Chapter Twenty
WHEN WE REHEARSED for our live stream from the theater earlier this week, the air on the academy stage had to be artificially cooled with fans in the wings to better protect the dozens of computers whirring just a few feet away.
Today those rigs are stored backstage and the warm, bright spotlight beaming from the ceiling’s iron catwalk is melting me like a candle.
That’s the bad part of being alone onstage.
The good part … I’m still trying to figure that out.
I’m not entirely alone. Past the curtain I can hear the rumblings of my academy peers settling into their seats in the auditorium.
Backstage, there’s approximately twenty people hovering just off camera waiting for Brian to call out a demand to surge out and swarm like those colonies of bees that cook spiders with their own body heat.
I’m temporarily blinded when the spotlight we’d been testing shuts off once people start streaming into the auditorium.
Greenish-black circles float in front of my eyes as they adjust to the significantly darker room, but I don’t need eyes to hear Brian’s team buzz on toward me with makeup brushes, spray bottles, and tablets outstretched.
“She’s right here,” I mumble under my breath.
No one notices, and another handler steps up with a compact in one hand and a thick, fluffy kabuki brush in another.
He pats the brush into the powder, taps it against his arm, and begins to dab the shine-slaying material on my forehead, down the bridge of my nose, at the tip of my chin.
He doesn’t ask to touch me first. No one’s asked me that yet today.
My vision begins to clear at the same time I feel the blunt poke of a pick in my hair, methodically lifting my curls away from my scalp to restore some of the volume I’ve surely lost to time, sweat, and gravity.
“We’re all clear to go live in ten.” Of course the first thing I see through the fog is Brian, expertly swerving around a light being wheeled offstage, clipboard in hand, to come stand beside me.
“Don’t forget to give it a little more emotion this time,” he reminds me, as if I could’ve forgotten the note he gave me multiple times throughout rehearsal.
“We threw in a few extra lines.” He hands me an updated script, my speech challenging Ivan to show his face and clear his name now significantly longer.
“We’ll get the teleprompter updated, but you can take or leave these. Go with the flow.”
“You got it,” I reply dully. I’m saving my energy for the cameras and the crowds.
“Just remember,” he continues, “you hate Ivan. He wronged you, abandoned you, and you’ve got to convince him to come back for one final confrontation. I need more fire, more fury. More righteous anger!”
You’d think drumming up those emotions for show would be easy, considering I actually do hate Ivan because he wronged me, abandoned me, and I need to convince him to come back for one final confrontation.
It’s not easy—it’s life imitating art imitating life, spinning around and around until I can’t remember which of my feelings are real and which ones I’m generating for a faceless audience of thousands.
The makeup crew takes a few more minutes to dab highlighter on my nose and cheeks, reapply my lipstick, and blend the line of my makeup down toward my neck.
Someone appears behind me to slide my jacket up my arms a little rougher than I would have liked.
It’s a small comfort knowing that Brian agreed to let Trieu do my makeup for the battle instead of someone on his payroll who probably doesn’t have the right color of foundation.
That I’ll at least have one person on my side before the biggest moment of my career—maybe even my life—so far.
What’s not comforting is the realization that in seconds I’m going to be parading in front of the entire academy student body—including people who don’t exactly love me right now. Kavi. Cass. And who knows how many other people I’ve managed to piss off since I got here.
“Places, people!” a production assistant whispers forcefully into their headset, sending the backstage area into a flurry of activity. The makeup artists flocking me finally disperse to the wind, and the various lighting rigs are all shifted back onto their marks.
Brian takes his place at the center of the stage, straightening himself up and putting on the cheerful smile everyone knows him for.
I really wish I’d noticed before now just how forced it all is—his positivity, his charm.
Everything that makes him the most wholesome guy in the gaming world.
What an awful joke. I already fell for someone else’s facade once this summer.
Now here I am again, realizing someone isn’t who they said they were. Fool me twice, shame on me …
Past the thick red curtains, someone manages to get the academy’s attention until the chatter falls to a hum, and eventually to silence.
