“That’s true, but you also like one-night stands.”
“I can’t have a one-night stand with a man I share a childhood tattoo with!”
“You have a point. Hey, have you checked your Insta?” Summer asked, her voice brimming with a disproportionate amount of excitement.
“What did you do?” I asked, warily.
Summer had a login to my Instagram, where she used her PR and marketing background to amplify my singing posts with the appropriate hashtags. I pulled up my Instagram with widening eyes, seeing that Summer had uploaded the video of me singing at the Bowery—singing the song I had written about Asher, to Asher.
“Check the views, babe.”
I blinked back the view count under the video: 53,680 views. My hands started to shake as my eyes floated up to my follower count: I had 22,000 new followers. I had fans. Well, fans of gossip and Asher Reyes—but still.
“Where are you right now? We need to spin this the right way,” Summer said.
“I’m a block away from Thirty Rock. I have to sing at a kid’s birthday.”
“Ew. Why?”
“I can’t let an innocent three-year-old down. It’s the swan song of my princess gigs, okay? Also, it might be a little late to spin this in the right direction.”
“What did you do?” Summer asked, her tone shifting, rightly foreboding.
“You know the part in Frozen where Elsa accidentally sends her cute little town into eternal winter?”
“Yeah…？”
“So, the good news is: I didn’t do that.”
“Crap—I have to roll into this nine a.m. Just come to me this afternoon—don’t you dare go back to your place. I’ll stop at your apartment after work and grab all your shit.”
“You’re the bestest friend there ever was.”
“And hey: don’t Story all the stupid memes you see today, got it?”
“The memes I find aren’t stupid!”
“And stop screenshotting and sharing tweets on your Instagram. Tweets should stay on Twitter. Also, we need to start branding you, now— Oh! I almost forgot. I assume you’re driving with me to Garrett’s engagement party this weekend? Valeria is out of town,” Summer said, before abruptly hanging up.
Summer was never one for goodbyes. It was a PR habit—one crisis folded into another at lightning speed, so she would word-vomit everything she needed to say before she hung up. She happily left conversations without pleasantries, and now, she’d left this conversation with a reminder that I had masochistically inked my name atop the “accepts with pleasure” line.
I pointed my chin up to the towering skyscraper above me, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, closing my eyes and inhaling the balmy air, the timeless city stench of hot sewer and early morning street meat.
Somehow, I hadn’t thought about Garrett—not for one second since Asher walked into the Bowery Electric. I looked down at my phone, seeing a candid photo of Asher and me after the show—his body leaning toward mine, my eyes taking in every inch of his face—on E! News. I wondered if Garrett had woken up to these photos. I wondered if it bothered him the way it bothered me when I saw a picture of him on Cecily’s Instagram the night after Garrett kissed me. I felt sick admitting it, but I hoped the idea of me with another man twisted Garrett’s insides.
I didn’t know how I was going to exist in the same room as Garrett without crumpling. How was I going to pretend that I didn’t know he liked biting my lower lip? I shook off the cruel reminder, choosing to heroically point the shoulders of my flapping blue cape up to the sky, like a princess with boy trouble who had to save herself.
* * *
I SPENT THE FOLLOWING TWO hours inside the Rainbow Room belting out Elsa’s, Anna’s, and Olaf’s greatest hits while the Empire State Building glared at me through the windows. More money went into this party than Frozen’s actual premiere. There were chocolate milk ice luges for the toddlers, and beluga caviar served on blocks of ice for the adults. After my final encore—a wildly gorgeous indie-folk rendition of “Let It Go”—I cut through a pack of strollers on West Forty-Ninth Street in my Elsa costume, sans the wig, holding my breath as I dared to venture back online. I wasn’t sure how to fully prepare myself to come Elsa-to-Elsa with the paparazzi photos from this morning—mainly, the one in front of the subway where I had casually shrieked into the camera. Just as I was about to type “Enews” into Safari’s browser, a text from a 917 number came on-screen.
You’re about to get a call from an Unknown Number. It’s me—Asher
He attached the very photo I had been dreading: Elsa Gone Bad—my nostrils flaring into the camera, wig swaying backward over my seething face. It was…not super flattering. If your friend tagged you in this picture, you would not only untag yourself, you would ask your friend to take the photo down completely. It was “also delete this pic from your Recently Deleted folder” kind of horrible.
My hands trembled, and then my phone rang. UNKNOWN NUMBER flashed on the screen.
“Hello,” I said.
“Well, hello there.”
I let my cheeks blanket in heat as I took in the photo.
“So my PR intercepts all things Asher Reyes, and I have to say, I really enjoyed getting that photo this morning,” he said.
“I’ve looked better.”
“I think it’s…charming.” I heard him exhale a little laugh. “Would you like that photo to go away forever?”
“Very much so.”
“Good. ’Cause I agreed to have a window-facing drink with you tomorrow night at Marea, so that the piece-of-shit photographer can get one photo of us and destroy this one.”
I put my hand on my chest, exhaling the mortification from my bones. “Really?”
“PR photo-ops aren’t my thing, but…for you…”
“Seriously, thank you,” I said.
“It’s a date.”
A date. My hands were shaking again. But I wasn’t sure it was nerves. I think it was anticipation. Like, my fingers were itching to curl around the back of his neck.
“It’s a date,” I echoed.
A date. I had never seen a photo of Asher on a date. The closest I came to seeing him candidly in a relationship was a photo of Asher hand-in-hand with Penelope Lynn—his stunning co-star—leaving an SNL after-party two years ago. That was it. The rest of the photos were red carpet appearances with different starlets on his arm. He was willing to open himself up to a mountain of scrutiny, to go on a date with a nobody, just to save this nobody from a lifetime of embarrassment.
“I’ll see you Wednesday. Also—I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t go home if I were you,” Asher warned. “The paparazzi are going to camp out at your place for a day or two—it’s their style. Do you have a friend’s place you can stay at?”
“I’m actually on the way there now.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It is. I didn’t think it through—just showing up at your gig like that. I got the final word from Amos and the studio, and I was so excited for you that I…Mags, I don’t do crowds like that. Ever. I’m sorry, honestly. I don’t know what came over me.”