Star Struck by Jane Lovering Read Free Book Online Page A

white ones?’
    I chose a fistful and munched as I lay. Felix sprawled himself at my feet and dipped idly between crisps. ‘Skye.’
    â€˜Mmmm?’
    â€˜You’re really into Fallen Skies , aren’t you?’
    â€˜What do you mean?’ I’d found something that tasted exactly like Wotsits and was sucking the coating off.
    â€˜I mean, you’ve been a fan since the beginning, but the series started just after the accident, right?’
    â€˜Six weeks after I came out of hospital.’
    â€˜Yeah. So, you know, with the surgery and all that … how much do you really remember about the early stuff? I mean, you had quite a bit of brain damage, didn’t you?’
    â€˜That was the operation.’
    â€˜Yeah, but how much memory did you really lose?’
    I stared at him. ‘Fe, you know all this.’
    I got a single raised-eyebrow comment. ‘Humour me.’
    I found that I was rubbing my scar, feeling the warped skin on my fingertips against its puckered surface. ‘My childhood is more or less intact. Everything from my teens onward is … fuzzy. I can remember bits and pieces but nothing really clearly, and I’ve lost the whole of the year leading up to the accident completely.’ I shrugged. ‘Everything I remember about Michael, about us, comes from photographs.’
    â€˜So when you say you remember the early Fallen Skies stuff, are you really remembering, or half-remembering what people have told you about it?’ By ‘people’ Felix meant him. No-one else had my obsessive interest, although one of the library assistants and I had exchanged some speculation on the new series, but even he had gone a bit glazed-over when I’d launched into my theories about the alien Skeel race and their motivations. Perhaps, on reflection, the queue at the counter should have been my clue that I’d gone on a bit.
    I used a finger to knock oily crumbs from my top lip. ‘No. I remember.’ The programme had saved my sanity, how could I have forgotten a single episode? My life had changed beyond recognition; I’d lost Faith, Michael, all my hopes for the future, and along had come a science-fiction drama that had made me suspend everything, even the grieving, for the brief hour it lasted. Gethryn Tudor-Morgan had stormed into my Wednesday evenings and taken me over. ‘All of it. Everything.’
    â€˜Okay. Just curious.’ Felix dipped a moistened finger into a nearly empty packet. ‘Would you … you know, if things had been different, would you have wanted to come over to the States and audition?’
    I shook my head. ‘I dunno. Think my hair has always been a bit too much for American TV.’ I smiled, but inside my heart had clenched into a ball. I’d joke and I’d smile and Felix would never know how I felt about my new life. How, deep down in the core of myself, in the place where I allowed introspection, I hated myself for losing any skills I’d ever had, any looks, any confidence. ‘And I’d never get a part now, even if I wanted one.’
    â€˜It’s really not that bad.’ Fe’s eyes ran over my scar. ‘Better than it was, anyway.’
    â€˜Not televisual-friendly though, you have to admit. I could probably try out for War of the Killer Zombies, if anyone’s casting for that.’
    â€˜Yeah. No make-up needed.’ Fe smirked, until I hit him with a pillow. ‘Right then, just for my own personal satisfaction, a little test. What was the name of the first ship that Lucas James flew?’
    The answer was there, as soon as he’d finished speaking, as though my new post-operative recall system was all on some instant-access Rolodex. ‘Everyone thinks it was the Medusa , because that was the one he was flying across the Ice Nebula, but it was the B’Ha Virgin . It was only in the pilot episode, which never got commercially