, possibly because when I usually come down to the restaurant I’m accompanied by a sausage dog in a tailored suit, not a world-famous pop star. Or it might have been down to my hair – Skylar had plaited it into a pretty braid across the top of my head like a halo and clipped a blue flower into it, matching the blue pleated skirt she’d chosen for me.
‘Miss Chase, we have your table ready and your guests have arrived,’ he began, before glancing at me. ‘And will Miss Royale be joining the party?’
‘She will.’ Skylar beamed at me.
‘No trouble at all. I’ll sort out another setting.’
As he scampered away to huddle together with the other waiters and rearrange the settings, a boy approached us with his arms outstretched towards Skylar.
‘You finally made it to the best city in the world.’ He grinned, as she squealed and embraced him. ‘Took you long enough.’
I recognised him straight away: Ethan Duke, the YouTuber. Grace would have passed out on the spot. We’d spent hours at school watching his vlogs in lunch breaks. According to the ‘About Me’ section on his website, which Grace had memorised word for word, the story went that he happened to grow up next door to, and become best friends with, the son of a director, who let him tag along to a load of movie sets. Ethan started asking the super famous actors if they’d let him interview them for his YouTube channel during their filming breaks, and before long he had millions of followers and a queue of celebrities wanting to appear in one of his vlogs. Sometimes they were interviews, sometimes they were dares and sometimes he and a celebrity would team up to play a big prank on another celebrity.
He also happened to be the hottest person on the planet. In person he was more good-looking than in his videos, which I’d thought impossible. His sleek brown hair swept perfectly across his forehead, just above the thick eyebrows that framed his hazel-coloured eyes and he had these really full lips. I could not stop staring at his perfectly square jaw. How was anything that chiselled? I had to stop staring at it.
Look away from the jaw, look away from the jaw, look away from the jaw . . .
‘Flick, this is Ethan.’
I was so deep in my examination of his angelic face, that when Skylar addressed me, I wasn’t ready to form words.
‘Jaw!’
Oh my God.
Skylar blinked at me. ‘Huh?’
‘I mean, four!’ I said quickly, trying to save the situation. ‘Four . . . forks. That’s how many forks there will be. Four.’
‘Flick, what are you talking about?’
‘The number of forks at a place setting. I was just . . . uh . . . checking that everything was in order. Timothy!’ I croaked, waiting for him to sidle up to me. ‘Are there four forks at each place? As usual?’
‘Yes . . .’ he replied slowly, as though expecting it to be a trick question.
‘Excellent,’ I said, patting him on the arm awkwardly. ‘Well done. You can go now.’
