Chapter 2 Fickle Fame
Fickle Fame
Sage knows it sounds self-deprecating, but she never expected to be here. And not just here as in doing a signing in Brooklyn at one of her favorite indie bookstores on the eve of one of the biggest conventions, but here as in …
This new version of her life she’s found herself in.
She keeps expecting to look in the mirror and find someone else staring back at her.
Like her dark brown hair will suddenly be blond, or her skin, olive-tinged from her mother’s Greek heritage and tanned by her sun exposure in LA, will suddenly have turned a ghostly pale.
How can life change so much and yet there be no physical evidence of it?
Maybe it’s because Sage hasn’t changed, not really. She’s more … come home to herself. She’s found a way to take her overactive brain and her too-big emotions and her too-sensitive heart and channel them into something that actually makes her and others feel good.
Well, some others. There are, of course, her parents and the random people who like to send her emails about how she’s the worst writer they’ve ever read, but she tries her best to ignore them.
Don’t let them see you sweat and all that jazz.
But the thing is … Sage craves control, and she does what she needs to in order to keep it.
Perhaps it stems from the years before her ADHD diagnosis—the ones where she didn’t understand her neurodivergence, so she masked, and planned, and organized, and hyper-fixated and strove because her energy needed to go somewhere, and success and achievement were outlets that also meant validation and love.
But Nights … Nights has never really been in her control.
From the first time she sat down to write about Cleo and her postapocalyptic world, it had felt completely out of her hands.
She’d come home one night after another meeting where she presented her data and recommendations to management only for them to care more about shareholder value than literally anything else that could actually improve the company, and that agitated energy had been pressing against her skin, begging for release.
She had to do something to ease that pressure building in her chest, so … she wrote.
It was what she’d always done, ever since she was old enough to realize she could use the written word to ease the ache of the emotions that often felt too big for her body and too much for those around her.
Journal entries. Short stories. Fan fiction one-shots about her favorite bands that Noah, her older brother, teased her for liking.
Sage would write until she felt better, until she felt a little less odd, then let the half-finished stories die.
But with Nights, she never stopped.
She wrote on her lunch break at work, in LA traffic in the Notes app on her phone, in the disgusting bathroom stall of some dive bar Emerson or Margot had talked her into going to with their friends.
Cleo wouldn’t stop demanding to have her story told, and so Sage kept writing, and writing, and writing.
And though it was more than she’d ever written before, she hadn’t known it would be anything more than a cathartic expression of some of the rawest bits of her heart and mind.
She loved Cleo and her chaos and the wreckage of the dystopian world she lived in, and sure, part of her hoped a publisher would love it, too, but …
She certainly hadn’t expected them to love it like this.
She hadn’t expected the auction between nine different publishers who desperately wanted to publish it.
She hadn’t expected the large, two-book advance she’d gotten, or the support that had people chomping at the bit to buy it before it was even available.
Sage had done her research—had tried to stay in control—so she’d known not to expect that in this industry.
So much of publishing, nearly all of it, is about luck.
This type of experience hardly happens to anyone.
At the time, she was a data analyst with grad school debt and a fairly new and cutting realization that the path she’d been bleeding on was one she couldn’t stand to be on for a second longer.
Suddenly, striving for the next level of the career she’d been told to want wasn’t enough. The monotony of her days—spreadsheets and presentations and meetings where stakeholders didn’t care—pulled her skin tight until she thought she might burst from the shape she’d contorted herself into.
Perhaps that’s why Nights hit a chord. She took all of that discomfort, all of that angst, and funneled it into a world that resembled her own, but worse.
The next thing she knew, publishers thought it could be the thing, and then it was, and it all happened so quickly, changed so quickly, that Sage knows it could change just as quickly again.
She’s seen it happen, and sometimes that thought alone is enough to have her heart rate increasing until she buries the nipping panic beneath her gratitude.
She’s hardly had time to adjust to her new normal.
But she tries to focus on making the most of the moments she has while she has them.
Like right now.
Her heart is pounding from adrenaline, her cheeks sore from smiling with readers, but she can’t stop grinning.
