Page 1 of Wish You Were Her
Chapter One
By eighteen, Allegra Brooks was used to hearing her name from the mouths of strangers. She was accustomed to people speaking excitedly to her without introducing themselves. She was even used to the occasional grab and shove.
But she never quite acclimatized to being pulled apart by people she had never met. She watched fans become her biggest critics, all because her boundaries had angered them.
“Stop scrolling. Put that phone down.”
The words were whispered to Allegra by Natalie, her publicist. Natalie was twenty-six and the hardest-working person Allegra had ever met. She would often ask herself “what would Natalie do?” before forcing herself into a party she had been terrified of going to, because the woman’s professional courage and work ethic put everyone else to shame. The two of them were in the back of a hire car—they were due to appear at a swanky benefit for literacy—and the tinted windows offered a brief respite from the outside world.
“Nat,” Allegra said, her voice shaking a touch, as she swapped her dark glasses for her regular ones. “I’m not—”
“Forget that stupid article. Stop reading those comments. It’s basically self-harm at this point, Allegra. Enough,” Nat saidfirmly. “Being loved on a massive scale means being disliked and misunderstood just as much. It all balances out. Wear the dark shades, there are tons of photographers. You’ll get overstimulated. Don’t think about that stupid hack of a writer. I never should have agreed to her.”
“I must have done everything wrong for her to have written that,” Allegra remarked, as they waited for the car to stop. “I feel like I’m not playing the fame game very well.”
“Nonsense, you’re perfect. It’s a clickbait tactic. The snarkier and meaner they are, the more people will read it. You were trending on socials because it created so much discourse—”
“I hate discourse,” breathed Allegra, rubbing her palms and trying to find some calm.
“But the best people are on your side, kid. Don’t you stress. Now, come on. Chin up. Let’s go.”
Allegra let Natalie propel her out of the car and the flashes started. People yelled out her name and she pretended that they were calling for someone else. Some other eighteen-year-old girl who had just set the world on fire.
One successful open call audition at the age of thirteen, and she was now the owner of two Emmys and one very shiny Golden Globe. She had been made a household name by her most recent and most famous role to date: Clera in the globally acclaimed television adaptation of fantasy seriesCourt of Bystanders. It just didn’t feel like a name she recognized anymore. She had been cast in a revival of the musicalShe Loves Me, but the director’s dubious past had been made public and the whole thing had been canceled. So now she had a free summer for the first time in years.
She was almost afraid of the open calendar.
At that moment, Allegra noticed a young woman filmingherself at the main door. When she spotted Allegra, her eyes widened and she leaped into motion.
“Allegra? Allegra! Oh, my God! I need a picture with you!”
Allegra smiled instinctively but she saw how anxious her eyes looked as she stared at herself on the girl’s phone screen.
Once inside, Allegra felt a bitter taste under her tongue when she looked around at the glitz and sparkle: this was acharity luncheon. There was a vast ballroom full of tables with guests milling all around. A large screen played slides full of information about the people they were supposedly there to help, but nobody paid attention. Attendees buzzed from table to table, all trying to find the most socially beneficial beehive. Allegra had made a sizeable donation and had hoped, in the car, that the event would highlight the underprivileged children the charity was trying to help.
Now it seemed like yet another soulless gathering for the people who had decided she was going to be one of them. Well, if she behaved.
“This is not my world,” Allegra said, too quietly for anyone to hear. “I don’t belong here.”
Natalie was a human battering ram against the crowd of photographers. Some attendees nodded at Allegra in greeting, others looked her slowly up and down. Almost all of them whispered to their companions as she and Natalie passed by.
Allegra had been working steadily for years, hacking at the tree of acting and making little dents with every artistic pursuit. Then one day, the tree just fell. All those years of working on its trunk had paid off and the towering thing hit the ground with enormous shockwaves.
And there was no standing the tree back up.
Natalie found their place settings at their table and Allegramoved to turn off her phones—one for work and one for herself. Natalie had wrangled the personal number from her so she could reach her late at night, but otherwise only the odd co-star and her mother got in touch on the personal phone.
So she was surprised to see a little red number one looking up at her from its barely used inbox.
People were still filing into the room. She opened her inbox to find an email from Brooks Books, her father’s bookshop; a reply to an email she had sent, intending it to reach her father:
Subject: Summer Book Festival
Hello!
