Bombshell - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rowan Maness is the author of Bombshell. She lives with her husband in Los Angeles.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Bombshell

CHAPTER 1

All right, I’m Anna. What am I up to?

There’s a full moon tonight, and in Paris it’s hanging bright and low behind the Eiffel Tower. My face is covered with ultra-futuristic Ziggy Stardust–style makeup, and the golden café lights are shining all reflected in the Seine like fallen stars. I’m exhausted after a long day of back-to-back runway shows, but this is only my second time in Paris, and it’s the first quiet moment I’ve had since the plane landed three days ago. Despite the setting—or maybe because of it—I’m lonely. (Anna is always a little bit lonely.) So I take out my phone and text Max, who’s been waiting.

Me: Damn, this is beautiful.

The streets have a cartoon van Gogh quality and from a restaurant open late “La Vie en Rose” filters out into the street just like in Sabrina. Max writes back Show me? and I’m already searching “full moon paris night” on Flickr. It takes only a second to find the right photograph, and just a few more to crop and filter, turning it into Anna’s Full Moon Paris Night. I send it off to Max.

Max will wonder at the pretty picture, and though he won’t think of it consciously, the girl who sent it to him will become a bit less abstract. She is across an ocean, but he’s seeing what she’s seeing right now. The face he fell in love with is placed in time and space, and in his mind, through his longing for her, she is made more real.

I never slip up, but if I do—if Anna takes a misstep beyond the realm of possibility—these solidifying moments will help Max instantly forget. When he doubts, he will soothe himself, repeating: But I’ve seen so many pictures. She has so many Instagram followers. If I ask for something, she supplies it. It is not impossible that I could be loved this way by a woman like her.

Max’s capacity for denial is a bottomless well inside him, like it is for everyone.

A text from someone else interrupts. I leave Anna standing on the moonlit bridge while I look at the clock—not the clock on my phone, but the clock on the classroom wall. It reads 3:40 p.m. That’s 6:40 p.m. in New York, forty minutes after midnight in Paris, and five minutes until the bell rings.

New message from GEORGE

George: Skype?

Another woman, Emma, stirs restlessly in the bedroom of a mansion in Savannah. Asleep next to her, the duvet-covered mound of her abusive husband, Ron, snores and farts, a detail she has been waiting to share with George.

But the phone’s red light is blinking, beckoning, telling me that Max has seen Anna’s picture and has something new to say. Sorry, George, not now.

Max: Wow, that’s pretty.

Anna, paused, takes a deep breath back to life.

Me: They offered to have a driver take me back to the hotel, but I felt like waiting. It should be romantic, strolling along the Seine way past midnight, but I’m lonely without you. And I’ve been thinking about our fantasy all day. . . .

Max: Naughty girl. Get back to your hotel and take another picture for me. I’m stuck in the lab, and I need a distraction.

Me: Hmm, I don’t know. I’m feeling pretty uninspired.

The red light’s blinking.

Now Mary-Kate’s saying ANSWERRRR CAREY NOW AGHGHHG

Oh shit, I thought, and tried to diffuse the haze that’s been comfortably separating me from sixth-period precalc for the past forty-five minutes. My phone, hastily shoved back inside the desk I’d been slumped over, made a sad little scraping sound. I missed it as soon as it left my hands.

I looked up, but the equations covering the SMART Board at the front of the classroom blurred and spun and refused to come into focus. My eyes landed on the phrase “real zero,” and it became an anchor. I hauled myself up from the abyss.

It was clear I should say something, so I said “Yes?” but I was thinking, Wait, what’s an unreal zero?

There was no precalc in Paris. There was no Anna in Ms. Carey’s class.

“Joss, is there something more interesting you’d like to share with the class?”

Pretty much everything is more interesting than a sophomore math class, but how could I explain that I had just been five thousand miles away, inhabiting the body of a woman who doesn’t exist? Or that she does exist, just not with the name and history I gave her? Hey, Ms. Carey, I took a candid Polaroid of an Estonian girl from a modeling agency’s website and turned her into a whole new person?

I looked at the clock again—3:44 p.m. (That’s 6:44 in New York, 12:44 in Paris, where the early-summer night is warm enough for a riverside stroll.) I drew a triangle between the three of us—me in Arizona, Max in New York, and the ghost of a made-up girl in France.

“No. I’m sorry, Ms. Carey. I was just reading ahead.” I touched the open textbook in front of me. “Real zeroes, right? They’re really—”

Across the room, Mary-Kate stifled a laugh. At the beginning of the school year we’d been forced to move our desks apart because we couldn’t stop talking to each other, like hyperactive third graders.

“—exciting.” I finished the sentence, dragging it out as far as I could toward the last remaining tick of the clock.

Three forty-five came as slowly as ever, two seconds forward, one second back. But the bell rang, setting me free. Everyone stood up, and I slid the phone out of my desk and into the sleeve of my sweatshirt. Before I could make it out the door, though, Ms. Carey called to me.

“Joss? A minute, please.”

Suddenly, the room was empty.

I took the tiniest step possible toward her desk.

“Hmm?” I mumbled.

“Hand it over,” she said. Coldhearted troll!

“Excuse me?”

“Your phone. Hand it over.”

“But it’s in my locker.”

Here’s where she knows I’m lying but can’t do anything about it because she’s a high school teacher and she’s tired and can’t exert any real power over me.

“Honestly. It’s in my locker.”

You’re walking the Seine right now. It’s the dead of night in Paris. There’s no precalc, no speckled linoleum tile and water-stained ceilings. The city’s asleep, but everything’s humming, and you’re a beautiful girl in a beautiful place, in love and beholden to no one.

The bags under Ms. Carey’s eyes were showing. I wondered how many episodes of Grey’s Anatomy she binge-watched on Netflix last night instead of grading our pop quizzes.

“Oh, by the way, do you have the quizzes from Monday ready yet? You said we’d have them back by Wednesday, but—” I said, trying to avoid looking at a faded, ruler-shaped poster with MATH RULES! printed across it in lime-green Comic Sans.

The look on her face said she suspected I knew about the Netflix. The look on mine said I’d put a firm bet on the probability of a software engineer boyfriend who plays video games all night while she looks at pictures of baby nurseries and oatmeal in mason jars on Pinterest.

“I can’t do my job if I’m competing for attention with...