Star Struck by Jane Lovering Read Free Book Online Page B

screened … think they showed it to advertisers to check the revenue-earning response … but it counts. Not many people know about it, but someone on the show once sneaked an illicit clip out – put it up on YouTube. Why?’
    â€˜Just checking, darling, just checking.’
    * * * * *
    I’d swear I only closed my eyes for a couple of seconds. Just to allow my stomach to get to work on all that saturated fat. But when I opened them the room was empty and all the crisp wrappers had been balled up into the bin, from where they occasionally crackled and spat like plastic flames.
    â€˜Fe?’
    I already knew he wasn’t there; it wasn’t in Felix’s nature to sit quietly in a corner – he’d have been banging around the bathroom swearing and covering himself in expensive sprays or trying his hand with the dubious fake tanning lotion he’d bought at the airport. Instead the room was full of muffled sounds from outside and a smell of elderly fried food filtering up from the dumpsters through the slightly open window. It was twenty past eleven.
    I shuffled myself back up against the pillows. The room felt secure, promoted from too small to cosy, particularly when compared to the boom and thump of all those voices travelling up the stairwells. I could stay here. It was safe.
    But.
    Autographs. The signing began at eleven. Gethryn would be there, in Meeting Room One, wherever that was. I could be there too, a mere table away. I could speak to him!
    Even as I thought it, my heart sped up and the sweat burst onto the palms of my hands. Yes, Gethryn would be there, but so would just about everyone else who’d come to the convention – that was kind of the point, wasn’t it? To mingle. After all, this godforsaken little motel in the middle of the Nevada desert wasn’t exactly offering any alternative entertainment, was it? You came to see and be seen. To mix with other like-minded folks, to chat and compare and pull apart episodes until your lips bled. To talk about characters who were as fixed in your mind as your own family. To have strangers stare …
    Breathe.
    Or. I could stay in my room. Safe. After all, Gethryn was here , wasn’t he? I’d probably got closer to him during our aborted attempt at breakfast than I would heading downstairs any time soon, where I’d have to queue and compete and I’d still be no more than a face across a table, shoving his own picture in front of him and probably too shy to even tell him my name. I’d wait. Go down later. Yes. Later. And, in the meantime, I’d pop a Valium. That way, it would have time to work, to blunt the impact of the looks, the nudges, the comments made behind raised hands, as though I’d been struck deaf rather than scarred. With a little chemical help I could pretend I didn’t care, pretend that the whispers didn’t touch me.
    I swallowed one capsule with half a glass of water, listened briefly to the continued sounds of activity from downstairs and then swilled down another capsule to keep the first one company. Pulled a pillow to myself and cuddled it against me, exploring the cheesy soreness of my mouth cautiously with my tongue. Pined, briefly, for my laptop and tried to ignore my stomach’s cries for solid food, whilst I listened to the tidal noises travelling along the corridors.
    There was a large TV in the corner, its standby light an alluring red wink, but I couldn’t find the remote. My search did turn up a Gideon Bible in a bedside cupboard and two sachets of instant coffee, although the kettle was long gone. I remade the bed, pulling the nylon sheets taut and then spent ten minutes staring out of the window at the people in the yard.
    It wasn’t what I’d imagined conventions to be like. In my head any collection of sci-fi people was a mass of bespectacled, T-shirted, skinny guys who communicated in quotes and in-jokes and took one