She’s just wrapped up the signing—for which tickets were sold out—and sure, maybe it will all slip away tomorrow, but for today, it’s real and it’s good and she will let the joy of it fill in every tiny crevice inside of her.
“You absolutely killed it, babe,” her publicist, Taylor, says as Sage stands from the table.
Taylor has a Stanley in one hand, her phone in the other.
“Good practice for the Con, yeah? I have some meetings, but you’re done for the day.
Oh, and don’t forget, Greg Norman of Ballad Books wants to have coffee, so I booked him in tomorrow mid-morning. ”
Taylor says it as if they haven’t been over the schedule a hundred times already.
Greg Norman tomorrow at 11.
Free time.
Dinner with Jaylen Hammel from the studio and Anna at 7:45.
Her Comic Con signing the next day.
Her panel the day after that.
But there’s something about Taylor running through it all again that’s soothing, nonetheless.
Taylor is all sharp edges, from her perfectly tailored black pantsuit to her tight brunette bun that accentuates the jut of her cheekbones to the sharp cut of her pink heels that matches her lipstick and the blush on her pale cheeks.
It’s only natural for her to launch straight into business, well, always.
And besides … Ballad Books is the largest retailer on the eastern seaboard.
To be grabbing coffee with the head fiction buyer is a big deal.
A huge deal. All of this is, really, and Sage doesn’t mind the reminder.
She’s walked a delicate balance between thriving on pressure and drowning beneath its weight her entire life. Why stop now?
“It’s a good thing Greg is in town,” Taylor says. “We need to strike while the iron is hot and use this momentum for book two.”
“Absolutely,” Sage replies with a confident nod, ignoring the ice that slips down her spine at the mention of her sequel that is very much not coming along. Emerson appears at her side, wordlessly handing her a chai.
“Hungry?” her friend asks as Taylor excuses herself.
“Starving.”
They find a wine bar a block away from their hotel.
They tuck themselves away in a booth and have just gotten started on a bottle when Sage realizes she should check in on the social media interactions from the signing.
It would be good to DM those who have shared and thank them again for coming.
She can also repost some photos from readers.
She grabs her phone and opens up Instagram.
“Should we do apps?” Emerson asks, her nose buried in a menu.
“If you want, I could go for—” The rest of Sage’s answer gets tangled on her tongue as she stills, the breath sweeping from her lungs. “What the hell?”
Her blood goes cold as she stares at the screen. Her notifications are flooded. New follower requests, new DMs, comments on comments on comments. Her signing was good, but it wasn’t that good. No signing she’s ever done has caused something like this.
Emerson leans over her shoulder, her brow furrowing. “Did you get hacked?”
Sage clicks around a bit, rather uselessly, because the notifications are still coming, and she sort of feels like her phone is about to combust in her hand, so she drops it on the table. “What the hell is happening?”
Emerson has her own device in hand, her bottom lip trapped firmly between her teeth as she taps around on her screen. Her eyes blow wide, and Sage knows, even before Emerson’s whispered “Oh shit,” that it’s bad.
“What?”
Wordlessly, Emerson hands her the phone.
It takes Sage a minute to realize what she’s looking at.
It looks like some gossip site’s Instagram.
Emerson has pulled up a picture of Theo walking down a hall, his hand lifted in a half wave as he squints in what Sage assumes is the flash of a camera.
He’s wearing the same black T-shirt he was wearing on the plane yesterday, because—
Oh. It’s from yesterday. She can see his duffle slung over his shoulder and a line of passengers behind him. There’s a red circle on the photo, but it’s not outlining Theo. It’s outlining a blurred shape behind him, just out of focus enough that you can’t see who it is.
“Fuck,” Sage breathes. Because when she swipes, there’s another photo, and there’s Sage, clear as day, her head tilted up toward Theo, and oh god, his arm is around her waist and her hand is on his chest and there’s that red circle around her again, a bunch of childishly drawn question marks at the edges.
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celebrity411 Is romance heating up at Comic Con? Theo Sharpe seen looking cozy with mystery woman as they left LaGuardia yesterday … more
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theosgirl omg wait is this his gf?!
1 HOUR AGO
“How do they know it’s me?” Sage breathes.