Page 11 of My Lucky Star
The shower took a long time to heat, the old pipes coughing and rattling before they finally delivered the hot stream of water I desperately needed. What had I agreed on with that chick? She’d looked oddly familiar, but I’d been too tired to piece it together, connect the arch of her eyebrows, the way her lashes curled in the corners... That pointy, decisive chin and the curve of her mouth. It had taken me all night, the answer only arriving at the last second before sleep claimed me.
If you ignored her dark hair and funny accent, she was the spitting image of Burcu Yilmaz, my first co-star and the reason for my fame. As if she’d come back from hiding after three years, looking happy and healthy, no longer consumed by the demons that once stood between us.
We’d been amazing together. Phenomenal. That’s what everyone said. I’d been a newbie, unsure of what to expect. I’d thought of our on-screen chemistry in that first series as normal, or at leastmynormal. How wrong I’d been.
The next two series after that tanked, and it took a lot of convincing from my agent to get me anything other than cologne commercials. Finally, I secured another romantic lead and did better, but with a lot of work. I had to learn those looks and glances as if I’d never done them before.
It all came so easily with Burcu. Something between us snapped into place like two interlocking pieces. The audience saw it. We felt it. It felt real and at the time, I thought it was real.
We decided to not sleep together to keep the tension on screen, and to keep her reputation intact. The agreement lasted for two agonizing seasons, almost, until one drunken night, only three episodes from wrapping up the show, we caved.
The next morning, I couldn’t wait to see her again. I arrived at the set early, quite the feat with the 6 a.m. call time. Burcu never showed up. Her agent told us she was sick. Later, the media reported about a nervous breakdown. The showrunners wrote her out of the story with one hasty episode, after which the studio cancelled the series.
I kept asking myself, and occasionally my brother, if her breakdown, or whatever it was, had something to do with me. At first, Emir laughed at me, but eventually, to shut me up, he contacted her family. We didn’t find out much; other than she didn’t want to see anyone from work, including me.
I needed to hear it from her, but Emir convinced me to stand back. She had protective older brothers, and the paparazzi swarmed her house. So, I forced my attention on the next job, and let go.
I toweled myself and perused the tall, gilded mirror, fogged up from the shower. I wiped it with a hand towel and sucked in my stomach. I wasn’t too far off my goal, but I shuddered as I thought of what I had to do to achieve it. I hated starving myself to coax out the eight pack that ensured higher ratings. Like my body wasn’t mine. Like I wasn’t good for anything else than those shirtless scenes.
Not that we ever had to worry about ratings with Burcu. Even with the show ending abruptly, it gradually became one of the most popular in syndication, sold to seven countries, cementing my place in the starry sky of Turkish TV,Türk dizileri. Eventually, those cancelled TV series’,dizis, didn’t matter. I had clout because of that first series, because of Burcu.
I hadn’t thought about her in a long time, and the realization shook me out of my jet lag stupor, because after she left the show, I’d sworn not to forget her.
Not because of our relationship. I knew thedizistoryline had infiltrated our reality and merged with our love story, making it half-fictional. I’d been okay with that, like our millions of viewers were okay with believing in the romanticized on-screen version of me, never knowing the real me.
No. I swore to never forget Burcu, because if I did, I’d also forget that I hadn’t earned any of my fame. I’d been in the right place at the right time, with the right person. I could work hard to create something similar, but I couldn’t manufacture it. There was no formula, only a stroke of luck.
I tried to smile at my reflection, ignoring the spots of mirror rot framing the picture. Maybe it was the forgiving lighting and soft fog reappearing on the surface, but my skin looked better. I peeled the old, shower-soaked nicotine patch off my forearm and dropped it in the rubbish bin, grateful I had a packet of them in my satchel. It had only been a week. One week since my father’s diagnosis. One week since I quit smoking.
One of the worst weeks of my life.
They’d ganged up on me, Emir and Dad, accusing me of shaming the whole family when those photos went public, but they didn’t live in the spotlight, the paparazzi tracking their every move. They didn’t understand how easy it was to slip up. I hadn’t planned it. How could I have known? But I had to admit the timing was shit. My bare ass blurred or pixelated across mainstream media, then again in high definition in the darker corners of the internet, right after my wider family found out about Dad’s cancer.
And that’s how I finally stopped smoking. Not because Dad asked me to, but because he didn’t. He had lung cancer, yet he didn’t say anything when I lit up a cigarette. He didn’t even ask me to cut down.
I didn’t have to be like him. That sudden thought was the most freeing in that moment, and it carried me through the week, all the way to the plane with my hypnosis app, an e-book about reprogramming the brain, and four packets of nicotine patches.
I could have killed for a smoke, though. The urge was so strong I found my hand shaking as I searched my bag for a new patch. I peeled off the plastic backing, repeating my new mantra about how I wasn’t a smoker. I had to reinforce the new identity, according to the book.
The knock on the door gave me a start, and I scrambled to wrap a towel around my waist. “Coming!”
I first thought of room service, wheeling in a tray of something delicious ordered by Emir, but as I opened the door, I laid eyes on Burcu... no, Aria. She looked so similar, yet different. Like someone new had jumped into Burcu’s skin, inhabiting her body with an entirely different energy. She also had a dark spot below her left eye, an oversized freckle shaped like a broken heart.
Staring at her, the previous night’s events fully rearranged themselves in my mind.
I’d asked her to return.
Apparently, I’d also asked her to bring me a mug of light brown liquid. I took the cup from her and gave it a sniff. It smelled vaguely of tea. “Thank you.”
She raised her eyebrows as she smiled. “I made it downstairs. The kitchen’s pretty well stocked.”
I took a sip. Definitely tea – the British version that was both milky and weak, like dishwater, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I took a deep breath and another, long slug.
I couldn’t hide my grimace as I swallowed. “Thank you.”
Aria stared at me, blinking a couple of times.
“Did you want sugar? I meant to offer this, sorry.” She pulled a stack of single serve sugar packets from the pocket of her emerald-green dress. A cute, casual thing that concealed more than it revealed, but I still couldn’t stop staring.