A rumble begins backstage as the crew falls silent too—the opening notes of the song Brian chose specifically for this momentous occasion.
Epic and loud and perfectly covering up the way my heart is threatening to hammer right out of my chest.
“We’re live in three, two …”
I don’t hear the PA a few feet away from me get to “one,” but the roar of applause as the curtain pulls open to reveal Brian at center stage fills in the gap for me.
Brian basks in it—the spotlight, the roar, the excitement.
He matches their enthusiasm effortlessly, bouncing around to high-five the players closest to the lip of the stage as the song plays on.
His cheeks are flushed pink as he returns to his mark, beaming like he just won the lottery—and, in a way, he has—as he addresses his loyal constituents.
“It’s been an amazing summer,” he begins, looking directly at the camera placed at the front of the stage.
It’s easy to lose focus as Brian drones on and on about how grateful he is to everyone who came to the academy.
Who dedicated themselves to making GLR as amazing as it could be.
Blah, blah, corporate-approved spiel to make everyone misty-eyed before he crushes their dreams. Because everyone sitting out there still thinks they have a shot at winning this thing.
“It’s my pleasure to announce the top two of the first-ever Wizzard Games Summer Academy Royale.
Who’ll be moving on to our epic battle royale next week …
” Brian pauses for dramatic effect and gestures to the screen hanging above his head.
Chairs creak, and shoes squeak against the floor as everyone shifts to the edge of their seats.
In the reflection of one of the makeup artists’ mirrors I can see the animation of all of our names appearing on-screen, shuffling rapidly before two names rise up to the top in time with a jaunty royalty-free tune.
“Our very own summer academy lovebirds, Zora Lyon and Ivan Hunt!”
The room breaks out into polite, but still pretty salty, applause.
I can’t blame them for not being enthusiastic about having lost the one thing they worked all summer for.
I consider running away as I’m cued by a nearby PA to take my mark, preparing for Brian to call me out onto the stage for my grand reveal, but my body moves on instinct.
Disconnected from the rest of me. Without even realizing I’d taken a single step forward, I’m standing on the black duct-taped X on the ground, my brain whirring with the lines I memorized, the pounding of my heart, and a dozen questions I still want answered.
Namely, will this be enough to get Ivan to show?
“But not everything is as it seems for our academy lovers,” Brian says, and my back arches from a noxious combo of nerves and disgust. He’s liking playing the game master to this teenage love story way too much.
“Zora, do you have anything to say to Ivan?”
With a gentle push from the PA, I’m stepping out of the darkness and into the spotlight.
The silence in the crowd is broken by hushed murmurs.
The news of our breakup hasn’t left the bubble of the party yet.
Despite walking away from us—well, me—Kavi didn’t break her vow of silence.
Thankfully, the crowd is completely invisible beneath the hot glare of the spotlight.
All I can see are dark, faceless shapes—killing any chance of me finding Kavi or Cass in the crowd and buckling before I can even open my mouth.
Over Brian’s shoulder, just above the lens of the camera, the teleprompter displays the speech we’d rehearsed. Packed with drama and metaphors and what I’m 99 percent sure is literally a direct quote from Game of Thrones.
It’s just another performance, I tell myself.
But as I stand there, baking in the heat of the spotlight, the words written on the screen might as well be in a foreign language.
It doesn’t feel right—none of it has. But especially this.
Playing some lovesick girl when I really did have my heart broken.
Everything might’ve been a lie from the start, but that doesn’t change that Ivan did hurt me.
And that doesn’t change how hard it’s hit me—no matter how much I wish it didn’t.
Brian side-eyes me when I don’t take the offered microphone from him as planned. He laughs nervously, tugging lightly at the collar of his button-down as he glances at a PA off camera to try to come up with an escape plan for me developing a massive case of stage fright.
“Well, I guess we’ll just have to—”
I grab the microphone out of Brian’s hand and look straight at the camera in front of me—not at the teleprompter. If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it on my own terms. In my own words.
Besides, Brian did say I could take or leave the new script.